The Romantic Scottish Ballads: Their Epoch and Authorship Part 6

Let it also here be noted that the eldern knight in that ballad sits 'at the king's knee,' and the nurse in _Gil Morrice_ is not very necessarily described as having 'the bairn upon her knee.' Why the knee on these occasions, if not a habitual idea of one poet?[27]

[27] In _Childe Maurice_, in Percy's folio ma.n.u.script, the hero says:

'... come hither, thou little foot-page, That runneth lowly by my knee.'

The author of _Sir Patrick Spence_, and the other ballads in question, might have known this version, and from it caught this expression.

The consequences of the visit having been fatal to Lady Janet's health and peace, she goes back to see her elfin lover, Tam Lane, who instructs her how to recover him from his bondage to the queen of fairy-land.

'The night it is good Halloween, When fairy folk will ride; And they that wad their true love win, At Miles Cross they maun bide.'

'But how shall I thee ken, Tam Lane, Or how shall I thee knaw, Amang so many unearthly knights, The like I never saw?'

'The first company that pa.s.ses by, Say na, and let them gae; The next company that pa.s.ses by, Say na, and do right sae; The third company that pa.s.ses by, Then I'll be ane o' thae.

'First let pa.s.s the black, Janet, And syne let pa.s.s the brown; But grip ye to the milk-white steed, And pu' the rider down.'

Compare the first two of these stanzas with the queries put by the gay gos-hawk to his master:

'But how shall I your true love find, Or how suld I her know?

I bear a tongue ne'er wi' her spoke, An eye that ne'er her saw.'

'O weel sall ye my true love ken, Sae sore as ye her see,' &c.

As to the latter three stanzas, they exhibit a formula of description, which appears in several of the suspected ballads, consisting of a series of nearly identical statements, apparently for the sake of amplitude. For example, the progress of the seeming funeral of the lady in the _Gay Gos-hawk_:

At the first kirk of fair Scotland, They gart the bells be rung; At the second kirk of fair Scotland, They gart the ma.s.s be sung.

At the third kirk of fair Scotland, They dealt gold for her sake; And the fourth kirk of fair Scotland, Her true love met them at.

Or the following, in _Sweet Willie and Fair Annie_, which is almost the same incident and relation of circ.u.mstances as the said seeming funeral; only the lady in this case is dead:

The firsten bower that he cam till, There was right dowie wark; Her mother and her sisters three Were making to Annie a sark.

The next bower that he cam till, There was right dowie cheer; Her father and her seven brethren Were making to Annie a bier.

The lasten bower that he cam till, O heavy was his care; The waxen lights were burning bright, And fair Annie streekit there.

In Scott's version of _Tam Lane_ there are some stanzas of so modern a cast as to prove that this poem has been at least tampered with. For example, the account of fairy life:

'And all our wants are well supplied From every rich man's store, Who thankless sins the gifts he gets, And vainly grasps for more.'

Without regard, however, to such manifest patches, the general structure and style of expression must be admitted to strongly recall the other ballads which have been already commented on.

Only a wish to keep this dissertation within moderate bounds forbids me to a.n.a.lyse a few other ballads, as the _Douglas Tragedy_, _Sweet Willie and Fair Annie_, _Lady Maiery_, the _Clerk's Two Sons of Owsenford_, and a Scotch _Heir of Linne_ lately recovered by Mr J. H. Dixon, all of which, besides others which must rest unnamed, bear traces of the same authorship with the ballads already brought under notice.

It is now to be remarked of the ballads published by the successors of Percy, as of those which he published, that there is not a particle of positive evidence for their having existed before the eighteenth century. Overlooking the one given by Ramsay in his _Tea-table Miscellany_, we have neither print nor ma.n.u.script of them before the reign of George III. They are not in the style of old literature. They contain no references to old literature. As little does old literature contain any references to them. They wholly escaped the collecting diligence of Bannatyne. James Watson, who published a collection of Scottish poetry in 1706-1711, wholly overlooks them. Ramsay, as we see, caught up only one. Even Herd, in 1769, only gathered a few fragments of some of these poems. It was reserved for Sir Walter Scott and Robert Jamieson, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, to obtain copies of the great bulk of these poems--that is, the ballads over and above the few published by Percy--from A LADY--a certain 'Mrs Brown of Falkland,' who seems to have been the wife of the Rev. Andrew Brown, minister of that parish in Fife--is known to have been the daughter of Professor Thomas Gordon, of King's College, Aberdeen--and is stated to have derived her stores of legendary lore from the memory of her aunt, a Mrs Farquhar, the wife of a small proprietor in Braemar, who had spent the best part of her life among flocks and herds, but lived latterly in Aberdeen. At the suggestion of Mr William Tytler, a son of Mrs Brown wrote down a parcel of the ballads which her aunt had heard in her youth from the recitation of nurses and old women.[28] Such were the external circ.u.mstances, none of them giving the least support to the a.s.sumed antiquity of the pieces, but rather exciting some suspicion to the contrary effect.

[28] _Minstrelsy Scot. Border_, I. cxxvi.

When we come to consider the internal evidence, what do we find? We find that these poems, in common with those published by Percy, are composed in a style of romantic beauty and elevation distinguishing them from all other remains of Scottish traditionary poetry. They are quite unlike the palpably old historical ballads, such as the _Battle of Otterbourne_ and the _Raid of the Reidswire_. They are unlike the Border ballads, such as _d.i.c.k o' the Cow_, and _Jock o' the Syde_, commemorating domestic events of the latter part of the sixteenth century. They are strikingly unlike the _Burning of Frendraught_, the _Bonny House o' Airly_, and the _Battle of Bothwell Bridge_, contemporaneous metrical chronicles of events of the seventeenth century. Not less different are they from a large ma.s.s of ballads, which have latterly been published by Mr Peter Buchan and others, involving romantic incidents, it is true, or eccentricities in private life, but in such rude and homely strains as speak strongly of a plebeian origin. In the ballads here brought under question, the characters are usually persons of condition, generally richly dressed, often well mounted, and of a dignified bearing towards all inferior people. The page, the nurse, the waiting-woman, the hound, the hawk, and other animals connected with the pageantry of high life, are prominently introduced. Yet the characters and incidents are alike relieved from all clear connection with any particular age: they may be said to form a world of their own, of no particular era, wherein the imagination of the reader may revel, as that of the author has done. It may be allowably said, there is a tone of _breeding_ throughout these ballads, such as is never found in the productions of rustic genius.

One marked feature--the pathos of deep female affections--the sacrifice and the suffering which these so often involve--runs through nearly the whole. References to religion and religious ceremonies and fanes are of the slightest kind. We hear of bells being rung and ma.s.s sung, but only to indicate a time of day. Had they been old ballads continually changing in diction and in thought, as pa.s.sed down from one reciter to another, they could not have failed to involve some considerable trace of the intensely earnest religious life of the seventeenth century; but not the slightest tincture of this enthusiastic feeling appears in them, a defect the more marked, as they contain abundant allusion to the superst.i.tions which survived into the succeeding time of religious indifference, and indeed some of their best _effects_ rest in a dexterous treatment of these weird ideas. There is but one exception to what has been observed on the obscurity of the epoch pointed to for the incidents--the dresses, properties, and decorations, are sometimes of a modern cast. The writer--if we may be allowed to speculate on a single writer--seems to have been unable to resist an inclination to indulge in description of the external furnishings of the heroes and heroines, or rather, perhaps, has been desirous of making out _effect_ from these particulars; but the finery of the court of Charles II. is the furthest point reached in the retrospect--although, I must admit, this is in general treated with a vagueness that helps much to conceal the want of learning.

Another point of great importance in the matter of internal evidence, is the isolatedness of these ballads in respect of English traditionary literature. The Scottish muse has not always gone hand in hand with the English in point of time, but she has done so in all other respects.

Any literature we had from the beginning of the seventeenth century downwards, was always sensibly tinged by what had immediately before been in vogue in the south. Nor is it easy to see how a people occupying part of the same island, and speaking essentially the same language, should have avoided this communion of literary taste; but the ballads in question are wholly unlike any English ballads. Look over Percy, Evans, or Mr Collier's suite of _Roxburghe Ballads_, giving those which were popular in London during the seventeenth century, and you find not a trace of the style and manner of these Scottish romantic ballads. Neither, it would appear, had one of them found its way into popularity in England before the time of Percy; for, had it been otherwise, he would have found them either in print or in the mouths of the people.[29]

[29] Robert Jamieson found in the _Koempe Viser_, a Danish collection of ballads published in 1695, one resembling the Scottish ballad of _Fair Annie_ (otherwise called _Lady Jane_), and on this ground he became convinced that many of our traditionary ballads were of prodigious antiquity, though they had been intermediately subjected to many alterations.

Mr Jamieson's belief seems remarkably ill supported, and as it has never obtained any adherents among Scottish ballad editors, I feel ent.i.tled to pa.s.s it over with but this slight notice.

Upon all of these considerations, I have arrived at the conclusion, that the high-cla.s.s romantic ballads of Scotland are not ancient compositions--are not older than the early part of the eighteenth century--and are mainly, if not wholly, the production of one mind.

Whose was this mind, is a different question, on which no such confident decision may for the present be arrived at; but I have no hesitation in saying that, from the internal resemblances traced on from _Hardyknute_ through _Sir Patrick Spence_ and _Gil Morrice_ to the others, there seems to me a great _likelihood_ that the whole were the composition of the auth.o.r.ess of that poem--namely, Elizabeth Lady Wardlaw of Pitreavie.

It may be demanded that something should be done to verify, or at least support, the allegation here made as to the peculiar literary character of the suspected ballads. This is, of course, a point to be best made out by a perusal of the entire body of this cla.s.s of compositions, and scarcely by any other means. Still, it is a difference so striking, that even to present one typical ballad of true rustic origin, could not fail to make a considerable impression on the reader, after he has read specimens of those which are here attributed to a higher source.

Be it observed, when an uneducated person speaks of knights, lords, and kings, or of dames and damosels, he reduces all to one homely level. He indulges in no diplomatic periphrases. It is simply, the king said this, and the lord said that--this thing was done, and that thing was done--the catastrophe or _denouement_ comes by a single stroke. This we find in the true stall-ballads. A vulgar, prosaic, and drawling character pervades the whole cla.s.s, with few exceptions--a fact which ought to give no surprise, for does not all experience shew, that literature of any kind, to have effect, requires for its production a mind of some cultivation, and really good verse flowing from an uninstructed source is what never was, is not now, and never will be?

With these remarks, I usher in a typical ballad of the common cla.s.s--one taken down many years ago from the singing of an old man in the south of Scotland:

JAMES HATELIE.

It fell upon a certain day, When the king from home he chanced to be, The king's jewels they were stolen all, And they laid the blame on James Hatelie.

And he is into prison cast, And I wat he is condemned to _dee_; For there was not a man in all the court To speak a word for James Hatelie.

But the king's eldest daughter she loved him well, But known her love it might not be; And she has stolen the prison keys, And gane in and discoursed wi' James Hatelie.

'Oh, did you steal them, James?' she said; 'Oh, did not you steal them, come tell to me?

For I'll make a vow, and I'll keep it true, You's never be the worse of me.'

'I did not steal them,' James he said; 'And neither was it intended by me, For the English they stole them themselves, And I wat they've laid the blame on me.'

Now she has hame to her father gane, And bowed her low down on her knee, 'I ask--I ask--I ask, father,' she said, 'I ask--I ask a boon of thee; I never asked one in my life, And one of them you must grant to me.'

'Ask on, ask on, daughter,' he said; 'And aye weel answered ye shall be; For if it were my whole estate, Naysaid, naysaid you shall not be.'

'I ask none of your gold, father, As little of your white monie; But all the asken that I do ask, It is the life of James Hatelie.'

'Ask on, ask on, daughter,' he said; 'And aye weel answered ye shall be; For I'll mak a vow, and keep it true-- James Hatelie shall not hanged be.'

'Another asken I ask, father; Another asken I ask of thee-- Let Fenwick and Hatelie go to the sword, And let them try their veritie.'

'Ask on, ask on, daughter,' he said; 'And aye weel answered you shall be; For before the morn at twelve o'clock, They both at the point of the sword shall be.'

James Hatelie was eighteen years of age, False Fenwick was thirty years and three; He lap about, and he strack about, And he gave false Fenwick wounds three.

'Oh, hold your hand, James Hatelie,' he said; 'And let my breath go out and in; Were it not for the spilling of my n.o.ble blood And the shaming of my n.o.ble kin.

'Oh, hold your hand, James Hatelie,' he said; Oh, hold your hand, and let me be; For I'm the man that stole the jewels, And a shame and disgrace it was to me.'

Then up bespoke an English lord, I wat but he spoke haughtilie: 'I would rather have lost all my lands, Before they had not hanged James Hatelie.'