Page:English folk-carols.djvu/15

 For sad indeed had been our case,

Most piteous and forlorn,

No hope for pardon or for grace,

Had Jesus not been born.

My song is done, I must be gone,

I can stay no longer here;

God bless you all, both great and small,

And send you a happy New Year.

This, while it lacks the freshness, the naiveté, and indeed pretty nearly all the typical and characteristic qualities of the folk-carol, is nevertheless quite as good as some, and far better than many of the modern Christmas hymns annually sung in fashionable Churches and Chapels.

There is, perhaps, no branch of folk-music in the creation of which the unconscious art of the peasant is seen to greater advantage than the carol. For his peculiar and most characteristic qualities, mental and emotional, are precisely those which in this case are most needed—his passion for simple, direct statement, his dislike of ornament and of the tricks of circumlocution, his abhorrence of sentimentality, and above all his courage in using, without hesitation, the obvious and commonplace phrase, of words or music, when by its means the required expression can most easily be realized. What cultivated musician would dare to set to such words as "The Virgin Unspotted" the graceful, flowing, 3-time melody given in this collection, even if he had the luck or skill to think of it? What, again, could be more concise in its diction or clearer in its meaning, than the last stanza in "King Herod and the Cock," or more vivid than the following lines in "The New Year's Carol"?—

which will, I venture to think, bear comparison with the parallel stanza of the Easter carol "Ye Sons and Daughters," translated by Neale.

It is just his transparent sincerity, his freedom from affectation, self-consciousness and conventional restrictions, that makes the unlettered Rh