Professor Francis James Child (1825-1896)
The sense of the word “hero”—once
limited mainly to famous warriors, explorers, and self-sacrificing
patriots--has apparently expanded so considerably as to include any member of
our armed forces and most civilian “first responders”, at least the ones who
are not racist pigs, another category of the lexical growth industry. I do not begrudge the generous instinct to
create more heroes. Indeed, I want to
add yet another subspecies: the academic hero.
That is the category to which one could plausibly assign Audubon, to
whom I devoted a recent post; and it is certainly the category for Francis James
Child. Child was born in Boston in
1825. The Republic was not yet half a
century old. Though he would become a
famous Harvard professor and the bosom companion of Brahmins like William James
and Charles Eliot Norton, he was born into modest circumstances and was a
product of those democratic and meritocratic impulses that continue to animate
our higher education at its best. I, of
all people, can “relate” to a nation that values the pursuit of old Germanic
philology as well as the pursuit of the almighty dollar. If you can believe Thomas Jefferson, he was
not less proud to be president of the American Philosophical Society than to be
President of his country!
Child was of a scholarly generation
that treasured the primary text. That
is, literature itself was more important to him than the ingenious prolusions
of professors upon it. Therefore he was
first of all an editor. But it was
impossible to do groundbreaking editorial work on Chaucer from America in
1850. He therefore brought out five
annotated volumes of Spenser—no trivial task.
Then, both as scholar and as patriot, he designed a vast project of
unique American significance.
Most of us know something of the
Pilgrims and Puritans of New England. We
tend to be less knowledgeable about succeeding generations of British
immigrants, mainly from the North of England, from Scotland, and from Ulster,
the so-called “Scotch-Irish” whose arrival antedated the large Catholic
immigration of the potato famine. They
were mainly no-frills Protestants used to very plain living, and they swarmed
westward through Tidewater Virginia and the Carolinas to the Appalachians and
the Cumberlands, into the Ohio Valley and the lush forests of Kentucky and
Tennessee. These pioneers travelled
light: a Bible, a gun, agricultural tools, spindles and sometimes even a
spinning wheel. More than a few, though,
had musical instruments, and practically all carried within their memories an
invisible inner treasury of popular song passed on to them by family elders and
hayseed bards from the time of the War of the Roses to the Battle of New
Orleans. In the Faerie Queene Spenser had deployed one kind of epic. In his huge edition of the transplanted English and Scottish Ballads (8 volumes,
1857-59, later 5 volumes of larger format) Child laid out another: the epic
poetry of the young American republic a-making.
The cultural importance of folk
music, real folk music, not its
pallid contemporary simulacrum, is impossible for us to understand today. The commodification of popular music, and the
big business that generates and distributes it, were unknown before the Civil
War, and hardly known before the twentieth century. Child, though a polyglot, was a native
speaker of American English and a scholar of early English dealing primarily
with printed texts; but his enterprise inspired, and sometimes provoked, those
field-workers who eventually would be called ethno-musicologists to try to
preserve native Amerindian traditions and to study the musical archaeology of
large and disparate American populations of African and Iberian origin, among
others. The English musicologist Cecil
Sharp, an early twentieth-century heir of F. J. Child, went ballad-hunting in
Appalachia during the First World War, recording a vast repertory of songs to
be returned, marvelously preserved, to the crofts and cottages whence they had
migrated a century earlier.
The old ballads are about
everything under the sun: battles, sea voyages, hunting parties, public
executions, country fairs, and supernatural events galore. Chevy
Chase, based in a half-remembered anecdote about an obscure
fourteenth-century battle as reduced to a brawl between two great Border
chieftains, is a tale of a great slaughter of deer that turned into a great
slaughter of men. Yet what power it
has. It was already
old in the sixteenth century, when one of that age’s most elegant poets, Sir
Philip Sidney, said this about it: “Certainly I must
confess mine own barbarousness; I never heard the old song of Percy and Douglas
that I found not my heart moved more than with a trumpet; and yet it is sung
but by some blind crowder, with no rougher voice than rude style; which being
so evil apparelled in the dust and cobwebs of that uncivil age, what would it
work, trimmed in the gorgeous eloquence of Pindar?”
But mostly the old ballads are
about the two great themes of world romance: Love and Death. “Would you, my lords”—so begins Bédier’s
reconstruction of the medieval Tristan
and Isolde—“would you hear a fine story of love and death?” And, boy, do we get one. “Set me as a seal upon thine heart,” says the
Song of Songs, “for love is as strong
as death”. My grandfather Fleming used
to sit on his porch in Arkansas half mumbling, half crooning “Barbara
Allen”. I wish I had paid more
attention. “Barbara Allen” is apparently
the most recorded song in musical history.
I could wish to have added to the repertory. I don’t know whether any two singers have
agreed as to its words. Like many old
ballads it is an at times inchoate verbal quilt. Yet a discernible plot forces its way like a
red cord through the song’s peripheral incoherencies and shifting points of
view; and it is the plot of tragic love.
Cruel Barbara Allen makes all the lads sing “well away” or “lack a day”
or, presumably, any trisyllabic bit of verbal stuffing that could rhyme in -ay.
All that is the noise. The signal
is that cruel beauty must come to know the everlasting sorrow of love and death,
must find indeed that they are the same.
“My true love died for me today,” she tells her distraught mother. “I’ll
die for him tomorrow.” Though she
spurned him in life, they will lie till Judgment Day in contiguous graves in
the old churchyard; yet even now the bard is not finished, for “out of his
grave grew a red, red rose, and out of hers a briar.”
