II
England, Scotland, and Ireland, now grouped together as the tiniest part only, geographically speaking, of the British Empire, were in early times as distinct and as antagonistic, nationally, as Germany and France are to-day. The lack of means of communication and social organization made it possible for very different social and artistic traditions to flourish independently within a few miles of each other. Thus there grew up in these countries highly distinct musical traditions which have preserved their individuality even through these days of printing presses and phonographs. Each of these musical traditions—the English, the Scotch, and the Irish—had its roots in the earliest times of which we have any record. And it is evident that the musical life of these countries was vigorous in the extreme. The beauty and individuality of the Scotch and Irish songs are familiar, but it has been accepted as axiomatic until recently that England was an unmusical nation—that she had neither the geniuses to create nor the people to appreciate the finest and sincerest musical beauty. Especially it was supposed that she had no truly creative folk-song. Certainly it is true that England for centuries stifled her folk-song, keeping it among the peasant classes, dumb and suppressed, where Germany coaxed hers upward to illumine and inspire the whole nation to great deeds. Recent investigators, notably Mr. Cecil Sharp, have unearthed in Somersetshire and elsewhere a great wealth of popular songs, most of them never before set on paper, but many of them showing great antiquity and distinctive beauty. This folk-art existed for centuries among the almost unlettered classes without the nation as a whole being aware of the fact. Now that the songs have been noted down and published it can never again be said that England, in the roots of her, is unmusical or uncreative in popular song. These songs, which are all the more charming for never having felt the influence of learned music, are almost as peculiar and inimitable as those of Scotland or Russia. Those of ancient origin—roughly speaking, from Elizabeth’s time or previous—are modal in style. But the modes are not the usual ones of the melodic minor or its most familiar variation, the Doric. They are the queerest things imaginable to modern ears, strange scales with raised sixths and lowered sevenths, melting from minor into major and back again. The feeling for the tonic is often very vague, the chief note of the scale being sometimes the second or the fourth or the fifth. These unquestionable evidences of antiquity lend a strange charm to the melodies. And the charm is one that is distinct from that of every other national folk-music.
The earliest of the English songs, barring a few questionable specimens, probably date from the time of Henry VIII (1491-1547), who was himself an accomplished musician and composer of several excellent songs. Among these are the Boar’s Head Carol, antedating 1521, still sung at Christmas gatherings; and the traditional tune for Shakespeare’s lyric, ‘Oh, Mistress Mine.’ Some of the simple airs to which the old Robin Hood ballads were sung also date from this period. The traditional air for the Chevy Chase ballads dates from the time of Charles I. But from this time on what passed in England for folk-songs were usually nothing but popular songs of the moment, published like any others and sung widely among the middle classes. These songs will be treated in another chapter. For our purpose here we must now skip more than three centuries and come down to the time when the interest in folk-song and folk-dancing began to revive in England. For the recent crop of folk-songs we are indebted to the labors of investigators like Mr. Sharp, patient, painstaking, sympathetic, and admirably equipped in point of musical technique. These men combine the qualities of the artist and the scientist. They have passed quite beyond the attitude of the eighteenth century collectors of folk-poetry—such distinguished men as Bishop Percy and Sir Walter Scott—who did their work out of personal enthusiasm but felt obliged to apologize for the poems they found. (Herder, who worked in Germany about the same time, was the one man who took the modern attitude, which is equally scholarly, scientific, and artistic.) The modern investigators feel their obligations to preserve the songs exactly as they come from the lips of the people. When they publish collections of these songs for popular use they supply accompaniments which are sometimes sophisticated and, in Mr. Sharp’s case, scholarly and delightful. But they seek always to preserve the letter and the spirit of the melodies in their arrangements. Such singers as the Misses Fuller, and Yvette Gilbert and her pupil Miss Loraine Wyman have spread the knowledge of the folk-songs of England and France and have demonstrated the great beauty of them to thousands who had never suspected it.
The English songs, fine as they are from a technical standpoint, have no very great emotional range. A few, like the famous ‘Willow’ song, strike a deep note of sorrow, but by far the greater portion are lively songs of the open-air or of festal gatherings. They reveal a vigorous sense of touch, a whole-hearted joy in the primitive feelings of the human body, in the invigorating English out-of-doors. They are clear-cut and literal—recalling the type of life and feeling which we associate with ‘the roast beef of old England.’ Their naïveté is that of an exuberant joy in the commonplace joys of life. We may mention such songs as ‘The Wraggle Taggle Gipsies, O!’ and ‘The Holly and the Ivy’ for their inspiriting physical vigor. Such songs as ‘God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen’ (old tune), the Wassail song from Sussex, or the Sheep-shearing Song from Somerset, are worthy of much study as fine examples of the old English use of modal scales.
The Scotch songs, of all true folk-songs the world over, have for many decades been the most familiar. No nation, except perhaps Russia, has been more vigorously creative in its folk-music than Scotland. Many excellent judges regard the Scotch folk-music as the finest in the world. It is probably quite as ancient as any. It entered into the lives of the Scotch people from the earliest times, when the Highland bards sang their praises to little tribal chieftains or narrated in rude verse the battles between one clan and another. There is a very old harper’s tune in existence, probably much modified in the course of the centuries but still eloquent of antiquity, which suggests the majesty of the days gone by. (It may be found under its modern title, ‘Harp of the Highlands.’) A large proportion of these tunes have lost their original words and taken on new ones. Robert Burns stimulated the process by writing words of his own (among them some of the greatest of his poems) for well-known melodies. The loss of the old texts, which were often crude or indecent, is, on the whole, of little moment from the artistic standpoint, especially since Burns, one of the finest folk-spirits of all ages, wrote words which fit the mouths of the people like their own. Perhaps, too, his words, as in the case of ‘Scots Wha Hae,’ helped to keep the old tunes alive and popular. Burns is one of the rare instances of a conscious artist who has been able to meddle with folk-art without making himself ridiculous.
A large number of the Scotch songs are written in the pentatonic or five-note scale—our ordinary major with the fourth and seventh omitted. Whether this was due to some early form of the Scotch bagpipe or to the genius of the people is still an open question.[8] But it is certain that the Scotch have given an individual flavor to their songs by means of this scale without betraying the least embarrassment over the absence of the two notes. Who imagines, for instance, until it is pointed out, that the magnificent ‘Auld Lang Syne’ is wholly in the pentatonic? The pentatonic feeling runs through nearly all the Scotch songs and in a large proportion of them exists almost in full purity. The occasional use of the fourth and seventh in the tunes of ‘Scots Wha Hae’ or ‘The Campbells Are Coming’ is unessential and probably a recent modification.
The range of feeling in the Scotch songs is almost equal to that of music itself. ‘Scots Wha Hae’ ranks with the three or four finest patriotic songs the world over. No grander hymn than ‘Auld Lang Syne’ has ever been sung; even Adeste Fideles, that treasure of the modern hymnal, seems to take on a certain triviality beside its irresistible rhythm. And what dance tune can be found that contains such an inexhaustible supply of life as ‘The Campbells Are Coming’ or ‘A Highland Lad My Love Was Born?’ Where can one match the pensive sadness of ‘Loch Lomond’ or the sentimental tenderness of ‘Will Ye Gang Over the Lee?’ Some of the Jacobite songs—‘Charlie Is My Darling’ or ‘The Piper of Dundee’—are inimitable for high spirits. One who turns over the pages of a book of Scotch folk-songs will find melodies of deep emotion unsurpassed in all song literature. Scotch song has also been materially enriched by conscious composers, though never, perhaps, by eminent ones. We need only mention the impressive ‘Caller Herrin’,’ or ‘Annie Laurie,’ one of the greatest folk-songs of all times. A thorough knowledge of Scotch folk-songs will acquaint the singer with almost every fundamental type of lyric utterance.
The Irish folk-song, likewise, is very fine, but it has, on the whole, neither the flexible range nor the supreme sense of artistic fitness possessed by the Scotch. The dominant moods are two: one the lively dance spirit, represented by the Irish jigs and reels; and the other the richly sentimental and even tragic tone of the love songs. As it happens, Irish folk-song has undergone the same process as the Scotch in having a native poet supply in great abundance new words to the old tunes. The ‘Irish Melodies’ of Sir Thomas Moore are pretentious poems designed to supplant the homely words of the folk-poets. But if Burns escaped being ridiculous in his attempt to supply his native country with a new folk-art, Moore emphatically did not. Nothing could be more incongruous than his pompous poems with their dreary romantic paraphernalia of harps and fair ladies. As poems his lyrics have only the virtues of the drawing-room, a mellifluous flow of words and a certain sensuous grace. As folk-art they are a painful absurdity. They evoke abstractions and conventional poetic phrases where the popular genius goes unerringly to concrete fact. They have the dreary sameness of the second-rate talent where the folk-poetry has all the variety of the commonplace things of this world and of the ordinary people in it. Yet Moore’s words are in many instances firmly wedded to the music in the popular mind, and it is not likely that a divorce will ever be achieved. This is doubtless because, false as the poet was to the spirit of the music, he caught and persuasively stated the romantic sentimentality of the Celtic nature.
Some of the older Irish songs have an archaic flavor not less marked than the English. The Doric mode especially is used sometimes with savage vigor. Indeed, the Irish as the race of warriors are represented almost exclusively in the older songs—songs like ‘Remember the Glories of Brian the Brave’ or ‘The Sword Shining Brightly’ (Moore’s words), which in their crude martial frenzy can hardly be matched the world over. The innumerable jigs and reels, some of which are of the finest quality, are often close to the Scotch in physical energy, but in nearly every case they preserve a certain note of sadness. Perhaps the best of all the Irish songs are the sentimental ones. The fine tunes to which Moore set his words ‘The Harp that Once Through Tara’s Halls’ and ‘When in Death’ strike a wonderfully deep chord of emotion. It is hard to realize the great number of sentimental Irish tunes which are of the highest beauty. They suffer, however, too often from excess. The long drawn cadences are hard to render honestly; in their excess of feeling they are apt to sound insincere. They lack the clear-cut statement which makes the Scotch songs so unfailingly true to the highest demands of art. Yet the folk-song of Ireland is a product of which any nation might be proud. And, on the whole, the folk-music of the British Isles is their worthiest contribution to musical literature. In former ages these islands were not inferior to any country in Europe in musical vigor. As the centuries have passed and left England far behind in musical creation these songs have remained as a proof of the sound healthfulness and the exuberant creativeness of her popular genius.