Percy and the Ballads.
The regeneration of English poetic style at the close of the last century
came from an unexpected quarter. What scholars and professional men of
letters had sought to do by their imitations of Spenser and Milton, and
their domestication of the Gothic and the Celtic muse, was much more
effectually done by Percy and the ballad collectors. What they had
sought to do was to recall British poetry to the walks of imagination and
to older and better models than Dryden and Pope. But they could not jump
off their own shadows: the eighteenth century was too much for them.
While they anxiously cultivated wildness and simplicity, their diction
remained polished, literary, academic to a degree. It is not, indeed,
until we reach the boundaries of a new century that we encounter a Gulf
Stream of emotional, creative impulse strong enough and hot enough to
thaw the classical icebergs till not a floating spiculum of them is left.
Meanwhile, however, there occurred a revivifying contact with one
department, at least, of early verse literature, which did much to clear
the way for Scott and Coleridge and Keats. The decade from 1760 to 1770
is important in the history of English romanticism, and its most
important title is Thomas Percy's "Reliques of Ancient English Poetry:
Consisting of Old Heroic Ballads, Songs, and Other Pieces of our Earlier
Poets," published in three volumes in 1765. It made a less immediate and
exciting impression upon contemporary Europe than MacPherson's "Poems of
Ossian," but it was more fruitful in enduring results. The Germans make
a convenient classification of poetry into _Kunstpoesie_ and
_Volkspoesie_, terms which may be imperfectly translated as literary
poetry and popular poetry. The English _Kunstpoesie_ of the Middle Ages
lay buried under many superincumbent layers of literary fashion.
Oblivion had overtaken Gower and Occleve, and Lydgate and Stephen Hawes,
and Skelton, and Henryson and James I. of Scotland, and well-nigh Chaucer
himself--all the mediaeval poetry of the schools, in short. But it was
known to the curious that there was still extant a large body of popular
poetry in the shape of narrative ballads, which had been handed down
chiefly by oral transmission, and still lived in the memories and upon
the lips of the common people. Many of these went back in their original
shapes to the Middle Ages, or to an even remoter antiquity, and belonged
to that great store of folk-lore which was the common inheritance of the
Aryan race. Analogues and variants of favorite English and Scottish
ballads have been traced through almost all the tongues of modern Europe.
Danish literature is especially rich in ballads and affords valuable
illustrations of our native ministrelsy.[1] It was, perhaps, due in part
to the Danish settlements in Northumbria and to the large Scandinavian
admixture in the Northumbrian blood and dialect, that "the north
countrie" became _par excellence_ the ballad land: Lowland
Scotland--particularly the Lothians--and the English bordering counties,
Northumberland, Westmoreland, and Cumberland; with Yorkshire and
Nottinghamshire, in which were Barndale and Sherwood Forests, Robin
Hood's haunts. It is not possible to assign exact dates to these songs.
They were seldom reduced to writing till many years after they were
composed. In the Middle Ages they were sung to the harp by wandering
minstrels. In later times they were chanted or recited by ballad-singers
at fairs, markets, ale-houses, street-corners, sometimes to the
accompaniment of a fiddle or crowd. They were learned by ancient dames,
who repeated them in chimney corners to children and grandchildren. In
this way some of them were preserved in an unwritten state, even to the
present day, in the tenacious memory of the people, always at bottom
conservative and, under a hundred changes of fashion in the literary
poetry which passes over their heads, clinging obstinately to old songs
and beliefs learned in childhood, and handing them on to posterity.
Walter Scott got much of the material for his "Ministrelsy of the Border"
from the oral recitation of pipers, shepherds, and old women in Ettrick
Forest. Professor Child's--the latest and fullest ballad
collection--contains pieces never before given in print or manuscript,
some of them obtained in America![2]
Leading this subterranean existence, and generally thought unworthy the
notice of educated people, they naturally underwent repeated changes; so
that we have numerous versions of the same story, and incidents,
descriptions, and entire stanzas are borrowed and lent freely among the
different ballads. The circumstance, _e.g._, of the birk and the briar
springing from the graves of true lovers and intertwisting their branches
occurs in the ballads of "Fair Margaret and Sweet William," "Lord Thomas
and Fair Annet," "Lord Lovel," "Fair Janet," and many others. The knight
who was carried to fairyland through an entrance in a green hillside, and
abode seven years with the queen of fairy, recurs in "Tam Lin," "Thomas
Rymer,"[3] etc. Like all folk-songs, these ballads are anonymous and may
be regarded not as the composition of any one poet, but as the property,
and in a sense the work, of the people as a whole. Coming out of an
uncertain past, based on some dark legend of heart-break or blood-shed,
they bear no author's name, but are _ferae naturae_ and have the flavor
of wild game. They were common stock, like the national speech; everyone
could contribute toward them: generations of nameless poets, minstrels,
ballad-singers modernized their language to suit new times, altered their
dialect to suit new places, accommodated their details to different
audiences, English or Scotch, and in every way that they thought fit
added, retrenched, corrupted, improved, and passed them on.
Folk-poetry is conventional; it seems to be the production of a guild,
and to have certain well understood and commonly expected tricks of style
and verse. Freshness and sincerity are almost always attributes of the
poetry of heroic ages, but individuality belongs to a high civilization
and an advanced literary culture. Whether the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey"
are the work of one poet or of a cycle of poets, doubtless the rhetorical
peculiarities of the Homeric epics, such as the recurrent phrase and the
conventional epithet (the rosy-fingered dawn, the well-greaved Greeks,
the swift-footed Achilles, the much-enduring Odysseus, etc.) are due to
this communal or associative character of ancient heroic song. As in the
companies of architects who built the mediaeval cathedrals, or in the
schools of early Italian painters, masters and disciples, the manner of
the individual artist was subdued to the tradition of his craft.
The English and Scottish popular ballads are in various simple stanza
forms, the commonest of all being the old _septenarius_ or "fourteener,"
arranged in a four-lined stanza of alternate eights and sixes, thus:
"Up then crew the red, red cock,
And up and crew the gray;
The eldest to the youngest said
''Tis time we were away.'"[4]
This is the stanza usually employed by modern ballad imitators, like
Coleridge in "The Ancient Mariner," Scott in "Jock o' Hazeldean,"
Longfellow in "The Wreck of the Hesperus," Macaulay in the "Lays of
Ancient Rome," Aytoun in the "Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers." Many of
the stylistic and metrical peculiarities of the ballads arose from the
fact that they were made to be sung or recited from memory. Such are
perhaps the division of the longer ones into fits, to rest the voice of
the singer; and the use of the burden or refrain for the same purpose, as
also to give the listeners and bystanders a chance to take up the chorus,
which they probably accompanied with a few dancing steps.[5] Sometimes
the burden has no meaning in itself and serves only to mark time with a
_Hey derry down_ or an _O lilly lally_ and the like. Sometimes it has
more or less reference to the story, as in "The Two Sisters":
"He has ta'en three locks o' her yellow hair--
Binnorie, O Binnorie--
And wi' them strung his harp sae rare--
By the bonnie mill-dams of Binnorie."
Again it has no discoverable relation to the context, as in "Riddles
Wisely Expounded"--
"There was a knicht riding frae the east--
_Jennifer gentle and rosemarie_--
Who had been wooing at monie a place--
_As the dew flies over the mulberry tree._"
Both kinds of refrain have been liberally employed by modern balladists.
Thus Tennyson in "The Sisters":
"We were two sisters of one race,
_The wind is howling in turret and tree;_
_ _She was the fairer in the face,
_O the earl was fair to see."_
While Rossetti and Jean Ingelow and others have rather favored the
inconsequential burden, an affectation travestied by the late Mr. C. S.
Calverley:
"The auld wife sat at her ivied door,
(Butter and eggs and a pound of cheese)
A thing she had frequently done before;
And her spectacles lay on her aproned knees.
"The farmer's daughter hath soft brown hair
(Butter and eggs and a pound of cheese),
And I met with a ballad, I can't say where,
Which wholly consisted of lines like these."[6]
A musical or mnemonic device akin to the refrain was that sing-song
species of repetend so familiar in ballad language:
"She had na pu'd a double rose,
a rose but only twa."
"They had na sailed a league, a league,
A league but barely three.
"How will I come up? How can I come up?
How can I come to thee?"
An answer is usually returned in the identical words of the question; and
as in Homer, a formula of narration or a commonplace of description does
duty again and again. Iteration in the ballads is not merely for
economy, but stands in lieu of the metaphor and other figures of literary
poetry:
"'O Marie, put on your robes o' black,
Or else your robes o' brown,
For ye maun gang wi' me the night,
To see fair Edinbro town.'
"'I winna put on my robes o' black,
Nor yet my robes o' brown;
But I'll put on my robes o' white,
To shine through Edinbro town.'"
Another mark of the genuine ballad manner, as of Homer and _Volkspoesie_
in general, is the conventional epithet. Macaulay noted that the gold is
always red in the ballads, the ladies always gay, and Robin Hood's men
are always his merry men. Doughty Douglas, bold Robin Hood, merry
Carlisle, the good greenwood, the gray goose wing, and the wan water are
other inseparables of the kind. Still another mark is the frequent
retention of the Middle English accent on the final syllable in words
like contrié, barón, dinére, felàwe, abbày, rivére, monéy, and its
assumption by words which never properly had it, such as ladý, harpér,
weddíng, watér, etc.[7] Indeed, as Percy pointed out in his
introduction, there were "many phrases and idioms which the minstrels
seem to have appropriated to themselves, . . . a cast of style and
measure very different from that of contemporary poets of a higher class."
Not everything that is called a ballad belongs to the class of poetry
that we are here considering. In its looser employment the word has
signified almost any kind of song: "a woeful ballad made to his mistress'
eyebrow," for example. "Ballade" was also the name of a somewhat
intricate French stanza form, employed by Gower and Chaucer, and recently
reintroduced into English verse by Dobson, Lang, Goose, and others, along
with the virelay, rondeau, triolet, etc. There is also a numerous class
of popular ballads--in the sense of something made _for_ the people,
though not _by_ the people--are without relation to our subject. These
are the street ballads, which were and still are hawked about by
ballad-mongers, and which have no literary character whatever. There are
satirical and political ballads, ballads versifying passages in Scripture
or chronicle, ballads relating to current events, or giving the history
of famous murders and other crimes, of prodigies, providences, and all
sorts of happenings that teach a lesson in morals: about George Barnwell
and the "Babes in the Wood," and "Whittington and his Cat," etc.: ballads
like Shenstone's "Jemmy Dawson" and Gay's "Black-eyed Susan." Thousands
of such are included in manuscript collections like the "Pepysian," or
printed in the publications of the Roxburghe Club and the Ballad Society.
But whether entirely modern, or extant in black-letter broadsides, they
are nothing to our purpose. We have to do here with the folk-song, the
_traditional_ ballad, product of the people at a time when the people was
homogeneous and the separation between the lettered and unlettered
classes had not yet taken place: the true minstrel ballad of the Middle
Ages, or of that state of society which in rude and primitive
neighborhoods, like the Scottish border, prolonged mediaeval conditions
beyond the strictly mediaeval period.
In the form in which they are preserved, a few of our ballads are older
than the seventeenth or the latter part of the sixteenth century, though
in their origin many of them are much older. Manuscript versions of
"Robin Hood and the Monk" and "Robin Hood and the Potter" exist, which
are referred to the last years of the fifteenth century. The "Lytel
Geste of Robyn Hode" was printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1489. The
"Not-Brown Maid" was printed in "Arnold's Chronicle" in 1502. "The
Hunting of the Cheviot"--the elder version of "Chevy Chase"--was
mentioned by Philip Sidney in his "Defence of Poesie" in 1850.[8] The
ballad is a narrative song, naïve, impersonal, spontaneous, objective.
The singer is lost in the song, the teller in the tale. That is its
essence, but sometimes the story is told by the lyrical, sometimes by the
dramatic method. In "Helen of Kirkconnell" it is the bereaved lover who
is himself the speaker: in "Waly Waly," the forsaken maid. These are
monologues; for a purely dialogue ballad it will be sufficient to mention
the power and impressive piece in the "Reliques" entitled "Edward."
Herder translated this into German; it is very old, with Danish, Swedish,
and Finnish analogues. It is a story of parricide, and is narrated in a
series of questions by the mother and answers by the son. The commonest
form, however, was a mixture of epic and dramatic, or direct relation
with dialogue. A frequent feature is the abruptness of the opening and
the translations. The ballad-maker observes unconsciously Aristotle's
rule for the epic poet, to begin _in medias res_. Johnson noticed this
in the instance of "Johnny Armstrong," but a stronger example is found in
"The Banks of Yarrow:"
"Late at e'en, drinking the wine,
And ere they paid the lawing,
They set a combat them between,
To fight it in the dawing."
With this, an indirect, allusive way of telling the story, which Goethe
mentions in his prefatory note to "Des Sängers Fluch," as a constant note
of the "Volkslied." The old ballad-maker does not vouchsafe explanations
about persons and motives; often he gives the history, not expressly nor
fully, but by hints and glimpses, leaving the rest to conjecture;
throwing up its salient points into a strong, lurid light against a
background of shadows. The knight rides out a-hunting, and by and by his
riderless horse comes home, and that is all:
"Toom[9] hame cam the saddle
But never cam he."
Or the knight himself comes home and lies down to die, reluctantly
confessing, under his mother's questioning, that he dined with his
true-love and is poisoned.[10] And again that is all. Or
"--In behint yon auld fail[11] dyke,
I wot there lies a new-slain knight;
And naebody kens that he lies there,
But his hawk, his hound, and lady fair.
"His hound is to the hunting game,
His hawk to fetch the wild-fowl hame,
His lady's ta'en another mate,
So we may mak our dinner sweet."
A whole unuttered tragedy of love, treachery, and murder lies back of
these stanzas. This method of narration may be partly accounted for by
the fact that the story treated was commonly some local country-side
legend of family feud or unhappy passion, whose incidents were familiar
to the ballad-singer's audience and were readily supplied by memory. One
theory holds that the story was partly told and partly sung, and that the
links and expositions were given in prose. However this may be, the
artless art of these popular poets evidently included a knowledge of the
uses of mystery and suggestion. They knew that, for the imagination, the
part is sometimes greater than the whole. Gray wrote to Mason in 1757,
"I have got the old Scotch ballad [Gil Maurice] on which 'Douglas'
[Home's tragedy, first played at Edinburgh in 1756] was founded. It is
divine. . . Aristotle's best rules are observed in it in a manner which
shews the author never had heard of Aristotle. It begins in the fifth
act of the play. You may read it two-thirds through without guessing
what it is about; and yet, when you come to the end, it is impossible not
to understand the whole story."
It is not possible to recover the conditions under which these folk-songs
"made themselves,"[12] as it were, or grew under the shaping hands of
generations of nameless bards. Their naïve, primitive quality cannot be
acquired: the secret is lost. But Walter Scott, who was steeped to the
lips in balladry, and whose temper had much of the healthy objectivity of
an earlier age, has succeeded as well as any modern. Some of his ballads
are more perfect artistically than his long metrical romances; those of
them especially which are built up from a burden or fragment of old
minstrel song, like "Jock o' Hazeldean"[13] and the song in "Rokeby":
"He turned his charger as he spake
Upon the river shore,
He gave the bride-reins a shake,
Said 'Adieu for evermore,
My love!
And adieu for evermore!'"
Here Scott catches the very air of popular poetry, and the dovetailing is
done with most happy skill. "Proud Maisie is in the Wood" is a fine
example of the ballad manner of story-telling by implication.[14]
As regards their subject-matter, the ballads admit of a rough
classification into the historical, or _quasi_-historical, and the purely
legendary or romantic. Of the former class were the "riding-ballad" of
the Scottish border, where the forays of moss-troopers, the lifting of
blackmail, the raids and private warfare of the Lords of the Marches,
supplied many traditions of heroism and adventure like those recorded in
"The Battle of Otterburn," "The Hunting of the Cheviot," "Johnnie
Armstrong," "Kinmont Willie," "The Rising in the North" and
"Northumberland Betrayed by Douglas." Of the fictitious class, some were
shortened, popularized, and generally degraded versions of the chivalry
romances, which were passing out of favor among educated readers in the
sixteenth century and fell into the hands of the ballad-makers. Such, to
name only a few included in the "Reliques," were "Sir Lancelot du Lake,"
"The Legend of Sir Guy," "King Arthur's Death" and "The Marriage of Sir
Gawaine." But the substance of these was not of the genuine popular
stuff, and their personages were simply the old heroes of court poetry in
reduced circumstances. Much more impressive are the original folk-songs,
which strike their roots deep into the ancient world of legend and even
of myth.
In this true ballad world there is a strange commingling of paganism and
Catholic Christianity. It abounds in the supernatural and the marvelous.
Robin Hood is a pious outlaw. He robs the fat-headed monks, but will not
die unhouseled and has great devotion to Our Blessed Lady; who appears
also to Brown Robyn, when he is cast overboard, hears his confession and
takes his soul to Heaven.[15] When mass has been sung and the bells of
merry Lincoln have rung, Lady Maisry goes seeking her little Hugh, who
has been killed by the Jew's daughter and thrown into Our Lady's
draw-well fifty fathom deep, and the boy answers his mother miraculously
from the well.[16] Birds carry messages for lovers[17] and dying
men,[18] or show the place where the body lies buried and the
corpse-candles shine.[19] The harper strings his harp with three golden
hairs of the drowned maiden, and the tune that he plays upon them reveals
the secret of her death.[20] The ghosts of the sons that have perished
at sea come home to take farewell of their mother.[21] The spirit of the
forsaken maid visits her false lover at midnight;[22] or "the dead comes
for the quick,"[23] as in Burger's weird poem. There are witches,
fairies, and mermaidens[24] in the ballads: omens, dreams, spells,[25]
enchantments, transformations,[26] magic rings and charms, "gramarye"[27]
of many sorts; and all these things are more effective here than in poets
like Spenser and Collins, because they are matters of belief and not of
make-believe.
The ballads are prevailingly tragical in theme, and the tragic passions
of pity and fear find an elementary force of utterance. Love is strong
as death, jealousy cruel as the grave. Hate, shame, grief, despair speak
here with their native accent:
"There are seven forsters at Pickeram Side,
At Pickeram where they dwell,
And for a drop of thy heart's bluid
They wad ride the fords of hell."[28]
"O little did my mother think,
The day she cradled me,
What lands I was to travel through,
What death I was to dee."[29]
The maiden asks her buried lover:
"Is there any room at your head, Sanders?
Is there any room at your feet?
Or any room at your twa sides,
Where fain, fain would I sleep?"[30]
"O waly, waly, but love be bonny
A little time while it is new;[31]
But when 'tis auld it waxeth cauld
And fades awa' like morning dew. . .
"And O! if my young babe were born,
And set upon the nurse's knee,
And I mysel' were dead and gane,
And the green grass growing over me!"
Manners in this world are of a primitive savagery. There are treachery,
violence, cruelty, revenge; but there are also honor, courage, fidelity,
and devotion that endureth to the end. "Child Waters" and "Fair Annie" do
not suffer on a comparison with Tennyson's "Enid" and Chaucer's story of
patient Griselda ("The Clerkes Tale") with which they have a common
theme. It is the medieval world. Marauders, pilgrims, and wandering
gleemen go about in it. The knight stands at his garden pale, the lady
sits at her bower window, and the little foot page carries messages over
moss and moor. Marchmen are riding through the Bateable Land "by the hie
light o' the moon." Monks are chanting in St. Mary's Kirk, trumpets are
blowing in Carlisle town, castles are burning; down in the glen there is
an ambush and swords are flashing; bows are twanging in the greenwood;
four and twenty ladies are playing at the ball, and four and twenty
milk-white calves are in the woods of Glentanner--all ready to be stolen.
About Yule the round tables begin; the queen looks over the castle-wall,
the palmer returns from the Holy Land, Young Waters lies deep in Stirling
dungeon, but Child Maurice is in the silver wood, combing his yellow
locks with a silver comb.
There is an almost epic coherence about the ballads of the Robin Hood
cycle. This good robber, who with his merry men haunted the forests of
Sherwood and Barnsdale, was the real ballad hero and the darling of the
popular fancy which created him. For though the names of his confessor,
Friar Tuck; his mistress, Maid Marian; and his companions, Little John,
Scathelock, and Much the miller's son, have an air of reality,--and
though the tradition has associated itself with definite
localities,--there is nothing historical about Robin Hood. Langland, in
the fourteenth century, mentions "rhymes of Robin Hood"; and efforts have
been made to identify him with one of the dispossessed followers of Simon
de Montfort, in "the Barons' War," or with some still earlier
free-booter, of Hereward's time, who had taken to the woods and lived by
plundering the Normans. Myth as he is, he is a thoroughly national
conception. He had the English love of fair play; the English readiness
to shake hands and make up when worsted in a square fight. He killed the
King's venison, but was a loyal subject. He took from the rich and gave
to the poor, executing thus a kind of wild justice. He defied legal
authority in the person of the proud sheriff of Nottingham, thereby
appealing to that secret sympathy with lawlessness which marks a
vigorous, free yeomanry.[32] He had the knightly virtues of courtesy and
hospitality, and the yeomanly virtues of good temper and friendliness.
And finally, he was a mighty archer with the national weapons, the
long-bow and the cloth-yard shaft; and so appealed to the national love
of sport in his free and careless life under the greenwood tree. The
forest scenery give a poetic background to his exploits, and though the
ballads, like folk-poetry in general, seldom linger over natural
descriptions, there is everywhere a consciousness of this background and
a wholesome, outdoor feeling:
"In somer, when the shawes be sheyne,
And leves be large and long,
Hit is full mery in feyre foreste
To here the foulys song:
"To se the dere draw to the dale,
And leve the hillis hee,
And shadow hem in the levës grene,
Under the grene-wode tre."[33]
Although a few favorite ballads such as "Johnnie Armstrong," "Chevy
Chase," "The Children in the Wood," and some of the Robin Hood ones had
long been widely, nay almost universally familiar, they had hardly been
regarded as literature worthy of serious attention. They were looked
upon as nursery tales, or at best as the amusement of peasants and
unlettered folk, who used to paste them up on the walls of inns,
cottages, and ale-houses. Here and there an educated man had had a
sneaking fondness for collecting old ballads--much as people nowadays
collect postage stamps. Samuel Pepys, the diarist, made such a
collection, and so did John Selden, the great legal antiquary and scholar
of Milton's time. "I have heard," wrote Addison, "that the late Lord
Dorset, who had the greatest wit tempered with the greatest candor, and
was one of the finest critics as well as the best poets of his age, had a
numerous collection of old English ballads, and a particular pleasure in
the reading of them. I can affirm the same of Mr. Dryden." Dryden's
"Miscellany Poems" (1684) gave "Gilderoy," "Johnnie Armstrong," "Chevy
Chase," "The Miller and the King's Daughter," and "Little Musgrave and
the Lady Barnard." The last named, as well as "Lady Anne Bothwell's
Lament" and "Fair Margaret and Sweet William,"[34] was quoted in Beaumont
and Fletcher's "Knight of the Burning Pestle," (1611). Scraps of them
are sung by one of the _dramatis personae_, old Merrythought, whose
speciality is a damnable iteration of ballad fragments. References to
old ballads are numerous in the Elizabethan plays. Percy devoted the
second book of his first series to "Ballads that Illustrate Shakspere."
In the seventeenth century a few ballads were printed entire in poetic
miscellanies entitled "Garlands," higgledy-piggledy with pieces of all
kinds. Professor Child enumerates nine ballad collections before
Percy's. The only ones of any importance among these were "A Collection
of Old Ballads" (Vols I. and II. in 1723, Vol III. In 1725), ascribed to
Ambrose Philips; and the Scotch poet, Allan Ramsay's, "Tea Table
Miscellany," (in 4 vols., 1714-40) and "Evergreen" (2 vols., 1724). The
first of these collections was illustrated with copperplate engravings
and supplied with introductions which were humorous in intention. The
editor treated his ballads as trifles, though he described them as
"corrected from the best and most ancient copies extant"; and said that
Homer himself was nothing more than a blind ballad-singer, whose songs
had been subsequently joined together and formed into an epic poem.
Ramsay's ballads were taken in part from a manuscript collection of some
eight hundred pages, made by George Bannatyne about 1570 and still
preserved in the Advocates' Library at Edinburgh.
In Nos. 70, 74, and 85, of the _Spectator_, Addison had praised the
naturalness and simplicity of the popular ballads, selecting for special
mention "Chevy Chase"--the later version--"which," he wrote, "is the
favorite ballad of the common people of England; and Ben Jonson used to
say he had rather have been the author of it than of all his works"; and
"the 'Two Children in the Wood,' which is one of the darling songs of the
common people, and has been the delight of most Englishmen in some part
of their age." Addison justifies his liking for these humble poems by
classical precedents. "The greatest modern critics have laid it down as
a rule that an heroic poem should be founded upon some important precept
of morality adapted to the constitution of the country in which the poet
writes. Homer and Virgil have formed their plans in this view."
Accordingly he thinks that the author of "Chevy Chase" meant to point a
moral as to the mischiefs of private war. As if it were not precisely
the _gaudium certaminis_ that inspired the old border ballad-maker! As
if he did not glory in the fight! The passage where Earl Percy took the
dead Douglas by the hand and lamented his fallen foe reminds Addison of
Aeneas' behavior toward Lausus. The robin red-breast covering the
children with leaves recalls to his mind a similar touch in one of
Horace's odes. But it was much that Addison, whose own verse was so
artificial, should have had a taste for the wild graces of folk-song. He
was severely ridiculed by his contemporaries for these concessions. "He
descended now and then to lower disquisitions," wrote Dr. Johnson," and
by a serious display of the beauties of 'Chevy Chase,' exposed himself to
the ridicule of Wagstaff, who bestowed a like pompous character on 'Tom
Thumb'; and to the contempt of Dennis, who, considering the fundamental
position of his criticism, that 'Chevy Chase' pleases and ought to please
because it is natural, observes that 'there is a way of deviating from
nature . . . by imbecility, which degrades nature by faintness and
diminution'. . . In 'Chevy Chase' . . . there is a chill and lifeless
imbecility. The story cannot possibly be told in a manner that shall
make less impression on the mind."[35]
Nicholas Rowe, the dramatist and Shakspere editor, had said a good word
for ballads in the prologue to "Jane Shore" (1713):
"Let no nice taste despise the hapless dame
Because recording ballads chant her name.
Those venerable ancient song enditers
Soared many a pitch above our modern writers. . .
Our numbers may be more refined than those,
But what we've gained in verse, we've lost in prose.
Their words no shuffling double meaning knew:
Their speech was homely, but their hearts were true. . .
With rough, majestic force they moved the heart,
And strength and nature made amends for art."
Ballad forgery had begun early. To say nothing of appropriations, like
Mallet's, of "William and Margaret," Lady Wardlaw put forth her
"Hardyknut" in 1719 as a genuine old ballad, and it was reprinted as such
in Ramsay's "Evergreen." Gray wrote to Walpole in 1760, "I have been
often told that the poem called 'Hardicanute' (which I always admired and
still admire) was the work of somebody that lived a few years ago. This
I do not at all believe, though it has evidently been retouched by some
modern hand." Before Percy no concerted or intelligent effort had been
made toward collecting, preserving, and editing the _corpus poetarum_ of
English minstrelsy. The great mass of ancient ballads, so far as they
were in print at all, existed in "stall copies," _i.e._, single sheets of
broadsides, struck off for sale by balladmongers and the keepers of
book-stalls.
Thomas Percy, the compiler of the "Reliques," was a parish clergyman,
settled at the retired hamlet of Easton Maudit, Northamptonshire. For
years he had amused his leisure by collecting ballads. He numbered among
his acquaintances men of letters like Johnson, Goldsmith, Garrick,
Grainger, Farmer, and Shenstone. It was the last who suggested the plan
of the "Reliques" and who was to have helped in its execution, had not
his illness and death prevented. Johnson spent a part of the summer of
1764 on a visit to the vicarage of Easton Maudit, on which occasion Percy
reports that his guest "chose for his regular reading the old Spanish
romance of 'Felixmarte of Hircania,' in folio, which he read quite
through." He adds, what one would not readily suspect, that the doctor,
when a boy, "was immoderately fond of reading romances of chivalry, and
he retained his fondness for them through life. . . I have heard him
attribute to these extravagant fictions that unsettled turn of mind which
prevented his ever fixing in any profession." Percy talked over his
project with Johnson, who would seem to have given his approval, and even
to have added his persuasions to Shenstone's. For in the preface to the
first edition of the "Reliques," the editor declared that "he could
refuse nothing to such judges as the author of the _Rambler_ and the late
Mr. Shenstone"; and that "to the friendship of Mr. Johnson he owes many
valuable hints for the conduct of his work." And after Ritson had
questioned the existence of the famous "folio manuscript," Percy's nephew
in the advertisement to the fourth edition (1794), cited "the appeal
publicly made to Dr. Johnson . . . so long since as in the year 1765, and
never once contradicted by him."
In spite of these amenities, the doctor had a low opinion of ballads and
ballad collectors. In the _Rambler_ (No. 177) he made merry over one
Cantilenus, who "turned all his thoughts upon old ballads, for he
considered them as the genuine records of the natural taste. He offered
to show me a copy of 'The Children in the Wood,' which he firmly believed
to be of the first edition, and by the help of which the text might be
freed from several corruptions, if this age of barbarity had any claim to
such favors from him." "The conversation," says Boswell, "having turned
on modern imitations of ancient ballads, and someone having praised their
simplicity, he treated them with that ridicule which he always displayed
when that subject was mentioned." Johnson wrote several stanzas in
parody of the ballads; _e.g._,
"The tender infant, meek and mild,
Fell down upon a stone:
The nurse took up the squealing child,
But still the child squealed on."
And again:
"I put my hat upon my head
And walked into the Strand;
And there I met another man
Whose hat was in his hand."
This is quoted by Wordsworth,[36] who compares it with a stanza from "The
Children in the Wood":
"Those pretty babes, with hand in hand,
Went wandering up and down;
But never more they saw the man
Approaching from the town."
He says that in both of these stanzas the language is that of familiar
conversation, yet one stanza is admirable and the other contemptible,
because the _matter_ of it is contemptible. In the essay supplementary
to his preface, Wordsworth asserts that the "Reliques" was "ill suited to
the then existing taste of city society, and Dr. Johnson . . . was not
sparing in his exertions to make it an object of contempt": and that "Dr.
Percy was so abashed by the ridicule flung upon his labors . . . that,
though while he was writing under a mask he had not wanted resolution to
follow his genius into the regions of true simplicity and genuine pathos
(as is evinced by the exquisite ballad of 'Sir Cauline' and by many other
pieces), yet when he appeared in his own person and character as a
poetical writer, he adopted, as in the tale of 'The Hermit of Warkworth,'
a diction scarcely distinguishable from the vague, the glossy and
unfeeling language of his day." Wordsworth adds that he esteems the
genius of Dr. Percy in this kind of writing superior to that of any other
modern writer; and that even Bürger had not Percy's fine sensibility. He
quotes, in support of this opinion, two stanzas from "The Child of Elle"
in the "Reliques," and contrasts them with the diluted and tricked-out
version of the same in Bürger's German.
Mr. Hales does not agree in this high estimate of Percy as a ballad
composer. Of this same "Child of Elle" he says: "The present fragment of
a version may be fairly said to be now printed for the first time, as in
the 'Reliques' it is buried in a heap of 'polished' verses composed by
Percy. That worthy prelate, touched by the beauty of it--he had a
soul--was unhappily moved to try his hand at its completion. A
wax-doll-maker might as well try to restore Milo's Venus. There are
thirty-nine lines here. There are two hundred in the thing called the
'Child of Elle' in the 'Reliques.' But in those two hundred lines all
the thirty-nine originals do not appear. . . On the whole, the union of
the genuine and the false--of the old ballad with Percy's tawdry
feebleness--makes about as objectionable a _mésalliance_ as in the story
itself is in the eyes of the father."[37] The modern ballad scholars, in
their zeal for the purity of the text, are almost as hard upon Percy as
Ritson himself was. They say that he polished "The Heir of Linne" till
he could see his own face in it; and swelled out its 126 lines to 216--"a
fine flood of ballad and water."[38] The result of this piecing and
tinkering in "Sir Cauline"--which Wordsworth thought exquisite--they
regard as a heap of tinsel, though they acknowledge that "these
additional stanzas show, indeed, an extensive acquaintance with old
balladry and a considerable talent of imitation."
From the critical or scholarly point of view, these strictures are
doubtless deserved. It is an editor's duty to give his text as he finds
it, without interpolations or restorations; and it is unquestionable that
Percy's additions to fragmentary pieces are full of sentimentalism,
affectation, and the spurious poetic diction of his age. An experienced
ballad amateur can readily separate, in most cases, the genuine portions
from the insertions. But it is unfair to try Percy by modern editorial
canons. That sacredness which is now imputed to the _ipsissima verba_ of
an ancient piece of popular literature would have been unintelligible to
men of that generation, who regarded such things as trifles at best, and
mostly as barbarous trifles--something like wampum belts, or nose-rings,
or antique ornaments in the _goût barbare et charmant des bijoux goths_.
Percy's readers did not want torsos and scraps; to present them with
acephalous or bobtailed ballads--with _cetera desunt_ and constellations
of asterisks--like the manuscript in Prior's poem, the conclusion of
which was eaten by the rats--would have been mere pedantry. Percy knew
his public, and he knew how to make his work attractive to it. The
readers of that generation enjoyed their ballad with a large infusion of
Percy. If the scholars of this generation prefer to take theirs without,
they know where to get it.
The materials for the "Reliques" were drawn partly from the Pepys
collection at Magdalen College, Cambridge; from Anthony Wood's, made in
1676, in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford; from manuscript and printed
ballads in the Bodleian, the British Museum, the archives of the
Antiquarian Society, and private collections. Sir David Dalrymple sent a
number of Scotch ballads, and the editor acknowledged obligations to
Thomas Warton and many others. But the nucleus of the whole was a
certain folio manuscript in a handwriting of Charles I.'s time,
containing 191 songs and ballads, which Percy had begged, then still very
young, from his friend Humphrey Pitt, of Prior's-Lee in Shropshire. When
he first saw this precious document, it was torn, unbound, and mutilated,
"lying dirty on the floor under a bureau in the parlor, being used by the
maids to light the fire." The first and last leaves were wanting, and
"of 54 pages near the beginning, half of every leaf hath been torn
away."[39] Percy had it bound, but the binders trimmed off the top and
bottom lines in the process. From this manuscript he professed to have
taken "the greater part" of the pieces in the "Reliques." In truth he
took only 45 of the 176 poems in his first edition from this source.
Percy made no secret of the fact that he filled _lacunae_ in his
originals with stanzas, and, in some cases, with nearly entire poems of
his own composition. But the extent of the liberties that he took with
the text, although suspected, was not certainly known until Mr. Furnivall
finally got leave to have the folio manuscript copied and printed.[40]
Before this time it had been jealously guarded by the Percy family, and
access to it had been denied to scholars. "Since Percy and his nephew
printed their fourth edition of the 'Reliques' from the manuscript in
1794," writes Mr. Furnivall in his "Forewords," "no one has printed any
piece from it except Robert Jamieson--to whom Percy supplied a copy of
'Child Maurice' and 'Robin Hood and the Old Man' for his 'Popular Ballads
and Songs' (1806)--and Sir Frederic Madden, who was allowed--by one of
Percy's daughters--to print 'The Grene Knight,' 'The Carle of Carlisle'
and 'The Turk and Gawin' in his 'Syr Gawaine' for the Bannatyne Club,
1839." Percy was furiously assailed by Joseph Ritson for manipulating
his texts; and in the 1794 edition he made some concessions to the
latter's demand for a literal rescript, by taking off a few of the
ornaments in which he had tricked them. Ritson was a thoroughly
critical, conscientious student of poetic antiquities and held the right
theory of an editor's functions. In his own collection of early English
poetry he rendered a valuable service to all later inquiries. These
included "Pieces of Ancient Popular Poetry," 1791; "Ancient Songs," 1792;
"Scottish Songs," 1794; "Robin Hood," 1795; besides editions of Laurence
Minot's poems, and of "Gammer Gurton's Needle," as well as other titles.
He was an ill-tempered and eccentric man: a vegetarian, a free-thinker, a
spelling reformer,[41] and latterly a Jacobin. He attacked Warton as
well as Percy, and used to describe any clerical antagonist as a
"stinking priest." He died insane in 1803. Ritson took issue with the
theory maintained in Percy's introductory "Essay on the Ancient
Minstrels," viz.: that the minstrels were not only the singers, but
likewise the authors of the ballads. But Ritson went so far in his rage
against Percy as to deny the existence of the sacred Folio Manuscript,
until convinced by abundant testimony that there was such a thing. It
was an age of forgeries, and Ritson was not altogether without
justification in supposing that the author of "The Hermit of Warkworth"
belonged in the same category with Chatterton, Ireland, and MacPherson.
Percy, like Warton, took an apologetic tone toward his public. "In a
polished age, like the present," he wrote, "I am sensible that many of
these reliques of antiquity will require great allowances to be made for
them. Yet have they, for the most part, a pleasing simplicity and many
artless graces, which, in the opinion of no mean critics, have been
thought to compensate for the want of higher beauties." Indeed how
should it have been otherwise? The old ballads were everything which the
eighteenth century was not. They were rough and wild, where that was
smooth and tame; they dealt, with fierce sincerity, in the elementary
passions of human nature. They did not moralize, or philosophize, or
sentimentalize; were never subtle, intellectual, or abstract. They were
plain English, without finery or elegance. They had certain popular
mannerisms, but none of the conventional figures of speech or rhetorical
artifices like personifications, periphrasis, antithesis, and climax so
dear to the Augustan heart. They were intent on the story--not on the
style--and they just told it and let it go for what it was worth.
Moreover, there are ballads and ballads. The best of them are noble in
expression as well as feeling, unequaled by anything in our medieval
poetry outside of Chaucer; unequaled by Chaucer himself in point of
intensity, in occasional phrases of a piercing beauty:
"The swans-fethers that his arrowe bar
With his hart-blood they were wet."[42]
"O cocks are crowing a merry mid-larf,
A wat the wild fule boded day;
The salms of Heaven will be sung,
And ere now I'll be missed away."[43]
"If my love were an earthly knight,
As he's an elfin gray,
A wad na gie my sin true love
For no lord that ye hae."[44]
"She hang ae napkin at the door,
Another in the ha,
And a' to wipe the trickling tears,
Sae fast as they did fa."[45]
"And all is with one chyld of yours,
I feel stir at my side:
My gowne of green, it is too strait:
Before it was too wide."[46]
Verse of this quality needs no apology. But of many of the ballads,
Dennis' taunt, repeated by Dr. Johnson, is true; they are not merely
rude, but weak and creeping in style. Percy knew that the best of them
would savor better to the palates of his contemporaries if he dressed
them with modern sauces. Yet he must have loved them, himself, in their
native simplicity, and it seems almost incredible that he could have
spoken as he did about Prior's insipid paraphrase of the "Nut Brown
Maid." "If it had no other merit," he says of that most lovely ballad,
"than the having afforded the ground-work to Prior's 'Henry and Emma,'
this ought to preserve it from oblivion." Prior was a charming writer of
epigram, society verse, and the humorous _conte_ in the manner of La
Fontaine; but to see how incapable he was of the depth and sweetness of
romantic poetry, compare a few lines of the original with the "hubbub of
words" in his modernized version, in heroic couplets:
"O Lord, what is this worldes blisse
That changeth as the mone!
The somer's day in lusty May
Is derked before the none.
I hear you say farewel. Nay, nay,
We departe not so soon:
Why say ye so? Wheder wyle ye goo?
Alas! what have ye done?
Alle my welfare to sorrow and care
Shulde change if ye were gon;
For in my minde, of all mankynde,
I love but you alone."
Now hear Prior, with his Venus and flames and god of love:
"What is our bliss that changeth with the moon,
And day of life that darkens ere 'tis noon?
What is true passion, if unblest it dies?
And where is Emma's joy, if Henry flies?
If love, alas! be pain, the pain I bear
No thought can figure and no tongue declare.
Ne'er faithful woman felt, nor false one feigned
The flames which long have in my bosom reigned.
The god of love himself inhabits there
With all his rage and dread and grief and care,
His complement of stores and total war,
O cease then coldly to suspect my love
And let my deed at least my faith approve.
Alas! no youth shall my endearments share
Nor day nor night shall interrupt my care;
No future story shall with truth upbraid
The cold indifference of the nut-brown maid;
Nor to hard banishment shall Henry run
While careless Emma sleeps on beds of down.
View me resolved, where'er thou lead'st, to go:
Friend to thy pain and partner of thy woe;
For I attest fair Venus and her son
That I, of all mankind, will love but thee alone."
There could be no more striking object lesson than this of the plethora
from which English poetic diction was suffering, and of the sanative
value of a book like the "Reliques."
"To atone for the rudeness of the more obsolete poems," and "to take off
from the tediousness of the longer narratives," Percy interspersed a few
modern ballads and a large number of "little elegant pieces of the lyric
kind" by Skelton, Hawes, Gascoigne, Raleigh, Marlowe, Shakspere, Jonson,
Warner, Carew, Daniel, Lovelace, Suckling, Drayton, Beaumont and
Fletcher, Wotton, and other well-known poets. Of the modern ballads the
only one with any resemblance to folk-poetry was "The Braes o' Yarrow" by
William Hamilton of Bangour, a Scotch gentleman who was "out in the
forty-five." The famous border stream had watered an ancient land of
song and story, and Hamilton's ballad, with its "strange, fugitive
melody," was not unworthy of its traditions. Hamilton belongs to the
Milton imitators by virtue of his octosyllabics "Contemplation."[47] His
"Braes o' Yarrow" had been given already in Ramsey's "Tea Table
Miscellany," The opening lines--
"Busk ye, busk ye, my bonny, bonny bride,
Busk ye, busk ye, my winsome marrow"--
are quoted in Wordsworth's "Yarrow Unvisited," as well as a line of the
following stanza:
"Sweet smells the birk, green grows, green grows the grass,
Yellow on Yarrow's bank the gowan:
Fair hangs the apple frae the rock,
Sweet the wave of Yarrow flowin'."
The first edition of the "Reliques" included one acknowledged child of
Percy's muse, "The Friar of Orders Grey," a short, narrative ballad made
up of song snatches from Shakspere's plays. Later editions afforded his
longer poem, "The Hermit of Warkworth," first published independently in
1771.
With all its imperfections--perhaps partly in consequence of its
imperfections--the "Reliques" was an epoch-making book. The nature of
its service to English letters is thus stated by Macaulay, in the
introduction to his "Lays of Ancient Rome": "We cannot wonder that the
ballads of Rome should have altogether disappeared, when we remember how
very narrowly, in spite of the invention of printing, those of our own
country and those of Spain escaped the same fate. There is, indeed,
little doubt that oblivion covers many English songs equal to any that
were published by Bishop Percy; and many Spanish songs as good as the
best of those which have been so happily translated by Mr. Lockhart.
Eighty years ago England possessed only one tattered copy of 'Child
Waters' and 'Sir Cauline,' and Spain only one tattered copy of the noble
poem of the 'Cid.' The snuff of a candle, or a mischievous dog, might in
a moment have deprived the world forever of any of those fine
compositions. Sir Walter Scott, who united to the fire of a great poet
the minute curiosity and patient diligence of a great antiquary, was but
just in time to save the precious reliques of the Minstrelsy of the
Border."
But Percy not only rescued, himself, a number of ballads from
forgetfulness; what was equally important, his book prompted others to
hunt out and publish similar relics before it was too late. It was the
occasion of collections like Herd's (1769), Scott's (1802-03), and
Motherwell's (1827), and many more, resting on purer texts and edited on
more scrupulous principles than his own. Futhermore, his ballads helped
to bring about a reform in literary taste and to inspire men of original
genius. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Scott, all acknowledged the
greatest obligations to them. Wordsworth said that English poetry had
been "absolutely redeemed" by them. "I do not think there is a writer in
verse of the present day who would not be proud to acknowledge his
obligations to the 'Reliques.' I know that it is so with my friends;
and, for myself, I am happy that it is so with my friends; and, for
myself, I am happy in this occasion to make a public avowal of my
own."[48] Without the "Reliques," "The Ancient Mariner," "The Lady of
the Lake," "La Belle Dame sans Merci," "Stratton Water," and "The
Haystack in the Floods" might never have been. Perhaps even the "Lyrical
Ballads" might never have been, or might have been something quite unlike
what they are. Wordsworth, to be sure, scarcely ranks among romantics,
and he expressly renounces the romantic machinery:
"The dragon's wing,
The magic ring,
I shall not covet for my dower."[49]
What he learned from the popular ballad was the power of sincerity and of
direct and homely speech.
As for Scott, he has recorded in an oft-quoted passage the impression
that Percy's volumes made upon him in his school-days: "I remember well
the spot where I read these volumes for the first time. It was beneath a
huge plantain tree in the ruins of what had been intended for an
old-fashioned arbor in the garden I have mentioned. The summer day sped
onward so fast that, notwithstanding the sharp appetite of thirteen, I
forgot the hour of dinner, was sought for with anxiety, and was still
found entranced in my intellectual banquet. To read and to remember was,
in this instance, the same thing; and henceforth I overwhelmed my
school-fellows, and all who would hearken to me, with tragical
recitations from the ballads of Bishop Percy. The first time, too, I
could scrape a few shillings together, I bought unto myself a copy of
these beloved volumes; nor do I believe I ever read a book so frequently,
or with half the enthusiasm."
The "Reliques" worked powerfully in Germany, too. It was received in
Lessing's circle with universal enthusiasm,[50] and fell in with that
newly aroused interest in "Volkslieder" which prompted Herder's "Stimmen
der Völker" (1778-79).[51] Gottfried August Bürger, in particular, was a
poet who may be said to have been made by the English ballad literature,
of which he was an ardent student. His poems were published in 1778, and
included five translations from Percy: "The Child of Elle" ("Die
Entführung"), "The Friar of Orders Grey" ("Graurock"), "The Wanton Wife
of Bath" ("Frau Schnips"), "King John and the Abbot of Canterbury" ("Der
Kaiser und der Abt"), and "Child Waters" ("Graf Walter"). A. W. Schlegel
says that Burger did not select the more ancient and genuine pieces in
the "Reliques"; and, moreover, that he spoiled the simplicity of the
originals in his translations. It was doubtless in part the success of
the "Reliques" that is answerable for many collections of old English
poetry put forth in the last years of the century. Tyrwhitt's "Chaucer"
and Ritson's publications have been already mentioned. George Ellis, a
friend and correspondent of Walter Scott, and a fellow of the Society of
Antiquaries, who was sometimes called "the Sainte Palaye of England,"
issued his "Specimens of Early English Poets" in 1790; edited in 1796 G.
L. Way's translations from French _fabliaux_ of the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries; and printed in 1805 three volumes of "Early English
Metrical Romances."
It is pleasant to record that Percy's labors brought him public
recognition and the patronage of those whom Dr. Johnson used to call "the
great." He had dedicated the "Reliques" to Elizabeth Percy, Countess of
Northumberland. Himself the son of a grocer, he liked to think that he
was connected by blood with the great northern house whose exploits had
been sung by the ancient minstrels that he loved. He became chaplain to
the Duke of Northumberland, and to King George III.; and, in 1782, Bishop
of Dromore in Ireland, in which see he died in 1811.
This may be as fit a place as any to introduce some mention of "The
Minstrel, or the Progress of Genius," by James Beattie; a poem once
widely popular, in which several strands of romantic influence are seen
twisted together. The first book was published in 1771, the second in
1774, and the work was never completed. It was in the Spenserian stanza,
was tinged with the enthusiastic melancholy of the Wartons, followed the
landscape manner of Thomson, had elegiac echoes of Gray, and was perhaps
not unaffected, in its love of mountain scenery, by MacPherson's
"Ossian." But it took its title and its theme from a hint in Percy's
"Essay on the Ancient Minstrels."[52] Beattie was Professor of Moral
Philosophy in the University of Aberdeen. He was an amiable, sensitive,
deeply religious man. He was fond of music and of nature, and was easily
moved to rears; had "a young girl's nerves," says Taine, "and an old
maid's hobbies." Gray, who met him in 1765, when on a visit to the Earl
of Strathmore at Glammis Castle, esteemed him highly. So did Dr.
Johnson, partly because of his "Essay on Truth" (1770), a shallow
invective against Hume, which gained its author an interview with George
III. and a pension of two hundred pounds a year. Beattie visited London
in 1771, and figured there as a champion of orthodoxy and a
heaven-inspired bard. Mrs. Montagu patronized him extensively. Sir
Joshua Reynolds painted his portrait, with his "Essay on Truth" under his
arm, and Truth itself in the background, an allegoric angel holding the
balances in one hand, and thrusting away with the other the figures of
Prejudice, Skepticism, and Folly. Old Lord Lyttelton had the poet out to
Hagley, and declared that he was Thomson come back to earth, to sing of
virtue and of the beauties of nature. Oxford made him an LL.D.: he was
urged to take orders in the Church of England; and Edinburgh offered him
the chair of Moral Philosophy. Beattie's head was slightly turned by all
this success, and he became something of a tuft-hunter. But he stuck
faithfully to Aberdeen, whose romantic neighborhood had first inspired
his muse. The biographers tell a pretty story of his teaching his little
boy to look for the hand of God in the universe, by sowing cress in a
garden plot in the shape of the child's initials and leading him by this
gently persuasive analogy to read design in the works of nature.
The design of "The Minstrel" is to "trace the progress of a Poetical
Genius, born in a rude age," a youthful shepherd who "lived in Gothic
days." But nothing less truly Gothic or medieval could easily be
imagined than the actual process of this young poet's education. Instead
of being taught to carve and ride and play the flute, like Chaucer's
squire who
"Cowde songes make and wel endite,
Juste and eek daunce, and wel purtraye and write,"
Edwin wanders alone upon the mountains and in solitary places and is
instructed in history, philosophy, and science--and even in Vergil--by an
aged hermit, who sits on a mossy rock, with his harp beside him, and
delivers lectures. The subject of the poem, indeed, is properly the
education of nature; and in a way it anticipates Wordsworth's "Prelude,"
as this hoary sage does the "Solitary" of "The Excursion." Beattie
justifies his use of Spenser's stanza on the ground that it "seems, from
its Gothic structure and original, to bear some relation to the subject
and spirit of the poem." He makes no attempt, however, to follow
Spenser's "antique expressions." The following passage will illustrate
as well as any the romantic character of the whole:
"When the long-sounding curfew from afar
Loaded with loud lament the lonely gale,
Young Edwin, lighted by the evening star,
Lingering and listening, wandered down the vale.
There would he dream of graves and corses pale,
And ghosts that to the charnel-dungeon throng,
And drag a length of clanking chain, and wail,
Till silenced by the owl's terrific song,
Or blast that shrieks by fits the shuddering aisles along.
"Or when the settling moon, in crimson dyed,
Hung o'er the dark and melancholy deep,
To haunted stream, remote from man, he hied,
Where fays of yore their revels wont to keep;
And there let Fancy rove at large, till sleep
A vision brought to his entrancëd sight.
And first a wildly murmuring wind gan creep
Shrill to his ringing ear; then tapers bright,
With instantaneous gleam, illumed the vault of night.
"Anon in view a portal's blazing arch
Arose; the trumpet bids the valves unfold;
And forth a host of little warriors march,
Grasping the diamond lance and targe of gold.
Their look was gentle, their demeanor bold,
And green their helms, and green their silk attire;
And here and there, right venerably old,
The long-robed minstrels wake the warbling wire,
And some with mellow breath the martial pipe inspire."[53]
The influence of Thomson is clearly perceptible in these stanzas. "The
Minstrel," like "The Seasons," abounds in insipid morality, the
commonplaces of denunciation against luxury and ambition, and the praise
of simplicity and innocence. The titles alone of Beattie's minor poems
are enough to show in what school he was a scholar: "The Hermit," "Ode to
Peace," "The Triumph of Melancholy," "Retirement," etc., etc. "The
Minstrel" ran through four editions before the publication of its second
book in 1774.
[1] Svend Grundtvig's great collection, "Danmarks Gamle Folkeviser," was
published in five volumes in 1853-90.
[2] Francis James Child's "English and Scottish Popular Ballads," issued
in ten parts in 1882-98 is one of the glories of American scholarship.
[3] _Cf._ The Tannhäuser legend and the Venusberg.
[4] "The Wife of Usher's Well."
[5] It should never be forgotten that the ballad (derived from
_ballare--to dance)_ was originally not a written poem, but a song and
dance. Many of the old tunes are preserved. A number are given in
Chappell's "Popular Music of the Olden Time," and in the appendix to
Motherwell's "Minstrelsy, Ancient and Modern" (1827).
[6] "A Ballad." One theory explains these meaningless refrains as
remembered fragments of older ballads.
[7] Reproduced by Rossetti and other moderns. See them parodied in Robert
Buchanan's "Fleshly School of Poets":
"When seas do roar and skies do pour,
Hard is the lot of the sailór
Who scarcely, as he reels, can tell
The sidelights from the binnacle."
[8] "I never heard the old song of Percie and Douglas that I found not my
heart moved more than with a trumpet; and yet it is sung but by some
blind crouder, with no rougher voice than rude style; which being so evil
apparelled in the dust and cobwebs of that uncivil age, what would it
work, trimmed in the gorgeous eloquence of Pindar!"
[9] Empty: "Bonnie George Campbell."
[10] "Lord Randall."
[11] Turf: "The Twa Corbies."
[12] I use this phrase without any polemic purpose. The question of
origins is not here under discussion. Of course at some stage in the
history of any ballad the poet, the individual artist, is present, though
the precise ration of his agency to the communal element in the work is
obscure. For an acute and learned view of this topic, see the
Introduction to "Old English Ballads," by Professor Francis B. Gummere
(Atheneum Press Series), Boston, 1894.
[13] From "Jock o' Hazel Green." "Young Lochinvar" is derived from
"Katherine Janfarie" in the "Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border."
[14] "Scott has given us nothing more complete and lovely than this little
song, which unites simplicity and dramatic power to a wildwood music of
the rarest quality. No moral is drawn, far less any conscious analysis
of feeling attempted: the pathetic meaning is left to be suggested by the
mere presentment of the situation. Inexperienced critics have often
named this, which may be called the Homeric manner, superficial from its
apparent simple facility."--_Palgrave: "Golden Treasury"_ (Edition of
1866), p. 392.
[15] "Brown Robyn's Confession." Robin Hood risks his life to take the
sacrament. "Robin Hood and the Monk."
[16] "Sir Hugh." _Cf._ Chaucer's "Prioresse Tale."
[17] "The Gay Goshawk."
[18] "Johnnie Cock."
[19] "Young Hunting."
[20] "The Twa Sisters."
[21] "The Wife of Usher's Well."
[22] "Fair Margaret and Sweet William."
[23] "Sweet William's Ghost."
[24] "Clerk Colven."
[25] "Willie's Lady."
[26] "Kemp Owyne" and "Tam Lin."
[27] "King Estmere."
[28] "Johnnie Cock."
[29] "Mary Hamilton."
[30] "Sweet William's Ghost."
[31] "The Forsaken Bride." _Cf._ Chaucer:
"Love is noght old as when that it is newe."
--_Clerkes Tale._
[32] What character so popular as a wild prince--like Prince Hal--who
breaks his own laws, and the heads of his own people, in a democratic way?
[33] "Robin Hood and the Monk."
[34] For a complete exposure of David Mallet's impudent claim to the
authorship of this ballad, see Appendix II. to Professor Phelps' "English
Romantic Movement."
[35] "Life of Addison."
[36] Preface to second edition of the "Lyrical Ballads."
[37] "Bishop Percy's Folio Manuscript" (1867), Vol. II. Introductory
Essay by J. W. Hales on "The Revival of Ballad Poetry in the Eighteenth
Century."
[38] _Ibid._
[39] "Advertisement to the Fourth Edition."
[40] In four volumes, 1867-68.
[41] Spelling reform has been a favorite field for cranks to disport
themselves upon. Ritson's particular vanity was the past participle of
verbs ending in _e; e.g., perceiveed._ _Cf._ Landor's notions of a
similar kind.
[42] "The Hunting of the Cheviot."
[43] "Sweet William's Ghost."
[44] "Tam Lin."
[45] "Fair Annie."
[46] "Child Waters."
[47] See Phelps' "English Romantic Movement," pp. 33-35.
[48] Appendix to the Preface to the 2nd edition of "Lyrical Ballads."
[49] "Peter Bell."
[50] Scherer: "Geschichte der Deutschen Literatur," p. 445.
[51] In his third book Herder gave translations of over twenty pieces in
the "Reliques," besides a number from Ramsay's and other collections.
His selections from Percy included "Chevy Chase," "Edward," "The Boy and
the Mantle," "King Estmere," "Waly, Waly," "Sir Patric Spens," "Young
Waters," "The Bonny Earl of Murray," "Fair Margaret and Sweet William,"
"Sweet William's Ghost," "The Nut-Brown Maid," "The Jew's Daughter,"
etc., etc.; but none of the Robin Hood ballads. Herder's preface
testifies that the "Reliques" was the starting-point and the kernel of
his whole undertaking. "Der Anblick dieser Sammlung giebts offenbar dass
ich eigentlich von _Englishchen_ Volksliedern ausging und auf sie
zurückkomme. Als vor zehn und mehr Jahren die 'Reliques of Ancient
Poetry' mir in die Hände fielen, freuten mich einzelne Stücke so sehr,
dass ich sie zu übersetzen versuchte."--_Vorrede zu den Volksliedern.
Herder's Sämmtlichee Werke_, Achter Theil, s. 89 (Carlsruhe, 1821).
[52] Stanzas 44-46, book i. bring in references to ballad literature in
general and to "The Nut-Brown Maid" and "The Children in the Wood" in
particular.
[53] Book I. stanzas 32-34.