FROM English Folk-Carols by Cecil J. Sharp (The Wessex Press, 1911):

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, three-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:”

Then Christ He called Thomas
And bid him: Come and see
And put thy fingers in the wounds
That are in my body;
And be not faithless, but believe!
And happy shalt thou be

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 rustic pre-eminently fitted to translate into music and poetry the dramatic incidents of the Christ story. His simplicity disarms criticism; just as his pious, intense, child-like belief in every detail ot the Gospel narrative banishes skepticism. Nor did he trouble himself about the place of performance; village Church or village inn —it mattered not. A tune, so long as it expressed his feeling, harmonized with the sense and fitted the metre of the words, served his purpose wherever and whenever it was destined to be sung.

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