The development of poetry, the articulate life of man, is hidden in
that mist which overhangs the morning of history. Yet the indications
are that this art of arts had its origin, as far back as the days of
savagery, in the ideal element of life rather than the utilitarian.
There came a time, undoubtedly, when the mnemonic value of verse was
recognized in the transmission of laws and records and the hard-won
wealth of experience. Our own Anglo-Saxon ancestors, whose rhyme, it
will be remembered, was initial rhyme, or alliteration, have
bequeathed to our modern speech many such devices for "the knitting up
of the memory," largely legal or popular phrases, as _bed and board_,
_to have and to hold_, _to give and to grant_, _time and tide_, _wind
and wave_, _gold and gear_; or proverbs, as, for example: _When bale
is highest, boon is nighest_, better known to the present age under
the still alliterative form: _The darkest hour's before the dawn_.
But if we may trust the signs of poetic evolution in barbarous tribes
to-day, if we may draw inferences from the sacred character attached
to the Muses in the myths of all races, with the old Norsemen, for
instance, Sagâ being the daughter of Odin, we may rest a reasonable
confidence upon the theory that poetry, the world over, finds its
first utterance at the bidding of the religious instinct and in
connection with religious rites.
Yet the wild-eyed warriors, keeping time by a rude triumphal chant to
the dance about the watch-fire, were mentally as children, with keen
senses and eager imagination, but feeble reason, with fresh and
vigorous emotions, but without elaborate language for these emotions.
Swaying and shouting in rhythmic consent, they came slowly to the use
of ordered words and, even then, could but have repeated the same
phrases over and over. The burden--sometimes senseless to our modern
understanding--to be found in the present form of many of our ballads
may be the survival of a survival from those primitive iterations. The
"Blaw, blaw, blaw winds, blaw" of _The Elfin Knight_ is not, in this
instance, inappropriate to the theme, yet we can almost hear shrilling
through it a far cry from days when men called directly upon the
powers of nature. Such refrains as "Binnorie, O Binnorie," "Jennifer
gentle an' rosemaree," "Down, a down, a down, a down," have ancient
secrets in them, had we ears to hear.
One of the vexed questions of criticism regarding these refrains is
whether they were rendered in alternation with the narrative verses or
as a continuous under-song. Early observers of Indian dances have
noted that, while one leaping savage after another improvised a simple
strain or two, the whole dancing company kept up a guttural cadence of
"Heh, heh, heh!" or "Aw, aw, aw!" which served the office of musical
accompaniment. This choral iteration of rhythmic syllables, still
hinted in the refrain, but only hinted, is believed to be the original
element of poetry.
In course of time, however, was evolved the individual singer. In the
earlier stages of society, song was undoubtedly a common gift, and
every normal member of the community bore his part in the recital of
the heroic deeds that ordinarily formed the subject of these primeval
lays. Were it the praise of a god, of a feasting champion, or of a
slain comrade, the natural utterance was narrative. Later on, the more
fluent and inventive improvisers came to the front, and finally the
professional bard appeared. Somewhere in the process, too, the burden
may have shifted its part from under-song to alternating chorus, thus
allowing the soloist opportunity for rest and recollection.
English ballads, as we have them in print to-day, took form in a far
later and more sophisticated period than those just suggested; yet
even thus our ballads stand nearest of anything in our literature to
the primitive poetry that was born out of the social life of the
community rather than made by the solitary thought of the artist. Even
so comparatively small a group as that comprehended within this volume
shows how truly the ballad is the parent stock of all other poetic
varieties. In the ballad of plain narrative, as _The Hunting of the
Cheviot,_ the epic is hinted. We go a step further in _A Lytell Geste
of Robyn Hode,_--too long for insertion in this collection, but
peculiarly interesting from the antiquarian point of view, having been
printed, in part, as early as 1489,--and find at least a rough
foundation for a genuine hero-lay, the _Lytell Geste_ being made up of
a number of ballads rudely woven into one. A poem like this, though
hardly "an epic in miniature,"--a phrase which has been proposed as
the definition of a ballad,--is truly an epic in germ, lacking the
finish of a miniature, but holding the promise of a seed. Where the
narrative is highly colored by emotion, as in _Helen of Kirconnell_ or
_Waly Waly,_ the ballad merges into the lyric. It is difficult here to
draw the line of distinction. _A Lyke-Wake Dirge_ is almost purely
lyric in quality, while _The Lawlands o' Holland, Gilderoy, The Twa
Corbies, Bonny Barbara Allan,_ have each a pronounced lyric element.
From the ballad of dialogue we look forward to the drama, not only
from the ballad of pure dialogue, as _Lord Ronald,_ or _Edward,
Edward,_ or that sweet old English folk-song, too long for insertion
here, _The Not-Browne Mayd,_ but more remotely from the ballad of
mingled dialogue and narrative, as _The Gardener or Fine Flowers i'
the Valley._
The beginnings of English balladry are far out of sight. From the
date when the race first had deeds to praise and words with which to
praise them, it is all but certain that ballads were in the air. But
even the mediteval ballads are lost to us. It was the written
literature, the work of clerks, fixed upon the parchment, that
survived, while the songs of the people, passing from lip to lip down
the generations, continually reshaped themselves to the changing
times. But they were never hushed. While Chaucer, his genius fed by
Norman and Italian streams, was making the fourteenth century reecho
with that laughter which "comes never to an end" of the Canterbury
story-tellers; while Langland, even his Teutonic spirit swayed by
French example, was brooding the gloomy _Vision of Piers the
Plowman,_--gloom with a star at its centre; while those "courtly
makers," Wyatt and Surrey, were smoothing English song, which in the
hands of Skelton had become so
"Tatter'd and jagged,
Rudely raine-beaten,
Rusty and moth-eaten,"
into the exquisite lyrical measures of Italy; while the mysteries and
miracle-plays, also of Continental impulse, were striving to do God
service by impressing the Scripture stories upon their rustic
audiences,--the ballads were being sung and told from Scottish loch to
English lowland, in hamlet and in hall. Heartily enjoyed in the
baronial castle, scandalously well known in the monastery, they were
dearest to the peasants.
"Lewd peple loven tales olde;
Swiche thinges can they wel report and holde."
The versions in which we possess such ballads to-day are comparatively
modern. Few can be dated further back than the reign of Elizabeth; the
language of some is that of the eighteenth century. But the number and
variety of these versions--the ballad of _Lord Ronald,_ for instance,
being given in fifteen forms by Professor Child in his monumental
edition of _The English and Scottish Popular Ballads;_ where "Lord
Ronald, my son," appears variously as "Lord Randal, my son," "Lord
Donald, my son," "King Henrie, my son," "Lairde Rowlande, my son,"
"Billy, my son," "Tiranti, my son," "my own pretty boy," "my bonnie
wee croodlin dow," "my little wee croudlin doo," "Willie doo, Willie
doo," "my wee wee croodlin doo doo"--are sure evidence of oral
transmission, and oral transmission is in itself evidence of
antiquity. Many of our ballads, moreover,--nearly a third of the
present collection, as the notes will show,--are akin to ancient
ballads of Continental Europe, or of Asia, or both, which set forth
the outlines of the same stories in something the same way.
It should be stated that there is another theory altogether as to the
origin of ballads. Instead of regarding them as a slow, shadowed,
natural growth, finally fossilized in print, from the rhythmic cries
of a barbaric dance-circle in its festal hour, there is a weighty
school of critics who hold them to be the mere rag-tag camp-followers
of mediaeval romance. See, for instance, the clownish ballad of _Tom
Thumbe,_ with its confused Arthurian echoes. Some of the events
recorded in our ballads, moreover, are placed by definite local
tradition at a comparatively recent date, as _Otterburne, Edom o'
Gordon, Kinmont Willie._ What becomes, then, of their claims to long
descent? If these do not fall, it is because they are based less on
the general theme and course of the story, matters that seem to
necessitate an individual composer, than on the so-called communal
elements of refrain, iteration, stock stanzas, stock epithets, stock
numbers, stock situations, the frank objectivity of the point of view,
the sudden glimpses into a pagan world.
In the lands of the schoolhouse, the newspaper, and the public
library, the conditions of ballad-production are past and gone. Yet
there are still a few isolated communities in Europe where genuine
folk-songs of spontaneous composition may be heard by the eavesdropper
and jotted down with a surreptitious pencil; for the rustics shrink
from the curiosity of the learned and are silent in the presence of
strangers. The most precious contribution to our literature from such
a, source is _The Bard of the Dimbovitza_, an English translation of
folk-songs and ballads peculiar to a certain district of Roumania.
They were gathered by a native gentlewoman from among the peasants on
her father's estate. "She was forced," writes Carmen Sylva, Queen of
Roumania, one of the two translators, "to affect a desire to learn
spinning, that she might join the girls at their spinning parties, and
so overhear their songs more easily; she hid in the tall maize to hear
the reapers crooning them, ... she listened for them by death-beds, by
cradles, at the dance, and in the tavern, with inexhaustible
patience.... Most of them are improvisations. They usually begin and
end with a refrain."
The Celtic revival, too, is discovering not only the love of song,
but, to some extent, the power of improvisation in the more remote
corners of the British Isles. Instances of popular balladry in the
west of Ireland are givrn by Lady Gregory in her _Poets and Dreamers._
The Roumanians still have their lute-players; old people in Galway
still remember the last of their wandering folk-bards; but the Ettrick
Shepherd, a century ago, had to call upon imagination for the picture
of
"Each Caledonian minstrel true,
Dressed in his plaid and bonnet blue,
With harp across his shoulders slung,
And music murmuring round his tongue."
Fearless children of nature these strolling poets were, even as the
songs they sang.
"Little recked they, our bards of old,
Of autumn's showers, or winter's cold.
Sound slept they on the 'nighted hill,
Lulled by the winds, or bubbling rill,
Curtained within the winter cloud,
The heath their couch, the sky their shroud;
Yet theirs the strains that touch the heart,--
Bold, rapid, wild, and void of art."
The value and hence the dignity of the minstrel's profession declined
with the progress of the printing-press in popular favor, and the
character of the gleemen suffered in consequence. This was more marked
in England than in Scotland. Indeed, the question has been raised as
to whether there ever existed a class of Englishmen who were both
ballad-singers and ballad-makers. This was one of the points at issue
between those eminent antiquarians, Bishop Percy and Mr. Ritson, in
the eighteenth century. Dr. Percy had defined the English minstrels as
an "order of men in the middle ages, who subsisted by the arts of
poetry and music, and sung to the harp the verses which they
themselves composed." The inflammable Joseph Ritson, whose love of an
honest ballad goes far to excuse him for his lack of gentle demeanor
toward the unfaithful editor of the _Reliques,_ pounced down so
fiercely upon this definition, contending that, however applicable to
Icelandic skalds or Norman trouveres or Provençal troubadours, it was
altogether too flattering for the vagabond fiddlers of England,
roughly trolling over to tavern audiences the ballads borrowed from
their betters, that the dismayed bishop altered his last clause to
read, "verses composed by themselves or others."
Sir Walter Scott sums up this famous quarrel with his characteristic
good-humor. "The debate," he says, "resembles the apologue of the gold
and silver shield. Dr. Percy looked on the minstrel in the palmy and
exalted state to which, no doubt, many were elevated by their talents,
like those who possess excellence in the fine arts in the present day;
and Ritson considered the reverse of the medal, when the poor and
wandering gleeman was glad to purchase his bread by singing his
ballads at the ale-house, wearing a fantastic habit, and latterly
sinking into a mere crowder upon an untuned fiddle, accompanying his
rude strains with a ruder ditty, the helpless associate of drunken
revellers, and marvellously afraid of the constable and parish
beadle."
There is proof enough that, by the reign of Elizabeth, the printer was
elbowing the minstrel out into the gutter. In Scotland the strolling
bard was still not without honor, but in the sister country we find
him denounced by ordinance together with "rogues, vagabonds, and
sturdy beggars." The London stalls were fed by Grub-street authors
with penny ballads--trash for the greater part--printed in
black-letter on broadsides. Many of these doggerel productions were
collected into small miscellanies, known as _Garlands,_ in the reign
of James I.; but few of the genuine old folk-songs found a refuge in
print. Yet they still lived on in corners of England and Scotland,
where "the spinsters and the knitters in the sun" crooned over
half-remembered lays to peasant children playing at their feet.
In 1723 a collection of English ballads, made up largely, though not
entirely, of stall-copies, was issued by an anonymous editor, not a
little ashamed of himself because of his interest in so unworthy a
subject; for although Dryden and Addison had played the man and given
kindly entertainment--the one in his _Miscellany Poems,_ the other in
_The Spectator_--to a few ballad-gypsies, yet poetry in general, that
most "flat, stale, and unprofitable" poetry of the early and middle
eighteenth century, disdained all fellowship with the unkempt,
wandering tribe.
In the latter half of that century, however, occurred the great event
in the history of our ballad literature. A country clergyman of a
literary turn of mind, resident in the north of England, being on a
visit to his "worthy friend, Humphrey Pitt, Esq., then living at
Shiffnal in Shropshire," had the glorious good luck to hit upon an old
folio manuscript of ballads and romances. "I saw it," writes Percy,
"lying dirty on the floor under a Bureau in ye Parlour; being used by
the Maids to light the fire."
"A scrubby, shabby paper book" it may have been, with some leaves torn
half away and others lacking altogether, but it was a genuine ballad
manuscript, in handwriting of about the year 1650, and Percy,
realizing that the worthy Mr. Pitt was feeding his parlor fire with
very precious fuel, begged the tattered volume of his host and bore it
proudly home, where with presumptuous pen he revised and embellished
and otherwise, all innocently, maltreated the noble old ballads until
he deemed, although with grave misgivings, that they would not too
violently shock the polite taste of the eighteenth century. The
eighteenth century, wearied to death of its own politeness, worn out
by the heartless elegance of Pope and the insipid sentimentality of
Prior, gave these fresh, simple melodies an unexpected welcome, even
in the face of the reigning king of letters, Dr. Johnson, who forbade
them to come to court. But good poems are not slain by bad critics,
and the old ballads, despite the burly doctor's displeasure, took
henceforth a recognized place in English literature. Herd's delightful
collection of Scottish songs and ballads, wherein are gathered so many
of those magical refrains, the rough ore of Burns' fine gold,--"Green
grow the rashes O," "Should auld acquaintance be forgot," "For the
sake o' somebody,"--soon followed, and Ritson, while ever slashing
away at poor Percy, often for his minstrel theories, more often for
his ballad emendations, and most often for his holding back the
original folio manuscript from publication, appeared himself as a
collector and antiquarian of admirable quality. Meanwhile Walter
Scott, still in his schoolboy days, had chanced upon a copy of the
_Reliques_, and had fallen in love with ballads at first sight. All
the morning long he lay reading the book beneath a huge platanus-tree
in his aunt's garden. "The summer day sped onward so fast," he says,
"that notwithstanding the sharp appetite of thirteen, I forgot the
hour of dinner, was sought for with anxiety, and was found still
entranced in my intellectual banquet. To read and to remember was in
this instance the same thing, and henceforth I overwhelmed my
school-fellows and all who would hearken to me, with tragical
recitations from the ballads of Bishop Percy. The first time, too, I
could scrape a few shillings together, which were not common
occurrences with me, I bought unto myself a copy of these beloved
volumes, nor do I believe I ever read a book half so frequently, or
with half the enthusiasm."
The later fruits of that schoolboy passion were garnered in Scott's
original ballads, metrical romances, and no less romantic novels, all
so picturesque with feudal lights and shadows, so pure with chivalric
sentiment; but an earlier result was _The Minstrelsy of the Scottish
Border,_ a collection of folk-songs gleaned in vacation excursions
from pipers and shepherds and old peasant women of the border
districts, and containing, with other ballads, full forty-three
previously unknown to print, among them some of our very best. Other
poet collectors--Motherwell and Aytoun--followed where Scott had led,
Scott having been himself preceded by Allan Ramsay, who so early as
1724 had included several old ballads, freely retouched, in his
_Evergreen and Tea-Table Miscellany._ Nor were there lacking others,
poets in ear and heart if not in pen, who went up and down the
country-side, seeking to gather into books the old heroic lays that
were already on the point of perishing from the memories of the
people. Meanwhile Ritson's shrill cry for the publication of the
original Percy manuscript was taken up in varying keys again and
again, until in our own generation the echoes on our own side of the
water grew so persistent that with no small difficulty the
much-desired end was actually attained. The owners of the folio having
been brought to yield their slow consent, our richest treasure of Old
English song, for so perilously long a period exposed to all the
hazards that beset a single manuscript, is safe in print at last and
open to the inspection of us all. The late Professor Child of Harvard,
our first American authority on ballad-lore, and Dr. Furnivall of
London, would each yield the other the honor of this achievement for
which no ballad-lover can speak too many thanks.
A list of our principal ballad collections may be found of practical
convenience, as well as of literary interest. Passing by the
_Miscellanies,_ Percy, as becomes one of the gallant lineage to which
he set up a somewhat doubtful claim, leads the van.
Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. 1765.
Herd's Ancient and Modern Scottish Songs, Heroic Ballads, etc. 1769.
Ritson's Ancient Popular Poetry. 1791.
Ritson's Ancient Songs and Ballads. 1792.
Ritson's Robin Hood. 1795.
Scott's Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. 1802-1803.
Jamieson's Popular Ballads and Songs. 1806.
Finlay's Scottish Historical and Romantic Ballads. 1808.
Sharpe's Ballad Book. 1824.
Maidment's North Countrie Garland. 1824.
Kinloch's Ancient Scottish Ballads. 1827.
Motherwell's Minstrelsy, Ancient and Modern. 1827.
Buchan's Ancient Ballads and Songs of the North of Scotland. 1828.
Chambers' Scottish Ballads. 1829.
Whitelaw's Book of Scottish Ballads. 1845.
Child's English and Scottish Ballads. 1857-1858.
Aytoun's Ballads of Scotland. 1858.
Maidment's Scottish Ballads and Songs. 1868.
Bishop Percy's Folio Manuscript. 1868.
Child's English and Scottish Popular Ballads (issued in parts).
1882-98.