Ballad Book | Page 3

The Twa Corbies, Bonny Barbara Allan,_ have each a pronounced lyric element. From the ballad of dialogue we look forward to the drama, not only from the ballad of pure dialogue, as Lord Ronald,_ or Edward, Edward,_ or that sweet old English folk-song, too long for insertion here, The Not-Browne Mayd, but more remotely from the ballad of mingled dialogue and narrative, as _The Gardener or Fine Flowers i' the Valley._
The beginnings of English balladry are far out of sight. From the date when the race first had deeds to praise and words with which to praise them, it is all but certain that ballads were in the air. But even the mediteval ballads are lost to us. It was the written literature, the work of clerks, fixed upon the parchment, that survived, while the songs of the people, passing from lip to lip down the generations, continually reshaped themselves to the changing times. But they were never hushed. While Chaucer, his genius fed by Norman and Italian streams, was making the fourteenth century reecho with that laughter which "comes never to an end" of the Canterbury story-tellers; while Langland, even his Teutonic spirit swayed by French example, was brooding the gloomy _Vision of Piers the Plowman,_--gloom with a star at its centre; while those "courtly makers," Wyatt and Surrey, were smoothing English song, which in the hands of Skelton had become so
"Tatter'd and jagged,?Rudely raine-beaten,?Rusty and moth-eaten,"
into the exquisite lyrical measures of Italy; while the mysteries and miracle-plays, also of Continental impulse, were striving to do God service by impressing the Scripture stories upon their rustic audiences,--the ballads were being sung and told from Scottish loch to English lowland, in hamlet and in hall. Heartily enjoyed in the baronial castle, scandalously well known in the monastery, they were dearest to the peasants.
"Lewd peple loven tales olde;?Swiche thinges can they wel report and holde."
The versions in which we possess such ballads to-day are comparatively modern. Few can be dated further back than the reign of Elizabeth; the language of some is that of the eighteenth century. But the number and variety of these versions--the ballad of Lord Ronald, for instance, being given in fifteen forms by Professor Child in his monumental edition of The English and Scottish Popular Ballads; where "Lord Ronald, my son," appears variously as "Lord Randal, my son," "Lord Donald, my son," "King Henrie, my son," "Lairde Rowlande, my son," "Billy, my son," "Tiranti, my son," "my own pretty boy," "my bonnie wee croodlin dow," "my little wee croudlin doo," "Willie doo, Willie doo," "my wee wee croodlin doo doo"--are sure evidence of oral transmission, and oral transmission is in itself evidence of antiquity. Many of our ballads, moreover,--nearly a third of the present collection, as the notes will show,--are akin to ancient ballads of Continental Europe, or of Asia, or both, which set forth the outlines of the same stories in something the same way.
It should be stated that there is another theory altogether as to the origin of ballads. Instead of regarding them as a slow, shadowed, natural growth, finally fossilized in print, from the rhythmic cries of a barbaric dance-circle in its festal hour, there is a weighty school of critics who hold them to be the mere rag-tag camp-followers of mediaeval romance. See, for instance, the clownish ballad of _Tom Thumbe,_ with its confused Arthurian echoes. Some of the events recorded in our ballads, moreover, are placed by definite local tradition at a comparatively recent date, as _Otterburne, Edom o' Gordon, Kinmont Willie._ What becomes, then, of their claims to long descent? If these do not fall, it is because they are based less on the general theme and course of the story, matters that seem to necessitate an individual composer, than on the so-called communal elements of refrain, iteration, stock stanzas, stock epithets, stock numbers, stock situations, the frank objectivity of the point of view, the sudden glimpses into a pagan world.
In the lands of the schoolhouse, the newspaper, and the public library, the conditions of ballad-production are past and gone. Yet there are still a few isolated communities in Europe where genuine folk-songs of spontaneous composition may be heard by the eavesdropper and jotted down with a surreptitious pencil; for the rustics shrink from the curiosity of the learned and are silent in the presence of strangers. The most precious contribution to our literature from such a, source is The Bard of the Dimbovitza, an English translation of folk-songs and ballads peculiar to a certain district of Roumania. They were gathered by a native gentlewoman from among the peasants on her father's estate. "She was forced," writes Carmen Sylva, Queen of Roumania, one of the two translators, "to affect a desire to learn spinning, that she might join the girls at