Читать книгу A Book of Old Ballads — Complete - Various - Страница 10

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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.

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 wars of the present.

But even the craziest 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

musician's 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 an 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.