34 Hartley Burr Alexander 



the metaphoric element of lyric mood, sensuous quality yielding 

 to the need of finer psychical discrimination, personality becom- 

 ing the poetic touchstone. 



Song, I suppose, is the most primitive aesthetic expression of 

 mankind, arising as emotional comprehension of emphatic im- 

 pressions and issuing into life as a melody of singing words. 

 The ballad, as a poem of action — " narrative is its vital fact " 

 and " its supreme art is to tell its story well," Professor Gummere 

 states — had at least one source in battle-boastings and lauda- 

 tions of prowess. At first the hero praised himself, narrating 

 his deeds in the formal and lofty style implied by the old verb 

 mathelian, — a flavor of the bombastic egotism of Mesopotamian 

 monarchs inscribing their kingly conquests. Later appeared the 

 professional minstrel in the chieftain's retinue, and with him the 

 artistically finished narrative that ensured perpetuity of fame. 

 Doubtless the ballad-form and its music setting — as distinguished 

 from epic narrative — may have been created by antiphonies of 

 dancers; but it is safe to conjecture the coordinate probability 

 that war-challenge and death-chant constitute the primeval 

 chanson de geste in the same wise that mathelian foretells poetic 

 diction. 



The main point is the loose annexation of music to ballad 

 narrative, — the logical consequence of the narrative function. 

 In musical art there are two fundamental modes of setting a song: 

 the ballad form, in which the musical motiv is repeated stanza 

 by stanza to the song's limit; and the lyric aria, in which the 

 initial element a is repeated after an intervening element b, so 

 that the whole form may be expressed a:b:a. In the ballad form 

 the effect is derived from the verbal content of the song, which 

 in ballad narrative moves to a dramatic climax; or musically 

 from the contrast of word change with repeated melody, or yet 

 from the mere emphasis which lies in repetition. In the lyric 

 aria the composition is a unit, and the total effect depends upon 

 a feeling for the whole form and a gathering up and inclusion of 

 the entire movement in the final appreciation, — the repeated 

 element seeming to absorb all that has gone before, and returning 



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