Ballade

“ And within that little work this famous Ballade is by far the greatest thing.
It contains all his qualities: not in the ordinary proportion of his character, but in that better, exact proportion which existed in him when his inspiration was most ardent: for the poem has underlying it somewhere a trace of his irony, it has all his ease and rapidity--excellent in any poet--and it is carried forward by that vigour I have named, a force which drives it well upwards and forward to its foaming in the seventh line of the third verse. ”

“ And so it is in poetry also: all this love of curious French metres like the Ballade, the Villanelle, the Rondel; all this increased value laid on elaborate alliterations, and on curious words and refrains, such as you will find in Dante Rossetti and Swinburne, is merely the attempt to perfect flute and viol and trumpet through which the spirit of the age and the lips of the poet may blow the music of their many messages.
And so it has been with this romantic movement of ours: ”

“ The construction of the Ballade, although not less stern in insisting on the introduction of a refrain than many of the other shapes, uses it at wider intervals, and so escapes the besetting danger of such forms as the villanelle or triolet, where its constant recurrence may easily become as senseless as the "with a fal, la, la" of the old madrigal writers, unless it be very skilfully brought in. ”

“ Ballad literature is scarcely a record of human constancy. In Ballad-land the percentage of [252] faithless swains, black or white, clown or knight, is a high one. Was the law regarding breach of promise first formulated by a student of ballad lore, I wonder? Whatever else it may have effected, it seems to have put an end to ballad-writing, perhaps because it ended the conditions and circumstances which went to the making of balladeering. ”

“ As a subtle harmony of colours may reveal, to those who can grasp it, a miracle of skill and science, while it is no more nor less than "a pretty picture" to others—or polyphonic harmony, with all the resources [Pg xlii] of the science of music, may be employed to enrich a clear popular melody, to which the unmusical can yet nod their heads and fancy they understand it all; so a ballade or rondeau may be so deftly wrought, with an infinity of care and grace, that those who read it simply as a dainty poem never suspect the stern laws ordering the apparent spontaneity of the whole. ”

“ In the reactions against sophisticated poetry which set in from lime to time, the popular ballad—the true folk-song—has often been exalted at the expense of other forms of verse. It is idle to attempt to arrange the various forms of poetry in an order of absolute values; it is enough that each has its own quality, and, therefore, its own value. The drama, the epic, the ballad, the lyric, each strikes its note in the complete expression of human emotion and experience. ”

“ Within them such literary tact and peasant-lore as you possess—and you cannot have too much—will infallibly detect the origin of a given ballad. So much as that, at least, is involved in the very nature of literature. A ballad—any ballad—was either written up to the height of his own powers by an original poet (a Burns, a Clare) , or written down to the auditory’s capacity, which is the way of the hack, or professional minstrel. ”

“ The mere recitation or reading of the ballad, with such unacademic and living comment as shall help the imagination of the hearer to leap into a vivid realization of the swiftly shifted scenes, the sympathy to follow with eager comprehension the crowded, changing passions, the whole nature to thrill with the warm pulse of the rough old poem, is perhaps the surest way to drive the ballad home, trusting it to work within the student toward that spirit—development which is more truly the end of education than mental storage. ”

“ Many such poems survive in our ballad literature.
p. xvThe material of the ballad may be either romantic or historical. The former class is based on one of the primeval invented situations, one of the elements of the Märchen in prose. Such tales or myths occur in the stories of savages, in the legends of peasants, are interwoven later with the plot in Epic or Romance, and may also inspire ballads. Popular superstitions, the witch, metamorphosis, the returning ghost, the fairy, all of them survivals of the earliest thought, naturally play a great part. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A Ballad History is welcome to childhood, from its rhymes, its high colouring, and its aptness to memory. As we grow into boyhood, the violent passions, the vague hopes, the romantic sorrow of patriot ballads are in tune with our fitful and luxuriant feelings. In manhood we prize the condensed narrative, the grave firmness, the critical art, and the political sway of ballads. And in old age they are doubly dear; the companions and reminders of our life, the toys and teachers of our children and grand-children. Every generation finds its account in them. ”

“ Modern poets have, in several instances, written ballads of striking picturesqueness and power, but as unlike the ballad of popular origin as the world of to-day is unlike the world in which "Chevy Chase" was first sung. These modern ballads are not necessarily better or worse than their predecessors; but they are necessarily different. It is idle to exalt the wild flower at the expense of the garden flower; each has its fragrance, its beauty, its sentiment; and the world is wide! ”

“ In writing a ballad the secrets of success are definiteness of aim, directness of execution, and singleness of idea. The language must be simple, but so vigorous that every word tells; the metre must also be simple, but the versification demands a musical swing, a rush of rhyme, the talent for which is rare. To smell of the lamp is fatal to the ballad ”

“ All the men but one leaned back upon the settles or forward upon the tables, their hands on their tankards, watching the one who sang a ballad—a ballad known to them so well that they seemed not to listen, but simply to let the melody surge about them and provoke what thoughts it would. ”

“ No well-defined frontier can be laid down between the three chief departments of ballad minstrelsy. The pieces in which fairy-lore and ancient superstition have a prominent place—the ballads of Myth and Marvel—have all of them a strong romantic colouring; and the like may be said of the traditional songs of war and of raiding and hunting, as well as of those whose theme is the passion and tragedy of love. ”

“ This apparent arrest, in the ballad stage, of a story which seemed destined to become an epic, naturally suggests the vexed question of the author ship of the popular ballads. They are in a very real sense the songs of the people; they make no claim to individual authorship; on the contrary, the inference of what may be called community authorship is, in many instances, irresistible. They are the product of a social condition which, so to speak, holds song of this kind in solution; of an age in which improvisation, singing, and dancing are the most natural and familiar forms of expression. ”

“ It really means a dance-song. For ballads were at first written to be sung to dances—slow, shuffling, balancing dances such as one may still see in out-of-the-way places in Brittany.
These ballads often had a chorus or refrain in which every one joined. But by degrees the refrain was dropped and the dancing too. Now we think of a ballad as a simple story told in verse. Sometimes it is merry, but more often it is sad.
The ballads were not made for grand folk. They were not made to be sung in courts and halls. They were made for the common people, and sometimes at least they were made by them. ”

“ This native growth of song, in which the chorus or refrain, the dance of a festal multitude, and the spontaneous nature of the words, were vital conditions, gradually faded away before the advance of cultivated verse and the vigor of production in what one may call poetry of the schools. Very early in the history of the ballad, a demand for more art must have called out or at least emphasized the artist, the poet, who chanted new verses while the throng kept up the refrain or burden. ”

“ 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 classes,—those derived from superstition, 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. ”

“ A true epic, on the other hand, is long, and its tone is grand, noble, and sustained. Ballads are not artistic; while the form of the epic, whether we take the hexameter or the rougher laisse of the French chansons de geste, is full of conscious and admirable art. Lastly, popular ballads deal with vague characters, acting and living in vague places; while the characters of an epic are heroes of definite station, whose descendants are still in the land, whose home is a recognisable place, Ithaca, or Argos. Now, though these two kinds of early poetry—the ballad, the song of the people ”

“ And
therefore, if I wished to collect the ballads of the future, the songs
which will endure into the next century (if there is any song in
the next century) , I should not rake through the contemporary poets, in
the hope of finding gems of lasting brilliance. No. I should go to the
music-halls. I should listen to the sort of thing they sing when the
faded lady with the high bust steps forward and shouts, "Now then, boys,
all together!"
Unless you can write the words "Now then, boys, all together", at the
top of a ballad, it is not really a ballad at all. ”

“ It is through the choral refrains, in fact, that the student of lyric poetry is chiefly fascinated as he reads the ballads. Students of epic and drama find them peculiarly suggestive in their handling of narrative and dramatic material, while to students of folklore and of primitive society they are inexhaustible treasures. The mingling of dance-motives and song-motives with the pure story-element may long remain obscure, but the popular ballad reinforces, perhaps more persuasively than any type of poetry, the conviction that the lyrical impulse is universal and inevitable. ”

“ There is something surpassingly sweet in the music of the flute and violin in the hands of skillful performers; and yet, to my thinking, it falls far short of the melody of the human voice. I have listened to some of the most celebrated singers, and of the most distinguished performers, but it appears to me now, that I never, on any other occasion, heard the melody of the human voice, or instrumental music half so enchanting, as that which came floating over the lake on that calm summer night. ”

“ Put into ballad-form, furnished, ballad-fashion, with a dramatic plot and climax, and adapted to their own belief and practice by the quaint suggestion of the maternal anger and the whipping with willow, it has been incorporated, as we have seen, into the native traditional lore.
Nothing, in fact, illustrates the story of survival better than the history of the European ballad, as told in three recent essays by Professor W. P. Ker. ”

“ But this process of purging and refining the ballad, so that it shall become—like the language, the proverbs, the folklore and nursery tales, and the traditional music of a nation—the reflection of the history and character of the race itself, if it is to be genuine, must go on unconsciously. As soon as the ballad is written down—at least as soon as it is fixed in print—the elements of natural growth it possesses are arrested. ”

“ Begging the question, that poetry can be produced by such a body, this poetry is naturally of a concrete and narrative character, and is previous to the poetry of art. ‘Therefore,’ says Professor Child, ‘while each ballad will be idiosyncratic, it will not be an expression of the personality of individuals, but of a collective sympathy; and the fundamental characteristic of popular ballads is therefore the absence of subjectivity and self-consciousness. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The popular ballad, indeed, is, next after the historical romance, the literary form to which the romantic movement has given, in the highest degree, a renewal of prosperous life. Every one has written ballads, and the "burden" has become a burden even as the grasshopper is such. ”

“ We cannot say who made the ballads. Nowadays a poet makes a poem, and it is printed with his name upon the title-page. The poem belongs to him, and is known by his name. We say, for instance, Gray's Elegy, or Shakespeare's Sonnets. But many people helped to make the ballads. I do not mean that twenty or thirty people sat down together and said, "Let us make a ballad." That would not have been possible. But, perhaps, one man heard a story and put it into verse. ”