After this, however, we hardly meet with a ballad having the antique ring about it, even on the Highland Line. The fine gold had become dim, or mixed with later clay. The mood and condition of the nation had changed. The 'end of the auld sang' of the Scottish Parliament was the end also of the ballad. There was an outburst of national feeling, expressed in song and music, over the Jacobite risings of last century; Allan Ramsay rose like a star at its beginning, and Burns shone out gloriously towards its close. But the expression was lyrical, and not narrative. The ballad of the old type no longer grew naturally and freshly by edge of copse and shaw. The collector had his eye upon it, and was already collecting, comparing, and classifying—and, what was worse, correcting, restoring, and improving.
CHAPTER III
BALLAD STRUCTURE AND BALLAD STYLE
'Strike on, strike on, Glenkindie,
O' thy harping do not blinne,
For every stroke goes o'er thy harp,
It stounds my heart within.'
Glenkindie.
The old ballads were made to be sung; or, at least, to be chanted. An inquiry whether the traditional ballad airs preceded the words, or vice versâ, would probably lead us to no more certain conclusions than that of whether the egg came before the fowl or the fowl before the egg. Both ballads and ballad airs have come down to us greatly changed and corrupted; and probably it is the airs that have suffered most from neglect and from alteration. Notation of the simple and plaintive and sweet old melodies appropriated in the ears and lips of the people to the words of particular ballads came long after the transcribing of the words themselves. There are other elements of perplexity and difficulty in ballad music which require an expert to unravel and explain, and which cannot be entered into here. The subject is referred to only because, in the eyes of the original composers and singers at least, to dissever the words from the tune would have seemed like parting soul from body; and because no right notion can be gathered of the Scottish ballads without bearing in mind the part which the ancient airs have taken in framing their structure and in moulding their style.
Like the ballads themselves, the 'sets' of ballad airs vary with the localities; and even in the same district different airs will be found sung to the same words and different words to the same air. But of many of the older ballads, at least, it may be affirmed that, from time immemorial, they have been preserved in a certain musical setting which has not altered more in transmission from place to place and from generation to generation than have the ballads themselves, and which has so wrought itself into the texture and essence of the tale that it is impossible to think of them apart. The analogy of the Scottish psalmody may, perhaps, be used in illustration. In it, also, there is a 'common measure' that can be fitted at will to the common metre—in the psalms, as in the ballads, the alternation of lines of four and three accented syllables. In the one case, as in the other, there is a certain family resemblance, in the melody as in the theme, that to the untrained and unaccustomed ear may convey an impression of monotony. But to each ballad, as to each psalm, there belongs a peculiar strain or lilt, touched, as a rule, with a solemn or piercing pathos, often cast in the plaintive minor mode, that alone can bring out the full inner meaning of the words, and that is endeared and hallowed by centuries of association. As easily might we explain why the words and air of the 'Old Hundredth' or the 'Old 124th' belong to each other, as analyse the wedded harmony of the verse and music in The Broom o' the Cowdenknowes, or Barbara Allan, or The Bonnie House o' Airlie.
But not all, and not all the sweetest and the best of our ballad strains, are so firmly fixed in the memory as these; because, for one thing, they have not all enjoyed the same popularity of print. As a rule, and until this popularity comes, it may be taken that the greater the variations in tune and in words the greater the age. The late Dean Christie, of Fochabers, an enthusiastic hunter after 'Traditional Ballad Airs,' of which he found great treasure-trove in out-of-the-way nooks of Buchan, Enzie, and other districts of the north-eastern counties, tells us, from his experience, that 'the differences in the versions of the Romantic Ballads, as sung in the different counties, may be taken as a proof of their antiquity.' He had 'seldom heard two ballad-singers sing a ballad in the same way, either in words or music'; and he holds it 'almost impossible to find the true set of any traditional air, unless the set can be traced genuinely to its composer,' a task, it need hardly be said, still more difficult than that of tracing the ballad words to the original balladist. It is also the opinion of this authority, that it is well-nigh impossible 'to arrange the traditional melodies without hearing them sung to the words of the ballad, the words and the air being so interwoven.' May it not be said, with equal truth, that those who know only the words of Binnorie, or Chil' Ether, or The Twa Corbies, and have never heard the strains, sweet and sad and weird, like the wind crooning at night round a ruined tower, to which it has been sung for untold generations, have not yet penetrated to the inmost soul of the ballad, or got a grasp of its formative principle?
The refrain is a venerable and characteristic feature of the ballad and ballad melody. In its refrains, as in everything else, Scottish ballad poetry has been peculiarly happy. Some will have it that they are of much older date than the ballads themselves. It has been suggested that many of them—and these the refrains that have lost, if they ever possessed, any definite or intelligible meaning to the ear—may be relics not merely of ancient song, but of ancient rites and incantations, and of a forgotten speech. Attempts have been made to interpret, for instance, the familiar 'Down, down, derry down,' as a Celtic invocation to assemble at the hill of sacrifice—a survival of pagan times when the altars smoked with human victims. It need only be said that these ingenious theorists have not yet proved their case; and that the origin of the refrain is a subject involved in still greater obscurity than that of the ballad itself.
Like the ballad verses and the ballad airs, also, these 'owerwords' are exceedingly variable, and are often interchangeable. Some of them are 'owerwords' literally; that is to say, they simply repeat or echo a word or phrase of the stanza to which they are attached. A specimen is the verse from Johnie o' Braidislee, quoted in the previous chapter. Others, and these, as has been said, among the refrains of most ancient and honourable lineage, bear the appearance of words whose meaning has been forgotten. 'With rombelogh' has come rumbling down to us from the days of Bannockburn; and may even then have been of such eld that the key to its interpretation had already been lost. The 'Hey, nien-nanny' of the Scottish ballad was, under slightly different forms, old and quaint in Shakespeare's time, and in Chaucer's. Still others have the effect upon us of the rhyming prattle invented by children at play. They are cries, naïve or wild, from the age of innocence—cries extracted from the children of nature by the beauty of the world or the sharp and relentless stroke of fate. Of such are 'The broom, the bonnie, bonnie broom,' 'Hey wi' the rose and the lindie o',' 'Blaw, blaw, ye cauld winds blaw,' and their congeners. These sweet and idyllic notes are often interposed in some of the very grimmest of our ballads. They suggest a harping interlude between lines that, without this relief, would be weighted with an intolerable load of horror or sorrow. There are refrain lines—'Bonnie St. Johnston stands fair upon Tay' is an example—which seem to hint that they may have been borrowed from some old ballad that, except for this preluding or interjected note, has utterly 'sunk dumb.' But more noticeable are those haunting burdens which, in certain moods, seem somehow to have absorbed more of the story than the ballad lines they accompany—that appeal to an inner sense with a directness and poignancy beyond the power of words to which we attach a coherent meaning. How deeply the sense of dread, of approaching tragedy, as well as that of colour and locality, is stimulated by the iteration of the drear owerword, 'All alone and alonie,' or 'Binnórie, O Binnórie!' How the horror of a monstrous crime creeps nearer with each repetition of the cry, 'Mither, Mither!' in the wild dialogue between mother and son in Edward! Like Glenkindie's harping, every stroke 'stounds the heart within'—we scarce can tell how or why.