LECTURE IVTHE BALLADS(Friday Evening, January 19, 1855)IV
(Friday Evening, January 19, 1855)
IV
One of the laws of the historical Macbeth declares that “Fools, minstrels, bards, and all other such idle people, unless they be specially licensed by the King, shall be compelled to seek some craft to win their living,” and the old chronicler adds approvingly, “These and such-like laws were used by King Macbeth, through which he governed the realm ten years in good justice.”
I do not quote this in order to blacken the memory of that unhappy monarch. The poets commonly contrive to be even with their enemies in the end, and Shakspeare has taken an ample revenge. I cite it only for the phraseunless they be specially licensed by the King, which points to a fact on which I propose to dwell for a few moments before entering upon my more immediate object.
When Virgil said, “Arma virumque cano,” “Arms and the man I sing,” he defined in the strictest manner the original office of the poet, and the object of the judicious Macbeth’s ordinance was to preventany one from singing the wrong arms and the rival man. Formerly the poet held a recognized place in the body politic, and if he has been deposed from it, it may be some consolation to think that theFools, whom the Scottish usurper included in his penal statute, have not lost their share in the government of the world yet, nor, if we may trust appearances, are likely to for some time to come. But the Fools here referred to were not those who had least, but those who had most wit, and who assumed that disguise in order to take away any dangerous appearance of intention from their jibes and satires.
The poet was once what the political newspaper is now, and circulated from ear to ear with satire or panegyric. He it was who first made public opinion a power in the State by condensing it into a song. The invention of printing, by weakening the faculty of memory, and by transferring the address of language from the ear to the eye, has lessened the immediate power of the poet. A newspaper may be suppressed, an editor may be silenced, every copy of an obnoxious book may be destroyed, but in those old days when the minstrels were a power, a verse could wander safely from heart to heart and from hamlet to hamlet as unassailable as the memories on which it was imprinted.Its force was in its impersonality, for public opinion is disenchanted the moment it is individualized, and is terrible only so long as it is the opinion of no one in particular. Find its author, and the huge shadow which but now darkened half the heaven shrinks like the genius of the Arabian story into the compass of a leaden casket which one can hold in his hand. Nowadays one knows the editor, perhaps, and so is on friendly terms with public opinion. You may have dined with it yesterday, rubbed shoulders with it in the omnibus to-day, nay, carried it in your pocket embodied in the letter of the special correspondent.
Spenser, in his prose tract upon Ireland, has left perhaps the best description possible of the primitive poet as he was everywhere when the copies of a poem were so many living men, and all publication was to the accompaniment of music. He says: “There is amongst the Irish a certain kind of people called bards, which are to them instead of poets, whose profession is to set forth the praises or dispraises of men in their poems or rhythms; the which are held in such high regard or esteem amongst them that none dare to displease them for fear of running into reproach through this offense, and to be made infamous in the mouths of all men.”
Nor was the sphere of the bards confined to thepresent alone. They were also the embodied memory of the people. It was on the wings of verse that the names of ancestral heroes could float down securely over broad tracts of desert time and across the gulfs of oblivion. And poets were sometimes made use of by sagacious rulers to make legends serve a political purpose. The Persian poet Firdusi is a remarkable instance of this. Virgil also attempted to braid together the raveled ends of Roman and Greek tradition, and it is not impossible that the minstrels of the Norman metrical romances were guided by a similar instinct.
But the position of the inhabitants of England was a peculiar one. The Saxons by their conversion to Christianity, and the Normans still more by their conversion and change of language, were almost wholly cut off from the past. The few fragments of the Celtic race were the only natives of Britain who had an antiquity. The English properly so called were a people who hardly knew their own grandfathers. They no longer spoke the language, believed in the religion, or were dominated by the ideas of their ancestors.
English writers demand of us a national literature. But where for thirteen centuries was their own? Our ancestors brought a past with them to Plymouth; they claimed descent from a great race;the language they spoke had been ennobled by recording the triumphs of ancestral daring and genius; it had gone up to Heaven wafted on the red wings of martyr-fires; mothers hushed their new-born babes, and priests scattered the farewell earth upon the coffin-lid, with words made sweet or sacred by immemorial association. But the Normans when they landed in England were a new race of armed men almost as much cut off from the influences of the past as those which sprang out of the ground at the sowing of the dragon’s teeth. They found there a Saxon encampment occupying a country strange to them also. For we must remember that though Britain was historically old, England was not; and it was as impossible to piece the histories of the two together to make a national record of as it would be for us to persuade ourselves into a feeling of continental antiquity by adopting the Mexican annals.
The ballads are the first truly national poetry in our language, and national poetry is not either that of the drawing-room or of the kitchen. It is the common mother-earth of the universal sentiment that the foot of the poet must touch, through which shall steal up to heart and brain that fine virtue which puts him in sympathy, not with his class, but with his kind.
Fortunately for the ballad-makers, they were not encumbered with any useless information. They had not wit enough to lose their way. It is only the greatest brains and the most intense imagination that can fuse learning into one substance with their own thought and feeling, and so interpenetrate it withthemselvesthat the acquired is as muchtheyas the native. The ballad-makers had not far to seek for material. The shipwreck, the runaway match, the unhappy marriage, the village ghost, the achievement of the border outlaw—in short, what we read every day under the head ofItemsin the newspapers, were the inspiration of their song. And they sang well, because they thought, and felt, and believed just as their hearers did, and because they never thought anything about it. The ballads are pathetic because the poet did not try to make them so; and they are models of nervous and simple diction because the business of the poet was totellhis story, and not to adorn it; and accordingly he went earnestly and straightforwardly to work, and let the rapid thought snatch the word as it ran, feeling quite sure of its getting the right one. The only art of expression is to have something to express. We feel as wide a difference between what is manufactured and what is spontaneous as between the sparkles of an electrical machine, whicha sufficiently muscular professor can grind out by the dozen, and the wildfire of God that writesmene, mene, on the crumbling palace walls of midnight cloud.
It seems to me that the ballad-maker, in respect of diction, had also this advantage—that he had no books. Language, when it speaks to the eye only, loses half its meaning. For the eye is an outpost of the brain, and wears its livery oftener than that of the character. But the temperament, the deep human nature, the aboriginal emotions,theseutter themselves in the voice. It is only by the ear that the true mother-tongue that knows the short way to the heart is learned. I do not believe that a man born deaf could understand Shakspeare, or sound anything but the edges and shores of Lear’s tempestuous woe. I think that the great masters of speech have hunted men and not libraries, and have found the secret of their power in the street and not upon the shelf.
It is thewayof saying things that is learned by commerce with men, and the best writers have mixed much with the world. It is there only that the language of feeling can be acquired.
The ballads are models of narrative poetry. They are not concerned with the utterance of thought, but only of sentiment or passion, and it isas illustrating poetic diction that I shall chiefly cite them. If they moralize it is always by picture, and not by preachment. What discourse of inconstancy has the force and biting pathos of this grim old song, the “Twa Corbies”?
As I was walking all aloneI heard twa corbies making a moan.The one unto the other did say:Where shall we gang and dine to-day?In beyond that old turf dykeI wot there lies a new-slain knight,And naebody kens that he lies there,But his hawk and his hound and his lady fair.His hound is to the hunting gone,His hawk to fetch the wild-fowl hame,His lady’s ta’en anither mate—Sae we may make our dinner sweet.You’ll sit upon his white neck-boneAnd I’ll pick out his bonny blue een;With a lock of his golden hairWe’ll thatch our nest when it grows bare.Many a one for him makes moan,But none sall ken where he is gone;O’er his white bones when they grow bareThe wind shall blow forever mair.
As I was walking all aloneI heard twa corbies making a moan.The one unto the other did say:Where shall we gang and dine to-day?In beyond that old turf dykeI wot there lies a new-slain knight,And naebody kens that he lies there,But his hawk and his hound and his lady fair.His hound is to the hunting gone,His hawk to fetch the wild-fowl hame,His lady’s ta’en anither mate—Sae we may make our dinner sweet.You’ll sit upon his white neck-boneAnd I’ll pick out his bonny blue een;With a lock of his golden hairWe’ll thatch our nest when it grows bare.Many a one for him makes moan,But none sall ken where he is gone;O’er his white bones when they grow bareThe wind shall blow forever mair.
As I was walking all aloneI heard twa corbies making a moan.The one unto the other did say:Where shall we gang and dine to-day?In beyond that old turf dykeI wot there lies a new-slain knight,And naebody kens that he lies there,But his hawk and his hound and his lady fair.His hound is to the hunting gone,His hawk to fetch the wild-fowl hame,His lady’s ta’en anither mate—Sae we may make our dinner sweet.You’ll sit upon his white neck-boneAnd I’ll pick out his bonny blue een;With a lock of his golden hairWe’ll thatch our nest when it grows bare.Many a one for him makes moan,But none sall ken where he is gone;O’er his white bones when they grow bareThe wind shall blow forever mair.
As I was walking all alone
I heard twa corbies making a moan.
The one unto the other did say:
Where shall we gang and dine to-day?
In beyond that old turf dyke
I wot there lies a new-slain knight,
And naebody kens that he lies there,
But his hawk and his hound and his lady fair.
His hound is to the hunting gone,
His hawk to fetch the wild-fowl hame,
His lady’s ta’en anither mate—
Sae we may make our dinner sweet.
You’ll sit upon his white neck-bone
And I’ll pick out his bonny blue een;
With a lock of his golden hair
We’ll thatch our nest when it grows bare.
Many a one for him makes moan,
But none sall ken where he is gone;
O’er his white bones when they grow bare
The wind shall blow forever mair.
Observe, the wind simply blows. That is enough; but a modern poet would have sought to intensifyby making the wind moan, or shriek, or sob, or something of the kind.
Mr. Lowell here quoted a ballad which tells a story of a child-murder. It begins:
Fair Anne sate in her bowerDown by the greenwood side,And the flowers did spring,And the birds did sing,’Twas the pleasant Mayday tide.
Fair Anne sate in her bowerDown by the greenwood side,And the flowers did spring,And the birds did sing,’Twas the pleasant Mayday tide.
Fair Anne sate in her bowerDown by the greenwood side,And the flowers did spring,And the birds did sing,’Twas the pleasant Mayday tide.
Fair Anne sate in her bower
Down by the greenwood side,
And the flowers did spring,
And the birds did sing,
’Twas the pleasant Mayday tide.
The ballad singers had all the advantage of that spur of the moment which the excitement of speaking gives, and they also received the magnetism which came from the sympathy of their hearers. They knew whattold, for they had their hand upon the living pulse of feeling. There was no time to palaver; they must come to the point.
The Percy came out of Northumberland,And a vow to God made heThat he would hunt in the mountainsOf Cheviot within days three,In the maugre of Doughty DouglasAnd all that ever with him be.
The Percy came out of Northumberland,And a vow to God made heThat he would hunt in the mountainsOf Cheviot within days three,In the maugre of Doughty DouglasAnd all that ever with him be.
The Percy came out of Northumberland,And a vow to God made heThat he would hunt in the mountainsOf Cheviot within days three,In the maugre of Doughty DouglasAnd all that ever with him be.
The Percy came out of Northumberland,
And a vow to God made he
That he would hunt in the mountains
Of Cheviot within days three,
In the maugre of Doughty Douglas
And all that ever with him be.
They plunge into deep water at once. And there is never any filling up. The transitions are abrupt. You can no more foretell the swift wheel of thefeeling than that of a falcon, and the phrases flash forth sharp-edged and deadly like a sword drawn in wrath. The passions speak out savagely and without any delicacies of circumlocution.
It is worth thinking of whether the press, which we have a habit of calling such a fine institution, be not weakening the fibre and damaging the sincerity of our English and our thinking, quite as fast as it diffuses intelligence.
Consider the meaning of expression—something wrung from us by the grip of thought or passion, whether we will or no. But the editor is quite as often compelled to write that he may fill an empty column as that he may relieve an overfilled brain. And in a country like ours, where newspapers are the only reading of the mass of the people, there is a danger of a general contentedness in commonplace. For we always become what we habitually read. We let our newspapers think for us, argue for us, criticize for us, remember for us, do everything for us, in short, that will save us from the misfortune of beingourselves. And so, instead of men and women, we find ourselves in a world inhabited by incarnated leaders, or paragraphs, or items of this or that journal. We are apt to wonder at the scholarship of the men of two centuries ago. They were scholars because they did not read so much as wedo. We spend more time over print than they did, but instead of communing with the choice thought of choice spirits, and insensibly acquiring the grand manner of that supreme society, we diligently inform ourselves of such facts as that a fine horse belonging to Mr. Smith ran away on Wednesday and that a son of Mr. Brown fell into the canal on Thursday, or that a gravel bank fell in and buried Patrick O’Callahan on Friday. And it is our own fault, and not that of the editor. Forwemake the newspapers, and the editor would be glad to give us better stuff if we did notdemandsuch as this.
Another evil of this state of things is the watering, or milk-and-watering, of our English. Writing to which there is no higher compelling destiny than the coming of the printer’s devil must end in this at last. The paragraphist must make his paragraph, and the longer he makes it, the better for him and the worse for us. The virtue of words becomes wholly a matter of length. Accordingly, we have now no longer any fires, but “disastrous conflagrations”; nobody dies, but “deceases” or “demises”; men do not fall from houses, but are “precipitated from mansions or edifices”; a convict is not hanged, but “suffers the extreme penalty of the offended law,” etc.
The old ballad-makers lived in a better day.They did not hear of so many events that none of them made any impression. They did not live, as we do, in a world that seems a great ear of Dionysius, where if a scandal is whispered in Pekin we hear of it in New York. The minstrels had no metaphysical bees in their bonnets. They did not speculate about this world or the next. They had not made the great modern discovery that a bird in a bush is worth two in the hand. They did not analyze and refine till nothing genuine was left of this beautiful world but an indigestion.
The ballads neither harangue nor describe; but only state things in the least complex way. Those old singers caught language fresh and with a flavor of the soil in it still, and their hearers were people of healthy sensibilities who must be hit directly and hard. Accordingly, there is a very vigorous handling. They speak bluntly and to the purpose. If a maiden loses her lover, she merely
Turns her face unto the wallAnd there her heart it breaks.
Turns her face unto the wallAnd there her heart it breaks.
Turns her face unto the wallAnd there her heart it breaks.
Turns her face unto the wall
And there her heart it breaks.
A modern poet would have hardly thrown away the opportunity offered him for describing the chamber and its furniture; he would put a painted window into it—for the inkstand will supply themquite as cheaply as plain glass. He would tell you all about the tapestry which the eyes of the dying maiden in her extreme agony would have been likely, of course, to have been minutely interested in. He would have given a clinical lecture on the symptoms, and a post-mortem examination. It was so lucky for those old ballad-mongers that they had not any ideas! And when they give a dying speech they do not make their heroes take leave of the universe in general as ifthatwere going into mourning for a death more or less.
When Earl Douglas is in his death-thraw, he says to his nephew:
My wound is deep; I fain would sleep;Take thou the vanguard of the three.And hide me by the brakenbushThat grows on yonder lily lee.O bury me by the brakenbushBeneath the blooming brere.Let never living mortal kenThat a kindly Scot lies here.
My wound is deep; I fain would sleep;Take thou the vanguard of the three.And hide me by the brakenbushThat grows on yonder lily lee.O bury me by the brakenbushBeneath the blooming brere.Let never living mortal kenThat a kindly Scot lies here.
My wound is deep; I fain would sleep;Take thou the vanguard of the three.And hide me by the brakenbushThat grows on yonder lily lee.O bury me by the brakenbushBeneath the blooming brere.Let never living mortal kenThat a kindly Scot lies here.
My wound is deep; I fain would sleep;
Take thou the vanguard of the three.
And hide me by the brakenbush
That grows on yonder lily lee.
O bury me by the brakenbush
Beneath the blooming brere.
Let never living mortal ken
That a kindly Scot lies here.
The ballads are the only true folk-songs that we have in English. There is no other poetry in the language that addresses us so simply as mere men and women. Learning has tempered with modernpoetry, and the Muse, like Portia, wears a doctor’s cap and gown.
The force and earnestness of style that mark the old ballad become very striking when contrasted with later attempts in the same way. It is not flatness and insipidity that they are remarkable for, but for a bare rocky grandeur in whose crevices tenderness nestles its chance tufts of ferns and harebells. One of these sincere old verses imbedded in the insipidities of a modern imitation looks out stern and colossal as that charcoal head which Michael Angelo drew on the wall of the Farnesina glowers through the paling frescoes.
Mr. Lowell here read a number of passages from the old ballad entitled “Margaret’s Ghost,” and compared them with a few stanzas from an “improved” version of the same by Mallet. He also read from the ballad of “Helen of Kirkconnell,” and from others.
Of the tenderness of the ballads I must give an instance or two before I leave them. In the old ballad of “Clerk Saunders,” Margaret follows the ghost of her lover to his grave.
So painfully she climbed the wall,She climbed the wall up after him,Hose nor shoon upon her feet,She had no time to put them on.O bonny, bonny, sang the birdSat on a coil o’ hay,But mournfu’, mournfu’, was the maidThat followed the corpse o’ clay.Is there any room at your head, Saunders?Or any room at your feet?Is there any room at your side, Saunders?For fain, fain I would sleep.She’s sat her down upon the graveAnd mourned sae lang and sairThat the clochs and wanton flies at lastCame and built in her yellow hair.
So painfully she climbed the wall,She climbed the wall up after him,Hose nor shoon upon her feet,She had no time to put them on.O bonny, bonny, sang the birdSat on a coil o’ hay,But mournfu’, mournfu’, was the maidThat followed the corpse o’ clay.Is there any room at your head, Saunders?Or any room at your feet?Is there any room at your side, Saunders?For fain, fain I would sleep.She’s sat her down upon the graveAnd mourned sae lang and sairThat the clochs and wanton flies at lastCame and built in her yellow hair.
So painfully she climbed the wall,She climbed the wall up after him,Hose nor shoon upon her feet,She had no time to put them on.
So painfully she climbed the wall,
She climbed the wall up after him,
Hose nor shoon upon her feet,
She had no time to put them on.
O bonny, bonny, sang the birdSat on a coil o’ hay,But mournfu’, mournfu’, was the maidThat followed the corpse o’ clay.
O bonny, bonny, sang the bird
Sat on a coil o’ hay,
But mournfu’, mournfu’, was the maid
That followed the corpse o’ clay.
Is there any room at your head, Saunders?Or any room at your feet?Is there any room at your side, Saunders?For fain, fain I would sleep.
Is there any room at your head, Saunders?
Or any room at your feet?
Is there any room at your side, Saunders?
For fain, fain I would sleep.
She’s sat her down upon the graveAnd mourned sae lang and sairThat the clochs and wanton flies at lastCame and built in her yellow hair.
She’s sat her down upon the grave
And mourned sae lang and sair
That the clochs and wanton flies at last
Came and built in her yellow hair.
In further illustration Mr. Lowell read from the “Clerk’s Two Sons of Oxenford.” He concluded his lecture thus:
I think that the makers of the old ballads did stand face to face with life in a way that is getting more and more impossible for us. Day by day the art of printing isolates us more and more from our fellows and from the healthy and inspiring touch of our fellows. We continually learn more and more of mankind and less of man. We know more of Europe than of our own village. We feel humanity from afar.
But I must not forget that the ballads havepassed through a sieve which no modern author has the advantage of. Only those have come down to us which imprinted themselves on the general heart. The new editions were struck off by mothers crooning their children to sleep, or by wandering minstrels who went about sowing the seeds of courtesy and valor in the cottage and on the hillside. Print, which, like the amber, preserves all an author’s grubs, gives men the chance to try him by the average, rather than the best, of his yield.
Moreover, the Review of the ballad-singer was in the faces of his ring of hearers, in whose glow or chill he could read at a glance a criticism from which there was no appeal. It was not Smith or Brown, but the human heart that judged him.
Doubtless another advantage of these old poets was their out-of-door life. They went from audience to audience on foot, and had no more cramped a study than the arch of heaven, no library but clouds, streams, mountains, woods, and men. There is something more in sunshine than mere light and heat. I fancy that a kind of flavor we detect in the old ballads is due to it, and that it may give color and bloom to the brain as well as to the apple and plum. Indoor inspiration is like the stove-heat of the forcing-house, and the fruits ripened by it are pale, dropsical, and wanting intang. Theremay be also a virtue in the fireside which gives to the Northern wind a domestic and family warmth, and makes it skilled to teach the ethics of home. But it is not to the chimney-corner that we can trace the spiritual dynasties that have swayed mankind. These have sunshine in their veins.
Perhaps another charm of these ballads is that nobody made them. They seem to have come up like violets, and we have only to thank God for them. And we imply a sort of fondness when we call them “old.” It is an epithet we give endearingly and not as supposing any decrepitude or senescence in them. Like all true poetry, they are not only young themselves, but the renewers of youth in us; they do not lose, but accumulate, strength and life. A true poem gets a part of its inspiring force from each generation of men. The great stream of Homer rolls down to us out of the past, swollen with the tributary delight and admiration of the ages. The next generation will find Shakspeare fuller of meaning and energy by the addition of our enthusiasm. Sir Philip Sidney’s admiration is part of the breath that sounds through the trumpet of “Chevy Chase.” That is no empty gift with which we invest a poem when we bestow on it our own youth, and it is no small debt we owe the true poem that it preserves for us some youth to bestow.