3g PERFORMANCE

rnulieram5, with their songs, had been a feature of French life
from, at least, the sixth century.1 These considerations raise issues
too distant for the present book; namely, the indebtedness of all
poetry to women.

Ballad performances, in which there is no dancing, have been
described by Cecil Sharp:2

The mountain singers sing in very much the same manner as English
folk-singers, in the same straightforward direct manner, without any
conscious attempt at expression, and with the even tone and clarity of
enunciation with which all folk-song collectors are familiar. ... So far
as I have been able to comprehend his mental attitude, I gather that,
when singing a ballad, for instance, he is merely relating a story in a
particularly effective way which he has learned from his elders, his
conscious attention being wholly concentrated on what he is singing and
not upon the effect which he himself is producing.

Mr. Neville Coghill has described to me his impression of ballads
heard in the Blue Mountains of Virginia. They were sung to him
without accompaniment, chorus, or dance. The singers were all
women, who adopted a harsh, clear, nasal intonation completely
devoid of expression. At the end of each piece the singer merely
said, 'That's a pretty ballad', and passed on to the next without
change of expression. (Similarly, Mila y Fontanals noticed that the
only comments were 'pretty' or 'sad'; more lively epithets were
used only for up-to-date ditties from the towns.) The effect of this
impersonal singing was to leave the words of the ballad to do their
own work, and for that a clear enunciation is essential. The singer
plainly originated nothing in her repertoire. She might add or
omit, as her memory served, or change the order of narrative, but
the only modifications of which she could be capable were of a
mechanical kind. Her repertoire probably went back to the seven-

^ The texts (chiefly ecclesiastical protests) are collected in K. Voretzsch,
Einfuhrung in das Studium der altfranzosischen Literatur, Halle, 1925. See also
G. Paris, *Les engines de la poe"sie lyrique en France*, Journal des Savants, 1892
(reprinted in his collected essays). The 'cossantes' in the old Canciomiros are
the work of men, but are attributed to women. There seems small reason to
doubt that this poetry was autochthonous. C. M. Bowra, Greek Lyric Poetry,
Oxford, 1936, connects Sappho's genius with folk-songs. In Chinese verse one
notes the prominence of women in the Confucian Odes, which are traditional.
Later lyrics are chiefly by men, but such conventions as the tableau of the
Deserted Wife must originally have been feminine.

2 Olive Dame Campbell and Cecil J. Sharp, English Folk-songs from the
Southern Appalachians, New York and London, 1917, pp. ix and x