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.
III
The French folk-song more than any other has contained from early times the spirit of its conscious art. Or perhaps France’s conscious art has, more than in most countries, been true to the genius of its people as revealed in its folk-art. Its melodies are rarely rich and luscious—rarely even emotional in the more strenuous sense of the term. Often they seem, at first hearing, to be cold and thin. But such a view is, of course, false. The French melodies have both emotion and sensuous beauty. But it is in the famous French ‘taste’ not to shout one’s message to the heavens. You do not appreciate the meaning of these melodies until you have come to know and love them, just as you do not appreciate the meaning of a child until you have come to know and love him. You must be on the alert, sensitive to catch the meaning of a whisper or a gesture. And, in addition to the meaning, you must learn to love the formal beauty of a French melody. No nation has carried perfection of form, even in the smallest things, to such a pitch as the French. The opening phrase of a French folk-tune may seem almost meaningless and pointless. But somewhere in it there is a suggestion of something distinctive in it. Watch for this, then follow it out in the other phrases—a gentle contrast, a delicate indiscretion, a comforting restatement. In some moods we shall find this whispered statement more stimulating, more thrilling than any burst of Italian passion.
As early as the fifteenth century we have French songs which show these qualities of restraint and delicate design. Of such we may instance Sy je perdoys mon amy and Vray Dieu d’amours. As we come to later centuries we find a host of songs (collected in great numbers by Weckerlin) which are scarcely to be distinguished from the simple songs of the great French composers. The delightful chanson, O, ma tendre Musette, is accredited to Monsigny, but it is an open question whether the melody was not taken by him bodily from a folk-tune. Many are the villanelles and musettes which are of folk origin. In no other country are the folk-music and the art-music less distinct. A few French songs, like Le pauvre laboureur, show the freedom and irregularity of phrase which betoken a development independent of art-music. This particular song is almost unrhythmical, probably a development from one or two stereotyped phrases, like the street-cries of Paris and of some of the Italian cities. But irregular songs are unusual. The French popular genius seems to have the same sense for design that has made the great men of France distinguished, and this sense is shown almost universally in its songs. (See Appendix for French-Canadian Folk-song.)
There could hardly be a more violent contrast than between the folk-music of the two Latin countries, France and Italy. The Italians are famous for their violent emotions, and these are revealed in their folk-songs, puffing like a steam engine. The utmost of passionate expression, by any means at hand—this seems to be the ideal of a goodly portion of the songs. Where the French songs are reserved the Italian are frenzied; where the French are delicate the Italian are like a sledge-hammer; where the French use a needle the Italian use an ax. This statement must be made with some exceptions, notably the songs of Venice and certain other northern localities. The Venetian songs are reserved and chiselled. Many of them might have been written by Mozart. They never go to excess of emotion. They are often as formally perfect as the French. The song known as ‘The Fisher’ (which has practically become a folk-song in Germany) may be taken as a fair example of this graceful and discreet type of lyric. As we go farther south the heat and sensuousness of the land show more and more in the music: Naples has a type of folk-song all her own. It sometimes shows the grace of the Venetian song, but never its reserve. The lighter songs all have an ardor of their own, for the Southern Italian is never abstract. But their lightness carries with it a certain fickleness, as though the lover expected to serenade at least a dozen fair ladies before the night was done. La Vera Sorrentina is one of the best of this type. The Neapolitan are perhaps the best known of all the Italian songs, and there are thousands of them that have been published. A large proportion of these are not strictly folk-songs, having been written by conscious composers (who, however, were of the people and composed for the people). For it seems that the folk-genius of the Italians was almost dormant in music for several centuries. But these semi-folk-songs are among the best. The more modern ones nearly always betray a certain vulgarity, a certain commonplaceness somewhere in their outline—a fault which is not often to be charged against the genuine folk-song. But one is willing to forgive them this, for the sake of the loveliness which is beneath it all. The strains of Oh, sole mio have already gone round the world, and Oh, Maria is scarcely inferior. And when the Italian Song (especially the Sicilian) breaks out in full passion it is not to be matched for crude emotional power the world over. Any one of these songs, as, for instance, the fine one known from its refrain as O, Mama mia, shows the inspiration of the bloody Italian operas of the ’nineties.
Much of the Italian folk-music is enlivened with the most powerful rhythm imaginable. The dance is cultivated in Italy as it is in scarcely any other country in the world. Many of the Spanish rhythms are to be found in the Italian songs, a relic of the times when the Spaniards held Sicily and the southern parts of the peninsula. We should not forget, either, the inimitable joke-songs of the Italians, the clear source of the opera buffa, which has been cultivated successfully by no other people. The love of the Italians for a joke has been noted from the earliest mediæval times. We need only listen to the Italian fruit-merchant trying to convince the ward politician that Columbus discovered Ireland to know that the tempo allegro giocoso is as alive to-day in the southern Latins as it ever was. The innumerable joke songs of Italy present a peculiar problem to the singer. They must be sung with the most expert enunciation, with a fine technique that conceals all art, and with a spirit bursting with fun. Perhaps it would be truer to say that they are impossible to any but the Italian born and bred. Their purely musical value, it must be admitted, is usually slight; but they have none the less a high place in folk-song literature. It is only fair to say that the musicianship of the Italian songs is often careless and faulty. Especially is this likely to be true in the accompaniments, which are always of the simplest possible description and frequently become monotonous with their limited supply of chords in regular succession. Yet this fault is only one more mark of the Italian genius, to which the melody—that is, the voice part, the human part—is all-important.
The Spanish songs are much less known than they deserve. Of Spain, as of England, it can be said that its folk-songs are its chief musical contribution. The pure folk-song of Spain, given to the world chiefly through the researches of the composer Albéniz, is highly sectional and local, primitive, almost untouched by the traditions of the great world of music. Just across this low range of mountains there may be another quite different type of song, with different scales and different rhythms and a different type of emotional utterance corresponding to the sectional variation of temperament. In addition to this pure folk-song there is an extensive Spanish folk-music which is somewhat more sophisticated and much better known. It is this class that chiefly contains the wonderful dance-tunes which we associate with Spain—for here rhythm is cultivated as nowhere else in the world. The chief rhythms—those of the Habañera, the Seguidilla, the Bolero, the Fandango, and the rest—have in the Spanish songs a poignancy which it is impossible to analyze. The melodies seem built on and for the rhythms. Both may seem simple and literal, yet there is a peculiar fitness in this simplicity which is ever the mark of the folk-genius, and which in this case gives the rhythms an unbelievable quantity of physical drive. The chief geographical and political sections of Spain have preserved their individuality in their folk-songs. The Castilian song is light and sparkling. The Catalonian is sombre and intense. The Andalusian is sensuous and passionate. In the singing of all these songs there is scarcely a trace of the intellectual factor. They are to be sung in a sort of divine frenzy. It is not too much to say that they must be sung with the whole physical body. For their powerful rhythm must be felt in every nerve and muscle, else it cannot be expressed in the voice. Of all songs these of Spain demand the most of the merely physical—of bone and nerves and muscles.