The Balladists Part 3

or

'O'er his white banes when they are bare The wind shall sigh for evermair.'

Or, to rise to the height of pity, despair, and terror to which the ballad strains of Scotland have reached, what master of modern realism has surpa.s.sed in trenchant and uncompromising power the pa.s.sages in _Clerk Saunders_?--

'Then he drew forth his bright long brand, And slait it on the strae, And through Clerk Saunders' body He 's gart cauld iron gae';

and,

'She looked between her and the wa', And dull and drumly were his een.'

Has it ever happened, since the harp of Orpheus drew iron tears down Pluto's cheek, that ruth has taken so grim a form as that of _Edom o'

Gordon_, as he turned over with his spear the body of his victim?

'O gin her breast was white; "I might have spared that bonnie face To be some man's delight."'

Is there in the many pages of romance a climax so surprising, so overwhelming--a revelation that in its succinct and despairing candour goes so straight to the quick of human feeling--as that in the ballad of _Gil Morice_?--

'"I ance was as fu' o' Gil Morice As the hip is wi' the stane."'

To the fountainhead of our ballad-lore the great poets and romancists, from Chaucer to Shakespeare, and from Shakespeare to Wordsworth and Swinburne, and from Gavin Douglas to Burns and Scott and Stevenson, have gone for refreshment and new inspiration, when the world was weary and tame and sunk in the thraldom of the vulgar, the formal, and the commonplace; and never without receiving their rich reward and testifying their grat.i.tude by fresh gifts of song and story, fresh harpings on the old lyre that moved the hearts of men to tears and laughter long before they knew of printed books. The old wellspring of music and poetry is still open to all, and has lost none of the old power of thrilling and enthralling; and the present is a time when a long and deep draught from the Scottish ballads seems specially required for the healing of a sick literature.

CHAPTER IV

THE MYTHOLOGICAL BALLAD

'Oh see ye not that bonnie road That winds about yon fernie brae?

Oh that 's the road to fair Elfland Where you and I this day maun gae.'

_Thomas the Rhymer._

No scheme of ballad cla.s.sification can be at all points complete and satisfactory. We have seen that it is impossible to cla.s.sify the Scottish ballads according to authorship, since authors, known and proved, there are none. Scarce more practicable is it to arrange them in any regular order of chronology or locality; and even when we seek to group them with regard to type and subject, difficulties start up at every step. A convenient and intelligible division would seem to be one that recognised the ballads as Mythological, Romantic, or Historical, this last cla.s.s including the lays of the foray and the chase, that cannot be a.s.signed to any particular date--that cannot, indeed, be proved to have any historical basis at all--but can yet, with more or less of probability, be a.s.signed to some historical or _quasi_-historical character. Besides these, there are groups of ballads that cannot be wholly overlooked--ballads in which, contrary to the prevailing spirit of this kind of poetry, Humour a.s.serts itself as an essential element; ballads of the Sea; and Peasant ballads, of which, perhaps, England yields happier examples than Scotland--simple rustic ditties, hawked about in broad-sheets, and dating, many of them, no earlier than the present century, that seldom rise much above the doggerel and commonplace, and do not, as a rule, concern themselves with the high personages and high-strung pa.s.sions of the ballad of Old Romance.

No well-defined frontier can be laid down between the three chief departments of ballad minstrelsy. The pieces in which fairy-lore and ancient superst.i.tion have a prominent place--the ballads of Myth and Marvel--have all of them a strong romantic colouring; and the like may be said of the traditional songs of war and of raiding and hunting, as well as of those whose theme is the pa.s.sion and tragedy of love.

Romance, indeed, is the animating soul of the body of Scottish ballad poetry; the note that gives it unity and distinguishes it from mere versified history and folklore. There are few ballads on which some shadow out of the World Invisible is not cast; few where ill-happed love is not a master-string of the minstrel's harp; few into which there does not come strife and the flash of cold steel. Natheless, a broad division into ballads Supernatural, Romantic, and Martial has reason as well as convenience to recommend it; and in a loose and general way such an arrangement should also indicate the comparative age, not indeed of the ballad versions as we know them, but of the ideas and materials of which they are composed.

First, then, of the ballads that are steeped in the element of the supernatural, let it be remembered that it is well-nigh impossible for us in these days, when we have cleared about us a little island of light in the darkness, to understand the atmosphere of mystery that pressed close around the life of man in the age when the ballad had its birth.

The Unknown and the Unseen surrounded him on every side. He could scarcely put forth a hand without touching things that were not of this world; and in proportion to the ignorance was the fear. Through the long twilight in which the primaeval beliefs and superst.i.tions grew up and became embodied in legend and custom, in _marchen_ and ballad, and all through the Middle Ages, man's pilgrimage on earth was indeed through a Valley of the Shadow. It was a narrow way, between 'the Ditch and the Quag, and past the very mouth of the Pit,' full of frightful sights and dreadful noises, of hobgoblins, and dragons, and chimeras dire. Tales that have ceased to frighten the nursery, that we listen to with a smile or at most with a pleasant stirring of the blood and t.i.tillation of the nerves, once on a time were the terror of grown men. The ogres and dragons of old are dead, and the Folklorist and the Comparative Mythologist make free of their caves, and are busy setting up, comparing, cla.s.sifying, and labelling their skeletons for the instruction of an age of science. But there was a time when the wisest believed in their existence as an article of faith, and when the boldest shuddered to hear them named. What are now idle fancies were once the most portentous of realities; and in this lies the secret of the almost universal diffusion of certain typical tales, beliefs, and observances, and of the fascination which they have not ceased to exercise over the imagination of mankind.

Into the subject of the origins, the relationships, and the signification of these venerable traditions and superst.i.tions of the race and of all races, there is neither time nor occasion for entering.

This oldest and yet last found of the realms of science is as yet only in course of being surveyed, and from day to day fresh discoveries are announced by the eager explorers of the darkling provinces of myth and folktale. But this at least may be said, that not in the wide domain of popular saga and poetry can there be reaped a richer or more varied harvest of weird and wild and beautiful fancies, touched by the light that 'never was on sea or land,' than is to be found in the Scottish ballads.

From among them one could gather out a whole menagerie of the 'selcouth'

beasts and birds and creeping things that have been banished from solid earth into the limbo of Faery and Romance. They furnish examples of nearly all the root-ideas and typical tales which folklorists have discovered in the vast jungle of popular legends and superst.i.tions--the Supernatural Birth, the Life and Faith Tokens, the Dragon Slayer, the Mermaid and the Despised Sister, Bluebeard of the Many Wives, the Well of Healing, the Magic Mirror, the Enchanted Horn, the Singing Bone, the Babes in the Wood, the Blabbing Popinjay, the Counterpart, the Transformation, the Spell, the Prophecy, the Riddle, the Return from the Grave, the Dead Ride, the Demon Lover, the Captivity in Faeryland, the Seven Years' Kain to h.e.l.l, and a host of others.

Certain of them, like _Thomas the Rhymer_ and _Young Tamlane_, are 'fulfilled all of Faery.' One can read in them how deeply the old superst.i.tion, which some would attribute to a traditional memory of the pre-Aryan inhabitants of Western Europe--to the 'barrow-wights,'

pigmies, or Pechts who dwelt in or were driven for shelter to caves and other underground dwellings of the land--had struck its roots in the popular fancy. Probably Mr. Andrew Lang carries us as far as we can go at present in the search for origins and affinities, when he says that the belief in fairies, and in their relatives, the gnomes and brownies, is 'a complex matter, from which tradition, with its memory of earth-dwellers, is not wholly absent, while more is due to a survival of the pre-Christian Hades, and to the belief in local spirits--the Vius of Melanesia, the Nereids of ancient and modern Greece, the Lares of Rome, the fateful Maerae and Hathors--old imaginings of a world not yet dispeopled of its dreams.' The elfin-folk of the Scottish ballads have some few traits that are local and national; but, on the whole, they conform pretty closely to a type that has now become well marked in the literature as well as in the popular beliefs of European countries. The fairies have been, among the orders of supernatural beings, the pets and favourites of the poets, who have heaped their flowers of fancy above the graves of the departed Little Folk. We suspect that the more graceful and gracious touches in the Fairy Ballad are the renovating work of later hands than the elder balladist; and in the two typical Scottish examples that have been mentioned, it is not difficult to find the mark of Sir Walter.

In the time when fairies still tripped the moonlit sward, they received praise and compliment indeed from the mouths of their human kin, but it was more out of fear than out of love. They were the 'Men of Peace' and the 'Good Neighbours' for a reason not much different from that which caused the Devil's share in the churchyard to be known as the 'Guid Man's Croft,' lest by speaking more frankly of those having power, evil might befall. The tenancy of brake and woodland in the 'witching hours'

by this uncanny people was a formidable addition to the terrors of the night:

'Up the craggy mountain And down the rushy glen, We dare not go a-hunting For fear of Little Men.

Wee folk, good folk, Trooping altogether, Green jerkin, red cap, And white owl's feather.'

They were tricksy, capricious, peevish, easily offended, malicious if not wholly malevolent, and dangerous alike to trust and to thwart. All this, together with their habit of trooping in procession and dancing under the moon; their practice of s.n.a.t.c.hing away to their underground abodes those who, by kiss or other spell, fall into their hands; and the penance or sacrifice which at every seven years' term they pay to powers still more dread, comes out in the tale of True Thomas's adventure with the Queen of Faery, and in Fair Janet's ordeal to win back Young Tamlane to earth. Their prodigious strength, so strangely disproportioned to their size, is celebrated in the quaint lines of _The Wee Wee Man_; while from _The Elfin Knight_ we learn that woman's wit as well as woman's faith can, on occasion, prove a match for all the spells and riddles of fairyland. The enchanted horn is heard blowing--

'A knight stands on yon high, high hill, Blaw, blaw, ye cauld winds blaw!

He blaws a blast baith loud and shrill, The cauld wind 's blawn my plaid awa,'

and, at the spoken wish, the Elfin Knight is at the maiden's side. But the spell the tongue has woven, the tongue can unloose; and the lady brings her unearthly lover first into captivity by setting him a preliminary task to perform, more baffling than that 'sewing a sark without a seam.'

It is otherwise with True Thomas, as it was with Merlin before him, and with all the men, wise and foolish, who have once yielded to the glamourie of the Elfin Queen and others of her type and s.e.x. The Rhymer of Ercildoune was probably only a man more learned and far-seeing than others of his time. His reputation for Second Sight may rest upon a basis similar to that which led the mediaeval mind to dub Virgil a magician, and to recognise the wizard in Sir Michael Scott, the grave amba.s.sador and counsellor of kings, and, at a later date, enabled the profane vulgar to discover a baronet of Gordonstoun to be a warlock, for no better reason than because, with the encouragement of that most indefatigable of ballad collectors, Samuel Pepys, he gave his attention to the perfecting of sea-pumps for the royal navy. Whether the Rhymer's expedition to Fairyland was feigned by the balladist to explain his soothsaying; or whether, rather, his prophecies were invented as evidence of the perilous gift he brought back with him from Elfland, research will never be able to tell us. But the journey True Thomas made on the fateful day when, lying on Huntlie bank,

'A ferlie he spied wi' his e'e; And there he saw a ladye bright Come riding down by the Eildon Tree,'

was one that many heroes of adventure, before him and after him, have made in fairy lands forlorn. The scenery and incidents of that strange ride are also among the common possessions of fairy romance. One dimly discerns in them the glimmer of an ancient allegory, of an old cosmogony, that may possibly be derived from the very infancy of the world, when human thought began to brood over the mysteries of life and time. There are the Broad Path of Wickedness and the Narrow Way of Right, and between them that 'bonnie road' of Fantasy, winding and fern-sown, that leads to 'fair Elfland.' There is a glimpse of the Garden of the Hesperides and its fruits; and a lurid peep into Hades:

'It was mirk, mirk nicht and nae starlicht, And they waded through red bluid to the knee; For a' the bluid that 's shed on earth Rins through the springs o' that countrie.'

The Palace of Truth as well as of Error is built on fairy ground; and there is a foretaste of Gilbertian humour in the dismay with which the Rhymer hears that he is to be endowed with 'the tongue that can never lie.'

'"My tongue is mine ain," True Thomas said; "A goodlie gift you would give me; I neither dought to buy or sell At fair or tryst where I may be; I dought neither speak to prince or peer Nor ask of grace from fair ladye."'

But from his seven years' wanderings in fairyland, that speed like a day upon earth, he wakens up as from a dream, and again he is laid on Huntlie bank, in sight of the cleft Eildon.

Is it not significant that Melrose and Abbotsford, where a later and greater wizard wrought his spells over the valley of the Tweed and Ettrick Forest, should be half-way between the chief scenes of our Fairy Ballads--between the Rhymer's Tower and Carterhaugh? Fair Janet's conduct, when forbidden to come or go by Carterhaugh, where Yarrow holds tryst with Ettrick, lest she might encounter the Young Tamlane, may be traced back to the Garden of Eden, and is of a piece with that of Mother Eve:

'Janet has kilted her green kirtle A little abune her knee; And she has braided her yellow hair A little abune her bree; And she 's awa' to Carterhaugh As fast as she could gae.'

There she falls in with the 'elfin grey' who might have been an 'earthly knight'; and he tells her how, as a youth, he had been reft away to fairyland:

'There cam' a wind out o' the north, A sharp wind and a snell; A deep sleep cam' over me And from my horse I fell';

as happened to 'Held Harald' and his men in the German legend. But he also tells her how, by waiting at the cross road at midnight on Halloweve, 'when fairy folk do ride,' she may win back the father of her child to mortal shape. That waiting on the dreary heath while 'a north wind tore the bent,' and what followed, become the ordeal of Janet's love:

'Aboot the dead hour o' the night She heard the bridles ring; And Janet was as glad o' that As any earthly thing.

And first gaed by the black, black steed, And then gaed by the brown, But fast she gripped the milk-white steed And pu'ed the rider down';

and holding her lover fast, through all his gruesome changes of form, she 'borrowed' him from the 'seely court,' and saved him from becoming the tribute paid every seven years to the powers that held fairydom in va.s.salage.

Another series of trans.m.u.tations, familiar in ballad and folklore, is that in which the powers of White and Black Magic strive for the mastery, generally to the discomfiture of the latter, after the manner of the Hunting of Paupukewis in _Hiawatha_. The baffled magician or witch--often the mother-in-law or stepmother, the stock villain of the piece in these old tales--alters her shape rapidly to living creature or inanimate thing; but fast as she changes the avenger also changes, pursues, and at length destroys. In the ballad of _The Twa Magicians_, given in Buchan's collection, it is virtue that flees, and wrong, in the shape of a Smith, of Weyland's mystic kin, that follows and overcomes.