The Balladists Part 7

'"Lie still, my babe, lie still, my babe, Lie still as lang 's ye may; For your father rides on high horseback, And cares na for us twae."'

And again,

'"Gin my seven sons were seven young rats, Runnin' upon the castle wa'; And I were a grey cat mysel', Soon should I worry ane and a'."'

Wide, surely, is the gulf between the Original Woman of old romance and the New Woman of recent fiction. The change, no doubt, is for the better; and yet is it altogether for the better?

According to all modern canons, the conduct of these too-tardy bridegrooms was brutal beyond words; and as for the heroines of the Romantic Ballad, Mother Grundy, had she the handling of them, would use them worse than ever did moody brother or crafty stepmother. But the balladists and ballad characters had their own gauges of conduct. Their morals were not other or better than the morals of their age. They strained out the gnats and swallowed the camels of the law as given to Moses; perhaps if they could look into modern society and the modern novel they would charge the same against our own times and literature.

If they broke, as they were too ready to do, the Sixth Commandment, or the Seventh, they made no attempt to glose the sin; they dealt not in innuendo or _double entendre_. Beside the page of modern realism, the ballad page is clean and wholesome. Human pa.s.sion unrestrained there may be; but no sickly or vicious sentiment. There is a punctilious sense of honour; and if it is sometimes the letter rather than the spirit of vow or promise that is kept, the knights and ladies in the ballads are no worse than are the Pharisees of our day; and they are always ready to pay, and generally do pay, the utmost penalty.

Thus, in that most powerful and tragic ballad, _Clerk Saunders_, May Margaret ties a napkin about her eyes that she 'may swear, and keep her aith,' to her 'seven bauld brothers,' that she had not seen her lover 'since late yestreen'; she carries him across the threshold of her bower, that she may be able to say that his foot had never been there.

The story of the sleeping twain--the excuses for their sin; the reason why ruth should turn aside vengeance--is told, in staccato sentences, by the brothers as they stand by the bedside of their 'ae sister,' with 'torches burning bright':

'Out and spake the first o' them, "I wot that they are lovers dear"; And out and spake the second o' them, "They 've been in love this mony a year";

And out and spake the third o' them, "His father had nae mair than he."'

And so until the seventh--the Rashleigh of the band--who spake no word, but let his 'bright brown brand' speak for him. What follows rises to the extreme height of the balladist's art; literature might be challenged for anything surpa.s.sing it in simplicity and power, in the mingling of horror and pathos:

'Clerk Saunders he started and Margaret she turned, Into his arms as asleep she lay; And sad and silent was the night That was atween the twae.

And they lay still and sleeped sound, Until the day began to daw, And softly unto him she said, "It 's time, true love, you were awa'."

But he lay still and sleeped sound, Albeit the sun began to sheen; She looked atween her and the wa', And dull and drumlie were his een.'

In the majority of ballads of the _Clerk Saunders_ cla.s.s there is some base agent who betrays trust and brings death upon the lovers. 'Fause Foodrage' takes many forms in these ancient tales without changing type.

He is the slayer of 'Lily Flower' in _Jellon Graeme_; and the boy whom he has preserved and brought up sends the arrow singing to his guilty heart. Lammiken, the 'bloodthirsty mason,' who must have a life for his wage, is another enemy within the house who finds his way through 'steekit yetts'; and he is a.s.sisted by the 'fause nourice.' In other ballads it is the 'kitchen-boy,' the 'little foot-page,' the 'churlish carle,' or the bower-woman who plays the spy and tale-bearer. In _Glenkindie_, 'Gib, his man,' is the vile betrayer of the n.o.ble harper and his lady. Sometimes, as in _Gude Wallace_, _Earl Richard_, and _Sir James the Rose_, it is the 'light leman' who plays traitor. But she quickly repents, and meets her fate in the fire or at the sword's point, in 'Clyde Water' or in 'the dowie den in the Lawlands o' Balleichan.' In _Gil Morice_, that ballad which Gray thought 'divine,' it is 'Willie, the bonnie boy,' whom the hero trusted with his message, that in malice and wilfulness brings about the tremendous catastrophe of the tale. He calls aloud in hall the words he was bid whisper in the ear of Lord Barnard's lady--to meet Gil Morice in the forest, and 'speir nae bauld baron's leave.'

'The lady stamped wi' her foot And winked wi' her e'e; But for a' that she could say or do Forbidden he wadna be.'

It is the angry and jealous baron who, in woman guise, meets and slays the youth who is waiting in gude greenwood, and brings back the b.l.o.o.d.y head to the mother.

Other fine ballads in which mother and son carry on tragic colloquy are _Lord Randal_ and _Edward_. These versions of a story of treachery and blood, conveyed in the dark hints of a strange dialogue, have received many touches from later hands; but the germ comes down from the age of tradition. It has even been noted that, with the curious tenacity with which the ballad memory often clings to a detail while forgetting or mislaying essential fact, the food with which, in the version Burns recovered for Johnson's _Museum_, Lord Randal is poisoned--'eels boiled in broo'--is identical with that given to his prototype in the folk-ballads of Italy and other countries. The structure of this ballad, like the beautiful old air to which it is sung, bears marks of antiquity, and its wide diffusion militates against Scott's not very convincing suggestion that it refers to the alleged poisoning of the Regent Randolph. But it lacks the terrible and dramatic intensity of _Son Davie_, better known in the version transmitted, under the name of _Edward_, by Lord Hailes to Bishop Percy's _Reliques_. Here it is the murderer, and not the victim, who answers; and it is the questioning mother, and not the absent false love, with whom the curse is left as a legacy. Despair had never a more piercing utterance than this:

'"And what will ye leave to your bairns and your wife?

Edward, Edward!

And what will ye leave to your bairns and your wife When ye gang over the sea, O?"

"The warld 's room, let them beg through life, Mither, Mither!

The warld 's room, let them beg through life, For them never mair will I see, O!"

"And what will ye leave to your ain mither dear?

Edward, Edward!

And what will ye leave to your ain mother dear, My dear son, now tell me, O?"

"The curse o' h.e.l.l from me shall ye bear, Mither, Mither!

The curse o' h.e.l.l from me shall ye bear, Sic counsels ye gae me, O!"'

Although Yarrow be the favoured haunt on Scottish soil--may we not also say on the whole round of earth?--of the Romantic Ballad, and has coloured them, and taken colour from them, for all time, yet there are other streams and vales that only come short of being its rivals.

'Leader Haughs,' for instance, which the harp of Nicol Burne, the 'Last Minstrel' who wandered and sang in the Borderland, has linked indissolubly with Yarrow braes, know of ballad strains well-nigh as sweet as those of the neighbour water. But cheerfulness rather than sadness is their prevailing note. _Auld Maitland_, the lay which James Hogg's mother repeated to Scott, has its scene on Leader side, and at the 'darksome town'--a misnomer in these days--of Lauder. Long before the time of that tough champion, St. Cuthbert and True Thomas had wandered and dreamed and sang by Leader. It was a Lord Lauderdale who rode to Traquair to court, after the older fashion, Katherine Janferie:

'He toldna her father, he toldna her mither, He toldna ane o' her kin; But he whispered the bonnie may hersel', And has her favour won.'

He it was, according to the old ballad, who rode to the bridal at the eleventh hour, with four and twenty Leader lads behind him:

'"I comena here to fight," he said, "I comena here to play; But to lead a dance wi' the bonnie bride, And mount and go my way"';

and it was Lord Lochinvar (although 'he who told the story later' has taught us so differently) who played the inglorious part of the deserted bridegroom. Scott himself drank in the pa.s.sion for Border romance and chivalry on the braes of Sandyknowe, between Leader and Eden waters, not far from Smailholm and Dryburgh, and Huntly Bank and Mellerstain, and Rhymer's Tower and the Broom o' the Cowdenknowes. According to Mr. Ford, the ballad which takes its name from this last-mentioned spot is traditionally a.s.signed to a Mellerstain maid named Crosbie, whose words were set to music by no less famous a hand than that of David Rizzio. So that here at least we have a vague echo of the name of a balladist and of a ballad-air composer. Between them, the maid of Mellerstain and 'Davy' have harmonised most musically, albeit with some touch of moral laxity, the spirit of pastoral and of ballad romance:

'The hills were high on ilka side, And the bucht i' the lirk o' the hill, And aye as she sang her voice it rang Out ower the head o' yon hill.

There cam' a troop o' gentlemen, Merrily riding by, And ane o' them rade out o' the way To the bucht to the bonnie may.'

Nowhere has the ballad inspiration and the ballad touch lingered longer than by Eden and Leader and Whitadder. Lady Grizel Baillie (who also wonned in Mellerstain) had them--

'There once was a may and she lo'ed nae men, And she biggit her bonnie bower doun in yon glen'--

and it still lives in Lady John Scott, who has sung of _The Bonnie Bounds of Cheviot_ as if the mantle of the Border minstrels had fallen upon her.

After all, the ballads of Yarrow and Ettrick, of the Merse and Teviotdale, owe their superior fame as much as anything to the happy chance that the Wizard of Abbotsford dwelt in the midst of them, and seizing upon them before they were forgotten, made them and the localities cla.s.sical. Other districts have in this way been despoiled to some extent of their proper meed of honour. Fortune as well as merit has favoured the Border Minstrelsy in the race for survival and for precedence in the popular memory. But Galloway, a land pervaded with romance, claims at least one ballad that can rank with the best. _Lord Gregory_ has aliases and duplicates without number. But the scene is always Loch Ryan and some castled island within sight of that arm of the sea, whither the love-lorn Annie fares in her boat 'wi' sails o' the light green silk and tows o' taffetie,' in quest of her missing lord:

'"O row the boat, my mariners, And bring me to the land!

For yonder I see my love's castle Close by the salt sea strand."'

Alas! cold is her welcome as she stands with her young son in her arms, and knocks and calls on her love, while 'the wind blaws through her yellow hair, and the rain draps o'er her chin.' A voice, that seems that of Lord Gregory, bids her go hence as 'a witch or a wil' warlock, or a mermaid o' the flood'; and with a woful heart she turns back to the sea and the storm. And when he wakes up from boding dreams to find his true love and his child have been turned from his door, it is too late. His cry to the waves is as vain as Annie's cry to that 'ill woman,' his mother, who has betrayed them:

'"And hey, Annie, and how, Annie!

O Annie, winna ye bide?"

But aye the mair that he cried Annie, The braider grew the tide.

"And hey, Annie, and how, Annie!

Dear Annie, speak to me!"

But aye the louder he cried Annie, The louder roared the sea.'

The sh.o.r.es and basin of the Forth have also their rowth of ballads; and some of them have, like _The La.s.s of Lochryan_, the sound of the waves and the salt smell of the sea mingled with their plaintive music. _Gil Morice_ has been 'placed' by Carronside--Ossian's 'roaring Carra'--a meet setting for the story. _Sir Patrick Spens_ cleaves to the sh.o.r.es of Fife; though some, eager for the honour of the North, have claimed that it is Aberdour in Buchan that is spoken of in the ballad. By the powerful spell of this old rhyme, the king still sits and drinks the blood-red wine in roofless Dunfermline tower; the ladies still haunt the windy headland--Kinghorn or Elie Ness--with 'their kaims intil their hands' waiting in vain the return of their 'good Scots lords'; the wraith of Sir Patrick himself in misty days strides the silver strand under the Hawes Wood, reading the braid letter. Near by is Donibristle; and it keeps the memory of the 'Bonnie Earl of Moray,' slain here, hints the balladist--though history is silent on the point--for pleasing too well the Queen's eye at Holyrood.

Edinburgh, too, draws a good part of its romance from the ballad bard.

Mary Hamilton, of the Queen's Maries, rode through the Netherbow Port to the gallows-foot:

'"Yestreen the Queen had four Maries, The night she 'll hae but three; There was Marie Seton, and Marie Beaton, And Marie Carmichael, and me."'

The Marchioness of Douglas wandered disconsolate on Arthur's Seat and drank of St. Anton's well:

'"O waly, waly, love be bonnie A little time while it is new, But when it 's auld it waxes cauld And fades awa' like morning dew.

But had I wist before I kissed That love had been so ill to win, I 'd locked my heart within a kist And fastened it wi' a siller pin"';

and across the hill lies the 'Wells o' Wearie.' Nowhere else has the wail of forsaken love found such wistful expression--except in _The Fause Lover_: