No gentle poet short of Shakespeare could get the awful simplicity of that; and Shakespeare, I think, only achieved it when, as for Ophelia’s faltered songs, he used peasant-rhymes.
It is, to me, a task of absorbing interest to go through Child’s huge repertorium piece by piece and pick out the folk-ballads which have the marks of peasant origin. So far as I can tell at present, certainly one half, and it may be three-fourths of them are peasant songs—I don’t say necessarily made by peasants, but in any case made for them. If one could, by such means, form a Corpus Poeticum Villanum there would be a treasure-house worth plundering by more students than one. For as nothing moves a people more than poetry, when it is good poetry, so nothing needs truth for its indispensable food so much as poetry. If you have what most deeply touched and stirred a people you have that which was dearest to them, the blood as it were of their hearts. The criteria are as I have indicated: minute observation, stark simplicity, the lyric cry, and realism. You may add to those a preference of sentiment to romance, and a decided adherence to the law of nature when that is counter to the law of the Church. Thus incontinence in love is not judged hardly when passion in the man or kindness in the woman has brought it about; on the other hand, infidelity to the marriage vow never escapes. Again, that which the Italians call “assassino per amore” is a matter of course in peasant-poetry; and another crime, universally condemned, except by about two of our gentle poets, is freely treated, and—not to say condoned—freely pitied. Perhaps one of the most curious of all the ballads is “Little Musgrave,” which is English and of unknown age. It is quoted in The Knight of the Burning Pestle of 1611. Little Musgrave and Lord Barnard’s wife fall in love, and betray his lordship. He, however, is informed by his page, and rides out to clear his honour. Musgrave hears something:
“Methinks I hear the thresel-cock,
Methinks I hear the jay;
Methinks I hear my Lord Barnard,
And I would I were away.”
But she answers him:
“Lye still, lye still, thou Little Musgrave,
And huddle me from the cold;
’Tis nothing but a shepherd’s boy