The Modern Street-ballads Of Ireland.
The home of the street-ballad, pure and simple, is in Ireland. It has nearly vanished in England, destroyed by the penny newspaper, which contains five times as highly spiced food for the money. In Ireland it still exists and supplies the place of the newspaper, not only in appeals to the passion or reason, but as a general chronicle of every event of importance, local or national, Very often both are combined, and the leading article and the account of political insult will be run into rude rhyme together, and the story of a murder be interspersed with reflections on its sin. The quantity of ballads is, of course, enormous, and to expect that any but a small portion should possess more poetry than a newspaper article would be unreasonable. But all are not of this prosaic class, and some possess the genuine spirit of poetry under their rude but often spirited diction.
The first question naturally asked is, Whence comes this enormous flood of ballads? Who are the poets who produce them on every imaginable subject, even the most verse-defying public meeting, or in praise of humblest of politicians? Like the immortal Smiths and Joneses, that make the thunder of the Times, their names never appear, and though the ballad or the leading article—and both have done so—may influence the fate of nations, it will bring to the author only his stipulated hire. At present, the street-ballads of Ireland are mostly composed by the singers themselves. In ancient days, the weavers and tailors and the hedge-schoolmasters used to be a fruitful source of supply, the sedentary occupations of the former being popularly supposed to foster the poetic talent, The latter class has vanished, and if here and there one exists, it is in the shape of a red-nosed, white-haired veteran, who is entertained in farmers' houses and country shebeens, in memory of his ancient glory, when sesquipedalian, long words and "cute" problems made him the monarch of the parish next to the priest himself. However, the singer of the ballad is, in most instances, the writer, who is only anxious for a subject of interest on which to exercise his muse, and generally turns out half-a-dozen verses of the established pattern in half an hour. This he takes to the publisher, who not only allows him no copyright, but does not even make a discount in the price of his stock in trade, for which he pays the same as his brother bards, who, finding his ballad popular, will straightway strain their voices to it. But then he has the same privilege with their productions, so that it is all right in the long run. The ballads are printed on the coarsest of paper with the poorest of type, and generally with a worn-out woodcut of the most inappropriate description at the head. Thus, for instance, I have one, where a portrait of Jerome Bonaparte does duty over the "Lamentation of Lawrence King for the murder of Lieut. Clutterbuck."
The ballad-singers are of both sexes, and are very dilapidated specimens. The tone in which they send their voices on the shuddering air is utterly indescribable—a sort of droning, pillelu falsetto, at once outrageously comical and lugubrious. They sing everything in the same melancholy cadence, whether lamentation or love-song. Very often, two, more especially of women, will be together. The first will sing the first two lines of a quatrain alone, and then the second will join in, and they rise to the height of discord together. Fair-days are their days of harvest, although in cities like Cork or Waterford they may be seen on every day except Sunday. A popular ballad will often have a very large sale, and will find its way all over the country.
The greater portion of ballads composed in this way are, of course, destitute of anything like poetry—mere pieces of outrageous metaphor and Malapropoian long words, for which last the ballad-singers have a ridiculous fondness. The singers sing in a foreign language; they have lost the sweet tongue peculiarly fitted for improvised poetry, in which their predecessors the bards, down to the date of less than one hundred years ago, sang so sweetly and so strongly, with such dramatic diction and happy boldness of epithet. The language of the Saxon oppressor is from the tongue, and not from the heart. As the mother of the late William Carleton used to say, "the Irish melts into the tune;" the English doesn't, and so many of the finest of the ancient melodies are now songs without words. "Turlogh O'Carolan," "Donogh MacConmara," and the "Mangaire Sugach" have not left their successors among the "English" poets of the present day. Among a people naturally so eloquent as the native Irish, not even the drapery of an incongruous language can entirely obscure the native vigor and strength of thought. A ballad is sometime seen which, though often unequal and rude, is alive with impassioned poetry, fierce, melancholy, or tender, and it almost always becomes a general favorite, and is preserved beyond its day to become a part of the standard stock. The songs of so genuine a poet as William Allingham, who is the only cultivated Irish poet who has had the taste and the spirit to reproduce in spirit and diction these wild flowers of song, have been printed on the half-penny ballad-sheets, and sung at the evening hearth and at the morning milking all over Ireland. "Lovely Mary Donnelly" and the "Irish Girl's Lamentation" have become, in truth, a part of the songs of the nation, touching alike the cultivated intellect and the untutored heart.
The street-ballads may be divided into five classes: patriotic, love-songs, lamentations, eulogies, and chronicles.
The patriotic songs are disappointing. There are few to stir the heart like the war-notes of Scotland. The reason is obvious. The triumphs were few and fleeting, and the song of the vanquished was only of hope or despair. They must sing in secret and be silent in the presence of the victors. In most of the political songs allegory is largely used. Ireland is typified under the form of a lonely female in distress, or a venerable old lady, or some other figure is used to disguise the meaning. Of course the street ballad-singers dare not sing anything seditious, and even the whistling of the "Wearing of the Green" will call down the rebuke of the "peeler." The ballads that express the hatred of the people to their rulers are sung in stealth and are often unprinted. They are not usually the production of the hackneyed professional ballad-singers, and are consequently of a much higher order. The following is a good specimen, It is entitled
The Irishman's Farewell To His Country.
Oh! farewell, Ireland: I am going across the stormy main,
Where cruel strife will end my life, to see you never again.
'Twill break my heart from you to part; acushla astore machree.
But I must go, full of grief and woe, to the shores of America.
"On Irish soil my fathers dwelt since the days of Brian Borue.
They paid their rent and lived content convenient to Carricmore.
But the landlord sent on the move my poor father and me.
We must leave our home far away to roam in the fields of America.
"No more at the churchyard, astore machree,
at my mother's grave I'll kneel.
The tyrants know but little of the woe the poor man has to feel.
When I look on the spot of ground that is so dear to me,
I could curse the laws that have given me cause to depart to America.
"Oh! where are the neighbors, kind and true, that
were once my country's pride?
No more will they be seen on the face of the green,
nor dance on the green hillside.
It is the stranger's cow that is grazing now,
where the people we used to see.
With notice they were served to be turned out or starved,
or banished to America.
"O! Erin machree, must our children be exiled all over the earth?
Will they evermore think of you, astore,
as the land that gave them birth?
Must the Irish yield to the beasts of the field?
Oh! no—acushla astore machree.
They are crossing back in ships, with vengeance on their lips,
from the shores of America."
The songs which were in vogue among the young and enthusiastic Fenians were, as might be supposed, of an entirely different nature. They were not peasants, but half-educated artisans. The proscribed National Cork Songster contains probably more rant and fustian than any similar number of printed pages in existence. The verses, of course, bear a family resemblance to those that appeared in the Nation for a couple of years previous to the events of '48, and in many instances are reproductions. Those of a modern date are still more extravagant, if possible, than that deluge of enthusiastic pathos; for among the Nation poets were Thomas Davis and James Clarence Mangan, while among those of the Fenians of 1866 there is but one that deserves the slightest shred of laurel. Charles J. Kickham, now under sentence of fourteen years' penal servitude in her Britannic Majesty's prisons, has written two or three pieces of genuine ballad-poetry of great merit, which the people have at once adopted as household songs. "Rory of the Hill" is of remarkable spirit. It begins:
"That rake up near the rafters,
Why leave it there so long?
The handle of the best of ash
Is smooth and straight and strong.
And mother, will you tell me
Why did my father frown,
When to make hay in summer-time
I climbed to take it down?
She looked up to her husband's eyes,
While her own with light did fill,
'You'll shortly know the reason why,'
Said Rory of the Hill."
The love-songs, that are sung by the colleens at the soft dewy dawn, as they sit beside the sleek cows just arisen from beneath the hedge, the nimble finger streaming the white milk into the foaming pail, while the lark's song melts down from that speck beneath the cloud, and the blackbird and thrush warble with ecstasy in the hedge, the morning light shining across the dewy green fields; or at
"Eve's pensive air,"
when the shadows are growing long, although the tops of the swelling uplands are bright, and the crows are winging home, and the swallows darting in the still air; or, in the winter evenings, when the candles are lighted in the kitchen, and busy fingers draw the woof, while the foot beats time to the whirring wheel, are very numerous, and generally of a higher order of merit than the patriotic songs. The pulses of the heart are freer and its utterance dearer in human love than in love of country. The beauties in which the Irish girls excel all others—the blooming cheeks, and brilliant eyes, and wealth of flowing hair, are the main objects of compliment, and are often transformed into personifications of endearment. Colleen, the universal term for young maidens, seems but a corruption of coolleen, which means a head of curls or abundant tresses. Grey and blue eyes are especially objects of endearment, and even in the ancient Irish poems, green-eyed is not unfrequently used, which is not so unnatural as the English reader may suppose, the Irish word expressing the indefinable tint of some lighter blue eyes, being untranslatable into English. [Footnote 18]
[Footnote 18: "Sweet emerald eyes."—Massinger. "How is that young and green-eyed Gaditana?" Longfellow's Spanish Student.]
Although the modern love-songs are inferior to those in the Irish language, for the reason that has been mentioned, that English is not yet the language of the Irish heart, they often possess a simple power, and, though seldom sustained throughout, a touch of nature's genius, which the highest poet cannot reach with all his art. How exquisite is the following:
"As Katty and I were discoursing,
She smiled upon me now and then,
Her apron string she kept foulding,
And twisting all round her ring."
Bits of poetry can be picked out of almost every love-ballad, as witness the following:
"My love is fairer than the lilies that do grow,
She has a voice that's clearer than any winds that blow."
"With mild eyes like the dawn."
"One pleasant evening, when pinks and daisies
Closed in their bosoms one drop of dew."
"His hair shines gold revived by the sun,
And he takes his denomination from the drien don."
"I wish I were a linnet, how I would sing and fly.
I wish I were a corn-crake, I'd sing till morning clear—
I'd sit and sing to Molly, for once I held her dear."
"'Twas on a bright morning in summer,
That I first heard his voice speaking low,
As he said to the colleen beside me,
Who's that pretty girl milking her cow?"
"The hands of my love are more sunny and soft
Than the snowy sea foam."
"My love will not come nigh me,
Nor hear the moan I make;
Neither would she pity me,
Though my poor heart should break."
There is not one, however, that would bear quoting entire, and none that comes anywhere near the flowers of the ancient Irish love-songs which are some of the finest in the world. The principal theme and delight of the ballad-singers are romantic episodes, where a rich young nobleman courts a farmer's daughter in disguise, and, after marriage, reveals himself, his lineage, and his possessions to his bride; or where a noble lady falls in love with a tight young serving-boy. Such a ballad will be as great a favorite among the colleens as the novels of romantic love are said to be among milliners' apprentices. One thing is especially noticeable among the love-ballads, and that is the total absence not only of licentiousness, but even of coarseness. The Irish peasant-girls at home are the most virtuous of their class in the world, owing to the influence of the confessional, the strong feeling of family pride, and the custom of universal and early marriage. Not but there are unfortunates who have made a "slip;" and when the ballad relates of such a tragedy, it shows of how deep effect is the scorn of the parish, and how wretched the fate of the unfortunate and her base-born offspring. The "lamentations" or confessions of condemned criminals are highly popular. Premeditated murder is rare among the Irish peasantry, in comparison with the records of ruffianism among the English laboring classes, and the interest excited by the event is deeper, and extends to a larger space of local influence. These lamentations are the rhymed confessions of the criminals, giving an account of the circumstances of the tragedy, sometimes in the third person, and sometimes in the first, always concluding with a regret at the disgrace which the criminal has brought on his relations, and imploring mercy for his soul. They are of unequal merit, and, as a whole, not equal to the love-songs. Once in a while, there is a touch of untaught pathos; but being without exception the production of the hackneyed writers, they are as little worth preservation as the "lives" of eminent murderers which supply their places among us.
The narrative ballads tell of every event of interest to Irish ears, from Aspromonte to the glorious steeplechase at Namore; the burning of an emigrant ship, to a ploughing-match at Pilltown, the same language being used for the one as the other. During the late war in this country, every great battle was duly sung by the Irish minstrels. The sympathies of the peasantry were usually with the majority of their kindred in the North, but not universally so. Thus does a bard give an account of the battle of New Orleans, which would astonish General Butler:
"To see the streets that evening,
the heart would rend with pain.
The human blood in rivers ran,
like any flood or stream.
Men's heads blown off their bodies,
most dismal for to see;
And wounded men did loudly cry
in pain and agony.
The Federals they did advance,
and broke in through the town.
They trampled dead and wounded
that lay upon the ground.
The wounded called for mercy,
but none they did receive—"
The eulogies of person or place, some patron or his residence, are innumerable, and ineffably absurd. Some years ago, an idle young lawyer at Cork happened to be visiting Blarney Castle, when one of these wandering minstrels came to the gate, and asked to dedicate a verse to "Lady Jeffers that owns this station." The request was granted, and the laughter of the guests, as the bard recited his "composition," may be imagined. The occurrence and the style of verse were common enough, but an idle banter incited the gay youth into a burlesque imitation. The result was the famous "Groves of Blarney," that has been sung and whistled all over the world. Those who have not seen the originals might imagine the "Groves of Blarney" to be an outrageous caricature. But it is not so. It hardly equals and cannot surpass some of the native flowers of blunder. The original is still sold in the streets of Cork, and some extracts, in conclusion, will show how much Dick Milliken was indebted to his unwitting model:
"There are fine walks in those pleasant gardens,
And spots most charming in shady bowers.
The gladiator, who is bold and daring,
Each night and morning to watch the flowers.
"There are fine horses and stall-fed oxen,
A den for foxes to play and hide,
Fine mares for breeding, with foreign sheep,
With snowy fleeces at Castle Hyde.
"The buck and doe, the fox and eagle,
Do skip and play at the river side.
The trout and salmon are always sporting
In the clear streams of Castle Hyde."