As folk songs we are wont to designate those lyrics of simple character which, handed down from generation to generation, are the common property of all the people. Every nation, regardless of the degree of its musical intelligence, possesses a stock of such songs, so natural in their simple ingenuity as to disarm the criticism of art, whose rules they follow unconsciously and with perfect concealment of means. Their origin is often lost in the obscurity of tradition and we accept them generally and without question as part and parcel of our racial inheritance. Yet, while in a sense spontaneous, every folk song did originate in the consciousness of some one person. The fact that we do not know its author’s name argues simply that the song has outlived the memory of him who created it. He was a man of the people, more gifted than his fellows, who saw the world through a poet’s eye, but who spoke the same language, was reared in the same traditions, and swayed by the same passions and sentiments as they who were unable to express such things in memorable form. This fellow, whose natural language is music, becomes their spokesman; their heartbeats are the accents of his song. His talent is independent of culture. A natural facility, an introspective faculty and a certain routine suffice to give his song the coherence and definiteness of pattern which fasten it upon the memory. Language is the only requisite for the transmission of his art. Once language is fixed and has become the common property of the people, this song, vibrating the heart-strings of its makers’ countrymen, will be repeated by another who perchance will fashion others like it; his son, if he be gifted like himself, will do likewise and so the inexhaustible well of popular genius will flow unceasingly from age to age.

In the sentiments and thoughts common to all, then, we will find the impulses of the songs which we shall now discuss. Considering the different shades of our temperament, sadness, contentment, gladness, and exuberance, we find that each gives rise to a species of song, of which the second is naturally the least distinctive, the two extremes calling for the most decisive expression. Now sadness and melancholy have their concrete causes, and it is in the narration of these causes that the heart vents its sorrow. Hence the narrative form, the complainte, whose very name would confirm our reasoning, is the earliest form of folk song in the vulgar tongue. In a warlike people this would naturally dwell upon warlike heroic themes, and we have already pointed out the early origin of the epic. The musical form of epic was perhaps the simplest of all, taking for its sole rhythm the accent of the words, one or two short phrases, chanted much in the manner of the plain-song, sufficing for innumerable verses. It is notable, too, that the church, adroitly seizing upon popular music as a power of influence, adopted this form to another genus, the légende, which, though developed by clericals, struck as deep a root in the people’s imagination. Thus we see in the ninth century the ‘Chant of St. Eulalia,’ and in the tenth the ‘Life of St. Leger,’ which already shows great advance in form, being composed in couplets of two, four, and six verses, alternating. Possessed of better means of perpetuation this religious epic flourished better and survived longer than the heroic complainte.

Still another genus was what we might call the popular complaintes, the chansons narratives, which dealt with the people’s own characters, with the common causes of woe; the common soldier and the peasant; the death of a husband or a son. Such a one is the Chanson de Renaud, which is considered the classic type of popular song. It is sung in every part of France, and its traces are found in Spain, Italy, Sweden, and Norway. It is unquestionably of great age, though its date cannot be fixed.

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Quand Jean Re-naud de guer-re r’vint,
Te-nait ses tri-pes dans ses mains.
Sa mère à la fe-nêtre en haut:
“Voi-ci ve-nir mon fils Re-naud.”

This strain is sung through thirteen stanzas, recounting Renaud’s return from the wars to his home, where mother and wife await him, only to die upon the stroke of midnight. The mother artfully conceals the fact from his young spouse till finally she hears the news from the boys in the street and sees the catafalque in the church. Her grief is expressed in two final stanzas upon this melody:

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