He that made this songe full good,
Came of the northe and of the sothern blode,
And somewhat kyne to Robyn Hood,—
Yit all we be nat soo.
And the refrain follows. In the Gest of Robin Hood, and in the other ballads of this cycle, “I,” that is to say, the singer, now bids hearers “lithe and listen,” or throws in an aside or a gloss,—“I pray to God woo be he,” about the “great-headed monk”; with which compare the delightful ejaculation in Young Beichan, “And I hope this day she sall be his bride,”—now notes the end of a canto, as in the Cheviot, “the first fit here I fynde”;[[412]] and makes other detached and alien remarks of the sort. In Russian ballads, as Bistrom[[413]] points out, the singer addresses his hearers only at the beginning and at the end, often not at all. Evidently, here is a mere singer and recorder, a link between the old singing and dancing throng and the new listening throng; in no case is he a maker, so far as traditional ballads go, and in Scandinavian ballads Steenstrup has proved him to be an impertinence.[[414]] This is said with due allowance for the functions of a leader in communal dance and song, where the “I” little by little got his foothold and his importance; he steps forward with uplifted beaker and begins a new movement, singing a subjective verse or two, then effaces himself from the narrative ballad which now goes with the dance.[[415]] “I bid you all dance,” he cries, “and we will sing of so-and-so.” This introductory stanza, of course, has got into the ballad; and the lyric opening of many a ballad, often touching on the time of year, the place, what not, and often, too, of great beauty, is in most cases to be referred to such an origin. When the ballad is recited, the leader turns recorder, editor, improver, commentator, improvising bard. That damnable iteration in long-winded epics and romances and in later ballads, “this is true that I tell you,” belongs to the reciting stage;[[416]] it is an alien in balladry. More than this, it is to be pointed out that historical ballads, meant to be recited and not sung, are no ballads at all in the communal sense.[[417]] They are on the way to epic, and no better study of this process can be made than in the Gest of Robin Hood.
So much for the absence of any direct trace of personal authorship in the ballad. It is strange to see critics going everywhere to fetch a reason for this fact, except to the most obvious place to find a reason,—in the singing and dancing throng, where at least the elements of a ballad were made. The subjective, the reflective, the sentimental, are characteristics impossible in throng-made verse. Even now when throngs are to be pleased, say in the modern drama, there is a strange mixture of communal bustle and “situation” with those sentimental ditties meant to touch the private heart. Such a play is a monstrosity, to be sure, sheer anarchy of art; but in its formless, purposeless racket it hits communal taste and excites the Dionysian sense, until the crowd is shouting, leaping, and singing by deputy. Going back, now, to the active throng, and to the ballad which in many ways represents that throng, let us see what communal elements are to be noted in its diction, its form, and its surroundings. The diction of a traditional ballad is spontaneous, simple, objective as speech itself, and close to actual life. The course of artistic poetry, as was shown in the preceding chapter, is away from simplicity of diction and toward a dialect. According to the temper of the time, this dialect of poetry will be broadly conventional, as with Waller, Dryden, and Pope, narrowly conventional, as in the puzzle style of the Scandinavian scaldic verse and in certain mannerisms of Tennyson, or individual, as with Tennyson in his main style and with Browning; but in any case it will be a good remove from the speech of daily life. True, certain features of both primitive and ballad poetry seem to make against this assertion. Dr. Brinton[[418]] says that all the American languages which he examined had a poetic dialect apart from that of ordinary life; but these records are clearly not of the communal type, not spontaneous, but rather fossil forms and ceremonial rites. Peasants in France, so Bujeaud notes, compose few ballads in their patois; Hebel pointed out the same fact for German song;[[419]] and there is other evidence. But this is no objection whatever to the theory of ballad simplicity; for as these writers concede, peasants do make their improvised songs, their couplets, schnaderhüpfl, rundâs, songs of labour, songs of feasts, in their own dialect and in nothing else. The traditional songs are often retained, as refrains or the like, in incomprehensible or difficult phrase; but that is another matter, and so far as one deals with communal elements, so far one finds simple and everyday speech, entirely different from the conventional or individual dialect of the poetry of art. Lack of simplicity is held to be a proof of false pretences, of forgery. More than this. The ballads lack figurative language and tropes; they rarely change either the usual order of words or the usual meaning. They lack not only antithesis, but even the common figure of inversion,[[420]] the figure which one would most expect to meet in ballad style. In the ballad itself, inversion is vanishingly rare, and in the refrain, significant fact, it is as good as unknown. Again, any wide word, any mouth-filling phrase, even such a term as “fatherland,” which opens a glimpse into the reaches of reflection and inference, is alien to the ballad of the throng. Now it is significant that this lack of tropes, characteristic of ballads no less than their stanzaic form, sunders them from our old recorded poetry; earliest English poetry is a succession of metaphoric terms.[[421]] All Germanic verse, in fact, laid main stress upon the trope known as “kenning”; the ocean is the “whale’s bath,” the “foaming fields,” the “sea-street”; a wife is “the weaver of peace”; so, in endless variation, the poet called object and action by as many startling names as he could find in tradition or invent for himself.[[422]] Like the recurring phrase of the ballad, these are often conventional terms; but they differ in quality from it by a world’s breadth. For the mark of this trope, in its deliberate or conscious stage,[[423]] is a palpable effort of invention, a refusal to catch the nearest way; the ballad is rarely figurative. What figures one does find in it, and they are few enough, are unforced and almost unconscious. As Steenstrup says, the Scandinavian ballad “talks like a mother to her child,” and has “scarcely a kenning.” Faroe and Icelandic ballads, to be sure, have a few kennings, but they are not frequent. J. F. Campbell[[424]] speaks of the simple Gaelic ballads as poor in figures, while the epic made from these lays riots in trope. The ballad hardly essays even personal description.[[425]] A modern Greek song ventures no farther than the conventional comparison of the maiden with a partridge; and no English ballad undertakes to give a picture of the heroine,—only a traditional epithet or so. The heroes are fair or ruddy, have yellow hair; and that is all. There is no realism, as one now calls it. Minute description of nature increases in direct ratio to the increasing individuality of the poet; and one distrusts those German folksongs which bring the sunset, or a fading leaf, or more subtle processes of nature, into line with the singer’s feeling,—a trait of German minnesang. One will search ballads in vain for a superb touch like that word for the disturbing sunrise which Wolfram puts into the watcher’s call to the lovers, “his claws have struck through the clouds,”—as if a bird of prey to rob them of their love;[[426]] for in the ballads nature is a background and rarely gets treatment in detail. Save in chronicle song like the Cheviot, it is spring, summer, evening, it is the greenwood, no more definite time or place; and so too it is bird or beast, not a special kind, until conventional rose and lily and deer and nightingale come to their monopoly. It is not communal verse, but poetry of art, which, without mythological intent, transfers a distinctly human motive to nature, as where Romeo sees those “envious streaks” in the east, or where, in the Béowulf, old Hrothgar describes the abode of Grendel, with that picture of the hounded stag, and with the “weeping” sky. In the ballads, reference to nature is conventional, though by no means insincere. Though the natural setting is often an irrelevancy, as in Lady Isabel:—
There came a bird out o’ a bush
On water for to dine,
And sighing sair, says the king’s daughter,
“O wae’s this heart of mine,”—