Goethe, who saw so many things with such clearness of vision,
brought out the charm of the popular ballad for readers of a later
day in his remark that the value of these songs of the people is to
be found in the fact that their motives are drawn directly from
nature; and he added, that in the art of saying things compactly,
uneducated men have greater skill than those who are educated. It is
certainly true that no kind of verse is so completely out of the
atmosphere of modern writing as the popular ballad. No other form of
verse has, therefore, in so great a degree, the charm of freshness.
In material, treatment, and spirit, these bat lads are set in sharp
contrast with the poetry of the hour. They deal with historical
events or incidents, with local traditions, with personal adventure
or achievement. They are, almost without exception, entirely
objective. Contemporary poetry is, on the other hand, very largely
subjective; and even when it deals with events or incidents it
invests them to such a degree with personal emotion and imagination,
it so modifies and colours them with temperamental effects, that the
resulting poem is much more a study of subjective conditions than a
picture or drama of objective realities. This projection of the
inward upon the outward world, in such a degree that the dividing
line between the two is lost, is strikingly illustrated in
Maeterlinck's plays. Nothing could be in sharper contrast, for
instance, than the famous ballad of "The Hunting of the Cheviot" and
Maeterlinck's "Princess Maleine." There is no atmosphere, in a
strict use of the word, in the spirited and compact account of the
famous contention between the Percies and the Douglases, of which
Sir Philip Sidney said "that I found not my heart moved more than
with a Trumpet." It is a breathless, rushing narrative of a swift
succession of events, told with the most straight-forward
simplicity. In the "Princess Maleine," on the other hand, the
narrative is so charged with subjective feeling, the world in which
the action takes place is so deeply tinged with lights that never
rested on any actual landscape, that all sense of reality is lost.
The play depends for its effect mainly upon atmosphere. Certain
very definite impressions are produced with singular power, but
there is no clear, clean stamping of occurrences on the mind. The
imagination is skilfully awakened and made to do the work of
observation.
The note of the popular ballad is its objectivity; it not only takes
us out of doors, but it also takes us out of the individual
consciousness. The manner is entirely subordinated to the matter; the
poet, if there was a poet in the case, obliterates himself. What we
get is a definite report of events which have taken place, not a
study of a man's mind nor an account of a man's feelings. The true
balladist is never introspective; he is concerned not with himself
but with his story. There is no self-disclosure in his song. To the
mood of Senancour and Amiel he was a stranger. Neither he nor the
men to whom he recited or sang would have understood that mood.
They were primarily and unreflectively absorbed in the world outside
of themselves. They saw far more than they meditated; they recorded
far more than they moralized. The popular ballads are, as a rule,
entirely free from didacticism in any form; that is one of the main
sources of their unfailing charm. They show not only a childlike
curiosity about the doings of the day and the things that befall
men, but a childlike indifference to moral inference and
justification. The bloodier the fray the better for ballad
purposes; no one feels the necessity of apology either for ruthless
aggression or for useless blood-letting; the scene is reported as it
was presented to the eye of the spectator, not to his moralizing
faculty. He is expected to see and to sing, not to scrutinize and
meditate. In those rare cases in which a moral inference is drawn,
it is always so obvious and elementary that it gives the impression
of having been fastened on at the end of the song, in deference to
ecclesiastical rather than popular feeling.
The social and intellectual conditions which fostered
self-unconsciousness,--interest in things, incidents, and adventures
rather than in moods and inward experiences,--and the unmoral or non
moralizing attitude towards events, fostered also that delightful
naivete which contributes greatly to the charm of many of the best
ballads; a naivete which often heightens the pathos, and, at times,
softens it with touches of apparently unconscious humour; the naivete of
the child which has in it something of the freshness of a wildflower,
and yet has also a wonderful instinct for making the heart of the matter
plain. This quality has almost entirely disappeared from contemporary
verse among cultivated races; one must go to the peasants of remote
parts of the Continent to discover even a trace of its presence. It has
a real, but short-lived charm, like the freshness which shines on meadow
and garden in the brief dawn which hastens on to day.
This frank, direct play of thought and feeling on an incident, or
series of incidents, compensates for the absence of a more perfect
art in the ballads; using the word "art" in its true sense as
including complete, adequate, and beautiful handling of
subject-matter, and masterly working out of its possibilities. These
popular songs, so dear to the hearts of the generations on whose lips
they were fashioned, and to all who care for the fresh note, the direct
word, the unrestrained emotion, rarely touch the highest points of
poetic achievement. Their charm lies, not in their perfection of form,
but in their spontaneity, sincerity, and graphic power. They are not
rivers of song, wide, deep, and swift; they are rather cool, clear
springs among the hills. In the reactions against sophisticated poetry
which set in from lime to time, the popular ballad--the true
folk-song--has often been exalted at the expense of other forms of
verse. It is idle to attempt to arrange the various forms of poetry in
an order of absolute values; it is enough that each has its own quality,
and, therefore, its own value. The drama, the epic, the ballad, the
lyric, each strikes its note in the complete expression of human emotion
and experience. Each belongs to a particular stage of development, and
each has the authority and the enduring charm which attach to every
authentic utterance of the spirit of man under the conditions of life.
In this wide range of human expression the ballad follows the epic
as a kind of aftermath; a second and scattered harvest, springing
without regularity or nurture out of a rich and unexhausted soil. The
epic fastens upon some event of such commanding importance that it
marks a main current of history; some story, historic, or mythologic;
some incident susceptible of extended narrative treatment. It is
always, in its popular form, a matter of growth it is direct, simple,
free from didacticism; representing, as Aristotle says, "a single
action, entire and complete." It subordinates character to action; it
delights in episode and dialogue; it is content to tell the story as
a story, and leave the moralization to hearers or readers. The
popular ballad is so closely related to the popular epic that it may
be said to reproduce its qualities and characteristics within a
narrower compass, and on a smaller scale. It also is a piece of the
memory of the people, or a creation of the imagination of the people;
but the tradition or fact which it preserves is of local, rather
than national importance. It is indifferent to nice distinctions and
delicate gradations or shadings; its power springs from its
directness, vigour, and simplicity. It is often entirely occupied
with the narration or description of a single episode; it has no room
for dialogue, but it often secures the effect of the dialogue by its
unconventional freedom of phrase, and sometimes by the introduction
of brief and compact charge and denial, question and reply. Sometimes
the incidents upon which the ballad makers fastened, have a unity or
connection with each other which hints at a complete story. The
ballads which deal with Robin Hood are so numerous and so closely
related that they constantly suggest, not only the possibility, but
the probability of epic treatment. It is surprising that the richness
of the material, and its notable illustrative quality, did not
inspire some earlier Chaucer to combine the incidents in a sustained
narrative. But the epic poet did not appear, and the most
representative of English popular heroes remains the central figure
in a series of detached episodes and adventures, preserved in a long
line of disconnected ballads.
This apparent arrest, in the ballad stage, of a story which seemed
destined to become an epic, naturally suggests the vexed question of
the author ship of the popular ballads. They are in a very real sense
the songs of the people; they make no claim to individual authorship;
on the contrary, the inference of what may be called community
authorship is, in many instances, irresistible. They are the product
of a social condition which, so to speak, holds song of this kind in
solution; of an age in which improvisation, singing, and dancing are
the most natural and familiar forms of expression. They deal almost
without exception with matters which belong to the community memory
or imagination; they constantly reappear with variations so
noticeable as to indicate free and common handling of themes of wide
local interest. All this is true of the popular ballad; but all this
does not decisively settle the question of authorship. What share did
the community have in the making of these songs, and what share fell
to individual singers?
Herder, whose conception of the origin and function of literature
was so vitalizing in the general aridity of thinking about the
middle of the last century, and who did even more for ballad verse
in Germany than Bishop Percy did in England, laid emphasis almost
exclusively on community authorship. His profound instinct for
reality in all forms of art, his deep feeling for life, and the
immense importance he attached to spontaneity and unconsciousness in
the truest productivity made community authorship not only
attractive but inevitable to him. In his pronounced reaction
against the superficial ideas of literature so widely held in the
Germany of his time, he espoused the conception of community
authorship as the only possible explanation of the epics, ballads,
and other folk-songs. In nature and popular life, or universal
experience, he found the rich sources of the poetry whose charm he
felt so deeply, and whose power and beauty he did so much to reveal
to his contemporaries. Genius and nature are magical words with him,
because they suggested such depths of being under all forms of
expression; such unity of the whole being of a race in its thought,
its emotion, and its action; such entire unconsciousness of self or
of formulated aim, and such spontaneity of spirit and speech. The
language of those times, when words had not yet been divided into
nobles, middle-class, and plebeians, was, he said, the richest for
poetical purposes. "Our tongue, compared with the idiom of the
savage, seems adapted rather for reflection than for the senses or
imagination. The rhythm of popular verse is so delicate, so rapid,
so precise, that it is no easy matter to defect it with our eyes;
but do not imagine it to have been equally difficult for those
living populations who listened to, instead of reading it; who were
accustomed to the sound of it from their infancy; who themselves
sang it, and whose ear had been formed by its cadence." This
conception of poetry as arising in the hearts of the people and
taking form on their lips is still more definitely and strikingly
expressed in two sentences, which let us into, the heart of Herder's
philosophy of poetry: "Poetry in those happy days lived in the ears
of the people, on the lips and in the harps of living bards; it sang
of history, of the events of the day, of mysteries, miracles, and
signs. It was the flower of a nation's character, language, and
country; of its occupations, its prejudices, its passions, its
aspirations, and its soul." In these words, at once comprehensive
and vague, after the manner of Herder, we find ourselves face to
face with that conception not only of popular song in all its forms,
but with literature as a whole, which has revolutionized literary
study in this century, and revitalized it as well. For Herder was a
man of prophetic instinct; he sometimes felt more clearly than he saw;
he divined where he could not reach results by analysis. He was often
vague, fragmentary, and inconclusive, like all men of his type; but he
had a genius for getting at the heart of things. His statements often
need qualification, but he is almost always on the tight track. When he
says that the great traditions, in which both the memory and the
imagination of a race were engaged, and which were still living in
the mouths of the people, "of themselves took on poetic form," he is
using language which is too general to convey a definite impression
of method, but he is probably suggesting the deepest truth with
regard to these popular stories. They actually were of community
origin; they actually were common property; they were given a great
variety of forms by a great number of persons; the forms which have
come down to us are very likely the survivors of a kind of in formal
competition, which went on for years at the fireside and at the
festivals of a whole country side.
Barger, whose "Lenore" is one of the most widely known of modern
ballads, held the same view of the origin of popular song, and was
even more definite in his confession of faith than Herder. He
declared in the most uncompromising terms that all real poetry must
have a popular origin; "can be and must be of the people, for that is
the seal of its perfection." And he comments on the delight with
which he has listened, in village street and home, to unwritten
songs; the poetry which finds its way in quiet rivulets to the
remotest peasant home. In like manner, Helene Vacaresco overheard the
songs of the Roumanian people; hiding in the maize to catch the
reaping songs; listening at spinning parties, at festivals, at
death-beds, at taverns; taking the songs down from the lips of peasant
women, fortune-tellers, gypsies, and all manner of humble folk who were
the custodians of this vagrant community verse. We have passed so
entirely out of the song-making period, and literature has become to us
so exclusively the work of a professional class, that we find it
difficult to imagine the intellectual and social conditions which
fostered improvisation on a great scale, and trained the ear of great
populations to the music of spoken poetry. It is almost impossible for
us to disassociate literature from writing. There is still, however, a
considerable volume of unwritten literature in the world in the form of
stories, songs, proverbs, and pithy phrases; a literature handed down in
large part from earlier times, but still receiving additions from
contemporary men and women.
This unwritten literature is to be found, it is hardly necessary to
say, almost exclusively among country people remote from towns, and
whose mental attitude and community feeling reproduce, in a way, the
conditions under which the English and Scotch ballads were originally
composed. The Roumanian peasants sing their songs upon every
occasion of domestic or local interest; and sowing and harvesting,
birth, christening, marriage, the burial, these notable events in
the life of the country side are all celebrated by unknown poets;
or, rather, by improvisers who give definite form to sentiments,
phrases, and words which are on many lips. The Russian peasant
tells his stories as they were told to him; those heroic epics whose
life is believed, in some cases, to date back at least a thousand
years. These great popular stories form a kind of sacred
inheritance bequeathed by one generation to another as a possession
of the memory, and are almost entirely unrelated to the written
literature of the country. Miss Hapgood tells a very interesting
story of a government official, stationed on the western shore of
Lake Onega, who became so absorbed in the search for this
literature of the people that he followed singers and reciters from
place to place, eager to learn from their lips the most widely known
of these folk tales. On such an expedition of discovery he found
himself, one stormy night, on an island in the lake. The hut of
refuge was already full of stormbound peasants when he entered.
Having made himself some tea, and spread his blanket in a vacant
place, he fell asleep. He was presently awakened by a murmur of
recurring sounds. Sitting up, he found the group of peasants
hanging on the words of an old man, of kindly face, expressive eyes,
and melodious voice, from whose lips flowed a marvellous song; grave
and gay by turns, monotonous and passionate in succession; but
wonderfully fresh, picturesque, and fascinating. The listener soon
became aware that he was hearing, for the first time, the famous
story of "Sadko, the Merchant of Novgorod." It was like being
present at the birth of a piece of literature!
The fact that unwritten songs and stories still exist in great
numbers among remote country-folk of our own time, and that additions
are still made to them, help us to understand the probable origin of
our own popular ballads, and what community authorship may really
mean. To put ourselves, even in thought, in touch with the
ballad-making period in English and Scotch history, we must dismiss from
our minds all modern ideas of authorship; all notions of individual
origination and ownership of any form of words. Professor ten Brink
tells us that in the ballad-making age there was no production; there
was only reproduction. There was a stock of traditions, memories,
experiences, held in common by large populations, in constant use on the
lips of numberless persons; told and retold in many forms, with
countless changes, variations, and modifications; without conscious
artistic purpose, with no sense of personal control or possession, with
no constructive aim either in plot or treatment; no composition in the
modern sense of the term. Such a mass of poetic material in the
possession of a large community was, in a sense, fluid, and ran into a
thousand forms almost without direction or premeditation. Constant use
of such rich material gave a poetic turn of thought and speech to
countless persons who, under other conditions, would have given no sign
of the possession of the faculty of imagination.
There was not only the stimulus to the faculty which sees events and
occurrences with the eyes of the imagination, but there was also
constant and familiar use of the language of poetry. To speak
metrically or rhythmically is no difficult matter if one is in the
atmosphere or habit of verse-making; and there is nothing surprising
either in the feats of memory or of improvisation performed by the
minstrels and balladists of the old time. The faculty of
improvising was easily developed and was very generally used by
people of all classes. This facility is still possessed by rural
populations, among whom songs are still composed as they are sting,
each member of the company contributing a new verse or a variation,
suggested by local conditions, of a well-known stanza. When to the
possession of a mass of traditions and stories and of facility of
improvisation is added the habit of singing and dancing, it is not
difficult to reconstruct in our own thought the conditions under
which popular poetry came into being, nor to understand in what
sense a community can make its own songs. In the brave days when
ballads were made, the rustic peoples were not mute, as they are
to-day; nor sad, as they have become in so many parts of England.
They sang and they danced by instinct and as an expression of social
feeling. Originally the ballads were not only sung, but they gave
measure to the dance; they grew from mouth to mouth in the very act
of dancing; individual dancers adding verse to verse, and the
frequent refrain coming in as a kind of chorus. Gesture and, to a
certain extent, acting would naturally accompany so free and general
an expression of community feeling. There was no poet, because all
were poets. To quote Professor ten Brink once more:--
"Song and playing were cultivated by peasants, and even by freedmen
and serfs. At beer-feasts the harp went from hand to hand. Herein
lies the essential difference between that age and our own. The
result of poetical activity was not the property and was not the
production of a single person, but of the community. The work of the
individual endured only as long as its delivery lasted. He gained
personal distinction only as a virtuoso. The permanent elements of
what he presented, the material, the ideas, even the style and metre,
already existed. 'The work of the singer was only a ripple in the
stream of national poetry. Who can say how much the individual
contributed to it, or where in his poetical recitation memory ceased
and creative impulse began! In any case the work of the individual
lived on only as the ideal possession of the aggregate body of the
people, and it soon lost the stamp of originality. In view of such
a development of poetry, we must assume a time when the collective
consciousness of a people or race is paramount in its unity; when
the intellectual life of each is nourished from the same treasury of
views and associations, of myths and sagas; when similar interests
stir each breast; and the ethical judgment of all applies itself to
the same standard. In such an age the form of poetical expression
will also be common to all, necessarily solemn, earnest, and simple."
When the conditions which produced the popular ballads become clear
to the imagination, their depth of rootage, not only in the community
life but in the community love, becomes also clear. We under stand
the charm which these old songs have for us of a later age, and the
spell which they cast upon men and women who knew the secret of
their birth; we understand why the minstrels of the lime, when
popular poetry was in its best estate, were held in such honour, why
Taillefer sang the song of Roland at the head of the advancing
Normans on the day of Hastings, and why good Bishop Aldhelm, when he
wanted to get the ears of his people, stood on the bridge and sang a
ballad! These old songs were the flowering of the imagination of
the people; they drew their life as directly from the general
experience, the common memory, the universal feelings, as did the
Greek dramas in those primitive times, when they were part of rustic
festivity and worship. The popular ballads have passed away with
the conditions which produced them. Modern poets have, in several
instances, written ballads of striking picturesqueness and power,
but as unlike the ballad of popular origin as the world of to-day is
unlike the world in which "Chevy Chase" was first sung. These
modern ballads are not necessarily better or worse than their
predecessors; but they are necessarily different. It is idle to
exalt the wild flower at the expense of the garden flower; each has
its fragrance, its beauty, its sentiment; and the world is wide!
In the selection of the ballads which appear in this volume, no
attempt has been made to follow a chronological order or to enforce a
rigid principle of selection of any kind. The aim has been to bring
within moderate compass a collection of these songs of the people
which should fairly represent the range, the descriptive felicity,
the dramatic power, and the genuine poetic feeling of a body of verse
which is still, it is to be feared, unfamiliar to a large number of
those to whom it would bring refreshment and delight.