It has been asserted that the Cante-fable is a sort of germ from which both ballad and prose narrative have evolved. Mr Jacobs, in English Fairy Tales, says—“The Cante-fable is probably the protoplasm out of which both ballad and folk-tale have been differentiated; the ballad by omitting the narrative prose, and the folk-tale by expanding it.”
Mr Cecil J. Sharp, in English Folk-song: Some Conclusions, p. 6, tells of having noted a version of the ballad “Lord Thomas and Fair Eleanor”—“in which the whole of the story was sung, with the exception of three lines, which the singer assured me should be spoken. This was clearly a case of a Cante-fable that had very nearly, but not quite, passed into the form of a ballad, thus corroborating Mr Jacobs’ theory.”
The present writer is sorry to differ from Mr Jacobs as well as from Mr Sharp in this matter, but he does not think that facts quite justify the conclusion. He can but look upon the speaking of the three lines of the “Fair Eleanor” ballad, instead of singing them, as merely an individual eccentricity that has no value as pointing to a nearly completed evolution. Their theory indicates, to put it crudely, that the Cante-fable is in the condition of a tadpole which by and by will have its fins and tail turned into legs, will forsake its original element, and hop about a meadow, instead of being entirely confined to pond water.
An examination of existing Cante-fables will certainly reveal the fact that the fragments of verse are used either as a literary ornament, or to force some particular dramatic situation home to the hearer. Also, it must be noticed that the rhyme passages are not merely fragmentary parts of a prose narrative which is gradually turning wholly into rhyme, but most frequently consist of a repeated verse, or couplet, that occurs at parts of the story, which could not be so effectively told in prose.
The commonly known story of “Orange,” versions of which, all having the same rhyme passages, are to be found in English, German, and other folk-tales is a good example. With little variation the story tells of a stepmother who kills her husband’s child, makes the body into a pie, to be eaten by the father, and buries the bones in the cellar. First one member of the family goes into this place and hears the voice of the murdered child sing,—
“My mother did kill me and put me in pies, My father did eat me and say I was nice; My two little sisters came picking my bones, And buried me under cold marble stones.”
Then other members of the family go to the cellar and in turn hear the same voice repeating the rhyme (see Folk-Song Journal, vol. ii., p. 295, for a version of the tale and a tune sung to the above words learned from Liverpool children).
Another Cante-fable, surely a genuine one, is given by Charles Dickens in “Nurses’ Stories” in The Uncommercial Traveller.
In this case the rhyme—
“A lemon has pips, A yard has ships, And I’ll have Chips!”