Balladist

“ The balladist is 'a voice and nothing more'—a voice singing in a chorus of others, in which only faintly and uncertainly we sometimes fancy we can make out the note, but rarely anything of the person or history, of the individual singer. ”

“ In the ballad-poets in general, as in men of a rude and early stage of the world, in whom their humanity is not yet variously and fully developed, the stock of these ideas is scanty, and the ideas themselves not very effective or profound. From them the narrative itself is the great matter, not the spirit and significance which underlies the narrative. Even in later times of richly developed life and thought, poets appear who have what may be called a balladist’s mind ”

“ These are all hackneyed phrases and incidents of the old balladists, the merest counters, borrowed, worn, and passed on through bards innumerable. But what fire and colour, what strength and pathos, continue to live in them! They smell of 'Flora and the fresh-delved earth'; they are redolent of the spring-time of human passion and thought. For the most part they belong to all ballad poetry, and not to the Scottish ballads alone. But there are other touches that seem to be{53} peculiar to the genius of our own land and our own ballad literature ”

“ Artificial, tedious, didactic. The author of the ancient ballad seldom points, and never draws, a moral, and has unbounded faith in the credulity of the audience. The seventeenth century balladists pitchforked Nature into the midden.
These compositions were printed as soon as written, or, to be exact, they were written for the press. We now class them as broadsides, that is, ballads printed on one side of the paper. The difference between these and the true ballad is the difference between art and nature. The broadside ballad was a form of art, and a low form of art. ”

“ In the ranks of the Balladists, then, we do not include the many writers of merit—some of them of genius—who have worked in the lines of the elder race of singers, copying their measures and seeking to enter into their spirit. The studied simplicity, the deliberate archaisms, the overstrained vigour or pathos of these modern ballads do but convince us that the vein is well-nigh worked out. ”

“ It would be more than rash, however, to imagine that ballads did not live and grow and spread in the obscure but fertile ground of the popular fancy and the popular memory, because they did not crop up in the contemporary{25} printed literature, and were overlooked by the dry-as-dust chroniclers of the time. Nor is it a paradox to say that a ballad may be older, by ages, than the hero and the deeds that it seems to celebrate. ”

“ Furthermore, the ballad is not the ballade. The ballade is a highly artificial form of verse, French in origin, consisting, as a rule, of three eight-line stanzas and a four-line envoi, with only three rhymes in all twenty-eight lines. People with a taste for untra-modern spelling sometimes label these productions "ballads" instead of "ballades," and other people sometimes try to give their ballads an archaic flavor by labeling them "ballades." Both practices are utterly unjustifiable. A ballade is no more a ballad than a sonnet is a quatrain. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In Elizabeth’s reign we first meet with the ballad-mongers and professional authors of ballads. Simultaneously, or nearly so, comes the degradation of the word ‘ballad,’ until it signifies either the genuine popular ballad, or a satirical song, or a broadside, or almost any ditty of the day. Of the ballad-mongers, we have mentioned Elderton, Deloney, and Johnson. We might add a hundred others, from Anthony Munday to Martin Parker, and even Tom Durfey, each of whom contributed largely to the vast mushroom-literature that sprang up and flourished vigorously for the next century. ”

“ In 1783, in one of his letters, the poet Cowper says: ‘The ballad is a species of poetry, I believe, peculiar to this country.... Simplicity and ease are its proper characteristics.’ Here we have one of the earliest attempts to define the modern meaning of a ‘ballad.’ Centuries of use and misuse of the word have left us no unequivocal name for the ballad, and we are forced to qualify it with epithets. ‘Traditional’ might be deemed sufficient; but ‘popular’ or ‘communal’ is more definite. ”

“ It is almost needless to say to the student of literature that the art of popular ballad writing is extinct, or is successful only in the rarest instances. Poets of genuine power and inspiration, imbued and saturated with the spirit of the ancient ballads, have attempted to re-create them in the telling of an ancient or modern story, but, whatever their original power or imitative skill, they have failed to reproduce that native strength and peculiar flavor of expression which gives the ancient ballads such a hold upon the mind. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ The refrain is a venerable and characteristic feature of the ballad and ballad melody. In its refrains, as in everything else, Scottish ballad poetry has been peculiarly happy. Some will have it that they are of much older date than the ballads themselves. It has been suggested that many of them—and these the refrains that have lost, if they ever possessed, any definite or intelligible meaning to the ear—may be relics not merely of ancient song, but of ancient rites and incantations, and of a forgotten speech. ”

“ It is not that ballad poetry was dumb, but that history was deaf and blind to its beauties.
Nor is any adverse judgment as to the antiquity of the Scottish ballad to be drawn from the comparative modernity of the style and language. The presence of archaisms in a ballad that claims to have been handed down by oral repetition from a remote period is, on the contrary, a thing to raise suspicion as to its genuineness. The ballad, as has been said, is a living and growing organism; or at least it is this until it has been committed to print. ”

“ So at the present time no one knows just where old Ritson's grave is, only that within that vast enclosure where so many thousand souls sleep their last sleep the dust of the famous ballad-lover lies fast asleep in the bosom of mother earth.
I have never been able to awaken in Miss Susan any enthusiasm for balladry. My worthy sister is of a serious turn of mind, and I have heard her say a thousand times that convivial songs (which is her name for balladry) are inspirations, if not actually compositions, of the devil. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Every bad ballad has its archetype in a good one, and all ballads of whatsoever quality, can be pigeonholed under subjects, whether of content or of treatment. My first specimen from Kent could be classified as the Ballad Encomiastic, or, at will, as the Ballad of Plain Statement, in which latter case it would be considered as a ballad proper and derive itself passim from Professor Child's book. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The verse tale is shorter and likely to be less dignified and serious than the metrical romance. The stories in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, or Burns's Tam O'Shanter, may serve as examples.
The ballad is a narrative poem, usually rather short and in such form as to be sung. It is distinguished from a song by the fact that it tells a story. Popular or folk ballads are ancient and of unknown authorship—handed down by word of mouth and varied by the transmitters. Artistic ballads are imitations, by known poets, of traditional ballads. ”

“ 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 Shiffnal in Shropshire," had the glorious good luck to hit upon an old folio manuscript 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." ”