Ballad.

Ballad. The word ballad is derived through the medium of French from the late Latin ballare, 'to dance,' and thus meant originally a song sung to the rhythmic movement of a dancing chorus—a dramatic poem sung or acted in the dance, of which a kind of survival is seen in the ring-songs of children's games at the present day. Now the name is sometimes applied to a simple song, usually of a romantic or sentimental nature, in two or more verses, each sung to the same melody—a form the permanent popularity of which is proved by the crowded audiences at modern 'Ballad Concerts' in London and elsewhere. Such a ballad, as distinguished from a song, has something of the narrative or dramatic; and, however difficult it may be to bring to an exact definition examples on the border-line between the two, this distinction is not obsolete even in the musical world, in spite of modern looseness of phrase. But in literature the name ballad means more particularly a simple, spirited, narrative poem in short stanzas of two or four lines (without counting the burden or refrain), in which a story is told in straightforward verse, often with great elaborateness and detail in incident, but always with graphic simplicity and force. The expression is marked by an artless naïveté and unconsciousness of art—it aims to be merely the perfect and living impress of the reality which it represents. Of all narrative and lyrical forms it is the simplest and most direct in its effect, in its power of representing to the imagination with vividness and truth incidents or natural emotions which it attempts to portray. It deals with the elemental human emotions, and its success as a literary form depends upon the potency with which these are sympa- thetically revived within the imagination of the hearer or the reader. It is obvious that such a form of literary expression is best fitted to a simple and unlettered age, and it is equally obvious that in an age of greater refinement and complexity in the conditions of social and intellectual life, it is difficult, if not impossible, for an artist so to divest himself of the effects of his environment as to reproduce it without affectation and unreality. And this is exactly what we find when we turn to contrast our traditional ballad poetry with the productions of the modern imitative school. Fine poetry though much of its work may be, we feel instinctively that it lacks the spontaneity and genuineness of the antique, the true simplicity born of the absence of self-consciousness—out of the singer's capacity for forgetting himself in his song. We can no more recover the naïveté of the early singers than the grown man can recover the simplicity of the child. But from singers who are wise enough to follow the analogy of nature in her continual advancement to new varieties from antecedent types, we may look for work which, while preserving the traditions of preceding times, will yet represent genuinely the spirit of its own, and save to us all the gains of culture and refinement which the generations have brought us, with something of the earnestness and reality of former days. Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Tennyson's Revenge, Browning's Hervé Riel, and Rossetti's King's Tragedy, preserve the best traditions of the ballad, while they are as genuine nineteenth-century poems as In Memoriam or the Ode to a Nightingale.

Our traditional ballads, then, stand by themselves, and bear upon their face the best evidence of their age. Their makers were not authors by profession, and it is natural that their names should be forgotten. Of course, ballads may have been written by men of any class, especially at a time when all audiences were unlettered and alike in taste, and the possession of literary culture was not the separating line that it is at present. For example, the Spanish romances, which are indeed not a little exceptional, and to be distinguished from the ballads resembling ours still traditional in Spain, are clearly the work of men above the vulgar. Nowhere perhaps has there been a richer growth of really popular ballads than in Sicily, where Pitré tells us as many as seven thousand examples have already been gathered. Here the bulk of the population still stands at that ballad stage which in the evolution of our national culture we Englishmen have already left several generations behind us. Our ballads were made by the people for the people, and they went straight to the hearts of their hearers, who, if they lacked the refinement of their successors, were not less quick to feel the hot human emotions—love, hate, pity, and fear. They were versified originally by unlettered men for unlettered audiences; and passing as they did from mouth to mouth and generation to generation of reciters possessing the literary sense in very varying degrees, it is not wonderful that many changes of omission or alteration have slipped in, and that what are really the same ballads are found in versions differing considerably from each other. Personal tastes and prejudices would interfere, while accidentally discovered felicities of thought or phrase would often occur, and be added to the recited poems by individual reciters, so that it might be wondered at that the differences of versions are not much greater than they are. The ballads must have gained in strength in the course of transmission, as the happy changes would stand and live in the memory, while the feebler words and verses would fall aside and disappear. Molière's old housekeeper had as true a sense for felicity of expression as the ladies of the court; so the instincts of the people guided the reciters to the choice of the best word, and when it was found, their memories retained it. But unfortunately the process of transmission has not always been synonymous with a process of refinement or improvement, but has often weakened and spoiled as well as strengthened and amended. Especially is this true with the ballads of the southern English folk, which too frequently are flat, spiritless, and didactic, totally unlike the Scottish and north-country English ballads. The reader cannot fail to be struck by this particularly in the Robin Hood ballads, where so much that is beautiful and artistic alternates awkwardly with the bald and prosy verbiage of the mere rhymester. 'The loyalty, good-humour, and the love of the free air and the green-wood remain, but the clerks have spoiled the praise of Robin Hood, the good outlaw.' Perhaps this is in great measure due to the early printing of much of the English popular poetry in the form of broad-sheets. These were subjected by half-educated editors and printers to a kind of preparation for the press which too often succeeded in stripping the poor ballads of almost all their poetic charm. The printed ballads were scattered broadcast over England, and often pasted on the walls of chambers in country-houses, where they were sometimes fortunate enough to catch the eye of a reader whose sympathies ranged wider than his culture. 'I cannot, for my Heart,' says The Spectator (No. 85), 'leave a Room before I have thoroughly studied the Walls of it, and examined the several printed Papers which are usually pasted upon them;' and he describes further how that on a wall he found 'the old ballad of The Two Children in the Wood, which is one of the darling songs of the common people.' The people 'love a ballad but even too well, if it be doleful matter merrily set down, or a very pleasant thing indeed and sung iamentably,' and Mopsa's preference for a ballad in print, 'for then we are sure they are true,' may be taken as expressing a not uncommon popular feeling. Indeed the whole passage referred to (Winter's Tale, IV. iv. 181-330) throws great light on the subject of the old broadsides, and the warm liking of the people for them. These printed broadsides were long as dear a solace to the southern rustic as the traditional ballads were to his fathers, though by passing through a series of unintelligent and unsympathetic recensions many of them had become so bald as to deserve Dr Johnson's parody:

I put my hat upon my head, and went into the Strand,
And there I saw another man, with his hat in his hand.

In our traditional ballads we must not look for exact dates; but there is ample evidence that a large part of our traditional ballad poetry existed in much the same form as now, more than three hundred years ago. Many of the themes, of course, are much older, and undoubtedly many of the versified ballads also. Already in The Vision of Piers Plowman (Skeat's ed., C. Passus viii. 10-12), in the second half of the 14th century, we find Robin Hood a hero of popular song. Sloth says:

Ich can noulit parfytiliche my pater-noster as the prest hit seggeth,
Ich can rymes of Robyn Hode, and of Randolf, erl of Chester,
Ac of our lord ne of oure lady, the lest that evere was maked.

Barbour tells us (The Brus, book xvi. 520-22, Skeat's ed.; xi. 524-26, Jamieson's ed.) that he thinks it unnecessary to rehearse the account of a victory gained in Eskdale over the English, because:

For quha sa likis, thai may heir
Young women, quhen thai will play,
Syng it emang thame ilke day.

Leslie, in that chapter in his History of Scotland (1594) devoted to the Border manners, notices par- ticularly the taste of the marchmen for music and ballad poetry. But we need not suppose that the only ballads they cared for were those of battle and bloodshed. Their rude and turbulent lives, full of danger and death, had in them the elements of rare romantic interest, and the pity of life must ever have been present to them as a rich artistic motive that would inspire the poetry of passion and pathos, of despair, or hopeless and interrupted love.

But our popular poetry was for generations the possession of the people alone: it was long before it attracted the notice of the learned at all. Shakespeare knew the old romantic ballads, and worked snatches of them with fine effect into his dramas. Sir Philip Sidney could say: 'I neuer heard the olde song of Percy and Duglas that I found not my heart mooed more then with a Trumpet: and yet is it sung but by some blinde Crouder, with no rougher voyce, then rude stile.' Ben Jonson used to say he would rather have been the author of it than of all his works; and Addison commended the 'majestic simplicity' of the same ballad in two fine papers of his Spectator (70 and 74). Yet the ballads continued to be neglected, and it was not till Bishop Percy published his famous Reliques of Ancient English Poetry in 1765, that Englishmen awakened to the fact that their popular poetry was poetry at all. Among the ballads in this collection were such masterpieces as 'Childe Waters,' 'Glasgerion,' 'Edom o' Gordon,' 'Edward, Edward,' 'The Jew's Daughter,' 'Old Robin of Portingale,' 'Sir Aldingar,' 'King Estmere,' 'Sir Patrick Spens,' and 'Gil Morice.' Percy admits in his preface that he had made 'a few slight corrections or additions,' as the old copies were 'often so defective and corrupted, that a scrupulous adherence to their wretched readings would only have exhibited unintelligible nonsense, or such poor meagre stuff as neither came from the bard nor was worthy the press.' Perhaps no book ever had a greater or more immediate effect. 'I do not think,' says Wordsworth, 'that there is an able writer in verse of the present day who would not be proud to acknowledge his obligation to the Reliques.' The same return to the simplicity of truth and nature took place about the same time in France and Germany, and erelong showed its results as plainly in the lyrical work of André Chenier, of Goethe, Schiller, and Heine. From the Reliques Scott drew directly the inspiration that made him a poet and more. In 1802 appeared at the provincial press of Kelso the first two volumes of his Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, the richest single collection of popular poetry that has ever been published. From the publication of this book the northern ballads permanently took their place in public estimation as one of the best and purest sources of English poetry. It was fortunate for English literature that the Border ballads secured, before it was too late, an editor in whom the antiquary had not drowned the poet. Many of the poems were the fruit of raid after raid into Liddesdale, and were in part actually taken down from the living lips of the old men and women who still knew them by heart. It may be regretted, from the point of view of the scientific student, that Scott did not print his texts exactly as he got them, but reference to his originals is possible in some cases, and shows us that Scott's changes—not always for the better—were not by any means so great as might be supposed. Of course, in many cases it is impossible now to say exactly how much they owe to the poetic touch of Scott himself, and we know that it was possible for him to be taken in by ingenious friends; still there is proof enough that here we have what is substantially a body of traditional poetry that fulfils the strictest conditions of the ballad, and is yet of uncommonly high poetic value. The influence which Percy's and Scott's ballads have had on poetry is enough to prove their intrinsic poetic power: their straightforward diction and artless melody at once became a powerful influence in literature, and made themselves felt in the work of Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson, Rossetti, and indeed every succeeding poet. Even the zeal of later imitative poetasters, however little according to knowledge, is a tribute to the poetic influence of the form that dominated them, although it did not save them from those faults of obscurity and quaint vagueness of expression, looseness of versification, and inaccuracy of accent, which not unfrequently accompany the merits of the model. Succeeding editors added to Scott's work, Robert Jamieson printing in his excellent collection in 1806 as many as fifteen ballads not before published: among them, 'Burd Helen,' 'Willie and May Margaret,' 'Young Beichan,' and 'Alison Gross.' Motherwell's originals, printed in 1827, were of less value, but many of his alternative oral versions were interesting and important, while his learned introduction contained a good survey of the subject, full of the indignant eloquence of the warm apologist, as well as the sympathetic insight of the poet. Peter Buchanan's collection, published in 1828, professed to give north-of-Scotland popular versions, which were discovered to be strangely bald in style, and barren of poetic quality. In the hands of the later editors, the proportion of dross to ore grew larger with each collection, while the modern arts of life killed the conditions which propagated and preserved the ballad. The work of many of the later ballad editors showed no little erudition, though some evidently had more care for the cobweb than relish for the wine. Whether the incidents recorded are historical or legendary, or whether they are partly both; whether the ballads belong to the 16th, or 15th, or any particular century; whether Lady Wardlaw, or any one else, ever added a line, or left one out, are after all questions of but little moment to the Englishman proud of possessing the richest body of popular poetry in the world, and which bears upon its face, in the impossibility of its being imitated, the only evidence of genuineness and antiquity worth anything at all.

Still less important look the discussions of the editors in the light of the results gained from the comparative study of folk-songs. We find that many of our traditional ballads have the same tone, the same incidents, the same iterations of words and ideas as the traditional ballads of Scandinavia, of Greece, of Germany, of Italy, of France, and of Spain. This discovery widens our interest in the question enormously. It strips it of something of its parochial and national interest, but it adds an interest to it that is conterminous with our civilisation itself. The plots and situations of many of our traditional folk-songs are the immemorial inheritance of Celts and Saxons, of Greek and Slavonic peoples—of unknown and prehistoric antiquity. Like our folk-tales, they do not belong to one nation in particular, but are the property at least of all the peoples of the Aryan family. 'There are certain incidents,' says Mr Lang, 'like that of the return of the dead mother to her oppressed children; like the sudden recovery of a fickle bridegroom's heart by the patient affection of his first love; like the adventure of May Colvin with a lover who has slain seven women, and tries to slay her; like the story of the bride who pretends to be dead, that she may escape from a detested marriage, which are in all European countries the theme of popular song.' Ballads, of course, have a narrower range than tales. There is here and there a trait common to Europe and Asia, but the ballads are substantially European. Each nation has a set of its own—not always large—besides the stock in common. It is idle, then, to quarrel any longer over the origin and authorship of these ballads. It is still true, of course, that we have some more or less historical ballads, and that even our purely romantic and non-historical ballads have been powerfully modified by local influences; but the fact remains that a large number of our ballads, and many of their characteristic incidents and qualities, though not their literary style, are not due to the poetic instincts of our own countrymen in particular, but were carried scores of centuries ago in the memories of our distant progenitors from the primeval home of our race. They form part of the stock of primitive folk-lore, and a study of them on the comparative method may be expected to lead to important constructive results in the hands of future scholars. The materials for such study will be placed for the first time in the hands of every student on the completion of Professor Child's monumental edition of the English and Scottish Popular Ballads (Parts I.-VII. 1882-93), with its learned and luminous introductions to each ballad, culled from a thousand volumes in every language of Europe.

But entirely apart from questions of origin, our popular ballads will repay the most diligent study on their literary side alone. As works of art in which a stock of primitive ideas and incidents has been preserved in poetic dress, they form a perennially valuable portion of our literature, and, as has been shown, they formed the chief factor in that naturalistic reaction from which has flowed the richest stream of nineteenth-century poetry, not yet exhausted after a hundred years. The Robin Hood cycle of ballads and the north-country and Border ballads are the two largest and richest collections of ballad poetry that remain to us; but as has been proved, the latter is infinitely the higher in lyrical quality. The Robin Hood ballads are some forty in number, but include much repetition both of phrase and incident. More than half a dozen are variants of the same story of Robin's meeting an unknown traveller—a tinker, butcher, tanner, shepherd, curtail friar, or beggar—straightway fighting with him, being beaten, and then, in good-humoured admiration of his antagonist's prowess, at once enlisting him in his band of honest outlaws. Among the best ballads of the group are 'Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne' and 'Robin Hood and the Monk,' the last a good and right spirited heroic tale. The Lytell Geste is a set of eight connected ballads, grouped for us by some early and not unskilful editor. 'If these ballads as a whole be tedious,' says Mr Allingham, 'the central figure (whithersoever or howsoever come) is a clear and delightful one, of that small class of ideal personages to which Don Quixote and Robinson Crusoe also belong—a bold, generous, and courteous outlaw, famous in archery, living under greenwood-tree with his merry men, taking from the rich and giving to the poor—a figure that, once lodged in the popular imagination, became an easy and favourite subject for one rhymester after another.' Of all our ballads, the palm for poetry must be given to those especially connected with Scottish and English Border life and story. These formed the richest part of Scott's collection, which contained altogether more than forty ballads never published before, among them such masterpieces as 'Thomas the Rhymer,' 'The Dowie Dens o' Yarrow,' 'The Wife of Usher's Well,' 'Annan Water,' 'The Douglas Tragedy,' 'The Lament of the Border Widow,' 'Clerk Saunders,' 'The Sang of the Outlaw Murray,' and 'Kinmont Willie'; as well as good fresh versions of 'Lord Randal,' 'Helen of Kirkconnell,' 'Tamlane,' and 'The Lass o' Lochryan.'

'Kinmont Willie' can hardly be overpraised as a masterpiece of the heroic ballad, unequalled in fire and speed. The reader is carried along in a whirl of sympathetic excitement, and is left no time to wonder at the marvellous fitness and truth of the words and images. Fighting ballads like this have high historical as well as poetical value, for they reflect closely and accurately the manners and life of the particular people who produced them; and doubtless they had their influence on the rude people who preserved them. The paradox of Fletcher of Salton occurs to the memory, and may be admitted to contain at least some measure of truth: 'I know a very wise man that believed that if a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a nation.' Some of the fighting ballads of the Border are so vivid and vigorous that we feel the singer had himself ridden in the foray, had heard with his own ears the very clash of steel; nor indeed need the minstrel have struck a feeble blow because he had an ear for ballad metres. The old Border life was rough and rude, but the blood-stains on its grassy holms have watered for us flowers that are among the rarest in the garden of English song. Above all our ballads in value stand those that have clustered round the Yarrow—'fabulosus as was ever Hydaspes.' Its story of love stronger than death has been one of the most potent charms in the world of English poetry, and has drawn some of the finest verse that has ever been written from Hamilton of Bangour, Logan, and Wordsworth.

The best collection of ballads, in all their varying versions, is Prof. Child's great work, English and Scottish Ballads (10 vols. 1882-98), successor to his earlier collection (8 vols. Boston, 1857-59). A good anthology, with a suggestive introduction, is that by William Allingham (1868); and a serviceable and comprehensive collection is The Ballad Minstrelsy of Scotland, Romantic and Historical (Glasgow, 1871). The most important individual collections have been: A Collection of Old Ballads (3 vols. Lond. 1723-25); Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (3 vols. 1765; a beautiful and excellent ed. by H. B. Wheatley, 3 vols. 1886); Herd's Ancient and Modern Scottish Songs, Heroic Ballads, &c. (1769; 2 vols. 1776); Johnson's Scots Musical Museum (6 vols. 1787-1803; 3d ed. by Stenhouse and David Laing, 4 vols. 1853); Ritson's Robin Hood: a Collection of all the Ancient Poems, Songs, and Ballads now extant, relative to that celebrated English Outlaw (2 vols. 1795; reedited by Gutch, A Lytell Geste, 2 vols. 1847); Scott's Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (3 vols. 1802-3, with its admirable introduction and notes); Robert Jamieson's Popular Ballads and Songs (2 vols. 1806); Kinloch's Ancient Scottish Ballads (1827); and Motherwell's Minstrelsy, Ancient and Modern (1827), with an excellent introduction.

Other collections, but of less importance, are Thomas D'Urfe's Pills to Purge Melancholy, containing a ballad here and there (6 vols. 1719-20); Allan Rausay's Evergreen (2 vols. 1724), and Tea-table Miscellany (3 vols. 1724-27; afterwards augmented with a fourth volume); Pinkerton's Select Scottish Ballads (2 vols. 1783); Ritson's Select Collection of English Songs (1783), Pieces of Ancient Popular Poetry (1791), Ancient Songs and Ballads (2 vols. 1792), and Scottish Song (2 vols. 1794); Finlay's Scottish Historical and Romantic Ballads (2 vols. 1808); Thomas Evans's Old Ballads (2 vols. 1777; enlarged ed. by R. H. Evans, 4 vols. 1784); Gilchrist's Collection of Ancient and Modern Scottish Ballads (2 vols. 1815); Hogg's Jacobite Relics (2 vols. 1819-21); David Laing's Select Remains of the Ancient Popular Poetry of Scotland (1822); C. K. Sharpe's Ballad Book (1824); Maidment's North Country Garland (1824); Kinloch's Ballad Book (1827); P. Buchanan's Ancient Ballads and Songs of the North of Scotland (2 vols. 1828); Dr Robert Chambers's Scottish Ballads (1829); Whitelaw's Book of Scottish Ballads (1845); J. P. Collier's Book of Roxburgh Ballads (1847); Aytoun's Scottish Ballads (2 vols. 1857); and Maidment's Scottish Ballads (2 vols. 1868).

The publications of the Percy Society embraced 30 vols. (1840-52), a few of them pertaining to ballads. Indispensable books are Chappell's Popular Music of the Olden Time (1855-59; new ed. 1893), and Hales and Furnival's reprint of the Percy Folio Manuscript (3 vols. 1867-68), in which we get behind the good bishop, and see his conception of an editor's duty, and how well on the whole he deserved the wrath of the surly but honest Ritson. It was a surprise to the world to discover that of his 180 ballads, there were only 45 that Percy had taken from his famous manuscript. In 1868 Mr Furnival succeeded in founding the Ballad Society, which has since published, mainly under the enthusiastic and untiring editorship of Mr Ebsworth, the Bagford ballads, the Roxburgh ballads almost entire, and other unprinted collections. The great collection of ballads made by the famous Pepys still remains buried in the library of Magdalen College, Cambridge.

For comparative study may be named the following collections: For France, E. Rolland's Recueil de Chansons Populaires (6 vols. 1883-88); for Denmark, Svend Grundtvig's Danmark's Gamle Folkeviser (Copenhagen, 1853-90); for Germany, F. K. von Erlach's Die Volkslieder der Deutschen (5 vols. Mannheim, 1834); for Italy, Giuseppe Pitrè's Canti Popolari Siciliani (2 vols. Palermo, 1870); and for Spain, Francisco Rodriguez Marin's Cantos Populares Españolas (Seville, 5 vols. 1882-84). See also Countess Martinengo-Cesareo's Essays in the Study of Folk-songs (1886), and most of the sixty-nine books named in her list of books consulted.

See Alexander Smith's 'Scottish Ballads' in Edinburgh Essays (1856); Mr Hewlett's 'Modern Ballads' in the Contemporary Review for November 1875; Andrew Lang's article in vol. iii. (1875) of the 9th edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, and his introduction to the selection of ballads in vol. i. (1880) of The English Poets, ed. by T. H. Ward; Professor Veitch's History and Poetry of the Scottish Border (1877; new ed. 1893), especially chap. x.; and chap. xiv. of John Russell's Haigs of Bemersyde (1881), for an excellent survey of the social conditions of old Border life.