CHAPTER III
BALLADS AND THE ILLITERATE
"A ballad," says F. Sidgwick, "is, and always lias been, so far from being a literary form that it is in its essentials not literary, and it, we shall see, has no single form. It is of a genre not only older than the Epic, older than Tragedy, but older than literature, older than the alphabet. It is lore, and belongs to the illiterate." 1 "You cannot write a popular ballad; in truth you cannot even write it down. At best you can but record a number of variants, and in the act of writing each one down you must remember that you are helping to kill that ballad." Professor Gummere speaks of "The homogeneous and unlettered state of the ballad-makers" and remarks that "Indeed, paper and ink, the agents of preservation in the case of ordinary verse, are for ballads the agents of destruction." 2 Professor Charles S. Baldwin refers to "unrecorded tales; tales not written but sung; tales composed, not for gentlefolk, but for the common unlettered people. These are the ballads." "Beginning in whatever way among the common people," he continues, "they were cherished, circulated, and handed down among the common people." 3
1 The Ballad, pp. 7, 39.
2 The Popular Ballad, and "Ballads " in A Library of the World's Best Literature.
3 English Mediaval Literature, pp. 242, 331.
87
When contemporary English and American scholars speak of " ballads" they have reference to narrative songs of the character of those included by Professor F. J. Child in his English and Scottish Popular Ballads. Although Professor Child's name, "popular" ballads, is much the safer name, it is customary to speak of the pieces in his collection as "traditional" ballads, and to think of oral preservation as a test of their inclusion. In fact, it is pretty widely customary at the present time to exaggerate the part played by oral tradition in preserving these pieces, to endow it, as it were, with a monopoly which it should not have, and to be over-insistent upon the association of them with the illiterate. In consequence, it is also customary to speak with misleading certainty as to their origins, and as to the humble and unlettered character of the audience to whom they were addressed, and to place emphasis upon their total lack of literary quality.
It may be well as a corrective to re-examine some of their characteristics. Let us look first at the sources of their recovery, recalling as a preliminary a few more of the accepted generalizations. "The important fact of ballad transmission," says Professor Walter Morris Hart, "is their singing or recitation from memory by people who do not read or write." * "Our typical ballads," says Professor G. H. Stempel, " have come to us pretty straight from unlettered people living in out of the way places, people of no converse with literature." 5 Or, to quote from Professor Gummere, "The ballad ... is a narrative lyric handed down from generation to generation of a homogeneous and unlettered community,"; and "...
* English Popular Ballads (1916), p. 47. 5 A Book of Ballads (1917), p. xxiii.
Oral transmission, the test of the ballad, is, of course, nowhere possible save in an unlettered community." 6
I SOURCES OF RECOVERY
Some of Professor Child's texts have been recovered from oral tradition of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in England and Scotland. Yet a surprising number, in fact, the majority of the best texts, have not come from oral sources. They have been preserved in books, or printed sheets, or manuscripts. Some of his most valuable sources for ballads were the Pepys Manuscript and the Percy Manuscript; and neither Pepys nor Percy cared only for oral sources, or even mainly for them, when they were gathering their pieces together. Professor Child, like his predecessors, drew also upon Elizabethan and later song-books, or Garlands, and he derived a large number of his texts from printed broadsides. In much the same way, in contemporary collections of folk-songs, made in our own country, some of the best " finds" have come from manuscript books, into which, like the Elizabethan song-lovers, the owners copied their favorite pieces. Such transcriptions have helped to preserve innumerable valuable texts. Contrary to the belief of many leading scholars, reduction to print does not "kill" good ballads, but helps to keep them alive. Insistence upon oral transmission, as an essential for their inclusion, would have barred a majority of Professor Child's best texts. It is hardly exaggeration to affirm that the most effective texts in the Child collection are those which have least claim to oral transmission.
• The Popular Ballad, p. 13; "Ballads" in Library of the World's Best Literature, U, p. 1307.
Even when typical ballads have been recovered from oral tradition, such recovery is not usually from the most unlettered or even from people of average gifts; but rather from special individuals. More likely than not, they are those among their immediate circle having the most vigorous minds and the best memories — those of outstanding rather than humble personality. Every collector of folklore knows the experience of coming upon these special people and deriving from them his best texts. The celebrated Mrs. Brown of Falkland, that source par excellence of superior ballads, was no spokesman of a humble and homogeneous society but the daughter of an Aberdeen professor and the wife of Dr. Brown, minister of Falkland. She learned her ballads by hearing them sung by her mother or by an old maid-servant. "Mrs. Brown," says Dr. Robert Anderson in his letter to Bishop Percy, "is fond of ballad poetry, writes verses, and reads everything in the marvellous way." 7 Mrs. Brown was far from illiterate, but it would never do to rule out her ballads from the Child collection. The gap would be great. Even had Mrs. Brown somehow derived her songs ultimately from the peasantry, the likelihood would remain that they were not songs originating among the peasantry and carried over the borders of some local community to pass down from generation to generation. They were probably the popular songs, mediaeval in style, of a period long antecedent,
i John Nichols, Illustrations of the Literary History of the Eighteenth Century, vol. vii. (1848), pp. 88-90.
The body of Danish ballads, collected by Grundtvig, comes mostly from the manuscripts of noble Danish ladies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, who wrote them down as they were current in aristocratic usage. Though less cultured than Mrs. Brown, these ladies were far from humble and illiterate.
forgotten in their original homes and lingering in her day only in the byways. In general, the fact that songs have been preserved in remote districts and among the humble, is no proof that they were composed in such places and by such people, spreading from local improvisation into wider currency; but it is rather proof of the contrary. The popular songs for entertainment in social centres, the current songs of upper life, or of the main population, soon fade from the knowledge of the audiences which knew them first, to be replaced by those of later composition. At the point of emergence for popular song, lateness is an asset. But by the time that new songs have won currency on the stage, or in the city, or let us say, in the castle, or the market-place, or the ale-house, or the fair — the old have found their way into remote places and are likely to persist there, especially among that more fixed and sheltered element of the population, the women. As for the crude pieces that the "people" sometimes improvise — not very often or very characteristically at that8 — they lack memorable quality except as they borrow from or are based upon better pieces; and they lack impetus for, and modes of, diffusion. Where something of the kind may be studied now, in existing society, observation shows that such pieces, whether composed by cowboys or ranchmen or lumbermen or negroes, or in social gatherings of the more sophisticated, are those which are soonest to die. Certainly the songs which are most vigorous among such peoples are those reaching them in some other way, with a pedigree of bygone vogue behind them. The real songs emerging from the unlettered are too crude, ungram
s Usually they are very short, and often some kind of personal satire or lampoon, and are based on some familiar model.
matical, fragmentary, uninteresting to attract any one but the student of folk-song. And usually he, too, passes them by; for mostly he is stalking or seeking to salvage pieces of older style and obviously pedigreed.
To bring up a few examples, when we first hear of Barbara Allen, it is a stage song, liked by Samuel Pepys: "In perfect pleasure I was to hear her [Mrs. Knipps, an actress] sing her little Scotch song of Barbara, Allen." A hundred years later, Goldsmith heard it from " our old dairymaid." Today, if we are to hear some of the popular songs, sentimental or martial, romantic or political of the Civil War, we are more likely to come upon them among villagers, surviving in remote and conservative communities, than we are in the circles which knew them first. After the Ball was a popular stage song in the 1890's. It is still vigorous in village communities and on western ranches, though it long ago died out in the city parlor and on the stage. The sentimental Lorena, which had tremendous vogue in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, lingers as a favorite song among mid-western cowboys. One of the ballads in Fletcher's Knight of the Burning Pestle, There was a Romish Lady, of Paris properly, can be identified as the ancestor of a but slightly mutilated, authorless narrative in the ballad style, existing in manuscript song-books in the Central West, and having faint currency elsewhere.
It is to be expected surely that an older type of English song, mediaeval in style,— replaced by another style and another set of characters after the advent of printing and the break-up of mediaeval conditions,— should linger among nursemaids and "ancient dames," among the spinners, pipers, shepherds, and weavers of remoter communities, often with singular fidelity of text. But it should not be taken as evidence that those from whom they are recovered were either the creators or the inspirers of them.
It is surprising that this should need emphasis; but in general, the process in literature, as in language, in games, in social usages and often in manner of garb, is likely to be a downward process, from the higher to the lower, rather than one of ascent from lower to higher. Here are some random illustrations. The game of "tag" now lingering only among children, was according to W. W. Newell the diversion of maids of honor in the days of Elizabeth; and similarly, the knightly practice of holding tournaments now survives only in the game usage of children. Pepys's stage song of Barbara Allen was used sometimes as a play-party song early in the nineteenth century in New England. The Maid Freed from the Gallows has been used in children's games. On the whole the best examples of the sinking from higher to lower may be seen in the texts of the ballads themselves.9 Lord Randal has become in America, Jimmy Randall, Johnny Randall, Jimmy Ramble, Jimmy Randolph, and the like; he has sunk to the social class of those who sing of him.10 The Two Brothers, Sir John and Sir Hugh, of the Scotch ballad have passed, in some American versions, into two little Western schoolboys. The game song Here Comes Three Dukes A-Roving has become in the Central West, Here Comes Three Ducks A-Roving. To pass to an
• The contrary process, bringing improvement, is very rare. An example is Mr. C. J. Sharp's text of the American negro ballad John Hardy, improved by incorporating some stanzas from The Lass of Roch Royal. See also J. H. Cox, John Hardy, in The Journal of American Folk-Lore, vol. xxxn, p. 505. 1919.
i« See pp. 122, 196.
illustration from language, the pronoun you, the plural of thou, had its origin, when applied to one person, in the usage of the Roman Emperors, who liked to be addressed as counting for more than one human being. Then it became a courtesy-form in the usage of aristocratic Europe. In English speech, it has now been generalized for all classes, even the humblest, and the old singular has disappeared from the everyday language. But no one who addresses a single person as you recalls the Roman Emperors, or the aristocrats of Europe from whom this usage is derived.11
It forces the plausibilities to assume that village throngs evolved the type exemplified by pieces like Lord Thomas and Fair Annet, King Estmere, Lord Lovel, Marie Hamilton, Lady Isabel, Lady Maisry, and all the other ballads,
11 Some further examples of the same process are easily cited. Riddles were a highly literary type of literature in the Old English period; compare the Mnigmata of Aldhelm (following Symposius), Taetwine, and Eusebius, and those in the vernacular preserved in the Exeter Book. In Middle English, riddling has lost vogue in higher literature but appears in ballads. The Cupids and Venuses and pierced hearts of the mediaeval and renaissance amourists now linger almost exclusively in popular valentines. A Maypole song, forgotten elsewhere, survives in the ring-games of Georgia negroes (Loraine Darby in Journal of American Folk-Lore, xxx, 1917). Literary animal-tales, as of the frog and the mouse, were common in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. A song, "The moste strange weddinge of the Frogge and the Mouse," was entered in the Stationers' Register in 1580; and the words and music of such a song have come down to us. "The froggie came to the mill door" was sung on the Edinburgh stage in the eighteenth century, according to J. A. H. Murray in his edition of The Oomplaynt of Scotland. "The Frog's Courtship," by the twentieth century, survives only as a nursery song.
Perhaps more significant is the oft-expatiated-upon fact that the debris of pagan religions is found in folk-lore and literature alike.
appropriate in feudal castles, of kings and lords and ladies and their adventures; but it is wholly plausible and the development is easily paralleled if we assume the contrary process, of descent from higher usage to the peasantry, not of ascent from the peasantry to the aristocracy. Yet let it be said once more that the number of texts actually recovered from the peasantry, not from a more lettered source, is customarily exaggerated. In practice, whatever the theories upheld, oral tradition among the humble has never been made an essential for the inclusion of a text among collections of popular song. It has been made no such essential, for example, as anonymity of authorship or as traces of a mediaeval style. Nor, in practice, has recovery from among the unlettered, rather than from some higher or written source, been made an essential for the classification of a narrative song as a popular ballad.
II. AUDIENCE AND AUTHOKSHIP AS MIRBORED IN
THE BAIXADS
Special emphasis is often placed upon the social solidarity of the period from which the popular ballads emerged. Professor F. J. Child had in mind the English and Scottish ballads when he wrote, "The condition of society in which a truly national or popular poetry appears explains the character of such poetry. It is a condition in which the people are not divided by political organization and book culture into markedly distinct classes, in which, consequently there is such community of ideas and feelings that the whole people form one individual." 12 Said Professor Henry Beers, "We have to do here with the 12 Article "Ballads" in Johnson's Cyclopaedia.
folk-song, the traditional ballad, product of the people at a time when the people was homogeneous and the separation between lettered and unlettered classes had not yet taken place." 13 "This homogeneous character of the ballad-making folk, by the way, is enough to explain the high rank of most personages in the ballads — princes, knights, and so on," said Professor Gummere.14 Elsewhere he remarked more specificially, "Those high-born people who figure in traditional ballads — Childe Waters, Lady Maisry, and the rest — do not require us to assume composition in aristocratic circles; for the lower classes of the people in the ballad days had no separate literature, and a ballad of the folk belonged to the community as a whole. The same habit of thought, the same standard of action, rules alike the noble and his meanest retainer."
The unmistakable fact is that, judging from the ballads themselves, they were composed primarily for the delectation of the upper classes. The difficulty with the view set forth in the various quotations just cited is that the conditions which they assume do not fit anywhere, at any stage, in the chronology of society. The generalization is not made of primitive peoples, among whom, contrary to the usual view of literary historians, composition is not characteristically "communal" but individual,15 but it
i3 English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century, p. 272.
i* Old English Ballads, Introd. p. xxvii; "Ballads" in A Library of the World's Best Literature, vol. ill, p. 1307. To these citations may be added the opinion of Professor G. L. Kittredge, who believes that the ballads "belonged, in the first instance, to the whole people, at a time when there were no formal divisions of literate and illiterate; when the intellectual interests of all were substantially identical, from the king to the peasant." Introduction to English and Scottish Popular Ballads, p. xii.
15 Compare the views of anthropologists. The institution of the would be far truer of primitive than of mediaeval society. Even for the pre-Norman period, one cannot think of the thrall or serf creating song of the same type as the court scop or the noble. If Gurth in Ivanhoe sang songs, they would not be of the same character as those of Richard Cceur-de-Lion. There was no period when " in a common atmosphere of ignorance, so far as book-lore is concerned, one habit of thought and one standard of action animate every member from prince to ploughboy." Try to imagine Jack Straw's " menye " ruled by the same habit of thought as Chaucer's Squire, or Froissart's Jacquerie by the same standard of action as Froissart himself. Chaucer knows his contemporary society too well to place the same quality of matter in the mouths of his higher and his lower characters. The interests and the tastes of the mediaeval nobility and the mediaeval peasantry were no more identical than were their occupations or their costumes or their destinies in general.
Songs of the adventures of the nobly born, of the deeds of the men of noble houses, were not addressed primarily to throngs of the rural variety, nor were they evolved by such throngs — not even the songs of Robin Hood, for whom the ballads claim noble descent, or whom some of them picture as an outlawed noble. In our earliest reference to him he is placed alongside Randolph, Earl of Chester.16
bard appears in all the earliest Indo-European literatures. There must have been (one would conjecture) ur-Aryan bards. If so, there is here a strong argument for high-born literary tradition. i8 Piers Plowman, B text:
"I cannot perfectly my paternoster, as the priest it singeth,
But I can rhymes of Robin Hood and Randolph, Earl of Chester." Whether these "rhymes" were or were not ballads, or ballads of the Child type, it is impossible to determine.
The very formula of introduction, used in the Geste, " Lyth and listen, gentlemen," suggests that his adventures originally entertained the higher not the lower classes. Robin Hood Newly Revived calls upon "gentlemen ... in this bower" to listen. Robin is as "courteous" as a knight errant "So curteyse as outlawe as he was one" was never found, says the Geste, and he is as devoted to " our lady" as the most chivalrous knight.17 But most of the ballads have much more of the aristocratic in them than do the ballads of Bobin Hood. Where we have the genuine improvisations of the unlettered, they deal always with themselves, or with happenings of near interest, in their own region, or involving their own circle, not with the interests and adventures and experiences of a widely severed class — the governing class.18 If the peasant throngs of the Middle Ages improvised songs we can imagine pretty well the crude character of their improvisations, and their themes. They did not concern the love affairs of the nobly born, and knightly doings in hall and bower. Nor did they concern the exploits of nobles. It is known that the great houses of mediaeval England and Scotland kept their own hereditary family bards, who composed pieces to be recited or sung, not for existence in written form, and their themes were the feats of their clan or of the noble houses with which they were
17 In any case, it will hardly do to speak of the Robin Hood cycle as "confined to humble tradition and the interest of a class" (Gummere, The Popular Ballad, 271). And alongside the Robin Hood ballads, telling of archery, we should recall Ascham's Toxophilus, celebrating archery, in its decay, for the upper classes, in prose.
w See pp. 153-161.
connected. Professor Firth is probably right19 when he thinks he detects fragments remaining of several cycles — a cycle about the Percys, as the first ballad of Chevy Chase, about the Stanleys, as The Rose of England, and about the Howards, as Flodden Field and Sir Andrew Barton. Such a mode of composition would account, too, for the vitality of these pieces, as well as for their quality. If the men-atarms of the Borderers made their own songs to celebrate their deeds, as Professor Gummere thinks,20 their "com'munal " songs would have had little chance of preservation beside the popular songs, for oral destination, of the bards employed for that purpose, repeated by them on notable occasions and becoming traditional.
The social atmosphere of the ballads is the atmosphere of the upper classes. Certainly no peasant audience or authorship is mirrored in them.21 The picture we get from them is a picture of the life of chivalry, not of the
i» C. H. Firth, The Ballad History of the Reigns of the Later Tudors, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 3d series, vol. m, London, 1909.
20 The Cambridge History of English Literature, n, ch. xvii, p. 453; also The Popular Ballad, p. 250.
21 The earliest reference to The Fair Flower of Northumberland mentions it as sung before the King and the Queen. According to Thomas Deloney (Reprint by R. Sievers, Palaestra, xxv, 1904, Historie of Jno. Winchcomb, p. 195), to whom we owe our earliest text, maidens "in dulcet manner chanted out this song, two of them singing the ditty and all the rest bearing the burden." Seven versions of the ballad have survived in all, but that given by Deloney is the only one that is early. It is also unquestionably the best version. Ophelia's songs in Hamlet are of ballad quality, another evidence of the aristocratic currency and acceptability of ballads in the age of Elizabeth. The popularity of Danish ballads in the highest circles is well known, and when they were first printed it was through the favor of the Queen.
doings of the common people; such as we have, for example, from genuinely " communal " ranch or lumberman or cowboy or fisherman or negro songs today. And the same composers who made heroic and historical narratives for their masculine hearers might well have made romantic and other pieces, on familiar or novel themes, for the delectation of their nobly-born women hearers, or of mixed audiences. Such songs were short, or fairly short, of a type suited for oral recital or for singing or memorizing. The English and Scottish ballads seem to have affiliations with classical narratives, mediaeval romances, scriptural matter, and lives of saints. There are also many plots which, as Professor Ker points out,22 could have existed only as ballad plots; it is as ballads that they seem to have been created, and it is as ballads that they are memorable. Some of them might have been utilized occasionally as dance songs; but if so, this was not typical, and it was not an essential of their composition.
The lowly, as over against the aristocrats, hardly play any part in the English and Scottish ballads; and the ballads which do show non-aristocratic characters are those which would be least missed, if eliminated. One mentions a hostler. Thomas Potts is a serving-man, in the seventeenth century ballad of that name, but he weds a lord's daughter, and is himself ennobled. The Kitchie Boy, who is the hero of another, also weds a lady of noble birth, in a ballad which is a late adaptation of King Horn. Lamkin in the ballad of that name is a mason. Add Richie Story, who marries a footman, although herself an aristocrat, and the list is about exhausted. All are late pieces. The
22 On the History of the Ballads: 1100-1500, Proceedings of the British Academy, vol. IV.
ballads, in due time, like fiction and the drama, were subjected to democratization of characters. Later British balladry stays no longer by the nobly-born for its heroes and heroines. Among mediaeval types of literature the ballad of the Child type was a type which lasted well, but it too finally yielded to later melodies and styles, with other characters and plots. The personages and the stories of mediaeval ballads constitute evidence enough that the "people " did not improvise them, for the songs which the people do improvise, when they can be certainly determined, do not incline to be narratives, and they reflect the immediate horizons of their makers and the limitations of their expression. Folk-throngs cannot produce real narratives, even today, nor do primitive throngs. There is no instance recorded where a collaborating, folk-throng or a primitive throng, for that matter, has produced a memorable song-story. Crude songs, at most pieces of tales rather than tales, are the best they can create. The power to convey a complete story comes late, not at the beginning of lyric art.
The English and Scottish ballads are not so wholly impersonal as one is often assured. The ballad " I " may not often refer to the individuality of the author, but the "I" of the singer or reciter is frequently present. That the majority of the ballads should be impersonal, however, is normal enough, when one considers the purpose for which they were created and the occasions of their delivery. In such poetry everywhere, the singer avoids asserting his own peculiarities and tastes. The epic narratives of the Old English scapas were not personal. Sir Walter Scott's folk-lyrics, tribal, marching, and elegiac, are not the work of a clan, though they sound like it, nor are Kipling's Barrack Room Ballads, nor our national songs, though they exhibit their authors no more than do the ballads. Why should The Battle of Otterboume or The Wife of Usher's Well or Sir Patrick Spens show subjective qualities or parade their composers ?" Nine-tenths of secular music and literature," says E. K. Chambers, "did have its origin in minstrelsy," 23 and the ballads are hardly likely to be an exception. There are references enough to minstrelsy in the pieces themselves. The harper and the minstrel appear in many ballads, while the rustics and villagers and unlettered, from whom we are supposed to derive them, appear not at all.
A look at some of the introductory stanzas of the ballads points to progress toward, not away from, democracy, and the stages of progress are quite parallel to those of literature proper. How the thirteenth and fourteenth-century "rimes" of Robin Hood opened, we do not know, though we can guess. A fairly old opening is this, of Robin Hood and the Shepherd: 24
"All gentlemen and yeomen good, I wish you to draw near." A stock opening of popular songs in the seventeenth century addresses " gallants,"—
"Come all you brave gallants and listen awhile." .
The stage of complete democratization is reached in the English and Irish " Come-all-ye's," as they are often called, of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
23 The Medueval Stage. I, iii and iv. 1903.
2* Introductions of this type seem to point to an inferior addressing superiors — hence to minstrel composition; as the vaudeville conteur today addresses "ladies and gentlemen."
To return from the matter of audience to the matter of authorship, the minstrel theory was held by all the early critics, those nearest to the time when ballads were at their height, and when their history was fresher; and few of the texts are older than the seventeenth or last part of the sixteenth century. The reference is probably to broadside writers when Nicholas Howe in the Prologue to Jane Shore, 1713, wrote:
"Let no nice tastes despise the hapless dame Because recording ballads chant her name. Those venerable ancient song enditers Soared many a pitch above our modern writers." But his statement concerning the superiority of the earlier over the later balladists is true enough. Allan Ramsay, whose Evergreen has been a source of many "genuine" ballads, uses for his sub-title " Scots poems wrote by the ingenious before 1600," implying his belief in individual authorship. Percy and all the Scotch ballad collectors held the minstrel theory. Percy had to subject some of his earlier views to revision, after the criticisms of Ritson; the position between Percy's and Ritson's is the right one, says E. K. Chambers, when writing of the minstrel. Sir Walter Scott, a pretty good antiquary, and nearer to sources of supply, in time and place, than our modern theorists, believed in minstrel authorship. Even Professor Child felt that "the ballad is not originally the product or the property of the common order of people." He states that the ballad is " at its best when it is early caught and fixed in print." He has nothing to say of the origin of ballads in dances or festal throngs, and he does not "rule the minstrel out of court " but allows the inference that ballads were the work of a fraternity whose business it was to provide tales and songs for the amusement of all ranks of society.25 He refers often to the minstrel. The character and the standing of minstrels changed after the introduction of printing and the disappearance of mediaeval conditions. The mediaeval form of minstrelsy broke up in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In general, there were many types of minstrels, higher and lower. Some recited the poetry of others, but they themselves composed pieces of many kinds. There were many types of occasions at which they sang, many types of audiences, and many themes. The evidence, so final to Professor Kittredge, of 26 what they were like in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when they were in their decay, no more shows what any one class of them produced earlier, than the standing of dramatists in the seventeenth century shows what their standing was in the sixteenth; or than seventeenthcentury songs in general or fiction or drama show the character and quality of mediaeval song or fiction or drama. Grant that minstrels were the authors of any proportion of the ballads admitted by Professor Child into his collection, and it is an admission that there is no fundamental distinction plainly differentiating the "true" ballad, in origin and style, from other types of ballads and songs. As we have them, the ballads had many origins, and they show in subject-matter affiliations with many varieties of oral recital or songs adapted for popular entertainment.
One important distinction must be borne in mind, how
25 W. M. Hart, Professor Child and the Ballad, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, vol. xxi., 1906, pp. 757, 764, etc.
*• Introduction to English and Scottish Popular Ballads, p. xxiii.
ever; and it is hard to see why it has not been pointed out many times by students of folk-song, to the clearing-up of much confusion. The songs which impress the folk and find vitality among them are not the uninteresting and nearly negligible kind of thing which they are able to produce themselves. Popular poetry likes to remember the extraordinary, not the near at hand — though it may make over the remote till it seems near at hand — and the unusual not the usual person.27 It keeps alive songs of Robin Hood, of the Percy and the Douglas, of Captain Kidd, of Jesse James, John Brown, or Casey Jones. It likes the strange, the sensational, the tragic, or at the other extreme, the comic; and it keeps alive the striking melody or the memorable refrain though it cannot itself produce these. In the nineteenth century, when popular fiction makers sought to provide a special kind of folk reading, such, for example, as The Fireside Companion furnished, they chose nobles and millionaires for their heroes, and made them live melodrama. They did not garb them in ordinary clothes but in silks and satins and velvets, and gave them the most thrilling adventures they could create.
"Compare Jeanroy, Origines de la Po6sie Lyrique en France au Moyen Age, p. 18. "Si nous possesions encore les chansons que chantaient les bergers du moyen age, il est certain a priori que ce ne serait pas la vie pastorale qui y serait decrite. Ce serait le seul exemple d'une poesie populaire peignant de parti pris les moeurs populaires. Le peuple au contraire a une preference marquees pour les evenements extraordinaires et les personnages de haut rang qui l'eloignent de sa vie de tous les jours."
It may be, however, that since all literature was aristocratic, not democratic, till the eighteenth century, nothing different should be expected, whether in folk-tales or in folk-poetry, until comparatively late. Popular songs having lower-class characters, the "vulgar ballads" of the collectors, appear in balladry when such characters begin to do so in fiction and in the drama.
But this was literature "for" not "by" the people. Their readers might not have cared for tales of commonplace people like themselves. As for the stories the people might themselves invent, these would stand no chance of popularity beside the stories provided for them and read with zest by them. If examples are needed, contrast the quality of My Little Old Sod Shanty, which Texas cowboys preserved but did not create,28 with the Old Chisholm Trail, which they did create; or the negroes', The Boll Weevil, which emanated from them, with Old Black Joe, which they assimilated but did not compose; or the probable text of Pastor Lyngbye's improvisation of the Faroe fishermen concerning one of their number, with the "stately songs of Sigurd" which they inherited. To reiterate, for emphasis; what constitutes a people's popular song, the kind of thing which the people preserve, and the kind of thing which they are themselves able to create, are very different matters.
Let us now inquire as to the gulf between ballads and real literature.
III. THE BALLADS AND LITERATURE
Many writers are impressed by the simplicity of the ballad language and by the want of conscious art which the
28 Purely local ballads are based upon some popular model, as The Assassination of J. B. Marcum, upon Jesse James, or Jack Combs upon The Dying Cowboy (W. Aspinwall Bradley, Song-Ballets and Devil's Ditties, Harper's Monthly Magazine, 130, 901-914, 1915), or the Nebraska improvisation, Joe Stecher, on J Didn't Raise My Boy to be a Soldier, see p. 228. One heard during the European war many "communal improvisations" from groups of singing soldiers, such as "We'll hang Kaiser Bill to a sour apple tree," and "We'll send submarines to the bottom of the sea," heard by the present writer, both modified from John Brown.
ballads exhibit. "The ballad-language," says F. Sidgwick, " is common popular stock; the folk will have nothing to do with the phraseology of artists." 29 "The language holds close to the everyday speech of the people who sang the ballads," says Professor Stempel.30 Professor Gummere speaks of "Such homely traditional songs as the people sang at their village dances and over their daily round of toil," and of "the unlettered and artless simplicity which marks genuine ballads of tradition."31 1 'The ballads," said Professor Kittredge, "belong to the folk; they are not the work of a limited professional class, whether of high or low degree." 32 Andrew Lang affirmed that " The whole soul of the peasant class breathes from their burdens." 33 Such quotations might be multiplied. The same note is struck in many literary histories. Simplicity of expression and absence of artistry are to be expected of songs emerging from and preserved by the common people.
The crudity, or unliterary quality, of the Child pieces has been much exaggerated; or so it seems to one who has before him living work unmistakably of folk-composition or adaptation. The English and Scottish ballads preserve many characteristics- pointing to a high descent, instead of to a humble origin and gradual improvement. The evidence is that their technique suffered gradual deterioration, rather than the contrary. The earlier text of The Hunting of the Cheviot is superior to the later; and so are the earlier Robin Hood ballads better than the later.
2» The Ballad, p. 61.
so A Book of Ballads (1917), p. xxxiii.
3i The Popular Ballad (1907), pp. 7, 8.
S2 English and Scottish Popular Ballads, Introd., p. xxiii.
33 Article "Ballads" in Encyclopaedia Britannica.
The fifteenth century text of Biddies Wisely Expounded, preserving its learned heading Inter diabolus et virgo, is superior in technique to its modern descendants and affiliations. Another excellent illustration is afforded by The Fair Flower of Northumberland. It has survived to us in seven versions in all; but that given in Deloney's The Pleasant History of John Winchcomb is the only one that is early and it is also unquestionably the best version.
To particularize in a few points, The Hunting of the Cheviot has an elaborate system of alliteration, a mark of art, pointing to a professional poet, not to folk authorship.
"Bowmen bickered upon the bent With their broad arrows clear." "Hardier men both of hart nor hand Were not in Christentie." « Tivydale may carp of care, Northomberlond may mayke great mon." In the later text this has disappeared. And in the older pieces there are many echoes of the special vocabulary of the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century professional poets, words not in the vocabulary, says Dr. Bradley,34 of everyday speakers.
"There was no freke that ther would flye."
Otterbourne, 58.
"A bolder barn was never born."
Hunting of the Cheviot, 14.
The favorite ballad term byrd or burd, for girl or woman, is another word which belonged to the professional poetic
a* Cambridge History of English Literature, i., chap. xix.
vocabulary of Middle English, not to daily life. The stock alliterative epithets, "brown brand," "merry men," "doughty Douglas," " bold baron," " proud porter," " wan water," remind one of the "kennings," so. helpful to the technique and to the memory of the Old English scop; also of the alliterative formulas of Langland and of the circumlocutory phrases of the poets of the age of Pope. The ballads preserve many archaic literary traits along with the emotions and culture of a vanished age. There are no set alliterative epithets or legacy-formulas or mannerisms of older aristocratic life in the improvisations of fishermen, cowboys, ranch hands, and negroes, genuinely communal and homogeneous as are the conditions under which they live.
Mrs. Brown of Falkland's texts contain literary words like paramour, a rhyme-word in her texts, dolour, travail. Paynim appears in King Estmere — and sounds like Percy's word. Adieu, hardly a folk-word, appears in Andrew Lammie, The Gardener, and other pieces; and Robin Hood and the Ranger actually begins with a reference to Phoebus. The first line of Robin and Oandeleyn, the text of which is one of the earliest ballad texts remaining, reads, "I heard the carpyng of a clerk." Traces of the retention of French accent, the language of the upper classes and the court, appear in words like pite, forest, menye, certdyne, chamber, contree, and there is frequent transference of it to native words like lady, water, thousand, having properly initial accent, or to names like Douglas, London.35 To cite a few more points of style,
85 Some prosodists might hold that these "wrenched accents" are only instanees of "pitch accent" and derive them from Old English. Others may feel that they are merely crudenesses made the premonitory dream (of a gryphon) is used in Sir Aldingar, in the way so characteristic of Old French and Middle English literature; frequent for instance in Chaucer and Langland; and many other mediaeval literary conventions are reflected. There are chanson d'aventure openings, as in Robin and Oandeleyn, and reverdi openings, as in many of the Robin Hood ballads. The satirical legacy, that favorite device of the ballads, had great popularity as a literary convention in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.36 The English and Scottish ballads shade off into literary and other verse of many types: The Rose of England into allegory, The Geste of Robin Hood into the epic chanson, Sir Aldingar into romance, The Battle of Otterbourne into verse chronicle. Many, like the riddle ballads, show affiliations with the debate or dialogue verse, the estrifs and verse contests of mediaeval literature. The Gray Cock is an aube, Barbara Aliens Cruelty is nearly a pure lyric, Johnny Campbell is a coronach or lament for the dead, The Holy Well and The Bitter Withy are carols, and The Carnal and the Crane is a theological discussion in verse. It would be futile perhaps to look for some wholly unique ballad archetype, differing absolutely from other forms of verse to be recited or sung; or to insist upon emergence of "genuine" ballads from a single source, whether villagers, improvisers at folk-dances, some specific class of bards or minstrels, or from the singers of the church.
The ballads show strophe forms and basic meters of the
possible by the fact that the ballads were sung not read. But the final accent is too clearly marked, and is used too definitely and too frequently, at least in the earlier pieces, to be explained as something merely casual and fortuitous.
s6 See E. C. Perrow, The Last Will and Testament in Literature.
types arising, it is usually thought, from the music ana hymns and chorals of the mediaeval church; and that such should be the case seems natural enough. The contrary process, that the people themselves should create a regular strophe, or regular strophes, with consistent meter, is not borne out by evidence or by analogy. Poetry of genuine popular creation does not know what meter is, save as it appropriates it — at that partially and inconsistently — from some model. Similarly the refrain when it is present — which is in about a fourth of the ballads — is used in the literary or art way, the way of the sophisticated. It does not resemble the crude repetitions of genuine popular creations. It is used as it is is in the ballade, the roundel, or the mediaeval religious songs of many types, that is, in a way that is consistent and symmetrical.
Last, let us look at two ballads which have been accepted as pre-eminently characteristic, and see where they stand as regards " art." Edward has been called "unimpeachable" by Professor Child, "one of the most sterling of the popular ballads." It is thought by Professor W. M. Hart to show, not conscious art at all, but rather the simplest and earliest stage of ballad development which the Child pieces have preserved to us.37 It is too familiar to need quotation in full. A few stanzas from the beginning and the close will serve to recall it.
Transactions of the Wisconsin Academy of Arts and Science. Vol. rvii.
"A favorite line of evolution with Professor Hart is from the simplicity and brevity of Edward to the epic complexity of the Geste of Robin Hood. Yet within the Robin Hood ballads themselves may be observed a line of decay, from the early Geste to the brevity and inferiority of the later pieces.
"' Why dois your brand sae drap wi bluid, Edward, Edward, Why dois your brand sae drap wi bluid, And why sae sad gang yee 01' '0 I hae killed my hauke sae guid, Mither, mither, 0 I hae killed my hauke sae guid, And I had nae mair bot hee 0.' "' Your haukis bluid was nevir sae reid, Edward, Edward, Your haukis bluid was nevir sae reid, My deir son I tell thee 0.' '0 I hae killed my red-roan steid, Mither, mither, 0 I hae killed my reid-roan steid, That erst was sae fair and frie 0. . . .'
"' And what wul ye leive to your ain mither deir, Edward, Edward, And what wul ye leive to your ain mither deirf My deir son, now tell me 0 f' 'The curse of hell frae me sail ye beir, Mither, mither, The curse of hell frae me sail ye beir, Sic counseils ye gave to me 0.'" We may postpone, as yet, generalization concerning this ballad, noting only its striking parallelism in structure, a parellelism carried out to a degree that brings us face to face with art. Repetition often aids in the avoidance of heavy or involved construction in ballad technique, and nowhere more than here.
The second ballad is the American text of The Hangman's Tree, of the composition of which Professor Kittredge draws a sketch, .when sung for the first time by its
"improvising author. The audience are silent for the first two stanzas, and until after the first line of the third has been finished. After that they join in the song." This, many think, is the characteristic method of ballad authorship — improvisation in the presence of a sympa- thetic company, which may even participate in the process. When "the song has ended, the creative act of composi- tion is finished." The author is "lost in the throng." Parenthetically, one would like to inquire what was the part played by the festal dance, insisted upon by one author,38 in the making of this genuine ballad. The text is short enough to be quoted in full: "' Hangman, hangman, howd yo hand, 0 howd it wide and far! For theer I see my feyther coomin, Riding through the air.
"' Hangman, hangman, howd yo hand, 0 howd it wide and far! For theer I see my meyther coomin, Riding through the air. 38 Gummere, The Popular Ballad, p. 117; The Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. n, p. 460.
'"Meyther, meyther, ha yo brot me gooldf Ha yo paid my fee? Or ha yo coom to see me hung, Beneath tha hangman's tree?' "' I ha naw brot yo goold, I ha naw paid yo fee, But I ha coom to see yo hung Beneath tha hangman's tree.' "' Hangman, hangman, howd yo hand,
0 howd it wide and far!
For theer I see my sister eoomin, Riding through the air. "' Sister, sister, ha yo brot me goold? Ha yo paid my fee? Or ha ye eoom to see me hung, Beneath the hangman's tree?' "'I ha naw brot yo goold,
1 ha naw paid yo fee, But I ha eoom to see yo hung
Beneath tha hangman's tree.'
"' Hangman, hangman, howd yo hand, 0 howd it wide and far! For theer I see my sweetheart coomin, Riding through the air. "' Sweetheart, sweetheart, ha yo brot me goold? Ha yo paid my fee? Or ha yo coom to see me hung, Beneath tha hangman's tree?' "' 0 I ha brot yo goold, And I .ha paid yo fee, And I ha coom to take yo from Beneath tha hangman's tree.'" Is not this, like Edward, perfect art? Neither piece could be improved, as regards cohesion, cumulative effect, economy of words, use of suspense, and climax — all of which belong to art. In general, it is students of folksong who have given their time to backward study, not to the study of contemporary folk-song and its processes, who are able to maintain so high an opinion of the products of improvisation and of the creative ability of folk-groups; or the powers of the unlettered. Those who have dealt much with living popular poetry and its processes are less sanguine. Human ways and powers do not change very much in matters of this kind, and to the student of living folk-song, the assumption of the creation, by an improvising singer and villagers, of the lyric type of which these pieces present one of the " simplest stages," is far from favored by the evidence. Especially, the brief, consistent telling of a story, by the question and answer method, is of late, not early literary development. Genuine folk-creations know no such thing. For that matter they know no such thing as the brief and consistent telling of a story. There is abundant living evidence that folkcreation does not incline to the narrative song, but merely to the song. In both primitive poetry and modern communally improvised popular poetry, finished well-constructed narrative is beyond the powers of the creators of whom we have knowledge or evidence.
Place beside Edward or The Hangman's Tree a folkimprovisation by the cowboys,— surely not inferiors as poetic creators of the mediaeval peasants — and the discrepancy in favor of the mediaeval pieces is marked.
Since they were composed for oral purposes, for the ear not for the eye, nor for manuscript preservation, the
wonder should be, no doubt, that the English and Scottish ballads exhibit so much as they do of literary quality and skilful technique. Some are inferior and some better; but they do show " art," or degrees of it; they are memorable and effective for the oral purposes for which they were intended. In form, as well as in themes and characters, they suggest a high descent. Contrast, where dates are available, early pieces with late, or American versions with their Old World parents, and make inference from the mass. The crudity and the unliterary quality increase with the lapse of time, and by popular preservation. The epic completeness and effectiveness of the Child pieces is likely to sink downward to simplicity or fragmentariness. Judging from the mass of recorded examples, there is no testimony in existent folk-song that the process was an upward process from popular simplicity and brevity to pieces of the length and quality of the Geste of Robin Hood.39
The distinction between poetry of art, which is literature, and poetry of the people, which is not, especially
so Professor Gummere's latest position was that the ballad is of communal origin, of dance origin, but grows more and more away from the dance-song in the direction of the epic. "Once choral, dramatic, with insistent refrain and constant improvisation, the ballad came to be a convenient form for narrative of every sort which drifted down the ways of tradition" (Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. II, p. 456). A song humble in origins may develop beyond its crude beginnings, subjected to the "refining and ennobling processes of tradition," or "improved by some vagrom bard" (The Popular Ballad, 76-79, 250). It is not till this stage of "improvement" has been reached that it becomes, in our sense, a ballad. Compare Professor Kittredge, who "rules the minstrel out of court," and maintains that he could never have created the ballads, but that genuine ballads are spoiled when they pass through his hands.
when there is insistence upon manner of origin, can be held much too rigidly and forced too far. The distinction takes care of itself if we think only of the destined audiences of the two types of poetry, and if we do not insist upon some mystical special manner of composition, under choral and festal conditions now obsolete. When we do insist upon a sharply differentiated origin for "genuine" pieces, and then try to apply such distinction consistently to any given body of folk-song, genuinely recovered from oral tradition, solid ground fails us. A definition which in itself denies to the ballad that it is a form of literature, denies it "art," and insists that it is the property of the unlettered, is a definition that is nearly useless for purposes of application. Fortunately, those who so define ballads never apply their definition in practice; just as they never in application restrict what should be termed ballads to songs that were originally dance-songs. If they applied their theories rigorously and consistently, they would have left nearly no ballads to which to apply them.40
It is enough to say that in English we mean by a ballad a certain type of lyrical narrative or narrative song or song-tale, which appears rather late in literary history; and we may discard as unessential for defining this type references to the origin of such pieces in the
40 Professor Gummere had a way of so defining his subjects that he robbed himself of most of the material which he proposed to treat. In his article on "Folk-Song" in the Warner Library of the World's Best Literature, when he finished elucidating what genuine folk-song is, he had left himself no valid material for illustrating his species. He had to follow most of his examples by qualification and apology; "few of the above specimens [of folksong] can lay claim to the title in any rigid classification."
dance — an origin rather more characteristic of other mediaeval lyric types than it is of the English and Scottish song-tales — and references to their emergence from illiterate throngs. We can then call The Wreck of the Hesperus 41 a ballad, as well as Sir Patrick Spens; we can call anonymous song-tales like King Estmere and Edward, which never had any connection with the dance, ballads; and we can call Professor Child's St. Stephen and Herod, with its Cristus natus est of the eleventh line intact, or King John and the Bishop of Canterbury, with no marks of crudity or deterioration upon it, ballads; and we can do so with no less right than if they had been popularly transmitted and transformed.
Folk re-creation of traditional ballads, of both melodies and texts, is something that no student of them would deny. It is not the same thing as folk-origin for them, though the confusion is often made. Unlike the assumption of folkcreation, it necessitates no hypothesis endowing the unlettered with the power to create verse in uniform stanzas dignified by the consistent use of rhyme, and terse and telling and memorable in expression; no insistence upon origins in the dance; no insistence upon the superiority of the creative powers of the throng over those of the individual; and no faith in the special ability of the ignorant and the illiterate to establish a lyric type impossible for those of higher place. If folk re-creation, not folk-creation, were all that was meant when the "communal" nature of popular poetry, as over against "art" poetry, is under discussion, much controversy and ambiguity and
4i Before it can be called a popular or a folk or traditional ballad, sense of the original author, or of personal proprietorship in a ballad must be lost.
confusion would have been saved. When a piece has been popularly preserved in oral tradition and transformed thereby, the product is truly enough the work of and the property of the people; 42 but that does not mean that the same piece might not have been a ballad before the illiterate ever touched it in a modifying way.
42 It is in this sense that Mr. Cecil Sharp may be called a communalist; indeed, it may fairly be said that all students of folksong are, in this sense, communalists.