And in modern narrative verse, surely, the line between "epic" quality and "lyric" quality is difficult to draw. Choose almost at random a half-dozen story-telling poems from the Oxford Book of English Verse, say "The Ancient Mariner," "The Burial of Sir John Moore," "La Belle Dame sans Merci," "Porphyria's Lover," "The Forsaken Merman," "He Fell among Thieves." Each of these poems narrates an event, but what purely lyric quality is there which cannot be found in "La Belle Dame sans Merci" and "The Ancient Mariner"? And does not each of the other poems release and excite the lyric mood?
We must admit, furthermore, that narrative measures and lyric measures are frequently identical, and help to carry over into a story a singing quality. Ballad measures are an obvious example. Walter Scott's facile couplets were equally effective for story and for song. Many minor species of narrative poetry, like verse satire and allegory, are often composed in traditional lyric patterns. Even blank verse, admirably suited as it is for story-telling purposes, yields in its varieties of cadence many a bar of music long associated with lyric emotion. Certainly the blank verse of Wordsworth's "Michael" is far different in its musical values from the blank verse, say, of Tennyson's Princess—perhaps truly as different as the metre of Sigurd the Volsung is from that of The Rape of the Lock. The perfect matching of metrical form to the nature of the narrative material, whether that material be traditional or firsthand, simple or complex, rude or delicate, demands the finest artistic instinct. Yet it appears certain that many narrative measures affect us fully as much through their intimate association with the moods of song as through their specific adaptiveness to the purposes of narrative.
5. The Ballad
The supreme illustration of this blending of story and song is the ballad. The word "ballad," like "ode" and "sonnet," is very ancient and has been used in various senses. We think of it to-day as a song that tells a story, usually of popular origin. Derived etymologically from ballare, to dance, it means first of all, a "dance-song," and is the same word as "ballet." Solomon's "Song of Songs" is called in the Bishops' Bible of 1568 "The Ballet of Ballets of King Solomon." But in Chaucer's time a "ballad" meant primarily a French form of lyric verse,—not a narrative lyric specifically. In the Elizabethan period the word was used loosely for "song." Only after the revival of interest in English and Scottish popular ballads in the eighteenth century has the word come gradually to imply a special type of story-telling song, with no traces of individual authorship, and handed down by oral tradition. Scholars differ as to the precise part taken by the singing, dancing crowd in the composition and perpetuation of these traditional ballads. Professor Child, the greatest authority upon English and Scottish balladry, and Professors Gummere, Kittredge and W. M. Hart have emphasized the element of "communal" composition, and illustrated it by many types of song-improvisation among savage races, by sailors' "chanties," and negro "work-songs." It is easy to understand how a singing, dancing crowd carries a refrain, and improvises, through some quick-tongued individual, a new phrase, line or stanza of immediate popular effect; and it is also easy to perceive, by a study of extant versions of various ballads, such as Child printed in glorious abundance, to see how phrases, lines and stanzas get altered as they are passed from lip to lip of unlettered people during the course of centuries. But the actual historical relationship of communal dance-songs to such narrative lyrics as were collected by Bishop Percy, Ritson and Child is still under debate. [Footnote: See Louise Pound, "The Ballad and the Dance," Pub. Mod. Lang. Ass., vol. 34, No. 3 (September, 1919), and Andrew Lang's article on "Ballads" in Chambers' Cyclopedia of Eng. Lit., ed. of 1902.]
"All poetry," said Professor Gummere in reply to a critic of his theory of communal composition of ballads, "springs from the same poetic impulse, and is due to individuals; but the conditions under which it is made, whether originally composed in a singing, dancing throng and submitted to oral tradition, or set down on paper by the solitary and deliberate poet, have given birth to that distinction of 'popular' and 'artistic,' or whatever the terms may be, which has obtained in some form with nearly all writers on poetry since Aristotle." Avoiding questions that are still in controversy, let us look at some of the indubitable characteristics of the "popular" ballads as they are shown in Child's collection. [Footnote: Now reprinted in a single volume of the "Cambridge Poets" (Houghton Mifflin Company), edited with an introduction by G. L. Kittredge.] They are impersonal. There is no trace whatever of individual authorship. "This song was made by Billy Gashade," asserts the author of the immensely popular American ballad of "Jesse James." But we do not know what "Billy Gashade" it was who first made rhymes about Robin Hood or Johnny Armstrong, or just how much help he had from the crowd in composing them. In any case, the method of such ballads is purely objective. They do not moralize or sentimentalize. There is little description, aside from the use of set, conventional phrases. They do not "motivate" the story carefully, or move logically from event to event. Rather do they "flash the story at you" by fragments, and then leave you in the dark. They leap over apparently essential points of exposition and plot structure; they omit to assign dialogue to a specific person, leaving you to guess who is talking. Over certain bits of action or situation they linger as if they hated to leave that part of the story. They make shameless use of "commonplaces," that is, stock phrases, lines or stanzas which are conveniently held by the memory and which may appear in dozens of different ballads. They are not afraid of repetition,—indeed the theory of choral collaboration implies a constant use of repetition and refrain, as in a sailor's "chanty." One of their chief ways of building a situation or advancing a narrative is through "incremental repetition," as Gummere termed it, i.e. the successive additions of some new bits of fact as the bits already familiar are repeated.
"'Christine, Christine, tread a measure for me!
A silken sark I will give to thee.'
"'A silken sark I can get me here,
But I'll not dance with the Prince this year.'
"'Christine, Christine, tread a measure for me,
Silver-clasped shoes I will give to thee!'
"'Silver-clasped shoes,'" etc.
American cowboy ballads show the same device: