Certainly no true ballad was ever hammered out at the desk. It may have been wrought and fashioned for singing in bower or hall; but the fire that shaped it was caught, in gloaming grey or under the 'lee licht o' the mune,' in birken shaw or by wan water.
It is true that one of the earliest of the Scots ballad-makers whose names have been handed down to us—Robert Henryson, who taught the Dunfermline bairns in the hornbook in the fifteenth century—has told us that he sought inspiration at the ingleside over a glass:
'I mend the fyre, and beikit me about,
Then tuik ane drink my spreitis to confort,
And armit me weill fra the cold thairout;
To cut the winter nicht, and mak it schort,
I tuik ane quhair, and left all uther sport.'
But this was while conning, in cold weather, the classic tale of Troilus and Cressid. Robin and Makyne, which among Henryson's acknowledged pieces (except The Bluidy Sark) comes nearest to our conception of the ballad—after all it is but a pastoral—has the scent of the 'grene wode' in summer.
In sooth, the Ballad Poet was neither made nor born; he grew. The 'wild flowers of literature' is the name that has been bestowed, with some little air of condescension, upon the rich inheritance he has left us. They are the purest and the strongest growth of the genius of the race and of the soil; and though they owe little save injury and mutilation to those who have deliberately sought to prune and trim them to please a later taste, they are as full of vigour and sap to-day as they were in the Ballad Age, when such poetry sprung up naturally and spontaneously. It is probable that not one of the old ballads that have come down to us by oral recitation is the product of a single hand; or of twenty hands. The greater its age, and the greater its popular favour, the greater is the number of individual memories and imaginations through which it has been filtered, taking from each some trace of colour, some flavour of style or character, some improving or modifying touch. The 'personal equation' is, in the ballad, a quantity at once immense and unknown. As in Homer's Iliad, the voice we hear is not that of any individual poet, but of an age and of a people—a voice simple, almost monotonous, in its rhythmic rise and fall, but charged with meanings multitudinous and unutterable.
The Scottish ballads are undoubtedly, in their present form, the outcome of a long and strenuous process of selection. In its earlier stages, the ballad was not written down but passed from mouth to mouth. Additions, interpolations, changes infinite must have been made in the course of transmission and repetition. Like a hardy plant, it had the power to spread and send down fresh roots wherever it found favourable soil; and in its new ground it always, as we shall see, took some colour and character from the locality, the time, and the race. Golden lines and verses may have been shed in the passage from place to place and down the centuries. But less of this happened, we may feel sure, than a purging away of the dross. As a rule, what was fittest—what was truest to nature and to human nature—survived and was perpetuated in this evolution of the ballad. When, in the course of its progress, it gathered to itself anything that was precious and worthy of remembrance, then, by the very law of things, this was seized and stored in the memories of the listeners and handed down to future generations.
But this process of purging and refining the ballad, so that it shall become—like the language, the proverbs, the folklore and nursery tales, and the traditional music of a nation—the reflection of the history and character of the race itself, if it is to be genuine, must go on unconsciously. As soon as the ballad is written down—at least as soon as it is fixed in print—the elements of natural growth it possesses are arrested. It is removed from its natural environment and means of healthy subsistence and development; and from a hardy outdoor plant it is in danger of becoming a plant of the closet—a potted thing, watered with printer's ink and trimmed with the editorial shears. Ballads have sprung up and blossomed in a literary age; but as soon as the spirit that is called literary seizes upon them and seeks to mould them to its forms, they begin to droop and to lose their native bloom and wild-wood fragrance. It is because they neglect, or are ignorant of, literary models and conventions, and go back to the 'eternal verities' of human passion and human motive and action—because they speak to 'the great heart of man'—that they are what they are.
Few of our ballads have escaped those sophisticated touches of art, which, happily, are easily detected in the rough homespun of the old lays. Walter Scott, the last of the minstrels, to whom ballad literature owes more than to any who went before or who has come after him, was himself not above mending the strains gathered from the lips of old women, hill shepherds, and the wandering tribe of cadgers and hawkers, so that one is sometimes a little at a loss to tell what is original and what is imitation. But even the Wizard's hand is not cunning enough to patch the new so deftly upon the old that the difference cannot be detected. The genuine ballad touch is incommunicable; to improve upon it is like painting the lilies of the field.
In the ranks of the Balladists, then, we do not include the many writers of merit—some of them of genius—who have worked in the lines of the elder race of singers, copying their measures and seeking to enter into their spirit. The studied simplicity, the deliberate archaisms, the overstrained vigour or pathos of these modern ballads do but convince us that the vein is well-nigh worked out. The writers could not help thinking of their models and materials; the old minstrels sang with no thought but telling what they saw with their eyes and heard with their ears. But even in these days the precious lode of ballad poetry will sometimes break to the surface; a phrase or a whole verse, fashioned in the Iron Age, will recall the Age of Gold. Scott has many such; and, to take a more modern instance, the spirit of Sir Patrick Spens seems to inspire almost throughout George MacDonald's Yerl o' Watery Deck, now with a graphic stroke of description, anon with a sudden gleam of humour, as when the Skipper, in haste to escape his pursuers, hacked with his sword at the stout rope that bound his craft to the pier,
'And thocht it oure weel made';