WHEN the learned first gave serious attention to popular ballads, from
the time of Percy to that of Scott, they laboured under certain
disabilities. The Comparative Method was scarcely understood, and was
little practised. Editors were content to study the ballads of their own
countryside, or, at most, of Great Britain. Teutonic and Northern
parallels to our ballads were then adduced, as by Scott and Jamieson. It
was later that the ballads of Europe, from the Faroes to Modern Greece,
were compared with our own, with European _Märchen_, or children’s tales,
and with the popular songs, dances, and traditions of classical and
savage peoples. The results of this more recent comparison may be
briefly stated. Poetry begins, as Aristotle says, in improvisation.
Every man is his own poet, and, in moments of stronge motion, expresses
himself in song. A typical example is the Song of Lamech in Genesis—
“I have slain a man to my wounding,
And a young man to my hurt.”
Instances perpetually occur in the Sagas: Grettir, Egil, Skarphedin, are
always singing. In _Kidnapped_, Mr. Stevenson introduces “The Song of
the Sword of Alan,” a fine example of Celtic practice: words and air are
beaten out together, in the heat of victory. In the same way, the women
sang improvised dirges, like Helen; lullabies, like the lullaby of Danæ
in Simonides, and flower songs, as in modern Italy. Every function of
life, war, agriculture, the chase, had its appropriate magical and
mimetic dance and song, as in Finland, among Red Indians, and among
Australian blacks. “The deeds of men” were chanted by heroes, as by
Achilles; stories were told in alternate verse and prose; girls, like
Homer’s Nausicaa, accompanied dance and ball play, priests and
medicine-men accompanied rites and magical ceremonies by songs.
These practices are world-wide, and world-old. The thoroughly popular
songs, thus evolved, became the rude material of a professional class of
minstrels, when these arose, as in the heroic age of Greece. A minstrel
might be attached to a Court, or a noble; or he might go wandering with
song and harp among the people. In either case, this class of men
developed more regular and ample measures. They evolved the hexameter;
the _laisse_ of the _Chansons de Geste_; the strange technicalities of
Scandinavian poetry; the metres of Vedic hymns; the choral odes of
Greece. The narrative popular chant became in their hands the Epic, or
the mediæval rhymed romance. The metre of improvised verse changed into
the artistic lyric. These lyric forms were fixed, in many cases, by the
art of writing. But poetry did not remain solely in professional and
literary hands. The mediæval minstrels and _jongleurs_ (who may best be
studied in Léon Gautier’s Introduction to his _Epopées Françaises_) sang
in Court and Camp. The poorer, less regular brethren of the art, harped
and played conjuring tricks, in farm and grange, or at street corners.
The foreign newer metres took the place of the old alliterative English
verse. But unprofessional men and women did not cease to make and sing.
Some writers have decided, among them Mr. Courthope, that our traditional
ballads are degraded popular survivals of literary poetry. The plots and
situations of some ballads are, indeed, the same as those of some
literary mediæval romances. But these plots and situations, in Epic and
Romance, are themselves the final literary form of _märchen_, myths and
inventions originally _popular_, and still, in certain cases, extant in
popular form among races which have not yet evolved, or borrowed, the
ampler and more polished and complex _genres_ of literature. Thus, when
a literary romance and a ballad have the same theme, the ballad may be a
popular degradation of the romance; or, it may be the original popular
shape of it, still surviving in tradition. A well-known case in prose,
is that of the French fairy tales.
Perrault, in 1697, borrowed these from tradition and gave them literary
and courtly shape. But _Cendrillon_ or _Chaperon Rouge_ in the mouth of
a French peasant, is apt to be the old traditional version,
uncontaminated by the refinements of Perrault, despite Perrault’s immense
success and circulation. Thus tradition preserves pre-literary forms,
even though, on occasion, it may borrow from literature. Peasant poets
have been authors of ballads, without being, for all that, professional
minstrels. Many such poems survive in our ballad literature.
The material of the ballad may be either romantic or historical. The
former class is based on one of the primeval invented situations, one of
the elements of the _Märchen_ in prose. Such tales or myths occur in the
stories of savages, in the legends of peasants, are interwoven later with
the plot in Epic or Romance, and may also inspire ballads. Popular
superstitions, the witch, metamorphosis, the returning ghost, the fairy,
all of them survivals of the earliest thought, naturally play a great
part. The Historical ballad, on the other hand, has a basis of
resounding fact, murder, battle, or fire-raising, but the facts, being
derived from popular rumour, are immediately corrupted and distorted,
sometimes out of all knowledge. Good examples are the ballads on
Darnley’s murder and the youth of James VI.
In the romantic class, we may take _Tamlane_. Here the idea of fairies
stealing children is thoroughly popular; they also steal young men as
lovers, and again, men may win fairy brides, by clinging to them through
all transformations. A classical example is the seizure of Thetis by
Peleus, and Child quotes a modern Cretan example. The dipping in milk
and water, I may add, has precedent in ancient Egypt (in _The Two
Brothers_), and in modern Senegambia. The fairy tax, tithe, or teind,
paid to Hell, is illustrated by old trials for witchcraft, in Scotland.
{0a} Now, in literary forms and romance, as in _Ogier le Danois_,
persons are carried away by the Fairy King or Queen. But here the
literary romance borrows from popular superstition; the ballad has no
need to borrow a familiar fact from literary romance. On the whole
subject the curious may consult “The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns,
and Fairies,” by the Reverend Robert Kirk of Aberfoyle, himself,
according to tradition, a victim of the fairies.
Thus, in _Tamlane_, the whole _donnée_ is popular. But the current
version, that of Scott, is contaminated, as Scott knew, by incongruous
modernisms. Burns’s version, from tradition, already localizes the
events at Carterhaugh, the junction of Ettrick and Yarrow. But Burns’s
version does not make the Earl of Murray father of the hero, nor the Earl
of March father of the heroine. Roxburgh is the hero’s father in Burns’s
variant, which is more plausible, and the modern verses do not occur.
This ballad apparently owes nothing to literary romance.
In _Mary Hamilton_ we have a notable instance of the Historical Ballad.
No Marie of Mary Stuart’s suffered death for child murder.
She had no Marie Hamilton, no Marie Carmichael among her four Maries,
though a lady of the latter name was at her court. But early in the
reign a Frenchwoman of the queen’s was hanged, with her paramour, an
apothecary, for slaying her infant. Knox mentions the fact, which is
also recorded in letters from the English ambassador, uncited by Mr.
Child. Knox adds that there were ballads against the Maries. Now, in
March 1719, a Mary Hamilton, of Scots descent, a maid of honour of
Catherine of Russia, was hanged for child murder (_Child_, vi. 383). It
has therefore been supposed, first by Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe long
ago, later by Professor Child, and then by Mr. Courthope, that our ballad
is of 1719, or later, and deals with the Russian, not the Scotch,
tragedy.
To this we may reply (1) that we have no example of such a throwing back
of a contemporary event, in ballads. (2) There is a version (_Child_,
viii. 507) in which Mary Hamilton’s paramour is a “pottinger,” or
apothecary, as in the real old Scotch affair. (3) The number of variants
of a ballad is likely to be proportionate to its antiquity and wide
distribution. Now only _Sir Patrick Spens_ has so many widely different
variants as _Mary Hamilton_. These could hardly have been evolved
between 1719 and 1790, when Burns quotes the poem as an old ballad. (4)
We have no example of a poem so much in the old ballad manner, for
perhaps a hundred and fifty years before 1719. The style first degraded
and then expired: compare _Rob Roy_ and _Killiecrankie_, in this
collection, also the ballads of _Loudoun Hill_, _The Battle of
Philiphaugh_, and others much earlier than 1719. New styles of popular
poetry on contemporary events as _Sherriffmuir_ and _Tranent Brae_ had
arisen. (5) The extreme historic inaccuracy of _Mary Hamilton_ is
paralleled by that of all the ballads on real events. The mention of the
Pottinger is a trace of real history which has no parallel in the Russian
affair, and there is no room, says Professor Child, for the supposition
that it was voluntarily inserted by reciter or copyist, to tally with the
narrative in Knox’s History.
On the other side, we have the name of Mary Hamilton occurring in a
tragic event of 1719, but then the name does not uniformly appear in the
variants of the ballad. The lady is there spoken of generally as Mary
Hamilton, but also as Mary Myle, Lady Maisry, as daughter of the Duke of
York (Stuart), as Marie Mild, and so forth. Though she bids sailors
carry the tale of her doom, she is not abroad, but in Edinburgh town.
Nothing can be less probable than that a Scots popular ballad-maker in
1719, telling the tale of a yesterday’s tragedy in Russia, should throw
the time back by a hundred and fifty years, should change the scene to
Scotland (the heart of the sorrow would be Mary’s exile), and, above all,
should compose a ballad in a style long obsolete. This is not the method
of the popular poet, and such imitations of the old ballad as
_Hardyknute_ show that literary poets of 1719 had not knowledge or skill
enough to mimic the antique manner with any success.
We may, therefore, even in face of Professor Child, regard _Mary
Hamilton_ as an old example of popular perversion of history in ballad,
not as “one of the very latest,” and also “one of the very best” of
Scottish popular ballads.
_Rob Roy_ shows the same power of perversion. It was not Rob Roy but his
sons, Robin Oig (who shot Maclaren at the plough-tail), and James Mohr
(alternately the spy, the Jacobite, and the Hanoverian spy once more),
who carried off the heiress of Edenbelly. Indeed a kind of added
epilogue, in a different measure, proves that a poet was aware of the
facts, and wished to correct his predecessor.
Such then are ballads, in relation to legend and history. They are, on
the whole, with exceptions, absolutely popular in origin, composed by men
of the people for the people, and then diffused among and altered by
popular reciters. In England they soon won their way into printed stall
copies, and were grievously handled and moralized by the hack editors.
No ballad has a stranger history than _The Loving Ballad of Lord
Bateman_, illustrated by the pencils of Cruikshank and Thackeray. Their
form is a ludicrous cockney perversion, but it retains the essence.
Bateman, a captive of “this Turk,” is beloved by the Turk’s daughter (a
staple incident of old French romance), and by her released. The lady
after seven years rejoins Lord Bateman: he has just married a local
bride, but “orders another marriage,” and sends home his bride “in a
coach and three.” This incident is stereotyped in the ballads and occurs
in an example in the Romaic. {0b}
Now Lord Bateman is _Young Bekie_ in the Scotch ballads, who becomes
_Young Beichan_, _Young Bichem_, and so forth, and has adventures
identical with those of Lord Bateman, though the proud porter in the
Scots version is scarcely so prominent and illustrious. As Motherwell
saw, Bekie (Beichan, Buchan, Bateman) is really Becket, Gilbert Becket,
father of Thomas of Canterbury. Every one has heard how _his_ Saracen
bride sought him in London. (Robert of Gloucester’s _Life and Martyrdom
of Thomas Becket_, Percy Society. See Child’s Introduction, IV., i.
1861, and _Motherwell’s Minstrelsy_, p. xv., 1827.) The legend of the
dissolved marriage is from the common stock of ballad lore, Motherwell
found an example in the state of _Cantefable_, alternate prose and verse,
like _Aucassin and Nicolette_. Thus the cockney rhyme descends from the
twelfth century.
Such are a few of the curiosities of the ballad. The examples selected
are chiefly chosen for their romantic charm, and for the spirit of the
Border raids which they record. A few notes are added in an appendix.
The text is chosen from among the many variants in Child’s learned but
still unfinished collection, and an effort has been made to choose the
copies which contain most poetry with most signs of uncontaminated
originality. In a few cases Sir Walter Scott’s versions, though
confessedly “made up,” are preferred. Perhaps the editor may be allowed
to say that he does not merely plough with Professor Child’s heifer, but
has made a study of ballads from his boyhood.
This fact may exempt him, even in the eyes of too patriotic American
critics, from “the common blame of a plagiary.” Indeed, as Professor
Child has not yet published his general theory of the Ballad, the editor
does not know whether he agrees with the ideas here set forth.
So far the Editor had written, when news came of Professor Child’s
regretted death. He had lived to finish, it is said, the vast collection
of all known traditional Scottish and English Ballads, with all
accessible variants, a work of great labour and research, and a
distinguished honour to American scholarship. We are not told, however,
that he had written a general study of the topic, with his conclusions as
to the evolution and diffusion of the Ballads: as to the influences which
directed the selection of certain themes of _Märchen_ for poetic
treatment, and the processes by which identical ballads were distributed
throughout Europe. No one, it is to be feared, is left, in Europe at
least, whose knowledge of the subject is so wide and scientific as that
of Professor Child. It is to be hoped that some pupil of his may
complete the task in his sense, if, indeed, he has left it unfinished.