'The King sits in Dumferling towne
Drinking the blude reid wine:
"O whar will I get a guid sailor,
To sail this ship of mine?"'
with the _Children in the Wood_:--
'Now ponder well, you parents deare,
These wordes, which I shall write;
A doleful story you shall heare,
In time brought forth to light.'
Artificial, tedious, didactic. The author of the ancient ballad seldom
points, and never draws, a moral, and has unbounded faith in the
credulity of the audience. The seventeenth century balladists
pitchforked Nature into the midden.
These compositions were printed as soon as written, or, to be exact,
they were written for the press. We now class them as broadsides, that
is, ballads printed on one side of the paper. The difference between
these and the true ballad is the difference between art and nature. The
broadside ballad was a form of art, and a low form of art. They were
written by hacks for the press, sold in the streets, and pasted on the
walls of houses or rooms: Jamieson had a copy of _Young Beichan_ which
he picked off a wall in Piccadilly. They were generally ornamented with
crude woodcuts, remarkable for their artistic shortcomings and
infidelity to nature. Dr. Johnson's well-known lines--though in fact a
caricature of Percy's _Hermit of Warkworth_--ingeniously parody their
style:--
'As with my hat upon my head,
I walk'd along the Strand,
I there did meet another man,
With his hat in his hand.'
Broadside ballads, including a few of the genuine ancient ballads, still
enjoy a certain popularity. The once-famous Catnach Press still survives
in Seven Dials, and Mr. Such, of Union Street in the Borough, still
maintains what is probably the largest stock of broadsides now in
existence, including _Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight_ (or _May Colvin_),
perhaps the most widely dispersed ballad of any.
Minstrels of all sorts were by this time nearly extinct, in person if
not in name; their successors were the vendors of broadsides.
Nevertheless, survivors of the genuine itinerant reciters of ballads
have been discovered at intervals almost to the present day. Sir Walter
Scott mentions a person who 'acquired the name of Roswal and Lillian,
from singing that romance about the streets of Edinburgh' in 1770 or
thereabouts. He further alludes to 'John Graeme, of Sowport in
Cumberland, commonly called the Long Quaker, very lately alive.' Ritson
mentions a minstrel of Derbyshire, and another from Gloucester, who
chanted the ballad of _Lord Thomas and Fair Eleanor_. In 1845 J. H.
Dixon wrote of several men he had met, chiefly Yorkshire dalesmen, not
vagrants, but with a local habitation, who at Christmas-tide would sing
the old ballads. One of these was Francis King, known then throughout
the western dales of Yorkshire, and still remembered, as 'the Skipton
Minstrel.' After a merry Christmas meeting, in the year 1844, he walked
into the river near Gargrave, in Craven, and was drowned. In Gargrave
church-yard lie the remains of perhaps the actual 'last of the
minstrels.'[8]
[Footnote 8: Unless we may attribute that distinction to the blind
Irish bard Raftery, who flourished sixty years ago. See various
accounts of him given by Lady Gregory (_Poets and Dreamers_) and
W. B. Yeats (_The Celtic Twilight_, 1902). But he appears to have
been more of an improviser than a reciter.]
+IV. Collectors and Editors.+
Now a word or two as to the collectors and editors. To take the
broadsides first, the largest collections are at Magdalene College,
Cambridge (eighteen hundred broadsides collected by Selden and Pepys),
in the Bodleian at Oxford, and in the British Museum. The Bodleian
contains collections made by Anthony-a-Wood, Douce, and Rawlinson; the
British Museum, the great Roxburghe and Bagford collections, which have
been reprinted and edited by William Chappell and the Rev. J. W.
Ebsworth for the Ballad Society, as well as other smaller volumes of
ballads.
But it is not among the broadsides that our noblest ballads are found.
The first attempt to collect popular ballads was made by the compiler of
three volumes issued in 1723 and 1725. The editor is said to have been
Ambrose Phillips, whose name and style combined to produce the word
'namby-pamby.' Next came Allan Ramsay, with 'the _Evergreen_,
a collection of Scots poems wrote by the ingenious before 1600.'--'By
the ingenious,' we note; not by the 'elegant.' The tide is already
beginning to turn; pitch-forked Nature will ever come back. Followed the
_Tea-Table Miscellany_, also compiled by Allan Ramsay, which contained
about twenty popular ballads, the rest being songs and ballads of modern
composition. The texts were, of course, chopped about and pruned to suit
contemporary taste. It was still necessary to adopt an apologetic
attitude on behalf of these barbarous and crude relics of antiquity.
These books paved the way to the great literary triumph of the century.
The first edition of Percy's _Reliques_ was issued in three volumes, in
1765. He received for it one hundred guineas, instant popularity and
patronage, and subsequently, the gratitude of succeeding centuries.
Nevertheless, Percy himself was so far under the influence of his
contemporaries that he felt it necessary to adopt the apologetic
attitude. In his preface he wrote:-- 'In a polished age like the
present, I am sensible that many of these reliques of antiquity will
require great allowances to be made for them.' And again:-- 'To atone
for the rudeness of the more obsolete poems, each volume concludes with
a few modern attempts in the same kind of writing; and to take off from
the tediousness of the longer narratives, they are everywhere
intermingled with little elegant pieces of the lyrical kind.' In short,
he could not trust that large child, the people of England, to take its
dose of powder without the conventional treacle. To vary the metaphor,
his famous Folio Manuscript he regarded as a Cinderella, and in his
capacity as fairy godmother refused to introduce her to the world
without hiding the slut's uncouth attire under fine raiment. To which
end, besides adding 'little elegant pieces,' he recast and rewrote 'the
more obsolete poems,' many of which came direct from the Folio
Manuscript. Are we to blame him for yielding to the taste of his day?
He did not satisfy every one. Ritson's immediate outcry is famous--and
Ritson stood almost alone. He did, indeed, go so far as to deny the
existence of the Folio Manuscript, and Percy was forced to confute him
by producing it. In the later editions of the _Reliques_, Percy sought
to conciliate him by revising his texts, so as to approximate them more
closely to his originals, but still Ritson cried out for the whole
truth, and nothing but the truth. And by this time he had supporters.
But the whole truth as regards the Folio was not to be divulged yet. The
manuscript was most jealously guarded.
Meanwhile the influence of the publication was having its effect. The
poetry of the schools, the poetry of the intellect, the poetry of art,
brought to its highest pitch by writers like Dryden and Pope, was
shelved; metrically exact diction, artificiality of expression,
carefully balanced antitheses, and all the mechanical devices of the
school were placed in abeyance. There was a general return to Nature, to
simplicity, to straightforwardness--not without imagination, however.
Wordsworth, besides insisting, in a famous passage, the Preface to the
_Lyrical Ballads_, on the spontaneity of good poetry, recorded his
tribute to the _Reliques_: 'I do not think that there is an able writer
in verse of the present day who would not be proud to acknowledge his
obligation to the _Reliques_.' While failing often to catch the gusto of
ancient poetry--witness his translations from Chaucer--Wordsworth was
full of the spirit--witness his rifacimento of _The Owl and the
Nightingale_--and, best of all, handed it on to Coleridge.[9] These two
fought side by side against the conventions of the preceding century,
against Dryden, Addison, Pope, and last, but not least, Johnson. Some
have gone so far as to place the definite turning-point in the year
1798, the year of the publication of the _Lyrical Ballads_. Coleridge's
_annus mirabilis_ was 1797, and the publication of _The Ancient Mariner_
is significant of the change. But we need not bind ourselves down to any
given year. Enough that the revolution was effected, and that it is
scarcely exaggeration to say that it was almost entirely due to the
publication of the _Reliques_.
[Footnote 9: 'He [Coleridge] said the _Lyrical Ballads_ were an
experiment about to be tried by him and Wordsworth, to see how far
the public taste would endure poetry written in a more natural and
simple style than had hitherto been attempted; totally discarding
the artifices of poetical diction, and making use only of such words
as had probably been common in the most ordinary language since the
days of Henry II.'--_Hazlitt._]
Sir Walter Scott remembered to the day of his death the place where he
first made acquaintance with the _Reliques_ in his thirteenth year. 'I
remember well the spot where I read those volumes for the first time. It
was beneath a large platanus-tree, in the ruins of what had been
intended for an old-fashioned arbour in the garden I have mentioned. The
summer day sped onward so fast, that, notwithstanding the sharp appetite
of thirteen, I forgot the hour of dinner, was sought for with anxiety,
and was still found entranced in my intellectual banquet.'
Almost immediately competitors appeared in the field, and especial
attention was given to Scotland, exceedingly rich ground, as it proved.
In 1769, David Herd published his collection of _Ancient and Modern
Scots Songs, Heroic Ballads, etc._ Then, at intervals of two or three
years only, came the compilations of Evans, Pinkerton, Ritson, Johnson;
in 1802 Sir Walter Scott's _Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border_, fit to
be placed side by side with the _Reliques_; in 1806 Jamieson's _Popular
Ballads and Songs_; then Finlay, Gilchrist, Laing, and Utterson. In 1828
the egregious Peter Buchan produced _Ancient Ballads and Songs of the
North of Scotland, hitherto unpublished_. Buchan hints that he kept a
pedlar or beggarman--'a wight of Homer's craft'--travelling through
Scotland to pick up ballads; and one of the two--probably Buchan--must
have been possessed of powerful inventive faculties. Each of Buchan's
ballads is tediously spun out to enormous and unnecessary length, and is
filled with solecisms and inanities quite inconsistent with the spirit
of the true ballad. But Buchan undoubtedly gained fresh material,
however much he clothed it; and his ballads are now reprinted, as
Professor Child says, for much the same reason that thieves are
photographed.
Scotland continued the work with two excellent students and pioneers,
George Kinloch and William Motherwell. Next, Robert Chambers published a
collection of eighty ballads, some being spurious. This was in 1829.
Thirty years later Chambers came to the conclusion that 'the high-class
romantic ballads of Scotland ... are not older than the early part of
the eighteenth century, and are mainly, if not wholly, the production of
one mind.' And this one mind, he thinks, was probably that of Elizabeth,
Lady Wardlaw, the acknowledged forger of the ballad _Hardyknute_, which
deceived so many. Chambers, of course, was absurdly mistaken.
So the work of collecting and editing progressed through the nineteenth
century, till it culminated in the final edition of Professor Child's
_English and Scottish Popular Ballads_. But even this is scarcely his
greatest benefaction to the study of ballads. We must confess that had
it not been for the insistence of this American scholar, the Percy Folio
Manuscript would remain a sealed book. For six years Professor Child
persecuted Dr. Furnivall, who persecuted in turn the owners of the
Folio, even offering sums of money, for permission to print the MS.
Eventually they succeeded, and not only succeeded in giving to the world
an exact reprint,[10] but also once for all secured the precious
original for the British Museum, where it now remains.[11]
[Footnote 10: _Bishop Percy's Folio Manuscript_, edited by J. W.
Hales and F. J. Furnivall, 4 vols., 1867-8. Printed for the Early
English Text Society and subscribers.]
[Footnote 11: Additional MS. 27, 879.]
And what is this manuscript? In brief, it is an example of the
commonplace books which abounded in the seventeenth century. But it is
unique in containing a large proportion of early romances and ballads,
as well as the lyrics of the day. Of the hundreds of commonplace books
made during that century, no other example is known which contains such
matter, for the obvious and simple reason that such matter was
despised.[12] The handwriting is put by experts at about 1650; it cannot
be much later, and one song in it contains a passage which fixes the
date of that song to the year 1643. Percy discovered the book 'lying
dirty on the floor under a bureau in the parlour' of his friend Humphrey
Pitt of Shifnal, in Shropshire, 'being used by maids to light the fire.'
Mr. Pitt's fires were lighted with half-pages torn out from incomparably
early and precious versions of certain Robin Hood and other ballads.
Percy notes that he was very young when he first got possession of the
MS., and had not then learned to reverence it. When he put it into
boards to lend to Dr. Johnson, the bookbinder pared the margins, and cut
away top and bottom lines. In editing the _Reliques_, Percy actually
tore out pages 'to save the trouble of transcribing.' In spite of all,
it remains a unique and inestimably valuable manuscript. Its writer was
presumably a Lancashire man, from his use of certain dialect words, and
was assuredly a man of slight education; nevertheless a national
benefactor.
[Footnote 12: Cp. _Love's Labour's Lost_:--
+Armado.+ Is there not a ballad, boy, of the King and the Beggar?
+Moth.+ The world was very guilty of such a ballad some three ages
since; but I think now 'tis not to be found.]
In speaking of manuscripts, we must not omit to mention the Scottish
collectors. Most of them went to work in the right way, seeking out aged
men and women in out-of-the-way corners of Scotland, and taking down
their ballads from their lips. If we condemn these editors for
subsequently adorning the traditional versions, we must be grateful to
them for preserving their manuscripts so that we can still read the
ballads as they received them. The old ladies of Scotland seem to have
possessed better memories than the old men. Besides Sir Walter Scott's
anonymous 'Old Lady,' there was another to whom we owe some of the
finest versions of the Scottish ballads. This was Mrs. Brown, daughter
of Professor Gordon of Aberdeen. Born in 1747, she learned most of her
ballads before she was twelve years old, or before 1759, from the
singing of her aunt, Mrs. Farquhar of Braemar. From about twenty to
forty years later, she repeated her ballads, first to Jamieson, and
afterwards to William Tytler, each of whom compiled a manuscript. The
latter, the Tytler-Brown MS., unfortunately is lost, but the ballads are
practically all known from the other manuscript and various sources.
Perhaps the richest part of our stock are the Scottish and Border
ballads. Beside them, most of our mawkish English ballads look pale and
withered. The reason, perhaps, may be traced to the effect of natural
surroundings on literature. The English ballads were printed or written
down at a period which is early compared with the date of collection of
the Scottish ballads. In fact, it is only during the last hundred and
thirty years that the ballads of Scotland have been recovered from oral
tradition. In mountainous districts, where means of communication and
intercourse are naturally limited, tradition dies more hard than in
countries where there are no such barriers. Moreover, as Professor Child
points out, 'oral transmission by the unlettered is not to be feared
nearly so much as by minstrels, nor by minstrels nearly so much as
modern editors.' Svend Grundtvig illustrates this from his twenty-nine
versions of the Danish ballad 'Ribold and Guldborg.' In versions from
recitation, he has shown that there occur certain verses which have
never been printed, but which are found in old manuscripts; and these
recited versions also contain verses which have never been either
printed or written down in Danish, but which are to be found still in
recitation, not only in Norwegian and Swedish versions, but even in
Icelandic tradition of two hundred years' standing.
Such, then, is the history of our ballads, so far as it may be stated in
a few pages. With regard to origins, the 'nebular' theory cannot be
summarily dismissed;[13] but, after weighing the evidence and arguments,
the balance of probability would seem to lie with the supporters of the
'artistic' theory in a modified form. The ballad may say, with Topsy,
'Spec's I growed'; but _vires adquirit eundo_ is only true of the ballad
to a certain point; progress, which includes the invention of printing
and the absorption into cities of the unsophisticated rural population,
has since killed the oral circulation of the ballad. Thus it was not an
unmixed evil that in the Middle Ages, as a rule, the ballads were
neglected; for this neglect, while it rendered the discovery of their
sources almost impossible, gave the ballads for a time into the
safe-keeping of their natural possessors, the common people.
Civilisation, advancing more swiftly in some countries than in others,
has left rich stores here, and little there. Our close kinsmen of
Denmark, and the rest of Scandinavia, possess a ballad-literature of
which they do well to be proud; and Spain is said to have inherited even
better legacies. A study of our native ballads yields much interest,
much delight, and much regret that the gleaning is comparatively so
small. But what we still have is of immense value. The ballads may not
be required again to revoke English literature from flights into
artificiality and subjectivity; but they form a leaf in the life of the
English people, they uphold the dignity of human nature, they carry us
away to the legends, the romances, the beliefs, the traditions of our
ancestors, and take us out of ourselves to 'fleet the time carelessly,
as they did in the golden world.'
[Footnote 13: Professor Gummere (_The Beginnings of Poetry_) is
perhaps the strongest champion of this theory, and takes an extreme
view.]