A Book of Old Ballads — Complete. Various

antiquity, be heard in England! We are supposed to have progressed

       towards internationalism, nowadays. Whereas, in reality, we have grown

       more and more frenziedly national. We are very far behind the age of

       Froissart, when there was a true internationalism--the internationalism

       of art.

      To some of us that is still a very real internationalism. When we hear a

       Beethoven sonata we do not think of it as issuing from the brain of a

       "Teuton" but as blowing from the eternal heights of music whose winds

       list nothing of frontiers.

      Man needs song, for he is a singing animal. Moreover, he needs communal song, for he is a social animal. The military authorities realized this very cleverly, and they encouraged the troops, during the war, to sing on every possible occasion. Crazy pacifists, like myself, may find it almost unbearably bitter to think that on each side of various frontiers young men were being trained to sing themselves to death, in a struggle which was hideously impersonal, a struggle of machinery, in which the only winners were the armament manufacturers. And crazy pacifists might draw a very sharp line indeed between the songs which celebrated real personal struggles in the tiny wars of the past, and the songs which were merely the prelude to thousands of puzzled young men suddenly finding themselves choking in chlorine gas, in the wars of the present.

      But even the craziest pacifist could not fail to be moved by some of the

       ballads of the last war. To me, "Tipperary" is still the most moving

       tune in the world. It happens to be a very good tune, from the

       musician's point of view, a tune that Handel would not have been ashamed

       to write, but that is not the point. Its emotional qualities are due to

       its associations. Perhaps that is how it has always been, with ballads.

       From the standard of pure aesthetics, one ought not to consider

       "associations" in judging a poem or a tune, but with a song like

       "Tipperary" you would be an inhuman prig if you didn't. We all have our

       "associations" with this particular tune. For me, it recalls a window in

       Hampstead, on a grey day in October 1914. I had been having the measles,

       and had not been allowed to go back to school. Then suddenly, down the

       street, that tune echoed. And they came marching, and marching, and

       marching. And they were all so happy.

      So happy.

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      "Tipperary" is a true ballad, which is why it is included in this book.

       So is "John Brown's Body". They were not written as ballads but they

       have been promoted to that proud position by popular vote.

      It will now be clear, from the foregoing remarks, that there are

       thousands of poems, labelled "ballads" from the eighteenth century,

       through the romantic movement, and onwards, which are not ballads at

       all. Swinburne's ballads, which so shocked our grandparents, bore about

       as much relation to the true ballads as a vase of wax fruit to a

       hawker's barrow. They were lovely patterns of words, woven like some

       exquisite, foaming lace, but they were Swinburne, Swinburne all the

       time. They had nothing to do with the common people. The common people

       would not have understood a word of them.

      Ballads must be popular. And that is why it will always remain one of the weirdest paradoxes of literature that the only man, except Kipling, who has written a true ballad in the last fifty years is the man who despised the people, who shrank from them, and jeered at them, from his little gilded niche in Piccadilly. I refer, of course, to Oscar Wilde's "Ballad of Reading Gaol." It was a true ballad, and it was the best thing he ever wrote. For it was written de profundis, when his hands were bloody with labour and his tortured spirit had been down to the level of the lowest, to the level of the pavement … nay, lower … to the gutter itself. And in the gutter, with agony, he learned the meaning of song.

      Ballads begin and end with the people. You cannot escape that fact. And

       therefore, if I wished to collect the ballads of the future, the songs

       which will endure into the next century (if there is any song in the next century), I should not rake through the contemporary poets, in the hope of finding gems of lasting brilliance. No. I should go to the music-halls. I should listen to the sort of thing they sing when the faded lady with the high bust steps forward and shouts, "Now then, boys, all together!"

      Unless you can write the words "Now then, boys, all together", at the

       top of a ballad, it is not really a ballad at all. That may sound a

       sweeping statement, but it is true.

      In the present-day music-halls, although they have fallen from their

       high estate, we should find a number of these songs which seem destined

       for immortality. One of these is "Don't 'ave any more, Mrs. Moore."

      Do you remember it?

      Don't 'ave any more, Mrs. Moore!

       Mrs. Moore, oh don't 'ave any more!

       Too many double gins

       Give the ladies double chins,

       So don't 'ave any more, Mrs. Moore!

      The whole of English "low life" (which is much the most exciting part of

       English life) is in that lyric. It is as vivid as a Rowlandson cartoon.

       How well we know Mrs. Moore! How plainly we see her … the amiable,

       coarse-mouthed, generous-hearted tippler, with her elbow on countless

       counters, her damp coppers clutched in her rough hands, her eyes

       staring, a little vacantly, about her. Some may think it is a sordid

       picture, but I am sure that they cannot know Mrs. Moore very well if

       they think that. They cannot know her bitter struggles, her silent

       heroisms, nor her sardonic humour.

      Lyrics such as these will, I believe, endure long after many of the most

       renowned and fashionable poets of to-day are forgotten. They all have

       the same quality, that they can be prefaced by that inspiring sentence,

       "Now then, boys--all together!" Or to put it another way, as in the

       ballad of George Barnwell,

      All youths of fair England

       That dwell both far and near,

       Regard my story that I tell

       And to my song give ear.

      That may sound more dignified, but it amounts to the same thing!

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      But if the generation to come will learn a great deal from the few

       popular ballads