Book of Old Ballads | Page 3

feeling blue,?_I_ don't know what to do,?'Cos _I_ love you?And you don't love me.
The above masterpiece is, as far as I am aware, imaginary. But it represents a sort of reductio ad absurdum of thousands of lyrics which have been echoing over the post-war world. Nearly all these lyrics are melancholy, with the profound and primitive melancholy of the negro swamp, and they are all violently egotistical.
Now this, in the long run, is an influence of far greater evil than one would be inclined at first to admit. If countless young men, every night, are to clasp countless young women to their bosoms, and rotate over countless dancing-floors, muttering "I'm feeling blue ... _I_ don't know what to do", it is not unreasonable to suppose that they will subconsciously apply some of the lyric's mournful egotism to themselves.
Anybody who has even a nodding acquaintance with modern psychological science will be aware of the significance of "conditioning", as applied to the human temperament. The late M. Cou�� "conditioned" people into happiness by making them repeat, over and over again, the phrase "Every day in every way I grow better and better and better."
The modern lyric-monger exactly reverses M. Cou��'s doctrine. He makes the patient repeat "Every night, with all my might, I grow worse and worse and worse." Of course the "I" of the lyric-writer is an imaginary "I", but if any man sings "I'm feeling blue", often enough, to a catchy tune, he will be a superman if he does not eventually apply that "I" to himself.
But the "blueness" is really beside the point. It is the egotism of the modern ballad which is the trouble. Even when, as they occasionally do, the modern lyric-writers discover, to their astonishment, that they are feeling happy, they make the happiness such a personal issue that half its tonic value is destroyed. It is not, like the old ballads, just an outburst of delight, a sudden rapture at the warmth of the sun, or the song of the birds, or the glint of moonlight on a sword, or the dew in a woman's eyes. It is not an emotion so sweet and soaring that self is left behind, like a dull chrysalis, while the butterfly of the spirit flutters free. No ... the chrysalis is never left behind, the "I", "I", "I", continues, in a maddening monotone. And we get this sort of thing....
_I_ want to be happy,?But _I_ can't be happy?Till I've made you happy too.
And that, if you please, is one of the jolliest lyrics of the last decade! That was a song which made us all smile and set all our feet dancing!
Even when their tale was woven out of the stuff of tragedy, the old ballads were not tarnished with such morbid speculations. Read the tale of the beggar's daughter of Bethnal Green. One shudders to think what a modern lyric-writer would make of it. We should all be in tears before the end of the first chorus.
But here, a lovely girl leaves her blind father to search for fortune. She has many adventures, and in the end, she marries a knight. The ballad ends with words of almost childish simplicity, but they are words which ring with the true tone of happiness:--
Thus was the feast ended with joye and delighte?A bridegroome most happy then was the young knighte?In joy and felicitie long lived hee?All with his faire ladye, the pretty Bessee.
I said that the words were of almost childish simplicity. But the student of language, and the would-be writer, might do worse than study those words, if only to see how the cumulative effect of brightness and radiance is gained. You may think the words are artless, but just ponder, for a moment, the number of brilliant verbal symbols which are collected into that tiny verse. There are only four lines. But those lines contain these words ...
Feast, joy, delight, bridegroom, happy, joy, young, felicity, fair, pretty.
Is that quite so artless, after all? Is it not rather like an old and primitive plaque, where colour is piled on colour till you would say the very wood will burst into flame ... and yet, the total effect is one of happy simplicity?
V
How were the early ballads born? Who made them? One man or many? Were they written down, when they were still young, or was it only after the lapse of many generations, when their rhymes had been sharpened and their metres polished by constant repetition, that they were finally copied out?
To answer these questions would be one of the most fascinating tasks which the detective in letters could set himself. Grimm, listening in his fairyland, heard some of the earliest ballads, loved them, pondered on them, and suddenly startled the world by announcing that most ballads were not