INTRODUCTION
When the learned first gave serious attention to popular ballads,
from the time of Percy to that of Scott, they laboured under
certain disabilities. The Comparative Method was scarcely
understood, and was little practised. Editors were content to
study the ballads of their own countryside, or, at most, of Great
Britain. Teutonic and Northern parallels to our ballads were then
adduced, as by Scott and Jamieson. It was later that the ballads
of Europe, from the Faroes to Modern Greece, were compared with our
own, with European MARCHEN, or children's tales, and with the
popular songs, dances, and traditions of classical and savage
peoples. The results of this more recent comparison may be briefly
stated. Poetry begins, as Aristotle says, in improvisation. Every
man is his own poet, and, in moments of stronge motion, expresses
himself in song. A typical example is the Song of Lamech in
Genesis -
"I have slain a man to my wounding,
And a young man to my hurt."
Instances perpetually occur in the Sagas: Grettir, Egil,
Skarphedin, are always singing. In KIDNAPPED, Mr. Stevenson
introduces "The Song of the Sword of Alan," a fine example of
Celtic practice: words and air are beaten out together, in the
heat of victory. In the same way, the women sang improvised
dirges, like Helen; lullabies, like the lullaby of Danae in
Simonides, and flower songs, as in modern Italy. Every function of
life, war, agriculture, the chase, had its appropriate magical and
mimetic dance and song, as in Finland, among Red Indians, and among
Australian blacks. "The deeds of men" were chanted by heroes, as
by Achilles; stories were told in alternate verse and prose; girls,
like Homer's Nausicaa, accompanied dance and ball play, priests and
medicine-men accompanied rites and magical ceremonies by songs.
These practices are world-wide, and world-old. The thoroughly
popular songs, thus evolved, became the rude material of a
professional class of minstrels, when these arose, as in the heroic
age of Greece. A minstrel might be attached to a Court, or a
noble; or he might go wandering with song and harp among the
people. In either case, this class of men developed more regular
and ample measures. They evolved the hexameter; the LAISSE of the
CHANSONS DE GESTE; the strange technicalities of Scandinavian
poetry; the metres of Vedic hymns; the choral odes of Greece. The
narrative popular chant became in their hands the Epic, or the
mediaeval rhymed romance. The metre of improvised verse changed
into the artistic lyric. These lyric forms were fixed, in many
cases, by the art of writing. But poetry did not remain solely in
professional and literary hands. The mediaeval minstrels and
JONGLEURS (who may best be studied in Leon Gautier's Introduction
to his EPOPEES FRANCAISES) sang in Court and Camp. The poorer,
less regular brethren of the art, harped and played conjuring
tricks, in farm and grange, or at street corners. The foreign
newer metres took the place of the old alliterative English verse.
But unprofessional men and women did not cease to make and sing.
Some writers have decided, among them Mr. Courthope, that our
traditional ballads are degraded popular survivals of literary
poetry. The plots and situations of some ballads are, indeed, the
same as those of some literary mediaeval romances. But these plots
and situations, in Epic and Romance, are themselves the final
literary form of MARCHEN, myths and inventions originally POPULAR,
and still, in certain cases, extant in popular form among races
which have not yet evolved, or borrowed, the ampler and more
polished and complex GENRES of literature. Thus, when a literary
romance and a ballad have the same theme, the ballad may be a
popular degradation of the romance; or, it may be the original
popular shape of it, still surviving in tradition. A well-known
case in prose, is that of the French fairy tales.
本新闻共5页,当前在第1页 1 2 3 4 5
|
当前位置：
