The popular ballad, as it is understood for the purpose of these
selections, is a narrative in lyric form, with no traces of individual
authorship, and is preserved mainly by oral tradition. In its earliest
stages it was meant to be sung by a crowd, and got its name from the
dance to which it furnished the sole musical accompaniment. In these
primitive communities the ballad was doubtless chanted by the entire
folk, in festivals mainly of a religious character. Explorers still meet
something of the sort in savage tribes: and children's games preserve
among us some relics of this protoplasmic form of verse-making, in which
the single poet or artist was practically unknown, and spontaneous,
improvised verses arose out of the occasion itself; in which the whole
community took part; and in which the beat of foot--along with the
gesture which expressed narrative elements of the song--was inseparable
from the words and the melody. This native growth of song, in which the
chorus or refrain, the dance of a festal multitude, and the spontaneous
nature of the words, were vital conditions, gradually faded away before
the advance of cultivated verse and the vigor of production in what one
may call poetry of the schools. Very early in the history of the ballad,
a demand for more art must have called out or at least emphasized the
artist, the poet, who chanted new verses while the throng kept up the
refrain or burden. Moreover, as interest was concentrated upon the words
or story, people began to feel that both dance and melody were separable
if not alien features; and thus they demanded the composed and recited
ballad, to the harm and ultimate ruin of that spontaneous song for the
festal, dancing crowd. Still, even when artistry had found a footing in
ballad verse, it long remained mere agent and mouthpiece for the folk;
the communal character of the ballad was maintained in form and matter.
Events of interest were sung in almost contemporary and entirely
improvised verse; and the resulting ballads, carried over the borders of
their community and passed down from generation to generation, served as
newspaper to their own times and as chronicle to posterity. It is the
kind of song to which Tacitus bears witness as the sole form of history
among the early Germans; and it is evident that such a stock of ballads
must have furnished considerable raw material to the epic. Ballads, in
whatever original shape, went to the making of the English 'Béowulf,'
of the German 'Nibelungenlied.' Moreover, a study of dramatic poetry
leads one back to similar communal origins. What is loosely called a
"chorus,"--originally, as the name implies, a dance--out of which older
forms of the drama were developed, could be traced back to identity with
primitive forms of the ballad. The purely lyrical ballad, even, the
_chanson_ of the people, so rare in English but so abundant among other
races, is evidently a growth from the same root.
If, now, we assume for this root the name of communal poem, and if we
bear in mind the dominant importance of the individual, the artist, in
advancing stages of poetry, it is easy to understand why for civilized
and lettered communities the ballad has ceased to have any vitality
whatever. Under modern conditions the making of ballads is a closed
account. For our times poetry means something written by a poet, and not
something sung more or less spontaneously by a dancing throng. Indeed,
paper and ink, the agents of preservation in the case of ordinary verse,
are for ballads the agents of destruction. The broadside press of three
centuries ago, while it rescued here and there a genuine ballad, poured
out a mass of vulgar imitations which not only displaced and destroyed
the ballad of oral tradition, but brought contempt upon good and bad
alike. Poetry of the people, to which our ballad belongs, is a thing of
the past. Even rude and distant communities, like those of Afghanistan,
cannot give us the primitive conditions. The communal ballad is rescued,
when rescued at all, by the fragile chances of a written copy or of oral
tradition; and we are obliged to study it under terms of artistic
poetry,--that is, we are forced to take through the eye and the judgment
what was meant for the ear and immediate sensation. Poetry _for_ the
people, however, "popular poetry" in the modern phrase, is a very
different affair. Street songs, vulgar rhymes, or even improvisations of
the concert-halls, tawdry and sentimental stuff,--these things are
sundered by the world's width from poetry _of_ the people, from the folk
in verse, whether it echo in a great epos which chants the clash of
empires or linger in a ballad of the countryside sung under the village
linden. For this ballad is a part of the poetry which comes from the
people as a whole, from a homogeneous folk, large or small; while the
song of street or concert-hall is deliberately composed for a class, a
section, of the community. It would therefore be better to use some
other term than "popular" when we wish to specify the ballad of
tradition, and so avoid all taint of vulgarity and the trivial. Nor must
we go to the other extreme. Those high-born people who figure in
traditional ballads--Childe Waters, Lady Maisry, and the rest--do not
require us to assume composition in aristocratic circles; for the lower
classes of the people in ballad days had no separate literature, and a
ballad of the folk belonged to the community as a whole. The same habit
of thought, the same standard of action, ruled alike the noble and his
meanest retainer. Oral transmission, the test of the ballad, is of
course nowhere possible save in such an unlettered community. Since all
critics are at one in regard to this homogeneous character of the folk
with whom and out of whom these songs had their birth, one is justified
in removing all doubt from the phrase by speaking not of the popular
ballad but of the communal ballad, the ballad of a community.
With regard to the making of a ballad, one must repeat a caution, hinted
already, and made doubly important by a vicious tendency in the study of
all phases of culture. It is a vital mistake to explain primitive
conditions by exact analogy with conditions of modern savagery and
barbarism. Certain conclusions, always guarded and cautious to a degree,
may indeed be drawn; but it is folly to insist that what now goes on
among shunted races, belated detachments in the great march of culture,
must have gone on among the dominant and mounting peoples who had
reached the same external conditions of life. The homogeneous and
unlettered state of the ballad-makers is not to be put on a level with
the ignorance of barbarism, nor explained by the analogy of songs among
modern savage tribes. Fortunately we have better material. The making of
a ballad by a community can be illustrated from a case recorded by
Pastor Lyngbye in his invaluable account of life on the Faroe Islands a
century ago. Not only had the islanders used from most ancient times
their traditional and narrative songs as music for the dance, but they
had also maintained the old fashion of making a ballad. In the winter,
says Lyngbye, dancing is their chief amusement and is an affair of the
entire community. At such a dance, one or more persons begin to sing;
then all who are present join in the ballad, or at least in the refrain.
As they dance, they show by their gestures and expression that they
follow with eagerness the course of the story which they are singing.
More than this, the ballad is often a spontaneous product of the
occasion. A fisherman, who has had some recent mishap with his boat, is
pushed by stalwart comrades into the middle of the throng, while the
dancers sing verses about him and his lack of skill,--verses improvised
on the spot and with a catching and clamorous refrain. If these verses
win favor, says Lyngbye, they are repeated from year to year, with
slight additions or corrections, and become a permanent ballad. Bearing
in mind the extraordinary readiness to improvise shown even in these
days by peasants in every part of Europe, we thus gain some definite
notion about the spontaneous and communal elements which went to the
making of the best type of primitive verse; for these Faroe islanders
were no savages, but simply a homeogeneous and isolated folk which
still held to the old ways of communal song.
Critics of the ballad, moreover, agree that it has little or no
subjective traits,--an easy inference from the conditions just
described. There is no individuality lurking behind the words of the
ballad, and above all, no evidence of that individuality in the form of
sentiment. Sentiment and individuality are the very essence of modern
poetry, and the direct result of individualism in verse. Given a poet,
sentiment--and it may be noble and precious enough--is sure to follow.
But the ballad, an epic in little, forces one's attention to the object,
the scene, the story, and away from the maker.
"The king sits in Dumferling town."
begins one of the noblest of all ballads; while one of the greatest of
modern poems opens with something personal and pathetic, key-note to all
that follows:--
"My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense ..."
Even when a great poet essays the ballad, either he puts sentiment into
it, or else he keeps sentiment out of it by a _tour de force_. Admirable
and noble as one must call the conclusion of an artistic ballad such as
Tennyson's 'Revenge,' it is altogether different from the conclusion of
such a communal ballad as 'Sir Patrick Spens.' That subtle quality of
the ballad which lies in solution with the story and which--as in 'Child
Maurice' or 'Babylon' or 'Edward'--compels in us sensations akin to
those called out by the sentiment of the poet, is a wholly impersonal if
strangely effective quality, far removed from the corresponding elements
of the poem of art. At first sight, one might say that Browning's
dramatic lyrics had this impersonal quality. But compare the close of
'Give a Rouse,' chorus and all, with the close of 'Child Maurice,' that
swift and relentless stroke of pure tragedy which called out the
enthusiasm of so great a critic as Gray.
The narrative of the communal ballad is full of leaps and omissions; the
style is simple to a fault; the diction is spontaneous and free.
Assonance frequently takes the place of rhyme, and a word often rhymes
with itself. There is a lack of poetic adornment in the style quite as
conspicuous as the lack of reflection and moralizing in the matter.
Metaphor and simile are rare and when found are for the most part
standing phrases common to all the ballads; there is never poetry for
poetry's sake. Iteration is the chief mark of ballad style; and the
favorite form of this effective figure is what one may call incremental
repetition. The question is repeated with the answer; each increment in
a series of related facts has a stanza for itself, identical, save for
the new fact, with the other stanzas. 'Babylon' furnishes good instances
of this progressive iteration. Moreover, the ballad differs from earlier
English epics in that it invariably has stanzas and rhyme; of the two
forms of stanza, the two-line stanza with a refrain is probably older
than the stanza with four or six lines.
This necessary quality of the stanza points to the origin of the ballad
in song; but longer ballads, such as those that make up the 'Gest of
Robin Hood,' an epic in little, were not sung as lyrics or to aid the
dance, but were either chanted in a monotonous fashion or else recited
outright. Chappell, in his admirable work on old English music ('Music
of the Olden Time,' ii. 790), names a third class of "characteristic
airs of England,"--the "historical and very long ballads, ... invariably
of simple construction, usually plaintive.... They were rarely if ever
used for dancing." Most of the longer ballads, however, were doubtless
given by one person in a sort of recitative; this is the case with
modern ballads of Russia and Servia, where the bystanders now and then
join in a chorus. Precisely in the same way ballads were divorced from
the dance, originally their vital condition; but in the refrain, which
is attached to so many ballads, one finds an element which has survived
from those earliest days of communal song.
Of oldest communal poetry no actual ballad has come down to us. Hints
and even fragments, however, are pointed out in ancient records, mainly
as the material of chronicle or legend. In the Bible (Numbers xxi. 17),
where "Israel sang this song," we are not going too far when we regard
the fragment as part of a communal ballad. "Spring up, O well: sing ye
unto it: the princes digged the well, the nobles of the people digged
it, by the direction of the lawgiver, with their staves." Deborah's song
has something of the communal note; and when Miriam dances and sings
with her maidens, one is reminded of the many ballads made by dancing
and singing bands of women in mediæval Europe,--for instance, the song
made in the seventh century to the honor of St. Faro, and "sung by the
women as they danced and clapped their hands." The question of ancient
Greek ballads, and their relation to the epic, is not to be discussed
here; nor can we make more than an allusion to the theory of Niebuhr
that the early part of Livy is founded on, old Roman ballads. A popular
discussion of this matter may be found in Macaulay's preface to his own
'Lays of Ancient Rome.' The ballads of modern Europe are a survival of
older communal poetry, more or less influenced by artistic and
individual conditions of authorship, but wholly impersonal, and with an
appeal to our interest which seems to come from a throng and not from
the solitary poet. Attention was early called to the ballads of Spain;
printed at first as broadsides, they were gathered into a volume as
early as 1550. On the other hand, ballads were neglected in France until
very recent times; for specimens of the French ballad, and for an
account of it, the reader should consult Professor Crane's 'Chansons
Populaires de France,' New York, 1891. It is with ballads of the
Germanic race, however, that we are now concerned. Denmark, Norway,
Sweden, Iceland, the Faroe Islands; Scotland and England; the
Netherlands and Germany: all of these countries offer us admirable
specimens of the ballad. Particularly, the great collections of
Grundtvig ('Danmarks Gamle Folkeviser') for Denmark, and of Child ('The
English and Scottish Popular Ballads') for our own tongue, show how
common descent or borrowing connects the individual ballads of these
groups. "Almost every Norwegian, Swedish, or Icelandic ballad," says
Grundtvig, "is found in a Danish version of Scandinavian ballads;
moreover, a larger number can be found in English and Scottish versions
than in German or Dutch versions." Again, we find certain national
preferences in the character of the ballads which have come down to us.
Scandinavia kept the old heroic lays (Kaempeviser); Germany wove them
into her epic, as witness the Nibelungen Lay; but England and Scotland
have none of them in any shape. So, too, the mythic ballad, scantily
represented in English, and practically unknown in Germany, abounds in
Scandinavian collections. The Faroe Islands and Norway, as Grundtvig
tells us, show the best record for ballads preserved by oral tradition;
while noble ladies of Denmark, three or four centuries ago, did high
service to ballad literature by making collections in manuscript of the
songs current then in the castle as in the cottage.
For England, one is compelled to begin the list of known ballads with
the thirteenth century. 'The Battle of Maldon,' composed in the last
decade of the tenth century, though spirited enough and full of communal
vigor, has no stanzaic structure, follows in metre and style the rules
of the Old English epic, and is only a ballad by courtesy; about the
ballads used a century or two later by historians of England, we can do
nothing but guess; and there is no firm ground under the critic's foot
until he comes to the Robin Hood ballads, which Professor Child assigns
to the thirteenth century. 'The Battle of Otterburn' (1388) opens a
series of ballads based on actual events and stretching into the
eighteenth century. Barring the Robin Hood cycle,--an epic constructed
from this attractive material lies before us in the famous 'Gest of
Robin Hood,' printed as early as 1489,--the chief sources of the
collector are the Percy Manuscript, "written just before 1650,"--on
which, not without omissions and additions, the bishop based his
'Reliques,' first published in 1765,--and the oral traditions of
Scotland, which Professor Child refers to "the last one hundred and
thirty years." Information about the individual ballads, their sources,
history, literary connections, and above all, their varying texts, must
be sought in the noble work of Professor F.J. Child. For present
purposes, a word or two of general information must suffice. As to
origins, there is a wide range. The church furnished its legend, as in
'St. Stephen'; romance contributed the story of 'Thomas Rymer'; and the
light, even cynical _fabliau_ is responsible for 'The Boy and the
Mantle.' Ballads which occur in many tongues either may have a common
origin or else may owe their manifold versions, as in the case of
popular tales, to a love of borrowing; and here, of course, we get the
hint of wider issues. For the most part, however, a ballad tells some
moving story, preferably of fighting and of love. Tragedy is the
dominant note; and English ballads of the best type deal with those
elements of domestic disaster so familiar in the great dramas of
literature, in the story of Orestes, or of Hamlet, or of the Cid. Such
are 'Edward,' 'Lord Randal,' 'The Two Brothers,' 'The Two Sisters,'
'Child Maurice,' 'Bewick and Graham,' 'Clerk Colven,' 'Little Musgrave
and Lady Barnard,' 'Glasgerion,' and many others. Another group of
ballads, represented by the 'Baron of Brackley' and 'Captain Car,' give
a faithful picture of the feuds and ceaseless warfare in Scotland and on
the border. A few fine ballads--'Sweet William's Ghost,' 'The Wife of
Usher's Well'--touch upon the supernatural. Of the romantic ballads,
'Childe Waters' shows us the higher, and 'Young Beichan' the lower, but
still sound and communal type. Incipient dramatic tendencies mark
'Edward' and 'Lord Randal'; while, on the other hand, a lyric note
almost carries 'Bonnie George Campbell' out of balladry. Finally, it is
to be noted that in the 'Nut-Brown Maid,' which many would
unhesitatingly refer to this class of poetry, we have no ballad at all,
but a dramatic lyric, probably written by a woman, and with a special
plea in the background.
[Illustration: Signature: F.B. Gummere]