Topography is also essential to a ballad, or to any Historian. This is not only necessary to save a writer from such gross blunder as we met the other day in Wharton's Ballad, called "The Grave of King Arthur," where he talks of "the steeps of rough Kildare," but to give accuracy and force to both general references and local description.
Ireland must be known to her Ballad Historians, not by flat, but by shaded maps, and topographical and scenic descriptions; not by maps of to-day only, but by maps (such as Ortelius and the maps in the State Papers) of Ireland in time past; and, finally, it must be known by the eye. A man who has not raced on our hills, panted on our mountains, waded our rivers in drought and flood, pierced our passes, skirted our coast, noted our old towns, and learned the shape and colour of ground and tree and sky, is not master of all a Balladist's art. Scott knew Scotland thus, and, moreover, he seems never to have laid a scene in a place that he had not studied closely and alone.
What we have heretofore advised relates to the Structure, Truth, and Colouring of ballads; but there is something more needed to raise a ballad above the beautiful—it must have Force. Strong passions, daring invention, vivid sympathy for great acts—these are the result of one's whole life and nature. Into the temper and training of "A Poet," we do not presume to speak. Few have spoken wisely of them. Emerson, in his recent essay, has spoken like an angel on the mission of "The Poet." Ambition for pure power (not applause); passionate sympathy with the good, and strong, and beautiful; insight into nature, and such loving mastery over its secrets as a husband hath over a wife's mind, are the surest tests of one "called" by destiny to tell to men the past, present, and future, in words so perfect that generations shall feel and remember.
We merely meant to give some "Hints on the Properties of Historical Ballads"—they will be idle save to him who has the mind of a Poet.
THE SONGS OF IRELAND.[49] ]
There are great gaps in Irish song to be filled up. This is true even of the songs of the Irish-speaking people. Many of the short snatches preserved among them from olden times are sweet and noble; but the bulk of the songs are very defective. Most of those hitherto in use were composed during the last century, and therefore their structure is irregular, their grief slavish and despairing, their joy reckless and bombastic, their religion bitter and sectarian, their politics Jacobite and concealed by extravagant and tiresome allegory. Ignorance, disorder, and every kind of oppression weakened and darkened the lyric genius of Ireland. Even these, such as they are, diminish daily in the country, and a lower class comes in. We have before us a number of the ballads now printed at Cork, in Irish, and English and Irish mixed. They are little above the street ballads in the English tongue. If Hardiman's and Daly's collections be fair specimens (as we believe they are) of the Irish Jacobite songs, we should not care to have more than a few of them given to the people; but, perhaps, there may be twenty, which, if printed clearly in slips, would sell as ballads in the Irish districts.
Assuming that the morsels given in O'Reilly's catalogue of Irish writers do not exaggerate the merits of the older bards, their works would supply numberless pastoral, love, joy, wailing, and war songs. A popular editor of these could condense them into three or four verses each—cut them so as exactly to suit the airs, preserve the local and broad historical allusions, but remove the clumsy ornaments and exaggerations. This is what Ramsay, Burns, and Cunningham did with the Lowland Scotch songs, and thus made them what they are—the best in Europe. This need not prevent complete editions of these songs in learned books; but such books are for libraries, not cabins.
There is one want, however, in all the Irish songs—it is of strictly national lyrics. They are national in form and colour, but clannish in opinion. In fact, from Brian's death, there was no thought of an Irish nation, save when some great event, like Aodh O'Neill's march to Munster, or Owen Roe's victory at Beinnburb, flashed and vanished. These songs celebrate M'Carthy or O'More, O'Connor or O'Neill—his prowess, his following, his hospitality; but they cry down his Irish or "more than Irish" neighbour as fiercely as they do the foreign oppressor. True it is, you will find amid the flight of minstrels one bolder than the rest, who mourns for the time when the Milesians swayed, and tells that "a soul has come into Eire," and summons all the Milesian tribes to battle for Ireland. But even in the seventeenth century, when the footing of the Norman and Saxon in Ireland was as sure as that of the once-invading Milesians themselves, we find the cry purely to the older Irish races, and the bounds of the nation made, not by the island, but by genealogy.
We may remark, in passing, that on no hypothesis did these same Milesians form more than the aristocracy of ancient Ireland—a class—a race of conquerors.