teristic from the popular lyric and belong
to poetry of the schools. Marriage, says Jeanroy, is always respected
in the true folk-song. Moreover, this is only a negative test. In
Portugal, many songs which must be referred to the individual and
courtly poet are written in praise of the unmarried girl; while in
England, whether it be set down to austere morals or to the practical
turn of the native mind, one finds little or nothing to match this
troubadour and minnesinger poetry in honor of the stately but
capricious dame.[14] The folk-song that we seek found few to record
it; it sounded at the dance, it was heard in the harvest-field; what
seemed to be everywhere, growing spontaneously like violets in spring,
called upon no one to preserve it and to give it that protection
demanded by exotic poetry of the schools. What is preserved is due
mainly to the clerks and gleemen of older times, or else to the
curiosity of modern antiquarians, rescuing here and there a belated
survival of the species. Where the clerk or the gleeman is in
question, he is sure to add a personal element, and thus to remove the
song from its true communal setting. Contrast the wonderful little
song, admired by Alceste in Moliere's 'Misanthrope,' and as
impersonal, even in its first-personal guise as any communal lyric
ever made,--with a reckless bit of verse sung by some minstrel about
the famous Eleanor of Poitou, wife of Henry II. of England. The song
so highly commended by Alceste[15] runs, in desperately inadequate
translation:--

If the King had made it mine,
Paris, his city gay,
And I must the love resign
Of my bonnie may,[16]--

To King Henry I would say:
Take your Paris back, I pray;
Better far I love my may,--
O joy!--
Love my bonnie may!

Let us hear the reckless "clerk":--

If the whole wide world were mine,
From the ocean to the Rhine,
All I'd be denying
If the Queen of England once
In my arms were lying![17]

[13] For early times translation from language to language is
out of the question, certainly in the case of lyrics. It is
very important to remember that primitive man regarded song
as a momentary and spontaneous thing.

[14] Yet even rough Scandinavia took up this brilliant but
doubtful love poetry. To one of the Norse kings is attributed
a song in which the royal singer informs his "lady" by way of
credentials for his wooing,-