"No Borders to the Ballad Maker's Art": Francis James Child and the Politics of the People
by Michael J. Bell
Western Folklore, Vol. 47, No. 4 (Oct., 1988), pp. 285-307
[Bell is examining Child's article (essay), Ballad Poetry.]
"No Borders to the Ballad Maker's Art": Francis James Child and the Politics of the People
MICHAEL J. BELL
Child, for whom the ballad held a place "anterior to the appearance of the poetry of art," believed that this "truly national or popular poetry" developed in a stage of society in which "there is such a community of ideas and feelings that the whole people form one individual." His statement is undoubtedly metaphorical and cannot be understood by those who try to translate metaphor into scientific fact, or by those who refuse to understand metaphor at all.
D. K. Wilgus[1]
Professor Child wished his essay on Ballad Poetry to be neither quoted nor regarded as final.
Francis B. Gummere[2]
I
Imagine that D. K. Wilgus was wrong. Imagine that Child meant what he wrote to be taken quite literally. Imagine further that Gummere was also wrong. Imagine that Child considered what he wrote in Johnson's Universal Cyclopedia to be an accurate, reasonable, if abbreviated, resume of his views on the ballad. Imagine, then, how folklorists would have to revise what they know about Francis James Child. For one, we would have to acknowledge that Child had a formal ballad theory. We might decide not to accept the theory he held.
We might even decide that he was not the paragon of ballad scholarship he is often presented to be. But we would have to admit that his ideas on the ballad were serious scholarship and not the oblique, half-hearted utterances they are said to be. We also would have to face the possibility, given the clearly "communalist" language in even the short extract quoted by Wilgus, that Gummere was, as he always claimed, merely a student of Child's who had adumbrated and refined what his teacher had first proposed. Francis James Child may have been the true father of Louise Pound's infamous "Harvard school of communalists," neither as "great" nor as "sane" nor as free from responsibility for the excesses of "the school of Child" as she and others have wished.[3]
The simplest way of testing these conceits, of course, would be to read what Child published in 1874 and see if it confirms either Wilgus's or Gummere's interpretation of his work. If Child wished his language to be interpreted as metaphoric, then we should have little trouble seeing the poetic in what he wrote. If what he wrote is merely an incomplete resume of his ideas, then this too should be easy to recognize. If our project is to read Child accurately, however, we must begin by reading him literally. We cannot assume to recognize Child's words for what they are simply because those words appear to be transparent. Neither can we assume we understand his intentions simply because those intentions have been taken for granted so long. The Francis James Child of American folk studies' history, the known Child, must, for the moment, disappear from view to be replaced by a stranger making demands on our attention: our encounter is with a novel, even enigmatic, discourse of uncertain purpose and obscure rhetoric. And we, for a while, will have to imagine ourselves as extremely naive readers asking of each sentence in turn not "What did our Child mean?" but "What did this other Child say?"
II
To begin with, he said more than might be expected. Most American folklorists know Child's ideas second-hand, through D. K. Wilgus's explication in Anglo-American Folksong Scholarship, Morris Hart's essay in PLMA, Sigurd Hustvedt's review in Ballad Books and Ballad Men, or Dave Harker's assault in The Folk Music Journal.[4] The original document is not readily accessible, and, besides, what would be the point? We know that it cannot be very important, for if it were, the theoretical debates over the nature of the ballad would have made much more of it, and it would certainly have been required reading along with all the other early seminal works of folklore scholarship, including Child's own great collection. So, Child's contribution on Ballad Poetry must be a slight thing, a few paragraphs at best in an unimportant, and now forgotten, encyclopedia.
The truth is quite different. Johnson's Universal Cyclopedia was a major accomplishment of nineteenth-century American intellectual culture. It was the first American encyclopedia to draw its contributors exclusively from the greatest intellects in the United States, representing one of the first attempts by an American publisher to demonstrate that American scholars were of sufficient national and international stature to serve as the final arbitrators of knowledge. Moreover, the entry on "Ballad Poetry" extends over five pages of double column printing, and includes both an extended definition (approximately 4000 words) and an extensive bibliography.[5]
Child begins by declaring that the word ballad signifies "a narrative song, a short tale in lyric verse." The word originally meant, he notes, a dance-song, but its application to its present use is "quite accidental." He continues: "The popular ballad, for which our language has no unequivocal name, is a distinct and very important species of poetry. Its historical and natural place is anterior to the appearance of the poetry of art, to which it has formed a step, and by which it has been regularly displaced, and, in some cases, all but extinguished."
A provocative opening for a document supposedly without serious content. Literature, Child tells us, is not just a catalogue of dead genres, of formalized contrasts between prose and poetry or between the poetry of the people and the poetry of art. Literature is alive, and, more importantly, it is evolving: an organic process in which literary forms are born, live because conditions allow them to, and die when they can no longer survive the environment. Thus, the popular ballad is not only a form of poetic expression, but also a distinct species, a first link, in the great chain of poetry. And, like all first links, it is condemned by its nature to oblivion.
The characterization of literature as organic, and specifically as biological, is by no means unique to Child or to his era; both are among the more prominent characteristics by which we recognize nineteenth-century thinking. Still, while nineteenth-century middle- class thinkers may have been generally in the business of turning culture into nature, it is important to remember that there were several distinct and competing natures in 1874, and it was possible for a scholar to steep his or her writing in organic imagery and never intend it to be read as strict social evolution. As if to illustrate this fact, Child follows his initial claims with an explanation of the relationship of literature to culture that owes far more to Wordsworth than to Spencer. "Whenever a people in the course of their development reaches a certain intellectual and moral stage," he argues, "it will feel an impulse to express itself, and the form of that expression to which it is first impelled is, as is well-known, not prose but verse, and, in fact, narrative verse." More specifically, this ability to create narrative verse is the direct product of social evolution: "The conditions of society in which a truly national or popular poetry appears explain the charac- ter of such poetry. It is a condition in which the people are not divided by political organizations and book-culture into markedly distinct classes, in which consequently there is such a community of ideas and feelings that the whole people form an individual." Popular poetry appears, and by extension can only survive, in a society marked by a freedom from gross distinction. Child's age of popular poetry is one in which the people all have access to the same knowledge in the same ways and are all governed by the same beliefs and values. As a result, there is such a uniformity of desire and expectation that, despite their differences of rank, or power, or prestige, the whole community can be said to think and feel as one.
Clearly, though they are not modern men and women, the makers of Child's narrative poetry are not primeval either; they are differentiated from their fellowmen and women, past and present, merely by the external circumstances of their lives. Popular culture produced popular poetry because popular poets could not read or write and did not live in defined nation states: neither the poets nor the ordinary people possessed the means to segregate themselves. And their poetry, Child continues, "while it is in its essence an expression of our common human nature, and so of universal and indestructible interest, will in each case be differentiated by circumstance and idiosyncrasy. On the other hand, it will always be an expression of the mind and heart of the people as an individual, and never of the personality of individual men." Other than language, there could be no borders to the ballad-makers' art because they possessed no way to exclude the mass of the people from participation. Prior to writing, all things that needed to be said must be said aloud and heard to be recorded, and without nations no spoken idea could be stopped at the frontier for lack of a passport.
In Child's opinion, then, the salient characteristic of popular culture was the inability of its members to articulate and identify their own individuality. Child did not believe in mass minds. His psychology was more direct. He had no question that the human biology produced one and only one kind of human being. What distinguished one human from another was the nature of the artifacts they produced in different ages. "The fundamental characteristic of popular ballads," Child wrote, "is, therefore, the absence of subjectivity and self-consciousness. Though they do not write themselves as William Grimm has said, though a man and not a people has composed them, still the author counts for nothing, and it is not by mere accident, but with the best reason, that they come down to us anonymous." People in popular culture were still exactly as people are today, in Child's view; all that was different was the times of popular poets. Popular poetry was anonymous because its authors lacked the capacity to distance themselves from the acts of creation and call attention to the process of their creativity. Likewise, modern poets such as Wordsworth and Coleridge could not imitate the popular ballad because they had no way of escaping the reflexive consciousness of their roles as poets; their attempts at popular poetry always reeked of the self- consciousness of the imitator.
After in this first paragraph laying out the broad strokes of his definition, Child (one might think) would fill in his picture with some historical or textural information about ballad poetry. Encyclopedia readers would expect to learn more about where ballads came from and what they were like. Instead, Child pauses momentarily and uses the next paragraph to refine exactly what he means by the term, "popular." "The primitive ballad," he writes, "then, is popular not in the sense of something arising from and suited to the lower orders of a people. As yet, no sharp distinction of high and low exists in respect to knowledge, desires, and tastes. An increased civilization, and especially the introduction of book-culture, gradually gives rise to such a division; the poetry of art appears; the popular poetry is no longer relished by a portion of the people, and is abandoned to an uncultivated or not over-cultivated class- a constantly diminishing number." Obviously, Child wishes to insure that his readers do not confuse the common meaning of the word "popular" with its scientific use. His "popular" defines a specific cultural constellation in which a whole community knows, wants, and values the same things in the same ways, and he needs to make sure that his readers do not mistake his usage for one that would imply the ordinary usage that popular culture was either the product or exclusive possession of the poor. Ballads might now be found only among the uncultured and unlettered; that, however, was not their natural home but merely a fact of their history, and more particularly, of the literary history that first made them possible and then rendered them obsolete. It had nothing at all to do with their value. "Being founded on what is permanent and universal in the heart of man, and now by printing put beyond the danger of perishing, [the ballad] will survive the fluctuations of taste, and may from time to time serve, as it notoriously did in England and Germany a hundred years ago, to recall a literature from false and artificial courses to nature and truth."
Child may have intended his pause to merely clarify a sticky point of definition, but it also points to another, larger, historical problem in need of its own explication. Child uses "popular" to characterize the narrative and ballad poetry he was describing because that had been the term used in the eighteenth century, when the materials first began to attract critical attention. Then, in accord with the Enlightenment's use, "popular" represented one of the most positive indices of community (as in the American Constitution's "We the People"). In the aftermath of the American and French Revolutions, and particularly after the Napoleonic era, however, the term was used increasingly in conservative political discourse to characterize all unaccept- able movements, and those who participated in them as low and unruly mobs. This was particularly the case in England, where revul- sion at the French overthrow of monarchy was deep and extensive, but it was also the case in the United States where Jacksonian democracy and the first waves of immigration were challenging the political status quo. By 1874, the transformation of the term's meaning was complete, hence Child's need to differentiate his use from his audi- ence's expectations.[6]
It is interesting to note, however, that Child did not solve his prob- lem by substituting the term "folk" for "popular," as he could have easily done. He certainly knew the term. W.J. Thoms's "good Saxon compound" had been in use for nearly thirty years and nothing was more final that its claim of equivalence: "Folklore, the lore of the people."[7] Moreover, Child had studied in Germany where he could not have avoided encountering first hand the original "Volk" in use as a scientific classification. It could be the case that he felt "folk" to be just as problematic as "popular" and simply felt more comfortable ex- plaining the scientific meaning of the latter term rather than the former. But I think it is more likely that Child found "folk" even more problematic; there were no folklore societies in 1874 to sanction its substitution for "popular" or to guarantee that it would mean exactly what the now discredited "popular" meant. Worse, in most usages of the times, "folk" defined a far more encompassing historical community and a far more intense idea of social ties than did the older "popular." In 1874, "folk" still carried its attachments to the German Romantic and philological tradition, a fact Thomas himself was at pains to indicate in his definition of "folk" as that great primeval, pan-Aryan, host tied together by language and blood and whose descendents in modern Europe still participated in the race and culture of their ancestors despite the diversity of their political allegiances. Thoms's very invention of the term "folklore" had been intended to call attention to the fundamental differences between the systematic nature of folklife as defined by the German Aryan theory and the disorganization of the random study of popular antiquities. Child's usage of "popular" does not carry any of this bag- gage. His "people" are the social communities of the recent past, and even though they may reach back to the tribal cultures of Europe during the ages of Greece and Rome, he avoids any claim that they stretch back to the dawn of human time. Child's "people" are a discernible feature of the recent past and derive their unity from the bonds of faith and feudal law of the world in which they find themselves.
His clarification completed, Child then proceeds to provide his readers with an extended description of the ballad poetry of various European nations, beginning with the Scandinavian-Germans who, he asserts, have best preserved their early ballads, through the Germans (whose mythological and historical "ballads" Tacitus described) and on to Charlemagne, who, we learn, had the "old traditional songs of his people collected and committed to writing, and even made them one of the subjects of school instruction." Christianity and its clergy worked systematically to eliminate this "heathen poetry" so that by the fourteenth century nearly all the older heroic popular poetry had disappeared. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, however, "a second growth of popular song appears, some of it springing, doubtless, out of shoots from the old stock which had lived through the long interval, some of it fresh product of the age." Child continues: "These ballads were popular in the large and strict sense; that is, they were the creation and manifestation of the whole people, great and humble, who were still one in all essentials, having the same beliefs, the same ignorance, and the same tastes, and living in much closer relations than now. The diffusion of knowledge and the stimulation of thought through the art of printing, the religious and intellectual consequences of the Reformation, the intrusion of cold reflection into a world of sense and fancy, broke up the national unity. The educated classes took a direction of their own, and left what had been a com- mon treasure to the people in the lower sense, the ignorant and unschooled mass."
Once more Child reiterates his original claims: ballads are popular in the strict use of the word; they are the products of a people who deeply share the same worldview until it is broken by print, Protestantism, and science. What had been the property of all was left to those peasants untouched by the moral and intellectual revolutions that ended the high Middle Ages and the Renaissance and brought on the modern era. What is interesting is that Child wants to guarantee that his audience will acknowledge only certain texts as legitimate and only certain experiences as productive of popular poetry. Child directly identifies the who and the what of his ballad ages, and more importantly, the specifics of their demise. Scandinavian-German popular culture has sway, at least, from the time of Tacitus in the first century until the Reformation in the sixteenth. Of its first age and its first poems, we know very little; we know a great deal more of the second ballad age: that despite the influence of Catholic Christianity, it remained essentially a popular culture governed by the social and mental conditions required to produce genuine ballads. And like its predecessor, the ballad age of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries remained an age of "sense and fancy." But unlike that earlier, heroic age it could not withstand the attacks upon its walls. It succumbed to its reformers and gave way to modern thought and self-conscious artistry.
There is something wryly delightful in Child's image of European history from the early Middle Ages to the Renaissance as a world of immediacy and unity untouched by sour national destinies or sober intellect. And the delight increases as that image is refined in the course of his survey. Remarking on the late arrival of Christianity to Germany, England, and the whole of Scandinavia, he notes of those countries: ". .. the peasantry long maintained a higher position. They were not an oppressed and ignorant class, but free men, who shared fully in the indigenous culture, and so were well fitted to keep and transmit their poetical heritage." A few sentences later, while discussing ballad preservation, he notes: "Sweden has a few manuscripts, and Denmark a great number, written mostly by noble ladies living on their estates, and giving the ballads as they were sung three or four hundred years ago, in the lord's castle as well as in the peasant's hut;" and still later:
The Spanish alone of the Latin nations can boast a ballad poetry of great compass and antiquity. Following the law of analogy where documents are wanting, the origin of these ballads would be put between the years 1000 and 1200, the period when the Spanish nationality and language had been developed to that degree which invariably incites and leads to epic song.... During the century that follows we find occasional mention of ballad-singers, but no ballads. As in Germany, the popular poetry, after that first bloom of the national genius, was supplanted by art poetry, among the higher classes, and it passed out of notice for two or three hundred years. A reaction set in the sixteenth century. This was the glorious period of Spanish history, and the return to national poetry was a natural consequence of the powerful stirring of the national mind.
It is when he shifts his attention from Western to Slavic Europe and from cultures in which the ballad is memory to ones in which it lives, however, that Child fully realizes the history he has been trying to create. He writes of the Servians, "a race that has not outlived the ballad era," that:
Vuk has collected many hundreds of their songs, one-third of them epic, and every one of them from the mouths of the people. ... So far the Servians are like the German nations: the distinction is that the fountain of popular poetry still flows, and that heroic poems produced among the Servians in this century are essentially similar to the older ones, and not at all inferior. We find the national poetry there in a condition closely resembling that in which it was among the races of Northern and Eastern Europe many hundred years ago. New songs appear with new occasions, but do not supersede the older ones. The heroic ballads are chanted at taverns, in the public squares, in the halls of the chiefs, to the accompaniment of a simple instrument. Sometimes they are only recited, and in this way are taught by the old to the young. All classes know them: the peasant, the merchant, the hayduk (the klept of the modern Greek, a sort of Robin Hood), as well as the professional bard. No class scorns to sing them-not even the clergy or the chiefs.
Child concludes his essay with "one or two general remarks" (in fact three), intended "to prevent misconceptions and to supply omissions." He once more addresses the problem inherent in his use of the term "popular."His concern is still that some in his audience might believe the popular ballad an inferior form because it is now the property of the lower classes. "Nothing, in fact, is more obvious," he writes," than that many of the ballads of the now most refined nations had their origin in that class whose acts and fortunes they depict--the upper classes-though the growth of civilization has driven them from the memory of the highly polished and instructed, and has left them as an exclusive possession to the uneducated. 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." Given that this is the third time that Child has made this point in almost exactly the same language, we might safely say that his claim is not "obvious" at all and is made no more obvious by its repetition. What is obvious is that he advocated a position as much ideological as factual.8 Encyclopedias justify their existence with a promise to contain the whole truth. They are. the one place where a reader can encounter the most up-to-date version of the structures of thought that define a culture. In reality, of course, encyclopedia articles are written by someone with not only "all" the facts but also a point of view, as Child's next comment makes clear: "The vulgar ballads of our day, the 'broadsides' which were printed in such huge numbers in England and elsewhere in the sixteenth century or later, belong to a different genus; they are products of a low kind of art, and most of them are, from a literary point of view, thoroughly despicable and worthless."
Such words are hardly a kindly critic's judgment, but they do serve to remind us that Child is committed to insuring that his audience understands that popular poetry is qualitatively different from any poetry they have experienced. It is not the poetry of art, or of artful, refined imitators, or of the broadside makers. Neither is it, merely because it might be found there, the poetry of the poor and working- class. Popular poetry is above class, or, more accurately, both before and beyond class. The popular ballad is the poetry of a people untouched by modern civilization's need to create and acknowledge distinction. For Child, it is truly a selfless poetry, a genuine high art, possessed of none of the self-display of modern creations, the product of that portion of the community whose lives and fortunes it details rather than of those whom circumstance has made its final owners.
Child's intentions are even more apparent in his second comment on ballad transmission. All ballads, he notes, change with time, but not always for the same reasons. In the mouths of the people, the change is seldom "willful," but in the hands of a professional singer "there is no amount of change they may not undergo" and in the hands of a modern editor "improvements are more to be feared than the mis- chances of a thousand years." Regardless of the particular cause, how- ever, the nature of ballad transmission produces variety. Passed from one singer to another, ballads took on distinct, local shapes and these in their turn could create their own particular modifications; they slid naturally away from the older forms, from alliteration without stanzas to stanza with rhyme, from heroic epic to historical ballad, from one original text to multiple versions, from narration to lyric. "In all cases, the language drifts insensibly from ancient forms, though not at the same rate as with the language of everyday life. The professional ballad-singer or minstrel, whose sole object is to please the audience before him, will alter, omit, or add, without scruple, and nothing is more common than to find different ballads blended together."
By Child's final point on the question of ballad origins, his intentions are unmistakable. "There remains," he writes, "the very curious question of the origin of the resemblances which are found in the ballads of different nations, the recurrence of the same incidents or even of the same story, among races distinct in blood and history, and geographically far separated." Curious indeed, inasmuch as the problem of independent invention would be the crucial question of ethnology throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but Child's concern is with the older philological version of the debate. Following on Grimm's proof that in the case of linguistic materials the presence of common cultural elements between diverse and distant populations for whom no recent historical connection could be found indicated that at some point in the distant past those groups must have shared a single ancestry, for years philologists had argued that a similar law must function for the whole of the rest of culture. To Child, this claim of a primeval connection stretched the bounds of credibility. "... [S]o stupendous an hypothesis is scarcely necessary. The incidents of many ballads are such as might occur anywhere and at any time; and with regard to agreements that can not be explained in this way we have only to remember that tales and songs were the chief social amusement of all classes of people in all the nations of Europe during the Middle Ages,and that new stories would be eagerly sought for by those whose business it was to furnish this amusement, and be rapidly spread among the fraternity." No magical equation, no gaze back to the beginnings of mankind, was needed to explain ballad correspondence. Ballads were alike because they were full of events and feelings that were common to everyone and possible everywhere. And Europe, for all its principalities, was still bound by a common law, a common faith, and a common taste. "A great effect," he concluded, "was undoubtedly produced by the crusades, which both brought the chief European nations into closer intercourse and made them acquainted with the East, thus facilitating the interchange of stories and thus enlarging the stock."
III
What are we to make of all this? If nothing else, it must be acknowledged that Francis James Child was not talking in metaphors and he was not talking casually. Those thoughts may not be as com- plete, final, or fully refined as they might have been if his audience had been professionals instead of the general public, but Child is sincere and committed in his efforts to make ballad poetry intelligible. Moreover, Child's language and style are clearly those of a man who is dealing with a scientific question in a scientific manner. His essay on ballad poetry is sober and serious, written in a fashion designed to explain his subject, to establish precise boundaries for reasonable discussion, and also to bring it into repute.
The irony, of course, is that any folklorist need be told that a scholar of Child's stature was serious. Unfortunately, what little we know of Child, the man, comes either in anecdote or in memoriam: first, there is Boston's own, the boy of the dock wanderings who rose to become a great professor of English at Harvard; this Child is usually a grandfatherly, twinkly sort of man who was everyone's friend and favorite teacher. The second Child, and the one familiar to most folklorists, is the great collector--forever seated in his library in cor- respondence with the other great rescuers of European ballad heritage or pouring over the texts of ancient ballads to cast out the spu- rious from the genuine. These images, however fail to note that Child was engaged in an intellectual business every bit as serious as that practiced by any folklorist or literary critic today. Francis James Child may have loved the ballads for their "sense and fancy," but he spent his academic life viewing them with "cold reflection."
Why, then, should Child's words have been so threatening that Gummere would turn them into idle musings and Wilgus into metaphor? The answer lies in misreading and fear. In Gummere's case, his own theory of the ballad reached directly and consciously into the great traditions of continental philology and German Romanticism that Child was rejecting in his essay. Gummere's communalism is, in fact, the critical and scientific accomplishment of that school of folk studies. Even as Gummere wrote, however, the mantle of Child lay so completely over the whole of ballad studies in America that any scholar who stood in opposition to the master's interpretation would have been simply ignored, no matter how brilliant his or her analyses were. Gummere's vested interests, as D. K. Wilgus has pointed out, lay in convincing others that what Child said in 1874 was not relevant to the great ballad wars.[9] As long as Child himself did not want his opinions to be quoted or treated as final, they could not be used as an arsenal against the Communalist Theory. And Gummere was safe to go his own way and still claim Child as his mentor.
In Wilgus's own case, the history of ballad studies was the culprit. By the time he wrote, folklorists were so used to thinking that Child did not have a ballad theory (or worse, secretly thought that his ballad theory might be what Gummere and his followers always claimed it was) that it was better to discount anything he said rather than discover that it might contain the dreaded seeds of communalism, and to leave Child alone on his pedestal as the great collector and editor rather than discover that he might have been an equally great, but hopelessly outdated, theorist. Wilgus's own reaction is the best evidence of this desire. Confronted with all the right communalist words in all the right communalist places, he would call Child's sentiments metaphor and Gummere's, only pages later, wrong. Of course, Wilgus was absolutely correct to separate Child out from Gummere's horde. Child was not a communalist. He was simply a scholar using a standard critical language of his times to express a basic theory of ballad poetry. Gummere, for that matter, was doing exactly the same with exactly the same critical language. The difference is that, though they used the same words, they did not mean the same things. Gummere's approach to popular poetry was a radical revision of the standard practice of nineteenth-century ballad scholarship. His concern with writing an anthropology of that moment of "intellectual and moral development" where even Child's people burst forth in song, re- quired a restructuring of the terms in which ballad scholarship ex- pressed itself. The truth, therefore, is not that Child used a commu- nalist language, but that Gummere appropriated, modified, and, in some cases, radicalized a conventional discourse to suit his own needs.
It is not enough, however, that we merely credit Child with knowing his own mind and speaking it clearly. It is also important to acknowledge that Child is writing folklore theory. The world of scholarship judges the greatness of its members on the basis of their contributions to theory, and, in this respect folk studies are no different. We respect our great collectors and compilers, acknowledging their long hours in the library or the field, but we honor only those few whose work made possible the way we look at or think about the most fundamental issues that make us folklorists and our work scientific. One hundred years of criticism have made Francis James Child a hollow man without theory and without place in the great chain of ideas that forms the modern discipline of Folk Studies. Neither is true. The essay on Ballad Poetry contains a theory of popular culture both important in its own right and central to the development of American folklore scholarship in the twentieth century.
Child's theory of the popular is important because it departs decisively from the assumptions of its age. The Herderian tradition invented and valorized the folk because it needed a way of rewriting a history that was not in its favor. Herder and his followers desired to achieve political independence for the diverse ethnic communities of Western Europe. Unfortunately, two thousand years of recorded history demonstrated that desire alone could not overcome the social and political ties that modern European states and principalities cited to justify the status quo. The folk were the nationalists' way of positing an original, organically whole, unsullied community who, because they existed prior to recorded history, were free of the claims of political sovereignty that history produced. In place of this nationalistic, idealistic view of folk culture, Child brought the folk into history. His "people" were real and recognizable. They existed because of the particular culture of the Middle Ages and their poetry was unselfcon- scious and impersonal because that culture, balanced as it was between the ancient and the modern, had not yet discovered the means by which to transform the "mind and heart of the people" into the knowing glances of the powerful and the powerless.
Moreover, Child's point of departure was crucial to the develop- ment of a scientific American folklore scholarship. American history simply could not produce a "Herderian" folk. The times of America's history-the Renaissance to the nineteenth century-were too new, and, even if one allowed that America's relative isolation from Euro- pean culture might give rise to the kind of community needed to create a folk, the time of that isolation was too short to make such a development possible. Child's history of the people provided a way out of the trap of time. His "people" still existed at the time of Amer- ica's settlement, and, while their culture was atrophying, it was still possible that a part of it might be imported to the new world to survive momentarily. Theoretically, his "people," though they were in his- tory, were not defined by history alone. History created the "people" by creating the conditions wherein a genuinely popular psychology might flourish. If one ignored history and concentrated on that psy- chology, or, better, if one reversed the relationship and asserted that psychology created history, then thought and action and not times and circumstances became the determining criteria of what was popular or folk and what was not.[10]
IV
Still, if Child's theory is not communalist, then what is it? To use his own characterizations, Child's approach to the ballad is Romantic in the large and strict sense of the term. Child's voice speaking in the essay on Ballad Poetry could as easily be that of Coleridge in the Biographia Literaria or Wordsworth in the Preface to the Edition of 1815, or Emerson or Lowell.[11] Francis James Child is an American Romantic scholar/critic, an inheritor of the great traditions of German Idealism, English Romanticism, and American Transcendentalism. His romanticism expresses itself most formally, however, in the ways in which he deals with the nature of the imagination, the dilemma of self-consciousness, and the question of origins. Child divides the mind into two basic configurations: the popular mind, again, is moved by "sense and fancy" while the modern mind is controlled by "cold re- flection." These terms may appear merely to convey the quality of the contrast Child was trying to create, but, they are, in fact, the classic romantic triad for differentiating between the mind's ability to per- ceive and man's ability to think. Coleridge, to cite one of the clearest examples, in Chapter XII of the Biographia divides the imagination thus:
The IMAGINATION then, I consider either as primary, or secondary. The primary IMAGINATION I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary Imagination I consider as an echo of the former co-existing with the con- scious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate; or where the process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead. FANCY, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with, but fixities and definites. The Fancy is indeed no other than a mode of Memory emancipated from the order of time and space; while it is blended with, and modified by that empirical phenomenon of the will, which we express by the word CHOICE. But equally with the ordinary memory the Fancy must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association.[12]
For Coleridge, the primary imagination is responsible for human perception, tying mankind to nature and presenting a continuous flow of original contacts with the world. Secondary imagination interrupts our continuous awareness of the world. It breaks the flow of perception and destroys the sameness that results from the primary imagination's transformation of the world into an unconscious, changeless, undifferentiated place; it creates difference. Fancy operates distinctly from both forms of imagination, though like the secondary imagination it operates upon primary sensations. Fancy, however, works only with what is known and given "ready made." It may blend and modify its contents, "choose," and arrange, but it cannot fuse.
Moreover, it is clear that Coleridge saw the two forms of the imagination as the end poles of a process of growth in which fancy was the middle term. Thus, mankind began its collective life flooded with sensation and able only to experience the world as a continuous given over which it had no control and which it could not shut out. From this stage, eventually, fancy emerged to bring order to experience through arrangement. It saw correspondences between the various patterns of experience and, operating as a "mode of Memory," it was able to group feelings and events so that those that seemed like others through the haze of remembering would be called alike. From the interplay of primary imagination and fancy, and yet not as fancy at all, secondary imagination emerged: a synthetic and analytic faculty, capable of discovering the hidden orders of things, and where such order was not present nor possible, capable of inventing that order. Secondary imagination was a finite echo of the original "I AM," and though it could not bring forth something from nothing, it could recreate by unifying what could not be joined together.[13]
Child is not Coleridge, but notice how closely the criteria of "sense," "fancy," and "reflection" Child introduces to distinguish the popular poet's imagination from that of the modern artist correspond to Coleridge's triad. Child's popular poet operates in a world of unity of knowledge and desire, a world of primary imagination, a world without difference. It is such a world of unity that the whole community, for all their differences as persons, live and respond as what the modern world would call a single person. Likewise, it is a world in which sensation is molded by fancy alone. Child's ballad poets do not reflect and they cannot display a point of view. Their expression-of the ideas and feelings of the whole people-springs forth unfettered by personality's canny eye, not "dissolved" or "diffused" through the filter of secondary imagination but merely remembered and arranged with no stamp of authorship. Child's poetics also articulated the dilemma of self-consciousness in Romantic terms. For the Romantics, self-consciousness was both a blessing and a burden. The source of true originality and the chief way to overcome the deadening sameness of ordinary perceptions, secondary imagination altered sense and gave the power to shape experience into art. But it also put its own distance between people and the primary experience of the world. The power of secondary imagination to create novelty contained always the possibility that its disruptions might slip into cliche or nonsense. Inevitably, unless it was renewed, its echo canceled out difference just as effectively as sensa- tion's stream. Thus, the Romantic poets were ever in quest of ways to recreate the original freshness of primary imagination, of ways to touch nature with truly childlike awe.[14]
Child, too, saw the value and terror of reflection, though this is one of the points where his poetics diverged from standard Romantic intentions. Though Child, too, was interested in the effects of consciousness on the poetic impulse, he was engaged in telling its history and not in overcoming its impact. His task in his essay on ballad poetry was to describe the historical conditions under which popular poetry emerged into the world, and, particularly, to set forth the conditions by which it evolved from its first tentative impulses, to narrative verse, and through to its shift to prose. Despite the restrictions of space and a lay audience, he made very clear the broad outlines of his intentions. Reflection produced the modern world, modern science and modern poetry, and that was a good. But it also drew a boundary between modern self-consciousness and the simpler consciousness of popular culture. Across this Romantic equivalent of the Fall, modern poets and critics could see only dimly the beauty of ballad poetry, and nothing could bring it under their power. All its forms were ". .. extremely difficult to imitate by highly civilized modern man, and most of the attempts to reproduce this kind of poetry have been ridiculous failures." Coleridge, Wordsworth, Longfellow, Emerson, even James Russell Lowell, Child's closest friend, might write ballads, epics, and songs that gave them access to the original freshness of sensation, but they were not poets in the original sense that the ballad makers were. Ballad poetry was impossible in the modern world, and where it was possible the world was not modern.
Child also worked hard to distance his theory of ballad poetry's origins from the German Romantic folklore theory of the racial inheritance of culture. He does not believe in mystical pasts, or collec- tive (un)consciousnesses, or "singing and dancing throngs," or in any of the other rhetoric of racial or collective memories. But this strong dose of scientific realism does not make his position on origins any less Romantic. Child's ballad makers were real people, but his beliefs about those people were just as visionary, just as total and organic as any paean or lament by a nineteenth-century Romantic for his culture's Golden Age. His "people" have not lost their original identity. Theirs is still a natural society in which individuals are not separated from themselves by self-consciousness or from nature by the subjec- tivity that self-consciousness breeds. Child's people, quite literally, are not estranged from their work, not severed from the material world, and not split off from their fellow man. They are, as only a Victorian Romantic might imagine them, unalienated. [15]
Given the social and political realities of the United States in 1874, it is not surprising that a middle-class Harvard professor might desire the "people" to be undifferentiated. From the end of the Civil War until the turn of the century, American cultural life was in an almost perpetual state of upheaval. The war itself was a devastating assault on the bourgeois' belief in an organic native tradition, and the facts of modern life only served to further undermine the Gilded Age's belief in order and stability. The sudden explosion of the cities, mass immigration, the migration of former slaves to the city, the brutal expansion of industry, the rise of an American working-class, the creation of professional classes, all endlessly combined to guarantee that no individual felt wholly secure and no locale felt free from instability. [16 ]
Child's "people" offered a classic ideological stance from which to confront this loss of the center and to claim a social advantage in a disguised form. His theory of the popular accounted for the instabil- ity of modern life by demonstrating that it was the outcome of the inevitable progress of human consciousness away from community and toward individualism. But it also provided a catalogue of worthy alternative values. The culture of the popular was produced by a singleness of faith, feeling and social class that was no longer possible. But if democratic political traditions could create a new faith, if the democratization of education could engineer a sincere nationality, if technology and material progress could overcome social distinctions, then the flux of American life might be transformed into an orderly modernity. More importantly, since democracy, education and tech- nology were already the cornerstones of Child's own New England middle-class life, then that life could become the norm against which the progress of American culture might be measured and the success or failure of others to achieve Americanness might be judged. Child, of course, wrote no such progressive future for America in his essay. In the same way that he was no Coleridge, he was also no Whitman demanding the creation of an authentically democratic culture.[17] Nonetheless, for all its dry scholarship, the hidden agenda of the essay on Ballad Poetry remains the thoroughly modern crisis of self and community. Implicit in Child's argument is the realization that modern life is premised on a paradox: the more modern one is - that is, the more self-conscious and refined- the more that refinement will lead to a flight from the masses bound by ancestral convention. How, then, is a modern society to involve its best individuals in the ongoing work of communal life? The immediate answer is that modern life can only retain its sense of community by identifying the forces which make genuine social life possible and by insuring that modern institutions promote rather than inhibit their development. Child's rigorous description of traditional poetry was potentially more effective than any polemic simply because it displayed the social form of science. He was reporting the "objective facts" of social history in as clear and concise a manner as he could, with no axe to grind, no special interest to promote, and surely nothing to gain.
V
In his preface to the Discourse on Inequality, Rousseau writes: "It is no light undertaking to separate what is original from what is artificial in the present nature of man, and to know correctly a state which no longer exists, which perhaps never existed, which probably never will exist, and about which it is nevertheless necessary to have precise notions in order to judge our present state accurately." His remarks speak both to the magnitude of what Francis James Child accomplished and to what we, his heirs, owe him. Child gave his readers the first published statement by an American scholar that systematized who the folk were, what folklore was and what value folklore served beyond the gratification of antiquarian desires. He told them that the folk were the whole people, high and low, acting as one with themselves and living in a world of shared values. He told them that the folk were not some mystical ancestor, but a people of the recent past before the invention of printing and the rise of nation states drove a wedge between the classes and fragmented knowledge and values. He told them that these "people" were folk not because of their biological inheritance but because they lived in times and circumstances that made them folk. He told them that folklore was the art of the "people" who lived in such times, and that it made itself known by the absence of any subjectivity or self-consciousness in its text or texture. He told them that folklore did not speak to the personal and private but to the universal and public, that unlike the art of their world it did not need special languages or acquired tastes to enjoy its meaning or understand its intent. He told them that folklore belonged to all the "people" because, despite the fact that only one voice spoke in creation, all voices could be heard. He told them, finally, that folklore opened up the past and made it possible for modern generations to look into the actual, historical conditions that made their lives what they were. He told them that folklore was the other side of modernity, that it was the ground against which their own understandings, beliefs and desires figured, where they could understand their growth and evolution as a community.
That he did so without mentioning either "folk" or "folklore" is irrelevant. Francis James Child could not use those terms in 1874 without loading himself down with an unwelcome intellectual baggage. So, he wrote "people" and "popular" and made sure that his audience understood exactly what those two terms meant. His students required no such artifice; less than twenty years later, they would found the American Folklore Society with Child as the first president, call themselves folklorists, and write a new definition of folklore that would say categorically what Child would not. In the 1892 edition of the same Johnson's Universal Cyclopedia, William Wells Newell, the chief of their number, would write an homage to Child. Defining folklore as the formerly universal customs and beliefs of the whole community now preserved by the conservative and less educated classes, Newell goes on to assert that folklore is marked best by its "external characteristic," its orality, and then continues with an almost exact gloss of Child's major ideas. Folklore persists until the introduction of writing creates a "reading class" who begin to think and act as individuals and ultimately form an "intellectual aristocracy." This aristocracy eventually brings the community "under the influence of superior minds and exact observations" and the formerly universal folk culture is reduced to a mere shadow. Accordingly, Newell concludes: "folklore, or oral tradition, is the supplement of literature; folklore and literature may be represented as two provinces, which taken together include the whole field of human thought."[18]
I have no space to demonstrate here the full extent of Child's influence, but this little is enough to make the point that Francis James Child was no metaphor maker speaking off the record when he wrote his essay on Ballad Poetry, but an active, vital scholar whose ideas would become the foundation for an American theory of folklore. We do him and ourselves a disservice by honoring him in any other way.[19]
Grinnell College
Grinnell, Iowa
Footnotes:
1. D. K. Wilgus, Anglo-American Folksong Scholarship since 1898 (New Brunswick, N.J., 1959), 7.
2. Among the many places Gummere's comment can be found is in the notes to his article, "The Ballad and Communal Poetry," Harvard Studies and Notes in Philology, 5(1897): 40-56, reprinted in The Critics and the Ballad, ed. MacEdward Leach and Tristram P. Coffin (Carbondale, Ill., 1961), 20-21, n. 261. See also, F. B. Gummere, "Primitive Poetry and the Ballad," Modern Poetry 1 (1903- 04): 378.
3. Louise Pound, as quoted in Wilgus, 6.
4. Morris Hart, "Professor Child and the Ballad," PMLA, 21(1906): 755-807; Sigurd B. Hustvedt, Ballad Books and Ballad Men (Cambridge, Mass., 1930); and Dave Harker, "Francis James Child and the 'Ballad Consensus'," The Folk Music Journal 4(1981): 146-164. Of these three, plus Wilgus, Harker's analysis is the most interesting. It goes beyond merely reading Child and provides ,a scathing analysis of Child's politics, especially as they effect his definitions of the "people." Un- fortunately, in his quest to point out the immensely negative effects of Child's New England conservatism (though he does not identify it as such) on later ballad scholarship, he neglects the equally positive and liberating aspects of Child's transformation of ballad studies away from phil- ological and evolutionary anthropology.
5. Francis James Child, "Ballad Poetry," Johnson's Universal Cyclopedia (New York, 1874), 464- 68. All quotes from Child unless otherwise indicated are drawn from this article. For two different contemporary responses to Child's definition of the ballad, see, again Hart, "Professor Child and the Ballad," and also Thomas F. Henderson, The Ballad in Literature (Cambridge, 1912), esp. 57-72. A not wholly complementary review of Child's work as a ballad editor can be found in Thomas Davidson's "Prof. Child's Ballad Book," American Journal of Philology 5 (1884): 466-78.
6. For a history of the rise and fall of the term "popular," see Harry C. Payne, "Elite versus Popular Mentality in the Eighteenth Century," Historical Reflections/Reflections Historiques 2 (1975- 76): 183-208, and Daniel Cottom, The Civilized Imagination (Cambridge, 1985), esp. the chapter "On Taste."
7. William Thoms, "Folklore," The Athenaeum No. 982 (August 22, 1846): 862-3, reprinted in The Study of Folklore, ed. Alan Dundes (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1959), 4-6.
8. My use of the concept "ideology" here derives from Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (New York, 1977), 55-71. For the purposes of this essay, ideology will be defined as the attempt by one class to represent its interests as if they were the universally valid and common interests of the entire community. In this sense, ideology is both the beliefs common to a single class and an attempt by that class to create a false consciousness about the world at large.
9. Wilgus, 8.
10. An excellent place to see this transformation in action is in William Wells Newell's introduction to his Games and Songs of American Children (New York, 1884).
11. Emerson's essay on experience can be found in The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston, 1903-04). Lowell's lectures mark the one of the institutional beginnings of literary/ aesthetic criticism in the United States and provide a valuable context for interpreting many of Child's arguments. Lowell's original lectures remain unpublished, but a newspaper summary of them, including the three of most interest to folklorists, "The Ballad," "The Poet," and "The Imagination," can be found in James Russell Lowell, Lectures on the English Poets (Cleveland, 1897).
12. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, I, ed. J. Shawcross (Oxford, 1907), 202. Coleridge's contrast of imagination and fancy is by no means his invention. The relation between the two was a consistent topic of literary criticism as early as the end of the seventeenth century and was one of the dominant themes of critical inquiry throughout the eighteenth century. For a survey of this critical literature, see Walter Jackson, The Probable and the Marvelous: Blake, Wordsworth, and the Eighteenth-Century Critical Tradition (Athens, Ga., 1978), esp. 11-38.
13. Arden Reed, personal communication, 1985. My reading of Coleridge and its application to Child is heavily indebted to Reed's Romantic Weather: The Climates of Coleridge and Baudelaire (Hanover and London, 1983), esp. his Chapter 5, "Imagination(s) and Fancy," 182-205.
14. See in particular Geoffrey Hartman, "Romanticism and Antiself-Consciousness," Centennial Review 6(1962): 553-565, as well as Mark A. Schneider, "Goethe and the Structuralist Tradition," Studies in Romanticism 18(1979): 457-478. For general background on the aesthetic and political contexts of these ideas in the Romantic movement, see M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (London and New York, 1946); M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (London and New York, 1971); Leslie Brisman, Romantic Origins (Ithaca and London, 1978); Geoffrey Hartman, Wordsworth's Poetry, 1787-1814 (New Haven, 1964); and Wallace Jackson, The Probable and the Marvelous (Athens, Ga., 1978).
15. For a stinging review of this entire rhetoric, see Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York, 1973). For a discussion of another Romantic's views on alienation, see Bertell Ollman, Alienation: Marx's Conception of Man in Capitalist Society (London and New York, 1971).
16. Two excellent interpretations of the effects of the upheavals of the Gilded Age on American culture are Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877-1920 (New York, 1967) and Alan Tracht- enberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York, 1982). Two other useful works that trace the effects of these changes on intellectual life are T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: The Quest for Alternatives to Modern American Culture 1880-1920 (New York, 198 1), and Cecilia Tichi, Shifting Gears: Technology, Literature, Culture in Modernist America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1987).
17. Whitman's argument for a genuine popular culture can be found in his Democratic Vistas (1871). A shorter version of the argument can be found in his "Democracy," The Galaxy IV (1867): 919-933, reprinted in Democratic Vistas 1860-1880, ed. Alan Trachtenberg (New York, 1970), 350-366.
18. William Wells Newell, "Folklore," Johnson's Universal Cyclopedia, 2nd Edition, (New York, 1892), 452, 453.
19. I would like to thank Charles Baxter, David Hereshoff, Jerry Herron, Arden Reed, Michael Scrivener, and especially Sandra Dolby Stahl and Jay Mechling for their criticism of this essay.