A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century Part 21

"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 contrie, baron, dinere, felawe, abbay, rivere, money, and its a.s.sumption by words which never properly had it, such as lad, harper, wedding, water, 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 cla.s.s."

Not everything that is called a ballad belongs to the cla.s.s 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 cla.s.s 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 pa.s.sages 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 ma.n.u.script 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 h.o.m.ogeneous and the separation between the lettered and unlettered cla.s.ses 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. Ma.n.u.script 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, nave, 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" ent.i.tled "Edward."

Herder translated this into German; it is very old, with Danish, Swedish, and Finnish a.n.a.logues. 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 Sangers 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] d.y.k.e, 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 pa.s.sion, 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 nave, 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 sh.o.r.e, 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 cla.s.sification into the historical, or _quasi_-historical, and the purely legendary or romantic. Of the former cla.s.s 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 fict.i.tious cla.s.s, some were shortened, popularized, and generally degraded versions of the chivalry romances, which were pa.s.sing 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 circ.u.mstances. 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 ma.s.s 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 pa.s.sions 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 h.e.l.l."[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 gra.s.s 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 tw.a.n.ging 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 a.s.sociated 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 leves 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 amus.e.m.e.nt 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). Sc.r.a.ps of them are sung by one of the _dramatis personae_, old Merrythought, whose speciality is a d.a.m.nable 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 Ill.u.s.trate Shakspere."

In the seventeenth century a few ballads were printed entire in poetic miscellanies ent.i.tled "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 ill.u.s.trated 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 ma.n.u.script 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 cla.s.sical 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 const.i.tution 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 pa.s.sage 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 Sh.o.r.e" (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 ma.s.s 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 ma.n.u.script," Percy's nephew in the advertis.e.m.e.nt 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."