BALLAD-ORIGINS
Discussion and research into the origin of folk-songs, or epic poetry, or children’s games, afford permanent recreation to a number of learned hands; and so they have ever since we left off taking things for granted. If nobody except the explorer is any the better, nobody except the other explorers is any the worse. There the ballads are, fruit for the thirsty mouth, as they were to Sir Philip Sidney. But research is good hunting, and discussion good talk: all makes for pattern and diversity in a life which, for most of us, runs too easily into drab. Whether Homer was written by Homer, or “by another man of the same name,” has been, and still is being, debated. Herr Wolff started the ingenious suggestion that, instead of one or two Homers, there were dozens of him. The late Mr. Butler put up a woman for author of the Odyssey, and gave her a name. But Mr. Butler loved two things above all else in life: little jokes and annoying other people. He must not be taken seriously. Similarly, the authorship of the ballads has ever been in debate. The man of our time who knew more about them than any man who ever lived—Professor Child, to wit—knew so much about them that he never committed himself to any hypothesis of their origin. That showed indeed the supreme of knowledge of his subject. But Professor Kittredge, who followed him, built himself a little bungalow of theory; and Professor Gummere presently reared a mansion of it; and now comes Professor Louise Pound from Nebraska with pick and crowbar to level them with the ground. It is very good fun, as I have admitted, except perhaps for Professors Kittredge and Gummere.
Professor Gummere gets the worst of it; but then he has put himself up a mansion of surmise. Professor Kittredge went no further than to declare a peasant-origin for ballad-poetry. Professor Gummere, according to his present housebreaker, erected a theory of something like spontaneous generation—a truly daring conception, one which makes ballad-poetry unlike any other poetry in the world. Throng-inspiration does not commend itself to me, knowing something of throngs and of inspiration. As Professor Pound has no difficulty in establishing, such a thing never happens now, and never happened to anything else, unless Horace Walpole’s account of the effect of putting horsehair into a bottle of water may be accepted. But if it may not, and if it never happened to any other kind of poetry, why should it have happened to ballad-poetry? Queste cose non si fanno. These things are not done.
However, when Professor Gummere argues that the folk-ballads originated in folk-dancing he is building his house of theory upon a footing of rock. Ballare means “to dance”; there’s no escape from that; and if ballads, or ballets, had nothing to do with dancing, why were they called ballads or ballets? Then he can put forward the refrains or burthens which a goodly number of ballads still retain: jingles like “Bow down,” like “Eh, wow, bonnie,” like “Three, three, and thirty-three.” The first of those describes an act of dancing; the second is foolishness unless you dance it; the third, even now, insists on being danced. If he had left it at that, without piling upon it his additament of spontaneous generation, I don’t think Professor Pound could have done any good with her crowbar. But he was too ingenious by half; he soared—he soared into the inane. So down he comes, and we are where we were before.
With all respect for the courage and learning of Professor Pound, I don’t think she has disproved the close connection of song and dance in my country’s youthful days. But “dance” is a word of special connotation now, and it is necessary to remember a much wider application of it in times gone by. It was once a word of ritual significance, as when “David danced before the Lord,” as now when the Canons of Seville dance at Easter; and it was once a word of sport. That, in all probability, is the right connotation of it where ballads are concerned. In certain phases of the dance as a game drama comes in. Drama involves dialogue, and may easily involve narration. “Here we go round the mulberry bush” is both drama, dance, and narration. “Sally, Sally Waters” is the same. So too “Ring a ring of Roses.” But to say of such things, as I suppose Professor Gummere says, that the dancing-game generated the dialogue or narration is to put the cart before the horse. If, as I have said, the jingle “three, three and thirty-three” insists on being danced, is it not more reasonable to suppose that in all cases the jingle, or lilt, or sentiment—“the broom blooms bonnie and says it is fair”—inspired the dance? Personally, I can conceive of spontaneous throng-generation of a dance much more readily. Let the Professor try it, when next he has a throng of children in his garden. Let him begin to jig up and down, saying repeatedly “three, three, and thirty-three,” and see what happens.
I am not at all concerned to say that all ballad-poetry originated in dancing-games, nor concerned to argue against Professor Pound when she suggests that they began in church. She has there the support of the fact, for what it is worth, that the earliest ballads we can find are concerned with religion. That is a fact, though it will not take her as far as she would like. Unfortunately very few such things can be dated before the fifteenth century; and the Professor must remember that preoccupation with religion was by no means confined to the clerical caste. The thirteenth century was the flowering time of the friars. They carried religion into corners where no cleric would ever have set his foot. If religious balladry had a religious origin it would be Franciscan. She does not insist upon all this, however, and certainly I do not. All the concern I have with a possible religious origin of ballad-poetry is with the certainty it affords that, if the friars had anything to do with the beginning of popular epic-narration, as they undoubtedly had to do with that of popular drama, their efforts were addressed to the populace rather than to the court, to the market-square and village green rather than to the hall.
What does Professor Pound herself believe about this obscure matter? She quotes, and quarrels with, Andrew Lang, who said that “Ballads spring from the very heart of the people, and flit from age to age, from lip to lip of shepherds, peasants, nurses, of all that continue nearest to the natural state of man.... The whole soul of the peasant class breathes in their burdens, as the great sea resounds in the shells cast up from its shores.” That seems to me so obviously true of most of the ballads that I should require a stronger case than Professor Pound’s, and a case less weakened by strange oversights, to cause me to think twice of it. Apparently Professor Pound’s main belief about ballads is that they were by origin “literary.” Being literature, that may be supposed by anybody without taking a body very far. But if she means by that that they were composed by professional “literary men,” and not by or for the peasants, I have to suggest to her that there is much in the peasantry and much in the ballads themselves which she has not brought into account; and that that must be sought within the peasantry, and within the ballads, rather than round about them. It is, for instance, a serious error to assume a courtly origin—courtly poet or courtly auditory—in all ballads which deal with courtly people—Lord Thomases, Estmere Kings, Child Horns, Little Musgraves, and so on. Such personages are the stock-in-trade of romance, from Homer to the Family Herald. Reasoning of that kind will land the Professor in uncharted seas. There is a fallacy in it comparable to that in “Who drives fat oxen must himself be fat.” Not a doubt of it but Professor Child’s great book contains a number of courtly ballads—“Chevy Chase” and the like; it needs nothing but a knowledge of literature and the texts to settle it. I should compute the number of such in Child to be between a third and a half of the whole.
To decide upon the remainder, whether they are written by or for the peasantry (and it does not matter which, because in either case the traditions of the peasantry would be preserved), one must go to the ballads themselves. Within them such literary tact and peasant-lore as you possess—and you cannot have too much—will infallibly detect the origin of a given ballad. So much as that, at least, is involved in the very nature of literature. A ballad—any ballad—was either written up to the height of his own powers by an original poet (a Burns, a Clare), or written down to the auditory’s capacity, which is the way of the hack, or professional minstrel. According as you judge (a) apprehensions of fact, (b) locutions, (c) parti pris, you will put the thing down to the idiosyncrasy and origin of the poet or to the idiosyncrasy and milieu of the auditory; and you will nearly always be right. It may not be possible to be sure whether a peasant-poet wrote, though the probabilities will be high; it will always be possible to be sure whether a peasant-audience was addressed, and whether, consequently, by a peasant-audience the ballad was learned and preserved. Who in particular the poet may have been does not matter. But it matters very much, to us, that we should have all we can collect of the nature of our indigenes, though we shall never be able to get it with the clearness and precision with which Professor Pound can get at the nature of hers.
As good an example as anyone could want of the truth of the preceding paragraph is furnished by “The Twa Corbies.” Everybody knows “The Twa Corbies,” a cynical, romantic, highly literary, and most successful thing in the Scots manner; assuredly written for the gentry. But Professor Child juxtaposes to it an English version, called “The Three Ravens,” and provides an instructive comparison. The earliest copy he finds of that is of 1611. It is as surely of peasant origin as the “Twa Corbies” is not. Firstly, it has a rollicking chorus, neither to be desired nor approved by the gentry; secondly, instead of being romantic, it is sentimental; thirdly, instead of ending with a wry mouth, it ends as genially as the circumstances allow. Cynicism has never “gone down” with the peasantry. I don’t quote it, for considerations of space. Another interesting comparison can be made by means of “Thomas Rymer” in Child’s versions A. and C. In each Thomas takes the Queen of Faëry for her of Heaven, and in each she denies it. In A. she says:
“‘O no, O no, True Thomas,’ she says,
‘That name does not belong to me;
I am but the Queen of fair Elfland,
And I’m come to visit thee.’”
But in C. she says:
“‘I’m no the Queen of Heaven, Thomas;
I never carried my head sae hie;
For I am but a lady gay,
Come out to hunt in my follee.’”
The idiom there is quite enough to settle the question for me. But there is another point. The peasantry will never name the fairies if they can help it. They call them the “Good People” or the “Little People,” and go no nearer. Well, observe, and let Professor Pound observe, how C. version gets round that difficulty.
Lastly, I will touch upon the delicate subject of ballads like “Sheath and Knife”, “Lizzie Wan”, “The King’s Daughter, Lady Jean”, and others. The romantic treatment of that subject is very rare in literature. Ford’s play I believe to be the first case of it in ours; and after Ford you must travel down to Shelley for another. With a peasant poet or a peasant auditory there would be no difficulty. For all sorts of reasons, that class knew a great deal about such matters. If you are to conceive those particular ballads as written for the gentry you are adding to fine literature things unknown before the seventeenth century, and then out of sight until the nineteenth. Let the Professor perpend. It does not do to be too exclusive in estimating ballad-origins.