I
‘In this or that Sicilian hamlet,’ says the Countess Martinengo-Cæsaresco in her ‘Essays in the Study of Folk-Songs,’ ‘there is a man known by the name of “the Poet,” or perhaps “the Goldfinch.” He is completely illiterate and belongs to the poorest class; he is a blacksmith, a fisherman, or a tiller of the soil. If he has the gift of improvisation, his fellow-villagers have the satisfaction of hearing him applauded by the Great Public—the dwellers in all the surrounding hamlets assembled at the fair on St. John’s Eve. Or it may be he is of a meditative turn of mind, and makes his poetry leisurely as he lies full length under the lemon-trees taking his noontide rest. Should you pass by, it is unlikely he will give himself the trouble of lifting his eyes. He could not say the alphabet to save his life; but the beautiful earth and skies and sea which he has looked on every day since he was born have taught him some things not learnt in school. The little poem he has made in his head is indeed a humble sort of poetry, but it is not unworthy of the praise it gets from the neighbors who come dropping into his cottage door, uninvited, but sure of a friendly welcome next Sunday after mass, their errand being to find out if the rumor is true that “the Goldfinch” has invented a fresh canzuna? Such is the peasant poet of to-day; such he was five hundred or a thousand years ago.’
Here is the original singer. He has existed all over the world in every age, probably, since civilization began to dawn. We are very wrong in thinking of songs as normally written by special composers and sung by special singers in concert halls. Such a situation is not the usual but the unusual one. For, generally speaking, it is not special people who are singers but ordinary people. Artists have been in the habit of thinking that the world is divided into ordinary men and artists. William Morris startled them by declaring that ordinary men are artists—that to be artistic is the normal condition of ordinary men. It is only our materialistic civilization, he said, that has made men inartistic. And historically, at least, he is quite right. It is only in recent times, and in certain nations, that it has come to be regarded as unusual that an ordinary man should be a singer. In all other ages, we may safely say, and in nearly all nations, it was regarded as unusual that an ordinary man should not be a singer. Singing has always been as natural to man as running, or whistling, or making love. It is only in these latter times that a man who sings for the joy of it is thought ‘queer.’
The songs that have been written down on paper are of course only the smallest fraction of those that have been invented. It is a very unusual adventure for a song to get written down on paper. Not one out of a thousand experiences it. Most songs are ‘made up’ by some ordinary person at work or at play, remembered and repeated, imitated by some one else and changed a little and passed on. They live from mouth to mouth and in the hearts of people. Every nation, until it became too lettered and too self-conscious, had its songs of this kind, many of them beautiful enough to be known by thousands of people, some the property of only a few. In Italy investigators have recently noted down thousands of songs that never touched paper before, but they were only a tiny part of the songs that were passing from mouth to mouth. So it has been in every country. Greenland and Iceland have their songs which originated no one knows where or when. We possess folk-songs of China, Japan, and India. The phonograph has noted down hundreds of songs of the North American Indians. And every country in Europe has yielded songs innumerable.
We should be on our guard, then, against assuming that what we know as ‘song literature’—the songs written by composers in their study and printed on paper before being sung—is any very considerable part of the song music of the world. It is merely the music chiefly at the disposal of highly educated people—principally because it is printed. And from a certain standpoint—that of the school-trained musician—it is perhaps the ‘greatest’ vocal music. But remember that the standpoint of the school-trained musician is only one standpoint. The conscious composer has chosen to look at his musical materials in a certain way and to judge the result accordingly. But by another test his work is inferior; in its power to move thousands of human hearts no song by Schubert or Schumann or Brahms can begin to equal ‘Auld Lang Syne’ or ‘The Marseillaise.’ Of necessity this book will be chiefly concerned with consciously composed ‘art’ music. But we should always remember that this is only because art music represents the great majority of all the music that has been noted down—and of course in a measure art songs at their best contain in a sublimated form the elements of folk-song.
The less civilized and conscious people are, the more readily they do their own singing. There is little spontaneous song among us to-day and yet we can occasionally hear a workman humming an aimless tune under his breath. This was probably the normal state of things when men were less educated. Everybody was a composer, partly because it was easier to make up your own song than to remember somebody else’s. Among the Indians songs were regarded in some tribes as the personal property of the person who invented them and were not to be sung by any one else unless that second person had acquired the rights in it by gift or inheritance. But generally, as people became somewhat more advanced, songs were freely appropriated from one singer to another. And each singer who borrowed generally added something of his own to the song—something to express his sense of beauty or artistic fitness: a more effective phrasing here, or a simpler group of notes there. Sometimes the song was so popular that it passed from tribe to tribe, or from nation to nation. In this case each people gave its individuality to the song, adding perhaps a little ornamentation if its nature was gay and volatile, or making the melody more regular and balanced if its soul was earnest and contemplative. Everywhere the races, the nations, and the tribes have shown their souls to us in their songs.
We must not suppose that these songs, which were so highly treasured, were elaborate. Sometimes they were made of no more than two or three tones of the scale. In thousands of songs there are no more than five tones and certain octave reduplications (as, for instance, in ‘Auld Lang Syne’). In most cases the more primitive popular songs are too simple to make any impression upon us at all. But often that is our fault and not theirs. Our taste has been somewhat spoiled by highly seasoned food. After a little sympathetic study of primitive songs we find them full of eloquence and pathos.