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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
It is the purpose of the following paper to examine the relationship of the mediæval ballad to the dance, in origin and in traditional usage. Particular reference is had to the English and Scottish ballad type. In various preceding papers I have considered the theory currently accepted in America of the inseparableness of primitive dance, music, and song and have shown that primitive song is not narrative in character. I have also questioned the assumption that the ballad is the archetypal poetic form—this position should be assigned to the song, not the ballad—and the assumption of “communal” as against individual authorship for the English and Scottish popular ballads. The present paper examines the relation to the dance of the English and Scottish ballads. The view is widely accepted both in the Old World and in America that this, and similar ballad types, originated in the dance. The following paper canvasses the evidence for this view and makes inquiry as to its validity.
1 See The Beginnings of Poetry, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, xxxii (1917), pp. 201 ff.; The Southwestern Cowboy Songs and the English and Scottish Popular Ballads, Modern Philology, xi (1913), pp. 195 ff.; New-World Analogues of the English and Scottish Popular Ballads, The Mid-West Quarterly, iii (1916), pp. 171 ff.; Ballads and the Illiterate, ibid., v, p. 4, etc.
2 Although the meaning narrative song gained headway in the eighteenth century, it was not very clearly recognized in the New English Dictionary, 1888. The entry given fifth place is “A simple spirited poem in short stanzas, originally a ‘ballad’ in sense 3 [popular songs—often broadsides] in which some popular story is graphically narrated. (This sense is essentially modern.) ”The New Webster International, 1910, also gives this meaning fifth place, but contributes clarity: “A popular kind of short narrative poem adapted for singing; especially a romantic poem of the kind characterized by simplicity of structure and impersonality of authorship.” In The Standard Dictionary, 1917, is entered as the first meaning of the word: “A simple lyrical poem telling a story or legend, usually of popular origin; as the ballad of Chevy Chase.” Here the older order of definition is reversed, recognizing the change established long before in usage.
3 The Danish name for pieces of English lyric-epic type is folkeviser. The Spanish name is romances. The German usage of Ballade follows the English; German poets derived much of their balladry from England. The name is applied to short poems in which the narrative element is as important as the lyrical. See F. A. Brockhaus, Konversations-Lexicon, Berlin and Vienna, 1894. Pieces of the English lyric-epic type have no specific name in French. They are grouped under the large class of chansons populaires, a name as inclusive as our “folk-song.” But see also note 6.
4 Dante, for example, assigns ballata a lower plane than song proper or sonnet on account of its dependence on the aid of dancers.
5 Introduction to his Select Collection of English Songs, 3 vols., 2nd edition, 1913. Shenstone and Michael Bruce had expressed the distinction earlier (see S. B. Hustvedt, Ballad Criticism in Scandinavia and Great Britain, 1916, p. 254), but it was first publicly enunciated by Ritson.
6 The entries in The New English Dictionary have been referred to. Fourteen pages of matter illustrative of the history of ballade are given in Larousse's Grand Dictionnaire Universel du XIX Siècle, Paris (1867), ranging from the first entry “chanson à danser” to, “Aujourd'hui, ode d'un genre familier et le plus souvent légendaire et fantastique: les ballades de Schiller, de Goethe, etc.” Nothing is said of a narrative element. But see especially Helen Louise Cohen, The Ballade, Columbia University Studies in English and Comparative Literature, New York, 1915. According to Miss Cohen, the word is used in contemporary French in the way in which it has come to be used in English and in German. “In France, at the present time, the same word, ballade, serves for the English or Scottish popular ballad and for a certain kind of narrative poem, written in imitation of German authors like Unland, as well as for the artificially fixed lyric poem.” The usages of “ballad” for English have been traced by Professor Gummiere, Old English Popular Ballad, pp. xviii ff.
7 An excellent example of his usage is found in the Prologue to The Legend of Good Women, where he has his characters dance in a circle “as it were in carole-wise” while they sang the ballade—
8 Toxophilus, Arber ed., p. 39.
9 In The Popular Ballad, 1907, and “Ballads” in Warner's Library of the World's Best Literature.
10 Compare the quotation from Chaucer's Prologue to the Legend of Good Women, note 7 preceding.
11 See the ballettes, in Jeanroy's Les Origines de la Poésie Lyrique en France au Moyen Age; and his letter, cited in Miss Cohen's The Ballade, p. 15; also Joseph Bédier, Les Plus Anciennes Danses Françoises, Revue des Deux Mondes, Jan. 15, 1906, p. 398.
12 Æneid, Prologue of Bk. xii, p. 193.
13 “King Cnut's Song,” of which a few lines remain, in thirteenth-century form, seems, from external and internal testimony, to have been a rowing song, later used, possibly as a dance song. For its bearing on ballad origins, see Modern Language Notes, March, 1919.
14 Concordance of Histories.
15 The first is from ms. Rawlinson, D. 913, f. 1, the second from ms. Balliol, 354, f. 229, b. They are cited by Professor Padelford, Cambridge History of English Literature, ii, xvi, p. 422.
16 See also Gilchrist and Broadwood, Journal of the Folk-Song Society, v, pp. 228 ff.
17 Mrs. Gomme gives a list of dance games, ii, p. 465, and of circle-form games, with singing and action, ii, p. 476. The songs cited here are recognized by her as descending in traditional dance usage.
“In den Kinderreigen,” says Böhme, Geschichte des Tanzes, ch. xvii, “werden wir noch alten Überresten von Tanzliedern der Vorzeit begegnen.” As ring-dances were given up by the mature they lingered among children. One should not infer, however, that all children's play songs were originally game or dance-songs of grown-ups. Childhood is as ancient as maturity, and even the savagest children have their own songs.
18 Mrs. L. D. Ames, The Missouri Play-Party, Journal of American Folk-Lore, xxiv (1911), p. 302.
19 Ibid., p. 306.
20 Ibid., p. 306.
21 Ibid., p. 304.
22 Ibid., p. 314.
23 Some Play-Party Games of the Middle West, Journal of American Folk-Lore, cix, p. 264.
24 This seems the natural process; but compare Professor Gummere's present theories of ballad growth and “improvement,” cited a little farther on. The process which, to collectors of folk dance-songs, brings ballad degradation, to Professor Gummere is the process by which are evolved “good” ballads. At other times, however, he still speaks occasionally of the “degradation” and “decay” due to tradition.
25 Ames, p. 296.
26 Piper, p. 266.
27 Ames, p. 309.
28 Piper, p. 268.
29 Goldy M. Hamilton, The Play-Party in Northeast Missouri, Journal of American Folk-Lore, xxvii, pp. 269, 297 (The Girl I Left Behind Me), p. 301.
30 Loraine Darby, Ring Games from Georgia, Journal of American Folk-Lore, cxvi (1917), p. 218.
English Folk-Song and Dance, by F. Kidson and Mary Neal, 1915, contains some material on English folk-dances, with bibliography.
31 Mrs. Gomme thinks that the dialogue songs are of later development, ii, p. 500. Professors W. M. Hart and G. H. Stempel think that dialogue songs represent a very early stage, in the history of ballads proper.
32 P. 84. It is rather surprising to find, on pp. 68–69, that “narrative is not a fixed fundamental, primary fact in the ballad scheme.” This means that the very thing that makes a ballad a ballad, not verse of some other lyric type, is not a fundamental or primary feature of its structure.
33 Andrew Lang, in his article on Ballads in the Encyclopædia Britannica wrote: “It is natural to conclude that our ballads too were first improvised and circulated in rustic dances.” He held at the time the views still held by the majority of American scholars. But in his article on the same subject in the last edition of Chambers's Cyclopædia of English Literature (1904), he has given up this theory of ballad origins, and indeed, from his article, is hardly recognizable as still a communalist.
34 Strictly, what are called “dances” among savages are in large part drama, and there is abundance of histrionic or mimetic action accompanied by songs of which action is the illustration, i. e., there are songs suggesting ideas, and these are to some extent enacted. Over against these are the rhythmic chants and ejaculatory refrains that form simple motor suggestions or reverberations. The latter are the only ones “danced” in our modern sense of “dance.”
35 “Narrative, too, are most of the dance songs in a modern Russian cottage,” writes Professor Gummere, Old English Ballads, p. lxxix, and cites Ralston, Songs of the Russian People 1872. But the examples given by Ralston are not narrative; they are not ballads but lyrics, and of the expected type. Professor Gummere's solitary example of a dance ballad is from the Ditmarsh folk of Holstein, but even that is more lyric than lyric-epic. It labels itself as a dance song, and might well be an older song which has been fitted to the dance, not one made in the dance. The Popular Ballad, p. 97, footnote.
36 Jeanroy, Les Origines de la Poésie Lyrique en France au Moyen Age, 1904; Bédier, Les Plus Anciennes Danses Françaises, Revue des Deux Mondes, Jan. 15, 1906, p. 398.
37 The Popular Bailad, p. 97.
38 Cleasby-Vigfusson, Icelandic Dictionary, under danz.
39 These and other examples are cited by Steenstrup, The Mediæval Popular Ballad, p. 12. Translated by E. G. Cox.
40 Chronik des Landes Dithmarschen, edited by F. C. Dahlmann, i, p. 177: “Nichtess weiniger isst tho vorwunderen (den up dat de Gesenge edder Geschichte deste ehr gelehret unnd beter beholden worden unnd lenger im Gebruke bleven, hebben se de alle fast den Dentzen bequemet), dat se nha Erfordering der Wortt and Wise des Gesanges,” etc.
41 The Popular Ballad, p. 74.
42 The Mediæval Popular Ballad, pp. 75–77.
43 “The ballad-genesis is more plainly proved for the Faroes than for any other modern people” (Gummere, The Popular Ballad, p. 69).
44 See The Mediæval Popular Ballad, p. 7.
45 Our earliest testimony concerning the Faroe dances is to be found in the Faroa Reserata of Lucas Debes, Kopenhagen, 1673. He writes, p. 251, that “the inhabitants of the Faroe Islands are little inclined toward useless pastimes or idle gaiety, but content them selves mostly with singing psalms … only at marriages or at Christmas time do they seek amusement in a simple circle dance, one grasping another by the hand while they sing old hero-songs.” Pastor Lyngbye's much-quoted Fær⊘iske Quæder, etc., was published in 1822. See also N. Annandale, The Faroes and Iceland, Oxford, 1905. The whole matter of Faroe folk-song was cleared up satisfactorily by H. Thuren in his Folke Saangen paa Fær⊘rne, 1908.
46 The type of song now used by Shakers, Holy Rollers, and other dancing religious sects ought to be a point of corroborative interest. They probably resemble the Salvation Army type of hymn.
47 For German, an excellent display of dance-song material may be found in Franz Böhme's Geschichte des Tanzes in Deutschland, Leipzig, 1886. In chapter xv, “Über Tanzlieder,” he groups his material into classes, to show the varied character of the content. He gives amatory songs first place, as the most frequent accompaniment of the dance, with many examples. Historical songs, old hero songs, and mythic pieces (his second class), were sung, he thinks, in the oldest period, for the dance. But his evidence for this is the hero songs of the Faroes, concerning which we have evidence from the seventeenth century, and the testimony of Neocorus (1598) concerning the Ditmarsh folk of Holstein. The bearing of this evidence has already been considered. The third class he names consists of ballads or epic folk-songs, for which his examples for Germany are meager. This class, he says, was “in full bloom” in the Romance languages and in England, as sung at the dance—a hasty and mistaken generalization. A fourth class consists of lampoons, vituperations, satires, etc., abundantly illustrated. This is the class of dance songs which is often improvised. His next class consists of bird and animal songs, as of the nightingale, cuckoo, heron, owl, fox, etc. Riddle, wishing, and wager songs, and (rarely) religious songs constitute the last classes. In the second part of his history, the author prints 356 specimens of dance songs and melodies, in chronological sequence. Among these illustrative dance songs the epic folk-song, the ballad of the Child type, is the type playing the least conspicuous rôle. How any scholar who examines Böhme's display of mediaeval dance-song material—it is strikingly parallel to English dance-song material—can retain the belief that lyric-epic pieces like the Child pieces were conditioned first of all by mediæval dances, is hard to understand. They seem to be a lyric type least to be associated with such usage.
It is true that Professor Böhme, whose book was published in 1886, begins with the view that “Tanzlieder waren die ersten Lieder,” “Beim Tanze wurden die ältesten epischen Dichtungen (erzählende Volkslieder) gesungen, durch den Tanz sind sie veranlasst worden …,” “Die älteste Poesie eines jeden Volkes ist eine Verbindung von Tanz, Spiel, und Gesang.” But his material does not bear out his preliminary statements, nor is he insistent upon the narrative song as the earliest dance song, as his book proceeds. He tells us, p. 230, that we learn the origin and the form of dance songs best from the South German Schnadahüpfln, short two- or four-line songs, to familiar melodies, often improvised (see his fourth class) by singers and dancers. Among these songs, the heroic element hardly appears, and the historic never. A careful survey of the citations in Böhme's Geschichte des Tanzes should disillusion believers in the ballad as the characteristic type of mediaeval dance song, or as the leading lyric type of dance genesis.
48 Compare “Incremental repetition made up the whole frame of The Maid Freed from the Gallows simply because such ballads were still part and parcel of the dance” (The Popular Ballad, p. 117). Repetition is emphasized as the most characteristic feature of ballads, pp. 117–134, etc.
49 Edited by J. A. H. Murray, for the Early English Text Society, 1872, vol. i, p. 63.
50 That belief in dance origin, emergence from the illiterate, communal improvisation, epic development, and the priority of dialogue and situation songs, has current American acceptance, is shown by the fact that such belief is set forth, without hesitation or question, in the two latest American ballad anthologies: Professor W. M. Hart's English Popular Ballads, 1916, and Professor G. H. Stempel's A Book of Ballads, 1917.