Introduction
Goethe, who saw so many things with such clearness of vision, brought out the charm of the popular ballad for readers of a later day in his remark that the value of these songs of the people is to be found in the fact that their motives are drawn directly from nature; and he added, that in the art of saying things compactly, uneducated men have greater skill than those who are educated. It is certainly true that no kind of verse is so completely out of the atmosphere of modern writing as the popular ballad. No other form of verse has, therefore, in so great a degree, the charm of freshness. In material, treatment, and spirit, these bat lads are set in sharp contrast with the poetry of the hour. They deal with historical events or incidents, with local traditions, with personal adventure or achievement. They are, almost without exception, entirely objective. Contemporary poetry is, on the other hand, very largely subjective; and even when it deals with events or incidents it invests them to such a degree with personal emotion and imagination, it so modifies and colours them with temperamental effects, that the resulting poem is much more a study of subjective conditions than a picture or drama of objective realities. This projection of the inward upon the outward world, in such a degree that the dividing line between the two is lost, is strikingly illustrated in Maeterlinck's plays. Nothing could be in sharper contrast, for instance, than the famous ballad of "The Hunting of the Cheviot" and Maeterlinck's "Princess Maleine." There is no atmosphere, in a strict use of the word, in the spirited and compact account of the famous contention between the Percies and the Douglases, of which Sir Philip Sidney said "that I found not my heart moved more than with a Trumpet." It is a breathless, rushing narrative of a swift succession of events, told with the most straight-forward simplicity. In the "Princess Maleine," on the other hand, the narrative is so charged with subjective feeling, the world in which the action takes place is so deeply tinged with lights that never rested on any actual landscape, that all sense of reality is lost. The play depends for its effect mainly upon atmosphere. Certain very definite impressions are produced with singular power, but there is no clear, clean stamping of occurrences on the mind. The imagination is skilfully awakened and made to do the work of observation.
The note of the popular ballad is its objectivity; it not only takes us out of doors, but it also takes us out of the individual consciousness. The manner is entirely subordinated to the matter; the poet, if there was a poet in the case, obliterates himself. What we get is a definite report of events which have taken place, not a study of a man's mind nor an account of a man's feelings. The true balladist is never introspective; he is concerned not with himself but with his story. There is no self-disclosure in his song. To the mood of Senancour and Amiel he was a stranger. Neither he nor the men to whom he recited or sang would have understood that mood. They were primarily and unreflectively absorbed in the world outside of themselves. They saw far more than they meditated; they recorded far more than they moralized. The popular ballads are, as a rule, entirely free from didacticism in any form; that is one of the main sources of their unfailing charm. They show not only a childlike curiosity about the doings of the day and the things that befall men, but a childlike indifference to moral inference and justification. The bloodier the fray the better for ballad purposes; no one feels the necessity of apology either for ruthless aggression or for useless blood-letting; the scene is reported as it was presented to the eye of the spectator, not to his moralizing faculty. He is expected to see and to sing, not to scrutinize and meditate. In those rare cases in which a moral inference is drawn, it is always so obvious and elementary that it gives the impression of having been fastened on at the end of the song, in deference to ecclesiastical rather than popular feeling.
The social and intellectual conditions which fostered self-unconsciousness,—interest in things, incidents, and adventures rather than in moods and inward experiences,—and the unmoral or non moralizing attitude towards events, fostered also that delightful naivete which contributes greatly to the charm of many of the best ballads; a naivete which often heightens the pathos, and, at times, softens it with touches of apparently unconscious humour; the naivete of the child which has in it something of the freshness of a wildflower, and yet has also a wonderful instinct for making the heart of the matter plain. This quality has almost entirely disappeared from contemporary verse among cultivated races; one must go to the peasants of remote parts of the Continent to discover even a trace of its presence. It has a real, but short-lived charm, like the freshness which shines on meadow and garden in the brief dawn which hastens on to day.
This frank, direct play of thought and feeling on an incident, or series of incidents, compensates for the absence of a more perfect art in the ballads; using the word "art" in its true sense as including complete, adequate, and beautiful handling of subject-matter, and masterly working out of its possibilities. These popular songs, so dear to the hearts of the generations on whose lips they were fashioned, and to all who care for the fresh note, the direct word, the unrestrained emotion, rarely touch the highest points of poetic achievement. Their charm lies, not in their perfection of form, but in their spontaneity, sincerity, and graphic power. They are not rivers of song, wide, deep, and swift; they are rather cool, clear springs among the hills. In the reactions against sophisticated poetry which set in from lime to time, the popular ballad—the true folk-song—has often been exalted at the expense of other forms of verse. It is idle to attempt to arrange the various forms of poetry in an order of absolute values; it is enough that each has its own quality, and, therefore, its own value. The drama, the epic, the ballad, the lyric, each strikes its note in the complete expression of human emotion and experience. Each belongs to a particular stage of development, and each has the authority and the enduring charm which attach to every authentic utterance of the spirit of man under the conditions of life.
In this wide range of human expression the ballad follows the epic as a kind of aftermath; a second and scattered harvest, springing without regularity or nurture out of a rich and unexhausted soil. The epic fastens upon some event of such commanding importance that it marks a main current of history; some story, historic, or mythologic; some incident susceptible of extended narrative treatment. It is always, in its popular form, a matter of growth it is direct, simple, free from didacticism; representing, as Aristotle says, "a single action, entire and complete." It subordinates character to action; it delights in episode and dialogue; it is content to tell the story as a story, and leave the moralization to hearers or readers. The popular ballad is so closely related to the popular epic that it may be said to reproduce its qualities and characteristics within a narrower compass, and on a smaller scale. It also is a piece of the memory of the people, or a creation of the imagination of the people; but the tradition or fact which it preserves is of local, rather than national importance. It is indifferent to nice distinctions and delicate gradations or shadings; its power springs from its directness, vigour, and simplicity. It is often entirely occupied with the narration or description of a single episode; it has no room for dialogue, but it often secures the effect of the dialogue by its unconventional freedom of phrase, and sometimes by the introduction of brief and compact charge and denial, question and reply. Sometimes the incidents upon which the ballad makers fastened, have a unity or connection with each other which hints at a complete story. The ballads which deal with Robin Hood are so numerous and so closely related that they constantly suggest, not only the possibility, but the probability of epic treatment. It is surprising that the richness of the material, and its notable illustrative quality, did not inspire some earlier Chaucer to combine the incidents in a sustained narrative. But the epic poet did not appear, and the most representative of English popular heroes remains the central figure in a series of detached episodes and adventures, preserved in a long line of disconnected ballads.
This apparent arrest, in the ballad stage, of a story which seemed destined to become an epic, naturally suggests the vexed question of the author ship of the popular ballads. They are in a very real sense the songs of the people; they make no claim to individual authorship; on the contrary, the inference of what may be called community authorship is, in many instances, irresistible. They are the product of a social condition which, so to speak, holds song of this kind in solution; of an age in which improvisation, singing, and dancing are the most natural and familiar forms of expression. They deal almost without exception with matters which belong to the community memory or imagination; they constantly reappear with variations so noticeable as to indicate free and common handling of themes of wide local interest. All this is true of the popular ballad; but all this does not decisively settle the question of authorship. What share did the community have in the making of these songs, and what share fell to individual singers?
Herder, whose conception of the origin and function of literature was so vitalizing in the general aridity of thinking about the middle of the last century, and who did even more for ballad verse in Germany than Bishop Percy did in England, laid emphasis almost exclusively on community authorship. His profound instinct for reality in all forms of art, his deep feeling for life, and the immense importance he attached to spontaneity and unconsciousness in the truest productivity made community authorship not only attractive but inevitable to him. In his pronounced reaction against the superficial ideas of literature so widely held in the Germany of his time, he espoused the conception of community authorship as the only possible explanation of the epics, ballads, and other folk-songs. In nature and popular life, or universal experience, he found the rich sources of the poetry whose charm he felt so deeply, and whose power and beauty he did so much to reveal to his contemporaries. Genius and nature are magical words with him, because they suggested such depths of being under all forms of expression; such unity of the whole being of a race in its thought, its emotion, and its action; such entire unconsciousness of self or of formulated aim, and such spontaneity of spirit and speech. The language of those times, when words had not yet been divided into nobles, middle-class, and plebeians, was, he said, the richest for poetical purposes. "Our tongue, compared with the idiom of the savage, seems adapted rather for reflection than for the senses or imagination. The rhythm of popular verse is so delicate, so rapid, so precise, that it is no easy matter to defect it with our eyes; but do not imagine it to have been equally difficult for those living populations who listened to, instead of reading it; who were accustomed to the sound of it from their infancy; who themselves sang it, and whose ear had been formed by its cadence." This conception of poetry as arising in the hearts of the people and taking form on their lips is still more definitely and strikingly expressed in two sentences, which let us into, the heart of Herder's philosophy of poetry: "Poetry in those happy days lived in the ears of the people, on the lips and in the harps of living bards; it sang of history, of the events of the day, of mysteries, miracles, and signs. It was the flower of a nation's character, language, and country; of its occupations, its prejudices, its passions, its aspirations, and its soul." In these words, at once comprehensive and vague, after the manner of Herder, we find ourselves face to face with that conception not only of popular song in all its forms, but with literature as a whole, which has revolutionized literary study in this century, and revitalized it as well. For Herder was a man of prophetic instinct; he sometimes felt more clearly than he saw; he divined where he could not reach results by analysis. He was often vague, fragmentary, and inconclusive, like all men of his type; but he had a genius for getting at the heart of things. His statements often need qualification, but he is almost always on the tight track. When he says that the great traditions, in which both the memory and the imagination of a race were engaged, and which were still living in the mouths of the people, "of themselves took on poetic form," he is using language which is too general to convey a definite impression of method, but he is probably suggesting the deepest truth with regard to these popular stories. They actually were of community origin; they actually were common property; they were given a great variety of forms by a great number of persons; the forms which have come down to us are very likely the survivors of a kind of in formal competition, which went on for years at the fireside and at the festivals of a whole country side.