'"Gin my seven sons were seven young rats,
Runnin' upon the castle wa';
And I were a grey cat mysel',
Soon should I worry ane and a'."'
Wide, surely, is the gulf between the Original Woman of old romance and the New Woman of recent fiction. The change, no doubt, is for the better; and yet is it altogether for the better?
According to all modern canons, the conduct of these too-tardy bridegrooms was brutal beyond words; and as for the heroines of the Romantic Ballad, Mother Grundy, had she the handling of them, would use them worse than ever did moody brother or crafty stepmother. But the balladists and ballad characters had their own gauges of conduct. Their morals were not other or better than the morals of their age. They strained out the gnats and swallowed the camels of the law as given to Moses; perhaps if they could look into modern society and the modern novel they would charge the same against our own times and literature. If they broke, as they were too ready to do, the Sixth Commandment, or the Seventh, they made no attempt to glose the sin; they dealt not in innuendo or double entendre. Beside the page of modern realism, the ballad page is clean and wholesome. Human passion unrestrained there may be; but no sickly or vicious sentiment. There is a punctilious sense of honour; and if it is sometimes the letter rather than the spirit of vow or promise that is kept, the knights and ladies in the ballads are no worse than are the Pharisees of our day; and they are always ready to pay, and generally do pay, the utmost penalty.
Thus, in that most powerful and tragic ballad, Clerk Saunders, May Margaret ties a napkin about her eyes that she 'may swear, and keep her aith,' to her 'seven bauld brothers,' that she had not seen her lover 'since late yestreen'; she carries him across the threshold of her bower, that she may be able to say that his foot had never been there. The story of the sleeping twain—the excuses for their sin; the reason why ruth should turn aside vengeance—is told, in staccato sentences, by the brothers as they stand by the bedside of their 'ae sister,' with 'torches burning bright':
'Out and spake the first o' them,
"I wot that they are lovers dear";
And out and spake the second o' them,
"They 've been in love this mony a year";
And out and spake the third o' them,
"His father had nae mair than he."'
And so until the seventh—the Rashleigh of the band—who spake no word, but let his 'bright brown brand' speak for him. What follows rises to the extreme height of the balladist's art; literature might be challenged for anything surpassing it in simplicity and power, in the mingling of horror and pathos:
'Clerk Saunders he started and Margaret she turned,
Into his arms as asleep she lay;
And sad and silent was the night
That was atween the twae.
And they lay still and sleepéd sound,
Until the day began to daw,
And softly unto him she said,
"It 's time, true love, you were awa'."
But he lay still and sleepéd sound,
Albeit the sun began to sheen;
She looked atween her and the wa',
And dull and drumlie were his een.'