Book of Old Ballads | Page 5

we find paid to the professors of poetry and music among all the Celtic and Gothic nations. Their character was deemed so sacred that under its sanction our famous King Alfred made no scruple to enter the Danish camp, and was at once admitted to the king's headquarters."
_And even so late as the time of Froissart, we have minstrels and heralds mentioned together, as those who might securely go into an enemy's country._
The reader will perhaps forgive me if I harp back, once more, to our present day and age, in view of the quite astonishing change in national psychology which that revelation implies. Minstrels and heralds were once allowed safe conduct into the enemy's country, in time of war. Yet, in the last war, it was considered right and proper to hiss the work of Beethoven off the stage, and responsible newspapers seriously suggested that never again should a note of German music, of however great antiquity, be heard in England! We are supposed to have progressed towards internationalism, nowadays. Whereas, in reality, we have grown more and more frenziedly national. We are very far behind the age of Froissart, when there was a true internationalism--the internationalism of art.
To some of us that is still a very real internationalism. When we hear a Beethoven sonata we do not think of it as issuing from the brain of a "Teuton" but as blowing from the eternal heights of music whose winds list nothing of frontiers.
Man needs song, for he is a singing animal. Moreover, he needs communal song, for he is a social animal. The military authorities realized this very cleverly, and they encouraged the troops, during the war, to sing on every possible occasion. Crazy pacifists, like myself, may find it almost unbearably bitter to think that on each side of various frontiers young men were being trained to sing themselves to death, in a struggle which was hideously impersonal, a struggle of machinery, in which the only winners were the armament manufacturers. And crazy pacifists might draw a very sharp line indeed between the songs which celebrated real personal struggles in the tiny wars of the past, and the songs which were merely the prelude to thousands of puzzled young men suddenly finding themselves choking in chlorine gas, in the wars of the present.
But even the craziest pacifist could not fail to be moved by some of the ballads of the last war. To me, "Tipperary" is still the most moving tune in the world. It happens to be a very good tune, from the musician's point of view, a tune that Handel would not have been ashamed to write, but that is not the point. Its emotional qualities are due to its associations. Perhaps that is how it has always been, with ballads. From the standard of pure aesthetics, one ought not to consider "associations" in judging a poem or a tune, but with a song like "Tipperary" you would be an inhuman prig if you didn't. We all have our "associations" with this particular tune. For me, it recalls a window in Hampstead, on a grey day in October 1914. I had been having the measles, and had not been allowed to go back to school. Then suddenly, down the street, that tune echoed. And they came marching, and marching, and marching. And they were all so happy.
So happy.
VII
"Tipperary" is a true ballad, which is why it is included in this book. So is "John Brown's Body". They were not written as ballads but they have been promoted to that proud position by popular vote.
It will now be clear, from the foregoing remarks, that there are thousands of poems, labelled "ballads" from the eighteenth century, through the romantic movement, and onwards, which are not ballads at all. Swinburne's ballads, which so shocked our grandparents, bore about as much relation to the true ballads as a vase of wax fruit to a hawker's barrow. They were lovely patterns of words, woven like some exquisite, foaming lace, but they were Swinburne, Swinburne all the time. They had nothing to do with the common people. The common people would not have understood a word of them.
Ballads must be popular. And that is why it will always remain one of the weirdest paradoxes of literature that the only man, except Kipling, who has written a true ballad in the last fifty years is the man who despised the people, who shrank from them, and jeered at them, from his little gilded niche in Piccadilly. I refer, of course, to Oscar Wilde's "Ballad of Reading Gaol." It was a true ballad, and it was the best thing he ever wrote. For it was written de profundis, when his hands were bloody with labour and his tortured spirit had been down to