Apply this analogy to the origin of ballads. It fits perfectly.
There has been a successful raid, or a wedding, or some great deed of
daring, or some other phenomenal thing, natural or supernatural. And now
that this day, which will ever linger in their memories, is drawing to
its close, the members of the tribe draw round the fire and begin to
make merry. The wine passes ... and tongues are loosened. And someone
says a phrase which has rhythm and a sparkle to it, and the phrase is
caught up and goes round the fire, and is repeated from mouth to mouth.
And then the local wit caps it with another phrase and a rhyme is born.
For there is always a local wit in every community, however primitive.
There is even a local wit in the monkey house at the zoo.
And once you have that single rhyme and that little piece of rhythm, you
have the genesis of the whole thing. It may not be worked out that
night, nor even by the men who first made it. The fire may long have
died before the ballad is completed, and tall trees may stand over the
men and women who were the first to tell the tale. But rhyme and rhythm
are indestructible, if they are based on reality. "Not marble nor the
gilded monuments of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme."
And so it is that some of the loveliest poems in the language will ever
remain anonymous. Needless to say, all the poems are not
anonymous. As society became more civilized it was inevitable that the
peculiar circumstances from which the earlier ballads sprang should
become less frequent. Nevertheless, about nearly all of the ballads
there is "a common touch", as though even the most self-conscious author
had drunk deep of the well of tradition, that sparkling well in which so
much beauty is distilled.
VI
But though the author or authors of most of the ballads may be lost in
the lists of time, we know a good deal about the minstrels who sang
them. And it is a happy thought that those minstrels were such
considerable persons, so honourably treated, so generously esteemed.
The modern mind, accustomed to think of the singer of popular songs
either as a highly paid music-hall artist, at the top of the ladder, or
a shivering street-singer, at the bottom of it, may find it difficult to
conceive of a minstrel as a sort of ambassador of song, moving from
court to court with dignity and ceremony.
Yet this was actually the case. In the ballad of King Estmere, for
example, we see the minstrel finely mounted, and accompanied by a
harpist, who sings his songs for him. This minstrel, too, moves among
kings without any ceremony. As Percy has pointed out, "The further we
carry our enquiries back, the greater respect we find paid to the
professors of poetry and music among all the Celtic and Gothic nations.
Their character was deemed so sacred that under its sanction our famous
King Alfred made no scruple to enter the Danish camp, and was at once
admitted to the king's headquarters."
And even so late as the time of Froissart, we have minstrels and
heralds mentioned together, as those who might securely go into an
enemy's country.
The reader will perhaps forgive me if I harp back, once more, to our
present day and age, in view of the quite astonishing change in national
psychology which that revelation implies. Minstrels and heralds were
once allowed safe conduct into the enemy's country, in time of war. Yet,
in the last war, it was considered right and proper to hiss the work of
Beethoven off the stage, and responsible newspapers seriously suggested
that never again should a note of German music, of however great
antiquity, be heard in England! We are supposed to have progressed
towards internationalism, nowadays. Whereas, in reality, we have grown
more and more frenziedly national. We are very far behind the age of
Froissart, when there was a true internationalism--the internationalism
of art.
To some of us that is still a very real internationalism. When we hear a
Beethoven sonata we do not think of it as issuing from the brain of a
"Teuton" but as blowing from the eternal heights of music whose winds
list nothing of frontiers.