1496 The Cornell Reading-Courses 



youth. Many of them, indeed, arc more or less epitomized versions of incidents in 

 their author's lives, thus accounting for the sympathetic interest they awaken. They 

 contain, although in veiled form, that one " touch of nature that makes the whole world 

 kin." 



The folk ballad may call people to a lively sense of patriotism, and may 

 remain the lilting narrative; or it may lend its tune to other words, or 

 vice versa, and may develop into a serious national song. The national 

 song, however, may be bom as Professor Brander Matthews has said: 



A national song is one of the things which, it would seem, cannot be made to order. 

 No man has ever yet sat him down and taken up his pen and said, " I will write a national 

 hymn," and composed either words or music which the nation was willing to take 

 for its own. The making of the song of a people is a happy accident, not to be accom- 

 plished by taking thought. It must be the result of fiery feeling long confined, and 

 suddenly finding vent in burning words or moving strains. Sometimes the heat and the 

 pressure of emotion have been fierce enough and intense enough to call forth at once 

 both words and music, and to weld them together indissolubly once and for all. Almost 

 always the maker of the song does not suspect the abiding value of his work; he has 

 wrought imconsciously, moved by a power within; he has written for immediate relief 

 to himself, and with no thought of fame or the future; he has builded better than he 

 knew. The great national lyric is the result of the conjunction of the hour and the 

 man. 



A national song of the kind Professor Matthews describes may properly 

 take its place among art songs. 



3. The art song. — This type of songs that have lived is spoken of as 

 classic. Ordinarily the classic song is the combined work of the poet and 

 the musician, the result of the skillful treatment of carefully chosen subject- 

 matter. There are instances, however, of folk songs and ballads with 

 authorship unknown or htunble, being accepted as song-classics because 

 of their artistic trueness to type and their simple beauty. The art song 

 that time as well as art has marked with the stamp of worth has double 

 value, the song's own beauty and its standardizing qualities for song- 

 making. 



Will it live? 



We do not sing songs merely because they have lived. We sing as a 

 mode of self-expression ; and if the song that is new to our ears and possibly 

 newly created answers us, we sing it with much the same right that we use 

 in adopting the style of the hour in house-furnishing or in dress. There 

 are few of us, however, who fail to appreciate that a song, by its very 

 nature, is more a matter of the spirit than is dress, and singing a more 

 permanent influence in the home than is house-furnishing. Yet we are 

 careful to-day to teach ourselves that the home that is artistically fur- 

 nished, however simply, has a moral advantage over the home that is 

 filled with the useless and the unbeautiful; and that the latest fashions 

 in dress may make of us caricatures of our real selves if in adopting these 



