The Birmingham age-herald., 1914-05-02
DELIGHTFUL OPEN
 MEETING OF CHEST GLIB


 o'clock with Mrs. Frank P. Glass as hostess at her home on Quinland ave- nue.
 The early part of the meeting was de- voted to a pretty musical programme. The most enjoyable feature of the after noon was the address on "The Frozen
 1nkwell," story of the Kalevala, the epic of Finland. given by MT. c. F.. Markell Later dainty refreshments were served to a full attendance and many ex- tra guests.
 ire'iows:
 l There Is 2 world of men and a world of books. Each has its heroes and it's inn
 mortals and each has contributed to the history, the glory and the prestige of
 the nation. Greece is greater today for her Homer than for the hero of Ther- mopylae; Virgil did more for Italy than Caesar ever accomplished, while Bun yon and Shapespeare added greater laur- els to England's crown than were woven
 by Cromwell and Wellington.
 Nor is it the great nation in size and
 power that produces the great literary
 genius. Of the 14 Nobel prizes recently
 awarded over half went to representa- | tives of small territories. Among these 1 may be noted Bjornson and Lagerlof of Scandinavia, Maeterlink of Belgium, Mis-
 tral of Provence and Tagore of Bengal. l It is singular that man first learned to speak in verse and so much of the prim- tive nature still fingers in his compo- | stion that when moved by a great senti- ment be 1t fear grief or joy. he bursts i into numbers Lamech gives us the first | song in the Bible for he broke into a
 chant when he sorrowed at having slain
 a man to his wounding. David in joy
 sang and danced before the ark with such
 a degree of enthusiasm as to call forth l 1 it has been said that a nation without | music is a nation without a past and wanting in history. It is the great strug- gle for national existence that causes a
 nation to compose its music. No one may
 estimate what the Marseillaise has done | for France or the Wacham Rhine for | Germany Tacitus tells us that the Ger
 mans of the forest went into battle sing 1 ing a hymn to their war god and critics | have declared that there is sweeter music than the melodies of Poland and l Hungary, both of which nations passed through a baptism of fire and were fin- ally prostrated beneath the hoof of the ! invader.
 | It must be remembered that original poetry was the ballad, and ballads were composed to accompany dancing. When Christianity dominated the nation and the
 church held sway, dancing was sup | pressed as an evil and a concomitant of I the devil, and with the decline of the dance perished a great store of ballads | that were forever lost to the world. Thus
 has the church made civilization poorer i to that extent.
 Savants have questioned whether the ballads which have survived were simply | crumbs and fragments which fell from 1 the epic or whether the epic is master
 piece fashioned by skilled and cunning
 hands from the warp and wool of the | ballad
 l This brings us to the question as to what is the dividing line; what consti-
 tutes ballad and what forms an epic? l Ballads are short long as the case
 may be, but they represent the passion
 the pastime and the life of the, people among whom they were curfent. They were sung at the feast. at the bethrothal and the wedding they were trenodies when a long .leavestaking prefaced journey to qtstant lands, and they ac- companied the last pilgrimage that mortal makesf for they were part of the funeral ,ri.es.
 They were not artistic and never de- signed to be. They deal with vague characters living and acting in vague places and their story is abrupt and broken. The epic upon the other hand is noble, classical and sustained. Its form, whether accentuating the hexa- meter of the rougher laisse of the chan sons de geste. is full of conscious art. The heroes are characters of a definite station living in recognized places and they are the chiefs or progenitors of
 the people among whom the epic found 1 birth.
 i But there was found not so long ago connecting link between the two and in a land of a people whom no one ever dreamed of possessing an appreciable inn | agination or a classical literature. Less f ba not r hot | Finland had national poem. The Films claim affinity with the Magyars of Hun l gary but they were left to a peaceful l life among the lakes of their homes and 1 to while away the dreary lonesomeness of | their long nights their bards sang of the end of things. It was the custom for | the singers to speak from memory alone. Before the log fire they sat facing each other and clasping each others hands, | they recited in turn until the one whose memory slackened also slackened his hold. The great poem that they sung was the epic known as the Kalevala. La l is a termination designating land and kaleva means heroic, we have the l land of the heroes It is longer than the | Iliad and is composed of 50 cantos. In | it's elevated style and its continuity it is uEouestionably an epic. but there is to me a sad pathos in the difference which 1t portrays from an epic Those people in that land of cold and night had no heroic ancestors of whom they could sing. The deeds of their characters were those of every day life, and their gods were the | animals of the field, the birds of the air and the fishes of the sea; aye. they even defied the frost and the cold, but l from their songs of seed time and har- vest from the rites of the nuptial and
 burial they wove grand and impress sive story.
 | Lacking aristocratic men they enobled nature, and to them the great bear that circles in a ceaseless dance around the north pole, the honey footed bear as they | loved to. call him, became an object of homage and worship. | I always approach the mythology of the Norsk with feeling of reverence, for | in it I see the first trace of Christianity. | While the Kalavela opens with cos mography as crude and imaginative as | that of any heather literature, it closes with strange resemblance to holy writ These songs it says were found by the
 wayside and gathered in the depths of
 the copse; blown from the branches of the forest and culled among the plumes
 of the pine trees. They came to me as
 I followed the fiocks in a land of mad
 ows honey sweet and of golden hills The cold has spoken to me and the rain has told me her runes; the winds of
 heaven and the waves of the sea have spoken and sung to me: the wild birds have taught me and the music of many
 waters has been my master.
 MRS. CABINESS GIVES GARDEN AND DANCING pARTy