Ballad Book | Page 3

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, 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