Ballad poetry is a phrase of elastic and variable meaning. In the national repertory there are Ballads Satirical, Polemical, and Political, and even Devotional and Doctrinal, of as early date as many of the songs inspired by the spirit of Love, War, and Romance. Among them they represent the diverse strands that are blended in the Scottish character—the sombre and the bright; the prose and the poetry. The one or the other has predominated in the expression of the genius of the nation in verse, according to the circumstances and mood of the time. But neither has ever been really absent; they are the opposite sides of the same shield. It is not proposed to enter here into the ballad literature of the didactic type—the 'ballads with a purpose'—either by way of characterisation or example. In further distinction from the authors of the specimens of old popular song, the writers of many or most of them are known to us, at least by name, and are among the most honoured and familiar in our literature.
Towards the unlettered bards of the traditional ballads, who 'saved other names, but left their own unsung,' the more serious and self-conscious race of poets who wrote satire and allegory and homily on the same model have generally thought themselves entitled to assume an attitude of superiority and even of disapproval. The verse of those self-taught rhymers was rude and simple, and wanting in those conventional ornaments, borrowed from classic or other sources, which for the time being were the recognised hallmarks of poesy; the moral lessons it taught were not apparent, nor even discoverable. It is curious to note how early this tone of reprobation, of contempt, or at best of kindly condescension on the part of the official priesthood of letters towards the humble tribe of balladists asserts itself, and how long it endures.
Even Edmund Spenser, as quoted by Scott in the Minstrelsy, reproves the Irish bards and rhymsters, as he might have done their Scottish brethren, because 'for little reward or the share of a stolen cow' they 'seldom use to choose the doings of good men for the arguments of their poems,' but, on the contrary, those of such men as live 'lawlessly and licentiously upon stealths and spoyles,' whom they praise to the people, and set up as an example to young men. A poetaster of the beginning of the seventeenth century prays his printer that his book 'be not with your Ballads mixt,' and that 'it come not brought on pedlars' backs to common Fairs'—a prayer fulfilled to the letter. And down even to our own century, a host of collectors, adaptors, and imitators have spoken patronisingly of the elder ballads, and foisted on them additions and ornaments that have not always or often been improvements.
The whirligig of time has brought in its revenges; and the final judgment passed by posterity upon the respective claims of the formal verse and the 'unpremeditated lay' of earlier centuries, has in large measure reversed that of the age in which they were born. The former, and particularly where it undertook to scourge the vices, the heresies, and the follies of the period, lacks entirely that air of simplicity and spontaneity—that 'wild-warlock' lilt, that 'wild happiness of thought and expression'—which, in the phrase of Robert Burns, marks 'our native manner and language' in ballad poetry certainly not less than in lyrical song. The laureated bard, honoured of the Court and blessed by the Church, is deposed from his pride of place, in the affections and remembrance of the people at least, while the chant of the unknown minstrel of 'the hedgerow and the field' goes sounding on in deeper and widening volume through the great heart of the race, and is hailed as the one true ballad voice.
Among the subjects which the Moral and Satirical Ballad selected for censure were, it will be seen, the themes and the heroes of the humble broadsheets sung at the common fairs and carried in the pedlar's pack. Nor are we to wonder at this. Much of the contents of that pack is better forgotten. Much even of what has been preserved might have been allowed to drop into oblivion, without loss to posterity and with gain to the character and reputation of the 'good old times.' The balladists—those of the early broadsheets at least—could be gross on occasion; although, it must be owned, not more gross than the dramatists of Elizabethan and Restoration times, and even the novelists of last century, sometimes deigned to be. In particular, they made the mistake, of venerable date and not quite unknown to this day, of confounding humour with coarseness. A humorous ballad is usually a thing to be fingered gingerly. Yet, although (partly for the reason hinted at) humour has been said not to be a strongly marked element of the flower of our ballad poetry, there are many of the best of them that have imbedded in them a rich and genuine vein of comic wit or broad fun; and there are also what may be classed as Humorous Ballads proper (or improper as the case may be), which reflect more plainly and frankly, perhaps, than any other department of our literature, the customs, character, and amusements of the commonalty, and have exercised an important influence on the national poets and poetry of a later day.
Of the blending of the humorous with the romantic, an excellent example is found in the ballad of Earl Richard and the Carl's Daughter. The Princess, disguised in beggar's duds, keeps on the hook the deluded and disgusted knight, who has unwillingly taken her up behind him, and with wilful and lively wit draws for him pictures of the squalid home and fare with which she is familiar, until it is her good time and pleasure to undeceive him:
'She said, "Good-e'en, ye nettles tall,
Where ye grow at the dyke;
If the auld carline my mother was here
Sae weel 's she wad ye pike.
How she wad stap ye in her poke,
I wot she wadna fail;
And boil ye in her auld brass pan,
And o' ye mak' good kail."
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"Awa', awa', ye ill woman,
Your vile speech grieveth me;
When ye hide sae little for yoursel'
Ye 'll hide far less for me."