Book of Old English Ballads | Page 4

this century, and revitalized it as well. For Herder was a man of prophetic instinct; he sometimes felt more clearly than he saw; he divined where he could not reach results by analysis. He was often vague, fragmentary, and inconclusive, like all men of his type; but he had a genius for getting at the heart of things. His statements often need qualification, but he is almost always on the tight track. When he says that the great traditions, in which both the memory and the imagination of a race were engaged, and which were still living in the mouths of the people, "of themselves took on poetic form," he is using language which is too general to convey a definite impression of method, but he is probably suggesting the deepest truth with regard to these popular stories. They actually were of community origin; they actually were common property; they were given a great variety of forms by a great number of persons; the forms which have come down to us are very likely the survivors of a kind of in formal competition, which went on for years at the fireside and at the festivals of a whole country side.
Barger, whose "Lenore" is one of the most widely known of modern ballads, held the same view of the origin of popular song, and was even more definite in his confession of faith than Herder. He declared in the most uncompromising terms that all real poetry must have a popular origin; "can be and must be of the people, for that is the seal of its perfection." And he comments on the delight with which he has listened, in village street and home, to unwritten songs; the poetry which finds its way in quiet rivulets to the remotest peasant home. In like manner, Helene Vacaresco overheard the songs of the Roumanian people; hiding in the maize to catch the reaping songs; listening at spinning parties, at festivals, at deathbeds, at taverns; taking the songs down from the lips of peasant?women, fortune-tellers, gypsies, and all manner of humble folk who were the custodians of this vagrant community verse. We have passed so entirely out of the song-making period, and literature has become to us so exclusively the work of a professional class, that we find it difficult to imagine the intellectual and social conditions which fostered improvisation on a great scale, and trained the ear of great populations to the music of spoken poetry. It is almost impossible for us to disassociate literature from writing. There is still, however, a considerable volume of unwritten literature in the world in the form of stories, songs, proverbs, and pithy phrases; a literature handed down in large part from earlier times, but still receiving additions from contemporary men and women.
This unwritten literature is to be found, it is hardly necessary to say, almost exclusively among country people remote from towns, and whose mental attitude and community feeling reproduce, in a way, the conditions under which the English and Scotch ballads were originally composed. The Roumanian peasants sing their songs upon every occasion of domestic or local interest; and sowing and harvesting, birth, christening, marriage, the burial, these notable events in the life of the country side are all celebrated by unknown poets; or, rather, by improvisers who give definite form to sentiments, phrases, and words which are on many lips. The Russian peasant tells his stories as they were told to him; those heroic epics whose life is believed, in some cases, to date back at least a thousand years. These great popular stories form a kind of sacred?inheritance bequeathed by one generation to another as a possession of the memory, and are almost entirely unrelated to the written literature of the country. Miss Hapgood tells a very interesting story of a government official, stationed on the western shore of Lake Onega, who became so absorbed in the search for this?literature of the people that he followed singers and reciters from place to place, eager to learn from their lips the most widely known of these folk tales. On such an expedition of discovery he found himself, one stormy night, on an island in the lake. The hut of refuge was already full of stormbound peasants when he entered. Having made himself some tea, and spread his blanket in a vacant place, he fell asleep. He was presently awakened by a murmur of recurring sounds. Sitting up, he found the group of peasants hanging on the words of an old man, of kindly face, expressive eyes, and melodious voice, from whose lips flowed a marvellous song; grave and gay by turns, monotonous and passionate in succession; but wonderfully fresh, picturesque, and fascinating. The listener soon became aware that he was hearing, for the first time,