VIGNETTE PORTRAITS

Foque Froude
France Fuller (Margaret)
Frederic Fuller (Thomas)
Freeman Garland
Freiligrath Gaskell
Froebel Gautier
Froissart Gay
Von Giebel

FOLK-SONG

BY F. B. GUMMERE

As in the case of ballads, or narrative songs, it was important to
sunder not only the popular from the artistic, but also the ballad of
the people from the ballad for the people; precisely so in the article
of communal lyric one must distinguish songs of the folk--songs made
by the folk--from those verses of the street or the music hall which
are often caught up and sung by the crowd until they pass as genuine
folk-song. For true folk-song, as for the genuine ballad, the tests
are simplicity, sincerity, mainly oral tradition, and origin in a
homogeneous community. The style of such a poem is not only simple,
but free from individual stamp; the metaphors, employed sparingly at
the best, are like the phrases which constantly occur in narrative
ballads, and belong to tradition. The metre is not so uniform as in
ballads, but must betray its origin in song. An unsung folk-song is
more than a contradiction,--it is an impossibility. Moreover, it is to
be assumed that primitive folk-songs were an outcome of the dance, for
which originally there was no music save the singing of the dancers. A
German critic declares outright that for early times there was "no
dance without singing, _and no song without a dance_; songs for the
dance were the earliest of all songs, and melodies for the dance the
oldest music of every race." Add to this the undoubted fact that
dancing by pairs is a comparatively modern invention, and that
primitive dances involved the whole able-bodied primitive community
(Jeanroy's assertion that in the early Middle Ages only women danced,
is a libel on human nature), and one begins to see what is meant by
folk-song; primarily it was made by the singing and dancing throng, at
a time when no distinction of lettered and unlettered classes divided
the community. Few, if any, of these primitive folk-songs have come
down to us; but they exist in survival, with more or less trace of
individual and artistic influences. As we c