Ballad Book Part 1

Ballad Book.

by Various.

Editor: Katharine Lee Bates.

PREFACE

Probably no teacher of English literature in our schools or colleges would gainsay the statement that the chief aim of such instruction is to awaken in the student a genuine love and enthusiasm for the higher forms of prose, and more especially for poetry. For love is the surest guarantee of extended and independent study, and we teachers are the first to admit that the cla.s.s-room is but the vestibule to education. So in beginning the critical study of English poetry it seems reasonable to use as a starting-point the early ballads, belonging as they do to the youth of our literature, to the youth of our English race, and hence appealing with especial power to the youth of the human heart. Every man of letters who still retains the boy-element in his nature--and most men, Sir Philip Sidney tells us, are "children in the best things, till they be cradled in their graves"--has a tenderness for these rough, frank, spirited old poems, while the actual boy in years, or the actual girl, rarely fails to respond to their charm. What Shakespeare knew, and Scott loved, and Bossetti echoes, can hardly be beneath the admiration of high school and university students. Rugged language, broken metres, absurd plots, dubious morals, are impotent to destroy the vital beauty that underlies all these. There is a philosophical propriety, too, in beginning poetic study with ballad lore, for the ballad is the germ of all poem varieties.

This volume attempts to present such a selection from the old ballads as shall represent them fairly in their three main cla.s.ses,--those derived from superst.i.tion, whether fairy-lore, witch-lore, ghost-lore, or demon-lore; those derived from tradition, Scotch and English; and those derived from romance and from domestic life in general. The Scottish ballads, because of their far superior poetic value, are found here in greater number than the English. The notes state in each case what version has been followed. The notes aim, moreover, to give such facts of historical or bibliographical importance as may attach to each ballad, with any indispensable explanation of outworn or dialectic phrases, although here much is left to the mother-wit of the student.

It is hoped that this selection may meet a definite need in connection with cla.s.ses not so fortunate as to have access to a ballad library, and that even where such access is procurable, it may prove a friendly companion in the private study and the recitation-room.

KATHARINE LEE BATES.

WELLESLEY COLLEGE, March, 1904.

INTRODUCTION

The development of poetry, the articulate life of man, is hidden in that mist which overhangs the morning of history. Yet the indications are that this art of arts had its origin, as far back as the days of savagery, in the ideal element of life rather than the utilitarian.

There came a time, undoubtedly, when the mnemonic value of verse was recognized in the transmission of laws and records and the hard-won wealth of experience. Our own Anglo-Saxon ancestors, whose rhyme, it will be remembered, was initial rhyme, or alliteration, have bequeathed to our modern speech many such devices for "the knitting up of the memory," largely legal or popular phrases, as _bed and board_, _to have and to hold_, _to give and to grant_, _time and tide_, _wind and wave_, _gold and gear_; or proverbs, as, for example: _When bale is highest, boon is nighest_, better known to the present age under the still alliterative form: _The darkest hour's before the dawn_.

But if we may trust the signs of poetic evolution in barbarous tribes to-day, if we may draw inferences from the sacred character attached to the Muses in the myths of all races, with the old Nors.e.m.e.n, for instance, Saga being the daughter of Odin, we may rest a reasonable confidence upon the theory that poetry, the world over, finds its first utterance at the bidding of the religious instinct and in connection with religious rites.

Yet the wild-eyed warriors, keeping time by a rude triumphal chant to the dance about the watch-fire, were mentally as children, with keen senses and eager imagination, but feeble reason, with fresh and vigorous emotions, but without elaborate language for these emotions.

Swaying and shouting in rhythmic consent, they came slowly to the use of ordered words and, even then, could but have repeated the same phrases over and over. The burden--sometimes senseless to our modern understanding--to be found in the present form of many of our ballads may be the survival of a survival from those primitive iterations. The "Blaw, blaw, blaw winds, blaw" of _The Elfin Knight_ is not, in this instance, inappropriate to the theme, yet we can almost hear shrilling through it a far cry from days when men called directly upon the powers of nature. Such refrains as "Binnorie, O Binnorie," "Jennifer gentle an' rosemaree," "Down, a down, a down, a down," have ancient secrets in them, had we ears to hear.

One of the vexed questions of criticism regarding these refrains is whether they were rendered in alternation with the narrative verses or as a continuous under-song. Early observers of Indian dances have noted that, while one leaping savage after another improvised a simple strain or two, the whole dancing company kept up a guttural cadence of "Heh, heh, heh!" or "Aw, aw, aw!" which served the office of musical accompaniment. This choral iteration of rhythmic syllables, still hinted in the refrain, but only hinted, is believed to be the original element of poetry.

In course of time, however, was evolved the individual singer. In the earlier stages of society, song was undoubtedly a common gift, and every normal member of the community bore his part in the recital of the heroic deeds that ordinarily formed the subject of these primeval lays. Were it the praise of a G.o.d, of a feasting champion, or of a slain comrade, the natural utterance was narrative. Later on, the more fluent and inventive improvisers came to the front, and finally the professional bard appeared. Somewhere in the process, too, the burden may have s.h.i.+fted its part from under-song to alternating chorus, thus allowing the soloist opportunity for rest and recollection.

English ballads, as we have them in print to-day, took form in a far later and more sophisticated period than those just suggested; yet even thus our ballads stand nearest of anything in our literature to the primitive poetry that was born out of the social life of the community rather than made by the solitary thought of the artist. Even so comparatively small a group as that comprehended within this volume shows how truly the ballad is the parent stock of all other poetic varieties. In the ballad of plain narrative, as _The Hunting of the Cheviot,_ the epic is hinted. We go a step further in _A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode,_--too long for insertion in this collection, but peculiarly interesting from the antiquarian point of view, having been printed, in part, as early as 1489,--and find at least a rough foundation for a genuine hero-lay, the _Lytell Geste_ being made up of a number of ballads rudely woven into one. A poem like this, though hardly "an epic in miniature,"--a phrase which has been proposed as the definition of a ballad,--is truly an epic in germ, lacking the finish of a miniature, but holding the promise of a seed. Where the narrative is highly colored by emotion, as in _Helen of Kirconnell_ or _Waly Waly,_ the ballad merges into the lyric. It is difficult here to draw the line of distinction. _A Lyke-Wake Dirge_ is almost purely lyric in quality, while _The Lawlands o' Holland, Gilderoy, The Twa Corbies, Bonny Barbara Allan,_ have each a p.r.o.nounced lyric element.

From the ballad of dialogue we look forward to the drama, not only from the ballad of pure dialogue, as _Lord Ronald,_ or _Edward, Edward,_ or that sweet old English folk-song, too long for insertion here, _The Not-Browne Mayd,_ but more remotely from the ballad of mingled dialogue and narrative, as _The Gardener or Fine Flowers i'

the Valley._

The beginnings of English balladry are far out of sight. From the date when the race first had deeds to praise and words with which to praise them, it is all but certain that ballads were in the air. But even the mediteval ballads are lost to us. It was the written literature, the work of clerks, fixed upon the parchment, that survived, while the songs of the people, pa.s.sing from lip to lip down the generations, continually reshaped themselves to the changing times. But they were never hushed. While Chaucer, his genius fed by Norman and Italian streams, was making the fourteenth century reecho with that laughter which "comes never to an end" of the Canterbury story-tellers; while Langland, even his Teutonic spirit swayed by French example, was brooding the gloomy _Vision of Piers the Plowman,_--gloom with a star at its centre; while those "courtly makers," Wyatt and Surrey, were smoothing English song, which in the hands of Skelton had become so

"Tatter'd and jagged, Rudely raine-beaten, Rusty and moth-eaten,"

into the exquisite lyrical measures of Italy; while the mysteries and miracle-plays, also of Continental impulse, were striving to do G.o.d service by impressing the Scripture stories upon their rustic audiences,--the ballads were being sung and told from Scottish loch to English lowland, in hamlet and in hall. Heartily enjoyed in the baronial castle, scandalously well known in the monastery, they were dearest to the peasants.

"Lewd peple loven tales olde; Swiche thinges can they wel report and holde."

The versions in which we possess such ballads to-day are comparatively modern. Few can be dated further back than the reign of Elizabeth; the language of some is that of the eighteenth century. But the number and variety of these versions--the ballad of _Lord Ronald,_ for instance, being given in fifteen forms by Professor Child in his monumental edition of _The English and Scottish Popular Ballads;_ where "Lord Ronald, my son," appears variously as "Lord Randal, my son," "Lord Donald, my son," "King Henrie, my son," "Lairde Rowlande, my son,"

"Billy, my son," "Tiranti, my son," "my own pretty boy," "my bonnie wee croodlin dow," "my little wee croudlin doo," "Willie doo, Willie doo," "my wee wee croodlin doo doo"--are sure evidence of oral transmission, and oral transmission is in itself evidence of antiquity. Many of our ballads, moreover,--nearly a third of the present collection, as the notes will show,--are akin to ancient ballads of Continental Europe, or of Asia, or both, which set forth the outlines of the same stories in something the same way.

It should be stated that there is another theory altogether as to the origin of ballads. Instead of regarding them as a slow, shadowed, natural growth, finally fossilized in print, from the rhythmic cries of a barbaric dance-circle in its festal hour, there is a weighty school of critics who hold them to be the mere rag-tag camp-followers of mediaeval romance. See, for instance, the clownish ballad of _Tom Thumbe,_ with its confused Arthurian echoes. Some of the events recorded in our ballads, moreover, are placed by definite local tradition at a comparatively recent date, as _Otterburne, Edom o'

Gordon, Kinmont Willie._ What becomes, then, of their claims to long descent? If these do not fall, it is because they are based less on the general theme and course of the story, matters that seem to necessitate an individual composer, than on the so-called communal elements of refrain, iteration, stock stanzas, stock epithets, stock numbers, stock situations, the frank objectivity of the point of view, the sudden glimpses into a pagan world.

In the lands of the schoolhouse, the newspaper, and the public library, the conditions of ballad-production are past and gone. Yet there are still a few isolated communities in Europe where genuine folk-songs of spontaneous composition may be heard by the eavesdropper and jotted down with a surrept.i.tious pencil; for the rustics shrink from the curiosity of the learned and are silent in the presence of strangers. The most precious contribution to our literature from such a, source is _The Bard of the Dimbovitza_, an English translation of folk-songs and ballads peculiar to a certain district of Roumania.

They were gathered by a native gentlewoman from among the peasants on her father's estate. "She was forced," writes Carmen Sylva, Queen of Roumania, one of the two translators, "to affect a desire to learn spinning, that she might join the girls at their spinning parties, and so overhear their songs more easily; she hid in the tall maize to hear the reapers crooning them, ... she listened for them by death-beds, by cradles, at the dance, and in the tavern, with inexhaustible patience.... Most of them are improvisations. They usually begin and end with a refrain."

The Celtic revival, too, is discovering not only the love of song, but, to some extent, the power of improvisation in the more remote corners of the British Isles. Instances of popular balladry in the west of Ireland are givrn by Lady Gregory in her _Poets and Dreamers._

The Roumanians still have their lute-players; old people in Galway still remember the last of their wandering folk-bards; but the Ettrick Shepherd, a century ago, had to call upon imagination for the picture of

"Each Caledonian minstrel true, Dressed in his plaid and bonnet blue, With harp across his shoulders slung, And music murmuring round his tongue."

Fearless children of nature these strolling poets were, even as the songs they sang.

"Little recked they, our bards of old, Of autumn's showers, or winter's cold.

Sound slept they on the 'nighted hill, Lulled by the winds, or bubbling rill, Curtained within the winter cloud, The heath their couch, the sky their shroud; Yet theirs the strains that touch the heart,-- Bold, rapid, wild, and void of art."

The value and hence the dignity of the minstrel's profession declined with the progress of the printing-press in popular favor, and the character of the gleemen suffered in consequence. This was more marked in England than in Scotland. Indeed, the question has been raised as to whether there ever existed a cla.s.s of Englishmen who were both ballad-singers and ballad-makers. This was one of the points at issue between those eminent antiquarians, Bishop Percy and Mr. Ritson, in the eighteenth century. Dr. Percy had defined the English minstrels as an "order of men in the middle ages, who subsisted by the arts of poetry and music, and sung to the harp the verses which they themselves composed." The inflammable Joseph Ritson, whose love of an honest ballad goes far to excuse him for his lack of gentle demeanor toward the unfaithful editor of the _Reliques,_ pounced down so fiercely upon this definition, contending that, however applicable to Icelandic skalds or Norman trouveres or Provencal troubadours, it was altogether too flattering for the vagabond fiddlers of England, roughly trolling over to tavern audiences the ballads borrowed from their betters, that the dismayed bishop altered his last clause to read, "verses composed by themselves or others."

Sir Walter Scott sums up this famous quarrel with his characteristic good-humor. "The debate," he says, "resembles the apologue of the gold and silver s.h.i.+eld. Dr. Percy looked on the minstrel in the palmy and exalted state to which, no doubt, many were elevated by their talents, like those who possess excellence in the fine arts in the present day; and Ritson considered the reverse of the medal, when the poor and wandering gleeman was glad to purchase his bread by singing his ballads at the ale-house, wearing a fantastic habit, and latterly sinking into a mere crowder upon an untuned fiddle, accompanying his rude strains with a ruder ditty, the helpless a.s.sociate of drunken revellers, and marvellously afraid of the constable and parish beadle."

There is proof enough that, by the reign of Elizabeth, the printer was elbowing the minstrel out into the gutter. In Scotland the strolling bard was still not without honor, but in the sister country we find him denounced by ordinance together with "rogues, vagabonds, and st.u.r.dy beggars." The London stalls were fed by Grub-street authors with penny ballads--trash for the greater part--printed in black-letter on broadsides. Many of these doggerel productions were collected into small miscellanies, known as _Garlands,_ in the reign of James I.; but few of the genuine old folk-songs found a refuge in print. Yet they still lived on in corners of England and Scotland, where "the spinsters and the knitters in the sun" crooned over half-remembered lays to peasant children playing at their feet.

In 1723 a collection of English ballads, made up largely, though not entirely, of stall-copies, was issued by an anonymous editor, not a little ashamed of himself because of his interest in so unworthy a subject; for although Dryden and Addison had played the man and given kindly entertainment--the one in his _Miscellany Poems,_ the other in _The Spectator_--to a few ballad-gypsies, yet poetry in general, that most "flat, stale, and unprofitable" poetry of the early and middle eighteenth century, disdained all fellows.h.i.+p with the unkempt, wandering tribe.

In the latter half of that century, however, occurred the great event in the history of our ballad literature. A country clergyman of a literary turn of mind, resident in the north of England, being on a visit to his "worthy friend, Humphrey Pitt, Esq., then living at s.h.i.+ffnal in Shrops.h.i.+re," had the glorious good luck to hit upon an old folio ma.n.u.script of ballads and romances. "I saw it," writes Percy, "lying dirty on the floor under a Bureau in ye Parlour; being used by the Maids to light the fire."

"A scrubby, shabby paper book" it may have been, with some leaves torn half away and others lacking altogether, but it was a genuine ballad ma.n.u.script, in handwriting of about the year 1650, and Percy, realizing that the worthy Mr. Pitt was feeding his parlor fire with very precious fuel, begged the tattered volume of his host and bore it proudly home, where with presumptuous pen he revised and embellished and otherwise, all innocently, maltreated the n.o.ble old ballads until he deemed, although with grave misgivings, that they would not too violently shock the polite taste of the eighteenth century. The eighteenth century, wearied to death of its own politeness, worn out by the heartless elegance of Pope and the insipid sentimentality of Prior, gave these fresh, simple melodies an unexpected welcome, even in the face of the reigning king of letters, Dr. Johnson, who forbade them to come to court. But good poems are not slain by bad critics, and the old ballads, despite the burly doctor's displeasure, took henceforth a recognized place in English literature. Herd's delightful collection of Scottish songs and ballads, wherein are gathered so many of those magical refrains, the rough ore of Burns' fine gold,--"Green grow the rashes O," "Should auld acquaintance be forgot," "For the sake o' somebody,"--soon followed, and Ritson, while ever slas.h.i.+ng away at poor Percy, often for his minstrel theories, more often for his ballad emendations, and most often for his holding back the original folio ma.n.u.script from publication, appeared himself as a collector and antiquarian of admirable quality. Meanwhile Walter Scott, still in his schoolboy days, had chanced upon a copy of the _Reliques_, and had fallen in love with ballads at first sight. All the morning long he lay reading the book beneath a huge plata.n.u.s-tree in his aunt's garden. "The summer day sped onward so fast," he says, "that notwithstanding the sharp appet.i.te of thirteen, I forgot the hour of dinner, was sought for with anxiety, and was found still entranced in my intellectual banquet. To read and to remember was in this instance the same thing, and henceforth I overwhelmed my school-fellows and all who would hearken to me, with tragical recitations from the ballads of Bishop Percy. The first time, too, I could sc.r.a.pe a few s.h.i.+llings together, which were not common occurrences with me, I bought unto myself a copy of these beloved volumes, nor do I believe I ever read a book half so frequently, or with half the enthusiasm."

The later fruits of that schoolboy pa.s.sion were garnered in Scott's original ballads, metrical romances, and no less romantic novels, all so picturesque with feudal lights and shadows, so pure with chivalric sentiment; but an earlier result was _The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border,_ a collection of folk-songs gleaned in vacation excursions from pipers and shepherds and old peasant women of the border districts, and containing, with other ballads, full forty-three previously unknown to print, among them some of our very best. Other poet collectors--Motherwell and Aytoun--followed where Scott had led, Scott having been himself preceded by Allan Ramsay, who so early as 1724 had included several old ballads, freely retouched, in his _Evergreen and Tea-Table Miscellany._ Nor were there lacking others, poets in ear and heart if not in pen, who went up and down the country-side, seeking to gather into books the old heroic lays that were already on the point of peris.h.i.+ng from the memories of the people. Meanwhile Ritson's shrill cry for the publication of the original Percy ma.n.u.script was taken up in varying keys again and again, until in our own generation the echoes on our own side of the water grew so persistent that with no small difficulty the much-desired end was actually attained. The owners of the folio having been brought to yield their slow consent, our richest treasure of Old English song, for so perilously long a period exposed to all the hazards that beset a single ma.n.u.script, is safe in print at last and open to the inspection of us all. The late Professor Child of Harvard, our first American authority on ballad-lore, and Dr. Furnivall of London, would each yield the other the honor of this achievement for which no ballad-lover can speak too many thanks.

A list of our princ.i.p.al ballad collections may be found of practical convenience, as well as of literary interest. Pa.s.sing by the _Miscellanies,_ Percy, as becomes one of the gallant lineage to which he set up a somewhat doubtful claim, leads the van.

Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. 1765.

Herd's Ancient and Modern Scottish Songs, Heroic Ballads, etc. 1769.

Ritson's Ancient Popular Poetry. 1791.

Ritson's Ancient Songs and Ballads. 1792.

Ritson's Robin Hood. 1795.

Scott's Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. 1802-1803.

Jamieson's Popular Ballads and Songs. 1806.

Finlay's Scottish Historical and Romantic Ballads. 1808.

Sharpe's Ballad Book. 1824.