Francis James Child and William Macmath Working Together for Ballads
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THE CAUSE Francis James Child and William Macmath Working Together for Ballads Mary Ellen Brown• • , Editor Contents Acknowledgements The Cause The Letters Index Acknowledgments The letters between Francis James Child and William Macmath reproduced here belong to the permanent collections of the Houghton Library, Harvard University and the Hornel Library, Broughton House, Kirkcudbright, a National Trust for Scotland property. I gratefully acknowledge the help and hospitality given me by the staffs of both institutions and their willingness to allow me to make these materials more widely available. My visits to both facilities in search of data, transcribing hundreds of letters to bring home and analyze, was initially provided by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial and Andrew W. Mellon foundations and subsequently—for checking my transcriptions and gathering additional material--by the Office of the Provost for Research at Indiana University Bloomington. This serial support has made my work possible. Quite unexpectedly, two colleagues/friends met me the last time I was in Kirkcudbright (2014) and spent time helping me correct several difficult letters and sharing their own perspectives on these and other materials—John MacQueen and the late Ronnie Clark. Robert E. Lewis helped me transcribe more accurately Child’s reference and quotation from Chaucer; that help reminded me that many of the letters would benefit from copious explanatory notes in the future. Much earlier I benefitted from conversations with Sigrid Rieuwerts and throughout the research process with Emily Lyle. Both of their published and anticipated research touches on related publications as they have sought to explore and make known the rich past of Scots and the study of ballads. The literary past—oral and written--of Scotland and its study have been my focus from the very beginning of my academic career; and I have benefitted from the libraries, archives, and human resources as I have done my work. Making these letters available is one small way of repaying my debt to Scotland. THE CAUSE Francis James Child and William Macmath--Working Together for Ballads The letters between Child and Macmath are but a sample of the letters exchanged around one nineteenth-century project. Some of the letters were about specific data; others explored issues and definitions about the subject; some provided corrections and suggestions. The letters, in toto, illustrate that the scholarly world in the second half of the nineteenth century could be international, certainly a trans-Atlantic community. The letters reveal scholars willing to engage in epistolary conversations, even to do research for one another, certainly to share knowledge freely and often abundantly. The letters provide a compelling picture of a scholarly community, of cooperation and sharing that offers a glimpse of a lost utopia. This project was begun by a Harvard Professor, Francis James Child: the subject was the ballad. This kind of poetry, usually short, often sung, was mostly transmitted orally; and there was a shared agreement among the scholarly community that the ballad’s time was past, that they had flourished in a particular societal milieu at a time before print. While these conjectures about the ballads’ history have been questioned multiply over time with the advent of new data, this should not erase the fact that Child and many Continental scholars of “national literatures” in the late nineteenth century agreed. Knowledge of oral literature was in its infancy, yet efforts were underway to identify truly national materials, like ballads, that provided the bedrock for subsequent literary flowering. Child’s work might be called one landmark of this period. Evidences of this early literature could often be found in manuscripts and sometimes, it became clear, the early ballads continued to be held in memory, to be sung and shared by members of the community, though often in fragmentary form. Child’s focus was on the English language ballads, once a part of the literary inheritance of those in England and Scotland (parts of Ireland, the United States, and other English-language enclaves). He sought to create an anthology, a critical edition of All of those ballads, all of the extant texts. And he had to find them and define them. While Child did not definitively define the “popular ballad,” there are evidences of his criteria in the published project, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882-1898) (hereafter ESPB): the ballads were old; had originally been whole, complete, but were changed and became incomplete through the processes of transmission—by singers and editors—orally and in print; contained aspects of traditionality in style and content; and were subject to constant change. Child began his search for popular ballads in published works, only some of which he found in Harvard’s library. He began to buy books, found abroad, and to build a library that today contains virtually all of the major publications of English language balladry and many of the collections of continental ballads. And he learned that almost MEB 1 every editor had altered, in ways great or small, what was recorded in the manuscripts that lay behind the books; so he sought the manuscripts, obtained carefully or carelessly made transcriptions and sometimes the manuscript itself. He poured through collections of broadsides (individually printed texts) and chapbooks (small collections of ballads); and he began to receive versions of ballads remembered and written down for his consideration. From all this data, accumulated over a considerable period of time—with the help of foreign scholars and enthusiasts—he cumulatively selected 305 ballads, printed with all of the versions available to him as an archive of a once vital, but early genre of literature. And, additionally, he provided comparative material of cognate versions of his 305 in European languages, showing that at least some of the ballads were international, but had presumably, individual national qualities. A great deal of the comparative material came to Child through correspondents, frequently from scholars of national literature. They were interested and involved with his work and he with theirs. One of Child’s earliest correspondents was a man ideally suited to advise him, for he had earlier published an edition of English and Scottish ballads (1843-6) and had met some of the primary experts in the British Isles. He was, however, Danish and was then engaged in an edition of Denmark’s balladry Danmarks gamle Folkeviser (Dgf) of which he was the founding and first editor. He had thought long and hard about various questions and felt Child was the scholar to do the same for the English language ballads: “let me express my sincere hope to see the edition The Popular Ballads of the English Race by Professor F.J. Child, to be for all time to come the chief source of information on that memorable subject” (Hustvedt, 252). Child, in turn, expressed his great delight in having Svend Grundtvig as correspondent and advisor: “There is literally no man in Europe whose acquaintance and friendship I should so highly esteem” (Hustvedt, 248). They were both scholars; they worked on similar subjects; they knew one another’s publications; they knew many of the same books—most especially the ballad edition of William Motherwell (Minstrelsy: Ancient and Modern: 1827) which greatly influenced Grundtvig’s selection of texts for his own collection (less than twenty years after Motherwell’s Minstrelsy) and whose manuscript, copied for Child early in his research process, was proclaimed an essential ingredient of ESPB. Grundtvig had explored many things long before Child began to study the ballad seriously, though they were nearly the same age. Child told him what he was doing, had done; Grundtvig sent him lists and suggestions which had arisen from his own work; he prodded Child. Together they explored various macro issues: criteria to use in determining a popular ballad—tradition, authenticity; arrangement and order—Grundtvig suggested form and his own earlier work on the English and Scottish ballads; the comparative aspect of the ballads—their existence in multiple language and linguistic traditions. And Child paid Grundtvig $500. for his help and suggestions. Grundtvig’s letters and the initial volumes of Dgf were Child’s models and were most influential as Child gathered materials and planned his own edition. Dgf had indeed been carefully developed, but Child was probably not aware of the extensive criticism its MEB 2 proposal had created: the approach had been critiqued as too extensive and expensive; some preferred the printing of a re-created text that conformed to some archetypical idea of what they imagined the ballad had been, a beautiful exemplar. This was not Grundtvig’s plan, Child’s model—to print all the ballads, with all their versions. The correspondence began in 1872 and concluded with Grundtvig’s death in 1883, not long after the publication of the first of ten parts of ESPB appeared; Grundtvig felt he had played a significant role in stimulating Child’s work, even directing it. Their correspondence reveals scholars who respected the work and knowledge of one another; and the letters often reflect their depth of academic knowledge. Their epistolary exchange exhibits a tonality of mutual appreciation and respect, a kind of genuine friendship. The correspondence between Child and Grundtvig was published in an appendix to a book published in 1930, Ballad Books and Ballad Men: Raids and Rescues in Britain, America, and the Scandinavian North since 1800 by Sigurd Bernhard Hustvedt, then an associate professor of English at the University of California Los Angeles. It marked an early high point in the “history of ballad studies,” concluding with Child’s work and locating its affinities with the Scandinavian. Child’s edition, ESPB, became a starting place or stumbling block in much subsequent scholarship: scholars sought to do what Child had not, to define the popular ballad, especially by origins (much ink was spilt over the “communal” theories), to cordon off Child’s ballads as a “canon” and to consider other ballads as lesser.