The Ballad Book a Selection of the Choicest
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THE BALLAD BOOK A SELECTION OF THE CHOICEST WILLIAM ALLINGHAM The Old Ballads' suggests as distinct a set of impressions as the name of Shakspeare, Spenser, or Chaucer ; but on looking close we find ourselves puzzled ; the sharp bounding lines disappear the mountain chain so definite on the horizon is found to be a disunited and intricate region. Perhaps most people's notion of the Old Ballads is formed out of recollections of Percy's Reliques Ritson's Robin Hood set, Scott's Border Minstrelsy as re- positories ; of ' Sir Patrick Spens,' Clerk Saunders,'tions, dissertations, notes, appendices, commenta- ries, controversies, of an antiquarian, historical, or pseudo-historical nature, wherein the poetry is packed, like pots of dainties and wine-flasks in straw and sawdust. In most of the collections, lyrics and metrical tales are associated with the Ballads proper, and it has been usual, besides, to load on a heap of Modern Imitations. All honour and gratitude to the collectors and editors, greater and lesser ; (yet one must venture to say that the really fine and favourite Old Ballads have hitherto formed the vital portions of a set of volumes which are, on the whole, rather lumpish and unreadable. The feast they offer is somewhat like an olla podrida' of Spenser's Fairy Queen, Dodsles Miscellany the driest columns of Notes and Queries, and a selection from the Poet's Comer of the provincial newspapers. The Ballads which we give have, one and all, no connection of the slightest importance with history. , Things that did really happen are no doubt shadowed forth in many of them, but with such a careless confu- sion of names, places, and times, now thrice and thirty .times confounded by alterations in course of oral transmission, vaiious versions, personal and local adaptations, not to speak of editorial emendations, that it is mere waste of time and patience to read (if any one ever does read) those grave disquisitions, historical and antiquarian, wherewith it has been the fashion to encumber many of these rudely pictu- resque and pathetic poems. All the aforesaid wrap- pages, or nearly all, the present editor has taken the liberty to put aside, leaving the reader of this volume of Ballads to enjoy them simply as poems, unvexed with dull and trivial questions, to which, after all, no precise answers are forthcoming. III. Those Ballads which give colour and value to this department of English literature are the best of the Robin Hood' set, and the Scottish and North- English Balladsof a romantic and supernatural kind, i The truly historical Ballads are one and all inferior, and, considered as poetry, rather like chips in the porridge. The printers' ballads, by Deloney, John- son, Elderton (who, as old Camden reports, did arm himself with ale when he ballated ') and other pro- fessional writers, made in a prosaic pedestrian style, though some of them meritorious in their own way, and preserving here and there a tinge of the better sort of ballad-writing, are of little or no account in the estimate. Some of the best ' Robin Hood ' Ballads were early printed ; the Lytell Geste,' by WynkenLiie-MLQr probably in H- but of the romantic Minstrel Ballads by far the greater number have b'een preserved by oral trans- mission, and gathered together by collectors during the last htmdred years, chiefly in the remoter . parts of the kingdom, and from the mouths of per- sons of humble rank. Of the comparatively few! old MS. copies extant, most, if not all, were doubt- less also taken down, directly or otherwise, from the oral delivery of professional minstrels, who themselves, whether as inventors or repeaters, were not accustomed to conmiit their verses to paper ; and such MS. copies, made by anonymous and often, as in the case of Percy's Folio, illiterate hands, have really no more authority than oralversions obtained in our own day, except in so far as they may be held to represent the popular forms at such or such a date. The Ballads owe no little of their merit to the countless riddlings, siftings, shiftings, omissions, and additions of innumerable reciters. The lucky changes hold, the stupid ones fall aside. Thus, with some effective fable, story, or incident for its soul, and taking form from the hands of a maker' who knew his business, the ballad (like the nursery rhyme) glides from generation to generation, and fits itself more and more to the brain and ear of its proper audience. At last the editors take it up, and then the alterations are huge and sudden a_" here with great and obvious improvement, there injurious and de- structive. It is the quick work (good and evil) of a despotism qompared with the gradual results of an old constitutional government. IV. How to date most of our popular romantic ballads is to this day a much debated question. It has been usual to take for granted in a vague way that they are old a_" very old ; and to connect them with a certain marketable neatness, but with no true strength of link, with the bards, trouveres, court minstrels, and so on. On the other hand, a gentleman of much study in the matter has recently given it as his opinion \The Romantic Scottish Ballads, their Epoch and Authorship, by Robert Chambers, 1859] of most, if not all, the best of the romantic ballads, that some were written, and the others entirely recast, no further back than in the last century, by Elizabeth, Lady Wardlaw. To us, how- ever, it appears that Hardyknute ' (granting the lady's authorship of that) has little or no poetical merit, and owes its reputation to the novelty, in that day, of its style; the true and pure examples (whereof Hardyknute ' was a poorish imitation) lying hidden as yet from the reading public. From Hardyknute ' alone Mr. Chambers argues Lady Wardlaw's capa- bility of writing or putting into their present forms Sir Patrick Spens,' Edward, Edward,' The Jew's Daughter,' ' Young Waters,' Edom o' Gordon,' V. We look upon our romantic ballads as a class of poems traceable backwards to perhaps the X From Minstrel down to Editor, teenth century, a_" impressive stories in a simple style of verse, sung (and often filled in with prose narra- tion) by professional strollers of a humbler sort than the courtly minstrels, who themselves by this time werebeginning to decline from their high place. These narrative songs (some derived from ancient times and foreign countries, some abridged from the long metrical romances, some of new invention) were com- posed, not without genius in the best, by unlearned men for popular audiences ; and passing from mouth to mouth and generation to generation of singers and reciters, dull and clever, undergoing numerous alterations by the way by reason of slips of memory, personal tastes, local adaptations and prejudices, additions, omissions, patches, and lucky thoughts, and on the whole gaining in strength in the process, came in a later day into the baskets of literary col- lectors, were transferred into the editorial labora- tories, there sifted, mixed, shaken, clarified, im- proved (or the contrary), no one can ever tell how much, and sent at last into the World of Books in a properly solemn shape, their triviality duly weighted with a load of antiquarianism, and garnished with fit apologies for the presentation of such barbauus productions' to 'a polished age like the present,' and assurances that those high literary personages, the ingenious ' Mr. This and the ' elegant ' Mr. That, whose own poems are so justly, &c. (read now, forgotten), have given some countenance to the venture. VI. Popular poems, similar in style and often in subject, are found in Denmark, Sweden, Ger- many, and other countries, all doubtless deriving no nttle from the splendidly obscure Oriental nursery of our race. In 1586, Sophia, Queen of Denmaric, visiting Tycho Brahe, prince of stars, in his island- observatory, was there storm-sted three days ; when to amuse Her Majesty a store of old Danish Ballads, collected by Pastor SaefTrensen, a friend of Tycho's, was produced ; and, with the Queen's encouragement, a select hundred of them were published in 1591, under the title of Kcempe Viser, Heroic Ballads. Just a century after this, Peter Say, another priest, published a second hundred ballads of his own collecting. _A complete edition of the Danske Visery in 5 vols., appeared at Copenhagen in 181 2-14. Of the Swedish Ballads, collections have been published at Stockholm in 3 vols. 18 14- 16, and in 3 vols. 1834-42. Among these Scandinavian Ballads are found parallel stories to our \f air Annie,' Kempion, Douglas Tragedy,' KaAarine Janfarie,' Etin the Forester,' Binnorie,' Will's Lady,' May Colvin,' ' The Crugl, Brother,' < Sweet William's Ghost ; ' while Lord Ronald,' and Edward, Edward,' ap- pear in the old German popular minstrelsy. This strong family likeness to old foreign ballads (where- soever we may look for the origin) is in itself no bad evidence for the antiquity of oiu. The existence of many versions in various parts of the country goes strongly to prove the same point But this is not all. The Lytell Geste,' as we have said, was printed about 1485. The Hunting of the Cheviot ' must be at least as old as Henry the VI XL's reign(some think half a century earlier). Childe Maurice ' in Percy's MS. is apparently in i6th century spelling. A verse from Little Musgrave ' is quoted in i6i i by Beaumont and Fletcher, and another from Fair Margaret's Misfortunes' (see our notes).