CONCLUSION
Though long on Time's dark whirlpool tossed,
The song is saved; the bard is lost.
_The Ettrick Shepherd._
Ballad poetry is a phrase of elastic and variable meaning. In the
national repertory there are Ballads Satirical, Polemical, and
Political, and even Devotional and Doctrinal, of as early date as many
of the songs inspired by the spirit of Love, War, and Romance. Among
them they represent the diverse strands that are blended in the Scottish
character--the sombre and the bright; the prose and the poetry. The one
or the other has predominated in the expression of the genius of the
nation in verse, according to the circumstances and mood of the time.
But neither has ever been really absent; they are the opposite sides of
the same shield. It is not proposed to enter here into the ballad
literature of the didactic type--the 'ballads with a purpose'--either by
way of characterisation or example. In further distinction from the
authors of the specimens of old popular song, the writers of many or
most of them are known to us, at least by name, and are among the most
honoured and familiar in our literature.
Towards the unlettered bards of the traditional ballads, who 'saved
other names, but left their own unsung,' the more serious and
self-conscious race of poets who wrote satire and allegory and homily on
the same model have generally thought themselves entitled to assume an
attitude of superiority and even of disapproval. The verse of those
self-taught rhymers was rude and simple, and wanting in those
conventional ornaments, borrowed from classic or other sources, which
for the time being were the recognised hallmarks of poesy; the moral
lessons it taught were not apparent, nor even discoverable. It is
curious to note how early this tone of reprobation, of contempt, or at
best of kindly condescension on the part of the official priesthood of
letters towards the humble tribe of balladists asserts itself, and how
long it endures.
Even Edmund Spenser, as quoted by Scott in the _Minstrelsy_, reproves
the Irish bards and rhymsters, as he might have done their Scottish
brethren, because 'for little reward or the share of a stolen cow' they
'seldom use to choose the doings of good men for the arguments of their
poems,' but, on the contrary, those of such men as live 'lawlessly and
licentiously upon stealths and spoyles,' whom they praise to the people,
and set up as an example to young men. A poetaster of the beginning of
the seventeenth century prays his printer that his book 'be not with
your Ballads mixt,' and that 'it come not brought on pedlars' backs to
common Fairs'--a prayer fulfilled to the letter. And down even to our
own century, a host of collectors, adaptors, and imitators have spoken
patronisingly of the elder ballads, and foisted on them additions and
ornaments that have not always or often been improvements.
The whirligig of time has brought in its revenges; and the final
judgment passed by posterity upon the respective claims of the formal
verse and the 'unpremeditated lay' of earlier centuries, has in large
measure reversed that of the age in which they were born. The former,
and particularly where it undertook to scourge the vices, the heresies,
and the follies of the period, lacks entirely that air of simplicity and
spontaneity--that 'wild-warlock' lilt, that 'wild happiness of thought
and expression'--which, in the phrase of Robert Burns, marks 'our native
manner and language' in ballad poetry certainly not less than in lyrical
song. The laureated bard, honoured of the Court and blessed by the
Church, is deposed from his pride of place, in the affections and
remembrance of the people at least, while the chant of the unknown
minstrel of 'the hedgerow and the field' goes sounding on in deeper and
widening volume through the great heart of the race, and is hailed as
the one true ballad voice.
Among the subjects which the Moral and Satirical Ballad selected for
censure were, it will be seen, the themes and the heroes of the humble
broadsheets sung at the common fairs and carried in the pedlar's pack.
Nor are we to wonder at this. Much of the contents of that pack is
better forgotten. Much even of what has been preserved might have been
allowed to drop into oblivion, without loss to posterity and with gain
to the character and reputation of the 'good old times.' The
balladists--those of the early broadsheets at least--could be gross on
occasion; although, it must be owned, not more gross than the dramatists
of Elizabethan and Restoration times, and even the novelists of last
century, sometimes deigned to be. In particular, they made the mistake,
of venerable date and not quite unknown to this day, of confounding
humour with coarseness. A humorous ballad is usually a thing to be
fingered gingerly. Yet, although (partly for the reason hinted at)
humour has been said not to be a strongly marked element of the flower
of our ballad poetry, there are many of the best of them that have
imbedded in them a rich and genuine vein of comic wit or broad fun; and
there are also what may be classed as Humorous Ballads proper (or
improper as the case may be), which reflect more plainly and frankly,
perhaps, than any other department of our literature, the customs,
character, and amusements of the commonalty, and have exercised an
important influence on the national poets and poetry of a later day.
Of the blending of the humorous with the romantic, an excellent example
is found in the ballad of _Earl Richard and the Carl's Daughter_. The
Princess, disguised in beggar's duds, keeps on the hook the deluded and
disgusted knight, who has unwillingly taken her up behind him, and with
wilful and lively wit draws for him pictures of the squalid home and
fare with which she is familiar, until it is her good time and pleasure
to undeceive him:
'She said, "Good-e'en, ye nettles tall,
Where ye grow at the dyke;
If the auld carline my mother was here
Sae weel 's she wad ye pike.
How she wad stap ye in her poke,
I wot she wadna fail;
And boil ye in her auld brass pan,
And o' ye mak' good kail."
. . . . .
"Awa', awa', ye ill woman,
Your vile speech grieveth me;
When ye hide sae little for yoursel'
Ye 'll hide far less for me."
"Gude-e'en, gude-e'en, ye heather berries,
As ye grow on yon hill;
If the auld carline and her bags were here,
I wot she would get her fill.
Late, late at night I knit our pokes,
Wi' four-and-twenty knots;
And in the morn, at breakfast-time
I 'll carry the keys o' your locks."
. . . . .
"But if you are a carl's daughter,
As I take you to be,
Where did you get the gay clothing
In greenwood was on thee?"
"My mother she 's a poor woman,
But she nursed earl's children three,
And I got it from a foster-sister,
To beguile such sparks as thee."'
Of the ballads descriptive of old country sports and merry-making that
have come down to us, the most famous are _Christ's Kirk on the Green_
and _Peblis to the Play_. They lead us back to times when life in
Scotland was not such a 'serious' thing as it afterwards became--when,
under the patronage of the Court or of the Church, Miracle-plays or
Moralities were played on the open sward in such places of resort for
gentle and simple as Falkland and Stirling and Peebles and Cupar; and
the strain of the more solemn mumming was relieved for the benefit of
the common folks, by rough jests, horse-play, and dancing, in which
their betters freely joined. No doubt it was a piece of sage church and
state policy to keep the minds of the people off the dangerous questions
that began to be stirring in them, by aid of these scenes of 'dancing
and derray,' and of almost Rabelaisian fits of mirth and laughter, the
savour of which remained long after they had been placed under the ban
of a sterner ecclesiastical rule.
Leslie in Fife and Leslie in Aberdeen are competitors for having given
the inspiration to _Christ's Kirk on the Green_, to which Allan Ramsay
afterwards added a second part in the same vein. But whether these
passages of boisterous merriment, in which 'licht-skirtit lasses and
girning gossips' play their part happed under the green Lomond or at
Dunideer, there can be no question of the national popularity which the
piece long enjoyed. Pope declared that a Scot would fight in his day for
its superiority over English ballads; and the author of _Tullochgorum_,
in a letter to Robert Burns, tells us that at the age of twelve he had
it by heart, and had even tried to turn it into Latin verse. In _Peblis
to the Play_, the fun is not less nimble although it is a whit more
restrained; there is an infectious spirit of spring-time and gaiety in
the strain that sings of the festal gathering at Beltane, when burgesses
and country folks fared forth 'be firth and forest,' all 'graithed full
gay' to take part in the sports. 'All the wenches of the west' were up
and stirring by cock-crow, selecting, rejecting, or comparing their
tippets, hoods, and curches. Not only Peebles, but
'Hop-Kailzie, and Cardronow,
Gaderit out thick-fald,
With "Hey and how rohumbelow"
The young folk were full bald.
The bag-pipe blew, and they out-threw
Out of the townis untald,
Lord, what a shout was them amang
Quhen thai were ower the wald
Their west
Of Peblis to the play!'
From a phrase used by John Major, it has been suggested that James I. of
Scots was the writer of this poem; and a note on the Bannatyne MS. of
_Christ's Kirk_ attributes that companion poem to the same royal
authorship. In spite of the adverse judgment pronounced by Professors
Guest and Skeat, it does not seem an inconceivable thing that the
monarch who wrote the _King's Quair_, and whose daughter kissed the
lips of Alain Chartier as the reward of France for his sweet singing,
should have written these strains descriptive of rural jollity in
localities where the court and sovereign are known to have often
resorted for hunting and other diversion. The cast and language of the
poems appear, however, to belong to a later date; and the quaint stanza,
afterwards employed in a modified form with such effect by Fergusson and
Burns, is that used by Alexander Scot in _The Justing at the Drum_, and
in other burlesque pieces of the early or middle period of the sixteenth
century.
A much more taking tradition is that which assigns them to the
adventure-loving 'Commons King,' James V. They are thoroughly after the
'humour'--using the word in the Elizabethan as well as in the ordinary
sense--of the wandering 'Red Tod'; who has also been held to be the
inspirer, if not the author, of those excellent humorous ballads--among
the best of their kind to be found in any language--_The Gaberlunzie
Man_ and _The Jolly Beggar_.
From the moral point of view, these pieces may, perhaps, come under
Spenser's condemnation of the rhymers who sing of amatory adventures in
which love is no sooner asked than it is granted. But the balladist
carries everything before him by the verve and good humour and pawky wit
of his song. There are touches worthy of the comedy spirit of Moliere in
the description, in _The Gaberlunzie Man_, of the good-wife's alternate
blessing and banning as she makes her morning discoveries about the
'silly poor man' whom she has lodged over night:
'She gaed to the bed whair the beggar lay;
The strae was cauld, he was away;
She clapt her hands, cry'd, "Dulefu' day!
For some of our gear will be gane."
Some ran to coffer and some to kist,
But nought was stown that could be mist,
She danced her lane, cry'd, "Praise be blest,
I 've lodg'd a leal poor man.
Since naething awa, as we can learn,
The kirn 's to kirn, and milk to yearn,
Gae but the house, lass, and waken my bairn,
And bid her come quickly ben."
The servant gaed where the dochter lay--
The sheets were cauld, she was away;
And fast to the goodwife did say
"She 's aff wi' the gaberlunzie man."
"O fy gar ride, and fy gar rin,
And haste ye, find these traitors again;
For she 's be burnt, and he 's be slain,
The wearifu' gaberlunzie man."'
_The Jolly Beggar_ is a variation of the same tale from the book of the
moonlight rovings of the 'Guidman o' Ballengeich,' with the same vigour
and lively humour, and with the bloom of the old ballad minstrelsy upon
it besides:
'He took his horn from his side,
And blew baith loud and shrill,
And four-and-twenty belted knights
Came skipping o'er the hill.
And he took out his little knife,
Loot a' his duddies fa';
And he stood the brawest gentleman
That was amang them a'.'
Other excellent specimens of old Scottish humour have come down to us in
ballad form, some of them made more familiar to our ears in modernised
versions or paraphrases in which, along with the roughnesses, much of
the force and quaint drollery of the originals has been smoothed away.
Of such is _The Wyf of Auchtermuchty_, a Fife ballad, full of local
colour and character, the production of 'Sir John Moffat,' a sixteenth
century priest, who loved a merry jest, and of whom we know barely more
than the name. With so many other precious fragments of our national
poetry, it is preserved in the collection of George Bannatyne, the
namefather of the Bannatyne Club, who beguiled the tedium of his
retirement in time of plague by copying down the popular verse of his
day. It is the progenitor of _John Grumlie_, and gives us a lively
series of pictures of the housewifery and the husbandry, as well as the
average human nature of the time, class, and locality to which it
belongs. The proverb, 'The more the haste the less the speed,' has never
been more humorously illustrated than in the troubles of the lazy
guidman who 'weel could tipple oot a can, and neither lovit hunger nor
cauld,' and who fancied that he could more easily play the housewife's
part:
'Then to the kirn that he did stour,
And jumbled at it till he swat;
When he had jumblit ane lang hour,
The sorrow crap of butter he gat.
Albeit nae butter he could get,
Yet he was cumbered wi' the kirn;
And syne he het the milk ower het,
That sorrow spark o' it wad yearn.'
Of the same racy domestic type are the still popular, _The Barrin' o'
the Door, Hame cam' oor Guidman at e'en_, to which, with needless
ingenuity, it has been sought to give a Jacobite significance, and
_Allan o' Maut_, an allegorical account of the genesis of 'barley bree.'
Of this last, also, Bannatyne has noted a version which was probably in
vogue in the first half of the sixteenth century. Even the hand of
Burns, who has produced, in _John Barleycorn_, the final form of the
ballad, could not give us more vigorous and trenchant Scots than is
contained in the verses of this venerable rhyme in Jamieson's
collection:
'He first grew green, syne grew he white,
Syne a' men thocht that he was ripe;
And wi' crookit gullies and hafts o' tree,
They 've hew'd him down, right dochtilie.
. . . . .
The hollin souples, that were sae snell,
His back they loundert, mell for mell,
Mell for mell, and baff for baff,
Till his hide flew round his lugs like chaff.'
Three (if not four) generations of the Semples of Beltrees carried the
tradition of this homely type of native poetry, with its strong gust and
relish of life, and the Dutch-like breadth and fidelity of its pictures
of the character and humours of common folk, over the period from the
Scottish Reformation to the Revolution; and are remembered by such
pieces as _The Packman's Paternoster_, _The Piper o' Kilbarchan_, _The
Blithesome Bridal_, and, best and most characteristic of all, _Maggie
Lauder_.
The 'business of the Reformation of Religion' did not go well with
ballad-making or with the roystering fun of the fair and the play. In
the stern temper to which the nation was wrought in the struggle to cast
out abuses in the faith and practice of the Church and to assert liberty
of judgment, the feigned adventures of knights and the sorrows of
love-crossed maids seemed to cease for a time to exercise their spell
over the fancy of the people. The open-air gatherings and junketings on
feast and saints' days, with their attendant mirth and music, were too
closely associated with the old ecclesiastical rule, and had too many
scandals and excesses connected with them, to escape censure from the
new Mentors and conscience-keepers of the nation. When, a little later,
the spirit of Puritanism came in, mirth and music, and more particularly
the dance, became themselves suspect. They savoured of the follies of
this world, and were among the wiles most in use by the Wicked One in
snaring souls. The flowers were cut down along with the weeds by those
root-and-branch men--only to spring up again, both of them, in due
season, more luxuriantly than ever.
There were other and cogent reasons why the exploits of 'Jock o' the
Side' and his confreres should be frowned upon and listened to with
impatience. The time for Border feud and skirmish was already well-nigh
past. Industry and knowledge and the pacific arts of life were making
progress. The moss-trooper was already becoming an anachronism and a
pestilent nuisance, to be put down by the relentless arm of the law,
before the Union of the Crowns. Half a century or more before that
event, this opinion had been formed of the reiving clans by their
quieter and more thoughtful neighbours, as is manifest from the biting
allusions of Sir David Lyndsay and Sir Richard Maitland. But after King
James's going to England, even the balladists were chary of lifting up a
voice in praise of the freebooters of the former Marches. Men were busy
finding and fitting themselves to new ideals of patriotism and duty. The
gift and the taste for ballad poetry disappeared, or rather went into
retirement for a time, to reappear in other forms at a later call of
loyalty and romanticism.
The _Gude and Godlie Ballates_ of the Wedderburns had been deliberately
produced and circulated by the Reformers, with the avowed intention, as
Sheriff Mackay says, of 'driving the old amatory and romantic ballads
out of the field, and substituting spiritual songs, set to the same
tunes--much as revivalists of the present day have adopted older secular
melodies.' But nothing enduring is to be done, in the field of poetry,
by mere dint of determination and good intent. If the older songs
succumbed for a time to the new spiritual melodies, we may feel sure
that it was not without a struggle. On the Borders and in the Highlands,
the Original Adam asserted himself, in deed and in song, long after the
more sober mind of Fife, Lanark, and the West Country had given itself
up to the solution of the new theological and ecclesiastical problems
which time and change had brought to the nation. The Reformers
complained that the fighting clans of the Western Marches could only
with difficulty be induced to turn their thoughts from the hereditary
business of the quarrel of the Kingdoms to take up instead the quarrel
of the Kirk. Even so late as the Covenanting period, Richard Cameron
found it hard work 'to set the fire of hell to the tails' of the
Annandale men. They came to the field meetings 'out of mere curiosity,
to see a minister preach in a tent, and people sit on the ground'--in a
spirit not unlike that in which the people used to gather at _Peblis to
the Play_ or _Christ's Kirk on the Green_, to mingle a pinch of piety
and priestly Moralities with a bellyful of carnal delights. It was not
until the preacher had denounced them as 'offspring of thieves and
robbers,' that some of them began to 'get a merciful cast.'
This, too, changed in the course of time, and having once caught fire,
the religious enthusiasm of the marchmen kindled into a brilliant glow,
or smouldered with a fervent heat. They flung themselves into the front
of Kirk controversy, as they did also into more peaceable pursuits, such
as sheep-farming and tweed manufacture, with the same hearty energy
which aforetime was expended upon raids into Cumberland and
Northumberland.
But through all the changes and distractions of the three centuries
since the Warden's men met with merriment and parted with blows at the
Reidswire, the old ballad music--the voice of the blood; the very speech
and message of the hills and streams--has sounded like a softly-played
accompaniment to the strenuous labour of the race with hand and head--a
reminder of the men and the thoughts of 'the days of other years.' At
times, in the strife of Church or State, or in the chase of gain, the
magic notes of this 'Harp of the North' may have sunk low, may have
become nigh inaudible. But in the pauses when the nation could listen to
the rhythmic beat of its own heart, the sound has made itself heard and
felt like the noise of many waters or the sough of the wind in the
tree-tops; it is music that can never die out of the land. Its echo has
never been wholly missed by Dee and Earn and Girvan; certainly never by
Yarrow and Teviot and Tweed. The 'Spiritual Songs'--the 'Gude and Godlie
Ballates'--are lost, or are remembered only by the antiquary; not indeed
because they were spiritual, or because they were written by worthy men
with good intent--for the Scottish Psalms, sung to their traditional
melodies, touch a still deeper chord in the natural breast than the
ballads--but because they lacked the sap of life, the beauty and the
passion of nature's own teaching, which only can give immortality to
song. There is a 'Harp of the Covenant', and in it there are piercing
wails wrung from a people almost driven frantic with suffering and
oppression. But the popular lays of the civil wars and commotions of
the seventeenth century are few in number, and singularly wanting in
those touches of grace and tenderness and kindly humour that somehow
accompany the very roughest and most trenchant of the earlier ballads,
like the bloom and fragrance that adorn the bristling thickets of the
native whin on the slopes of the Eildons or Arthur Seat. The times were
harsh and crabbed, and the song they yielded was like unto themselves.
There are ballads of the _Battle of Pentland_, of _Bothwell Brig_, of
_Killiecrankie_, and, to make a leap into another century, of
_Sheriffmuir_. But they are memorable for the passion of hatred and
scorn that is in them, rather than for their merits as poetry--for
girdings, from one side or the other, at 'cruel Claver'se' and the
red-shanked Highlandmen that slew the hope of the Covenant, or at the
'Riven hose and ragged hools,
Sour milk and girnin' gools,
Psalm beuks and cutty stools'
of Whiggery.
After a time of dearth, however, Scottish poetry began to revive; and
one of the earliest signs was the attention that began to be paid to the
anonymous ballads of the country. It is curious that the first printed
collection of them should have been almost contemporary with that
merging of the Parliaments of the two kingdoms, which, according to the
fears and beliefs of the time, was to have made an end of the
nationality and identity of the smaller and poorer of the countries. It
was in 1706--the year before the Union--that James Watson's _Serious and
Comic Scots Poems_ made their appearance, prompted, conceivably, by the
impulse to grasp at what seemed to be in danger of being lost.
Of infinitely greater importance in the history of our ballad literature
was the appearance, some eighteen years later, of Allan Ramsay's
_Evergreen_ and _Tea-Table Miscellany_. It was a fresh dawning of
Scottish poetry. Warmth, light, and freedom seemed to come again into
the frozen world. The blithe and genial spirit of the black-avised
little barber-poet was itself the greatest imaginable contrast to the
soured Puritanism and prim formalism that for half a century and more
had infested the national letters. But the author of _The Gentle
Shepherd_ himself--and small blame to him--did not fully comprehend the
nature and extent of his mission. He did not wholly rid himself from the
prevalent idea that the simple natural turn of the old verse was naked
rudeness which it was but decent and charitable to deck with the
ornaments of the time before it could be made presentable in polite
society; indeed he himself, in later editions especially, tried his hand
boldly at emendation, imitation, and continuation.
For a generation or two longer, the ballad suffered from these
attentions of the modish muse. Yet the original spark of inspiration was
not extinct; in the Border valleys especially--its native country, as
we have called it--there were strains that 'bespoke the harp of ancient
days.' Of Lady Grizel Baillie's lilts, composed at 'Polwarth on the
Green' or at Mellerstain--classic scenes of song and of legend, both of
them--mention has been made; they have on them the very dew of homely
shepherd life, closed about by the hills, of 'forest charms decayed and
pastoral melancholy.' The Wandering Violer, also, 'Minstrel Burne,' from
whom Scott may have taken the hint of the 'last of all the bards who
sang of Border chivalry'--caught an echo, in _Leader Haughs_, of the
grief and changes 'which fleeting Time procureth.'
'For many a place stands in hard case
Where blyth folks ken'd nae sorrow,
With Humes that dwelt on Leaderside,
And Scotts that wonned in Yarrow.'
His song, with its notes of native sweetness and its artificial
garnishing of classic allusions, marks the passing of the old ballad
style into the new.
Jane Elliot, too, a descendant of that Gibbie Elliot--'the laird of
Stobs, I mean the same'--who refused to come to the succour of Telfer's
kye, listened to the murmuring of the 'mining Rule' and looked up
towards the dark skirt and threatening top of Ruberslaw, as she crooned
the old fragment which her fancy shaped into that lilting before
daybreak of the lasses at the ewe-milking, turned ere night into wailing
for the lost Flowers of the Forest. Her contemporary, Mrs. Cockburn,
who wrote the more hackneyed set of the same Border lament, was of the
ancient race of Rutherford of Wauchope in the same romantic Border
district,--a district wherein James Thomson, of _The Seasons_, spent his
childhood from almost his earliest infancy, and where the prototype of
Scott's Dandie Dinmont, James Davidson of 'Note o' the Gate,' sleeps
sound under a green heap of turf. To trace the Teviotdale dynasty of
song further in the female line, Mrs. Cockburn's niece, Mrs. Scott, was
that 'guidwife o' Wauchope-house,' who addressed an ode to her 'canty,
witty, rhyming ploughman,' Robert Burns, with an invitation to visit her
on the Border--an invitation which the poet accepted, and on the way
thither, as he relates, chanced upon 'Esther (Easton), a very remarkable
woman for reciting poetry of all kinds, and sometimes making Scots
doggerel of her own.'
Meanwhile, in other parts of the country, the search for and the study
of the remains of the old and popular poetry was making progress. With
this had come a truer appreciation of its beauty and its spirit, and the
return of a measure of the earlier gift of spontaneous song. The fancy
of Scotland was kindled by the tale of the '45. Her poetic heart beat in
sympathy with the 'Lost Cause'--after it was finally lost; even while
her reason and judgment remained, on the whole, true to the side and to
the principles that were victorious. Men who were almost Jacobin in
their opinion--Robert Burns is a prime example--became Jacobite when
they donned their singing robes. The faults and misdeeds of the Stewarts
were forgotten in their misfortunes. In the gallant but ruinous 'cast
for the crown' of the native dynasty, the national lyre found once more
a theme for song and ballad. 'Drummossie moor, Drummossie day' drew
laments as for another Flodden; and 'Johnnie Cope,' in his flight from
the field of Prestonpans, was pursued more relentlessly by mocking
rhymes than by Highland claymores.
A rush of Jacobite song, which had the great good fortune to be wedded
to music not less witching than itself, followed rather than attended
the Rebellion; and has become among the most precious and permanent of
the nation's possessions in the sphere of poetry. Whichever side had the
better in the sword-play, there can be no doubt which has won the
triumph in the piping. Song and music have given the Stewart cause its
revenge against fortune; and Prince Charlie, and not Cumberland, will
remain for all time the hero of the cycle of song that commemorates the
last romantic episode in our domestic annals. Jacobite poetry has been
lyrical for the most part. But the ballad--narrative in form and
dramatic in spirit--has not been neglected.
In a host of singers, Caroline Oliphant, Baroness Nairne, wears the
laurel crown of the Jacobite Muse, and Strathearn is the chief centre of
inspiration. But the authoress of _The Auld Hoose_, and _The Land o' the
Leal_, also wrote ballads of cheery and pawky, yet 'genty' humour that
have caught and held the popular ear, as witness the immortal _Laird of
Cockpen_. Hamilton of Bangour, who was 'out' in the '45, had struck anew
the lyre of Yarrow in _Busk ye, busk ye!_ Fife could already 'cock her
crest' over Elizabeth Halkett, Lady Wardlaw, a balladist whose verse,
acknowledged and unacknowledged, had many genuine touches 'of the
antique manner;' and Lady Anne Barnard, a granddaughter of Colin, Earl
of Balcarres, whose career was one of the romances of the '15 and of the
House of Lindsay, was able to tell Sir Walter Scott, so late as 1823,
the story of the conception and birth of her _Auld Robin Gray_, which
also, on its first anonymous appearance, was taken by some as 'a very,
very ancient ballad, composed perhaps by David Rizzio.' As with so many
other ballads--perhaps as with most of them--the inspiration of the
words was caught from a beautiful and still older air--'an ancient
Scotch melody,' says Lady Anne, 'of which I was passionately fond; Sophy
Johnstone used to sing it to us at Balcarres.' The date of this, perhaps
the sweetest of our modern ballads, is fixed approximately by the gifted
writer 'as soon after the close of the year 1771'--perhaps the first
approach that can be made to the timing a ballad's birth.
Walter Scott, also, was born in the latter half of 1771. Burns was then
fifteen years of age, 'beardless, young, and blate,' but already, as he
wrote to the 'guidwife of Wauchope-house,' with
'The elements o' sang
In formless jumble right an' wrang
Wild floating in his brain.'
Already the wish was 'strongly heaving the breast' of that young
Ayrshire ploughman,
'That I, for poor auld Scotland's sake
Some usefu' plan or beuk could make,
Or sing a sang at least.'
Galloway had by this time taken up again its rough old lyre. Away in the
North--in the Mearns and in Buchan, old homes of the ballad--the
Reverend John Skinner had written his genial songs of _Tullochgorum_,
_The Ewie wi' the Crookit Horn_ and the rest, that seem to thrill with
the piercing and stirring notes of fiddle and pipes, being moved
thereto, as he has told us, by his daughters, 'who, being all good
singers, plagued me for words to their favourite tunes.' Fergusson was
celebrating, in an old stanza, shortly to be made world-famous, the high
jinks on Leith Links. Everywhere, from the Moray Firth to the Cheviots,
and from the East Neuk of Fife to Maidenkirk, there were preludings for
the new and splendid burst of Scottish song, that by and by broke from
the banks of Ayr and Doon. The service rendered by the genius of Burns
in quickening and purifying Scottish song and ballad poetry has often
been acknowledged. It was, indeed, beyond all measure and praise. But
recognition, has not, perhaps, been made so fully and frequently of what
our 'King of Song' owed to the popular poetry of country people and
elder times--and notably to the ballads--that have been handed down by
memory rather than books. His was not an isolated phenomenon, blazing up
meteor-like without visible cause or prompting. His poetry is rather the
culminating effect of an impulse that had been making itself felt for
generations. It was like one of those grand bale-fires of the days of
peril and watching, whose sudden gleam made the blood stir in the veins,
and turned men's faces skywards, but which caught its message from
distant points of light that to us seem almost swallowed in the
surrounding darkness.
Burns had an inimitable ear for ballad feeling and for ballad rhythm and
music. But, except for some vigorous satiric, political, and
bacchanalian chants of his own, and the recasting of a few of the
old-fashioned and lively rhymes like _The Carl o' Kellyburn Braes_ that
were not out of the need of being cleaned and furbished to please a more
fastidious age, he could scarcely be called a ballad writer. His special
sphere in the restoration and preservation of the old was in lyrical
poetry. What Robert Burns achieved for the songs, however, Walter Scott
did for the ballads and prose legends of Scotland. The appearance of the
_Border Minstrelsy_ makes 1802 the red-letter year in the later annals
of the Scottish Ballad. More than twenty years before, the little lame
boy, with the good blood of two Border clans, the Scotts and the
Rutherfords, in his veins, had lain on the braes of Sandyknowe, and had
drunk in through all his senses the history and romance of the
Borderland. He had heard from the 'aged hind,' or at the 'winter
hearth,' the old tales of woe and mirth; wild conjurings of superstition
or real events that, although nearer then by a hundred years than they
are to-day, had already been magnified, distorted, glorified in passing
through the medium of the popular memory. His dreaming fancy did the
rest. Looking from his point of vantage across the fair valley of the
Tweed to the blue chain of Cheviot, every notch in which was 'a gate and
passage of the thief,' every fold below it, the site of some battle or
story of old,
'Over Tweed's fair flood, and Mertoun's wood,
And all down Teviotdale,'
he was able to repeople the scene as it was when ballad romance was not
only written but lived:
'I marvelled as the aged hind
With some strange tale bewitched my mind,
Of forayers, who with headlong force
Down from that strength had spurred their horse.
. . . . .
And ever, by the winter hearth,
Old tales I heard of woe or mirth,
Of lovers' slights, of ladies charms,
Of witches' spells, of warriors' arms;
Of patriot battles won of old
By Wallace wight and Bruce the bold.'
There could not have been a more 'meet nurse for a poetic child' than
the green slopes, the black rocks, and the grey keep, reflected in its
still 'lochan,' of Scott's ancestral home at Sandyknowe. Dryburgh,
Melrose, and Kelso, are hidden in the valley below. The huge square
tower of Hume--'Willie Wastle's' castle--stands on the same sky-line as
Smailholm peel itself, keeping guard along with it over the passes and
marches of the ancient Scottish Kingdom. Wrangholm is near by, where St.
Cuthbert dreamed and played boyish sports before he set forth on his
mission to christianise Northumbria. Bemerside, the Broom o' the
Cowdenknowes, and the Rhymer's Tower are not far off; Huntly Bank is
also where True Thomas lay alone listening to the throstle and the jay,
under the Eildon tree, and
'Was war of a lady gay
Come rydyng ouyr a fair le';
Mellerstain, whence the hero of _James Haitlie_ rode to find favour in
the eyes of the king's daughter, and where Grizel Hume and the
Mellerstain Maid afterwards sung notes as wild and sweet and fresh as
ever came from fairyland; and many a famous spot besides. The
three-headed Eildons are in sight, with Dunion, Ruberslaw, Penielheugh,
Minto Crags, Lilliard's Edge, and all the Border high places. Here
Scott's poetic fancy was born; and he paid it only to the tribute that
was due when he made it the scene of the finest of the modern ballads of
its class, the _Eve of St. John_. As a shrine of pilgrimage for the
lover of ballad lore, Smailholm and Sandyknowe should rank next after,
if they should not take precedence of the Vale of Yarrow. Six years
before Scott's birth, while Burns was just a toddler, Bishop Percy's
_Reliques_ had seen the light. The chief gathering ground of this
celebrated collection was on the English side of the Border, but was not
confined to ballad poetry. But it brought to some of the choicest of our
ballads, such as _Sir Patrick Spens_, a fame and vogue such as they had
never before enjoyed in the world without; and it profoundly influenced
the poetic thought and taste of Scotland, as of every land where song
was loved and English speech was spoken. One effect was seen in the more
strictly Scottish collections of fragments of ballad verse that began
soon after to issue from the press. Herd's, the 'first classical
collection of Scottish songs and ballads,' as Scott calls it, appeared
in 1769; that of Lord Hailes 1770; and Pinkerton's in 1781 and 1783. The
publication in 1787 of the first volume of Johnson's _Museum_ was one of
the fruitful results to the national poetry and music of the visit of
Robert Burns to Edinburgh; but the impulse that brought it to the light
can be traced back by sure lines to Percy. Ritson's learned labours in a
still wider field came forth between 1780 and 1794; and Sibbald's
_Chronicle_ was of the same year as the _Border Minstrelsy_.
The age of ballad collection and collation had fairly set in. But this
does not deprive the _Minstrelsy_ of the praise that, with the beginning
of a new century, it ensured that the search for and rescue from
oblivion of the old ballads should thenceforth be a business which, not
alone the antiquary and the poet, but the whole people should make their
concern. Jamieson's _Popular Ballads_ followed in 1806; and, after a
pause, filled up with the appearance of fresh volumes and fresh editions
of the earlier collections, the works of Kinloch, Motherwell, and Buchan
came with a rush, in the years 1827-8.
Of these, and other repertories of the national ballads, the number is
legion, and the merits and methods as varied and diverse. There is not
space to discuss and compare them, even were discussion and comparison
part of the present plan. Such treatment is apt to reduce a book on
ballads and balladists to what Charles G. Leland terms 'mere logarithmic
tables of variants.' First came the harvesters; and then those who were
content to glean where the others had left. As matter of course and of
necessity the readings, and even the structure of the pieces picked up
from oral recitation and singing, presented endless points of difference
according to the locality and to the individual singer or collector. As
has been said, each old piece of popular poetry, before it has been
fixed in print, and even after, takes a certain part of its colour and
character from the minds and memories through which it has been
strained. As an illustration of this, in another field, one might
mention that Pastor Hurt, when he set about, a few years ago, gathering
the fragments of Esthonian folk literature, obtained contributions from
633 different collectors, most of them simple peasants, and as the
result of three and a half years' work, he brought together 'of epics,
lyrics, wedding songs, etc., upwards of 20,000 specimens; of tales about
3000; of proverbs about 18,000; of riddles, about 20,000, besides a
large collection of magical formulae, superstitions, and the like.' These
figures include variants of the same tale or ballad theme, of which
there were in some cases as many as 160.
The Scottish ballads may scarce be so multitudinous and protean a host
as this. But the search for them, and the choice of them when
discovered, have given infinite exercise to the industry, the judgment,
and the patience of successive editors; and literature has no more
curious and romantic chapter than that which deals with ballad
collecting and collectors. The latter, in Scotland as elsewhere, have
not been free from the human liability to err--few men have been less
so. As Percy admitted _Hardyknut_ and other examples of the
pseudo-antique among his specimens of 'Old Romance Poetry,' Scott's
critical acumen did not avail to detect brazen forgeries of Surtees,
like _Barthram's Dirge_ and _The Death of Featherstonhaugh_. In Cromek's
_Relics of Galloway Song_ were somewhat palpable 'fakements' of Allan
Cunningham; William Motherwell and Peter Buchan made their egregious
blunders, and even such careful and experienced antiquaries as Joseph
Ritson and David Laing slipped on the dark and broken and intricate
paths which they sought to explore. On the whole it can hardly be
regretted that our ballad collections bear the impress of the
idiosyncrasies of the individual ballad-hunters, as well as of the game
they pursued and the district they coursed over.
Scott made his bag, as he tells us, chiefly 'during his early youth,'
among 'the shepherds and aged persons in the recesses of the Border
mountains,' who 'remembered and repeated the warlike songs of their
fathers.' They were gathered on those long pedestrian excursions, with
Shortreed or with Leyden (himself a balladist), which were themselves
often as full of incident, and of the seeds of future romance, as any
old Border raid. The great Master of Romance was, as one of his
companions said, 'makin' himsel' a' the time.' Dandie Dinmont, whom the
author of _Guy Mannering_ sketches from the traits of a dozen honest
yeomen and store farmers, whose hospitality he had shared in his rambles
through the wilds of Liddesdale, would a few generations earlier have
been a stark moss-trooper, ready to ride to the rescue of Kinmont Willie
or to seek his 'beef and kail' in the Merse. The raid on Habbie Elliot
of the Heughfoot is but a 'variant' of the lifting of Telfer's kye; and
_Wandering Willie's Tale_, if it had been cast in verse, would have been
the pick of our ballads of 'glamourie,' instead of the choicest of short
prose stories. The rhyme and air that haunted the memory of Henry
Bertram--what are they but an echo out of Scott's own romantic
youth--out of the enchanted land of ballad poetry?
'"Are these the Links of Forth," she said,
"Or are they the crooks of Dee,
Or the bonnie woods o' Warroch-head
That I so fain would see?"'
It was on one of these excursions up Ettrick that Scott forgathered with
Margaret Laidlaw, the mother of the 'Shepherd,' and the repository of an
inexhaustible store of fairy tales, songs and ballads, which, as she
declared, the compiler of the _Border Minstrelsy_ 'spoiled' by
transmitting to print. But the richest and rarest of his 'finds' was
Hogg himself. He was nursed in the lap of the Forest and cradled in
ballad and fairy lore. Here was the 'heart of pathos' of the older
poetry; the head buzzing with its wild fancies; 'the sang o' the linty
amang the broom in the spring'; and along with these the shaggy front,
the strong hand-grips, the loyalty, and the sturdy sense that are the
far-descended inheritance of the Border farmer and shepherd. Surely, to
parody his own words, those who love to listen to Allan Ramsay and Burns
and Scott, and to the nameless Balladists who were their masters and
teachers, will 'never forget a'thegither the Ettrick Shepherd.'
More important, however, even than the materials gathered by Scott from
the lips of Mrs. Hogg and other Border ballad reciters, or from the
Glenriddell MSS., was the golden mine of old poetry, for the
preservation of which he and the nation were indebted to the taste and
retentive memory of Mrs. Brown, daughter of Professor Thomas Gordon, of
King's College, Aberdeen, and wife of a minister of Falkland, in the
beginning of the century. There are in existence three MSS. of the songs
and ballads this lady was able to remember as sung to her on Deeside;
and transcription of her father's account of this precious collection,
as the story is told by him in a letter to Mr. A. Fraser Tytler, and by
him communicated to Scott, may best and most authentically explain its
origin:--
'An aunt of my children, Mrs. Farquhar, now dead, who was
married to the proprietor of a small estate near the sources of
the Dee, in Braemar, a good old woman who spent the best part of
her life among flocks and herds, resided in her latter days in
the town of Aberdeen. She was possessed of a most tenacious
memory, which retained all the songs she had heard from nurses
and country-women in that sequestered part of the country. Being
maternally fond of my children when young, she had them much
about her, and delighted them with her songs and tales of
chivalry. My youngest daughter, Mrs. Brown, at Falkland, is
blessed with a memory as good as her aunt, and has almost the
whole of her songs by heart. In conversation, I mentioned them
to your father (William Tytler, the champion of Mary Stuart) at
whose request my grandson, Mr. Scott, wrote down a parcel of
them as her aunt sung them. Being then a mere novice in music,
he added, in the copy, such musical notes as, he supposed, would
give your father some notion of the airs, or rather lilts, to
which they were sung.'
To all those whose names are mentioned in the above extract, Scotland
and poetry owe a deep debt of gratitude. But here again, although men,
and men of learning, have borne their part in the salvage, it is to the
'spindle side,' and to simple country ears and memories, that the main
acknowledgment is due for saving what it would have been a calamity to
lose. What may almost be described as the 'classical text' of some of
the finest of our ballads, is that obtained by collation of the Brown
'sets,' of which the fullest is that originally owned by Robert
Jamieson, which reappears in revised form in one of the copies possessed
by Miss Tytler. From the circumstances of its origin, this text has
something of a North Country cast, even where it deals with a South
Country theme. But the three divisions of the land, the North, the
Centre, and the South, bear a share of the credit of its preservation.
The ballads were gathered by Deeside; they were sung and recited under
Lomond Law; they were brought before the world by a Borderer.
No such 'finds' are to be looked for any longer. The ground has been for
the most part well reaped and gleaned. Only a few ears are to be picked
up that have escaped the notice of previous collectors; although, within
the last quarter of a century, in quiet corners like the Enzie and
Buchan and the Cabrach, the late Dean Christie was still able to gather
from the lips of old peasant and fisher women specimens both of ballads
and ballad airs that had never been in print. The chief work for half a
century has been that of comparing, collating, and critically annotating
the materials already found, and reference need only be made to the
monumental work in eight volumes of Professor Child, in which the
subject of the origins, affinities, variants and genuine text of both
the Scottish and English ballads has been thoroughly worked out and
brought nearly down to date.
The Ballads themselves have done a greater work. They have permeated and
revived the poetry and literature of the century like a draught of rare
old wine. The greatest of our modern poets have been proud to
acknowledge what they owe to the forgotten minstrels who have not sent
down to us out of the darkness, along with their song, so much as their
name. Wordsworth, as well as Scott, pored entranced over Percy's
_Reliques_. Coleridge, Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, and a host
besides, have drunk delight and found inspiration in the Scottish ballad
minstrelsy; and it has awakened a responsive chord in the lyre of the
poets of America. As enthusiastic old Christopher North wrote, 'Perhaps
none of us ever wrote verses of any worth who had not been more or less
readers of our old ballads.'
'The Bards are lost,
The song is saved.'