Thomas Humphry Ward, ed. The English Poets. 1880–1918.rnVol. I. Early Poetry: Chaucer to Donne
BalladsCritical Introduction by Andrew Lang
I
Other European ballads are echoes from the same stage of social life, but they are clearer, sweeter, more full and unbroken in tone than the lays of rural England. Our ballads speak of adventures known to Romaic, Danish, and Italian peasants; but in listening to them we hear the drawl of the dull rustic, and catch the snivelling drone of the provincial moralist. Unlike the Provençal, or Romaic, or Lowland Scotch ballads, the English remains are too often flat, garrulous, spiritless, and didactic. They lack the picturesqueness, the simplicity, the felicitous choice of expression, the fire, the speed of the best European volks-lieder. The probable reason of this flatness and languor will be stated presently; in the meantime we must note that the ballads of the Lowland Scotch, recovered from oral tradition, have the fire which we miss in English popular poems. It is for this reason that many of our selected ballads are chosen from the northern Border. The poets were none the less English in blood and language.
Before attempting to assign the causes of the poverty of English ballads, it may be as well to prove the fact. The death of Douglas in the English ballad of Chevy Chase is a passage that has won the praise of Addison. It runs thus:—
Popular poetry has often been compared to the wild rose, the wild stock out of which the richer garden roses are grown. If the wild stock be so poor and feeble in England, how comes it, we may ask, that English cultivated poetry is so rich in colour and perfume? In simpler language, if the people is so devoid of poetry, how has the race come to produce so many great poets and the noblest poetic literature of the modern world, while artistic poets are rare indeed among races which have great wealth of popular song? This is not the place to attempt a full answer to the question; we can only defend the natural imagination of the English people by saying that we do not really possess its unsophisticated productions. The English ballads are not, or are very rarely, pure volks-lieder. The vast majority of them have not been collected from oral tradition, like the ballads of the Scotch Border, of Italy, and of Greece. As soon as printing was firmly established in England, the traditional songs were distributed in cheap broad-sheets. 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 lamentably.’ Pedlars like Shakspeare’s Autolycus ‘had songs for man or woman of all sizes.’ These songs may originally have been true volks-lieder—many of them, indeed, can have been nothing else. In passing, however, through the hands of the printers and poor scholars who prepared them for the press, they became dull, long-drawn, and didactic. The loyalty, good-humour, and love of the free air and the greenwood remain, but the clerks have spoiled the praise of ‘Robin Hood, the good outlaw.’ The ballads wandered about the land, corrupted from the simplicity that pleased the untaught, into harmony with the roughest educated taste. By Addison’s time these broad-sheet ballads had been pasted on the walls of chambers in country houses. In the country, says The Spectator (No. 85, June 7, 1711), ‘I cannot, for my Heart, 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 on a wall, Addison says, he found ‘the old Ballad of The two Children in the Wood, which is one of the darling songs of the common People.’ Most of our English ballads are gathered from old broad-sheets and ancient MS. collections. To say that is to say that they are dashed with the humblest literary commonplace, that they do not come straight from the heart and lips of a singing people, like the modern Greeks or Italians. They have acquired, in the hands of half-educated printers and editors, a tone which is not the tone of the people. They are almost as bald, often, as Dr. Johnson declared them to be—as bald as Johnson’s parody:—
The history of English ballad-collecting may be summed up very briefly. We know from Sir Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesie, and from many passages in the Elizabethan drama, that ballads were both sung by ‘blind crowders,’ like the minstrels on the modern Greek frontier, and distributed by pedlars. Addison not only studied English volks-lieder, but also those of France and Italy. He tells us that Lord Dorset ‘had a numerous collection of old English Ballads, and took a particular pleasure in the reading of them.’ Mr. Dryden was of the same humour, so was Pepys of the famous diary. ‘The little conceited wits of the age’ laughed at Addison, but Dryden ventured to publish some ballads in Miscellany Poems (1684–1708). A Collection of Old Ballads (since reprinted) was put out in 1723. Ramsay’s Evergreen, containing many popular songs, appeared in 1724. The great event in the history of the taste for ballads was the publication of Percy’s Reliques of Ancient Poetry, in 1765. Percy, as is well known, altered, softened, and diluted the old copies which he found in a folio MS. that came into his possession. A correct text from the folio, with excessively copious notes and prolegomena, was published by Messrs. Furnivall and Hales (London, 1867–68, 3 vols.). Other noteworthy collections are those of Herd (1769), Ritson, Buchan, Motherwell, Kinloch, Jamieson (1806), and above all, The Border Minstrelsy of Scott. Perhaps the best modern collection, the most scholarly, and the least overladen with notes, is that of Professor F. J. Child (English and Scotch Ballads, Boston, 1864). The Ballad Book of Mr. W. Allingham (London, 1864) is the companion of every true ballad lover.
The poetic character and quality of the ballads will be best learned from these poems themselves. They have the imaginative daring of early and simple minds; they often deal with great tragic situations, with deep and universal passions. They are most poetical when the ardour, the anguish, the love, the remorse of some passionate mind becomes for once articulate, as in the cry of Waly, waly, the regret of Edom o’ Gordon, the mysterious wail of The Wife o’ Usher’s Well, or the monotonous chant of The Lyke-wake Dirge.
In selecting Ballads for a purely poetical collection, it is necessary to choose, not those which the historian, the antiquary, the student of early society might prefer, but those which have most poetical power and charm, and are least embellished by modern editors. We may, for the purposes of this work, divide Ballads into five classes—the Historical, or Mythico-historical, to represent which we pick out Sir Patrick Spens, and Edom o’ Gordon. In each of these poems the popular fancy works on true historical data. The second class is the Romantic, and here Glasgerion, The Douglas Tragedy, The Twa Corbies, and Waly, Waly are chosen. As specimens of the popular treatment of the Supernatural, we take Clerk Saunders, The Wife of Usher’s Well, and the fragment of a popular Dirge, like those which are still sung by the women of Corsica and the Greek isles. Ballads of the adventures of outlaws and wild marchmen will find their representative in Kinmont Willie. As any selection, however limited, is incomplete without fragments of the Robin Hood cycle, we end with Robin and the Widow’s Three Sons, and Robin Hood’s Death and Burial, while The Bailiff’s Daughter illustrates the more domestic ballads of the English people. These are representatives of different classes of volks-lieder, but few poems suffer so much in the process of selection. Too many of the highest quality have to be omitted for want of space. And the ballads are wronged too, when they are made to appear among the more ornate and various measures of cultivated and artistic poetry.