A CENTURY OF CHILDREN’S BOOKS
A CENTURY
OF CHILDREN’S BOOKS
BY
FLORENCE V. BARRY
B. LITT.
METHUEN & CO. LTD.
36 ESSEX STREET W. C.
LONDON
_First Published in 1922_
PREFACE
This book was begun at Oxford before the War, when I had the great
privilege of being a student in Sir Walter Raleigh’s class. Through his
generous encouragement, it was continued at intervals and under many
difficulties; and if he had not found some things to like in it, I should
hardly venture to put it forth in its present shape.
It is true that the interest of great men in little books (a token of
romance since the eighteenth century) is no gauge of public favour; but
the history of children’s books is in some sort a record of childhood.
Lovers of children may be willing to look through the shelves of old
nurseries, if only for the portraits.
The farther one goes upon such small business, the more intricate it
seems; and although I began with some knowledge of the treasures that
Mrs. Field had unearthed in her study of _The Child and His Book_, I had
no idea there were so many of these books, or that I should find it so
difficult to choose. In this I was helped by the older reprints, by the
collections of Mr. E. V. Lucas, and later by Mr. Harvey Darton’s chapter
in the _Cambridge History of English Literature_.
The book itself is a poor acknowledgment of my gratitude to Oxford: to
Sir Charles Firth and Mr. Nichol Smith for their advice and criticism; to
the late Mr. R. J. E. Tiddy and Mr. Percy Simpson for help in the early
stages; to Miss Helen Darbishire, Miss Janet Spens, and not least to my
fellow students at Somerville who, in the midst of serious things, found
time to be amused.
F. V. B.
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
INTRODUCTION 1
I. CHAP-BOOKS AND BALLADS 13
II. FAIRY TALES AND EASTERN STORIES 35
III. THE LILLIPUTIAN LIBRARY 58
IV. ROUSSEAU AND THE MORAL TALE 85
V. THE ENGLISH SCHOOL OF ROUSSEAU 105
VI. DEVICES OF THE MORALIST 122
VII. SOME GREAT WRITERS OF LITTLE BOOKS 147
VIII. MISS EDGEWORTH’S TALES FOR CHILDREN 175
IX. THE OLD-FASHIONED GARDEN OF VERSES 194
APPENDIX A.—NOTES AND EXTRACTS 224
” B.—CHRONOLOGICAL LIST 250
A CENTURY OF CHILDREN’S BOOKS
INTRODUCTION
To open a child’s book nowadays is to discover some part of that unknown
world which touches experience at so many points. The city beyond the
clouds, the underground country, all the enchantments of woods and
islands are open to the little traveller. From _The Water Babies_ to
_Peter Pan_ there has been little else in nursery tales but the stuff of
dreams.
It is hard to believe that the child who read the story of Rosamond and
the Purple Jar, less than a hundred years ago, had no curiosity about
dream countries, no sense of poetry in nature; yet the first sign of a
romantic movement in children’s books was the printing of unknown or
forgotten fairy tales under the title of _The Court of Oberon_, in 1823.
The actual awakening came later, with the nature stories of the Howitts
and the imaginative nonsense of Edward Lear.
A century of little books had passed before a child could read fairy
tales without shame, and the taste for true “histories” prevailed long
after Miss Edgeworth had written her last sequel.
For although there were eighteenth century chap-books that kept alive
old tales of chivalry, these had no proper place on the nursery shelves.
Books written for children were always designed to instruct as well as
to amuse, and it was only because the human interests of the eighteenth
century included children that it became a century of children’s books.
Those that survived the use of their first owners,—a little company
in old sheepskin or flowered paper covers,—are either treasured by
collectors or hidden away in some old library; but some of the best
are still to be had in reprints and collections of “Old-fashioned” or
“Forgotten” children’s books.
The new generation, pressing forward to discover more of the dream
country, cares little for tales that reflect the quiet schooling of its
ancestors; yet the most moral and instructive of these books mark the
child’s escape from a sterner school. It was on his way to the Child’s
Garden that he passed through this town of Georgian dolls’ houses, where,
indeed, he found some rare and curious things.
In the earlier centuries a child made shift with such tales as his elders
chose to tell him. There were few books that he could call his own, and
those were devised to advance him in knowledge or courtesy. Yet the monks
of the eleventh and twelfth centuries had a way of turning the natural
instincts of children to account. They taught Latin by means of imaginary
conversations, and put the raw material of wonder tales into their
instructive “Elucidarium”, a sort of primitive “Child’s Guide” which told
of fabulous beasts and gave miraculous accounts of heaven and earth.
The successors of these old schoolmasters devised a book for parents
which they might share with their children. This was the _Gesta
Romanorum_, a collection of stories put together in Latin about the
fourteenth century to serve as texts for “Moralities”. It became the
popular story-book of the Middle Ages, and a woodcut in the early
editions shows a whole family gathered round the fire on a winter night
telling stories to pass the time.
This was no book for children, even in the days before nurseries; yet it
contained variants of the Arabian Tales, a story that Chaucer afterwards
used for his “History of Constance”, and two strands of the _Merchant of
Venice_ plot.
Travellers’ tales, also shared between men and children, filled a gap
between the truthful records of King Alfred and Caxton’s new-discovered
wealth of romance. Marco Polo and other voyagers brought back stories and
fables from the East; Sir John Mandeville wrote of “the Meruayles of Ynde
and of other diuerse Coûtries”. These cross the border between truth and
fancy much as children do; but children knew them only from hearsay.
Caxton alone, had he been so minded, could have filled a child’s library;
for besides his _Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye_, he printed Sir
Thomas Malory’s _Noble Histories of King Arthur_ with many romances of
his own translating and legends and lives of Saints. He was actually the
first printer and editor of the very books which Locke, in the eighteenth
century, prescribed for children: Æsop’s _Fables_ and _The History of
Reynard the Fox_; but Caxton intended none of these for children. The
_Fables_ showed men their follies; and _Reynard_ was then a satire that
ridiculed unjust rulers under the figures of beasts. For children, he
chose the kind of books that their parents would buy: the instructive
_Parvus et Magnus Chato_, with its woodcut print of a monastery school;
_Stans Puer ad Mensam_, a museum of quaint formalities, and _The Book of
Courtesy_, addressed to “Lytyl John” in “tendre enfancye”.
Thus early did grown-up persons monopolise the pleasures of fiction,
while they prepared handbooks of learning and courtesy for youth.
Chaucer, it will be remembered, wrote a scientific treatise instead of a
story for his little boy; and _The Babees Book_, designed for the royal
wards and pages of the fifteenth century, had not a word of romance or
fable; nothing but precepts of fair behaviour, and lessons that should
teach those “Bele Babees” how to give their reasons smoothly, “in words
that are gentle but compendious”.
There were many such books, nor were they all confined to children of
gentle birth. _The Book of Courtesy_ was for the sons “of gentleman,
yeoman or knave”, and Symon’s _Lesson of Wisdom_ (1500) “for all manner
children”.
As for Caxton’s successors, they were content with his ideas about
children’s books; it was simply a choice between manners and learning.
Wynkyn de Worde, though he printed the splendid romance of _Bevis of
Southampton_, gave his child-readers a “Wyse Chylde of Thre Year Old”
that could answer the fearful question: “Sage enfaunt, how is the
skye made?”; and William Copland produced _The Secret of Secrets of
Aristotle_, “very good to teach children to read English”, while he
lavished the adventures of Guy of Warwick upon their parents.
It is true that the child of the sixteenth century had much to compensate
him for a lack of books. If he dwelt in the country, he saw _Robin
Hood_ and _St. George_ played out upon the village green, or if in a
town, he might meet with strange merchantmen in any street. He lived in
an age of practical romance, and could match you the exploits of Guy
or Bevis any day from the adventures of his neighbours. Moreover the
Elizabethan child, if he could not read the old stories, at least had a
chance of hearing them set to a new measure. Puttenham in his _Art of
English Poesie_ (1589) writes of the “Blind Harpers and such like taverne
Minstrels” who sang “stories of old time” to ballad tunes: “the tale of
Sir Topas, the reportes of Bevis of Southampton, Guy of Warwick, Adam
Bell and Clymme of the Clough, and such other old romances or historical
rimes”.
But a boy had to evade his schoolmaster before he could listen to
such things; and the schoolmaster saw to it that he had no English
story-books. The new learning, which poured out its treasures for
scholars, meant little more to the average boy than longer hours of study
and more stripes; and reformers in education, although they looked upon
him as a creature of promise, and were concerned to make his lot more
bearable, came no nearer than their predecessors to the secrets of his
mind.
Companies of schoolboy-players,—the children of the Chapel, or of
Paul’s—might make the most of such plays as they could understand; and
the Queen’s wards had times of “honest recreation” when they might tell
each other stories; but their hours with tutors and music-masters would
astonish the youth of these days.
Perhaps the happiest child of the great age of romance was the truant who
could follow some pedlar along the road. For the pedlar’s songs were more
enthralling than his “unbraided wares”; and he had ballads, such as “The
Two Children in the Wood” and “Chevy Chace”, that a child could paste
upon his nursery walls.
There was at least one writer who recognised the pedlar’s claims, and
made him the hero of an instructive book. This was Thomas Newberry, who
in 1563 wrote “A booke in English metre, of the great Marchaunt man
called Dives Pragmaticus, very pretye for chyldren to rede: wherby they
may the better, and more readyer, rede and wryte Wares and Implements, in
this World contayned”.
This merchant knows all crafts and deals in every kind of wares; but he
does it in the manner of Autolycus, calling all men to come and buy. His
“Inkyll, crewell and gay valances fine” perhaps made copy for _A Winter’s
Tale_; his “ouches, brooches and fine aglets for Kynges” might lie in the
pack with
“Bugle bracelet, necklace amber,
Perfume for a lady’s chamber”;
and though he had neither songs nor ballads, he spoke in verse and could
find poetry in the “chyselle” and “blade” which Stevenson, more than
three centuries later, praised in his _Child’s Garden_:
“A chisel, both handle and blade,
Which _a man who was really a carpenter made_.”
It was a hard day for the men of the road when the Roundhead prevailed
over King Charles. Had the Puritans been gifted with the worldly wisdom
of old religious orders, the pedlar’s songs, interpreted as allegories,
would have passed, with a word or two altered here and there; as it
was, many of these poor merchants were reduced to carrying tracts
that reflected the gloomy spirit of the times. But the seventeenth
century garlands still preserved some of the older ballads, and the
true Autolycus was never without copies of _Tom Thumb_, _The Wise Men
of Gotham_, and other chap-books for the unregenerate. He suffered the
penalties of rogues and vagabonds, and the child shared his disgrace.
George Fox, in his _Warning to all Teachers_, condemns, among other sins
of children, “the telling of Tales, Stories, Jests, Rhimes and Fables”.
The doctrine of Original Sin left no hope of grace by means of books.
Courtesy, as concerning the mere outward forms and carriage of a child,
was held of no account, and instruction itself was abandoned in favour
of “Emblems”, “Warnings”, and morbid “Examples for Youth”: such books,
for example, as James Janeway’s _Token for Children_, which contained
“an exact account of the conversion, holy and exemplary lives and joyful
deaths of several young children”: a literature of denial and negation.
And yet the greatest child’s book of the age was written by a Puritan.
John Bunyan was the first to reconcile the claims of religion and
romance, and he never could have written _The Pilgrim’s Progress_ if he
had not been a good customer of the pedlar in his youth. But in writing
it, Bunyan had no more thought of children than Caxton when he printed
the stories of King Arthur. Both were thinking of grown-up children. And
when, some eight years later, Bunyan tried his hand at a _Book for Boys
and Girls_, he made it a mere collection of “Emblems” in doggerel verse.
The alternative title, _Country Rhimes for Children_, seems to refer to
certain farmyard creatures which he introduced to point analogies even
more absurd than those of the old monkish Bestiaries; but the monks had
sirens and other wonderful things in their natural history. There is
nothing to atone for the dulness of these rhymes; any child would be
better entertained in the Interpreter’s House.
After the Restoration, the pedlar had a better market for his books,
but he also came upon new enemies; for it was then that members of the
Royal Society were beginning to question those “strange and wonderful
Relations” which simple folk, seeing them in print, received as true.
When Shakespeare’s shepherdess asked the pedlar “Is it true, think you?”
he answered “Five justices’ hands at it, and witnesses more than my pack
will hold”; but these men of letters and science accepted no evidence
save that of their own reason, and this was fatal to the common matter
of chap-books. It is the more surprising that one of their number should
have been an unacknowledged maker of children’s books.
John Locke was the first to apply the methods of the Royal Society to
education. He cared neither for creeds nor grammars, followed Montaigne
in denouncing the pedantry of the old schoolmasters, and held with
Rabelais that “the greatest clerks are not the wisest men.”
It is true that his concern for literal truth made him a very imperfect
reader of children’s minds. He never understood the part that imagination
plays in a child’s life, and his plan of education allows no scope for
it; yet he understood children so well on the practical side that every
eighteenth century writer of little books quoted his maxims, despised
romance and produced “fables” that made a certain appeal to childish
interests while they proved the advantages of common sense.
Locke’s book, _Some Thoughts concerning Education_, which he published
in 1693, was put together from the letters he had written during his
exile in Holland, to Edward Clarke; but it suggests notes rather than
letters. Locke so condenses the human element that it reads like a book
of educational prescriptions. The key is to be found in the letters of
his friends, and in the records of his pupil, the third Lord Shaftesbury,
author of the _Characteristics_. Locke was the first earl’s friend and
medical adviser, and for a time had taught his son; the third earl came
to him as “Mr. Anthony” at the age of three, and was his “more peculiar
charge” till he was twelve years old. After the grandfather’s death, they
sent him to Westminster, entirely against Locke’s wish, for he hated
schools; but when “Mr. Anthony” came to write about his childhood, he had
not a good word for “pedants and schoolmasters”; only for Mr. Locke to
whom, next his “immediate parents”, he owed “the highest gratitude and
duty”.
Men do not write thus of tutors who were not their friends; and doubtless
others could have said the same of Locke: the younger brothers of Lord
Shaftesbury, the Dutch Quaker’s little boy, Arent Furly, a kind of
foster-child of his in Holland, or little Frank Masham, his last pupil,
who was between four and five when Locke came to live with his family.
They all owed him good health and a happy childhood, and it does not
appear that they hankered after the forbidden joys of romance.
Locke’s belief in physical training was a welcome contrast to the average
tutor’s insistence upon books. He put aside the rod, invented games for
his pupils and, as soon as possible, treated them as “rational creatures”.
By reversing the order of Books of Courtesy, he relieved them of rules
and maxims. Virtue stood first in his judgment, then wisdom, then
breeding, and learning last. At heart he was not less concerned for
manners than the old masters of courtesy; but he thought they could only
be acquired by habit and good company. It is the more curious to find
him, in another part of the book, assuming that the right kind of tutor
could teach Virtue and Wisdom as another might teach Latin. Locke himself
came as near as a man could to his ideal of a tutor more wise than
learned, a man of the world that knew how to bear himself in any company;
and it mattered little to his pupils that such a tutor could not be found
for every child.
Intelligent parents found in his published _Thoughts_ some confirmation
of their own experience, and his very inconsistencies made his ideas
seem the more reasonable to them. For it cannot be denied that Locke,
although he believed in teaching children not what, but how to think,
yet fell into the error of impressing facts upon their memory, and facts
that could only be learned from books. His Irish friend Molyneux, on
whose advice the _Thoughts_ were put together, brought up his little
boy according to Locke’s plan, and proved that the system could produce
a rival to Wynkyn de Worde’s Wyse Chylde: one that at five years old
could read perfectly and trace out upon the globes “all the noted parts,
countries and cities of the world”. At six, his knowledge was incredible,
he was “obedient and observant to the nicest particular”, and his father
believed that no child “had ever his passions more perfectly at command”.
There is nothing in Locke’s theory to account for the encyclopædic
knowledge of this child; but in practice he had replaced Latin and Greek
with Geometry, Chronology, the use of the Globes, and even some part of
“the incomparable Mr. Newton’s” Philosophy, so far as it was justified by
“Matter of Fact”.
This helps to explain the little pedantries of later children’s books,
although many of these do not go beyond Locke’s directions for teaching a
child to read.
“There may be Dice and Play-things with the letters on them,” he says,
“to teach Children the Alphabet by Playing; and twenty other Ways may
be found, suitable to their particular Tempers, to make this Kind of
Learning a Sport to them. Thus Children may be cozen’d into a Knowledge
of the Letters....”
If this smacks of artifice, there is no question of his wisdom about
essentials: “If you have any Contests with him, let it be in Matters of
Moment, of Truth and Good Nature; but lay no Task on him about A.B.C.”
About books he is very plain: when “by these gentle Ways” a child begins
to read, “some easy pleasant Book, suited to his Capacity should be put
into his Hands, wherein the Entertainment that he finds might draw him
on, and reward his Pains in Reading, and yet not such as should fill
his Head with perfectly useless Trumpery, or lay the Principles of Vice
and Folly. To this purpose I think Æsop’s Fables the best, which being
Stories apt to delight and entertain a Child, may yet afford useful
Reflections to a grown Man; and if his Memory retain them all his Life
after, he will not repent to find them there, amongst his manly Thoughts
and serious Business”.
Then, after recommending an _Æsop_ with pictures in it, he adds:
“_Reynard the Fox_ is another Book I think may be made Use of to the same
Purpose”. Talking beasts that can be made the mouthpiece of a moralist
are Locke’s nearest approach to the supernatural. In another place, he
admonishes parents to preserve a child’s mind “from all Impressions
and Notions of _Spirits_ and _Goblins_, or any fearful Apprehensions
in the Dark”. Thus the child is to be protected from ghost-stories or
fairy-tales and “cozen’d” into reading what will be useful to him when he
is a man.
Locke knew no other books in English “fit to engage the liking of
children and tempt them to read”; and indeed there were few to know. _The
Seven Wise Masters of Rome_ is an example of what was thought fit for
children. This was a very old sequence of Eastern parables first printed
by Wynkyn de Worde. Francis Kirkman, who translated it from the French
in 1674, declared that it was “held in such estimation in Ireland that
it was always put into the hands of young children immediately after the
horn book”. English copies were common; but the tales had less interest
for children than those of the _Gesta_. “Pedants and Schoolmasters” must
have conspired to keep it in print.
Thus at the close of the seventeenth century the greater number of
children, if they read anything, amused themselves with chap-books
or broadsheets,—all of which, doubtless, came under Locke’s ban as
“perfectly useless Trumpery”; and for those that read no books, in spite
of Locke, there were still tales “of Sprites and Goblins”.
CHAPTER I
CHAP-BOOKS AND BALLADS
Children and the Supernatural—Steele’s Account of a boy’s
reading—Characteristics of chap-book “histories”—Folk-lore
and legendary settings—_The History of Friar
Bacon_—_Fortunatus_—Other chap-book survivals—The Georgian
Autolycus—Travellers’ tales—A great chap-book—Books for men and
children—Chap-books and ballads—Treatment of romances—The fairy
world—Legend and history—Border and Robin Hood ballads.
Steele’s account of his two god-children[1] (perhaps the choicest of his
_Tatler_ papers) discovers the weak point of Locke’s philosophy. Nothing
could so shake a blind faith in Æsop as the frank words of Steele’s
little boy who, at eight years old, although he was “a very great
Historian in Æsop’s Fables”, declared “that he did not delight in that
Learning, because he did not believe they were true”.
His sister Betty defied Mr. Locke upon another side, for she dealt
“chiefly in Fairies and Sprights”; and would “terrifie the Maids with her
Accounts” till they were afraid to go up to bed.
Now, neither of these children had the least difficulty about the
supernatural. The boy could have believed in beasts that talked; but he
detected the man inside the lion’s skin: the man that pointed a moral.
These _Fables_, once understood as ridiculing the follies of mankind,
were no longer “true”; but there were other stories of the boy’s own
choosing which, though full of magic, were true to the spirit of their
kind.
Steele says he had “very much turned his studies for about a Twelvemonth
past into the Lives and Adventures of _Don Bellianis of Greece_, _Guy of
Warwick_, the _Seven Champions_, and other Historians of that Age”.
Not only does the sympathetic godfather enter into these literary
adventures, as Mr. Locke, with all his wisdom, never could have done, but
he knows the virtue of an unpointed moral: the boy, he says, “had made
Remarks, which might be of Service to him during the Course of his whole
Life. He would tell you the Mismanagements of _John Hickathrift_, find
Fault with the passionate Temper in _Bevis of Southampton_ and loved _St.
George_ for being the Champion of _England_; and by this Means had his
Thoughts insensibly moulded into the Notions of Discretion, Virtue and
Honour”.
In the reign of Anne, these stirring “Histories” were a part of every
pedlar’s stock-in-trade. They were sold at fairs or hawked from door
to door; and a boy that could never stumble through the maze of a
seventeenth century folio might read as many romances as he had
halfpence. Some had been among the earliest printed books. They were
mostly from French originals, though Sir Bevis and Sir Guy had been
“_Chevaliers d’Angleterre_” from the beginning. The chap-book _Seven
Champions_ and _Life and Death of St. George_ were both based on Richard
Johnson’s _History of the Seven Champions_, a medley of other romances
in which Caxton’s “Saynt George of Capadose” had become St. George of
Coventry. But the romance spirit was cosmopolitan, born of the Crusades,
and foreign champions like Don Bellianis of Greece were hardly less
popular.[2]
Late writers varied the old adventures; but the chap-book printer, who
did his own editing, cut down the heavy matter of the folios to a bare
chain of incidents. His words were few and ill-chosen, he had neither
style nor grammar; but the core of interest was sound: the stories
touched the imagination of his readers like ballads and fairy tales.
Gallant Knights came straight from the fields of France to the
magnificence of Eastern cities; youths, setting out from the English
towns, adventured among dwarfs and Saracens, giants and dragons, and won
their knighthood by the way.
If the hero never failed to subdue his enemies and win a lady of
surpassing beauty, there was still a doubt (enough to keep the reader
curious) whether a rival would snatch her from him and put him upon a
more dangerous adventure to win her back; or whether, if they fared on
together, they would meet an enchanter or a giant first.
Repetition seldom tires a child. The feats of Acquitaine could be
repeated at Damascus; and the wood-cuts in the chap-books proved that
Montelion and Parismus could fight in the armour of Don Bellianis or
St. George. Nor was it a chance association of the pedlar’s pack which
threw these champions into the company of a village strongman, John
Hickathrift, more commonly called Tom; for although Hickathrift fought
with a cart-wheel and axle-tree for shield and sword, he could beat the
best of them at giant-killing.[3]
The romances, indeed, are full of the common stuff of folk-lore. If the
hero blow a trumpet at a castle-gate, a giant may be expected; if he
blow it at the mouth of an enchanted cave, a prophetic voice replies, or
if he enter the cave by chance, he may find the prophecy inscribed on a
pillar of sapphire—the prelude, in _Don Bellianis_, to the coming of the
Enchantress through a pair of ivory gates.
A hundred folk-tales tell of the Princess rescued from a dragon;
transformation is an affair of every day: Don Bellianis slays a magician
“in the shape of a griffin”; St. Denis, in the _Seven Champions_, is
transformed into a hart, the Princess of Thessaly into a mulberry-tree;
and St. David sleeps seven years in an enchanted garden—the Magic Sleep
of the fairy tales. Nor is the champion of romance without his wonderful
sword or cloak.
The Sword “Morglay” (no more than a stout weapon in the old version of
_Sir Bevis_) is called “wonderful” in the chap-books. Don Bellianis draws
a magic sword from a pillar, as Arthur pulled his out of the stone; St.
George has invincible armour; and the later _History of Fortunatus_ is
the tale of a Wonderful Purse and a Wishing Cap.
But whoever looks upon a child as a pure romantic, has learned but half
his lesson; for in many tales that have stood the test of time, there is
little interest outside sheer matter of fact; and even the romances owed
something to legendary settings which touched a borderland of truth. To
know that Bevis lived in the reign of Edgar, that Guy, returning from
his pilgrimage, found King Athelstane at Winchester, beset by the Danes,
would confirm a child’s belief; but the little reader of chap-books knew
more than this; he could give the exact measurements of Tom Hickathrift’s
grave in Tilney Churchyard, knew where to find Guy’s armour and his
porridge-pot at Warwick, and never doubted that Bevis built Arundel
Castle for love of his horse.
It might be done indeed, for such a horse: no mere product of a wizard’s
cunning, but a steed fit to carry a champion: alive as the persons of the
romances never were. He figures in every adventure, carries the thread
of the story from point to point, and yet stands out, a very symbol of
romance.
The chap-book writer makes no picture of the knighting of Bevis, and
never mentions his shield with the three blue eagles on a field of gold;
but he remembers well enough how the Saracen King’s daughter, Josian the
fair, presented Bevis with the sword “Morglay” and the “wonderful steed
called Arundel”.
From that point the story goes to a sound of hoofs; and though the King
betrayed Bevis into the hands of his enemy and gave the horse Arundel to
Bevis’s rival, King Jour, and though Bevis lay in a dungeon for seven
years, Josian herself was not more faithful to him than Arundel; for when
at last he escaped, and came, disguised as a poor pedlar, to the castle
of Jour, Josian knew him not; but Arundel, hearing his master speak,
“neighed and broke seven chains for joy”.
As to the men and women of romance, they borrowed life from their
adventures, but apart from these, were mere types of strength or beauty.
The original portraits, though vague, were not without poetry: the
impression of “The Squyere Guy” has a hint of Chaucer:
“Feyre he was and bryght of face,
He schone as bryght as ane glace.”
The chap-book writer contents himself with the remark that King Ermine
was “prepossessed with Guy’s looks”. He bestows more care on the heroine,
Felyce, but covers the faint outline with his trowel. Felyce, once
“the Erlys Doghtur, a swete thynge”,
becomes “this heavenly Phillis, whose beauty was so excellent that Helen
the pride of all Greece might seem as a Black a Moor to her”.
Many striking situations and dramatic incidents of the older stories
are lost in the chap-books, for want of picture-making phrases and live
speech. A name here and there, such as Brademond, King of Damascus,
would lift a boy like a magic carpet, and set him down among Saracen
pavilions; bare facts might call up pictures; there was the ransom of
King Jour,—“Twenty tun of gold and three hundred white steeds”; but
the unlettered writer shirked most of the details which, in telling
the story aloud, he would express by gestures. The fine fight with the
dragon, in _Guy of Warwick_, makes but a paragraph in the chap-book; the
monster’s head is off before the fight is well begun. Not even a “picture
of the dragon, thirty feet in length, worked in a cloth of arras and hung
up in Warwick Castle for an everlasting monument” could make amends for
this.
Yet a child, making his own pictures out of the poor phrases of these
writers, might have in his mind’s eye something not unlike the images of
the old translator: the boy Bevis on a hillside with his sheep, looking
down at the Castle “that should be his”; the four Knights selling him to
the Saracen merchantmen; or the giant Ascapart wading out to the ship,
with Bevis and Josian and the horse Arundel tucked under his arm.
These stand in clear outline, and, in the roughest shape, have
suggestions of pathos or incongruity; but they pass at once into action,
which is what a child wants: the boy comes down from the hill, forces his
way into the castle and attacks the usurper with his shepherd’s crook;
the Saracens carry him overseas, and set him in the way of adventure;
Ascapart proves himself “a mariner good at need”, hoists sail and brings
his master and mistress safely into harbour.
Laughter is rare in the romances, but this story of Ascapart has a humour
of its own. Bevis, having beaten the giant, spares his life on condition
that he becomes his servant; and in the course of their adventures the
vanquished rescues the victor, the servant picks up his master and
carries him about like a toy. Such a feat measures the great creature
more effectually than the exact method of the chap-book writer: “thirty
Foot high and a Foot between his eyebrows”.
Another “famous History” which came with these into the chap-books, was
that of _Valentine and Orson_, first printed by Wynkyn de Worde, and
reprinted at the close of the nineteenth century as an “old fairy tale”.
It has some novel features besides the usual stage properties of romance.
Of the twin brothers separated in childhood, one is brought up at Court
and trained in knightly exercises; the other carried off by a bear and
nourished with her cubs. This is a foretaste of _The Jungle Book_:
“In a cave, the bear had four young ones, among whom she laid the child
to be devoured, yet all the while the young bears did it no harm; but
with their rough paws stroked it softly. The old bear, perceiving they
did not devour it, showed a bearish kind of favour towards it, inasmuch
that she kept it and gave it suck among her young ones for the space of
one year”.
The second chapter records how the bear’s nursling, Orson, grew up into
a Wild Man, and how the young knight Valentine, his brother, meeting him
in a wood, won a victory of skill against strength; after which, still
unconscious of their relationship, he tamed the Wild Man and taught him
the arts of chivalry.
The more magical elements of the story have a flavour of the East, and
doubtless belong to the older strata of Eastern romance. The adventure of
the Dwarf Pacolet suggests the tale of the “Magic Horse” in the _Thousand
and One Nights_; for by his art this dwarf, who was an Enchanter, “had
contrived a horse of wood, and in the forehead a fixed pin, by turning of
which he could convey himself to the farthest part of the world”.
Many such marvels, related during the Middle Ages by merchants or
Crusaders returning from the East, had been caught up in the weavings
of romance; but it is a sort of magic that has little to do with the
myth-making power of childhood. Pacolet’s flying horse is made of wood;
the touch of its hoof never brought water from a mountain-side. It
represents the magic of ingenuity which comes half-way between pure
romance and the practical marvels of a scientific age.
Indeed, it is but a step from the flying horse of Eastern tales to Roger
Bacon’s horseless chariots and flying “instruments”. The “Learned Friar”,
a clerk of Oxford in the thirteenth century, foretold many things to be
performed by “Art and Nature”, wherein should be “nothing magical”. Yet
he studied such strange matters that he was persecuted for practising
magic, and the chap-books set him down a conjurer. The Enchanted Head
of Brass which in _Valentine and Orson_ reveals the parentage of the
brothers, reappears in the _Famous History of Friar Bacon_, as the
Brazen Head, wrought in so many sleepless nights by the Friar and his
brother-in-magic, Friar Bungay.
Greene, in his play of _Fryer Bacon and Fryer Boungay_ (1591), follows
this well known tract,[4] which came down with few changes to the
eighteenth century. Here the old magic machinery goes with the light
movement of a popular tale. The Brazen Head should have disclosed a
secret whereby Friar Bacon “would have walled England about with brass”;
but the stupidity of his servant Miles prevented it. For when the two
magicians, worn out with toil, lay down to sleep, they set him to watch
the Head, commanding him to call them the moment it should speak; and he,
the while, kept up his spirits “with tabor and pipe and song”.
When at last the Head spake these words: “Time Is,” and no more, Miles,
understanding nothing by that, fell to mockery: “If thou canst speak no
wiser, they shall sleep till doomsday for me. Time is! I know Time is,
that you shall hear, Goodman Brazen Face!”
So saying, he fitted the words to the tune of “Dainty, come thou to me”,
and sang for half-an-hour. Thereupon the Head spake again, saying two
words and no more: “Time Was”; whereat the Simpleton railed afresh, and
another half-hour went by.
Then the Brazen Head spake again, these words: “Time is Past”, and then
fell down; and presently followed a terrible noise, with strange flashes
of fire, so that Miles was half-dead with fear.
“Out on thee, villain,” cried Friar Bacon, “thou hast undone us both;
hadst thou but called us when it did speak, all England had been walled
about with brass, to its glory and our eternal fame.”
Locke’s followers were never tired of setting the “plain Magique of
tru Reason’s Light” against Friar Bacon’s conjurings. There were later
moralists who recognized the Wizard as a pioneer of science; but these
would have none of his magic, and rejected all tales of undeserved good
fortune.
Wordsworth alone had the courage to tum a child loose in the enchanted
woods. He praised _The History of Fortunatus_, which is more like
“Aladdin” than any tale of chivalry. By sheer luck the Spendthrift
finds a Galley of Venice lying at anchor and gets his choice of gifts.
These vanished like fairy gold in the hands of his sons, and children
remembered little else but his Wishing Cap and his Purse that never was
empty. Yet Fortunatus was a name to conjure by, and the pure spirit of
adventure was in his first setting out, as the woodcut shows, “with a
Hawk in his Hand”.
It seems odd that the eighteenth century child should have ballads
about King Arthur and his Knights, but no account of them in prose.
Malory’s “Noble Histories”, like the once famous cycles of Amadis and the
Palmerins, escaped the chap-book writers; but they had one or two relics
of the old _Historyes of Troye_, in which Priam’s palace had become an
enchanted castle, and Hector a knight errant.
The pedlar had no chronology. Patient Grissel, fresh from a new
translation of Boccaccio, was a lady of the eighteenth century, and what
pleased the country fireside of 1700 still pleased it in 1760. The tales
that Mr. Burchell gave the children in _The Vicar of Wakefield_ might
have come out of a chapman’s bundle in almost any part of the century:
“the story of the Buck of Beverland, with the History of Patient Grissel,
the Adventures of Catskin and then Fair Rosamond’s Bower.”
Among other “useless Trumpery” were riddles, nonsense-books and farcical
tales of rogues or simpletons.[5] These are full of the topsy-turvy
nonsense that children love, and the coarse jests from which they were
seldom guarded. The older stories, even when they deal with everyday
life, give it a romantic flavour. The Cobbler feasts with the King; the
Valiant London Prentice leaves his shop on London Bridge, and sets out to
joust with eastern princes. A Tudor pedlar, Tom Long, in the course of
his absurd adventures, visits the Cave of the Seven Sleepers, whose story
makes a welcome interlude:
“Coming to the town, they found everything altered, the inhabitants being
other sort of people than they were the night before. So, going to buy
food, the people refused to take their money, saying they knew not the
coin; but enquiring further, found that since their being there, three
generations had been dead and the fourth was in being”.
Tom Long was the puppet of a nonsense-book; but other chap-books,
following Deloney, told the “true histories” of industrious
fortune-makers who were not out of place in a commercial age; and the
life of an eighteenth century pedlar was plain enough to pass for truth.
An account (in a late Stirling tract)[6] of the “Flying Stationer”,
Peter Duthie, shows that he took up his trade in 1729, when he was eight
years old, and was upon the road for eighty years—a Georgian Autolycus,
known for his quaint wit “in every city, town, village and hamlet in
great Britain”. At some time, perhaps, he sold “lives” of his brethren
Dougal Graham and John Cheap the Chapman, whose story was “moralised” by
Hannah More.
The traveller is always a romantic figure. No amount of fact can take the
pleasure of expectation and surprise out of a journey, and the setting
of most chap-books was a journey by land or sea. The “Flying Stationer”
asked no more for the Wonderful Voyages of Sir John Mandeville than for
the rough yarn of a ship-wrecked sailor.
This last, if it pointed a moral, might serve a double purpose, for the
old allegories were dying out, except in burlesques. Abstractions always
had a way of coming alive when they set foot on English ground, and _The
History of Laurence Lazy_, of “Lubberland Castle in the County of Sloth”
was no mere allegory of Idleness, but the tale of a scapegrace who, to
the joy of all children, got the better of the Schoolmaster, the Squire’s
Cook and the Farmer. His “Arraignment and Trial” in the Town Hall of
“Never Work” was a triumphant apology for idlers; yet a scene like this
may have suggested the symbolic trial of Christian and Faithful in the
Town of Vanity.
That splendid chap-book, _The Pilgrim’s Progress_,[7] is built up of
such things. Bunyan’s reading, outside the Bible (although he counted
it among his sins) had acquainted him with romances, tales of magic and
enchantment, “histories” of live persons; and all these, or nearly all,
were concerned with adventures upon the road.[8]
Bible stories and Christian legends were common in Bunyan’s youth. There
was a versified “history” of Joseph and his Brethren, and the beautiful
legend of the Glastonbury Thorn was as well known as that of _The Seven
Sleepers_ or _The Wandering Jew_.
But _The Pilgrim’s Progress_ dealt in terms of unmistakable experience
with the journey that every man must go; the figures of its allegory were
live persons, such as a man might meet upon any road, and its setting
changed as the way ran through towns and villages, past fields and
sloughs and thickets, over hills where the surest-footed might fall “from
running to going and from going to clambering upon his hands and knees,
because of the steepness of the place”, or beside rivers that ran through
meadows and orchards, with lilies underfoot, and above, “green trees with
all manner of fruit”.
These things give place at certain points, as they do in life, to the
scorched plains of torment, the overwhelming Shadow of Death, or, where
the river and the way for a time part, to the Dungeon of Despair. There
are glimpses by the way of strange and beautiful lands, of vineyards and
mountains upon which “the sun shineth night and day”; but here also is
the road running through the midst of the country to a city more splendid
than the cities of romance, for “it was builded of pearls and precious
stones, also the streets thereof were paved with gold”.
The child would start on this journey with some knowledge of his
bearings, for, like Bunyan, he had set out on an earlier pilgrimage
with Guy of Warwick.[9] At the Palace Beautiful, he would remember how
Montelion had been armed by nymphs, and at Doubting Castle, how Bevis had
escaped from his prison in Damascus.
No knight ever strove with giant or dragon as Christian struggled with
Apollyon; none of the Seven Champions had encountered the dangers of this
road. Yet these were adventures that might happen to a man in the midst
of his ordinary business; that much a child might understand beneath the
surface of romance which for him is the chief matter of the book.
This was the first of three great books which pleased both men and
children in the eighteenth century. The others are _Robinson Crusoe_[10]
and _The Travels and Adventures of Captain Lemuel Gulliver_.[11] Each, in
its own kind, is a _Voyage Imaginaire_ and the unwrought matter of all
three was to be found in chap-books. The tale of the shipwrecked man had
never been told with such apparent truth as in _Robinson Crusoe_. Readers
of the chap-book history of Drake, who were familiar with accounts
of “Monsters and Monstrous People”, would read this sober journal as
the purest matter of fact; nor was there anything beyond belief in
Gulliver’s adventures, to anyone who knew the pedlar’s book of _Sir John
Mandeville_. For here, among greater marvels, was a notable account of
giants and pigmies.
The island setting of _Robinson Crusoe_, the figure of Friday, the
footprint in the sand, belong to the world of romance; so do the giants
and dwarfs of _Gulliver_. Yet in both books, the things that happen are
human and practical; the setting gives scope for the chief interests
of the century: men and morals and matters of fact. Defoe pointed his
moral, and as an afterthought explained the Voyage of Robinson Crusoe as
an allegory of his life; Swift used the contrary device of satire. But
no child was ever concerned with an under-sense, where he could follow
every turn of the adventure. A philosopher would not have discovered
Crusoe’s allegory, and a child is more likely to suspect satire in
_Reynard the Fox_ than in _Gulliver_.
The adventures of Lilliput and Brobdignag are the convincing “history”
of a nation of Tom Thumbs and a nation of Blunderbores; only a little
Gradgrind would question their truth. A child reading _The Pilgrim’s
Progress_ is himself the Pilgrim; in the adventure of the island he is
the shipwrecked man; and in the Travels, first the big man upon whose
body the little men climb with ladders, then the little man, paddling his
toy boat to amuse the giants.
These books, like the romances, were for little men as well as big ones;
but their authors renewed the old devices by a masterly simple style.
They made pictures such as were never found in chap-book prose, and
rarely in tales that had passed into ballad form.
* * * * *
The eighteenth century pedlar had fewer ballads than his predecessors;
yet those he had, like the songs of Autolycus, were “for man or woman, of
all sizes”.
Ballad tunes, from Shakespeare to Wordsworth, were “Food for the hungry
ears of little ones,” and there is something in the simple conventions
of ballads that suggests the story-telling of a child. Those printed
ballads, “darling songs of the common People”, which Addison found upon
the walls of eighteenth-century houses, attracted him by their classic
simplicity, but the two he liked the best: “Chevy Chase” and “The Two
Children in the Wood”, had been the joy of Elizabethan nurseries.[12]
Most of the chap-book stories were sung as ballads. “The Seven
Champions”, “St. George”, “Patient Grissel” and “The London Prentice”
were all in the _Collection of Old Ballads_ printed in 1723, with “The
Noble Acts of King Arthur” from Malory;[13] and others were reprinted
in Percy’s _Reliques_ (1765) from a folio manuscript of the seventeenth
century.
The ballad maker, dealing with romances, preferred short episodes. A
tedious story would never go to his quick measures; but by laying his
chief stress on speech and movement, or adding a refrain, he made a thing
quite unlike the short versions of the chap-books, and gave a certain
dramatic unity to the separate parts.
Thus the incident of “Guy and Colebrande”, in Percy’s folio, had been
chosen from _Guy of Warwick_, and the ballad of St. George, in the
Collection of 1723, deals only with the dragon story. Some ballads, it is
true, cover a sequence of adventures. “The Lord of Lorn,”, like _Bevis of
Southampton_, gives the whole story of a child robbed of his inheritance:
a shepherd boy that should have been a lord; and the scene changes from
Britain to France and back again; but so much is told in dialogue that
the story dances to its end:
“Do thou me off thy sattin doublett
Thy shirtband wrought with glistering gold,
And doe mee off thy golden chaine
About thy necke so many a fold.
“Do thou me off thy velvett hat.
With fether in that is so ffine;
All unto thy silken shirt
That’s wrought with many a golden seam.
...
“‘What must be my name, worthy Steward?
I pray thee now, tell it me:’
‘Thy name shalbe Pore Disaware,
To tend sheepe on a lonelye lee.’”
Of the fairy world revealed in “Thomas Rymer”, the ghostly suggestion
of “The Wife of Usher’s Well,” there is no trace till the close of the
century. The true ballads of Elfland are more song than story, and rise
by suggestion above the simplicity of fairy tales:
“O they rade on and farther on,
And they waded rivers abune the knee
And they saw neither sun nor moon,
But they heard the roaring of the sea.”
The breath of enchantment is rare in English ballads. There is nothing
in print before Scott’s _Minstrelsy_ like the magic of these lines; but
Percy reprinted a sixteenth century ballad, “The Mad-Merry Prankes of
Robbin Goodfellow” which Puck himself might have sung:
“From Oberon in Fairyland
The King of ghosts and shadows there,
Mad Robbin I at his command
Am sent to view the night-sports here.
What revell rout
Is kept about
In every corner where I goe
I will oresee
And merry be
And make good sport with ho, ho, ho.”
This is the triumphant laughter of a child. The “shrewd and knavish
sprite” has neither the delicacy of smaller fairies nor the courtly
dignity of his master. He is the spirit of childish mischief: greeting
night-wanderers “with counterfeiting voice”, shape-changing, “whirrying”
over hedges and pools, or playing tricks on lads and lasses at village
feasts. “Hobgoblin” or “sweet Puck”, half-child, half-fairy, he roams the
English country,
“Through woods, through lakes,
Through bogs, through brakes,
Ore bush and brier”,
and boasts of greater powers.
There is no doubting either voice or words:
“More swift than lightning can I flye
And round about this ayrie welkin soone.
And in a minutes space descry
Each thing that’s done belowe the moone”.
There are two more fairy songs in the _Reliques_: one given “with some
corrections” from a seventeenth century garland, the other, Bishop
Corbet’s “Farewell” to the fairies. The first contradicts the second, for
obeying the invocation
“Come, follow, follow me
You fairy elves that be”,
a team of little atomies appear, proving that they were never out of
England since Shakespeare wrote, but “unheard and unespy’d”, were gliding
through Puritan key-holes and spreading their feasts while the Bishop was
composing his lament,
“Farewell, rewards and fairies!”
Yet these, like Robin Goodfellow, are spirits of Earth; they eat more
than fairy bread. A mortal surely suggested the details of their feast,
but they dance a fairy measure:
“The grasshopper, gnat and fly,
Serve for our minstrelsy;
Grace said, we dance awhile,
And so the time beguile;
And if the moon doth hide her head,
The gloe-worm lights us home to bed.
“On tops of dewie grasse
So nimbly do we passe;
The young and tender stalk
Ne’er bends when we do walk:
Yet in the morning may be seen
Where we the night before have been.”
Rhymed nursery tales seldom show the true ballad quality. The only
children’s stories in the Collection of 1723 are “The Children in the
Wood”, and “Sir Richard Whittington”: the one a true ballad, newly
licensed and approved by Addison; the other (also mentioned in the
_Spectator_) taking precedence of such rhymes as “Catskin” and “Tom
Thumb” for a popular grafting of the romance of Fortune upon a stock of
historical fact.
Southern ballad-printers favoured the merry or tragic themes of legend
and history,[14] and if few of their songs had the trumpet-note of “Chevy
Chase”, they lacked neither freshness nor vigour. Some, like “the Blind
Beggar’s Daughter of Bednall-Green”, gave a fresh turn to Elizabethan
traditions, and made up for indifferent workmanship by a plentiful
force of rhythm. Late nursery poets could not better this trick of the
ballad-maker’s:
“It was a blind beggar that long lost his sight,
He had a fair daughter of beauty most bright;
And many a gallant brave suitor had she,
For none was so comely as pretty Bessee.”
Another of these old broadsides, “Johnny Armstrong’s Last Good Night”
appeared among Dryden’s Miscellanies in 1702, in the Collections of 1723
and 1724, and again in Evans’s _Old Ballads_ (1777).
“The music of the finest singer is dissonance,” wrote Goldsmith, “to what
I felt when our old dairymaid sung me into tears with Johnny Armstrong’s
last Good Night or the Cruelty of Barbara Allen.”
These are the true stuff of ballads; but a child cares most about action,
and, asked to choose between them, would be pretty sure to call for the
Border Song.
The story of John Armstrong, which came down to prose in the chap-books,
has points in common with “Robin Hood”, but John and his “Merry Men” have
no touch of Robin’s careless humour. They fight like the heroes of Chevy
Chase, and ask no quarter:
“Said John, Fight on, my merry men all,
I am a little hurt, but I am not slain.
I will lay me down for to bleed a while
Then I’le rise and fight with you again.”
The pirate song of “Sir Andrew Barton”[15] is a sailor’s variant of this.
Lord Howard defies Sir Andrew upon the high seas much as Erle Percy, in
despite of the Douglas, takes his pleasure in the Scottish woods. There
was never a better fight on shore, and when at last the pirate falls to
an English bowman, he repeats the border cry:
“‘Fight on, my men!’ says Sir Andrew Barton,
‘I am hurt, but I am not slain;
I’le lay mee downe and bleed awhile,
And then I’le rise and fight again’.”
Sir Andrew stands out from his fellows, though the portrait is not to be
compared with Robin Hood’s; and the king himself speaks his epitaph:
“‘I wo’ld give a hundred pound,’ says King Henrye
‘The man were alive as he is dead!’”
Another of these narrative ballads, “Adam Bell”,[16] has a forest
background that suggests Robin Hood:
“Merry it was in grene forest
Among the leves grene
Where that men walke both East and West
Wyth bowes and arrowes kene.”
The full title, “Adam Bell, Clim of the Clough and William of
Cloudesley”, has a sufficing rhythm, and the story is good; not unlike a
Norse Saga, where they set fire to the outlaw’s house, and like _William
Tell_, where Cloudesley splits an apple on his son’s head at six score
paces.
But the true Robin Hood ballads take a child into his own country, and
he finds it peopled with his friends. From the first stanzas of “The
Curtall Friar”, he is Robin’s man:
“In summer time, when leaves grow green
And flowers are fresh and gay
Robin Hood and his merry men
_Were disposed to play_.”
In this play-humour, the outlaws themselves are children, as every child
is by nature an outlaw. They know better than to take life for a serious
business. To them, as to a child, it is one long and absorbing game of
make-believe.
Robin, like Fulk Fitz-Warine or Hereward, could play at any trade—a
potter, a beggar, a shepherd, a fisherman. His band were mostly men who
had forsaken some dull craft for this great game of hiding and hunting
and robbery. In the midst of active enjoyment, they set themselves to
redress the unequal balance of fortune; but they never doubted their own
solid advantages over sheriffs and abbots,—the people who dwelt in towns
and cloisters, and had forgotten how to play.
Early collectors of the eighteenth century found no ballads that echoed
the sound of the greenwood:
“notes small
Of Byrdis mery syngynge”,
or that made pictures of the deer shadowed in green leaves; but there
were imitations of the older songs, and the setting was always implied.
After 1765, there must have been children who knew the prelude to “Guy of
Gisborne”, from Percy’s _Reliques_:
“When shaws been sheene and shradds full fayre,
And leaves both large and longe,
It is merrye walking in the fayre forrest,
To heare the small birdes songe.
“The woodweele sang and wold not cease,
Sitting upon the spraye
So lowde, he wakened Robin Hood
In the greenwood where he lay.”
A child cares little about landscape for its own sake, but much for the
things which it suggests. Here, the setting is essential to the game
these outlaws are playing; they are as much a part of it as the deer they
chase. The beauty of the forest and the song of birds lead on to the
adventure; but they are as nothing compared to the romantic fact that
this is a place where any man may meet with Robin Hood.
In the same way, a child appreciates character as it affects the course
of events. Robin Hood’s men are neither an army nor a clan; they join
his company of their own free choice, after proof of sportsmanship; and
the chief of them—Little John, Scarlett and Much the miller’s son, are
distinct personalities. The result is a spirit of individual adventure
which gives the stories unusual interest and variety.
The earliest songs of Robin Hood had grown into a ballad-epic, “A Lytell
Geste of Robyn Hood”,[17] in which Robin’s character was proved in talk
and incidents, and further shown by the story-teller’s comments on his
courage and gentleness, his respect for women, his love of the forest;
but gentle attributes failed to impress the writers of eighteenth century
broadsheets. They recall the more obvious traits by a few epithets:
“I will you tell of a bold outlaw,”
or
“A story of gallant brave Robin Hood
Unto you I will declare.”
Taking the rest for granted, they deal directly with Robin’s combats and
escapes, his farcical adventures with bishops and beggars, his daring
rescues; and in these, the quality that comes uppermost is the roguish
humour which above all distinguishes him from the conventional knight of
chivalry.
A single attempt to connect him with the romances—the late ballad of
“Robin Hood and the Prince of Aragon”—marks the difference of kind; for
though Robin kills the prince, and John and Scadlock bag a giant apiece,
they move like live men among shadows.
The children of the eighteenth century did not meet the outlaws of the
“golden world”. They knew the Curtal Friar and Alan a Dale, and what
happened when Robin Hood
“Weary of the Wood-side
And chasing of the fallow deer,”
tried his fortunes at sea. They had two ballads at least that varied
old themes of the _Geste_, “Robin Hood and the Bishop” and “The King’s
Disguise”. And Little John was their friend,—not of course, the old
Little John who praised the season in the words of a poet; but “A jolly
brisk blade right fit for the trade”, more like the scapegrace in a
popular “History”.
_Robin Hood’s Garland_, printed in 1749, gave a mere collection of
stories for the sequence of the _Geste_, and many chap-books copied it in
prose; but a rough cadence is better than none, and Robin Hood was first
praised in a ballad.
The chap-books, indeed, were no more than the dead leaves of romance;
it took the vivid play of a child’s fancy to revive them; but whatever
the ballad-maker touched,—fairy tale or legend or history,—he made a new
thing of it: a story to sing or tell, but short enough to be sung or told
many times over.