No More Learning

Tacitus informs us that songs were the only
memorials of the past which the ancient Germans possessed. We
learn from Lucan and from Ammianus Marcellinus that the brave
actions of the ancient Gauls were commemorated in the verses of
Bards. During many ages, and through many revolution, minstrelsy
retained its influence over both the Teutonic and the Celtic
race. The vengeance exacted by the spouse of Attila for the
murder of Siegfried was celebrated in rhymes, of which Germany is
still justly proud. The exploits of Athelstane were commemorated
by the Anglo-Saxons and those of Canute by the Danes, in rude
poems, of which a few fragments have come down to us. The chants
of the Welsh harpers preserved, through ages of darkness, a faint
and doubtful memory of Arthur. In the Highlands of Scotland may
still be gleaned some relics of the old songs about Cuthullin and
Fingal. The long struggle of the Servians against the Ottoman
power was recorded in lays full of martial spirit. We learn from
Herrera that, when a Peruvian Inca died, men of skill were
appointed to celebrate him in verses, which all the people
learned by heart, and sang in public on days of festival. The
feats of Kurroglou, the great freebooter of Turkistan, recounted
in ballads composed by himself, are known in every village of
northern Persia. Captain Beechey heard the bards of the Sandwich
Islands recite the heroic achievements of Tamehameha, the most
illustrious of their kings. Mungo Park found in the heart of
Africa a class of singing men, the only annalists of their rude
tribes, and heard them tell the story of the victory which Damel,
the negro prince of the Jaloffs, won over Abdulkader, the
Mussulman tyrant of Foota Torra. This species of poetry attained
a high degree of excellence among the Castilians, before they
began to copy Tuscan patterns. It attained a still higher degree
of excellence among the English and the Lowland Scotch, during
the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries. But it
reached its full perfection in ancient Greece; for there can be
no doubt that the great Homeric poems are generically ballads,
though widely distinguished from all other ballads, and indeed
from almost all other human composition, by transcendent
sublimity and beauty.
As it is agreeable to general experience that, at a certain stage
in the progress of society, ballad-poetry should flourish, so is
it also agreeable to general experience that, at a subsequent
stage in the progress of society, ballad-poetry should be
undervalued and neglected. Knowledge advances; manners change;
great foreign models of composition are studied and imitated. The
phraseology of the old minstrels becomes obsolete. Their
versification, which, having received its laws only from the ear,
abounds in irregularities, seems licentious and uncouth. Their
simplicity appears beggarly when compared with the quaint forms
and gaudy coloring of such artists as Cowley and Gongora. The
ancient lays, unjustly despised by the learned and polite, linger
for a time in the memory of the vulgar, and are at length too
often irretrievably lost. We cannot wonder that the ballads of
Rome should have altogether disappeared, when we remember how
very narrowly, in spite of the invention of printing, those of
our own country and those of Spain escaped the same fate. There
is indeed little doubt that oblivion covers many English songs
equal to any that were published by Bishop Percy, and many
Spanish songs as good as the best of those which have been so
happily translated by Mr. Lockhart. Eighty years ago England
possessed only one tattered copy of Childe Waters and Sir
Cauline, and Spain only one tattered copy of the noble poem of
the Cid. The snuff of a candle, or a mischievous dog, might in a
moment have deprived the world forever of any of those fine
compositions. Sir Walter Scott, who united to the fire of a great
poet the minute curiosity and patient diligence of a great
antiquary, was but just in time to save the precious relics of
the Minstrelsy of the Border. In Germany, the lay of the
Nibelungs had been long utterly forgotten, when, in the
eighteenth century, it was, for the first time, printed from a
manuscript in the old library of a noble family. In truth, the
only people who, through their whole passage from simplicity to
the highest civilization, never for a moment ceased to love and
admire their old ballads, were the Greeks.

That the early Romans should have had ballad-poetry, and that
this poetry should have perished, is therefore not strange. It
would, on the contrary, have been strange if these things had not
come to pass; and we should be justified in pronouncing them
highly probable even if we had no direct evidence on the subject.