Strange Survivals
We will now take a case or two from the Roman Communion. Hysteria, as we might suppose, would be likely to manifest itself in the monastic orders. St. Joseph of Cupertino was one Christmas Eve in church, when the pifferari began to play their carols. Joseph, who was a Franciscan friar, carried away by religious emotion, began to dance in the midst of the choir, and then, with a howl, he took a flying leap and lighted on the high altar. He was then vested in a gorgeous cope, conducting the service. The carollers were amazed, no less than the friars; and their amazement was increased when they saw him jump from the altar on to the pulpit ledge, fifteen feet above the ground. One day he went into the convent choir of the Sisters of St. Clara, at Cupertino. When the nuns began to sing, Joseph, unable to restrain his emotion, ran across the chancel, caught the old confessor of the convent in his arms, and danced with him before the altar. Then he span himself about like a teetotum, with the confessor clinging to his hands, and his legs flying out horizontally.
St. Christina, The Wonderful, a Belgian virgin, used to go into fits when her religious emotions were worked upon, put her head between her feet, bending her spine backwards, and roll round the room or church like a ball.
St. Peter of Alcantara in his fervours used to strip himself naked. He would jump, curled up like a ball, high into the air, and in and out at the church door. “What was going on in his soul all this while,” says his biographer, “it is not given to mortals to declare.”
The numerous cases of possession in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were nothing but hysterical disorders, the symptoms precisely those of Methodist revivals, Witches’ Sabbaths, Paulinian orgies, and Schamanism.
It is worthy of note that the witches were always a prey to extreme exhaustion after they had attended their Sabbaths, a feature that is invariable after spiritual raptures.
In Sweden a religious revival took place in 1842-3, which swept over the country, affecting great numbers of children. Boys and girls, only eight years of age, were inspired to preach the Gospel and go about in bands singing hymns. In the province of Skaraburg, where the epidemic was least extensive, it numbered, at least, 3000 victims. The patients had “quaking fits,” dropped down, became unconscious, had trances, saw visions, and preached when in an ecstatic state. Not two centuries before, a similar epidemic had passed over Sweden, affecting the children, but it then took a slightly different complexion: it was an epidemic of witchcraft. In 1669-70, the children declared that they were transported nightly to the Blockula, and their condition afterwards was one of complete prostration.
A Commission was appointed to examine into the matter, public prayers and humiliations were ordered, and a great number of women and children were executed for their guilt in having attended these meetings on the Blockula.
Into the details of the Witch-Sabbaths I have not entered; it is unnecessary. My object has been to show that in all likelihood there were such gatherings, that they took the place of assemblies of Pagan origin, which were analogous to the assemblies of the spiritual Pauline heretics in the early Church; that modern revivals are not derived from these, but are analogous exhibitions, and that all are alike manifestations of hysteria, superinduced by a love of the sensational, a vague credulity, and an absolute stagnation of the intellectual powers.
We are in the age of compulsory education; in our Board Schools religious teaching is reduced to the thinnest gruel, absolutely tasteless, and wholly unnutritious. We are straining, perhaps over-straining, the mental faculties, and making no provision for the co-ordinate development of the spiritual powers in the soul. The result will be, not that we shall kill the spiritual faculty, but that we shall drive it in – and it will break forth inevitably in extraordinary and outrageous manifestations. It must do so – just as a check to the free action of the pores superinduces fever. We shall have a sporadic fever of wild mysticism bursting forth, in the place of healthy religion. The spiritual element in man will rebel against compression, will insist on not being ignored. We are now suffering from the nuisance of the Salvation Army. But the Salvation Army is a comparatively innocuous form of reaction, or is comparatively innocuous just at present. We do not know but that it may herald other and worse forms of spiritual excitement, or that it may not itself develop in an Antinomian direction. We have no guarantee. There is a law in these manifestations that is constant. They all begin in ecstatic raptures and with a high moral aim, and all inevitably fall into laxity if not license in morality. The moral sense becomes inevitably blunted. It ceases to speak and work when man takes his ecstatic thrills and visions – which are veritable hallucinations – as the guide of his conduct, in place of the still small voice of conscience, instructed by the written, revealed law.
IX.
Broadside Ballads
“I love a ballad in print, a’ life,” said Mopsa, in the “Winter’s Tale,” and the clown confessed to the same liking. “I love a ballad but even too well; if it be doleful matter merrily set down, or a very pleasant thing indeed, and sung lamentably.”
In 1653, Dorothy Osborne tells Sir William Temple that she has received from her brother a ballad “much older than my ‘Lord of Lorne,’ and she sends it on to him.” Would that she had told us more about it. And then she writes, “The heat of the day is spent in reading or working, and about six or seven o’clock I walk out into a common that lies hard by the house, where a great many young wenches keep sheep and cows, and sit in the shade singing of ballads. I go to them and compare their voices and beauties to some ancient shepherdesses that I have read of, and find a vast difference there; but, trust me, I think these are as innocent as those could be. I talk to them, and find they want nothing to make them the happiest people in the world but the knowledge that they are so.”
Walton in his “Complete Angler,” printed in the very same year in which Dorothy Osborne wrote to her lover of the singing peasant girls, says: “I entered into the next field, and a second pleasure entertained me: ’twas a handsome milk-maid, that had cast away all care, and sung like a nightingale; her voice was good, and the ditty fitted for it; ’twas that smooth song which was made by Kit Marlow, now at least fifty years ago; and the milk-maid’s mother sung an answer to it, which was made by Sir Walter Raleigh in his younger dayes.”
We know what the song was, “Come, live with me and be my love.”
The mother says to Walton, “If you will but speak the word, I will make you a good sillabub, and then you may sit down in a hay-cock and eat it, and Maudlin shall sit by and sing you the good old song of the Hunting in Chevy Chase, or some other good ballad, for she hath good store of them: Maudlin hath a notable memory.”
But ballad-singing was not confined to milk-maids and clowns, for Walton proposes to spend a pleasant evening with his brother, Peter, and his friends, “to tell tales, or sing ballads, or make a catch, or find some harmless sport to content us.”
It is a somewhat sad fact – fact it is, that the ballad is at its last gasp among us. It has gone through several phases, and it has now reached the last, when it disappears altogether.
The ballad was anciently a story set to music, and music to which the feet could move in dance. The ballet is the dance to which the ballad was sung. It was not always danced to, but it always could be danced to. It was of great length, but not too long for light hearts or light feet on a threshing-floor. The ballad was accommodated to the exigencies of the dance, by being given a burden, or bourdon, a drone that was sung by the young men, when no bagpipe was there. This burden appears in numerous ballads, and has usually no reference to the story told by the singers, and when printed is set in italics. In the scene in the “Winter’s Tale,” already quoted, the servant alludes to these burdens, “He has the prettiest love-songs for maids – with such delicate burdens of ‘dildos and fadings.’”
Thus: —
“There was a lady in the North country,Lay the bent to the bonny broom,And she had lovely daughters three,Fa, la la la; fa, la la la ra re.”or: —
“There were three sisters fair and bright,Jennifer, Gentle, and Rosemaree,And they three loved one valiant knight,As the doo (dove) flies over the mulberry tree.”In the first edition of Playford’s “Dancing Master,” in 1650-1, nearly every air can be proved to have been that of a song or ballad of earlier date than the book. Of these only a few have the words preserved, and we cannot be sure that the words of those we have got were the original, as ballads were continually being written afresh.
It was not till about 1690 that tunes were composed expressly for dancing, and in the later editions of the “Dancing Master,” 1715 and 1728, about half the airs given are old ballad tunes. The other half, newly composed dance tunes, had no traditional words set to them, and none were composed to fit them.
In the old English romance of “Tom of Reading,” printed before 1600, we have an instance of the way in which a ballad came to be turned into a dance. Tom Dove was an Exeter clothier passionately fond of music. William of Worcester loved wine, Sutton of Salisbury loved merry tales, Simon of Southampton “got him into the kitchen and to the pottage and then to a venison pasty.”
Now a ballad was composed relative to Tom of Exeter: —
“Welcome to town, Tom Dove, Tom Dove,The merriest man alive.Thy company still we love, we love,God grant thee well to thrive.And never will we depart from theeFor better or worse, my joy!For thou shalt still have our good-will,God’s blessing on my sweet boy.”And the author adds, “This song went up and down through the whole country, and at length became a dance among the common sort.”
The old heroic ballad was a geste, and the singer was a gestour. Chaucer speaks of —
“Jestours that tellen talesBoth of seeping and of game.”The tales of game were stories calculated to provoke laughter, in which very often little respect was paid to decency; sometimes, however, they were satirical. These tales of game were much more popular than those of weeping, and the gestour, whose powers were mainly employed in scenes of conviviality, finding by experience that the long lays of ancient paladins were less attractive than short and idle tales productive of mirth, accommodated himself to the prevailing coarse taste, and the consequence was that nine of the pieces conceived in a light vein have been preserved to every one of the other.
In the “Rime of Sir Thopas,” Chaucer speaks of —
“MinestralesAnd gestours for to tellen tales,Of romaunces that ben reales,Of popes and of cardinalesAnd eke of love-longing.”Here we have the historic geste and the light and ribald tale. When Chaucer recited the Ballad of Sir Thopas, conceived after the fashion of the old romances, the host interrupted him and said —
“This may well be rime – dogerel,Mine eres aken of thy drafty speche.”We heartily wish that Chaucer had finished the tale. The host merely repeated the general objection to the heroic ballad, and showed the common preference for the ribald tales. The author of the “Vision of Piers the Ploughman,” complains that the passion for songs and ballads was so strong that men attended to these to the neglect of more serious and of sacred matters.
“I cannot parfitly my paternoster, as the priest it singeth,But I can ryme of Roben Hode, of Randolf erl of Chester,But of our Lord and our Lady I learn nothing at all;I am occupied every day, holy daye and other, with idle tales at the ale.”The degradation in the meaning of the names once given to minstrels of various classes tells its own sad tale. The ryband has lent his name to ribaldry; the scurra to whatever is scurrilous; the gestour, who sang the gestes of heroes, became the jester, the mere buffoon; the joculator degenerated into a joker; and the jongleur into a juggler.
A few men of taste and of reverence for the past stood up for the old heroic ballads, which, indeed, contained the history of the past, mixed with much mythical matter. So the great Charles, says his scribe, Eginhard, “commanded that the barbarous and most ancient song in which the acts and wars of the old kings were sung should be written down and committed to memory.” And our own Alfred, says Asser, “did not fail to recite himself and urge on others, the recitation by heart of the Saxon songs.” But the English ballad found no favour with the Norman conquerors, who readily received the Provençal troubadour. The old heroic ballad lingered on, and was killed, not so much by the ridicule of Chaucer as by the impatience of the English character, which will not endure the long-drawn tale, and asks in preference what is pithy and pointed.
Of song and ballad there were many kinds, characterised rather by the instrument to which it was sung, than by the nature of the song itself; or perhaps we may say most justly that certain topics and certain kinds of composition suited certain instruments, and were, therefore, accommodated to them.
In the “Romans de Brut” we have a list of some of these:
“Molt ot a la cort jugleors,Chanteors, estrumanteors;Molt poissiez oir chançons,Rotruanges et noviaz sonsVieleures, lais, et notes,Lais de vieles, lais de rotes,Lais de harpe et de fretiax.”Here we have the juggler, the chanter, and the strummer. What the strumentum34 was we do not exactly know, but it was clearly a stringed instrument that was twanged, and it has left its reminiscence in our language, – every child strums before it can play a piano. There exists an old table of civic laws for Marseilles of the date 1381, in which all playing of minstrel and jongleur, – in a word, all strumming was disallowed in the streets without a license.
To return to the passage quoted from the “Romans de Brut,” we have among the chançons, those on the rote, and those on the vielle, those on the harp and those on the fret, (i. e. flute).35 The rote was a pierced board, over which strings were drawn, and it could be played with both hands, one above, the other below, through the hole. The vielle was a hurdy-gurdy.
A healthier taste existed in Scotland than in England, and the old heroic ballads were never completely killed out there. In England they had been expelled the court, and banished from the hall long before they disappeared from the alehouse and the cottage. The milk-maids sang them; the nurses sang them; the shepherds sang them; but not the cultured ladies and gentlemen of the Elizabethan period. The musicians of that period set their faces against ballad airs, and introduced the motette and madrigal, in which elaborate part-singing taxed the skill of the performers. But the common people loved the simple melodious ballads. Miles Coverdale, in his “Address unto the Christian Reader,” in 1538, which he prefixed to his “Goastly Psalms,” laments it. “Wolde God that our mynstrels had none other thynge to play upon, neither our carters and pluomen other thynge to whistle upon, save psalmes, hymns, and such godly songes. And if women at the rockes (distaff), and spinnynge at the wheles, had none other songes to pass their tyme withal than such as Moses’ sister … songe before them, they should be better occupied than with, Hey nonny nonny, —Hey trolly lolly, and such like fantasies.”
Laneham, in 1575, thus describes his evening amusements: “Sometimes I foot it with dancing; now with my gittern, and else with my cittern, then at the virginals (ye know nothing comes amiss to me); then carol I up a song withal; that by and by they come flocking about me like bees to honey; and ever they cry, ‘Another, good Laneham, another!’”
In the great agitation of minds caused by the Reformation, the itinerant minstrels were an element of danger to the Crown, for they kept alive the popular feeling against the changes in religion, and the despotic measures of the Sovereign. Moreover, an immense number of ballads were printed, having a religious or political character, were set to the old ballad airs, and sung in place of the traditional lays, and then hawked by the singers. Accordingly, in 1543, an Act was passed “for the advancement of true religion,” and it recites that, forasmuch as certain froward persons have taken upon them to print “ballads, rhymes, etc., subtilly and craftily to instruct His Highness’ people untruly, for the reformation whereof His Majesty considereth it most requisite to purge the realm of all such books, ballads, rhymes, and songs.” The Act contains a list of exceptions; but it is noticeable that no ballads of any description were excepted.
In the reign of Queen Elizabeth another Act was passed, in 1597, against “minstrels wandering abroad,” by virtue of which they were to be whipped, put in the stocks, and imprisoned, if caught going from place to place with their ballads.
Then came the period of Puritan domination under the Commonwealth, when every engine was set to work to suppress popular music and ballad singing, and to sour the English character. The first Act levelled against them and stage players was in 1642. In the following year a tract was issued complaining that this measure had been ineffective, in which the writer says, “Our musike that was held so delectable and precious that they scorned to come to a tavern under twenty shillings salary for two hours, now wander with their instruments under their cloaks (I mean such as have any), to all houses of good fellowship, saluting every room where there is company with, Will you have any musike, gentlemen?” But even the license to go round the country was to be denied the poor wretches. In 1648 Captain Bertham was appointed Provost Marshall, “with power to seize upon all ballad-singers, and to suppress stage-plays.” The third Parliament of Cromwell struck the heaviest blow of all. It enacted that any minstrel or ballad-singer who was caught singing, or making music in any alehouse or tavern, or was found to have asked anyone to hear him sing or play, was to be haled before the nearest magistrate, whipped and imprisoned.
With the Restoration came a better time for ballad-singing; but the old romantic ballad was almost dead, and though many of the ancient melodies remained, to them new ballads were set. Of these vast numbers poured from the press. The printed ballad which supplanted the traditional ballad was very poor in quality. It turned on some moral or religious topic; it satirised some fashion of the day; it recorded in jingling rhymes some fire, earthquake, flood, or other accident. Above all, it narrated the story of a murder. Now for the first time did the vulgar assassin stand forward as the hero of English poetry and romance.
Many an old song or ballad was parodied. Thus the famous song of “The Hunt is up,” was converted into a political ballad in 1537; and a man named John Hogon was arrested for singing it. “An Old Woman Clothed in Grey” was the tune to which all England rang at the Restoration, with the words, “Let Oliver now be forgotten.” “Grim King of the Ghosts” was made use of for “The Protestants’ Joy,” a ballad on the coronation of King William and Queen Mary; and “Hey, then, up go we!” served, with parodied words against the Rump Parliament, as the “Tories’ Delight,” as an anti-Papal ballad, and even as a ballad on the great frost of the winter of 1683-4.
The dissociation of the old tunes from the ballads that had given them their names, and to which they had been composed, did much to occasion the loss of our early ballads. Not only so, but with James I.’s reign there came in a fashion for recomposing the old themes in the new style; and the new editions caused the disappearance of the earlier ballad. There can be little doubt that the romantic and historic ballad, which has been happily preserved in Scotland, was common to all English-speaking people. These ballads are called Scottish, because they have been preserved in Scotland, but it is more than doubtful that they are of Scottish origin. Ballads travelled everywhere. We have in Thomas of Erceldoune’s “Sir Tristram,” an instance of a French metrical romance turned into a long poem in Scotland, in the thirteenth century. Many of the Scottish ballads have, as their base, myths or legends common to all the Norse people, and found in rhymes among them.
At the beginning of this century, Mr. Davis Gilbert published a collection of Cornish Christmas Carols, and subjoined a couple of samples of the ballads sung by the Cornish people. One is “The Three Knights.” It begins —
“There did three knights come from the West,With the high and the lily oh!And these three knights courted one lady,And the rose was so sweetly blown.”This is precisely the ballad given by Herd and others as “The Cruel Brother.” One version in Scotland begins: —
“There was three ladies play’d at the ba’With a hegh-ho! and lily gay;There came a knight and play’d o’er them a’,And the primrose spread so sweetly.”But another version sung in Scotland begins —
“There was three ladies in a ha’,Fine flowers i’ the valley;There came three lords among them a’,Hi’ the red, green, and the yellow.”Now, the remarkable thing is, that there is still sung in Cornwall – or was, till quite recently – a form of the ballad with a burden like this latter. It begins —
“There was a woman and she was a widow,O the red, the green, and the yellow!And daughters had three as the elm tree,The flowers they blow in the valley.”with this chorus: —
“The harp, the lute, the fife, the flute, and the cymbal.Sweet goes the treble violin,The flowers that blow in the valley.”How is it possible that a ballad sung in two forms in Scotland, and recovered there in a fragmentary condition, should be known in very similar forms in Cornwall? To suppose that the two versions were carried from the Highlands to the Land’s End, so as to have become popular, is inconceivable. It is more likely that the same English ballad found its way both north and south-west, and when it had been displaced elsewhere, remained in the extremities of the island. The burden in each case is clearly that which marked the melody. We very much wish that the Scottish airs, to which these ballads were sung, had been preserved, that they might be compared with those to which they were sung in Cornwall. The burden in each case has nothing to do with the story, but it seems to indicate that the same ballad in its two forms, to two independent airs, was carried all over Great Britain at some period unknown. The same ballad was also sung in Cheshire at the close of last century, and also in Ireland.
Another specimen given by Mr. Gilbert is that of the “Three Sisters.”
“There were three sisters fair and bright,Jennifer, Gentle and Rosemaree;And they three loved one valiant knight;As the doo (dove) flies over the mulberry tree.”36The same is found in broadside, in the Pepysian and other collections, and as “The Unco Knicht’s Wooing” in Scotland.
Take again the ballad of “The Elfin Knight” or “The Wind hath blown my Plaid away.” This is found in Scotland, but also as a broadside in the Pepysian collection; it was the subject within the memory of man of a sort of play in farmhouses in Cornwall; it is found in a more or less fragmentary condition all over England. The same ballad is found in German, in Danish, in Wend – and the story in Tyrol, in Siberia, and Thibet.
Buchan, in his “Ballads of the North of Scotland,” gives the ballad of “King Malcolm and Sir Colvin,” but it is based on a story told by Gervase of Tilbury, in his Otia Imperialia, and the scene is laid by him on the Gogmagog Hills in Cambridgeshire. He wrote in the 12th century, and his story is clearly taken from a ballad. So also Buchan’s “Leesome Brand” is found in Danish and Swedish. And “The Cruel Sister” is discovered in Sweden and the Faroe Isles. At an early period there was a common body of ballad, where originated no one can say; the same themes were sung all over the North of Europe, and the same words, varied slightly, were sung from the Tweed to the Tamar, in the marches of Wales and in Ireland.
The greatest possible debt of gratitude is due to the Scots for having preserved these ballads when displaced and forgotten elsewhere, and it speaks volumes for the purity of Scottish taste that it appreciated what was good and beautiful, when English taste was vitiated and followed the fashion to prefer the artificial and ornate to the simple and natural expression of poetic fancy.
