An explanation and intro to the intro
I’ve been delving deep into old stories, both for House of Revels and for a new play I am co-writing with Sophie Haxworth, and in the midst of the search of our childrens bookcase I discovered ‘A book of Old Ballads, collated by Beverly Nichols.’ The book plate tells me this compendium was a school prize awarded to my grandmother in Upper 6, July 1938.
The book and illustrations are wonderful, and the same edition is widely and cheaply available, should anyone else wish to follow this Rabbit Hole. But the introduction struck a chord. Not only is it a masterful display of “how” to write, it also seems the issues concerning Nichols: public consciousness, grey society, egotism, the internationalism of art and the worst side of patriotism and its distortion of this long tradition strike a chord today, 87 years after publication. The points he raises are worth a discussion and for ease of access I have transcribed the essay here. May it prove useful and thought provoking!
Forward by Beverley Nichols
(Note of caution: this essay is 87 years old. As such, some terminology is out of date, and the definitions of words have shifted. In a couple of places a turn of phrase that was standard academic wording then now feels hideously out of date. With that in mind, stay generous and enjoy)
These poems are the very essence of the British Spirit. They are, to literature, what the bloom of the heather is to the Scot, and the smell of the sea to the Englishman. All that is beautiful in the old word “patriotism”… a word which, of later, has been twisted to such ignoble purposes… is latent in these gay and full-blooded measures.
But it is not only for these reason that they are so valuable to the modern spirit. It is rather for their tonic qualities that they should be prescribed in 1934. The post-war vintage of poetry is the thinnest and the most watery that England has ever produced. But here, in these ballads, are great draughts of poetry which have lost none of their sparkle and none of their bouquet. It is worht while asking ourselves why this should be- why these poems should “keep”, apparently forever, when the average modern poem turns sour overnight. And though all generalizations are dangerous I believe there is. one which explains our problem, a very simple one…. namely, that they eyes of the old ballad-singers were turned outwards, while the eyes of the modern lyric-writer are turned inwards.
The authors of the old ballards wrote when the world was young, and infinitely exciting, when nobodoy knew what mystery mgiht not lie on the other side of the hilll, when the moon was a golden lamp, lit by a personal God, when ginants and monsters stalked, without the slightest doubt, in the valleys over the river. In such a world, what could a man do but stare about him, with bright eyes, searching the horizon, while his heart beat fast in the rhythm of a song?
But now- the mysteries have gone. We know, all too well, what lies on the other side of the hill. The scientists have long ago puffed out, scornfully, the golden lamp of the night… leaving us in the uttermost darkness. The giants and the monsters have either skilked away or have been tamed, and are engaged in wiritng their memoirs for the popular press. And so, in a world where everything is known (and nothing understood), the modern lyric-writer wearily averts his eyes, and stares into his own heart.
That way madness lies. All madmen are ferocious egotists, and so are all modern lyric-writers. That is the first and most vital difference between these ballads and their modern counter-parts. The old ballad-singers hardly every used the first person singular. The modern lyric-writer hardly every uses anything else.
II
This is really such an important point that it is worth labouring.
Why is ballad-making a lost art? That is is a lost art there can be no question. Nobody who is painfully acquainted with the rambling egotistical pieces of dreary versification, passing for modern “ballads”, will deny it.
Ballad-making is a lost rat for a very simple reason. Which is, that we are all, nowadays, too sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought to receive emotions directly, without self-consciousness. If we are wounded, we are no longer able to sing a song about a clean sword, and a great cause, and a black enemy, and a waving flag. No- we must needs go into long descriptions of our pain, and abstruse calculations about its effect upon our souls.
It is not “we” who have changed. It is life that has changed. “We” are the same men, with the same legs, arms and eyes as our ancestors. But life has so twisted things that there are no longer any clean swords nor great causes, nor black enemies. And the flags do not know which way to flutter, so contrary are the winds of the modern world. All is doubt. And doubt’s colour is grey.
Grey is no colour for a ballad. Ballads are woven from stuff of primitive hue… the red blood gushing, the gold sun shining, the green grass growing, the white snow falling. Never will you find grey in a ballad. You will find the black of the night and the raven’s wing, and the silver of a thousand stars. You will find the blue of many summer skies. But you will not find grey.
III
That is why ballad-making is a lost art. Or almost a lost art. For even in this odd and musty world of phantoms which we call the twentieth century, there are times when a man finds himself in a certain place at a certain hour and something happens to him which takes him out of himself. And a song is born, simply, and sweetly, a song which other men can sing, for all time, and forget themselves…
Such a song was once written by a master at my old school, Malborough. He was a Scot. But he loved Malborough with the sort of love which the old ballad-mongers must have had – the sort of love which takes a man on wings, far from his foolish little body.
He wrote a song called “The Scotch Malburian”.
Here it is:-
Oh Malborough, though she’s a toun o’ touns
We will say that and mair,
We that ha’walked alang her douns
and snuffed her Wiltshire air.
A weary way ye’ll hae to tramp
Afore ye match the green
O’Savernake and Barbery Camp
And a’that lies atween!
The infinite beauty of that phrase… “And a’that lies atween”! The infinite beauty as it is roared by 700 young throats in unison! For in that phrase there drifts a whole pageant of boyhood the sound of cheers as a racist ran on a stormy day in March , the tolling of the Chapel Bell, the crack of ball against bat, the size of sleep in a long white dormitory.
But you may say “What is all this to me? I wasn’t at Malborough. I don’t like school boys… they strike me as dirty, noisy, and usually foul-minded. Why should I go into raptures about such a song, which seems only to express a highly debatable approval of a certain method of education? “
If you are asking yourself that sort of question, you are obviously in a very grave need of the tonic properties of this book. For after you have read it, you will wonder why you ever asked it.
IV
I go back and back to the same point, at the risk of boring you to distraction. For it is a point which has much more “to” it than the average modern will care to admit, unless he is forced to do so.
You remember the generalization about the eyes… how they used to look out, but now look in? Well, listen to this…
I’m feeling blue
I don’t know what to do
‘Cos I love you
And you don’t love me.
The above masterpiece is, as far as I am aware imaginary. But it represents a sort of reductio ad absurdum of thousands of lyrics which have been echoing over the post-war world. Nearly all these lyrics are melancholy, with the profound primitive melancholy of the negro swamp, and they are all violently egotistical.
Now this, in the long run, is an influence of far greater evil than one woudl be inclined at first to admit. If countless young men, every night, are to clasp countless young woman to their bosoms, and rotate over countless dancing-floors, muttery “I’m feeling blue.. I don’t know what to do”, it is not unreasonable to suppose that they will subconsciously apply some of the lyric’s mournful egotism to themselves.
Anybody has had even a nodding acquaintance with modern psychological science will be aware of the significance of “conditioning”, as applied to the human temperament. The late M. Coue “conditioned” people into happiness by making them repeat, over and over again, the phrase “Every day in every way I grow better and better and better.”
The modern lyric-monger exactly reverse M. Coue’s doctrine. He makes the patient repeat “Every night, with all my might, I grow worse and worse and worse.” Of course the “I” of the lyric-writer is an imaginary “I”, but if any man sings “I’m feeling blue”, often enough, to a catchy tune, he will be a superman if he does not eventually apply that “I” to himself.
But the “blueness” is really beside the point. It is the egotism of the modern ballad which is the trouble. Even when, as they occasionally do, the modern lyric-writers discover, to their astonishment, that thye are feeling happy, they make the happiness such a personal issue that half its tonic value is destroyed. It is not, like the old ballads, just an outburst of delight, a sudden rapture at the warmth of the sun, or the song of the birds, or the glint of moonlight on a sword, or the dew in a woman’s eyes. It is not an emotion so sweet and soaring that self is left behind, like a dull chrysalis, while the butterfly of the spirit flutters free. No… the chrysalis is enver elft behind, the “I”, “I”,”I”, continues, in a maddening monotone. And we get this sort of thing…
I want to be happy,
But I can’t be happy
Till I’ve made you happy too.
And that, if you please, is one of the jolliest lyrics of the last decade! That was a song which made us all smile and set our feet dancing!
Even when their tale was woven out of the stuff of tragedy, the old ballads were not tarnished with such morbid speculations. Read the tale of the beggar’s daughter of Bethnal Green. One shudders to thing what a modern lyric-writer would make of it. We should all be in tears before the end of the first chorus. But here, a lovely girl leaves her blind father to search for fortune. She has many adventures, and in the end, she marries a knight. The ballad ends with words of almost childish simplicity, but they are words which ring with the true tone of happiness:-
Thus was the feast ended with joye and delighte
A bridegroome most happy thne was the young knighte
In joy and felicitie long live hee
All with his faire ladye, the pretty Bessee.
I said that the words were of almost childish simplicity. But the student of language, and the would-be writer, might do worse that study those words, if only to see how the cumulative effect of bright and radiance is gained. You may think the words are artless, but just ponder, for a moment, the number of brilliant verbal symbols which are collected into that tiny verse. There are only four lines. But those lines contain these words…
Feast, joy, delight, bridegroom, happy, joy, young, felicity, fair, pretty.
Is that quite so artless, after all? Is it not rather like an old and primitive plaque, where colour is piled on colour till you would say the very wood will burst into flame.. and yet, the total effect is one of happy simplicity?
V
How were the early ballads born? Who made them? Who made them? One man or many? Were they written down, when they were still young, or was it only after the lapse of many generations when their rhymes had been sharpened and their metres polished by constant repetition that they were finally copied out?
To answer these questions would be one of the most fascinating tasks which the detective in letters could set himself. Grimm, listening in his fairyland, heard some of the earliest ballads, loved them, pondered on them, and suddenly startled the world by announcing that most ballads were not the work of a single author, but of the people at large. Das Volkdichtet, he said. And that phrase got him into a lot of trouble. People told him to get back to his fairyland and not make such ridiculous suggestions. For how, they asked, could a whole people make a poem? You might as well tell a thousand men to make a tune, limiting each of them to one note!
To invest Grimm’s words with such an intention is quite unfair. Obviously a multitude of people could not, deliberately, make a single poem anymore than a multitude of people could, deliberately, make a single picture, one man doing the nose, one man and eye and so on. Such a suggestion is grotesque, and Grimm never meant it . If I might guess at what he meant, I would suggest that he was thinking that the origin of ballads must been similar to the origin of the dance, (which was probably the earliest form of aesthetic expression known to man).
The dance was invented because it provided a means prolonging ecstasy by art. It may have been an ecstasy of sex or an ecstasy of victory… that doesn’t matter. The point is that it gave to a group of people and ordered means of expressing their delight instead of justice leaping about and making loud cries, like the animals. and you may be sure that as the primitive dance began, there was always some member of the tribe a little more agile than the rest- some man kicked a little higher or wriggled his body in an amusing way. and the rest of them copied him, and incorporated his step into their own.
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 around the fire and begin to make Mary. 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 or that night, or 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 prince’s 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 civilised 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 minstrel’s who sang them. And it is a happy thought that those minstrel’s 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 finally 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 inquiries back, the great 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 Kings headquarters.”
And even so late as the time of Froissart, we have minstrel’s and heralds mentioned together, as those who might securely go into an enemy’s country .
The reader will perhaps forgive me if I heart back, once more, to our present day and age, in view of the quite astonishing change in national psychology which that revelation implies. Minstrel’s 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 progress towards internationalism, nowadays. Whereas, in reality, we have grown more and more friendly 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.
Man needs song, for he is a singing animal. Moreover, he needs communal song, for he is a social animal. The military authorities realized this very cleverly, and they encouraged the troops, during the war, to sing on every possible occasion. Crazy pacifists, like myself, may find it almost unbearably bitter to think that on each side of various frontiers young men were being trained to sing themselves to death, in a struggle which was hideously impersonal, a struggle of machinery, in which the only winners were the armament manufacturers. And crazy pacifists might draw a very sharp line indeed between the songs which celebrated real personal struggles in the tiny wars of the past and the songs which were merely the prelude to thousands of puzzled young men suddenly finding themselves choking in chlorine gas, in the walls of the present.
But even the crazy pacifist could not fail to be moved by some of the ballads of the last war. To me , “Tipperary” is still the most moving tune in the world. It happens to be a very good tune, from the musicians point of view, a tune that Handel would not have been ashamed to write, but that is not the point. Its emotional qualities are due to its associations. Perhaps that is how it has always been, with ballads. From the standard of pure aesthetics one ought not to consider “associations” in judging a poem or a tune, but with a song like “Tipperary” you would be in inhuman prig if you didn’t. We all have our “associations” with this particular tune. For me, it recalls a window in Hampstead, on a grey day in October 1914. I had been having the measles, and had not been allowed to go back to school. Then suddenly , down the street, that tune echoed. And they came marching, and marching, and marching. And they were all so happy.
So happy.
VII
“Tipperary” is a true ballad, which is why it is included in this book. So is “John Brown’s Body”. They were not written as ballads but they have been promoted to that proud position by popular vote.
It will now be clear, from the foregoing remarks, that there are thousands of poems, labelled “ballads” from the eighteenth century, through the romantic movement, and onwards, which are not ballads at all. Swinburne’s ballads, Which so shocked our grandparents, bore about as much relation to the true ballads as a vase of wax fruit to the hawker’s barrow. They were lovely patterns of words, woven like some exquisite, firming lace, but they were Swinburne, Swinburne all the time. They had nothing to do with the common people. The common people would not have understood a word of them.
Ballads must be popular. And that is why it will always remain one of the weirdest paradoxes of literature that the only man, except Kipling, who has written a true ballad in the last fifty years is the man who despised the people, who shrank from them, and jeered them, from his little gilded niche Piccadilly. I refer, of course, to Oscar Wilde’s “Ballad of Reading Gaol.” It was a true ballad, and it was the best thing he ever wrote. For it was written de profundis, when his hands were bloody with Labour and his tortured spirit had been down to the level of the lowest, to the level of the pavement… nay, lower… to the gutter itself . And in the gutter, with agony, he learned the meaning of song.
Ballads begin and end with the people. You cannot escape that fact. And therefore, if I wished to collect the ballads of the future, the songs which will endure into the next century (if there is any song in the next century), I should not rake through the contemporary poets, in the hope of finding gems of lasting brilliance. No. I should go to the music-halls. I should listen to the sort of thing they sing when the faded lady with the high bust steps forward and shouts, “Now then, boys, all together!”
Unless you can write the words “Now then, boys, all together”, at the top of a ballad, it is not really a ballad at all. That may sound a sweeping statement, but it is true.
in the present-day music-halls, although they have fallen from their higher state, we should find a number of these songs which seemed destined for immortality. One of these is “Don’t ‘ave any more Mrs Moor.”
Do you remember it?
Don’t ‘ave any more, Mrs. Moore!
Mrs. Moore, oh don’t ‘ave any more!
Too may double gins
Give the ladies double chins,
So don’t ‘ave any more, Mrs. Moore!
The whole of English ‘low life’ (which is much the most exciting part of English life) is in that lyric. It is as vivid as a Rowlandson cartoon. How well we know Mrs. Moore! How plainly we see her… the amiable, coarse-mouthed, generous-hearted tippler, with her elbow on the countless counters, her damp coppers clutched in her rough hands, her eyes staring, a little vacantly, about her. Some may think it is a sordid picture. but i am sure that they cannot know Mrs. Moore very well it they think that. They cannot know her bitter struggles, her silent heroisms, nor her sardonic humour.
Lyrics such as these will, I believe, endure long after many of the most renowned and fashionable poets of to-day are forgotten. They all have the same quality, that they can be prefaced by that inspiring sense to sentence, “Now then, boys- all together!” Or to put it another way, as in the ballad of George Barnwell,
All youths of fair England
That dwell both and far and near,
Regard my story that I tell
And to my song give ear.
That may sound more dignified, but it amounts to the same thing!
VIII
But if the generation to come will learn a great deal from the few popular ballads which we are still creating in our music-halls, how much more shall we learn of history from these ballads, which rang through the whole country, and were impregnated with the spirit of a whole people! These ballads are history, and as such they should be recognised.
It has always seemed to me that we teach history in the wrong way. We give boys the impression that it is an affair only of kings and queens and great statesman, of generals and Admirals, and such-like bores. Thousands of boys could probably draw you a map of many pettifogging little campaigns, with startling accuracy, but not one in a thousand could tell you what the private soldier carried in his knapsack. You could get sheaves of competent essays, from any school, dealing with such things as the Elizabethan ecclesiastical settlement, but how many boys could tell you, even vaguely, what an English home was like, what they ate, what coins we used, how their rooms were lit, and what they paid their servants?
In other words, how many history masters ever take the trouble to sketch in the great background, the life of the common people? How many even realise their existence, except on occasions of national disaster, such as the Black Plague?
The proper study of the ballad would go a long way towards remedying this defect. Thomas Percy, whose Reliques must ever be the main source of our information all questions connected with ballots have pointed out that all the great events of the country have, sooner or later, found their way into the country’s song-book. But it is not only the resounding names that are celebrated. In the ballads we hear the echoes of the street, the rude laughter and the pointed gests. Sometimes these rings so plainly that they need no explanation. At other times, we have to go to Percy or to some of his successors to realise the true significance of the song.
For example. The famous balled “John Anderson my Jo” seems, at first sight, to be innocent of any polemical intention. But it was written during the Reformation when, as Percy drily observes, “the Muses were deeply engaged in religious controversy.” The zeal of the Scottish reformers was at its height and this zeal found vent in many a pasquil discharged at Popery. It caused them, indeed, in their frenzy, to compose songs which were grossly licentious, and to sing these songs in rasping voices to the tunes of some of the most popular hymns in the Latin Service.
“Jo Anderson my Jo” was such a ballad composed for such an occasion. And Percy, who was more qualified than any other man to read between the lines, has pointed out that the first stanza contains a satirical illusion to the luxury of the popish clergy, while the second, which makes an apparently light reference to “seven bairns”, is actually concerned with the seven sacraments, the five of which were the spurious offspring of Mother Church.
Thus it was in a thousand cases. The ballads, even the lightest and most blossoming of them, were deep-rooted in the soil of English history. How different from anything that we possess today! Great causes do not lead men to song, nowadays they lead them to write letters to the newspapers. And national thanksgiving cannot call forth a single bar of music. Who can remember a solitary verse of Thanksgiving, from any of our poets, in commemoration of any of the victories of the Great War? Who can recall even a fragment of verse in praise of the long deferred coming of Peace?
Very deeply significant is it that our only method of commemorating Armistice Day was by a two minute silence. No song. No music. Nothing. The best we could do we felt was to keep quiet.