THE MYTHOLOGICAL BALLAD
'Oh see ye not that bonnie road
That winds about yon fernie brae?
Oh that 's the road to fair Elfland
Where you and I this day maun gae.'
_Thomas the Rhymer._
No scheme of ballad classification can be at all points complete and
satisfactory. We have seen that it is impossible to classify the
Scottish ballads according to authorship, since authors, known and
proved, there are none. Scarce more practicable is it to arrange them in
any regular order of chronology or locality; and even when we seek to
group them with regard to type and subject, difficulties start up at
every step. A convenient and intelligible division would seem to be one
that recognised the ballads as Mythological, Romantic, or Historical,
this last class including the lays of the foray and the chase, that
cannot be assigned to any particular date--that cannot, indeed, be
proved to have any historical basis at all--but can yet, with more or
less of probability, be assigned to some historical or _quasi_-historical
character. Besides these, there are groups of ballads that cannot be
wholly overlooked--ballads in which, contrary to the prevailing spirit
of this kind of poetry, Humour asserts itself as an essential element;
ballads of the Sea; and Peasant ballads, of which, perhaps, England
yields happier examples than Scotland--simple rustic ditties, hawked
about in broad-sheets, and dating, many of them, no earlier than the
present century, that seldom rise much above the doggerel and
commonplace, and do not, as a rule, concern themselves with the high
personages and high-strung passions of the ballad of Old Romance.
No well-defined frontier can be laid down between the three chief
departments of ballad minstrelsy. The pieces in which fairy-lore and
ancient superstition have a prominent place--the ballads of Myth and
Marvel--have all of them a strong romantic colouring; and the like may
be said of the traditional songs of war and of raiding and hunting, as
well as of those whose theme is the passion and tragedy of love.
Romance, indeed, is the animating soul of the body of Scottish ballad
poetry; the note that gives it unity and distinguishes it from mere
versified history and folklore. There are few ballads on which some
shadow out of the World Invisible is not cast; few where ill-happed love
is not a master-string of the minstrel's harp; few into which there does
not come strife and the flash of cold steel. Natheless, a broad division
into ballads Supernatural, Romantic, and Martial has reason as well as
convenience to recommend it; and in a loose and general way such an
arrangement should also indicate the comparative age, not indeed of the
ballad versions as we know them, but of the ideas and materials of which
they are composed.
First, then, of the ballads that are steeped in the element of the
supernatural, let it be remembered that it is well-nigh impossible for
us in these days, when we have cleared about us a little island of light
in the darkness, to understand the atmosphere of mystery that pressed
close around the life of man in the age when the ballad had its birth.
The Unknown and the Unseen surrounded him on every side. He could
scarcely put forth a hand without touching things that were not of this
world; and in proportion to the ignorance was the fear. Through the long
twilight in which the primaeval beliefs and superstitions grew up and
became embodied in legend and custom, in _maerchen_ and ballad, and all
through the Middle Ages, man's pilgrimage on earth was indeed through a
Valley of the Shadow. It was a narrow way, between 'the Ditch and the
Quag, and past the very mouth of the Pit,' full of frightful sights and
dreadful noises, of hobgoblins, and dragons, and chimeras dire. Tales
that have ceased to frighten the nursery, that we listen to with a smile
or at most with a pleasant stirring of the blood and titillation of the
nerves, once on a time were the terror of grown men. The ogres and
dragons of old are dead, and the Folklorist and the Comparative
Mythologist make free of their caves, and are busy setting up,
comparing, classifying, and labelling their skeletons for the
instruction of an age of science. But there was a time when the wisest
believed in their existence as an article of faith, and when the boldest
shuddered to hear them named. What are now idle fancies were once the
most portentous of realities; and in this lies the secret of the almost
universal diffusion of certain typical tales, beliefs, and observances,
and of the fascination which they have not ceased to exercise over the
imagination of mankind.
Into the subject of the origins, the relationships, and the
signification of these venerable traditions and superstitions of the
race and of all races, there is neither time nor occasion for entering.
This oldest and yet last found of the realms of science is as yet only
in course of being surveyed, and from day to day fresh discoveries are
announced by the eager explorers of the darkling provinces of myth and
folktale. But this at least may be said, that not in the wide domain of
popular saga and poetry can there be reaped a richer or more varied
harvest of weird and wild and beautiful fancies, touched by the light
that 'never was on sea or land,' than is to be found in the Scottish
ballads.
From among them one could gather out a whole menagerie of the 'selcouth'
beasts and birds and creeping things that have been banished from solid
earth into the limbo of Faery and Romance. They furnish examples of
nearly all the root-ideas and typical tales which folklorists have
discovered in the vast jungle of popular legends and superstitions--the
Supernatural Birth, the Life and Faith Tokens, the Dragon Slayer, the
Mermaid and the Despised Sister, Bluebeard of the Many Wives, the Well
of Healing, the Magic Mirror, the Enchanted Horn, the Singing Bone, the
Babes in the Wood, the Blabbing Popinjay, the Counterpart, the
Transformation, the Spell, the Prophecy, the Riddle, the Return from the
Grave, the Dead Ride, the Demon Lover, the Captivity in Faeryland, the
Seven Years' Kain to Hell, and a host of others.
Certain of them, like _Thomas the Rhymer_ and _Young Tamlane_, are
'fulfilled all of Faery.' One can read in them how deeply the old
superstition, which some would attribute to a traditional memory of the
pre-Aryan inhabitants of Western Europe--to the 'barrow-wights,'
pigmies, or Pechts who dwelt in or were driven for shelter to caves and
other underground dwellings of the land--had struck its roots in the
popular fancy. Probably Mr. Andrew Lang carries us as far as we can go
at present in the search for origins and affinities, when he says that
the belief in fairies, and in their relatives, the gnomes and brownies,
is 'a complex matter, from which tradition, with its memory of
earth-dwellers, is not wholly absent, while more is due to a survival of
the pre-Christian Hades, and to the belief in local spirits--the Vius of
Melanesia, the Nereids of ancient and modern Greece, the Lares of Rome,
the fateful Maerae and Hathors--old imaginings of a world not yet
dispeopled of its dreams.' The elfin-folk of the Scottish ballads have
some few traits that are local and national; but, on the whole, they
conform pretty closely to a type that has now become well marked in the
literature as well as in the popular beliefs of European countries. The
fairies have been, among the orders of supernatural beings, the pets and
favourites of the poets, who have heaped their flowers of fancy above
the graves of the departed Little Folk. We suspect that the more
graceful and gracious touches in the Fairy Ballad are the renovating
work of later hands than the elder balladist; and in the two typical
Scottish examples that have been mentioned, it is not difficult to find
the mark of Sir Walter.
In the time when fairies still tripped the moonlit sward, they received
praise and compliment indeed from the mouths of their human kin, but it
was more out of fear than out of love. They were the 'Men of Peace' and
the 'Good Neighbours' for a reason not much different from that which
caused the Devil's share in the churchyard to be known as the 'Guid
Man's Croft,' lest by speaking more frankly of those having power, evil
might befall. The tenancy of brake and woodland in the 'witching hours'
by this uncanny people was a formidable addition to the terrors of the
night:
'Up the craggy mountain
And down the rushy glen,
We dare not go a-hunting
For fear of Little Men.
Wee folk, good folk,
Trooping altogether,
Green jerkin, red cap,
And white owl's feather.'
They were tricksy, capricious, peevish, easily offended, malicious if
not wholly malevolent, and dangerous alike to trust and to thwart. All
this, together with their habit of trooping in procession and dancing
under the moon; their practice of snatching away to their underground
abodes those who, by kiss or other spell, fall into their hands; and the
penance or sacrifice which at every seven years' term they pay to powers
still more dread, comes out in the tale of True Thomas's adventure with
the Queen of Faery, and in Fair Janet's ordeal to win back Young Tamlane
to earth. Their prodigious strength, so strangely disproportioned to
their size, is celebrated in the quaint lines of _The Wee Wee Man_;
while from _The Elfin Knight_ we learn that woman's wit as well as
woman's faith can, on occasion, prove a match for all the spells and
riddles of fairyland. The enchanted horn is heard blowing--
'A knight stands on yon high, high hill,
Blaw, blaw, ye cauld winds blaw!
He blaws a blast baith loud and shrill,
The cauld wind 's blawn my plaid awa,'
and, at the spoken wish, the Elfin Knight is at the maiden's side. But
the spell the tongue has woven, the tongue can unloose; and the lady
brings her unearthly lover first into captivity by setting him a
preliminary task to perform, more baffling than that 'sewing a sark
without a seam.'
It is otherwise with True Thomas, as it was with Merlin before him, and
with all the men, wise and foolish, who have once yielded to the
glamourie of the Elfin Queen and others of her type and sex. The Rhymer
of Ercildoune was probably only a man more learned and far-seeing than
others of his time. His reputation for Second Sight may rest upon a
basis similar to that which led the mediaeval mind to dub Virgil a
magician, and to recognise the wizard in Sir Michael Scott, the grave
ambassador and counsellor of kings, and, at a later date, enabled the
profane vulgar to discover a baronet of Gordonstoun to be a warlock, for
no better reason than because, with the encouragement of that most
indefatigable of ballad collectors, Samuel Pepys, he gave his attention
to the perfecting of sea-pumps for the royal navy. Whether the Rhymer's
expedition to Fairyland was feigned by the balladist to explain his
soothsaying; or whether, rather, his prophecies were invented as
evidence of the perilous gift he brought back with him from Elfland,
research will never be able to tell us. But the journey True Thomas made
on the fateful day when, lying on Huntlie bank,
'A ferlie he spied wi' his e'e;
And there he saw a ladye bright
Come riding down by the Eildon Tree,'
was one that many heroes of adventure, before him and after him, have
made in fairy lands forlorn. The scenery and incidents of that strange
ride are also among the common possessions of fairy romance. One dimly
discerns in them the glimmer of an ancient allegory, of an old
cosmogony, that may possibly be derived from the very infancy of the
world, when human thought began to brood over the mysteries of life and
time. There are the Broad Path of Wickedness and the Narrow Way of
Right, and between them that 'bonnie road' of Fantasy, winding and
fern-sown, that leads to 'fair Elfland.' There is a glimpse of the
Garden of the Hesperides and its fruits; and a lurid peep into Hades:
'It was mirk, mirk nicht and nae starlicht,
And they waded through red bluid to the knee;
For a' the bluid that 's shed on earth
Rins through the springs o' that countrie.'
The Palace of Truth as well as of Error is built on fairy ground; and
there is a foretaste of Gilbertian humour in the dismay with which the
Rhymer hears that he is to be endowed with 'the tongue that can never
lie.'
'"My tongue is mine ain," True Thomas said;
"A goodlie gift you would give me;
I neither dought to buy or sell
At fair or tryst where I may be;
I dought neither speak to prince or peer
Nor ask of grace from fair ladye."'
But from his seven years' wanderings in fairyland, that speed like a day
upon earth, he wakens up as from a dream, and again he is laid on
Huntlie bank, in sight of the cleft Eildon.
Is it not significant that Melrose and Abbotsford, where a later and
greater wizard wrought his spells over the valley of the Tweed and
Ettrick Forest, should be half-way between the chief scenes of our Fairy
Ballads--between the Rhymer's Tower and Carterhaugh? Fair Janet's
conduct, when forbidden to come or go by Carterhaugh, where Yarrow holds
tryst with Ettrick, lest she might encounter the Young Tamlane, may be
traced back to the Garden of Eden, and is of a piece with that of Mother
Eve:
'Janet has kilted her green kirtle
A little abune her knee;
And she has braided her yellow hair
A little abune her bree;
And she 's awa' to Carterhaugh
As fast as she could gae.'
There she falls in with the 'elfin grey' who might have been an 'earthly
knight'; and he tells her how, as a youth, he had been reft away to
fairyland:
'There cam' a wind out o' the north,
A sharp wind and a snell;
A deep sleep cam' over me
And from my horse I fell';
as happened to 'Held Harald' and his men in the German legend. But he
also tells her how, by waiting at the cross road at midnight on
Halloweve, 'when fairy folk do ride,' she may win back the father of her
child to mortal shape. That waiting on the dreary heath while 'a north
wind tore the bent,' and what followed, become the ordeal of Janet's
love:
'Aboot the dead hour o' the night
She heard the bridles ring;
And Janet was as glad o' that
As any earthly thing.
And first gaed by the black, black steed,
And then gaed by the brown,
But fast she gripped the milk-white steed
And pu'ed the rider down';
and holding her lover fast, through all his gruesome changes of form,
she 'borrowed' him from the 'seely court,' and saved him from becoming
the tribute paid every seven years to the powers that held fairydom in
vassalage.
Another series of transmutations, familiar in ballad and folklore, is
that in which the powers of White and Black Magic strive for the
mastery, generally to the discomfiture of the latter, after the manner
of the Hunting of Paupukewis in _Hiawatha_. The baffled magician or
witch--often the mother-in-law or stepmother, the stock villain of the
piece in these old tales--alters her shape rapidly to living creature or
inanimate thing; but fast as she changes the avenger also changes,
pursues, and at length destroys. In the ballad of _The Twa Magicians_,
given in Buchan's collection, it is virtue that flees, and wrong, in the
shape of a Smith, of Weyland's mystic kin, that follows and overcomes.
But, as a rule, the transformations that are made the subject of the
Scottish ballads are of a more lasting kind; the prince or princess,
tempted by a kiss, or at the touch of enchanted wand or ring, is doomed
for a time to crawl in the loathly shape of snake or dragon about a
tree, or swim the waters as mermaid or other monstrous brood of the seas
of romance, until the appointed time when the deliverer comes, and by
like magic art, or by the pure force of courage and love, looses the
spell. _Kempion_ is a type of a class of story that runs, in many
variations, through the romances of chivalry, and from these may have
been passed down to the ballad-singer, although ruder forms of it are
common to nearly all folk-mythology. The hero is one of those kings'
sons, who, along with kings' daughters, people the literature of ballad
and _maerchen_; and he has heard of the 'heavy weird' that has been laid
upon a lady to haunt the flood around the Estmere Crags as a 'fiery
beast.' He is dared to lean over the cliff and kiss this hideous
creature; and at the third kiss she turns into
'The loveliest ladye e'er could be.'
The rescuer asks--
'O, was it wehrwolf in the wood,
Or was it mermaid in the sea?
Or was it man, or vile woman,
My ain true love, that misshaped thee?'
Nor do we wonder to hear that it was the doing of the wicked and envious
stepmother, on whom there straight falls a worse and a well-deserved
weird. In _King Henrie_, too, it is the stepdame that has wrought the
mischief. He is lying 'burd alane' in his hunting hall in the forest,
when his grey dogs cringe and whine; the door is burst in, and
'A grisly ghost
Stands stamping on the floor.'
The manners of this _Poltergeist_ are in keeping with her rough entrance
on the scene; her ogreish appetite is not satisfied even when she had
devoured his hounds, his hawks, and his steed. As in the _Wife of Bath's
Tale_, and the _Marriage of Sir Gawain_ and other legends of the same
type, the knight's courtesy withstands every test, and he is rewarded
for having given the lady her will:
'When day was come and night was gane
And the sun shone through the ha',
The fairest ladye that e'er was seen
Lay between him and the wa'.'
In most cases it is not wise or safe to give entertainment to these
wanderers of the night, whether they come in fair shape or in foul. They
are apt to prove to be of the race of the _succubi_, from whom a kiss
means death or worse. More than one of our Scottish ballads are
reminiscent of the beautiful old Breton lay, _The Lord Nann_, so
admirably translated by Tom Taylor, wherein the young husband, stricken
to the heart by the baleful kiss given to him against his will by a
wood-nymph, goes home to die, and his fair young wife follows him fast
to the grave. _Alison Gross_ is another of those Circes who, by
incantation of horn and wand, seek to lower the shape and nature of her
lovers to those of the beasts that crawl on their bellies. Sometimes the
tempter is of the other sex. Thus _The Demon Lover_ is a tale known in
several versions in Scotland, and lately brought under notice by Mr.
Hall Caine in its Manx form. The frail lady is enticed from her home,
and induced to put foot on board the mysterious ship by an appeal, a
pathetic echo of which has lingered on in later poetry, and has been
quoted as the very dirge of the Lost Cause:
'He turned him right and round about,
And the tear blindit his e'e;
"I would never have trodden on Irish ground
If it hadna been for thee."'
They have not sailed far, when his countenance changes, and he grows to
a monstrous stature; the foul fiend is revealed. They are bound on a
drearier voyage than that of True Thomas--to a Hades of ice and
isolation that bespeaks the northern origin of the tale:
'"O whaten a mountain 's yon," she said,
"So dreary wi' frost and snow?"
"O yon 's the mountain of hell," he cried,
"Where you and I must go."
He strack the tapmast wi' his hand,
The foremast wi' his knee;
And he brake the gallant ship in twain
And sank her in the sea.'
Other spells and charms not a few, for the winning of love and the
slaking of revenge, are known to the old balladists. We hear of the
compelling or sundering power of the bright red gold and the cold steel.
Lovers at parting exchange rings, as in _Hynd Horn_, gifted with the
property of revealing death or faithlessness:
'When your ring turns pale and wan,
Then I 'm in love wi' another man.'
Or, as in _Rose the Red and Lily Flower_, it is a magic horn, to be
blown when in danger, and whose notes can be heard at any distance.
These are examples of the 'Life Token' and the 'Faith Token,' known to
the folklore of nearly all peoples who have preserved fragments of their
primitive beliefs. The prophetic power of dreams is revealed in _The
Drowned Lovers_, in _Child Rowland_, in _Annie of Lochryan_, and in a
host of others. The spells used by witchcraft to arrest birth do not
differ greatly in _Willie's Lady_--the 'nine witch-knots,' the 'bush of
woodbine,' the 'kaims o' care,' and the 'master goat'--from those
mentioned in its prototypes in Scandinavian, Greek, and Eastern ballads
and stories; and in more than one it is the sage counsels of 'Billy
Blin''--the Brownie--that give the cue by which the evil charm is
unwound. The Brownie--the Lubber Fiend--owns a department of legend and
ballad scarcely less important than that possessed by his relatives, the
Elfin folk and the Trolds; a shy and clumsy monster, but harmless and
good-natured, and with a turn for hard manual labour that can be turned
to useful account. Good and ill fortune, in the ballads, comes often by
lot:
'We were sisters, sisters seven,
Bowing down, bowing down;
The fairest maidens under heaven;
And aye the birks a' bowing.
And we keest kevils us amang,
Bowing down, bowing down;
To see who would to greenwood gang,
And aye the birks a' bowing.'
The birk held a high place in the secret rites and customs of the Ballad
Age. It was with 'a wand o' the bonnie birk' that May Margaret went
through the mysterious process of restoring her plighted troth to Clerk
Saunders; in other ballads it is done by passes of the hand, or of a
crystal rod. When the 'Clerk's Twa Sons o' Owsenford' were brought back
to earth by their mother's bitter grief and longing, they wore 'hats
made o' the birk':
'It neither grew in syke or ditch,
Nor yet in ony sheugh;
But at the gate of Paradise
That birk grew green eneuch.'
Birds of the air carry a secret; there are tongues in trees that
syllable men's names; and even inanimate things cry aloud with the voice
of Remorse or of Doom. When the knight wishes to send a message, he
speaks in the ear of his 'gay goshawk that can baith speak and flee.'
When May Colvin returns home after the fatal meeting at the well, where
her seven predecessors in the love of the 'Fause Sir John' had been
drowned, the 'wylie parrot' speaks the words that were no doubt ringing
in her brain:
'What hae ye made o' the fause Sir John
That ye gaed wi' yestreen?'
And in _Earl Richard_ and other ballads, it is the 'popinjay' that
proclaims guilt or fear from turret or tree. One remembers also 'Proud
Maisie' walking early in the wood, and Sweet Robin piping her doom among
the green summer leaves:
'"Tell me, my bonnie bird,
When shall I marry me?"
"When six braw gentlemen
Kirkward shall carry thee"';
and the 'Three Corbies' croaking the most grim and dismal notes in all
the wide, wild range of ballad poetry, as they feast on the new-slain
knight:
'Ye 'll sit on his white hause bane,
And I 'll pike oot his bonnie blue een;
Wi' ae lock o' his yellow hair
We 'll theak our nest when it is bare.
O mony a ane for him maks mane,
But nae ane kens whaur he is gane,
O'er his white banes when they are bare
The wind shall sigh for evermair.'
But things that have neither sense nor life utter aloud words of menace
and accusation. Lord Barnard's horn makes the forest echo with the
warning notes, 'Away, Musgrave, away!' _Binnorie_ embalms the tradition
of the 'singing bone' which pervades the folklore of the Aryan peoples,
and is found also in China and among the negro tribes of West Africa. A
harper finds the body of the drowned sister, and out of her
'breast-bane' he forms a harp which he strings with her yellow hair.
According to a northern version of the ballad, he makes a plectrum from
'a lith of her finger bane.' On this strange instrument the minstrel
plays before king and court, and the strings sigh forth:
'Wae to my sister, fair Helen!'
In other ballads, the yearning or remorse of the living draw the dead
from their graves. In the tale of _The Cruel Mother_, we seem to see the
workings of the guilty conscience, which at length 'visualised' the
victims of unnatural murder. The bride goes alone to the bonnie
greenwood, to bear and to slay her twin children:
'She 's wrapped her mantle about her head,
All alone, and alonie O!
She 's gone to do a fearful deed
Down by the greenwood bonnie O!'
The crime and shame are hid; but peace does not come to her:
'The lady looked o'er her high castle wa',
All alone and alonie O!
She saw twa bonnie bairnies play at the ba'
Down by yon greenwood bonnie O!
The mother's yearning awakens within her, and she promises them all
manner of gifts if they will only be hers. But the voices of the
ghost-children rise and pronounce judgment on her:
'O cruel mither, when we were thine,
All alone and alonie O!
From us ye did our young lives twine,
Doon by yon greenwood bonnie O.'
Elsewhere in these old rhymes may be traced a superstitious belief,
which was put in practice as a means of discovering guilt, at least as
late as the middle of the seventeenth century--that of the Ordeal by
Touch. In _Young Benjie_ another test is applied to find the murderer;
and at midnight the door of the death-chamber is set ajar, so that the
wandering spirit may enter and reanimate for an hour the 'streikit
corpse':
'About the middle of the night
The cocks began to craw;
And at the dead hour o' the night,
The corpse began to thraw.'
It sat up; and with its dead lips told the waiting brethren on whose
head justice, tempered with a strange streak of mercy, should fall for
the foul slaughter of their 'ae sister':
'Ye maunna Benjie head, brothers,
Ye maunna Benjie hang,
But ye maun pyke oot his twa grey een
Before ye let him gang.'
In _Proud Lady Margaret_, again, we have a form of the legend, told in
many lands, and made familiar, in a milder form, by the classical German
ballad of _The Lady of the Kynast_, of a haughty and cruel dame whose
riddles are answered and whose heart is at length won by a stranger
knight. She would fain ride home with him, but he answers her that he is
her brother Willie, come from the other side of death to 'humble her
haughty heart has gart sae mony dee':
'The wee worms are my bedfellows
And cauld clay is my sheets';
and there is no room in his narrow house for other company. Out of the
Dark Country, too, on a similar errand, on Hallowe'en night, rides the
betrayed and slain knight in _Child Rowland_, the first line of which,
preserved in _King Lear_ as it was known in Shakespeare's day, seems to
strike a keynote of ballad romance:
'Child Rowland to the dark tower came,'
mumbles the feigned madman in the ear of the poor wronged king as they
tread the waste heath. And the sequel, as it has come down to us,
sustains and strengthens the spell of the opening:
'And he tirled at the pin;
And wha sae ready as his fause love,
To rise and let him in.'
The passages that describe the haunted ride in the moonlight, when the
lady has fled from the scene of her treachery and guilt, are not
surpassed in weird imaginative power, if they are equalled, by anything
in ballad or other literature:
'She hadna ridden a mile, a mile,
Never a mile but ane,
When she was 'ware o' a tall young man
Riding slowly o'er the plain.
She turned her to the right about,
And to the left turned she;
But aye 'tween her and the wan moonlight
That tall knight did she see.'
She set whip and spur to her steed, but 'nae nearer could she get'; she
appealed to him, as from a 'saikless,' or guiltless, maid to 'a leal
true knight,' to draw his bridle-rein until she can come up with him:
'But nothing did that tall knight say,
And nothing did he blin;
Still slowly rade he on before,
And fast she rade behind,'
until he drew rein at a broad river-side. Then he spoke:
'"This water it is deep," he said,
"As it is wondrous dun;
But it is sic as a saikless maid,
And a leal true knight can swim."'
They plunged in together, and the flood bore them down:
'"The water is waxing deeper still,
Sae does it wax mair wide;
And aye the farther we ride on,
Farther off is the other side."
. . . . .
The knight turned slowly round about
All in the middle stream,
He stretched out his hand to that lady,
And loudly she did scream.
"O, this is Hallow-morn," he said,
"And it is your bridal day;
But sad would be that gay wedding
Were bridegroom and bride away.
But ride on, ride on, proud Margaret,
Till the water comes o'er your bree;
For the bride maun ride deep and deeper yet
Who rides this ford wi' me."'
But the perturbed spirit does not always thus revisit the glimpses of
the moon to awaken conscience, to humble pride, or to wreak vengeance.
More often it is the repinings and longings of passionate love that keep
it from its rest. In _maerchen_ and ballad the ghost of the lover comes
to complain that the tears which his betrothed sheds nightly fill his
shroud with blood; when she smiles, it is filled with rose leaves. The
mother steals from the grave to hap and comfort her orphan children;
their harsh stepmother neglects and ill-treats them, and their exceeding
bitter and desolate cry has penetrated beneath the sod, and reached the
dead ear. In _The Clerk's Sons o' Owsenford_, and in that singular
fragment of the same creepy theme, recovered by Scott, _The Wife of
Usher's Well_, it is the yearning of the living mother that brings the
dead sons back to their home:
'"Blaw up the fire, my maidens,
Bring water from the well!
For a' my house shall feast this nicht,
Since my three sons are well."'
The _revenants_, silent guests with staring eyes, wait and warm
themselves by the fireside, while the 'carline wife' ministers to their
wants, and spreads her 'gay mantle' over them to keep them from the
cold, until their time comes:
'"The cock doth craw, the day doth daw,
The channerin' worm doth chide;
Gin we be missed out o' our place
A sair pain we must bide."
"Lie still, be still a little wee while,
Lie still but if we may;
Gin my mother should miss us when she wakes,
She 'll gae mad, ere it be day."
O it 's they 've taen up their mother's mantle,
And they 've hung it on a pin;
"O lang may ye hing, my mother's mantle,
Ere ye hap us again."'
A chill air as from the charnel-house seems to breathe upon us while
reading the lines; the coldness, the darkness, and the horror of death
have never been painted for us with more terrible power than in the
'Wiertz Gallery' of the old balladists.
We feel this also in the ballads of the type of _Sweet William and May
Margaret_, quoted in Beaumont and Fletcher's _Knight of the Burning
Pestle_, where the dead returns to claim back a plighted word; and at
the same time we feel the strength of the perfect love that triumphs
over death and casts out fear:
'"Is there any room at your head, Willie,
Or any room at your feet,
Or any room at your side, Willie,
Wherein that I may creep?"'
How miserably the poetical taste of the early part of last century
misappreciated the spirit of the ancient ballad, preferring the dross to
the fine gold, and tricking out the 'terrific old Scottish tale,' as
Sir Walter Scott calls it, in meretricious ornament, may be seen by
comparing the original copies with that 'elegant' composition of David
Mallet, _William and Margaret_, so praised and popular in its day, in
which every change made is a disfigurement of the nature of an outrage.
Read the summons of the ghost, still 'naked of ornament and simple':
'"O sweet Marg'ret, O dear Marg'ret!
I pray thee speak to me;
Gie me my faith and troth, Marg'ret,
As I gae it to thee,"'
along with the 'improved' version:
'"Awake!" she cried, "thy true love calls,
Come from her midnight grave;
Now let thy pity hear the maid
Thy love refused to save."'
Of a long antiquity most of these Mythological Ballads must be, if not
in their actual phraseology, in the dark superstitions they embody and
in the pathetic glimpses they afford us of the thoughts and fears and
hopes of the men and women of the days of long ago--the days before
feudalism; the days, as some inquisitors of the ballad assure us, when
religion was a kind of fetichism or ancestor worship, when the laws were
the laws of the tribe or family, and when the cannibal feast may have
been among the customs of the race. We cannot find a time when this
inheritance of legend was not old; when it was not sung, and committed
to memory, and handed down to later generations in some rude rhyme. The
leading 'types' were in the wallet of Autolycus; and he describes
certain of them with a seasoning of his grotesque humour, to his simple
country audience. There were the well-attested tale of the _Usurer's
Wife_, a ballad sung, as ballads are wont, 'to a very doleful
tune'--obviously a form of the Supernatural Birth; and the story, true
as it is pitiful, of the fish that turned to woman, and then back again
to fish, in which he that runs may read an example from the Mermaid
Cycle. They are to be found to-day, often in debased and barely
recognisable guise, in the hands of the peripatetic ballad-mongers who
still haunt fairs and sing in the streets, and in the memories of
multitudes of country folks who know scarce any other literature bearing
the magic trademark of Old Romance.