still, there are touches of nature, sincere and exquisite and appropriate, to be found in sundry ballads, notably at the opening of Robin Hood and the Monk.[[427]] However, ballads are mainly for the action, not the setting of the stage, and a throng of festal dancers would not care for a bill of particulars. It is the poet, fugitive from throngs, who turns to nature and studies her charms with a lover’s scrutiny.
On the other hand, what ballads lack in figurative and descriptive power, they supply in an excess of iteration, of repetition, of fixed and recurring phrases. The recurring phrase, along with the standing epithet, one finds, to be sure, in the great epic as well as in the ballad of tradition; repetition in the simpler sense, however, is peculiar to the ballads. Epithets in the ballad are of a modest type; the steed is “milk-white” or “berry-brown,” the lady is “free,”—that is, “noble,”—while now and then an adjective cleaves to its substantive in defiance of fact, as when the “true-love” is palpably false, or when the newborn infant is called an “auld son.” As for the phrases, when a little foot-page starts off with his message, when two swordsmen fall to blows, when there are three horses, black, brown, and white, to be tested, any reader of ballads can shut his eyes and repeat the two or three conventional lines or even stanzas that follow. Of course, as poetry grows artistic, recurring phrases vanish; the artist shuns what is traditional and evident, seeking to announce by independence and freshness of phrase the individuality of his own art. Tobler notes that while the more communal epic of old France used the same terms and the same general apparatus for a fight here and a fight there, Ariosto contrives, however one fight is like another, to give an individual character to each.
To say that these recurring phrases are due to the need of the improvising singer for a halting-place, a rest, in order to think of new material, is distortion of facts. Undoubtedly the minstrel used these traditional passages for the purpose, but they are due to the communal and public character of the poetry itself, and belong, so far as the question of origins is concerned, to that main fact in all primitive song, the fact of iteration. This is now to be studied not so much in the actual recurrence of identical passages, as in that characteristic of ballad style which may be called incremental repetition. One form of this is where a question is repeated along with the answer, a process radically different from that of Germanic epic, where the zeal for variation has blotted out this primitive note of repetition, and, against all epic propriety, forced a messenger to give his message in terms quite different from the original. Again, each slight change in the situation of a ballad often has a stanza which repeats the preceding stanza exactly, save for a word or two to express the change. Lyngbye[[428]] found the Faroe ballads so laden with this kind of repetition that in the record he omitted many of the stanzas, giving them all only here and there, to show the general style. Side by side with incremental repetition, which is usually found in sets of three stanzas, runs a refrain, either repeated at the end of each stanza or sung throughout as a burden. Moreover, with all this iteration goes a tendency to omit particulars and events which modern poetry would give in full, so that a very ill-natured critic might define ballads as a combination of the superfluous and the inadequate. But these traits can best be seen in an actual ballad, Babylon, or the Bonnie Banks of Fordie, familiar not only to Britain, but “to all branches of the Scandinavian race.”[[429]] It is an admirable specimen of communal elements and traditional form blended with incipient art:—
There were three ladies lived in a bower,
Eh vow bonnie,[[430]]
And they went out to pull a flower
On the bonnie banks o’ Fordie.[[430]]
They hadna pu’ed a flower but ane,
When up started to them a banisht man.
He’s taen the first sister by the hand,