DOGGEREL OR NOT
If Mr. Cecil Sharp, as I hope, is collecting his many and scattered publications under one roof, so to speak, he will be doing a service to a number of people besides me. I await his learned leisure, having now possessed myself of his English Folk-Songs, Vols. I and II. He will not achieve what I want to see done before I die, a Corpus Poeticum Villanum, because, being a musician before all things, he is only interested in peasant verse of which the music has survived. He won’t do that, but he will help somebody else towards it with an indispensable supplement to Child, in an accessible form; and that will be great gain—goodliness with contentment, in fact.
Valuable variants of many and many a folk-song are to be found in his first instalment; though such was the phenomenal patience and far-flung activity of the American that in two volumes of a hundred songs Mr. Sharp has only been able to find one which is not in the great work. That is one which would have delighted the Professor—“Bruton Town.” The English and Scottish Popular Ballads contains nothing at all like “Bruton Town”; yet the theme of it is one of those which was common to every folk, no doubt, in Europe. Boccaccio gave it its first fame, Hans Sachs followed him. In England we had to wait for Keats, who, so far as we are concerned, supplanted the Florentine and the Nuremberger; for all the Britains know something of Isabella and the Pot of Basil. It must, however, be noted that the specific note of those masterpieces is not the real theme, and never could have been. The horrid dealings with the murdered man’s head are macabre embroidery altogether too sophisticated for a folk-tale. The real theme is the Squire of Low Degree. You get it in the “Duchess of Malfy,” and you get it in “Bruton Town.” There is no instance of the morbid in a peasant-ballad. Elemental human beings dealt in elemental passions. Love, pride, scorn, birth, death were concern enough for them. So, in “Bruton Town,” the theme is the trusty servant, his master’s daughter, the young men’s reprobation and vindication of their sister’s “honour.” Here is the opening:
“In Bruton Town there lived a farmer
Who had two sons and one daughter dear.
By day and night they were a-contriving
To fill their parents’ hearts with fear.
“One told his secret to none other,
But to his brother this he said:
I think our servant courts our sister,
I think they have a mind to wed.”
Doggerel or not, I don’t see how that could be bettered. Mr. Sharp thinks something has been lost, but I think not. What could heighten the note of mystery and dread with which the second quatrain opens—“One told his secret to none other”? Mr. Sharp has not—he confesses it—been able to refrain from the temptation which has always beset the ballad-hunter, from Percy and Sir Walter onwards, of working on the ore which he finds; but that stroke of art in particular is unpremeditated and original, I feel sure. It is constant to all the versions of “Bruton Town” which I have seen.
The hasty whispered plot follows, the preparation of the “day of hunting,” the murder, and the sister’s discovery of the deed. She rises early and finds the corpse. Then comes:
“She took her kerchief from her pocket,
And wiped his eyes though he was blind;
‘Because he was my own true lover,
My own true lover and friend of mine.’”
That again is constant, and could not be mended: though Mr. Sharp would mend it if he could, thinking that the hasty shifting of persons, from third to first, is awkward. It may be awkward, but is very characteristic and, as I think, evidence of authenticity. One more verse, which devotes the mourner to a shared grave, ends “Bruton Town” in pure tragedy; pity, terror, but not disgust. Boccaccio’s additament is nasty, and Keats did not avoid it, though he was not so nasty as Boccaccio.
“Bruton Town” comes from Somerset, and is worthy of that songful shire. It carries in itself its own conviction of peasant origin. No other race of our people would have conceived the verse last quoted exactly like that, nor any other audience have accepted it as adequate. “Friend of mine” is the pièce de conviction: the sweetest name a village girl can give her lover is that of her friend. The pathos of “And wiped his eyes though he was blind” is the pathos of a wounded bird. It is beyond the compass of art altogether, one of those strokes of truth which puts art out of court. It is Nature’s justification before the schools.
Doggerel, then, or not? There are other things in Mr. Sharp’s volumes which may help to determine. There is the well-known “Little Sir Hugh,” where the sacrifice of a Christian child by the Jews is sung. Mr. Sharp’s version is in parts new. Take this out of it for good doggerel:
“She set him up in a gilty chair,
She gave him sugar sweet;
She laid him out on a dresser board,
And stabbed him like a sheep.”
Well, without any pretence at curiosa felicitas, that does its work. It is terse, tense, yet easy and colloquial. It is shocking rather than pitiful; but it means to be so. It might be evidence at the Assizes, where, term by term, they supply just the kind of thing which would have given that versifier what he wanted. Mr. Sharp’s “Little Sir Hugh” in fact is not far from Catnachery, of which he gives some avowed examples. It has only to be set beside “Bruton Town” to settle it that if “Sir Hugh” is doggerel, the other is not. Ease, tensity, colloquialism both have; but then comes the difference. “Sir Hugh” shocks, “Bruton Town” moves; “Bruton Town” has in it the lyric cry, “Sir Hugh” has it not.
Take as a last case “The True Lover’s Farewell,” pure doggerel, but excellent of its kind. Everybody knows it, for a reason:
“O fare you well, I must be gone
And leave you for a while;
But wherever I go I will return,
If I go ten thousand mile,
My dear,
If I go ten thousand mile.”
Now for the reason. Burns lifted that for his occasions, and hardly altered it. He took it and fitted it into its place among other verses on the same model—but this is how he began:
“O my luve’s like a red, red rose
That’s newly sprung in June:
O my luve’s like the melodie
That’s sweetly played in tune—”
An opening, observe, of three beats; and then, as a kind of chorus, the emotions quickened up, three four-beat verses of abandonment increasing in reckless simile, and ending with:
“And fare thee well, my only luve;
And fare thee well awhile!
And I will come again, my luve,
Tho’ it were ten thousand mile!”
That is drawing poetry out of doggerel, the work of genius.