II
But whether or not the early songs would please us now, they were of incalculable importance in the lives of early peoples. We are inclined to regard singing as an amusement only. We forget that it once had a practical importance that is hardly to be equalled by any single institution in modern life. Men were shut up within valleys, or tied by their work to the fields. It was by singing and poetry that they became citizens of the world. For, before the days of newspapers and postal service, it was the wandering bards who took the news from city to city, from court to court, from nation to nation. They served as historians, recording in verse the great events of their own nation and others, and passing the record down to succeeding generations. They served as public libraries, conserving the legend and sentiment of nations for the reference of others. More, they conserved the teaching of religious seers, the great unwritten laws of the nation, from fathers to children. In short, all that passed between nation and nation, and between generation and generation, was transmitted in song.
We wonder, of course, why these things happened in song, rather than in plain prose. But the answer is simple: verse is easier to remember than prose. All the stories, all the laws, all the culture of the nation had to be remembered. People’s memories served instead of libraries. And with such a mass of matter to remember, people developed memories which are almost unbelievable to-day. To retain the equivalent of hundreds of pages of prose was of course impossible. But once throw the matter into verse and the remembering of it, to a primitive man, became comparatively simple. The whole of the Iliad and Odyssey were transmitted in this way through at least three centuries before they were committed to writing. For verse somehow remembers itself; the sound remains even after the sense is gone. Prof. G. L. Kittredge, of Harvard, tells of some literary investigators in the Orient, who came upon a blind beggar. They asked him to recite poetry, and he started on a long epic of which he knew thousands of lines. It was not in the language of the time, but an old and strange tongue. They asked him what the lines meant. He did not know. He had heard them from his father, and had remembered them by the sound.
Illustration from the Roman der Fauvel (15th Cent.)
It was, then, of the highest importance that all knowledge that was to be preserved be cast in metrical form. A wandering minstrel was able to tell one country about the battles of another country by making a song about them. The nature of the Gods and the religious duties of men could be preserved for succeeding centuries because Homer made a poem out of them. And so poetry was a thing of incalculable value.
In these practical matters, of course, the music was not of the same importance as the words. We do not know, in fact, to what extent music entered into the reciting of the old poems. But it has been conjectured that even the longest poems, like the Iliad, were usually intoned and rose into something like a set melody in the more impassioned parts. Certainly the shorter poems always tended to find a tune for themselves. It is even quite likely that the bards invented words and tune at the same time. The long Robin Hood poems of England were usually sung and not spoken and we possess some of the curious tunes with which they were traditionally associated. Among the earlier minstrels much of the music was improvised in the course of the recitation, though as the poems became old and widely spread it is likely that they were associated with precise melodies or melodic motives. On the whole, it seems that little of the metrical literature antedating the art of writing was without music of one sort or another. All early references, however, tend to regard the tune and the words as one and the same thing. It seems to some, therefore, since melody is not mentioned by itself, that music was of slight importance. But the truth seems rather to be that the melody was inseparable from the words and not to be thought of apart from them. And the music seems to have been of the highest importance in giving dignity and seriousness to the poem.
What the music of the earliest poems was like we have no exact means of guessing. The writing of musical notes is of comparatively late invention and there was no way to preserve the old tunes through the changing centuries. When the traditional poems were committed to writing the sacred marriage of verse and music usually ended in a divorce. We have, however, a Finnish melody of great age, sung to an epic fragment, which might be taken as typical. It consists of few notes (which can safely be said of nearly all primitive tunes), but the stanza is long and the winding melodic line is highly expressive. But in general we cannot hope to know the earliest melodies of the European nations. We can fumble our way back about a thousand years and then we are met by the blackness of mystery.
But we know that the songs were there and that they gave to little lives the opportunity of being big. We find it hard to realize how important they were, now that telegraph wires have connected all parts of the world, when a message can be sent from San Francisco to Moscow and back in a day, when all that has happened the world over (and much besides) is spread out before us on paper at our breakfast tables the next morning, when all knowledge is classified and published and can be found in any good public library. Imagine yourself living in a village or working on a farm without these things. It is a day’s walk to the next village. The next country lies beyond the mountains and there are no passes over, and besides there would be no way of living if you left your work, unless you went as a pilgrim. Every year a few young men wander away seeking their fortunes and never come back. Every year a few men come seeking their fortunes and stay. One or two men have wandered the world and come back home, telling wonderful incoherent tales of what happens beyond the mountains. But this is all the news you get beyond the gossip of your town and the country around—except that once in a while comes a wandering minstrel or juggler with tricks and songs. He will tell you the political fortunes of the next kingdom and whether its king is likely to go to war with your king and whether you will thus be forced to serve in the army. He will tell you the gossip and scandal of the courts. He will tell you the customs of other people and will give you practical hints that may save you trouble in your work. And, best of all, he will tell you new stories to vary the monotony of the village gossip. So you will spend a wonderful afternoon listening to him in the village square, and when he is gone you will have something to think and talk about for weeks to come.
Thus the wandering singers served as newspapers. And their best songs were remembered and repeated (and improved upon) to serve as history from that time on. But history might also be made in another way. The skalds of the northern races accompanied their chiefs on their battles in order to sing of them afterwards. But they were there as historians, not merely as poets. ‘Ye shall be here that ye may see with your own eyes what is achieved this day,’ King Olaf is recorded to have told his skalds on the eve of the battle of Stiklastad (1030), ‘and have no occasion, when ye shall afterward celebrate these actions in song, to depend on the reports of others.’ The skalds were there, that is, as true witnesses of the events, as the specialized repositories of historical information. We cannot suppose that their reports were altogether truthful. They were doubtless expected to ‘forget’ many things that might seem inglorious. But their songs often passed to the people. And, if the king or chief had made a bad record with them, be sure the songs became changed in people’s mouths to show him in his true character. And very often the people, or their own singers, made the narrative songs themselves, dealing out praise or blame by their own justice without fear or favor.
In religion song was a matter of the highest importance, as it has always been. A prophet might reveal the will of the gods, but, unless he were a poet or had a poet to help him, he could not make people remember it. And so in all primitive races the priests were poets and musicians. By the beauty and impressiveness of their songs they proved their right to interpret the divine will. And only in poems could they preserve their doctrine for their successors. But in time the priests generally had to give up their prestige to those who were first of all poets and singers. The gods of Greece were interpreted and made known to the people by the poets. The Teutonic and Norse gods were made known in the epics and sagas. No one else spoke to the people with the same religious conviction as the poet. And so the poets have always, until the most recent times, partaken of a certain religious sanctity. Dante and Milton served as interpreters of religion to their fellow creatures—as beings set apart ‘to justify the ways of God to men.’