'KALEVALA'; OR, THE FINNISH NATIONAL EPIC.
It is difficult to account for the fact that the scientific curiosity
which is just now so busy in examining all the monuments of the primitive
condition of our race, should, in England at least, have almost totally
neglected to popularise the 'Kalevala,' or national poem of the Finns. Besides its fresh and simple beauty of style, its worth as a storehouse of every kind of primitive folklore, being as it is the production of an Urvolk, a nation that has undergone no violent revolution in language or institutions—the 'Kalevala' has the peculiar interest of occupying a position between the two kinds of primitive poetry, the ballad and the epic. So much difficulty has been introduced into the study of the first developments of song, by confusing these distinct sorts of composition under the name of popular poetry, that it may be well, in writing of a poem which occupies a middle place between epic and ballad, to define what we mean by each.
The author of our old English 'Art of Poesie' begins his work with a
statement which may serve as a text: 'Poesie,' says Puttenham, writing in
1589, 'is more ancient than the artificiall of the Greeks and Latines, coming by instinct of nature, and used by the savage and uncivill, who were before all science and civilitie. This is proved by certificate of merchants and travellers, who by late navigations have surveyed the whole world, and discovered large countries, and strange people, wild and savage, affirming that the American, the Perusine, and the very canniball, do sing, and also say, their highest and holiest matters in certain riming versicles.' Puttenham is here referring to that instinct of primitive men, which compels them in all moments of high-wrought feeling, and on all solemn occasions, to give utterance to a kind of chant. Such a chant is the song of Lamech, when he had 'slain a man to his wounding.' So in the Norse sagas, Grettir and Gunnar sing when they have anything particular to say; and so in the Märchen—the primitive fairy tales of all nations—scraps of verse are introduced where emphasis is wanted. This craving for passionate expression takes a more formal shape in the lays which, among all primitive peoples, as among the modern Greeks to-day, are sung at betrothals, funerals, and departures for distant lands. These songs have been collected in Scotland by Scott and Motherwell; their Danish counterparts have been translated by Mr. Prior. In Greece, M. Fauriel and Dr. Ulrichs; in Provence, Damase Arbaud; in Italy, M. Nigra; in Servia, Talvj; in France, Gérard de Nerval—have done for their separate countries what Scott did for the Border. Professor Child, of Harvard, is publishing a beautiful critical collection of English Volkslieder, with all known variants from every country.
A comparison of the collections proves that among all European lands
the primitive 'versicles' of the people are identical in
tone, form, and incident. It is this kind of early expression
of a people's life—careless, abrupt, brief, as was necessitated
by the fact that they were sung to the accompaniment of the dance—that
we call ballads. These are distinctly, and in every sense, popular
poems, and nothing can cause greater confusion than to apply the same
title, 'popular,' to early epic poetry. Ballads are
short; a long ballad, as Mr. Matthew Arnold has said, creeps and halts. A true epic, on the other hand, is long, and its tone is grand, noble, and sustained. Ballads are not artistic; while the form of the epic, whether we take the hexameter or the rougher laisse of the French chansons de geste, is full of conscious and admirable art. Lastly, popular ballads deal with vague characters, acting and living in vague places; while the characters of an epic are heroes of definite station, whose descendants are still in the land, whose home is a recognisable place, Ithaca, or Argos. Now, though these two kinds of early poetry—the ballad, the song of the people; the epic, the song of the chiefs of the people, of the ruling race—are distinct in kind, it does not follow that they have no connection, that the nobler may not have been developed out of the materials of the lower form of expression. And the value of the 'Kalevala' is partly this, that it combines the continuity and unison of the epic with the simplicity and popularity of the ballad, and so forms a kind of link in the history of the development of poetry. This may become clearer as we proceed to explain the literary history of the Finnish national poem.