Vernacular Song and the Folkloric Imagination at the Fin de Siècle ROSS COLE In 1893 the polymath, folklorist, and eminent emigrate with his family to New York City, Jewish historian Joseph Jacobs read a paper—as where he became Professor of English and a stopgap—to London’s Folk-lore Society, Rhetoric at the Jewish Theological Seminary of which he had joined in 1889. Raised in Sydney, America. Jacobs journeyed to Britain in 1873; after grad- Simply titled “The Folk,” the paper he uating from the University of Cambridge, he delivered to the Folk-lore Society began as fol- studied briefly in Berlin and subsequently lows: under Francis Galton.1 A prolific scholar with a During the discussions which took place some years seemingly boundless range of interests, Jacobs ago in the Folk-lore Society as to the nature of published literary essays, fought publicly folk-lore, there was one curious omission. Much against anti-Semitism, raised funds for the was said about what the Folk believed, what the plight of persecuted Jews in Russia, and pur- Folk did, and how these sayings and doings of the sued demographic research to counter what he Folk should be arranged and classified. But very saw as the biological essentialism underpin- little indeed was said as to what the Folk was that ning the question of race. Jacobs would later said and did these things, and nothing at all was said as to how they said and did them, and especially as to how they began to say and do them. In short, in I would like to thank Philip Bohlman, Nicholas Cook, dealing with Folk-lore, much was said of the Lore, Marina Frolova-Walker, Vic Gammon, Oskar Cox Jensen, almost nothing was said of the Folk.2 and Ceri Owen. This project was funded by a grant from the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council. 1Anne J. Kershen, “Jacobs, Joseph (1854–1916),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford Univer- sity Press, 2004) (http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/ 2Joseph Jacobs, “The Folk,” Folklore 4/2 (1893): 233–38, 51106, accessed 1 June 2016). 233. 19th Century Music, vol. 42, no. 2, pp. 73–95. ISSN: 0148-2076, electronic ISSN: 1533-8606 © 2018 by the Regents of the 73 University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/ journals.php?p=reprints. https://doi.org/10.1525/ncm.2018.42.2.73. 19TH Reminding his audience that this “myste- Jacobs’s views have a strikingly modern CENTURY MUSIC rious entity” presumed to be the folk was character, yet they have not fared well in the “many-minded,” Jacobs states and restates a century and a quarter that followed his paper. radical claim: “When we come to realise what Throughout the intense disputes surrounding we mean by saying a custom, a tale, a myth folk song over the years, such views—despite arose from the Folk, I fear we must come to the or perhaps due to their critical aptitude—have conclusion that the said Folk is a fraud, a delu- been silenced, drowned out, or simply forgot- sion, a myth.”3 ten. This article builds on Jacobs’s ideas by Jacobs’s polemic is striking not only for this foregrounding discrepancies between vernacu- audacious statement implicating the very con- lar singing and the work of those affiliated cept of folklore as mythology, but also for his with London’s Folk-Song Society, founded in broader political commitment to understand- 1898. It offers a revisionist account critical not ing the complex patterns of human agency just of expropriative “mediation” but also of lying tacitly beneath folklorists’ theories and the conceptual framework motivating the very collections. Stressing acts of individual idea of folk song.8 artistry, initiative, and borrowing as points of The term Volkslied entered German histo- origin rather than spontaneous acts of commu- riography during the 1770s courtesy of Johann nal creation, Jacobs proposed that “the Folk is Gottfried Herder, and cognate terms such as simply a name for our ignorance: we do not “national music” circulated during the know to whom a proverb, a tale, a custom, a Enlightenment. In Britain, however, influen- myth owes its origin, so we say it originated tial ideas regarding folk song were institution- among the Folk”—wryly portrayed as “a pub- alized by figures with agendas and anxieties lishing syndicate that exploits the productions peculiar to the fin de siècle.9 This era wit- of that voluminous author, Anon.”4 Further- nessed a series of jarring confrontations in more, careful attention should be paid to the which urban modernism clashed with Arca- fact that communities are never entirely her- dian nostalgia, patriotic insularity with cos- metic but rather in constant “culture-contact, mopolitan internationalism, advances in tech- mediate or immediate” with other locales, tra- nology and communications with reactionary ditions, and ideas.5 One key consequence was impulses, and the apogee of Empire with that folklore could not be separated from the bourgeoning socialism.10 By retracing the con- category of art: “We shall have to break down tours of the resulting discourse in relation the rather hard and fast line we draw between folk-lore and literature . for, after all, we 8 are the Folk as well as the rustic.”6 Even more A theory of mediation was advanced by Dave Harker in Fakesong: The Manufacture of British “Folksong”: 1700 to remarkably, yet another binary was to be lev- the Present Day (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, eled: “Breaking down the distinction between 1985). 9 the Folk of the past and of the present, we shall See Philip V. Bohlman, “Herder’s Nineteenth Century,” Nineteenth-Century Music Review 7/1 (2010): 3–21; A be able to study the lore of the present with Companion to the Works of Johann Gottfried Herder, ed. happy results. The music-hall, from this Hans Adler and Wulf Koepke (Rochester: Camden House, point of view, will have its charm for the folk- 2009); and Matthew Gelbart, The Invention of “Folk Music” and “Art Music”: Emerging Categories from Oss- lorist, who will there find the Volkslieder of ian to Wagner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, to-day.”7 2007). 10G. R. Searle, A New England? Peace and War, 1886–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004). Interdisciplinary litera- ture on the fin de siècle is expansive, with recent “third 3Ibid., 234. wave” studies adopting a global perspective. See Fin de 4Ibid., 235–36. siècle and Its Legacy, ed. Mikuláš Teich and Roy Porter 5Ibid., 236. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Cultural 6Ibid., 237. On this point, see Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Politics at the Fin de Siècle, ed. Sally Ledger and Scott Culture in England, 1500–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University McCracken (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Press, 2000). 1995); The Cambridge Companion to the Fin de Siècle, ed. 7Jacobs, “The Folk,” 237. Such views of the music hall Gail Marshall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, were extremely rare: see Ross Cole, “Notes on Troubling 2007); and The Fin-de-Siècle World, ed. Michel Saler ‘the Popular’,” Popular Music 37/3 (2018): 392–414. (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015). 74 to vernacular song, I want to draw attention one country’s “innate” musical character ROSS COLE to what I term the “folkloric imagination”—a against another. As the contrapuntal perspec- Vernacular conceptual outlook shared by those concerned tive adopted by writers such as Edward Said, Song with the selective preservation of “folk” mate- Homi Bhabha, and Paul Gilroy has demon- rial in the form of written texts over and above strated, however, such Manichean thinking is the intricacies of lived experience. The folk- untenable in view of the hybridities arising loric imagination allowed its practitioners to from globalization and from the profoundly envisage a mythical and curative past driven porous or interstitial nature of colonial by the yearning for an alternative present.11 encounter.13 Likewise, it is impossible to The majority of song collectors, in other square claims made for the unalloyed purity words, were more interested in the beguilingly of folk song with a critical genealogy of this “primitive” quality of the material they sought material. than in the social experience of popular music- Scholars including Robin Kelley, Regina making during the nineteenth century. Bendix, and Matthew Gelbart have established By drawing out the hitherto neglected ties that, although folkloric ideals were rhetori- between folkloric thought and imperialism, cally envisioned as the antithesis of techno- moreover, I seek to advocate a postcolonial logical progress, “premodern” folk culture was turn of thought grounded in the work of constitutively tied up in the fears and desires Michel de Certeau. Folk-song theory shares in of a society in the throes of modernization.14 what Leela Gandhi describes as a “peculiar The concept of folk culture, Kelley argues, is habit of mind” prevalent in the imperial an example of what Lévi-Strauss termed brico- metropolis at the fin de siècle: “A complex lage: “A cutting, pasting, and incorporating of analogical system relentlessly mapping hier- various cultural forms that”—in this archies of race, culture, and civilization upon case—“then become categorized in a racially relationships between genders, species, [and] or ethnically coded aesthetic hierarchy.”15 So classes.”12 Reflecting the broader epistemology understood, folk culture is best viewed as a of colonialism—a worldview striving to trope, a disciplinary force striving to refine, uphold a partitioned model of “us” (civilized, homogenize, and control the intricacies of ver- modern) and “them” (primitive, premod- nacular culture.