english-[節選]A Collection of Ballads-english language

english-[節選]A Collection of Ballads-english language
english class-http://english.zoapiere.com/-learning english
english learning centre When the learned first gave serious attention to popular ballads,from the time of Percy to that of Scott, they laboured undercertain disabilities. The Comparative Method was scarcely
understood, and was little practised. Editors were content tostudy the ballads of their own countryside, or, at most, of GreatBritain. Teutonic and Northern parallels to our ballads were thenadduced, as by Scott and Jamieson. It was later that the balladsof Europe, from the Faroes to Modern Greece, were compared with ourown, with European MARCHEN, or children's tales, and with thepopular songs, dances, and traditions of classical and savagepeoples. The results of this more recent comparison may be brieflystated. Poetry begins, as Aristotle says, in improvisation. Everyman is his own poet, and, in moments of stronge motion, expresseshimself in song. A typical example is the Song of Lamech inGenesis -"I have slain a man to my wounding,And a young man to my hurt."Instances perpetually occur in the Sagas: Grettir, Egil,Skarphedin, are always singing. In KIDNAPPED, Mr. Stevensonintroduces "The Song of the Sword of Alan," a fine example ofCeltic practice: words and air are beaten out together, in theheat of victory. In the same way, the women sang improviseddirges, like Helen; lullabies, like the lullaby of Danae inSimonides, and flower songs, as in modern Italy. Every function oflife, war, agriculture, the chase, had its appropriate magical andmimetic dance and song, as in Finland, among Red Indians, and amongAustralian blacks. "The deeds of men" were chanted by heroes, asby Achilles; stories were told in alternate verse and prose; girls,like Homer's Nausicaa, accompanied dance and ball play, priests andmedicine-men accompanied rites and magical ceremonies by songs.These practices are world-wide, and world-old. The thoroughlypopular songs, thus evolved, became the rude material of aprofessional class of minstrels, when these arose, as in the heroicage of Greece. A minstrel might be attached to a Court, or anoble; or he might go wandering with song and harp among thepeople. In either case, this class of men developed more regularand ample measures. They evolved the hexameter; the LAISSE of theCHANSONS DE GESTE; the strange technicalities of Scandinavianpoetry; the metres of Vedic hymns; the choral odes of Greece. Thenarrative popular chant became in their hands the Epic, or themediaeval rhymed romance. The metre of improvised verse changedinto the artistic lyric. These lyric forms were fixed, in manycases, by the art of writing. But poetry did not remain solely inprofessional and literary hands. The mediaeval minstrels andJONGLEURS (who may best be studied in Leon Gautier's Introductionto his EPOPEES FRANCAISES) sang in Court and Camp. The poorer,less regular brethren of the art, harped and played conjuringtricks, in farm and grange, or at street corners. The foreignnewer metres took the place of the old alliterative English verse.But unprofessional men and women did not cease to make and sing.Some writers have decided, among them Mr. Courthope, that ourtraditional ballads are degraded popular survivals of literarypoetry. The plots and situations of some ballads are, indeed, thesame as those of some literary mediaeval romances. But these plotsand situations, in Epic and Romance, are themselves the finalliterary form of MARCHEN, myths and inventions originally POPULAR,and still, in certain cases, extant in popular form among raceswhich have not yet evolved, or borrowed, the ampler and morepolished and complex GENRES of literature. Thus, when a literaryromance and a ballad have the same theme, the ballad may be apopular degradation of the romance; or, it may be the originalpopular shape of it, still surviving in tradition. A well-knowncase in prose, is that of the French fairy tales.english oral