The Book of Old English Ballads Part 1

The Book of Old English Ballads.

by George Wharton Edwards.

Introduction

Goethe, who saw so many things with such clearness of vision, brought out the charm of the popular ballad for readers of a later day in his remark that the value of these songs of the people is to be found in the fact that their motives are drawn directly from nature; and he added, that in the art of saying things compactly, uneducated men have greater skill than those who are educated. It is certainly true that no kind of verse is so completely out of the atmosphere of modern writing as the popular ballad. No other form of verse has, therefore, in so great a degree, the charm of freshness.

In material, treatment, and spirit, these bat lads are set in sharp contrast with the poetry of the hour. They deal with historical events or incidents, with local traditions, with personal adventure or achievement. They are, almost without exception, entirely objective. Contemporary poetry is, on the other hand, very largely subjective; and even when it deals with events or incidents it invests them to such a degree with personal emotion and imagination, it so modifies and colours them with temperamental effects, that the resulting poem is much more a study of subjective conditions than a picture or drama of objective realities. This projection of the inward upon the outward world, in such a degree that the dividing line between the two is lost, is strikingly ill.u.s.trated in Maeterlinck's plays. Nothing could be in sharper contrast, for instance, than the famous ballad of "The Hunting of the Cheviot" and Maeterlinck's "Princess Maleine." There is no atmosphere, in a strict use of the word, in the spirited and compact account of the famous contention between the Percies and the Douglases, of which Sir Philip Sidney said "that I found not my heart moved more than with a Trumpet." It is a breathless, rushing narrative of a swift succession of events, told with the most straight-forward simplicity. In the "Princess Maleine," on the other hand, the narrative is so charged with subjective feeling, the world in which the action takes place is so deeply tinged with lights that never rested on any actual landscape, that all sense of reality is lost.

The play depends for its effect mainly upon atmosphere. Certain very definite impressions are produced with singular power, but there is no clear, clean stamping of occurrences on the mind. The imagination is skilfully awakened and made to do the work of observation.

The note of the popular ballad is its objectivity; it not only takes us out of doors, but it also takes us out of the individual consciousness. The manner is entirely subordinated to the matter; the poet, if there was a poet in the case, obliterates himself. What we get is a definite report of events which have taken place, not a study of a man's mind nor an account of a man's feelings. The true balladist is never introspective; he is concerned not with himself but with his story. There is no self-disclosure in his song. To the mood of Senancour and Amiel he was a stranger. Neither he nor the men to whom he recited or sang would have understood that mood.

They were primarily and unreflectively absorbed in the world outside of themselves. They saw far more than they meditated; they recorded far more than they moralized. The popular ballads are, as a rule, entirely free from didacticism in any form; that is one of the main sources of their unfailing charm. They show not only a childlike curiosity about the doings of the day and the things that befall men, but a childlike indifference to moral inference and justification. The bloodier the fray the better for ballad purposes; no one feels the necessity of apology either for ruthless aggression or for useless blood-letting; the scene is reported as it was presented to the eye of the spectator, not to his moralizing faculty. He is expected to see and to sing, not to scrutinize and meditate. In those rare cases in which a moral inference is drawn, it is always so obvious and elementary that it gives the impression of having been fastened on at the end of the song, in deference to ecclesiastical rather than popular feeling.

The social and intellectual conditions which fostered self-unconsciousness,--interest in things, incidents, and adventures rather than in moods and inward experiences,--and the unmoral or non moralizing att.i.tude towards events, fostered also that delightful naivete which contributes greatly to the charm of many of the best ballads; a naivete which often heightens the pathos, and, at times, softens it with touches of apparently unconscious humour; the naivete of the child which has in it something of the freshness of a wildflower, and yet has also a wonderful instinct for making the heart of the matter plain. This quality has almost entirely disappeared from contemporary verse among cultivated races; one must go to the peasants of remote parts of the Continent to discover even a trace of its presence. It has a real, but short-lived charm, like the freshness which shines on meadow and garden in the brief dawn which hastens on to day.

This frank, direct play of thought and feeling on an incident, or series of incidents, compensates for the absence of a more perfect art in the ballads; using the word "art" in its true sense as including complete, adequate, and beautiful handling of subject-matter, and masterly working out of its possibilities. These popular songs, so dear to the hearts of the generations on whose lips they were fashioned, and to all who care for the fresh note, the direct word, the unrestrained emotion, rarely touch the highest points of poetic achievement. Their charm lies, not in their perfection of form, but in their spontaneity, sincerity, and graphic power. They are not rivers of song, wide, deep, and swift; they are rather cool, clear springs among the hills. In the reactions against sophisticated poetry which set in from lime to time, the popular ballad--the true folk-song--has often been exalted at the expense of other forms of verse. It is idle to attempt to arrange the various forms of poetry in an order of absolute values; it is enough that each has its own quality, and, therefore, its own value. The drama, the epic, the ballad, the lyric, each strikes its note in the complete expression of human emotion and experience. Each belongs to a particular stage of development, and each has the authority and the enduring charm which attach to every authentic utterance of the spirit of man under the conditions of life.

In this wide range of human expression the ballad follows the epic as a kind of aftermath; a second and scattered harvest, springing without regularity or nurture out of a rich and unexhausted soil. The epic fastens upon some event of such commanding importance that it marks a main current of history; some story, historic, or mythologic; some incident susceptible of extended narrative treatment. It is always, in its popular form, a matter of growth it is direct, simple, free from didacticism; representing, as Aristotle says, "a single action, entire and complete." It subordinates character to action; it delights in episode and dialogue; it is content to tell the story as a story, and leave the moralization to hearers or readers. The popular ballad is so closely related to the popular epic that it may be said to reproduce its qualities and characteristics within a narrower compa.s.s, and on a smaller scale. It also is a piece of the memory of the people, or a creation of the imagination of the people; but the tradition or fact which it preserves is of local, rather than national importance. It is indifferent to nice distinctions and delicate gradations or shadings; its power springs from its directness, vigour, and simplicity. It is often entirely occupied with the narration or description of a single episode; it has no room for dialogue, but it often secures the effect of the dialogue by its unconventional freedom of phrase, and sometimes by the introduction of brief and compact charge and denial, question and reply. Sometimes the incidents upon which the ballad makers fastened, have a unity or connection with each other which hints at a complete story. The ballads which deal with Robin Hood are so numerous and so closely related that they constantly suggest, not only the possibility, but the probability of epic treatment. It is surprising that the richness of the material, and its notable ill.u.s.trative quality, did not inspire some earlier Chaucer to combine the incidents in a sustained narrative. But the epic poet did not appear, and the most representative of English popular heroes remains the central figure in a series of detached episodes and adventures, preserved in a long line of disconnected ballads.

This apparent arrest, in the ballad stage, of a story which seemed destined to become an epic, naturally suggests the vexed question of the author ship of the popular ballads. They are in a very real sense the songs of the people; they make no claim to individual authorship; on the contrary, the inference of what may be called community authorship is, in many instances, irresistible. They are the product of a social condition which, so to speak, holds song of this kind in solution; of an age in which improvisation, singing, and dancing are the most natural and familiar forms of expression. They deal almost without exception with matters which belong to the community memory or imagination; they constantly reappear with variations so noticeable as to indicate free and common handling of themes of wide local interest. All this is true of the popular ballad; but all this does not decisively settle the question of authorship. What share did the community have in the making of these songs, and what share fell to individual singers?

Herder, whose conception of the origin and function of literature was so vitalizing in the general aridity of thinking about the middle of the last century, and who did even more for ballad verse in Germany than Bishop Percy did in England, laid emphasis almost exclusively on community authorship. His profound instinct for reality in all forms of art, his deep feeling for life, and the immense importance he attached to spontaneity and unconsciousness in the truest productivity made community authorship not only attractive but inevitable to him. In his p.r.o.nounced reaction against the superficial ideas of literature so widely held in the Germany of his time, he espoused the conception of community authorship as the only possible explanation of the epics, ballads, and other folk-songs. In nature and popular life, or universal experience, he found the rich sources of the poetry whose charm he felt so deeply, and whose power and beauty he did so much to reveal to his contemporaries. Genius and nature are magical words with him, because they suggested such depths of being under all forms of expression; such unity of the whole being of a race in its thought, its emotion, and its action; such entire unconsciousness of self or of formulated aim, and such spontaneity of spirit and speech. The language of those times, when words had not yet been divided into n.o.bles, middle-cla.s.s, and plebeians, was, he said, the richest for poetical purposes. "Our tongue, compared with the idiom of the savage, seems adapted rather for reflection than for the senses or imagination. The rhythm of popular verse is so delicate, so rapid, so precise, that it is no easy matter to defect it with our eyes; but do not imagine it to have been equally difficult for those living populations who listened to, instead of reading it; who were accustomed to the sound of it from their infancy; who themselves sang it, and whose ear had been formed by its cadence." This conception of poetry as arising in the hearts of the people and taking form on their lips is still more definitely and strikingly expressed in two sentences, which let us into, the heart of Herder's philosophy of poetry: "Poetry in those happy days lived in the ears of the people, on the lips and in the harps of living bards; it sang of history, of the events of the day, of mysteries, miracles, and signs. It was the flower of a nation's character, language, and country; of its occupations, its prejudices, its pa.s.sions, its aspirations, and its soul." In these words, at once comprehensive and vague, after the manner of Herder, we find ourselves face to face with that conception not only of popular song in all its forms, but with literature as a whole, which has revolutionized literary study in this century, and revitalized it as well. For Herder was a man of prophetic instinct; he sometimes felt more clearly than he saw; he divined where he could not reach results by a.n.a.lysis. He was often vague, fragmentary, and inconclusive, like all men of his type; but he had a genius for getting at the heart of things. His statements often need qualification, but he is almost always on the tight track. When he says that the great traditions, in which both the memory and the imagination of a race were engaged, and which were still living in the mouths of the people, "of themselves took on poetic form," he is using language which is too general to convey a definite impression of method, but he is probably suggesting the deepest truth with regard to these popular stories. They actually were of community origin; they actually were common property; they were given a great variety of forms by a great number of persons; the forms which have come down to us are very likely the survivors of a kind of in formal compet.i.tion, which went on for years at the fireside and at the festivals of a whole country side.

Barger, whose "Lenore" is one of the most widely known of modern ballads, held the same view of the origin of popular song, and was even more definite in his confession of faith than Herder. He declared in the most uncompromising terms that all real poetry must have a popular origin; "can be and must be of the people, for that is the seal of its perfection." And he comments on the delight with which he has listened, in village street and home, to unwritten songs; the poetry which finds its way in quiet rivulets to the remotest peasant home. In like manner, Helene Vacaresco overheard the songs of the Roumanian people; hiding in the maize to catch the reaping songs; listening at spinning parties, at festivals, at death-beds, at taverns; taking the songs down from the lips of peasant women, fortune-tellers, gypsies, and all manner of humble folk who were the custodians of this vagrant community verse. We have pa.s.sed so entirely out of the song-making period, and literature has become to us so exclusively the work of a professional cla.s.s, that we find it difficult to imagine the intellectual and social conditions which fostered improvisation on a great scale, and trained the ear of great populations to the music of spoken poetry. It is almost impossible for us to disa.s.sociate literature from writing. There is still, however, a considerable volume of unwritten literature in the world in the form of stories, songs, proverbs, and pithy phrases; a literature handed down in large part from earlier times, but still receiving additions from contemporary men and women.

This unwritten literature is to be found, it is hardly necessary to say, almost exclusively among country people remote from towns, and whose mental att.i.tude and community feeling reproduce, in a way, the conditions under which the English and Scotch ballads were originally composed. The Roumanian peasants sing their songs upon every occasion of domestic or local interest; and sowing and harvesting, birth, christening, marriage, the burial, these notable events in the life of the country side are all celebrated by unknown poets; or, rather, by improvisers who give definite form to sentiments, phrases, and words which are on many lips. The Russian peasant tells his stories as they were told to him; those heroic epics whose life is believed, in some cases, to date back at least a thousand years. These great popular stories form a kind of sacred inheritance bequeathed by one generation to another as a possession of the memory, and are almost entirely unrelated to the written literature of the country. Miss Hapgood tells a very interesting story of a government official, stationed on the western sh.o.r.e of Lake Onega, who became so absorbed in the search for this literature of the people that he followed singers and reciters from place to place, eager to learn from their lips the most widely known of these folk tales. On such an expedition of discovery he found himself, one stormy night, on an island in the lake. The hut of refuge was already full of stormbound peasants when he entered.

Having made himself some tea, and spread his blanket in a vacant place, he fell asleep. He was presently awakened by a murmur of recurring sounds. Sitting up, he found the group of peasants hanging on the words of an old man, of kindly face, expressive eyes, and melodious voice, from whose lips flowed a marvellous song; grave and gay by turns, monotonous and pa.s.sionate in succession; but wonderfully fresh, picturesque, and fascinating. The listener soon became aware that he was hearing, for the first time, the famous story of "Sadko, the Merchant of Novgorod." It was like being present at the birth of a piece of literature!

The fact that unwritten songs and stories still exist in great numbers among remote country-folk of our own time, and that additions are still made to them, help us to understand the probable origin of our own popular ballads, and what community authorship may really mean. To put ourselves, even in thought, in touch with the ballad-making period in English and Scotch history, we must dismiss from our minds all modern ideas of authorship; all notions of individual origination and ownership of any form of words. Professor ten Brink tells us that in the ballad-making age there was no production; there was only reproduction. There was a stock of traditions, memories, experiences, held in common by large populations, in constant use on the lips of numberless persons; told and retold in many forms, with countless changes, variations, and modifications; without conscious artistic purpose, with no sense of personal control or possession, with no constructive aim either in plot or treatment; no composition in the modern sense of the term. Such a ma.s.s of poetic material in the possession of a large community was, in a sense, fluid, and ran into a thousand forms almost without direction or premeditation. Constant use of such rich material gave a poetic turn of thought and speech to countless persons who, under other conditions, would have given no sign of the possession of the faculty of imagination.

There was not only the stimulus to the faculty which sees events and occurrences with the eyes of the imagination, but there was also constant and familiar use of the language of poetry. To speak metrically or rhythmically is no difficult matter if one is in the atmosphere or habit of verse-making; and there is nothing surprising either in the feats of memory or of improvisation performed by the minstrels and balladists of the old time. The faculty of improvising was easily developed and was very generally used by people of all cla.s.ses. This facility is still possessed by rural populations, among whom songs are still composed as they are sting, each member of the company contributing a new verse or a variation, suggested by local conditions, of a well-known stanza. When to the possession of a ma.s.s of traditions and stories and of facility of improvisation is added the habit of singing and dancing, it is not difficult to reconstruct in our own thought the conditions under which popular poetry came into being, nor to understand in what sense a community can make its own songs. In the brave days when ballads were made, the rustic peoples were not mute, as they are to-day; nor sad, as they have become in so many parts of England.

They sang and they danced by instinct and as an expression of social feeling. Originally the ballads were not only sung, but they gave measure to the dance; they grew from mouth to mouth in the very act of dancing; individual dancers adding verse to verse, and the frequent refrain coming in as a kind of chorus. Gesture and, to a certain extent, acting would naturally accompany so free and general an expression of community feeling. There was no poet, because all were poets. To quote Professor ten Brink once more:--

"Song and playing were cultivated by peasants, and even by freedmen and serfs. At beer-feasts the harp went from hand to hand. Herein lies the essential difference between that age and our own. The result of poetical activity was not the property and was not the production of a single person, but of the community. The work of the individual endured only as long as its delivery lasted. He gained personal distinction only as a virtuoso. The permanent elements of what he presented, the material, the ideas, even the style and metre, already existed. 'The work of the singer was only a ripple in the stream of national poetry. Who can say how much the individual contributed to it, or where in his poetical recitation memory ceased and creative impulse began! In any case the work of the individual lived on only as the ideal possession of the aggregate body of the people, and it soon lost the stamp of originality. In view of such a development of poetry, we must a.s.sume a time when the collective consciousness of a people or race is paramount in its unity; when the intellectual life of each is nourished from the same treasury of views and a.s.sociations, of myths and sagas; when similar interests stir each breast; and the ethical judgment of all applies itself to the same standard. In such an age the form of poetical expression will also be common to all, necessarily solemn, earnest, and simple."

When the conditions which produced the popular ballads become clear to the imagination, their depth of rootage, not only in the community life but in the community love, becomes also clear. We under stand the charm which these old songs have for us of a later age, and the spell which they cast upon men and women who knew the secret of their birth; we understand why the minstrels of the lime, when popular poetry was in its best estate, were held in such honour, why Taillefer sang the song of Roland at the head of the advancing Normans on the day of Hastings, and why good Bishop Aldhelm, when he wanted to get the ears of his people, stood on the bridge and sang a ballad! These old songs were the flowering of the imagination of the people; they drew their life as directly from the general experience, the common memory, the universal feelings, as did the Greek dramas in those primitive times, when they were part of rustic festivity and worship. The popular ballads have pa.s.sed away with the conditions which produced them. Modern poets have, in several instances, written ballads of striking picturesqueness and power, but as unlike the ballad of popular origin as the world of to-day is unlike the world in which "Chevy Chase" was first sung. These modern ballads are not necessarily better or worse than their predecessors; but they are necessarily different. It is idle to exalt the wild flower at the expense of the garden flower; each has its fragrance, its beauty, its sentiment; and the world is wide!

In the selection of the ballads which appear in this volume, no attempt has been made to follow a chronological order or to enforce a rigid principle of selection of any kind. The aim has been to bring within moderate compa.s.s a collection of these songs of the people which should fairly represent the range, the descriptive felicity, the dramatic power, and the genuine poetic feeling of a body of verse which is still, it is to be feared, unfamiliar to a large number of those to whom it would bring refreshment and delight.

HAMILTON WRIGHT MABIE

Chevy Chace

G.o.d prosper long our n.o.ble king, Our liffes and safetyes all; A woefull hunting once there did In Chevy-Chace befall.

To drive the deere with hound and horne, Erle Percy took his way; The child may rue that is unborne The hunting of that day.

The stout Erle of Northumberland A vow to G.o.d did make, His pleasure in the Scottish woods Three summers days to take;

The cheefest harts in Chevy-Chace To kill and beare away: These tydings to Erle Douglas came, In Scotland where he lay.

Who sent Erie Percy present word, He wold prevent his sport; The English Erle not fearing that, Did to the woods resort,

With fifteen hundred bow-men bold, All chosen men of might, Who knew full well in time of neede To ayme their shafts arright.

The gallant greyhounds swiftly ran, To chase the fallow deere; On Munday they began to hunt, Ere day-light did appeare;

And long before high noone they had An hundred fat buckes slaine; Then having din'd, the drovyers went To rouze the deare againe.

The bow-men mustered on the hills, Well able to endure; Theire backsides all, with speciall care, That day were guarded sure.

The hounds ran swiftly through the woods, The nimble deere to take, That with their cryes the hills and dales An eccho shrill did make.

Lord Percy to the quarry went, To view the tender deere; Quoth he, "Erle Douglas promised This day to meet me heere;

"But if I thought he wold not come, Noe longer wold I stay."

With that, a brave younge gentleman Thus to the Erle did say:

"Loe, yonder doth Erle Douglas come, His men in armour bright; Full twenty hundred Scottish speres, All marching in our sight.

"All men of pleasant Tivydale, Fast by the river Tweede:"

"O cease your sport," Erle Percy said, "And take your bowes with speede.

"And now with me, my countrymen, Your courage forth advance; For never was there champion yett In Scotland or in France,

"That ever did on horsebacke come, But, if my hap it were, I durst encounter man for man, With him to breake a spere."

Erle Douglas on his milke-white steede, Most like a baron bold, Rode formost of his company, Whose armour shone like gold.

"Show me," sayd hee, "whose men you bee, That hunt soe boldly heere, That, without my consent, doe chase And kill my fallow-deere."

The man that first did answer make Was n.o.ble Percy hee; Who sayd, "Wee list not to declare, Nor shew whose men wee bee.

"Yet will wee spend our deerest blood, Thy cheefest harts to slay;"

Then Douglas swore a solempne oathe, And thus in rage did say;

"Ere thus I will out-braved bee, One of us two shall dye: I know thee well, an erle thou art; Lord Percy, soe am I.

"But trust me, Percy, pittye it were, And great offence, to kill Any of these our guiltlesse men, For they have done no ill.

"Let thou and I the battell trye, And set our men aside."

"Accurst bee he," Erle Percy sayd, "By whome this is denyed."

Then stept a gallant squier forth, Witherington was his name, Who said, "I wold not have it told To Henry our king for shame,