A Study of Poetry, Bliss Perry [books to read to improve english .txt] 📗

begins to tell his tale, we find that he is apt to “set it out” with vivid description. He is obliged to paint a picture as well as to spin a yarn, and not even Homer and Virgil—“objective” as they are supposed to be–can draw a picture without betraying something of their attitude and feeling towards their material. Like the messenger in Greek drama, their voices are shaken by what they have seen or heard. In the popular epic like the Nibelungen story, there is more objectivity than in the epic of art like Jerusalem Delivered or Paradise Lost. We do not know who put together in their present form such traditional tales as the Lay of the Nibelungs and Beowulf, and the personal element in the narrative is only obscurely felt, whereas Jerusalem Delivered is a constant revelation of Tasso, and the personality of Milton colors every line in Paradise Lost. When Matthew Arnold tells us that Homer is rapid, plain, simple and noble, he is depicting the characteristics of a poet as well as the impression made by the Iliad and the Odyssey. Those general traits of epic poetry which have been discussed ever since the Renaissance, like “breadth,” and “unity” and the sustained “grand” style, turn ultimately upon the natural qualities of great story-tellers. They are not mere rhetorical abstractions.

The narrative poet sees man as accomplishing a deed, as a factor in an event. His primary business is to report action, not to philosophize or to dissect character or to paint landscape. Yet so sensitive is he to the environing circumstances of action, and so bent upon displaying the varieties of human motive and conduct, that he cannot help reflecting in his verse his own mental attitude toward the situations which he depicts. He may surround these situations, as we have seen, with all the beauties and pomps and terrors of the visible world. In relating “God’s ways to man” he instinctively justifies or condemns. He cannot even tell a story exactly as it was told to him: he must alter it, be it ever so slightly, to make it fit his general conceptions of human nature and human fate. He gives credence to one witness and not to another. His imagination plays around the noble and base elements in his story until their original proportions are altered to suit his mind and purpose. Study the Tristram story, as told by Gottfried of Strassburg, by Malory, Tennyson, Arnold, Swinburne and Wagner, and you will see how each teller betrays his own personality through these instinctive processes of transformation of his material. It is like the Roman murder story told so many times over in Browning’s Ring and the Book: the main facts are conceded by each witness, and yet the inferences from the facts range from Heaven to Hell.

Browning is of course an extreme instance of this irruption of the poet’s personality upon the stuff of his story. He cannot help lyricising and dramatizing his narrative material, any more than he can help making all his characters talk “Browningese.” But Byron’s tales in verse show the same subjective tendency. He was so little of a dramatist that all of his heroes, like Poe’s, are images of himself. No matter what the raw material of his narrative poems may be, they become uniformly “Byronic” as he writes them down. And all this is “lyricism,” however disguised. William Morris, almost alone among modern English poets, seemed to stand gravely aloof from the tales he told, as his master Chaucer stood smilingly aloof. Yet the “tone” of Chaucer is perceived somehow upon every page, in spite of his objectivity.

The whole history of medieval verse Romances, indeed, illustrates this lyrical tendency to rehandle inherited material. Tales of love, of enchantment, of adventure, could not be held down to prosaic fact. Whether they dealt with “matter of France,” or “matter of Brittany,” whether a brief “lai” or a complicated cycle of stories like those about Charlemagne or King Arthur, whether a merry “fabliau” or a beast-tale like “Reynard the Fox,” all the Romances allow to the author a margin of mystery, an opportunity to weave his own web of brightly colored fancies. A specific event or legend was there, of course, as a nucleus for the story, but the sense of wonder, of strangeness in things, of individual delight in brocading new patterns upon old material, dominated over the sense of fact. “Time,” said Shelley, “which destroys the beauty and the use of the story of particular facts, stripped of the poetry which should invest them, augments that of poetry, and forever develops new and wonderful applications of the eternal truth which it contains…. A story of particular facts is as a mirror which obscures and distorts that which should be beautiful: poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.”

And in modern narrative verse, surely, the line between “epic” quality and “lyric” quality is difficult to draw. Choose almost at random a half-dozen story-telling poems from the Oxford Book of English Verse, say “The Ancient Mariner,” “The Burial of Sir John Moore,” “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” “Porphyria’s Lover,” “The Forsaken Merman,” “He Fell among Thieves.” Each of these poems narrates an event, but what purely lyric quality is there which cannot be found in “La Belle Dame sans Merci” and “The Ancient Mariner”? And does not each of the other poems release and excite the lyric mood?

We must admit, furthermore, that narrative measures and lyric measures are frequently identical, and help to carry over into a story a singing quality. Ballad measures are an obvious example. Walter Scott’s facile couplets were equally effective for story and for song. Many minor species of narrative poetry, like verse satire and allegory, are often composed in traditional lyric patterns. Even blank verse, admirably suited as it is for story-telling purposes, yields in its varieties of cadence many a bar of music long associated with lyric emotion. Certainly the blank verse of Wordsworth’s “Michael” is far different in its musical values from the blank verse, say, of Tennyson’s Princess—perhaps truly as different as the metre of Sigurd the Volsung is from that of The Rape of the Lock. The perfect matching of metrical form to the nature of the narrative material, whether that material be traditional or firsthand, simple or complex, rude or delicate, demands the finest artistic instinct. Yet it appears certain that many narrative measures affect us fully as much through their intimate association with the moods of song as through their specific adaptiveness to the purposes of narrative.

 

5. The Ballad

The supreme illustration of this blending of story and song is the ballad. The word “ballad,” like “ode” and “sonnet,” is very ancient and has been used in various senses. We think of it to-day as a song that tells a story, usually of popular origin. Derived etymologically from ballare, to dance, it means first of all, a “dance-song,” and is the same word as “ballet.” Solomon’s “Song of Songs” is called in the Bishops’ Bible of 1568 “The Ballet of Ballets of King Solomon.” But in Chaucer’s time a “ballad” meant primarily a French form of lyric verse,—not a narrative lyric specifically. In the Elizabethan period the word was used loosely for “song.” Only after the revival of interest in English and Scottish popular ballads in the eighteenth century has the word come gradually to imply a special type of story-telling song, with no traces of individual authorship, and handed down by oral tradition. Scholars differ as to the precise part taken by the singing, dancing crowd in the composition and perpetuation of these traditional ballads. Professor Child, the greatest authority upon English and Scottish balladry, and Professors Gummere, Kittredge and W. M. Hart have emphasized the element of “communal” composition, and illustrated it by many types of song-improvisation among savage races, by sailors’ “chanties,” and negro “work-songs.” It is easy to understand how a singing, dancing crowd carries a refrain, and improvises, through some quick-tongued individual, a new phrase, line or stanza of immediate popular effect; and it is also easy to perceive, by a study of extant versions of various ballads, such as Child printed in glorious abundance, to see how phrases, lines and stanzas get altered as they are passed from lip to lip of unlettered people during the course of centuries. But the actual historical relationship of communal dance-songs to such narrative lyrics as were collected by Bishop Percy, Ritson and Child is still under debate. [Footnote: See Louise Pound, “The Ballad and the Dance,” Pub. Mod. Lang. Ass., vol. 34, No. 3 (September, 1919), and Andrew Lang’s article on “Ballads” in Chambers’ Cyclopedia of Eng. Lit., ed. of 1902.]

“All poetry,” said Professor Gummere in reply to a critic of his theory of communal composition of ballads, “springs from the same poetic impulse, and is due to individuals; but the conditions under which it is made, whether originally composed in a singing, dancing throng and submitted to oral tradition, or set down on paper by the solitary and deliberate poet, have given birth to that distinction of ‘popular’ and ‘artistic,’ or whatever the terms may be, which has obtained in some form with nearly all writers on poetry since Aristotle.” Avoiding questions that are still in controversy, let us look at some of the indubitable characteristics of the “popular” ballads as they are shown in Child’s collection. [Footnote: Now reprinted in a single volume of the “Cambridge Poets” (Houghton Mifflin Company), edited with an introduction by G. L. Kittredge.] They are impersonal. There is no trace whatever of individual authorship. “This song was made by Billy Gashade,” asserts the author of the immensely popular American ballad of “Jesse James.” But we do not know what “Billy Gashade” it was who first made rhymes about Robin Hood or Johnny Armstrong, or just how much help he had from the crowd in composing them. In any case, the method of such ballads is purely objective. They do not moralize or sentimentalize. There is little description, aside from the use of set, conventional phrases. They do not “motivate” the story carefully, or move logically from event to event. Rather do they “flash the story at you” by fragments, and then leave you in the dark. They leap over apparently essential points of exposition and plot structure; they omit to assign dialogue to a specific person, leaving you to guess who is talking. Over certain bits of action or situation they linger as if they hated to leave that part of the story. They make shameless use of “commonplaces,” that is, stock phrases, lines or stanzas which are conveniently held by the memory and which may appear in dozens of different ballads. They are not afraid of repetition,—indeed the theory of choral collaboration implies a constant use of repetition and refrain, as in a sailor’s “chanty.” One of their chief ways of building a situation or advancing a narrative is through “incremental repetition,” as Gummere termed it, i.e. the successive additions of some new bits of fact as the bits already familiar are repeated.

 

“‘Christine, Christine, tread a measure for me!

A silken sark I will give to thee.’

 

“‘A silken sark I can get me here,

But I’ll not dance with the Prince this year.’

 

“‘Christine, Christine, tread a measure for me,

Silver-clasped shoes I will give to thee!’

 

“‘Silver-clasped shoes,’” etc.

American cowboy ballads show the same device:

 

“I started up the trail October twenty-third,

I started up the trail with the 2-U herd.”

Strikingly as the ballads differ from consciously “artistic” narrative in their broken movement and allusive method, the contrast is even more different if we consider the naive quality of their refrains. Sometimes the refrain is only a sort of