A RECENT THEORY OF BALLAD-MAKING

PROFESSOR GORDON HALL GEROULD\u27S article entitled The Making of Ballads \u27 is an attractive essay, written in the fluent and polished manner that we are accustomed to expect from this scholar. It has charm of style, and its positions, taken as a whole, may be termed accepted positions. Because of its literary quality, because it brings together in one paper what has hithert been stressed in scattered places, and because of its appreciation of the poetical quality of those English and Scottish ballads sough out by the notable collectors of the earlier nineteenth century and made available in the volumes of Professor Child, the paper has real value for the student. That The Making of Ballads is research article, the product of painstaking investigation, Professor Gerould would not, I think, himself maintain. He is a literary theorist in the realm of traditional song, rather than an experienced field worker or a practical folk-lorist. He bring forward little that has novelty for the special scholar. This circumstance would call for no particular comment except for the fact that the paper has been announced as new and subversive- as something independent of old theories. It has been referred to by several scholars as The Gerould Theory of Ballad Origins. The author himself leads us to expect something revolutionary when he asks us to- dismiss from our minds, for the time being, our preconceived and w buttressed theories as to the narrative lyrics we call ballads; forget, we can, our arguments; and .... look at certain .... indisputable phenomena of the ballad. Oddly enough, though they are perfectly w known, they have been much neglected. Very rarely has their exist been noticed in writings on the ballads, while never, I believe, has t true significance been fully recognized

THE SOUTHWESTERN COWBOY SONGS AND THE ENGLISH AND SCOTTISH POPULAR BALLADS

Several writers recently have found analogy between the conditions attending the growth of cowboy songs in isolated communities in the Southwest, and the conditions under which arose the English and Scottish popular ballads—those problematic pieces which form so special a chapter in the history of English poetry. Mr. Lomax, the chief collector of southwestern folk songs, notes, when speaking of western communities, how illiterate people and people cut off from newspapers and books, isolated and lonely—thrown back on primal resources for entertainment and for the expression of emotion—utter themselves through somewhat the same character of songs as did their forefathers of perhaps a thousand years ago. Professor Barrett Wendell suggests that it is possible to trace in this group of American ballads the precise manner in which songs and cycles of songs—obviously analogous to those surviving from older and antique times—have come into being. The facts which are still available concerning the ballads of our own Southwest are such as should go far to prove, or to disprove, many of the theories advanced concerning the laws of literature as evinced in the ballads of the Old World. Ex-President Roosevelt affirms in a personal letter to Mr. Lomax that there is something very curious in the reproduction here on this new continent of essentially the conditions of ballad-growth which obtained in mediaeval England

The Value of English Linguistics to the Teacher

WHAT is included in the usual course in the history of the English language? Presumably some teachers emphasize the translation of older monuments, some emphasize training in etymologies, some phonetic changes, and some changes in language structure and forms. Some offer courses in the hope of fostering a more accurate use of language, some because of the discipline ~o be gained from the study of language ID the abstract, and some in order to afford the necessary preparation for the scholar. All have in mind the development, on the part of the student, of a scientific attitude toward language. Any teacher is the better who has background in the subject which he teaches, and he teaches it the more inspiringly and the more validly for having that background. The exhaustive study of philological details belongs to the advanced student and to the specialist. ~o: the average student of the language, 1t 1S of less importance to settle Hoti\u27s business than to understand the relation of existing linguistic forms to the language in general, and to acquire a deepened linguistic consciousness. Except for the ultra-specialist, the consideration of a multiplicity of details (though command of details and accuracy in details are always important) may well be subordinated to the establishment of main lines and the opening up of new fields. A main benefit of the historical study of English is that it enhances linguistic sensitiveness and brings a wider linguistic horizon

The Uniformity of the Ballad Style

It is a significant fact, says a well-known writer on ballads,\u27 that wherever found, the ballad style and manner are essentially the same. Many make the same generalization. But this is true only in the most general sense. It presupposes too great fixity ill the ballad style. The ballad is a lyric type exhibiting epic, dramatic, and choral elements; but within the type there is as great variation as within other lyric types. The ballad style is hardly more essentially the same than the song style in general, or the sonnet style, or the ode style. There is no single dependable stylistic test even for the English and Scottish traditional ballads; and there are wide differences between the ballads of divergent peoples, Scandinavian, German, Spanish, American. There are differences in the stanza form, in the presence and use of refrains, iteration, and choral repetition, in the preservation of archaic literary touches, in the method of narration, and the like

Notes on Tennyson\u27s \u3ci\u3eLancelot and Elaine\u3c/i\u3e

The chief sources of Tennyson\u27s Idylls are, as so well known, Malory\u27s Morte Darthur and the Mabinogion. Secondary sources are the chronicles of Geoffrey of Monmouth, from whom the poet derived a few name-forms like Igerne and Gorlois, and stray touches in the handling, and the anonymous history, ascribed to Nennius, from which (Lancelot and Elaine, ll. 284-315) he derived his account of Arthur\u27s twelve battles. In 1889, Dr. Walther Wüllenweber pointed out that Tennyson seems also to have drawn upon Ellis\u27 Specimens of Early English Metrical Romances, for a few proper names, like Bellicent and Anguisant, not found elsewhere. It seems probable that Tennyson owes certain other suggestions to Ellis. The following are possible cases, not hitherto noted, for the Idyll of Lancelot and Elaine

The Kraze for K

As illustrated by the Klassy Klown and the Kute Kid, the present slump toward alliteration is mostly confined to the letter k, and the hunting of it appears most prominently in the language of advertising. For k in poetry there was Coleridge\u27s (one is tempted to write Koleridge\u27s) Kubla Khan, and one recalls Walt Whitman\u27s picturesque respellings Kanada and Kanadian. But love of k plays little part in comtemporary verse, although it appears abundantly elsewhere. Its rise in favor seems to be bound up with the late agitation for simplified spelling, or the oncoming tide of interest in phonetics. Simplified orthography for advertising is perhaps the most important legacy of the defunct spelling reform movement. ... The curious, better perhaps kurious, nomenclature of the Ku Klux Klan is said to constitute part of its spell for its members and to have helped its rapid spread. The Klan makes much of Klansmen and Klannishness, It numbers among its officers, if reports speak true, an Imperial Klaliff and a King Kleagle, It has a revised oath and a revised Kloran, sealed by a prayer of the Imperial Kludd, It holds an Imperial Kloncilium or Klonvocation, rumor says, and there are meetings in a Klavern, Could all this fail to contribute to its success

Then and Now

I HOPE this microphone works. If you have to listen to me I hope you can hear me. Once before at a gathering of a learned society, seeing an upright gadget before me, I talked with extreme care directly into it for half an hour, moving neither to the right nor to the left, only to find as I went down from the platform that it was a lamp. For half a century I have belonged to the MLA. My name first appears in the Proceedings for 1906, printed in 1907. Apparently I joined in a historic year. Percy Waldron Long, who became Secretary of our Association in 1935 and its President in 1948, joined in that same year, 1906, and our retiring Secretary, William Riley Parker, to whom the MLA owes its recent and long needed Foreign Language Program, was born in that year. Recently when looking over old volumes of PMLA I was surprised to note-I had utterly forgotten this-that in 1898 I was on the program of the Central Division, the earliest Division to splinter off for geographical convenience from the MLA proper. It was founded at a Chicago meeting in 1895 and was given up at Ann Arbor in 1923. Thereafter the general meetings were to alternate between the East and the West, the latter usually meaning Chicago. By our day multiple divisions of our now gargantuan parent organization have arisen in the South and West, with the Rocky Mountain Division nearest the old Central.1 In 1898 Chancellor G. E. MacLean of the University of Nebraska, who studied at Berlin and Leipsic, Professors L. Fossler of the Department of German and A. H. Edgren, head of Romance Languages (founder of our graduate School, later Chancellor of the University of Goteborg, Sweden, later still member of the Nobel Prize Commission), brought the fourth session of the Central Division to Lincoln. I had been newly promoted from theme reader to a minor form of instructorship. When a paper from the Department of English Literature was wished for the program, my head, Dr. L. A. Sherman, asked me to prepare one. I was not a member of the MLA then, probably knew nothing about joining. I was in good company on the program. C. Alphonso Smith, then of the University of Louisiana, was the President of the Central Division. Sixteen papers were read. Among those taking part were three professors from the University of Chicago, F. I. Carpenter, A. H. Tolman, P. S. Allen. Others appearing were Raymond Weeks of Missouri and W. H. Carruth of Kansas. The subject I selected to discuss was (of all things) The Relation of the Finnsburg Fragment to the Finn episode in Beowulf, a moot question then. Professor Blackburn of Chicago commented that he thought the paper should be published. Inexperienced as I was, unacquainted with organs of publication and none too sure of my home-grown Anglo-Saxon, I did nothing about this. Perhaps I should have tried to print my venture, for its conclusions were those ultimately prevailing. Joining as I did in the early twentieth century if not in the late nineteenth, I come tonight trailing clouds of MLA memories, manners, and mores. Am I becoming a professional patriarch? I reported in this role to the Dialect Society a few years ago and I was given a gold pin recently for membership for fifty years in a local society. I have kept up my MLA membership all these decades except for paying dues. In the first World War period when life memberships were offered for $25 I took out one. The Treasurer of the MLA informs me that I have saved$151 thereby through the years. I promise to try not to exceed my allotted time. I do not want my hearers to say of me what Gertrude Stein once said in a private letter. She remarked of a woman speaker (I have quoted this saying often and widely since I came upon it), She\u27s the kind you like the better the more you hear her less

Then and Now

I HOPE this microphone works. If you have to listen to me I hope you can hear me. Once before at a gathering of a learned society, seeing an upright gadget before me, I talked with extreme care directly into it for half an hour, moving neither to the right nor to the left, only to find as I went down from the platform that it was a lamp. For half a century I have belonged to the MLA. My name first appears in the Proceedings for 1906, printed in 1907. Apparently I joined in a historic year. Percy Waldron Long, who became Secretary of our Association in 1935 and its President in 1948, joined in that same year, 1906, and our retiring Secretary, William Riley Parker, to whom the MLA owes its recent and long needed Foreign Language Program, was born in that year. Recently when looking over old volumes of PMLA I was surprised to note-I had utterly forgotten this-that in 1898 I was on the program of the Central Division, the earliest Division to splinter off for geographical convenience from the MLA proper. It was founded at a Chicago meeting in 1895 and was given up at Ann Arbor in 1923. Thereafter the general meetings were to alternate between the East and the West, the latter usually meaning Chicago. By our day multiple divisions of our now gargantuan parent organization have arisen in the South and West, with the Rocky Mountain Division nearest the old Central.1 In 1898 Chancellor G. E. MacLean of the University of Nebraska, who studied at Berlin and Leipsic, Professors L. Fossler of the Department of German and A. H. Edgren, head of Romance Languages (founder of our graduate School, later Chancellor of the University of Goteborg, Sweden, later still member of the Nobel Prize Commission), brought the fourth session of the Central Division to Lincoln. I had been newly promoted from theme reader to a minor form of instructorship. When a paper from the Department of English Literature was wished for the program, my head, Dr. L. A. Sherman, asked me to prepare one. I was not a member of the MLA then, probably knew nothing about joining. I was in good company on the program. C. Alphonso Smith, then of the University of Louisiana, was the President of the Central Division. Sixteen papers were read. Among those taking part were three professors from the University of Chicago, F. I. Carpenter, A. H. Tolman, P. S. Allen. Others appearing were Raymond Weeks of Missouri and W. H. Carruth of Kansas. The subject I selected to discuss was (of all things) The Relation of the Finnsburg Fragment to the Finn episode in Beowulf, a moot question then. Professor Blackburn of Chicago commented that he thought the paper should be published. Inexperienced as I was, unacquainted with organs of publication and none too sure of my home-grown Anglo-Saxon, I did nothing about this. Perhaps I should have tried to print my venture, for its conclusions were those ultimately prevailing. Joining as I did in the early twentieth century if not in the late nineteenth, I come tonight trailing clouds of MLA memories, manners, and mores. Am I becoming a professional patriarch? I reported in this role to the Dialect Society a few years ago and I was given a gold pin recently for membership for fifty years in a local society. I have kept up my MLA membership all these decades except for paying dues. In the first World War period when life memberships were offered for $25 I took out one. The Treasurer of the MLA informs me that I have saved$151 thereby through the years. I promise to try not to exceed my allotted time. I do not want my hearers to say of me what Gertrude Stein once said in a private letter. She remarked of a woman speaker (I have quoted this saying often and widely since I came upon it), She\u27s the kind you like the better the more you hear her less

English in Wartime: A Symposium by College Teachers

After the declaration of war upon us by the Axis nations, it seemed the editors of College English that the members of the College should, as soon as possible, co-operate in determining how best to fulfil our special responsibility throughout World War II. As a first step, we invited twenty-five teachers of English in colleges and universities to suggest how we should meet this professional emergency. The Planning Commission of the N.C.T.E., at their meeting in Chicago during the Christmas holidays, and the College Section, at their meeting in Indianapolis with the M.L.A., considered general and basic wartime policies for the National Council. The result of these deliberations will be presented in the March College English. To assemble a preliminary survey of opinion on the teaching of English in World War II, we had to act quickly in order to meet the deadline for the February issue. Nine letters from college men and women came back in time to be included in the symposium. The weakness of the small number, however, is overcome by the strength of the unified and obviously representative character of the responses. Teachers of English believe in the permanent value of the work they are doing. In peace or in war the discipline of the humanities is a way to decency in human relations. Those who have written for the symposium agree that our time of emergency requires of us, as teachers of English, a more vigorous concentration than ever upon clear expression and broad, permanently vital reading. We will need to make curriculum changes, and individually we will perform special wartime duties; but the initial message from outstanding college teachers is that we must do the job for which we are trained: help others to realize the power which emanates from great literature to live humanely in the midst of conflict