"FOR HE'S A JOLLY GOOD FELLOW."

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXVI, Issue 9368, 18 May 1889, Page 2 (Supplement)

"FOR HE'S A JOLLY GOOD FELLOW."

It is only to recognise the inevitable when we state that there lias arisen in AngloSaxon society a widely-spread impression that the once favourite chorus, " For lie's A Jolty Good Fellow," has been sung, or rather shouted, to satiety, and that our present scheme of civilisation demands a ditty which shall be more in consonance with the increased sobriety and refinement of the age. It is scarcely possible to deny the postulate that the lyric in question has somewhat ot a three-bottle savour about it; and that- it belongs to what, io the " Universal Songster" of two centuries ago, used to be classified as " Bacchanalian Ditties." It- is worth while inquiring a little, not into the history of the words, which are feeble enough, of For He's A Jolly Good Fellow,'' but, into the singularly tuneful and sprightly melody to which the verses tire sung, and which melody has an extremely envious history. It may be pretty generally known that the tune of the song in question is almost identical with that of the famous " Chanson tie Malbrouck but it is far less notorious that " Malbrouck ' is sonic hundreds of yews older than the song which was brought to the Court ot Versailles in the year 1781 by Madame I'oitrine, the wife of ft Pieardy farmer, who was ongaged as wet nurse for the little Dauphin, the son of Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette. " Malbrouck" at once became as popular in Paris as " Lillibtilero ' had been in England and Ireland at the end of the seventeenth century. " Malbrouek" was sung, played on the spin net and the harpsichord ; it was hummed and whistled in every saloon, every cafe, and every " carrefour ' in Paris ; it rivalled in popularity the most favourite operatic airs of the day, and its vogue continued until it was eclipsed by the sinister " Belle lsourhonnai.se," which in its turn was to yield to the appalling "Madame Veto" and the horrible "Carmagnole." As for the Chanson do Malbrouck," it seems to have crossed the Channel and to have been gleefully adopted in England very soon after its journey from Picardy to" Versailles. It was practically impossible to translate the words of the song itself into comprehensible English, since they merely set forth in remarkably stupid doggerel that "Malbrouck' went off to the wars ; that he was a long time gone ; that Madame Malbrouck saw from the top of a tower her page approaching, clad in deep mourning, and that the youthful servitor informed her that Monsieur Malbrouck was dead; and that he (the page) had seen him buried ; and that when the ceremony was over everybody went home to bed. When the ridiculous ditty first made its appearance in the .trench capital, the theory most generally accepted by scholars was that the verses had been composed by some regimental wag in the French army at the period when Marlborough was campaigning in Flanders ; but, considering the terror which the victorious John Churchill excited in the Gallic, ranks, it was a matter for perplexity that the poem contained not a single hostile or even contemptuous allusion to him. lie is treated, indeed, rather as a hero than otherwise, for in one of the stanzas the page declares that he saw his master's spirit soar high above the laurels to Heaven. These were scarcely the terms in which a French military poet would have spoken of the victor of Blenheim and Malplaquet. When John Bull came into possession of the chanson he coolly threw the absurd poetry overboard. He was quite cognisant of the fact that the great Duke of "Marlborough died in his bed in peace and honour, and in the presence of his wife, who survived him many years, and the long-winded doggerel of the French poem could have presented to him no kind of purport or significance. The delightful tune, however, was a godsend. It. was a capital change after " Mule Britannia,*' " Britons, Strike Home," the British Grenadiers," and t.he " Roast Beef of Old England" and, wedded to the merry, although somewhat incoherent, jingle of words, " For He's a Jolly Good Fellow," the Anglicised "Malbrouck" became, with astonishing celerity, part and parcel of our national minstrelsy. For a good hundred years, then, have we been holloaing these slightly imbecile but friendly verses to their certainly taking tune. "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow" crossed the Atlantic years ago, and became almost as popular in Canada as it was in England ; and at the present moment it may be said that there is not a sj.ot on the earth, from Gibraltar to Geelong, from Bermuda to Brisbane, from Montreal to Melbourne, from Hong Kong to Calcutta, from Mauritius to Manitoba, where Anglo-Saxons, when they feel exuberantly festive, or wish to do special honour to a justly-popular friend, do not join in the heartiest of refrains in " For He's a. Jolly Good Fellow." The canny and pcrfervid Scot, however, although, for good fellowship's sake, he may not object to sing " So Say All of Us" in the company of the Southron pock-puddings, will not fail at more strictly Celtic symposia to give the preference to " Auld Lang Syne." Meanwhile the French antiquaries have been by no means satisfied with the vague history of the "Chanson de Malbrouck," circulated in 1781. The incongruous eulogy said to have been written by a French poet on an English commander puzzled them, to begin with, and this perplexitywas increased when Chateaubriand, returning from the East, declared that lie had heard the melody of " Malbrouek" sung by the Arabs of Syria.. This was a clue at which the antiquaries eagerly snatched. They followed it up, and discovered a very ancient Spanish ballad entitled, " The Canzon de Mambrou," which begin;! with the same words as the French lyric, only reciting that it; was "Mambrou," and not "Malbrouek," who went to the wars ; and they consequently assumed that the melodies of the two songs wore the same,and that the "Canzon tie Mambrou" hud been transported to Palestine by the Crusaders. Equally curious was the discovery that the interment of Malbrouck, to the minutest details, such as the carrying of his panoply by four officers of his household, had been described in a burlesque ballad called The Funeral of the Duke of Guise," which became popular among the soldiers shortly after the assasination of the Duke at the siege of Orleans, This was in 15(i.'i; but the antiquaries further remarked that the rhythm of the "Guise" ballad corresponded precisely with that of the popular anthology of the thirteenth century. Thus they arrived at the conclusion that there had been a Crusaders' song which had travelled to the East, of which the melody survived, but of which the words had been lost. Englishmen might afford to be profoundly indifferent to this controversy, were it not just possible that the tune of " For lie's a Jolly Good Fellow" is really a very old English one ; that ib was taken to the Holy Land by the followers of Richard, the Lion Heart; and that the air was left as a legacy to the warriors of the Sultan Saladin. If this could only be certified by some zealous follower in the footsteps of Dr. Rimbault or Mr. Chappell, veneration for old English music might cause us to mitigate the fretful impatience v/ith which we J are beginning to complain that wo have [ had a surfeit of "For He's a Jolly Good I Fellow."— DaiX" Telegraph,