John Geddie

“ Romance, indeed, is the animating soul of the body of Scottish ballad poetry; the note that gives it unity and distinguishes it from mere versified history and folklore. There are few ballads on which some shadow out of the World Invisible is not cast; few where ill-happed love is not a master-string of the minstrel's harp; few into which there does not come strife and the flash of cold steel. ”

“ But Yarrow Vale is strewn with the sites of those tragedies of the far-off years, forgotten by history but remembered in song and tradition. Its green hills enclose the very sanctuary of romantic ballad-lore. Its clear current sings a mournful song of the 'good heart's bluid' that once stained its wave; of the drowned youth caught in the 'cleaving o' the craig.' The winds that sweep the hillsides and bend 'the birks a' bowing' seem to whisper still of the wail of the 'winsome marrow,' and to have an undernote of sadness on the brightest day of summer ”

“ But in the Scottish ballads fathers and lovers are not given to the melting mood. In sympathy with the scenery and atmosphere, the ballad spirit is with us sterner and darker; and just{87} as the materials of that tender little idyll of faithful love, The Three Ravens, are in Scottish hands transformed into the drear, wild dirge of The Twa Corbies, the gallant adventure of the Child of Elle turns inevitably to tragedy by Douglas Water and Yarrow. But how much more true to this soul of romance is the choice of the northern minstrel! ”

“ In modern fiction or drama the lady hesitates between the opposing forces of love and of family pride and duty; the old influences in her life do not yield to the new without a struggle. But of struggle or indecision the ballad heroine knows, or at least says, nothing. A glance, a whispered word, a note of harp or horn, and she flings down her 'silken seam,' and whether she be king's daughter or beggar maid she obeys the spell, and follows the enchanter to greenwood or to broomy hill, to the ends of the earth, and to the gates of death. ”

“ The 'wild flowers of literature' is the name that has been bestowed, with some little air of condescension, upon the rich inheritance he has left us. They are the purest and the strongest growth of the genius of the race and of the soil; and though they owe little save injury and mutilation to those who have deliberately sought to prune and trim them to please a later taste, they are as full of vigour and sap to-day as they were in the Ballad Age, when such poetry sprung up naturally and spontaneously. ”

“ The good or the ill done by the heroes and heroines of the Romantic Ballad is done on the spur of the moment, on the impulse of hot blood. Whether it be sin or sacrifice, the prompting is not that of convention, but of Nature herself. Love and hate, though they may burn and glow like a volcano, are not prodigal of words. It is one of the marks by which we may distinguish the characters in the ballads from those in later and more cultivated fields of literature that, as a rule, they say less rather than more than they mean. ”

“ In truth, no poetry of any tongue or land is more powerfully dominated by the sense of locality—is more expressive of the manners of the time and mood of the race—than those rough Border lays of moonlight rides, on reiving or on rescue bound, and of death fronted boldly in the press of spears or 'behind the bracken bush.' These are not tales of the infancy of a people. Scotland had already attained to something of national unity of blood and of sentiment before they came to birth. ”

“ Is it too much to believe that in our older ballads we hear the echoes of the voices—it may be the very words—of the old bards, the harpers and the minstrels, who sang in the ears of princes and people as far back as history can carry us? We know, by experience of other lands and races, from Samoa to Sicily, that are still in their earlier or later ballad-age, that the making of ballads is almost as old as the making of war or of love—that it long precedes letters, to say nothing of the printed page. ”

“ It may look like taking a liberty with the chart of ballad poetry to label as 'romantic' a single province of this kingdom of Old Romance. It is probably not even the most ancient of the provinces of balladry, but it has some claim to be regarded as the central one in fame and in wealth—the one that yields the purest and richest ore of poetry. It is that wherein the passion and frenzy of love is not merely an element or a prominent motive, but is the controlling spirit and the absorbing interest. ”

“ More often it is the repinings and longings of passionate love that keep it from its rest. In märchen and ballad the ghost of the lover comes to complain that the tears which his betrothed sheds nightly fill his shroud with blood; when she smiles, it is filled with rose leaves. The mother steals from the grave to hap and comfort her orphan children; their harsh stepmother neglects and ill-treats them, and their exceeding bitter and desolate cry has penetrated beneath the sod, and reached the dead ear. ”

“ There was an escape of the odium theologicum which always and everywhere is fatal to the tenderer flowers of poetry and romance. Men's minds were too deeply moved, and their hands too full to look upon ballads otherwise than askance and with disfavour. The Wedderburns and other zealous reformers set themselves to match the traditional and popular airs to 'Gude and Godlie Ballates' of their own invention. The wandering ballad-singer could no longer count on a welcome, either in the castles of the nobles or with the shepherds of the hills. ”

“ It comes as natural for men to sing of the pangs of passion, or of the joys of victory, as to kiss or to fight. For untold generations the harps twanged in the hall, and the song of battle and the song of sorrow found eager listeners. All the while, the same tales, though perhaps in ruder and simpler guise, met with as warm a welcome in road and field and at country merrymaking. Trouvere and wandering minstrel, gleeman and eke gleemaiden, passed from place to place and from land to land repeating, altering, adapting the old stock of heroic or lovelorn ditties, or inventing new ones. ”

“ The greater its age, and the greater its popular favour, the greater is the number of individual memories and imaginations through which it has been filtered, taking from each some trace of colour, some flavour of style or character, some improving or modifying touch. The 'personal equation' is, in the ballad, a quantity at once immense and unknown. As in Homer's Iliad, the voice we hear is not that of any individual poet, but of an age and of a people—a voice simple, almost monotonous, in its rhythmic rise and fall, but charged with meanings multitudinous and unutterable. ”

“ Perhaps it is natural that a warlike people should sing of their triumphs rather than of their defeats and humiliations. But if the old ballads have lost sight of some great landmarks in the country's chronicle, they have preserved names and incidents which the duller pen of history has forgotten or overlooked. The breath of poetry passes over the Valley of Bones of the national annals, and each knight stands up in his place, a breathing man and a living soul. ”

“ In it the song of the river has been wedded to its story 'like perfect music unto noble words.' It is indeed the voice of Yarrow, chiding, imploring, lamenting; a voice 'most musical, most melancholy.' A ballad minstrel with a master-touch upon the chords of passion and pathos, with a feeling for dramatic intensity of effect that Nature herself must have taught him, must have left us these wondrous pictures of the quarrel, hot and sudden ”

“ Through the long twilight in which the primæval beliefs and superstitions grew up and became embodied in legend and custom, in märchen and ballad, and all through the Middle Ages, man's pilgrimage on earth was indeed through a Valley of the Shadow. ”

“ There is a 'Harp of the Covenant', and in it there are piercing wails wrung from a people almost driven frantic with suffering and oppression. But the popular{143} lays of the civil wars and commotions of the seventeenth century are few in number, and singularly wanting in those touches of grace and tenderness and kindly humour that somehow accompany the very roughest and most trenchant of the earlier ballads, like the bloom and fragrance that adorn the bristling thickets of the native whin on the slopes of the Eildons or Arthur Seat. ”

“ But, on the whole, mirth and light-heartedness are very far from being characteristics of the Scottish ballads. Of ballad themes in general, it has been said that they concern themselves mainly with the tragedy and the pathos of the life of feudal and early times; while, on the other hand, the folk-song reflects the sunnier hours of the days of old. This is peculiarly true of the Scottish ballads. The best of them are dipped in gloom of the grave. They breathe the very soul of 'the old, unhappy far-off times.' Even over the true lovers, Fate stands from the first with a drawn sword ”

“ But the native-grown ballad takes also colour from the ground whence it springs. It has the tang of the soil as well as the savour of the blood. Fletcher of Saltoun's hackneyed epigram, 'Let me make a country's ballads, and let who will make its laws,' does not embody all the truth. A country and the race inhabiting it may not be responsible for the laws that govern it. But a country and a people may rightly be tried and judged by their ballads—their own handiwork ”

“ For when the gallant knight and his 'fair may' ride away, prying eyes are upon them; black care and red{86} vengeance climb up behind them and keep them company. The Douglas Tragedy may be selected for its terseness and dramatic strength, for the romance and pathos inwoven in the very names and scenes with which it is associated, as the type of a favourite story which under various titles—Earl Brand and the Child of Elle among the rest—has, time beyond knowledge, captivated the imagination and drawn the tears of ballad-lovers. ”

“ If there ever be matter of offence in the traditional ballad, it resides in the theme and not in the handling and language. Whatever be its faults, it never has the taint of the vulgar; it avoids the suggestive with the same instinct with which it avoids the vapid adjective; it is the antithesis of the modern music-hall ditty. The balladist and his men and women speak straight to the point, and call a spade a spade.
'Ye lee, ye lee, ye leear loud,
Sae loud 's I hear ye lee,'
and
'O wae betide you, ill woman,
And an ill death may ye dee,'
are among the familiar courtesies of colloquy. ”

“ First, then, of the ballads that are steeped in the element of the supernatural, let it be remembered that it is well-nigh impossible for us in these days, when we have cleared about us a little island of light in the darkness, to understand the atmosphere of mystery that pressed close around the life of man in the age when the ballad had its birth. ”

“ In portraiture, in scenery, in costume, he is simplicity itself. The heroine of the ballad, and, for that matter, the hero also, as a rule, must have 'yellow hair.' If she is not a Lady Maisry, it is a wonder if she be not a May Margaret or a Fair Annie, although there is also a goodly sprinkling of Janets, and Helens, and Marjories, and Barbaras in the enchanted land of ballad poetry. ”

“ Human passion unrestrained there may be; but no sickly or vicious sentiment. There is a punctilious sense of honour; and if it is sometimes the letter rather than the spirit of vow or promise that is kept, the knights and ladies in the ballads are no worse than are the Pharisees of our day; and they are always ready to pay, and generally do pay, the utmost penalty.
Thus, in that most powerful and tragic ballad, Clerk Saunders, May Margaret ties a napkin about her eyes that she 'may swear, and keep her aith,' to her 'seven bauld brothers,' that she had not seen her lover 'since late yestreen' ”

“ They supply, unquestionably, a large portion of that feeling of mystery, of over-shadowing fate, and melancholy yearning—that air of another world surrounding and infecting the life of the senses—which seems to distinguish the body and soul of Scottish ballad poetry from the more matter-of-fact budget of the English minstrels. ”

“ Like Sir Lancelot, in the famous eulogy of Sir Ector, these Borderers of old were not only strong men of their hands, but strong also of heart, and 'true friends to their friends,' who, since they held the first line of defence of the Kingdom, might be said to embrace, after their own family and clan, their countrymen at large. They might, on occasion, 'seek their broth in England and in Scotland both.' But they robbed and slew, when it was possible, with patriotic discrimination. ”

“ How deeply the sense of dread, of approaching tragedy, as well as that of colour and locality, is stimulated by the iteration of the drear owerword, 'All alone and alonie,' or 'Binnórie, O Binnórie!' How the horror of a monstrous crime creeps nearer with each repetition of the cry, 'Mither, Mither!' in the wild dialogue between mother and son in Edward! Like Glenkindie's harping, every stroke 'stounds the heart within'—we scarce can tell how or why. ”