Ballad Book | Page 2

value of verse was recognized in the transmission of laws and records and the hard-won wealth of experience. Our own Anglo-Saxon ancestors, whose rhyme, it will be remembered, was initial rhyme, or alliteration, have bequeathed to our modern speech many such devices for "the knitting up of the memory," largely legal or popular phrases, as bed and board, to have and to hold_, _to give and to grant_, _time and tide_, wind and wave_, gold and gear_; or proverbs, as, for example: When bale is highest, boon is nighest_, better known to the present age under the still alliterative form: The darkest hour's before the dawn. But if we may trust the signs of poetic evolution in barbarous tribes to-day, if we may draw inferences from the sacred character attached to the Muses in the myths of all races, with the old Norsemen, for instance, Sag?￠ being the daughter of Odin, we may rest a reasonable confidence upon the theory that poetry, the world over, finds its first utterance at the bidding of the religious instinct and in connection with religious rites.
Yet the wild-eyed warriors, keeping time by a rude triumphal chant to the dance about the watch-fire, were mentally as children, with keen senses and eager imagination, but feeble reason, with fresh and vigorous emotions, but without elaborate language for these emotions. Swaying and shouting in rhythmic consent, they came slowly to the use of ordered words and, even then, could but have repeated the same phrases over and over. The burden--sometimes senseless to our modern understanding--to be found in the present form of many of our ballads may be the survival of a survival from those primitive iterations. The "Blaw, blaw, blaw winds, blaw" of The Elfin Knight is not, in this instance, inappropriate to the theme, yet we can almost hear shrilling through it a far cry from days when men called directly upon the powers of nature. Such refrains as "Binnorie, O Binnorie," "Jennifer gentle an' rosemaree," "Down, a down, a down, a down," have ancient secrets in them, had we ears to hear.
One of the vexed questions of criticism regarding these refrains is whether they were rendered in alternation with the narrative verses or as a continuous under-song. Early observers of Indian dances have noted that, while one leaping savage after another improvised a simple strain or two, the whole dancing company kept up a guttural cadence of "Heh, heh, heh!" or "Aw, aw, aw!" which served the office of musical accompaniment. This choral iteration of rhythmic syllables, still hinted in the refrain, but only hinted, is believed to be the original element of poetry.
In course of time, however, was evolved the individual singer. In the earlier stages of society, song was undoubtedly a common gift, and every normal member of the community bore his part in the recital of the heroic deeds that ordinarily formed the subject of these primeval lays. Were it the praise of a god, of a feasting champion, or of a slain comrade, the natural utterance was narrative. Later on, the more fluent and inventive improvisers came to the front, and finally the professional bard appeared. Somewhere in the process, too, the burden may have shifted its part from under-song to alternating chorus, thus allowing the soloist opportunity for rest and recollection.
English ballads, as we have them in print to-day, took form in a far later and more sophisticated period than those just suggested; yet even thus our ballads stand nearest of anything in our literature to the primitive poetry that was born out of the social life of the community rather than made by the solitary thought of the artist. Even so comparatively small a group as that comprehended within this volume shows how truly the ballad is the parent stock of all other poetic varieties. In the ballad of plain narrative, as _The Hunting of the Cheviot,_ the epic is hinted. We go a step further in _A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode,_--too long for insertion in this collection, but peculiarly interesting from the antiquarian point of view, having been printed, in part, as early as 1489,--and find at least a rough foundation for a genuine hero-lay, the Lytell Geste being made up of a number of ballads rudely woven into one. A poem like this, though hardly "an epic in miniature,"--a phrase which has been proposed as the definition of a ballad,--is truly an epic in germ, lacking the finish of a miniature, but holding the promise of a seed. Where the narrative is highly colored by emotion, as in Helen of Kirconnell or Waly Waly, the ballad merges into the lyric. It is difficult here to draw the line of distinction. A Lyke-Wake Dirge is almost purely lyric in quality, while _The Lawlands o' Holland, Gilderoy,