The Balladists Part 5

'And he tirled at the pin; And wha sae ready as his fause love, To rise and let him in.'

The pa.s.sages that describe the haunted ride in the moonlight, when the lady has fled from the scene of her treachery and guilt, are not surpa.s.sed in weird imaginative power, if they are equalled, by anything in ballad or other literature:

'She hadna ridden a mile, a mile, Never a mile but ane, When she was 'ware o' a tall young man Riding slowly o'er the plain.

She turned her to the right about, And to the left turned she; But aye 'tween her and the wan moonlight That tall knight did she see.'

She set whip and spur to her steed, but 'nae nearer could she get'; she appealed to him, as from a 'saikless,' or guiltless, maid to 'a leal true knight,' to draw his bridle-rein until she can come up with him:

'But nothing did that tall knight say, And nothing did he blin; Still slowly rade he on before, And fast she rade behind,'

until he drew rein at a broad river-side. Then he spoke:

'"This water it is deep," he said, "As it is wondrous dun; But it is sic as a saikless maid, And a leal true knight can swim."'

They plunged in together, and the flood bore them down:

'"The water is waxing deeper still, Sae does it wax mair wide; And aye the farther we ride on, Farther off is the other side."

The knight turned slowly round about All in the middle stream, He stretched out his hand to that lady, And loudly she did scream.

"O, this is Hallow-morn," he said, "And it is your bridal day; But sad would be that gay wedding Were bridegroom and bride away.

But ride on, ride on, proud Margaret, Till the water comes o'er your bree; For the bride maun ride deep and deeper yet Who rides this ford wi' me."'

But the perturbed spirit does not always thus revisit the glimpses of the moon to awaken conscience, to humble pride, or to wreak vengeance.

More often it is the repinings and longings of pa.s.sionate love that keep it from its rest. In _marchen_ and ballad the ghost of the lover comes to complain that the tears which his betrothed sheds nightly fill his shroud with blood; when she smiles, it is filled with rose leaves. The mother steals from the grave to hap and comfort her orphan children; their harsh stepmother neglects and ill-treats them, and their exceeding bitter and desolate cry has penetrated beneath the sod, and reached the dead ear. In _The Clerk's Sons o' Owsenford_, and in that singular fragment of the same creepy theme, recovered by Scott, _The Wife of Usher's Well_, it is the yearning of the living mother that brings the dead sons back to their home:

'"Blaw up the fire, my maidens, Bring water from the well!

For a' my house shall feast this nicht, Since my three sons are well."'

The _revenants_, silent guests with staring eyes, wait and warm themselves by the fireside, while the 'carline wife' ministers to their wants, and spreads her 'gay mantle' over them to keep them from the cold, until their time comes:

'"The c.o.c.k doth craw, the day doth daw, The channerin' worm doth chide; Gin we be missed out o' our place A sair pain we must bide."

"Lie still, be still a little wee while, Lie still but if we may; Gin my mother should miss us when she wakes, She 'll gae mad, ere it be day."

O it 's they 've taen up their mother's mantle, And they 've hung it on a pin; "O lang may ye hing, my mother's mantle, Ere ye hap us again."'

A chill air as from the charnel-house seems to breathe upon us while reading the lines; the coldness, the darkness, and the horror of death have never been painted for us with more terrible power than in the 'Wiertz Gallery' of the old balladists.

We feel this also in the ballads of the type of _Sweet William and May Margaret_, quoted in Beaumont and Fletcher's _Knight of the Burning Pestle_, where the dead returns to claim back a plighted word; and at the same time we feel the strength of the perfect love that triumphs over death and casts out fear:

'"Is there any room at your head, Willie, Or any room at your feet, Or any room at your side, Willie, Wherein that I may creep?"'

How miserably the poetical taste of the early part of last century misappreciated the spirit of the ancient ballad, preferring the dross to the fine gold, and tricking out the 'terrific old Scottish tale,' as Sir Walter Scott calls it, in meretricious ornament, may be seen by comparing the original copies with that 'elegant' composition of David Mallet, _William and Margaret_, so praised and popular in its day, in which every change made is a disfigurement of the nature of an outrage.

Read the summons of the ghost, still 'naked of ornament and simple':

'"O sweet Marg'ret, O dear Marg'ret!

I pray thee speak to me; Gie me my faith and troth, Marg'ret, As I gae it to thee,"'

along with the 'improved' version:

'"Awake!" she cried, "thy true love calls, Come from her midnight grave; Now let thy pity hear the maid Thy love refused to save."'

Of a long antiquity most of these Mythological Ballads must be, if not in their actual phraseology, in the dark superst.i.tions they embody and in the pathetic glimpses they afford us of the thoughts and fears and hopes of the men and women of the days of long ago--the days before feudalism; the days, as some inquisitors of the ballad a.s.sure us, when religion was a kind of fetichism or ancestor worship, when the laws were the laws of the tribe or family, and when the cannibal feast may have been among the customs of the race. We cannot find a time when this inheritance of legend was not old; when it was not sung, and committed to memory, and handed down to later generations in some rude rhyme. The leading 'types' were in the wallet of Autolycus; and he describes certain of them with a seasoning of his grotesque humour, to his simple country audience. There were the well-attested tale of the _Usurer's Wife_, a ballad sung, as ballads are wont, 'to a very doleful tune'--obviously a form of the Supernatural Birth; and the story, true as it is pitiful, of the fish that turned to woman, and then back again to fish, in which he that runs may read an example from the Mermaid Cycle. They are to be found to-day, often in debased and barely recognisable guise, in the hands of the peripatetic ballad-mongers who still haunt fairs and sing in the streets, and in the memories of mult.i.tudes of country folks who know scarce any other literature bearing the magic trademark of Old Romance.

CHAPTER V

THE ROMANTIC BALLAD

'O they rade on, and farther on, By the lee licht o' the moon, Until they cam' to a wan water, And there they lichted them doon.'

_The Douglas Tragedy._

It may look like taking a liberty with the chart of ballad poetry to label as 'romantic' a single province of this kingdom of Old Romance. It is probably not even the most ancient of the provinces of balladry, but it has some claim to be regarded as the central one in fame and in wealth--the one that yields the purest and richest ore of poetry. It is that wherein the pa.s.sion and frenzy of love is not merely an element or a prominent motive, but is the controlling spirit and the absorbing interest.

As has been acknowledged, it is not possible to make any hard and fast division of the Scottish ballads by applying to them this or any other test; and mention has already been made, on account of the mythological or superst.i.tious features they possess, of a number of the choicest of these old lays that turn essentially upon the strength or the weakness, the constancy or the inconstancy, the rapture or the sorrow of earthly love. Love in the ballads is nearly always masterful, imperious, exacting; nearly always its reward is death and dule, and not life and happiness. But as it spurns all obstacles, it meets its fate unflinchingly. No sacrifices are too great, no penance too dire, no shame or sin too black to turn aside for an instant the rush of this impetuous pa.s.sion, which runs bare-breasted on the drawn sword.

It is not to the ballads we must go for example--precept of this or of any kind there is none--in the _bourgeois_ and respectable virtues; of the sober and chastened behaviour that comes of a prudent fear of consequences, of a cold temperament and a calculating spirit. The good or the ill done by the heroes and heroines of the Romantic Ballad is done on the spur of the moment, on the impulse of hot blood. Whether it be sin or sacrifice, the prompting is not that of convention, but of Nature herself. Love and hate, though they may burn and glow like a volcano, are not prodigal of words. It is one of the marks by which we may distinguish the characters in the ballads from those in later and more cultivated fields of literature that, as a rule, they say less rather than more than they mean. They speak daggers; but they are far more apt in using them. At a word or look the lovers are ready to die for each other; but of the language of endearment they are not prodigal; and a phrase of tenderness is sweet in proportion that it is rare.

With the tamer affections it fares no better than with the moral law when it comes in the path of the master pa.s.sion. Mother and sisters are defied and forsaken; father and brethren are resisted at the sword's point when they cross, as is their wont, the course of true love. It is curious to note how little, except as a foil, the ballad makes of brotherly or sisterly love. It finds exquisite expression in the tale of _Chil Ether_ and his twin sister,

'Who loved each other tenderly 'Boon everything on earth.

"The ley likesna the simmer shower Nor girse the morning dew, Better, dear Lady Maisrie, Than Chil Ether loves you."'

But for this, among other reasons, the genuine antiquity of the ballad is under some suspicion.

In modern fiction or drama the lady hesitates between the opposing forces of love and of family pride and duty; the old influences in her life do not yield to the new without a struggle. But of struggle or indecision the ballad heroine knows, or at least says, nothing. A glance, a whispered word, a note of harp or horn, and she flings down her 'silken seam,' and whether she be king's daughter or beggar maid she obeys the spell, and follows the enchanter to greenwood or to broomy hill, to the ends of the earth, and to the gates of death.

For when the gallant knight and his 'fair may' ride away, prying eyes are upon them; black care and red vengeance climb up behind them and keep them company. _The Douglas Tragedy_ may be selected for its terseness and dramatic strength, for the romance and pathos inwoven in the very names and scenes with which it is a.s.sociated, as the type of a favourite story which under various t.i.tles--_Earl Brand_ and the _Child of Elle_ among the rest--has, time beyond knowledge, captivated the imagination and drawn the tears of ballad-lovers. In the best-known Scots version--that which Sir Walter Scott has recovered for us, and which bears some touches of his rescuing hand--it is the lady-mother who gives the alarm that the maiden has fled under cloud of night with her lover:

'Rise up, rise up, my seven bauld sons, And put on your armour so bright, And take better care of your youngest sister, For your eldest 's awa' the last night.'

In English variants, it is the sour serving-man or false bower-woman who gives the alarm and sets the chase in motion. But there are other differences that enter into the very essence of the story, and express the diverse feeling of the Scottish and the English ballad. In the latter there is a pretty scene of entreaty and reconciliation; the lady's tears soften the harsh will of the father, and stay the lifted blade of the lover, and all ends merry as a marriage bell. But in the Scottish ballads fathers and lovers are not given to the melting mood.

In sympathy with the scenery and atmosphere, the ballad spirit is with us sterner and darker; and just as the materials of that tender little idyll of faithful love, _The Three Ravens_, are in Scottish hands transformed into the drear, wild dirge of _The Twa Corbies_, the gallant adventure of the _Child of Elle_ turns inevitably to tragedy by Douglas Water and Yarrow. But how much more true to this soul of romance is the choice of the northern minstrel! Lady Margaret, as she holds Lord William's bridle-rein while he deals those strokes so 'wondrous sair' at her nearest kin, is a figure that will haunt the 'stream of sorrow' as long as verse has power to move the hearts of men:

'"O choose, O choose, Lady Marg'ret," he cried, "O whether will ye gang or bide?"

"I 'll gang, I 'll gang, Lord William," she said, "For you 've left me no other guide."

He lifted her on a milk-white steed, And himself on a dapple grey, With a buglet horn hung down by his side, And slowly they both rade away.

O they rade on, and farther on, By the lee licht o' the moon, Until they cam' to a wan water, And there they lichted them doon.