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THE BALLADISTS
[Illustration:
THE BALLADISTS
BY
JOHN
GEDDIE
FAMOUS
.SCOTS.
.SERIES.
PUBLISHED BY
OLIPHANT ANDERSON
& FERRIER . EDINBURGH
AND LONDON
]
* * * * *
The designs and ornaments of this volume are by Mr. Joseph Brown, and
the printing from the press of Messrs. T. and A. Constable, Edinburgh.
* * * * *
PREFACE
Not much more has been attempted in these pages than to extract the
marrow of the Scottish Ballad Minstrelsy. They will have served their
purpose if they help to awaken, or to renew, a relish for the contents
of the Ballad Book. To know and love these grand old songs is its own
exceeding great reward; and it is also, alas! almost the only means now
left to us of knowing something concerning their nameless writers.
Questions involving literary or critical controversy as to the age and
genuineness of the ballads have been, as far as possible, avoided in
this popular presentation of their beauties and their qualities; and in
case any challenge may be made of the origin or authenticity of the
passages quoted, I may say that, in nearly every case, I have prudently,
and of purpose, refrained from giving the authority for my text, and
have taken that which best pleases my own ear or has clung most closely
to my memory.
J. G.
_July 1896._
CONTENTS
PAGE
CHAPTER I
BALLAD CHARACTERISTICS 9
CHAPTER II
BALLAD GROWTH AND BALLAD HISTORY 24
CHAPTER III
BALLAD STRUCTURE AND BALLAD STYLE 43
CHAPTER IV
THE MYTHOLOGICAL BALLAD 58
CHAPTER V
THE ROMANTIC BALLAD 83
CHAPTER VI
THE HISTORICAL BALLAD 108
CHAPTER VII
CONCLUSION 128
CHAPTER I
BALLAD CHARACTERISTICS
'Layes that in harping
Ben y-found of ferli thing;
Sum beth of wer, and sum of wo,
Sum of joye and mirthe also;
And sum of treacherie and gile;
Of old aventours that fell while;
And sum of bourdes and ribaudy;
And many ther beth of faery,--
Of all things that men seth;
Maist o' love forsoth they beth.'
_The Lay of the Ash._
Who would set forth to explore the realm of our Ballad Literature needs
not to hamper himself with biographical baggage. Whatever misgivings and
misadventures may beset him in his wayfaring, there is no risk of
breaking neck or limb over dates or names. For of dates and names and
other solid landmarks there are none to guide us in this misty
morning-land of poetry. The balladist is 'a voice and nothing more'--a
voice singing in a chorus of others, in which only faintly and
uncertainly we sometimes fancy we can make out the note, but rarely
anything of the person or history, of the individual singer. In the
hierarchy of song, he is a priest after the order of Melchisedec--without
father or mother, beginning of days or end of life.
The Scottish ballads we may thus love and know by heart, and concerning
their preservation, collection, collation, we may gather a large store
of facts. But the original ballad-writers themselves must remain for us
the Great Unknown. Here and there one can lay down vague lines that seem
to confine a particular ballad, or group of ballads, within particular
bounds of place and of time. Here and there one seems to get a glimpse
of the balladist himself, as onlooker or as actor in the scenes of
fateful love and deathless grief which he has fixed for ever in the
memory of men of his race and blood. There are passages in which, in the
light and heat of battle, or in agony of terror or sorrow, we are made
to see something of the minstrel as well as his theme. But by no
research are we likely at this late date to recover any clew to the
birthplace or to the lineaments of the life and face of the grand old
poet who wrote the grand old ballad of _Sir Patrick Spens_; nor do towns
contend for the honour of having produced the sweet singer of
_Kirkconnel Lea_, the blithe minstrel of _Glenlogie_, or the first of
all the bards who made the _Dowie Dens of Yarrow_ vocal with the song of
unavailing sorrow.
And in truth towns--even such towns as were in those days--could have
had but little to do with the birth and shaping of the Scottish
Balladists. Chief among the marks by which we may the true ballad-maker
know among the verse-makers of his age, is the open-air feeling that
pervades his thought and style. Like the Black Douglas, he likes better
to hear the laverock sing than the mouse cheep. It is not only that he
cares to tread 'the bent sae brown' rather than the paved street; that
the tragedies of fiery love and hate quenched by death, in which he
delights, are more often enacted under the blue cope of heaven than
under vault of stone. What we seem to feel is that these simple old
lays, in which lives a passion that still catches the breath and makes
the cheek turn pale--whose 'words of might' have yet the power to waft
us, mind and sense, into the 'Land of Faery,' must have been conceived
and brought to full strength under the light of the sun and the breath
of the wind. 'The Muse,' says Robert Burns, himself of the true kin of
the balladists:
'The Muse, nae Poet ever fand her,
Till by himsel' he learned to wander,
Adown some trottin' burn's meander,
An' no think lang.'
Certainly no true ballad was ever hammered out at the desk. It may have
been wrought and fashioned for singing in bower or hall; but the fire
that shaped it was caught, in gloaming grey or under the 'lee licht o'
the mune,' in birken shaw or by wan water.
It is true that one of the earliest of the Scots ballad-makers whose
names have been handed down to us--Robert Henryson, who taught the
Dunfermline bairns in the hornbook in the fifteenth century--has told us
that he sought inspiration at the ingleside over a glass:
'I mend the fyre, and beikit me about,
Then tuik ane drink my spreitis to confort,
And armit me weill fra the cold thairout;
To cut the winter nicht, and mak it schort,
I tuik ane quhair, and left all uther sport.'
But this was while conning, in cold weather, the classic tale of
_Troilus and Cressid_. _Robin and Makyne_, which among Henryson's
acknowledged pieces (except _The Bluidy Sark_) comes nearest to our
conception of the ballad--after all it is but a pastoral--has the scent
of the 'grene wode' in summer.
In sooth, the Ballad Poet was neither made nor born; he grew. The 'wild
flowers of literature' is the name that has been bestowed, with some
little air of condescension, upon the rich inheritance he has left us.
They are the purest and the strongest growth of the genius of the race
and of the soil; and though they owe little save injury and mutilation
to those who have deliberately sought to prune and trim them to please a
later taste, they are as full of vigour and sap to-day as they were in
the Ballad Age, when such poetry sprung up naturally and spontaneously.
It is probable that not one of the old ballads that have come down to us
by oral recitation is the product of a single hand; or of twenty hands.
The greater its age, and the greater its popular favour, the greater is
the number of individual memories and imaginations through which it has
been filtered, taking from each some trace of colour, some flavour of
style or character, some improving or modifying touch. The 'personal
equation' is, in the ballad, a quantity at once immense and unknown. As
in Homer's _Iliad_, the voice we hear is not that of any individual
poet, but of an age and of a people--a voice simple, almost monotonous,
in its rhythmic rise and fall, but charged with meanings multitudinous
and unutterable.
The Scottish ballads are undoubtedly, in their present form, the outcome
of a long and strenuous process of selection. In its earlier stages, the
ballad was not written down but passed from mouth to mouth. Additions,
interpolations, changes infinite must have been made in the course of
transmission and repetition. Like a hardy plant, it had the power to
spread and send down fresh roots wherever it found favourable soil; and
in its new ground it always, as we shall see, took some colour and
character from the locality, the time, and the race. Golden lines and
verses may have been shed in the passage from place to place and down
the centuries. But less of this happened, we may feel sure, than a
purging away of the dross. As a rule, what was fittest--what was truest
to nature and to human nature--survived and was perpetuated in this
evolution of the ballad. When, in the course of its progress, it
gathered to itself anything that was precious and worthy of remembrance,
then, by the very law of things, this was seized and stored in the
memories of the listeners and handed down to future generations.
But this process of purging and refining the ballad, so that it shall
become--like the language, the proverbs, the folklore and nursery tales,
and the traditional music of a nation--the reflection of the history and
character of the race itself, if it is to be genuine, must go on
unconsciously. As soon as the ballad is written down--at least as soon
as it is fixed in print--the elements of natural growth it possesses are
arrested. It is removed from its natural environment and means of
healthy subsistence and development; and from a hardy outdoor plant it
is in danger of becoming a plant of the closet--a potted thing, watered
with printer's ink and trimmed with the editorial shears. Ballads have
sprung up and blossomed in a literary age; but as soon as the spirit
that is called literary seizes upon them and seeks to mould them to its
forms, they begin to droop and to lose their native bloom and wild-wood
fragrance. It is because they neglect, or are ignorant of, literary
models and conventions, and go back to the 'eternal verities' of human
passion and human motive and action--because they speak to 'the great
heart of man'--that they are what they are.
Few of our ballads have escaped those sophisticated touches of art,
which, happily, are easily detected in the rough homespun of the old
lays. Walter Scott, the last of the minstrels, to whom ballad literature
owes more than to any who went before or who has come after him, was
himself not above mending the strains gathered from the lips of old
women, hill shepherds, and the wandering tribe of cadgers and hawkers,
so that one is sometimes a little at a loss to tell what is original and
what is imitation. But even the Wizard's hand is not cunning enough to
patch the new so deftly upon the old that the difference cannot be
detected. The genuine ballad touch is incommunicable; to improve upon it
is like painting the lilies of the field.
In the ranks of the Balladists, then, we do not include the many writers
of merit--some of them of genius--who have worked in the lines of the
elder race of singers, copying their measures and seeking to enter into
their spirit. The studied simplicity, the deliberate archaisms, the
overstrained vigour or pathos of these modern ballads do but convince us
that the vein is well-nigh worked out. The writers could not help
thinking of their models and materials; the old minstrels sang with no
thought but telling what they saw with their eyes and heard with their
ears. But even in these days the precious lode of ballad poetry will
sometimes break to the surface; a phrase or a whole verse, fashioned in
the Iron Age, will recall the Age of Gold. Scott has many such; and, to
take a more modern instance, the spirit of _Sir Patrick Spens_ seems to
inspire almost throughout George MacDonald's _Yerl o' Watery Deck_, now
with a graphic stroke of description, anon with a sudden gleam of
humour, as when the Skipper, in haste to escape his pursuers, hacked
with his sword at the stout rope that bound his craft to the pier,
'And thocht it oure weel made';
and again when the King's Daughter chose between father and lover in
words that leap forth like a sword from its scabbard:
'I loot me low to my father for grace,
Down on my bended knee;
But I rise, and I look my king in the face,
For the Skipper 's the king o' me.'
But even here, where we touch high-water mark of the latter-day Scottish
ballad, one seems to find a faint reminiscence of stage-setting and
effect, of purposed antithesis, of ethical discriminations unfamiliar to
the manner and mode of thought of the ancient balladist. The latter, it
may be said, does not stop to think or to analyse or moralise; he feels,
and is content to tell us in the most direct and naive language, all
that he has felt. He has not learned the new trick of introspection; he
is guided by intuition and the primaeval instincts. He carries from his
own lips to ours a draught of pure, strong, human passion, stirred into
action by provocations of love, jealousy, revenge, and grief such as
visit but rarely our orderly, workaday modern world. He renders for us
the 'form and express feature' of his time, and though the
draughtsmanship may be rude, it is free from suspicion of either
flattery or bias. It is not enlisted in the cause of any moral theory or
literary ideal. It is, so far as it goes, truth naked and not ashamed.
But the native-grown ballad takes also colour from the ground whence it
springs. It has the tang of the soil as well as the savour of the blood.
Fletcher of Saltoun's hackneyed epigram, 'Let me make a country's
ballads, and let who will make its laws,' does not embody all the truth.
A country and the race inhabiting it may not be responsible for the laws
that govern it. But a country and a people may rightly be tried and
judged by their ballads--their own handiwork; their own offspring. The
more cultured and highly-developed products of a national literature,
however healthy, however strong and beautiful, must always owe much to
neighbouring and to universal influences. Like the language and manners
of the educated classes of a nation, they conform more or less to models
of world-wide and age-long acceptance among educated men. But in the
ballad one goes to the root of national character, to the pith and
marrow of national life and history.
What then, thus questioned, do the Scottish ballads teach us of Scotland
and the Scots? Surely much to be proud of. They are among the most
precious, as they are among the oldest, of our possessions as a people.
Nay, it may be held that they are the best and choicest of all the
contributions that Scotland has made to poetry and story. They are
written in her heart's blood. Even the songs of Burns and the tales of
Scott must take second rank after the ballads; their purest inspiration
was drawn from those rude old lays. In this field of national
literature, at least, we need not fear comparison with any other land
and people. Our ballads are distinctly different, and in the opinion of
unbiassed literary judges, also distinctly superior to the rich and
beautiful ballad-lore of the Southern Kingdom. One can even note an
expressive diversity of style and spirit in the ballads originating on
the North and on the South margin of the Border line. The latter do not
yield in rough vigour and blunt manliness to the ballads grown on the
northern slope of Cheviot. _Chevy Chase_ may challenge comparison with
_The Battle of Otterburn_, and come at least as well out of the contest
as the Percy did from his meeting with the Douglas; and in many other
ballads which the two nations have in common--_The Heir of Linn_, for
example--the English may fairly be held to bear away the bell from the
Scottish version. We do not possess a group of ballads pervaded so
thoroughly with the freedom and delight of living under 'the leaves
greene' as those of the Robin Hood Cycle; although we also have our
songs of the 'gay greenwood'; although bows twanged as keenly in Ettrick
Forest and in Braidislee Wood as in Sherwood itself, and we can even
claim, partly, perhaps, as a relic of the days when the King of Scotland
was Prince of Cumbria and Earl of Huntingdon, the bold Robin and his
merry men among the heroes of our ballad literature.
But, on the whole, mirth and light-heartedness are very far from being
characteristics of the Scottish ballads. Of ballad themes in general, it
has been said that they concern themselves mainly with the tragedy and
the pathos of the life of feudal and early times; while, on the other
hand, the folk-song reflects the sunnier hours of the days of old. This
is peculiarly true of the Scottish ballads. The best of them are dipped
in gloom of the grave. They breathe the very soul of 'the old, unhappy
far-off times.' Even over the true lovers, Fate stands from the first
with a drawn sword; and the story ends with the 'jow of the deid bell'
rather than with the wedding chimes. Superstitious terrors, too, add a
shadow of their own to these tragedies of crossed and lawless love and
swift-following vengeance. In this respect, the Scottish ballads are
more nearly akin to the popular poetry of Denmark and other countries
across the North Sea, than to that of our neighbours across the Tweed.
There are a score of ballads that agree so closely in plot and
structure, and even in names and phrases, with Norse or German versions,
that it is impossible to doubt that they have been drawn directly from
the same source. Either they have been transplanted thither in the many
descents which the Northmen made on Scotland, as is witnessed not only
by the chronicles, but by existing words, and customs, and place-names
scattered thickly around our coasts; or, what may perhaps be as strongly
argued, both versions may have come from an older and common original.
Celtic influences are also present, although scarcely, perhaps, so
directly manifest as might have been expected, considering that the
Celtic race and speech must at one time have been spread almost
universally over Scotland; they appear rather in the spirit than in the
plot and scene and characters of the typical Scottish ballad. They
supply, unquestionably, a large portion of that feeling of mystery, of
over-shadowing fate, and melancholy yearning--that air of another world
surrounding and infecting the life of the senses--which seems to
distinguish the body and soul of Scottish ballad poetry from the more
matter-of-fact budget of the English minstrels.
But it has to be remembered that the matrix of the ballads that have
taken first place in the love and in the memory of Scotland was the
region most remote and isolated from the Highlands and the Highlanders
during the ballad-making era. This is the basin of the Tweed--the howms
of Yarrow; Leader haughs and Ettrick shaws; the clear streams that flow
past ruined abbey and peel-tower, through green folds of the Cheviots
and the Lammermuirs, that for hundreds of years were the chosen homes of
Border war and romance. Next after these come the banks of Clyde and
Forth; Annan Water and the streams of Ayr and Galloway; and ballads and
ballad localities, differing somewhat, in theme and structure, in mood
and metre, from those of the South, as Aberdonian differs from Borderer,
and the Men of the Mearns from the Men of the Merse, are found scattered
thinly or sprinkled thickly over the whole North, by Tay, and Dee, and
Spey.
These latter streams are partly without and partly within the Highland
Line, across which, as unacquainted with a language that has its own
rich and peculiar store of legend and ballad poetry, we do not propose
to penetrate; sufficient field for exploration is provided by the Scots
ballads in Scots. But when these were in the making, the Highland Line
must have run down much lower into the Lowlands than it does to-day; the
retreating Gaelic had still outposts in Buchan, and even in Fife, and
Ayr, and Galloway. In the ballads of the North-eastern Counties, the
feuds of Highland chiefs and the raids of Highland caterans make
themselves seen and felt, too visibly and not too sympathetically, in
the ditties of their Lowland neighbours. 'The Hielandmen' play the part
that the English clans from Bewcastle and Redesdale play in the Border
ballads. The 'Red Harlaw' in those boreal provinces was a landmark and
turning-point in history and poetry, as Bannockburn or Flodden was in
the South. By Hangingshaws or Hermitage Castle they knew little of the
Highlander, being too much absorbed in their own quarrels; on Donside
and in the Lennox they knew him better than they liked him; and it was
not until a comparatively recent period of literary history that the
kilted warrior began to take his place as a heroic and imposing figure
in the poetry and prose of the Scottish vernacular.
Making all allowance for borrowings and influences drawn from without,
may we not still say that the Scottish ballad owes nearly all that is
best in it--the sweetness not less than the strength of this draught of
old poetry and passion--to the land and to the folk that gave it birth?
A land thrust further into the gloom and cold of stormy seas than the
Southern Kingdom; a land whose spare gifts are but the more esteemed by
its children because they are given so grudgingly, whose high and bleak
and stern features make the valleys they shelter the more lovely and
loved from the contrast; a race whose blood has been blended of many
strains, and tempered by long centuries of struggle with nature and with
outside enemies; perfervid of spirit and dour of will; holding with
strong grip to the things of this world, but never losing consciousness
of the nearness and mystery of the world of things invisible; with a
border-line on either side of them that for hundreds of years had to be
kept with the strong hand and the stout heart, and behind them a
background of history more charged with trouble and romance than that of
almost any other nation in Europe--where should the ballad draw pith and
sap and colour if not on such a soil and among such a people? If Mr.
Buckle was able to trace the complexion and form of Scottish religion in
the climate and configuration of Scotland, much more easily should we be
able to find the atmosphere and scenery of Scotland reflected in her
ballads.