The Balladists

But not all, and not all the sweetest and the best of our ballad strains, are so firmly fixed in the memory as these; because, for one thing, they have not all enjoyed the same popularity of print. As a rule, and until this popularity comes, it may be taken that the greater the variations in tune and in words the greater the age. The late Dean Christie, of Fochabers, an enthusiastic hunter after 'Traditional Ballad Airs,' of which he found great treasure-trove in out-of-the-way nooks of Buchan, Enzie, and other districts of the north-eastern counties, tells us, from his experience, that 'the differences in the versions of the Romantic Ballads, as sung in the different counties, may be taken as a proof of their antiquity.' He had 'seldom heard two ballad-singers sing a ballad in the same way, either in words or music'; and he holds it 'almost impossible to find the true set of any traditional air, unless the set can be traced genuinely to its composer,' a task, it need hardly be said, still more difficult than that of tracing the ballad words to the original balladist. It is also the opinion of this authority, that it is well-nigh impossible 'to arrange the traditional melodies without hearing them sung to the words of the ballad, the words and the air being so interwoven.' May it not be said, with equal truth, that those who know only the words of Binnorie, or Chil' Ether, or The Twa Corbies, and have never heard the strains, sweet and sad and weird, like the wind crooning at night round a ruined tower, to which it has been sung for untold generations, have not yet penetrated to the inmost soul of the ballad, or got a grasp of its formative principle?

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. Attempts have been made to interpret, for instance, the familiar 'Down, down, derry down,' as a Celtic invocation to assemble at the hill of sacrifice – a survival of pagan times when the altars smoked with human victims. It need only be said that these ingenious theorists have not yet proved their case; and that the origin of the refrain is a subject involved in still greater obscurity than that of the ballad itself.

Like the ballad verses and the ballad airs, also, these 'owerwords' are exceedingly variable, and are often interchangeable. Some of them are 'owerwords' literally; that is to say, they simply repeat or echo a word or phrase of the stanza to which they are attached. A specimen is the verse from Johnie o' Braidislee, quoted in the previous chapter. Others, and these, as has been said, among the refrains of most ancient and honourable lineage, bear the appearance of words whose meaning has been forgotten. 'With rombelogh' has come rumbling down to us from the days of Bannockburn; and may even then have been of such eld that the key to its interpretation had already been lost. The 'Hey, nien-nanny' of the Scottish ballad was, under slightly different forms, old and quaint in Shakespeare's time, and in Chaucer's. Still others have the effect upon us of the rhyming prattle invented by children at play. They are cries, naïve or wild, from the age of innocence – cries extracted from the children of nature by the beauty of the world or the sharp and relentless stroke of fate. Of such are 'The broom, the bonnie, bonnie broom,' 'Hey wi' the rose and the lindie o',' 'Blaw, blaw, ye cauld winds blaw,' and their congeners. These sweet and idyllic notes are often interposed in some of the very grimmest of our ballads. They suggest a harping interlude between lines that, without this relief, would be weighted with an intolerable load of horror or sorrow. There are refrain lines – 'Bonnie St. Johnston stands fair upon Tay' is an example – which seem to hint that they may have been borrowed from some old ballad that, except for this preluding or interjected note, has utterly 'sunk dumb.' But more noticeable are those haunting burdens which, in certain moods, seem somehow to have absorbed more of the story than the ballad lines they accompany – that appeal to an inner sense with a directness and poignancy beyond the power of words to which we attach a coherent meaning. 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.

Like the early Christians, the old balladists seem to have believed in community of goods. They had a kind of joint-stock of ideas, epithets, images; and freely borrowed and exchanged among themselves not merely refrains and single lines, but whole verses, passages, and situations. Always frugal in the employment of ornament in his text, the balladist never troubled to invent when he found a descriptive phrase or figure made and lying ready to his hand. Plagiarism from his brother bards was a thing that troubled him no more than repeating himself. He lived and sang in times before the literary conscience had been awakened or the literary canon had been laid down – or at least in places and among company where the fear of these, and of the critic, had never penetrated; and he borrowed, copied, adapted, without any sense of shame or remorse, because without any sense of sin. He has his conventional manner of opening, and his established formula for closing his tale. 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. Sweet William has always been the favourite choice of the balladist, among the Christian names of the knightly wooers. Destiny presides over their first meeting. The king's daughters

'Cast kevils them amang,To see who will to greenwood gang';

and the lot falls upon the youngest and fairest – the youngest is always the fairest and most beloved in the ballad. The note of a bugle horn, and the pair see each other, and are made blessed and undone. Like Celia and Oliver in the Forest of Arden they no sooner look than they sigh; they no sooner sigh than they ask the reason; and as soon as they know the reason they apply the remedy. Or, mounted on 'high horseback,' the lover comes suddenly upon the lady among her sisters or her bower-maidens 'playin' at the ba'.'

'There were three ladies played at the ba',Hey wi' the rose and the lindie O!There cam' a knight and played o'er them a',Where the primrose blooms so sweetly.The knight he looted to a' the three,Hey wi' the rose and the lindie O!But to the youngest he bowed the kneeWhere the primrose blooms so sweetly.'

He sends messages that reach his true love's ear, through the guard of 'bauld barons' and 'proud porters,' by his little footpage, who,

'When he came to broken brig,He bent his bow and swam,And when he came to grass growin',Set down his feet and ran.And when he came to the porter's yett,Stayed neither to chap or ca',But set his bent bow to his breast,And lightly lap the wa'.'

Or the knight comes himself to the bower door at witching and untimely hours – at 'the to-fa' o' the nicht,' or at the crowing of the 'red red cock' – and 'tirles at the pin.' But always treachery, in the shape of envious step-dame, angry brother, or false squire, is watching and listening. Six perils may go past, but the seventh is sure to strike its mark. Even should the course of true love run smoothly almost to the church door, something is sure to happen. Love is hot and swift as flame in the ballads, although it does not waste itself in honeyed phrases. It is quick to take offence; and at a hasty word the lovers start apart,

'Lord Thomas spoke a word in jest,Fair Annet took it ill.'

But more often the bolt comes out of the blue from another and jealous hand. The bride sets out richly apparelled and caparisoned to the tryst with the bridegroom. Her girdle is of gold and her skirts of the cramoisie. Four-and-twenty comely knights ride at her side, and four-and-twenty fair maidens in her train. The very hoofs of her steed are 'shod in front with the yellow gold and wi' siller shod behind.' To every teat of his mane is hung a silver bell, and,

'At every tift o' the norland win'They tinkle ane by ane.'

If the voyage is by sea,

'The masts are a' o' the beaten goldAnd the sails o' the taffetie.'

The old minstrel loved to linger over and repeat these details, and his audience, we may feel sure, never tired of hearing them. But they knew that calamity was coming, and would overtake bride and groom before they had gone, by sea or land,

'A league, a league,A league, but barely three.'

It might be in the shape of storm or flood. One ballad opens:

'Annan Water 's runnin' deep,And my love Annie 's wondrous bonnie,'

and afar off we see what is going to happen. But greater danger than from salt sea wave or 'frush saugh bush' is to be apprehended from the poisoned cup of the slighted rival or the dagger of the jealous brother. The knight had perhaps forgotten when he came courting his love to 'spier at her brither John'; and when she stoops from horseback to kiss this sinister kinsman at parting, he thrusts his sword into her heart. The rosy face of the bride is wan, and her white bodice is full of blood when the gay bridegroom greets her, and he is left 'tearing his yellow hair.' More often, death itself does not sunder these lovers dear:

'Lady Margaret was dead lang e'er midnicht,And Lord William lang e'er day.'

And when they are buried, there springs up from their graves, as has happened in all the ballad lore and märchen of all the Aryan nations:

'Out of the one a bonnie rose bush,And out o' the other a brier,'

that 'met and pleat' in a true lovers' knot in emblem of the immortality of love, as love was in the olden time.

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 peculiar to the genius of our own land and our own ballad literature; and, as has been said, one can with no great difficulty note the characteristic marks of the song of a particular district and even of an individual singer. The romantic ballads of the North, for example, although in no way behind those of the Border in strength and in tenderness, are commonly of rougher texture. They lack often the grace which, in the versions sung in the South, the minstrel knew how to combine with the manly vigour of his song; they are content with assonance where the other must have rhyme; and in many long and popular ballads, such as Tiftie's Annie and Geordie, there is scarcely so much as a good sound rhyme from beginning to end. One sometimes fancies that these Aberdonian ballads bear signs of being 'nirled' and toughened by the stress of the East Wind; they are true products of a keen, sharp climate working upon a deep and rich, but somewhat dour and stiff, historic soil.

Whether they come from the north or the south side of Tay, whether they use up the traditional plots and phrases, or strike out an original line in the story and language, our ballads have all this precious quality, that they reflect transparently the manners and morals of their time, and human nature in all times. Their vast superiority, alike in truth and in beauty, over those imitations of them that were put forward last century as improvements upon the rude old lays, may best be seen, perhaps, by laying the old and the new 'set' of Sir James the Rose side by side, or comparing verse by verse David Mallet's much vaunted William and Margaret, with the beautiful old ballad, There came a ghost to Marg'ret's door. There is indeed no comparison. The changes made are nearly all either tinsel ornaments or mutilations of the traditional text, which an eighteenth century poetaster had sought to dress up to please the modish taste of the period. Nothing can be more out of key with the simple, direct, and graphic style of the Scottish ballads, dealing with elemental emotions and the situations arising therefrom, than a style founded on that of Pope, unless it be the style of the modern poet and romancist of the analytical and introspective school.

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. In the telling of his tale, the minstrel puts off no time in preluding or introductory passages. In a single verse or couplet he has dashed into the middle of his theme, and his characters are already in dramatic parley, exchanging words like sword-thrusts. Take the opening of the immortal Dowie Dens of Yarrow, where the place, time, circumstances, and actors in the fatal quarrel are put swiftly before us in four lines:

'Late at e'en, drinking the wine,And e'er they paid the lawin',They set a combat them between,To fight it e'er the dawin'.'

Or still better example, the not less famous:

'The king sits in Dunfermline tower,Drinking the blood-red wine.Oh, where shall I find a skeely skipperTo sail this ship o' mine.'

Or of Sir James the Rose:

'O, hae ye nae heard o' Sir James the Rose,The young laird o' Balleichan,How he has slain a gallant squireWhose friends are out to take him!'

Or in yet briefer space the whole materials of tragedy are given to us, as in that widely-known and multiform legend of the Twa Sisters which Tennyson took as the basis of his We were two daughters of one race:

'He courted the eldest wi' glove and wi' ring,Binnorie, O Binnorie!But he loved the youngest aboon a' thing,By the bonnie mill dams o' Binnorie.'

Sometimes a brilliant or glowing picture is called up before our eyes by a stroke or two; as —

'The boy stared wild like a grey goshawk,'

or

'The mantle that fair Annie woreIt skinkled in the sun';

or

'And in at her bower windowThe moon shone like a gleed';

or

'O'er his white banes when they are bareThe wind shall sigh for evermair.'

Or, to rise to the height of pity, despair, and terror to which the ballad strains of Scotland have reached, what master of modern realism has surpassed in trenchant and uncompromising power the passages in Clerk Saunders? —

'Then he drew forth his bright long brand,And slait it on the strae,And through Clerk Saunders' bodyHe 's gart cauld iron gae';

and,

'She looked between her and the wa',And dull and drumly were his een.'

Has it ever happened, since the harp of Orpheus drew iron tears down Pluto's cheek, that ruth has taken so grim a form as that of Edom o' Gordon, as he turned over with his spear the body of his victim?

'O gin her breast was white;"I might have spared that bonnie faceTo be some man's delight."'

Is there in the many pages of romance a climax so surprising, so overwhelming – a revelation that in its succinct and despairing candour goes so straight to the quick of human feeling – as that in the ballad of Gil Morice? —

'"I ance was as fu' o' Gil MoriceAs the hip is wi' the stane."'

To the fountainhead of our ballad-lore the great poets and romancists, from Chaucer to Shakespeare, and from Shakespeare to Wordsworth and Swinburne, and from Gavin Douglas to Burns and Scott and Stevenson, have gone for refreshment and new inspiration, when the world was weary and tame and sunk in the thraldom of the vulgar, the formal, and the commonplace; and never without receiving their rich reward and testifying their gratitude by fresh gifts of song and story, fresh harpings on the old lyre that moved the hearts of men to tears and laughter long before they knew of printed books. The old wellspring of music and poetry is still open to all, and has lost none of the old power of thrilling and enthralling; and the present is a time when a long and deep draught from the Scottish ballads seems specially required for the healing of a sick literature.

CHAPTER IV

THE MYTHOLOGICAL BALLAD

'Oh see ye not that bonnie roadThat winds about yon fernie brae?Oh that 's the road to fair ElflandWhere you and I this day maun gae.'Thomas the Rhymer.

No scheme of ballad classification can be at all points complete and satisfactory. We have seen that it is impossible to classify the Scottish ballads according to authorship, since authors, known and proved, there are none. Scarce more practicable is it to arrange them in any regular order of chronology or locality; and even when we seek to group them with regard to type and subject, difficulties start up at every step. A convenient and intelligible division would seem to be one that recognised the ballads as Mythological, Romantic, or Historical, this last class including the lays of the foray and the chase, that cannot be assigned to any particular date – that cannot, indeed, be proved to have any historical basis at all – but can yet, with more or less of probability, be assigned to some historical or quasi-historical character. Besides these, there are groups of ballads that cannot be wholly overlooked – ballads in which, contrary to the prevailing spirit of this kind of poetry, Humour asserts itself as an essential element; ballads of the Sea; and Peasant ballads, of which, perhaps, England yields happier examples than Scotland – simple rustic ditties, hawked about in broad-sheets, and dating, many of them, no earlier than the present century, that seldom rise much above the doggerel and commonplace, and do not, as a rule, concern themselves with the high personages and high-strung passions of the ballad of Old Romance.

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. 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. Natheless, a broad division into ballads Supernatural, Romantic, and Martial has reason as well as convenience to recommend it; and in a loose and general way such an arrangement should also indicate the comparative age, not indeed of the ballad versions as we know them, but of the ideas and materials of which they are composed.

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 Unknown and the Unseen surrounded him on every side. He could scarcely put forth a hand without touching things that were not of this world; and in proportion to the ignorance was the fear. 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. It was a narrow way, between 'the Ditch and the Quag, and past the very mouth of the Pit,' full of frightful sights and dreadful noises, of hobgoblins, and dragons, and chimeras dire. Tales that have ceased to frighten the nursery, that we listen to with a smile or at most with a pleasant stirring of the blood and titillation of the nerves, once on a time were the terror of grown men. The ogres and dragons of old are dead, and the Folklorist and the Comparative Mythologist make free of their caves, and are busy setting up, comparing, classifying, and labelling their skeletons for the instruction of an age of science. But there was a time when the wisest believed in their existence as an article of faith, and when the boldest shuddered to hear them named. What are now idle fancies were once the most portentous of realities; and in this lies the secret of the almost universal diffusion of certain typical tales, beliefs, and observances, and of the fascination which they have not ceased to exercise over the imagination of mankind.

Into the subject of the origins, the relationships, and the signification of these venerable traditions and superstitions of the race and of all races, there is neither time nor occasion for entering. This oldest and yet last found of the realms of science is as yet only in course of being surveyed, and from day to day fresh discoveries are announced by the eager explorers of the darkling provinces of myth and folktale. But this at least may be said, that not in the wide domain of popular saga and poetry can there be reaped a richer or more varied harvest of weird and wild and beautiful fancies, touched by the light that 'never was on sea or land,' than is to be found in the Scottish ballads.

From among them one could gather out a whole menagerie of the 'selcouth' beasts and birds and creeping things that have been banished from solid earth into the limbo of Faëry and Romance. They furnish examples of nearly all the root-ideas and typical tales which folklorists have discovered in the vast jungle of popular legends and superstitions – the Supernatural Birth, the Life and Faith Tokens, the Dragon Slayer, the Mermaid and the Despised Sister, Bluebeard of the Many Wives, the Well of Healing, the Magic Mirror, the Enchanted Horn, the Singing Bone, the Babes in the Wood, the Blabbing Popinjay, the Counterpart, the Transformation, the Spell, the Prophecy, the Riddle, the Return from the Grave, the Dead Ride, the Demon Lover, the Captivity in Faëryland, the Seven Years' Kain to Hell, and a host of others.

Certain of them, like Thomas the Rhymer and Young Tamlane, are 'fulfilléd all of Faëry.' One can read in them how deeply the old superstition, which some would attribute to a traditional memory of the pre-Aryan inhabitants of Western Europe – to the 'barrow-wights,' pigmies, or Pechts who dwelt in or were driven for shelter to caves and other underground dwellings of the land – had struck its roots in the popular fancy. Probably Mr. Andrew Lang carries us as far as we can go at present in the search for origins and affinities, when he says that the belief in fairies, and in their relatives, the gnomes and brownies, is 'a complex matter, from which tradition, with its memory of earth-dwellers, is not wholly absent, while more is due to a survival of the pre-Christian Hades, and to the belief in local spirits – the Vius of Melanesia, the Nereids of ancient and modern Greece, the Lares of Rome, the fateful Mæræ and Hathors – old imaginings of a world not yet dispeopled of its dreams.' The elfin-folk of the Scottish ballads have some few traits that are local and national; but, on the whole, they conform pretty closely to a type that has now become well marked in the literature as well as in the popular beliefs of European countries. The fairies have been, among the orders of supernatural beings, the pets and favourites of the poets, who have heaped their flowers of fancy above the graves of the departed Little Folk. We suspect that the more graceful and gracious touches in the Fairy Ballad are the renovating work of later hands than the elder balladist; and in the two typical Scottish examples that have been mentioned, it is not difficult to find the mark of Sir Walter.