A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century

by Henry A. Beers

"Those pretty babes, with hand in hand,
Went wandering up and down;
But never more they saw the man
Approaching from the town."

He says that in both of these stanzas the language is that of familiar conversation, yet one stanza is admirable and the other contemptible, because the matter of it is contemptible. In the essay supplementary to his preface, Wordsworth asserts that the "Reliques" was "ill suited to the then existing taste of city society, and Dr. Johnson . . . was not sparing in his exertions to make it an object of contempt": and that "Dr. Percy was so abashed by the ridicule flung upon his labors . . . that, though while he was writing under a mask he had not wanted resolution to follow his genius into the regions of true simplicity and genuine pathos (as is evinced by the exquisite ballad of 'Sir Cauline' and by many other pieces), yet when he appeared in his own person and character as a poetical writer, he adopted, as in the tale of 'The Hermit of Warkworth,' a diction scarcely distinguishable from the vague, the glossy and unfeeling language of his day." Wordsworth adds that he esteems the genius of Dr. Percy in this kind of writing superior to that of any other modern writer; and that even Bürger had not Percy's fine sensibility. He quotes, in support of this opinion, two stanzas from "The Child of Elle" in the "Reliques," and contrasts them with the diluted and tricked-out version of the same in Bürger's German.

Mr. Hales does not agree in this high estimate of Percy as a ballad composer. Of this same "Child of Elle" he says: "The present fragment of a version may be fairly said to be now printed for the first time, as in the 'Reliques' it is buried in a heap of 'polished' verses composed by Percy. That worthy prelate, touched by the beauty of it—he had a soul—was unhappily moved to try his hand at its completion. A wax-doll-maker might as well try to restore Milo's Venus. There are thirty-nine lines here. There are two hundred in the thing called the 'Child of Elle' in the 'Reliques.' But in those two hundred lines all the thirty-nine originals do not appear. . . On the whole, the union of the genuine and the false—of the old ballad with Percy's tawdry feebleness—makes about as objectionable a mésalliance as in the story itself is in the eyes of the father."[37] The modern ballad scholars, in their zeal for the purity of the text, are almost as hard upon Percy as Ritson himself was. They say that he polished "The Heir of Linne" till he could see his own face in it; and swelled out its 126 lines to 216—"a fine flood of ballad and water."[38] The result of this piecing and tinkering in "Sir Cauline"—which Wordsworth thought exquisite—they regard as a heap of tinsel, though they acknowledge that "these additional stanzas show, indeed, an extensive acquaintance with old balladry and a considerable talent of imitation."

From the critical or scholarly point of view, these strictures are doubtless deserved. It is an editor's duty to give his text as he finds it, without interpolations or restorations; and it is unquestionable that Percy's additions to fragmentary pieces are full of sentimentalism, affectation, and the spurious poetic diction of his age. An experienced ballad amateur can readily separate, in most cases, the genuine portions from the insertions. But it is unfair to try Percy by modern editorial canons. That sacredness which is now imputed to the ipsissima verba of an ancient piece of popular literature would have been unintelligible to men of that generation, who regarded such things as trifles at best, and mostly as barbarous trifles—something like wampum belts, or nose-rings, or antique ornaments in the goût barbare et charmant des bijoux goths. Percy's readers did not want torsos and scraps; to present them with acephalous or bobtailed ballads—with cetera desunt and constellations of asterisks—like the manuscript in Prior's poem, the conclusion of which was eaten by the rats—would have been mere pedantry. Percy knew his public, and he knew how to make his work attractive to it. The readers of that generation enjoyed their ballad with a large infusion of Percy. If the scholars of this generation prefer to take theirs without, they know where to get it.

The materials for the "Reliques" were drawn partly from the Pepys collection at Magdalen College, Cambridge; from Anthony Wood's, made in 1676, in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford; from manuscript and printed ballads in the Bodleian, the British Museum, the archives of the Antiquarian Society, and private collections. Sir David Dalrymple sent a number of Scotch ballads, and the editor acknowledged obligations to Thomas Warton and many others. But the nucleus of the whole was a certain folio manuscript in a handwriting of Charles I.'s time, containing 191 songs and ballads, which Percy had begged, then still very young, from his friend Humphrey Pitt, of Prior's-Lee in Shropshire. When he first saw this precious document, it was torn, unbound, and mutilated, "lying dirty on the floor under a bureau in the parlor, being used by the maids to light the fire." The first and last leaves were wanting, and "of 54 pages near the beginning, half of every leaf hath been torn away."[39] Percy had it bound, but the binders trimmed off the top and bottom lines in the process. From this manuscript he professed to have taken "the greater part" of the pieces in the "Reliques." In truth he took only 45 of the 176 poems in his first edition from this source.

Percy made no secret of the fact that he filled lacunae in his originals with stanzas, and, in some cases, with nearly entire poems of his own composition. But the extent of the liberties that he took with the text, although suspected, was not certainly known until Mr. Furnivall finally got leave to have the folio manuscript copied and printed.[40] Before this time it had been jealously guarded by the Percy family, and access to it had been denied to scholars. "Since Percy and his nephew printed their fourth edition of the 'Reliques' from the manuscript in 1794," writes Mr. Furnivall in his "Forewords," "no one has printed any piece from it except Robert Jamieson—to whom Percy supplied a copy of 'Child Maurice' and 'Robin Hood and the Old Man' for his 'Popular Ballads and Songs' (1806)—and Sir Frederic Madden, who was allowed—by one of Percy's daughters—to print 'The Grene Knight,' 'The Carle of Carlisle' and 'The Turk and Gawin' in his 'Syr Gawaine' for the Bannatyne Club, 1839." Percy was furiously assailed by Joseph Ritson for manipulating his texts; and in the 1794 edition he made some concessions to the latter's demand for a literal rescript, by taking off a few of the ornaments in which he had tricked them. Ritson was a thoroughly critical, conscientious student of poetic antiquities and held the right theory of an editor's functions. In his own collection of early English poetry he rendered a valuable service to all later inquiries. These included "Pieces of Ancient Popular Poetry," 1791; "Ancient Songs," 1792; "Scottish Songs," 1794; "Robin Hood," 1795; besides editions of Laurence Minot's poems, and of "Gammer Gurton's Needle," as well as other titles. He was an ill-tempered and eccentric man: a vegetarian, a free-thinker, a spelling reformer,[41] and latterly a Jacobin. He attacked Warton as well as Percy, and used to describe any clerical antagonist as a "stinking priest." He died insane in 1803. Ritson took issue with the theory maintained in Percy's introductory "Essay on the Ancient Minstrels," viz.: that the minstrels were not only the singers, but likewise the authors of the ballads. But Ritson went so far in his rage against Percy as to deny the existence of the sacred Folio Manuscript, until convinced by abundant testimony that there was such a thing. It was an age of forgeries, and Ritson was not altogether without justification in supposing that the author of "The Hermit of Warkworth" belonged in the same category with Chatterton, Ireland, and MacPherson.

Percy, like Warton, took an apologetic tone toward his public. "In a polished age, like the present," he wrote, "I am sensible that many of these reliques of antiquity will require great allowances to be made for them. Yet have they, for the most part, a pleasing simplicity and many artless graces, which, in the opinion of no mean critics, have been thought to compensate for the want of higher beauties." Indeed how should it have been otherwise? The old ballads were everything which the eighteenth century was not. They were rough and wild, where that was smooth and tame; they dealt, with fierce sincerity, in the elementary passions of human nature. They did not moralize, or philosophize, or sentimentalize; were never subtle, intellectual, or abstract. They were plain English, without finery or elegance. They had certain popular mannerisms, but none of the conventional figures of speech or rhetorical artifices like personifications, periphrasis, antithesis, and climax so dear to the Augustan heart. They were intent on the story—not on the style—and they just told it and let it go for what it was worth.

Moreover, there are ballads and ballads. The best of them are noble in expression as well as feeling, unequaled by anything in our medieval poetry outside of Chaucer; unequaled by Chaucer himself in point of intensity, in occasional phrases of a piercing beauty:

"The swans-fethers that his arrowe bar
With his hart-blood they were wet."[42]

"O cocks are crowing a merry mid-larf,
A wat the wild fule boded day;
The salms of Heaven will be sung,
And ere now I'll be missed away."[43]