Part 2

Percy's opening remarks, attributing the ballads to the minstrels, are as well known as the scoffs of the hard-hitting Joseph Ritson, who contemptuously dismissed Percy's theories,[4] and refused to believe any ballad to be of earlier origin than the reign of Elizabeth. Sir Walter Scott was quite ready to accept the ballads as the productions of the minstrels, either as 'the occasional effusions of some self-taught bard,' or as abridged from the tales of tradition after the days when, as Alfred de Musset says, 'our old romances spread their wings of gold towards the enchanted world.'

[Footnote 4: 'The truth really lay between the two, for neither appreciated the wide variety covered by a common name' (_The Mediaeval Stage_, E. K. Chambers, 1903). See especially chapters iii. and iv. of this work for an admirably complete and illuminating account of minstrelsy.]

This brings us nearer to our own day. The argument is not closed, although we can discern offers of concession from either side. Svend Grundtvig, editor of the enormous collection of Danish ballads, distinguished the ballad from all forms of artistic literature, and would have the artist left out of sight; Nyrop and the Scandinavian scholars, on the other hand, entirely gave up the notion of communal authorship. Howbeit, the trend of modern criticism,[5] on the whole, is towards a common belief regarding most ballads, which may be stated again, in Professor Child's words: 'Though a man and not a people has composed them, still the author counts for nothing, and it is not by mere accident, but with the best reason, that they have come down to us anonymous.'

[Footnote 5: For the most recent discussions, see Bibliography, p. lii.]

+III. The Growth of Ballads.+

Let us then picture, however vaguely and uncertainly, the growth of a ballad. It is well known that the folklores of the various races of the world exhibit common features, and that the beliefs, superstitions, tales, even conventionalities of expression, of one race, are found to present constant and remarkable similarities to those of another. Whether these similarities are to be held mere coincidences, or whether they are to be explained by the theory of a common ancestry in the cradle of the world, is a side-issue into which I do not intend to enter. Suffice it that the fact is true, especially of the peoples who speak the Indo-European tongues. The lore which has for its foundation permanent and universal acceptance in the hearts of mankind is preserved by tradition, and remains independent of the criteria applied instinctively and unconsciously to artistic compositions. The community is one at heart, one in mind, one in method of expression. Tales are recited, verses chanted, and the singer of a clan makes his version of a popular story. Simultaneously other singers, it may be of other clans of the same race, or of another race altogether, elaborate their versions of the common theme. Meanwhile the first singer has again recited or chanted his ballad, and, having forgotten the exact wording, has altered it, and perhaps introduced improvements. The same happens in the other cases. The various audiences carry away as much as they can remember, and recite their versions, again with individual omissions, alterations, and additions. Thus, by ever-widening circles, the tale is distributed in countless forms over an unlimited area. The elements of the story remain, wholly or in part, while the literary clothing is altered according to the 'taste and fancy' of the reciter. The lore is now traditional, whether it be in prose, as Maerchen, or in verse, as ballad. And so it remains in oral circulation--and therefore still liable to variation--until it is written down or printed. It is left 'masterless,' unsigned; for of the original author's composition, may be, only a word or two remains. It has passed through many mouths, and has been made over countless times. But once written down it ceases _virum volitare per ora_; the invention of printing has spoiled the powers of man's memory.

We can now take up the tale at the fifteenth century; let us henceforth confine our attention to England. It is agreed on all sides that the fifteenth century was the period when, in England at least, the ballads first became a prominent feature. Of historical ballads, _The Hunting of the Cheviot_ was probably composed as early as 1400 or thereabouts. The romances contemporaneously underwent a change, and took on a form nearer to that of the ballad. Whatever may be the date of the origin of the subject-matter, the literary clothing--language, mode of expression, colour--of no ballad, as we now have it, is much, earlier than 1400. The only possible exceptions to this statement are one or two of the Robin Hood ballads--attributed to the thirteenth century by Professor Child, but _adhuc sub judice_--and a ballad of sacred legend--_Judas_--which exists in a thirteenth-century manuscript in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge.

During the fifteenth century, the ballads, still purely narrative, were cast abroad through the length and breadth of the land, undergoing continual changes, modifications, enlargements, for better or for worse. They told of romance and chivalry, of historical, quasi-historical, and mythico-historical deeds, of the traditions of the Church and sacred legend, and of the lore that gathers round the most popular of heroes, Robin Hood. The earliest printed English ballad is the _Gest of Robyn Hode_, which now remains in a fragment of about the end of the fifteenth century.

The sixteenth century continued the process of the popularisation of ballads. Minstrels, who, as a class, had been slowly perishing ever since the invention of printing, were now vagrants, and the profession was decadent. Towards the end of the century we hear of Richard Sheale, whom we may describe as the first of the so-called 'Last of the Minstrels.' He describes himself as a minstrel of Tamworth, his business being to chant ballads and tell tales. We know that the ballad of _The Hunting of the Cheviot_ was part of his repertory, for he wrote down his version, which is still preserved in the Ashmolean MSS. At the end of the sixteenth century the minstrels had fallen, in England at least, into entire degradation. In 1597, Percy notes, a statute of Elizabeth was passed including 'minstrels, wandering abroad,' amongst the other 'rogues, vagabonds, and sturdy beggars'; and fifty years later Cromwell made a very similar ordinance.[6]

[Footnote 6: But these were only re-enactments of existing laws. See Chambers, _Mediaeval Stage,_ i. p. 54.]

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. Chappell mentions that seven hundred and ninety-six ballads remained at the end of 1560 in the cupboards of the council-chamber of the Stationers' Company for transference to the new wardens of the succeeding year. These, of course, would consist chiefly of broadsides: the narrations of strange events, monstrosities, or 'true tales' of the day.

It is true that many of the genuine popular ballads were rewritten to suit contemporary taste. But the style of the seventeenth century ballads cannot be compared to the noble straightforwardness and simplicity of the ancient ballad. Let us place side by side the first stanza of the _Hunting of the Cheviot_ and the first few verses of _Fair Rosamond_, a very fair specimen of Deloney's work.

The popular ancient ballad wastes no time on preliminaries[7]:--

[Footnote 7: A good notion of the way in which the old ballads plunge _in medias res_ may be obtained by reading the Index of First Lines.]

'The Perse owt off Northombarlonde And avowe to God mayd he, That he wold hunte in the mowntayns Off Chyviat within days thre, In the magger of doughte Dogles; And all that ever with him be.'

Now for the milk-and-water:--

'Whenas King Henry rulde this land, The second of that name, Besides the queene, he dearly lovde A faire and comely dame.

Most peerlesse was her beautye founde, Her favour and her face; A sweeter creature in this worlde Could never prince embrace.

Her crisped lockes like threads of golde Appeard to each man's sight; Her sparkling eyes, like Orient pearles, Did cast a heavenly light.'

Ritson's taste actually led him, in comparing the above two first verses, to prefer the latter.

Or again we might contrast _Sir Patrick Spence_--

'The King sits in Dumferling towne Drinking the blude reid wine: "O whar will I get a guid sailor, To sail this ship of mine?"'

with the _Children in the Wood_:--

'Now ponder well, you parents deare, These wordes, which I shall write; A doleful story you shall heare, In time brought forth to light.'

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. They were written by hacks for the press, sold in the streets, and pasted on the walls of houses or rooms: Jamieson had a copy of _Young Beichan_ which he picked off a wall in Piccadilly. They were generally ornamented with crude woodcuts, remarkable for their artistic shortcomings and infidelity to nature. Dr. Johnson's well-known lines--though in fact a caricature of Percy's _Hermit of Warkworth_--ingeniously parody their style:--

'As with my hat upon my head, I walk'd along the Strand, I there did meet another man, With his hat in his hand.'

Broadside ballads, including a few of the genuine ancient ballads, still enjoy a certain popularity. The once-famous Catnach Press still survives in Seven Dials, and Mr. Such, of Union Street in the Borough, still maintains what is probably the largest stock of broadsides now in existence, including _Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight_ (or _May Colvin_), perhaps the most widely dispersed ballad of any.

Minstrels of all sorts were by this time nearly extinct, in person if not in name; their successors were the vendors of broadsides. Nevertheless, survivors of the genuine itinerant reciters of ballads have been discovered at intervals almost to the present day. Sir Walter Scott mentions a person who 'acquired the name of Roswal and Lillian, from singing that romance about the streets of Edinburgh' in 1770 or thereabouts. He further alludes to 'John Graeme, of Sowport in Cumberland, commonly called the Long Quaker, very lately alive.' Ritson mentions a minstrel of Derbyshire, and another from Gloucester, who chanted the ballad of _Lord Thomas and Fair Eleanor_. In 1845 J. H. Dixon wrote of several men he had met, chiefly Yorkshire dalesmen, not vagrants, but with a local habitation, who at Christmas-tide would sing the old ballads. One of these was Francis King, known then throughout the western dales of Yorkshire, and still remembered, as 'the Skipton Minstrel.' After a merry Christmas meeting, in the year 1844, he walked into the river near Gargrave, in Craven, and was drowned. In Gargrave church-yard lie the remains of perhaps the actual 'last of the minstrels.'[8]

[Footnote 8: Unless we may attribute that distinction to the blind Irish bard Raftery, who flourished sixty years ago. See various accounts of him given by Lady Gregory (_Poets and Dreamers_) and W. B. Yeats (_The Celtic Twilight_, 1902). But he appears to have been more of an improviser than a reciter.]

+IV. Collectors and Editors.+

Now a word or two as to the collectors and editors. To take the broadsides first, the largest collections are at Magdalene College, Cambridge (eighteen hundred broadsides collected by Selden and Pepys), in the Bodleian at Oxford, and in the British Museum. The Bodleian contains collections made by Anthony-a-Wood, Douce, and Rawlinson; the British Museum, the great Roxburghe and Bagford collections, which have been reprinted and edited by William Chappell and the Rev. J. W. Ebsworth for the Ballad Society, as well as other smaller volumes of ballads.

But it is not among the broadsides that our noblest ballads are found. The first attempt to collect popular ballads was made by the compiler of three volumes issued in 1723 and 1725. The editor is said to have been Ambrose Phillips, whose name and style combined to produce the word 'namby-pamby.' Next came Allan Ramsay, with 'the _Evergreen_, a collection of Scots poems wrote by the ingenious before 1600.'--'By the ingenious,' we note; not by the 'elegant.' The tide is already beginning to turn; pitch-forked Nature will ever come back. Followed the _Tea-Table Miscellany_, also compiled by Allan Ramsay, which contained about twenty popular ballads, the rest being songs and ballads of modern composition. The texts were, of course, chopped about and pruned to suit contemporary taste. It was still necessary to adopt an apologetic attitude on behalf of these barbarous and crude relics of antiquity.

These books paved the way to the great literary triumph of the century. The first edition of Percy's _Reliques_ was issued in three volumes, in 1765. He received for it one hundred guineas, instant popularity and patronage, and subsequently, the gratitude of succeeding centuries.

Nevertheless, Percy himself was so far under the influence of his contemporaries that he felt it necessary to adopt the apologetic attitude. In his preface he wrote:-- 'In a polished age like the present, I am sensible that many of these reliques of antiquity will require great allowances to be made for them.' And again:-- 'To atone for the rudeness of the more obsolete poems, each volume concludes with a few modern attempts in the same kind of writing; and to take off from the tediousness of the longer narratives, they are everywhere intermingled with little elegant pieces of the lyrical kind.' In short, he could not trust that large child, the people of England, to take its dose of powder without the conventional treacle. To vary the metaphor, his famous Folio Manuscript he regarded as a Cinderella, and in his capacity as fairy godmother refused to introduce her to the world without hiding the slut's uncouth attire under fine raiment. To which end, besides adding 'little elegant pieces,' he recast and rewrote 'the more obsolete poems,' many of which came direct from the Folio Manuscript. Are we to blame him for yielding to the taste of his day?

He did not satisfy every one. Ritson's immediate outcry is famous--and Ritson stood almost alone. He did, indeed, go so far as to deny the existence of the Folio Manuscript, and Percy was forced to confute him by producing it. In the later editions of the _Reliques_, Percy sought to conciliate him by revising his texts, so as to approximate them more closely to his originals, but still Ritson cried out for the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. And by this time he had supporters. But the whole truth as regards the Folio was not to be divulged yet. The manuscript was most jealously guarded.

Meanwhile the influence of the publication was having its effect. The poetry of the schools, the poetry of the intellect, the poetry of art, brought to its highest pitch by writers like Dryden and Pope, was shelved; metrically exact diction, artificiality of expression, carefully balanced antitheses, and all the mechanical devices of the school were placed in abeyance. There was a general return to Nature, to simplicity, to straightforwardness--not without imagination, however. Wordsworth, besides insisting, in a famous passage, the Preface to the _Lyrical Ballads_, on the spontaneity of good poetry, recorded his tribute to the _Reliques_: 'I do not think that there is an able writer in verse of the present day who would not be proud to acknowledge his obligation to the _Reliques_.' While failing often to catch the gusto of ancient poetry--witness his translations from Chaucer--Wordsworth was full of the spirit--witness his rifacimento of _The Owl and the Nightingale_--and, best of all, handed it on to Coleridge.[9] These two fought side by side against the conventions of the preceding century, against Dryden, Addison, Pope, and last, but not least, Johnson. Some have gone so far as to place the definite turning-point in the year 1798, the year of the publication of the _Lyrical Ballads_. Coleridge's _annus mirabilis_ was 1797, and the publication of _The Ancient Mariner_ is significant of the change. But we need not bind ourselves down to any given year. Enough that the revolution was effected, and that it is scarcely exaggeration to say that it was almost entirely due to the publication of the _Reliques_.

[Footnote 9: 'He [Coleridge] said the _Lyrical Ballads_ were an experiment about to be tried by him and Wordsworth, to see how far the public taste would endure poetry written in a more natural and simple style than had hitherto been attempted; totally discarding the artifices of poetical diction, and making use only of such words as had probably been common in the most ordinary language since the days of Henry II.'--_Hazlitt._]

Sir Walter Scott remembered to the day of his death the place where he first made acquaintance with the _Reliques_ in his thirteenth year. 'I remember well the spot where I read those volumes for the first time. It was beneath a large platanus-tree, in the ruins of what had been intended for an old-fashioned arbour in the garden I have mentioned. The summer day sped onward so fast, that, notwithstanding the sharp appetite of thirteen, I forgot the hour of dinner, was sought for with anxiety, and was still found entranced in my intellectual banquet.'

Almost immediately competitors appeared in the field, and especial attention was given to Scotland, exceedingly rich ground, as it proved. In 1769, David Herd published his collection of _Ancient and Modern Scots Songs, Heroic Ballads, etc._ Then, at intervals of two or three years only, came the compilations of Evans, Pinkerton, Ritson, Johnson; in 1802 Sir Walter Scott's _Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border_, fit to be placed side by side with the _Reliques_; in 1806 Jamieson's _Popular Ballads and Songs_; then Finlay, Gilchrist, Laing, and Utterson. In 1828 the egregious Peter Buchan produced _Ancient Ballads and Songs of the North of Scotland, hitherto unpublished_. Buchan hints that he kept a pedlar or beggarman--'a wight of Homer's craft'--travelling through Scotland to pick up ballads; and one of the two--probably Buchan--must have been possessed of powerful inventive faculties. Each of Buchan's ballads is tediously spun out to enormous and unnecessary length, and is filled with solecisms and inanities quite inconsistent with the spirit of the true ballad. But Buchan undoubtedly gained fresh material, however much he clothed it; and his ballads are now reprinted, as Professor Child says, for much the same reason that thieves are photographed.

Scotland continued the work with two excellent students and pioneers, George Kinloch and William Motherwell. Next, Robert Chambers published a collection of eighty ballads, some being spurious. This was in 1829. Thirty years later Chambers came to the conclusion that 'the high-class romantic ballads of Scotland ... are not older than the early part of the eighteenth century, and are mainly, if not wholly, the production of one mind.' And this one mind, he thinks, was probably that of Elizabeth, Lady Wardlaw, the acknowledged forger of the ballad _Hardyknute_, which deceived so many. Chambers, of course, was absurdly mistaken.

So the work of collecting and editing progressed through the nineteenth century, till it culminated in the final edition of Professor Child's _English and Scottish Popular Ballads_. But even this is scarcely his greatest benefaction to the study of ballads. We must confess that had it not been for the insistence of this American scholar, the Percy Folio Manuscript would remain a sealed book. For six years Professor Child persecuted Dr. Furnivall, who persecuted in turn the owners of the Folio, even offering sums of money, for permission to print the MS. Eventually they succeeded, and not only succeeded in giving to the world an exact reprint,[10] but also once for all secured the precious original for the British Museum, where it now remains.[11]

[Footnote 10: _Bishop Percy's Folio Manuscript_, edited by J. W. Hales and F. J. Furnivall, 4 vols., 1867-8. Printed for the Early English Text Society and subscribers.]

[Footnote 11: Additional MS. 27, 879.]

And what is this manuscript? In brief, it is an example of the commonplace books which abounded in the seventeenth century. But it is unique in containing a large proportion of early romances and ballads, as well as the lyrics of the day. Of the hundreds of commonplace books made during that century, no other example is known which contains such matter, for the obvious and simple reason that such matter was despised.[12] The handwriting is put by experts at about 1650; it cannot be much later, and one song in it contains a passage which fixes the date of that song to the year 1643. Percy discovered the book 'lying dirty on the floor under a bureau in the parlour' of his friend Humphrey Pitt of Shifnal, in Shropshire, 'being used by maids to light the fire.' Mr. Pitt's fires were lighted with half-pages torn out from incomparably early and precious versions of certain Robin Hood and other ballads. Percy notes that he was very young when he first got possession of the MS., and had not then learned to reverence it. When he put it into boards to lend to Dr. Johnson, the bookbinder pared the margins, and cut away top and bottom lines. In editing the _Reliques_, Percy actually tore out pages 'to save the trouble of transcribing.' In spite of all, it remains a unique and inestimably valuable manuscript. Its writer was presumably a Lancashire man, from his use of certain dialect words, and was assuredly a man of slight education; nevertheless a national benefactor.

[Footnote 12: Cp. _Love's Labour's Lost_:--

+Armado.+ Is there not a ballad, boy, of the King and the Beggar?

+Moth.+ The world was very guilty of such a ballad some three ages since; but I think now 'tis not to be found.]