The English and Scottish Popular Ballads

IN the long-expected work of which the first part lies before us, Professor Child undertakes to give every existing version of every popular English ballad, together with its comparative history, including an analysis of all forms in which the song may appear on the continent of Europe, and an account of such traditions as may illustrate its principal traits. The preparations undertaken in order to carry out this project have been commensurate with the extent of the plan : gleanings have been made of the scanty remains of the ancient song still traditional in Great Britain and America ; all unpublished ballad-manuscripts which it was possible to reach have been either purchased or copied, and have found a secure lodging in the library of Harvard University; while a collection of folk-lore, aiming at entire completeness, and probably the richest in the world, has been gathered by the same library ; so that if the admirable talent and system which have lately rendered that institution most convenient for working purposes are taken into account, it is certain that no other scholar in this department of knowledge has had such means at his disposal.

The present work comes to fill a disgraceful vacancy in English literature. There exists, indeed, no edition of English ballads having claims to critical excellence, except that put forth by Professor Child in 1857-58, under the name of English and Scottish Ballads, consisting of eight volumes. It is curious to contrast the small stock of foreign material then at hand with the vast range of popular lore now available for comparison. The editor could even at that time refer to the great work which has served as a model for the present edition, — that of Svend Grundtvig, Danmarks Gamle Folkeviser, which, begun in 1853, with the support of the Danish government, finished its second volume in 1856, but yet remains incomplete. Beside the older Danish and Spanish books, and several modern German collections, he had before him the Swedish of Arwidsson, of Afzelius, and of Cavallius and Stephens ; the songs of modern Greece were represented by Fauriel, Servian ballads by Talvj, while the volumes of Villemarqué, not yet discredited, professed to contain ancient Breton lays. His sole predecessor in the comparative treatment of folk-song, Robert Jamieson, was acquainted only with Scandinavian parallels. Jamieson had very just views of the relationship of Scottish and Scandinavian folk-lore, and has supplied subsequent writers not only with much of their knowledge on the subject, but with ready-made errors ; for, happening to allude, in his Popular Ballads and Songs (1806), to wellknown Danish collectors by the names of Sæffrensen and Say, instead of (Sörensen) Vedel and Syv respectively, he is religiously followed by Mr. William Allingham in The Ballad-Book, and by Professor Veitch, the last British writer on the subject, in his History and Poetry of the Scotch Border (1878), although Jamieson had done his best to correct the faults in Northern Antiquities (1814). Perhaps if Professor Veitch had taken the trouble, as part of the preparation desirable for writing on ballads, to read the latter book, be would not have informed us that the song of the Border land has been a pure growth of the soil. After Jamieson, only one British comparative student of popular poetry need be mentioned, Dr. Prior, whose translation of Ancient Danish Ballads, published in 1860, despite faults of taste and an erroneous view of ballad origins and dates, is characterized by sound and extensive learning. During the last twenty years, strange to say, no English work of any consequence has been done. The whole wide field has been left to be occupied by the present editor alone.

The most remarkable addition to the literature of the subject within this quarter of a century has been made in France. In 1853, the celebrated Ampère drew up a remarkable paper of instructions on the part of the Comité de la Langue de l'Histoire et des Arts, directing the collection of the popular songs of France. It had generally been supposed that no French ballads survived, even that none had ever existed; but, as a result of this effort, several excellent publications appeared, proving the continued life of the ballad on French soil ; and a great manuscript gathering of popular poetry remains in government possession, of which a copy has been taken for the library of Harvard University. Of late years, every civilized country of Europe has joined in the task of preserving the ancient national poesy. The work of Arbaud revealed the existence of old ballads in Provence; that of Milá y Fontanals showed that such still abound in Catalonia; the publications of Ferraro and many others have established that a limited number of such songs are to be found in Italy; Spanish literati, though late in the field, are now pursuing the same object, their land being rich in every species of traditional lore ; while nowhere have such investigations been pursued with more ardor or success than among Slavic peoples. As a consequence of this activity we find that, in treating of the single ballad of Lady Isabel and the Elf-Knight, Professor Child is able, in the course of a discussion of thirty pages, to point out Dutch, Flemish, Danish, Icelandic, Swedish, Norwegian, German, Polish, Wendish, Bohemian, Servian, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Breton, and Magyar equivalents, citing (if we count correctly) eighty-five collections.

It must not be supposed that the attempt to exhibit side by side all obtainable versions of a popular song is one of those scholarly enterprises in which the value consists more in the completeness itself than in any direct result. The ballads taken down from recitation in Scotland, or on the Scottish border,— commonly called Scottish, although they are such only in so far as they have been longest preserved and finally recorded in that dialectic form, — have been transmitted to us by the earlier editors in a sadly mangled guise. Not all of these, indeed, were as reckless correctors and rewriters as Percy, who had no more hesitation about providing an ancient song with a beginning, middle, or end, suitable to his own ideas of literary propriety, than he had in introducing into his work “ a few modern attempts in the same kind of writing,” “ to atone for the rudeness of the more obsolete poems.” But, unfortunately, all of them were more or less poets on their own account, and saw no reason for omitting to improve a barbarous composition with a smooth line, now and then, or neglecting to fill up any gap as fancy suggested. Almost all of them, from Scott down, had a secret or avowed contempt for the “ rude ” compositions which they reproduced, and considered that a great part of the value of these was to set off as a foil the immense progress which had been made by their own “ polished age,” as they chose to term it, and which we, in impatience and disgust, are often inclined to characterize with very different epithets. It is indeed difficult to accept the taste of the time as a sufficient excuse for these mutilations, when we observe that nearly all these editors made profession of an accuracy which their practice was far from exemplifying. But an account of the changes of popular taste, as exemplified in the treatment and estimation of English folksong, would be a curious and melancholy chapter of the records of intelligence, which we have no space to set forth. It is enough to say that the state in which English ballads have reached us often renders necessary, for their appreciation, all the illustration available from every known version, as well as the light which an examination of parallels in other languages may cast on their original character.

There will never be any more popular ballads. Made to be understood through the ear, not the eye ; characterized by the inimitable freshness, sweetness, and simplicity of oral tradition, they present a pleasant contrast to the poetry of thought, which constantly tends to become more abstruse and subtle. The most recent (if we except a few lays of local history, composed at a comparatively late day in isolated districts, where the ancient style of poetry continued in vogue) have remained for centuries on the lips of the people ; changing, indeed, linguistic form from generation to generation, but in the main preserved with marvelous persistency, as the vehicle of the pleasures and sorrows of a nation. We hold that this very use and diffusion put popular ballads on an entirely different footing from literary productions, which may represent only the fancy of a single individual, who has perhaps chiefly in view his own literary reputation, The national song must be taken for what it is ; its many and immortal beauties reverently owned ; its traits, unpleasant, or even at times repulsive, to modern sentiment, tolerated as the property of a different social state. Every fragment must be gathered up ; and when the modern relics of the ancient treasure present, as they often do, inconsistencies and absurdities, we must consider these as results of the impurity of the soil through which the once crystal water has percolated. If we may be allowed a comparison, it is as with the violets of the wood, gathered late in the season, which are fairest in clusters ; even half - withered blooms may add somewhat to the impression of color, and assist to express the character of the flower.

Independently of the pride which an American may properly take in every enterprise which shows how rapidly scholarship in this country is progressing, there is a special reason why he may be pleased that the English folksong should have first received adequate attention and study in the United States. It seems to attest his claim of co-proprietorship in the treasures of the language. In particular, many of these ballads have been handed down and sung, from generation to generation, in the New England as well as in the Old. Haliburton, in the Attaché, makes Mr. Hopewell, an aged clergyman, educated before the Revolution “at Cambridge College in Massachusetts,” say, “ Our nursery tales taught our infant lips to lisp in English, and the ballads that first exercised our memories stored the mind with the traditions of our forefathers.” The assertion is much more literally true than we had, until lately, supposed. In the last generation, the usual amusement at evening gatherings in New England country towns was singing; and among the “ love songs ” then current were, without doubt, many ballads. A gentleman, born in Massachusetts during the first quarter of the century, has assured us that his nurse, an American woman, was in the habit of singing to him such lays, often treating of heroes, who, as he expressed it, left their country “ for a year and a day,” returning, perhaps, in time to save their deserted mistresses from wedding another. So nearly has this lore perished that it must always remain uncertain how large a measure of the ancient ballad poetry Puritans brought with them to American shores ; yet it is our impression, founded upon the remnants which exist, and upon information similar to the foregoing, that a very tolerable balladbook might have been made in New England about the beginning of the century. The present volume includes two such pieces, one the ballad of Lord Randal, or, as it seems to have been known in Massachusetts, Tiranti, which has remained familiar on account of the character it assumed as a nursery song.

Only second in importance to the undertaking of a complete publication of ballad texts are the results—as remarkable as unpretentiously stated — of the editor’s comparative research of the twenty-eight ballads contained in the first part (about one eighth of the designed whole), almost every one (the five or six exceptions being fragments) has equivalents in other tongues, either in the form of song or tale. As an example of the wonder and romance with which the subject abounds, take the ballad of Earl Brand, who has fled with “ the king’s daughter of fair England ; ” the song proceeds: —

The lady advises her lover to put to death the “ old carl; ” but he replies, —

The aged stranger accuses Earl Brand of carrying off the maid, and will not be put off with the assertion that she is only his sick sister, whom he is bringing from the cloister.

The seeming beggar reports the elopement at the castle, and the knight is pursued, and in the end mortally wounded. Most curious are many traits of the English (and Scandinavian) ballad, which may possibly (though we cannot regard it as made out) be a mediæval echo of the lay of Helgi Hundingslayer, in the Edda of Sæmund. But however this may be, Professor Child has shown that the “ old Carl Hood ” of the song is none other than Odin himself, who thus, disguised as a (presumably blind) beggar, plays exactly the same part of a mischievous tell-tale which we find him assuming in the heathen poesy of a thousand years earlier. How full of instruction and suggestion, how replete with food for thought and fancy, is this wonderful survival of the figure of the capricious deity once worshiped in England !

We must cite an instance of a different character. The story of Orpheus and Eurydice was turned into a mediæval romance, in which the king of fairyland plays the part of Pluto, the faithfulness of love is rewarded, and Eurydice (or Heurodis) restored to the light of day. The oldest form of the tale is found in the Auchinlech manuscript, dating from the beginning of the fourteenth century. At the end of this copy it is stated that harpers in Britain heard this marvel, and made a lay thereof, which they called, after the king, Lay Orfeo. Wonderful to state, it is but three years since this very ballad was recovered in the Shetland Isles, in a beautiful dialectic version, from which we cannot deny ourselves the pleasure of giving a few verses; the refrain, as Scandinavian and nearly unintelligible, we omit: —

The king, having thus learned from his retainer the fate of his queen, sets out in search of the fairy castle.

“Dan he took oot his pipes ta play,
Bit sair his hert wi döl an wae.

He is invited into the hall, plays for the fairy king, and is asked at last, —

Has the beautiful classic tale ever inspired any minstrelsy in its way more pleasing than this song, taken in the nineteenth century from the lips of an illiterate peasant ?

The mechanical execution of the volume demands the highest praise. The typography and paper and all the externals of this sumptuous quarto challenge comparison with the very choicest work of foreign presses.