The Ballad Revival and National Literature: Textual Authority and the Invention of Tradition

THE BALLAD REVIVAL AND NATIONAL LITERATURE: TEXTUAL AUTHORITY AND THE INVENTION OF TRADITION David Atkinson Francis James Child and the “Popular” Ballad In an encyclopaedia article on “ballad poetry” first published in 1874, the great English-language ballad editor Francis James Child surveyed (with a very substantial bibliography) the ballad literature of a range of European nations.1 For Child, the identification of the ballad genre with the original, native poetry of a nation or people—providing a cultural foundation to the political sense of national identity that was emerging across Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—could be explained by the peculiar social circumstances that had brought what he called the “popular” ballad into being: “The condition of society in which a truly national or popular poetry appears explains the character of such poetry. It is a condition in which the people are not divided by political organization and book-culture into markedly distinct classes, in which consequently there is such community of ideas and feelings that the whole people form an individual.”2 At the end of the same article, Child reiterated: “The genuine popular ballad had its rise in a time when the distinctions since brought about by education and other circumstances had practically no existence.”3 The popular ballads represent “an expression of the mind and heart of the people as an individual, and never of the personality of individual men”.4 1 Francis J. Child, “ ‘Ballad Poetry’, Johnson’s Universal Cyclopædia, 1900”, Journal of Folk- lore Research, 31 (1994), pp. 214–22. 2 Child, “Ballad Poetry”, p. 214. Child’s thinking is discussed in Sigrid Rieuwerts, “ ‘The Genuine Ballads of the People’: F.J. Child and the Ballad Cause”, Journal of Folk- lore Research, 31 (1994), pp. 1–34; Sigrid Rieuwerts, “From Percy to Child: The ‘Popular Ballad’ as ‘a distinct and very important species of poetry’ ”, in Ballads and Boundaries: Narrative Singing in an Intercultural Context, ed. by James Porter, Proceedings of the 23rd International Ballad Conference of the Commission for Folk Poetry (Société Internation- ale d’Ethnologie et de Folklore), University of California, Los Angeles, June 21–24, 1993 (Los Angeles: Department of Ethnomusicology & Systematic Musicology, UCLA, 1995), pp. 13–20; Sigrid Rieuwerts, “The Folk-Ballad: The Illegitimate Child of the Popular Bal- lad”, Journal of Folklore Research, 33 (1996), pp. 221–26. 3 Child, “Ballad Poetry”, p. 218. 4 Child, “Ballad Poetry”, p. 214. 276 david atkinson Although he specifically disavowed communal authorship—“a man and not a people has composed them” (a point apparently overlooked by some of his successors)—within this shared cultural environment, “the author counts for nothing, and it is not by mere accident, but with the best rea- son, that they have come down to us anonymous”.5 This historical theory gave Child the title for his English and Scot- tish Popular Ballads (1882–98).6 The ideas can no doubt be traced to the Germanic philological tradition of Herder, Bürger, and the brothers Grimm.7 They are prefigured, too, in the earlier English and Scottish ballad publications of Thomas Percy and William Motherwell, respectively, which both sought to present ballads as examples of the ancient indig- enous literature of a nation or a people, and which were important influ- ences on Child. Thus the dedication to Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) described the ballads as “effusions of nature, shewing the first efforts of ancient genius”;8 while Motherwell in the Introduction to Minstrelsy: Ancient and Modern (1827) wrote of Scottish balladry as “that body of poetry which has inwoven itself with the feelings and passions of the people, and which shadows forth as it were an actual embodiment of their Universal mind, and of its intellectual and moral tendencies”.9 Later, too, the English folk song collector Cecil Sharp continued to speak in remarkably similar terms (although there is no need to posit any direct connection between his thinking and that of Child): “Now, in Folk-poetry, Folk-ballad, Folk-tale, and Folk-song, we are dealing with the output of this earlier period, when the unit was not the individual, but the community; we are dealing with the product of a people as yet undivided into a lettered and an unlettered class. We are thinking of a time when in a common atmosphere of ignorance, so far as book lore is concerned, one habit of thought and one standard of action animated every member from Prince to Plough-boy.”10 5 Child, “Ballad Poetry”, p. 214. 6 The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, ed. by Francis James Child, 5 vols (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1882–98). 7 Rieuwerts, “The Genuine Ballads of the People”, p. 20; “The Folk-Ballad”, pp. 221–22. 8 [Thomas Percy], Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, consisting of old heroic ballads, songs, and other pieces of our earlier poets (chiefly of the lyric kind), together with some few of later date, 3 vols (London: J. Dodsley, 1765), I, vi. The dedication was written for Percy by Samuel Johnson. 9 William Motherwell, Minstrelsy: Ancient and Modern, with an historical introduction and notes (Glasgow: John Wylie, 1827), p. v. 10 London, Vaughan Williams Memorial Library, Cecil J. Sharp MSS, Miscellaneous material, CJS/5/3, Lecture on Folk Songs from Somerset, Hampstead, March 1905, p. 4. A .

Load more