Hence it is not surprising that at first their fresh and spontaneous language was regarded, when contrasted with the artificial and refined diction of the time, as “barbarous” or “rude.” Thus Prior thought it necessary to paraphrase the old ballad of the “Nut Brown Maid” into his insipid “Henry and Emma” (1718), but a comparison of only a few lines of the original with the banality of the modernized version is sufficient testimony to the refreshing and vivifying influence of such collections as the “Reliques.”
The tendency to present the old ballads in an eighteenth century dress had soon revealed itself; at least, the editors of the early collections often felt themselves obliged to apologize for the obsolete style of their material.[150] But in 1760 the first attempt at a critical text appeared when Edward Capell, the famous Shakespearian editor, published his “Prolusions”; or “Select Pieces of Antient Poetry—compil’d with great Care from their several Originals, and offer’d to the Publick as specimens of the Integrity that should be found in the Editions of worthy Authors.” Capell’s care was almost entirely directed to ensuring textual accuracy, but the “Nut-Browne Maid,” the only ballad included, receives sympathetic mention in his brief Preface.[151]
Five years later, the most famous of all the ballad collections appeared, Thomas Percy’s “Reliques of Ancient English Poetry” (1765). The nucleus of Percy’s collection was a certain manuscript in a handwriting of Charles I’s time, containing 191 songs and ballads, but he had also had access to various other manuscript collections, whilst he was quite ready to acknowledge that he had filled gaps in his originals with stanzas and, in some cases, with nearly entire poems of his own composition. Much censure has been heaped upon Percy for his apparent lax ideas on the functions of an editor, but in decking out his “parcel of old ballads” in the false and affected style of his age, he was only doing his best to meet the taste of his readers. He himself passes judgment on his own labours, when, alongside of the genuine old ballads, with their freshness and simplicity of diction, he places his own “pruned” or “refined” versions, or additions, garbed in a sham and sickly idiom.
It was not until over a century later, when Percy’s folio manuscript was copied and printed,[152] that the extent of his additions, alterations, and omissions were fully realized, though at the same time it was admitted that the pruning and refining was not unskilfully done.
Nevertheless the influence of the “Reliques,” as a vital part of the Romantic revival, was considerable:[153] it was as if a breath of “the wind on the heath” had swept across literature and its writers, bringing with it an invigorating fragrance and freshness, whilst, on the purely formal side, the genuine old ballads, which Percy had culled and printed untouched, no doubt played their part in directing the attention of Wordsworth to the whole question of the language of poetry. And when the great Romantic manifestoes on the subject of “the language of metrical composition” were at length launched, their author was not slow to bear witness to the revivifying influence of the old ballads on poetic form. “Our poetry,” he wrote, “has been absolutely redeemed by it. I do not think that there is an able writer in verse of the present day who would not be proud to acknowledge his obligations to the “Reliques.”[154]
The year before the appearance of the “Reliques,” Thomas Chatterton had published his “Rowley Poems,” and this attempt of a poet of genius to pass off his poems as the work of a mediaeval English writer is another striking indication of the new Romantic spirit then asserting itself. As for the pseudo-archaic language in which Chatterton with great labour clothed his “revivals,” there is no need to say much. It was a thoroughly artificial language, compiled, as Skeat has shown, from various sources, such as John Kersey’s “Dictionarium Anglo-Brittanicum,” three editions of which had appeared before 1721. In this work there are included a considerable number of obsolete words, chiefly from Spenser and his contemporaries, marked “O,” and in some cases erroneously explained. This dictionary was the chief source of Chatterton’s vocabulary, many words of which the young poet took apparently without any definite idea of their meaning.[155]
Yet in the Rowley poems there are passages where the pseudo-archaic language is quite in keeping with the poet’s theme and treatment, whilst here and there we come across epithets and lines which, even in their strange dress, are of a wild and artless sweetness, such as
Where thou mayst here the sweete night-lark chant,
Or with some mocking brooklet sweetly glide,
or the whole of the first stanza of the famous “An Excelente Balade of Charitie,” where the old words help to transport us at once into the fictitious world which Chatterton had made for himself. Perhaps, as has been suggested, the “Rowley dialect” was not, as we nowadays, with Skeat’s analysis in our minds, are a little too apt to believe, a deliberate attempt to deceive, but rather reflected an attempt to escape from the dead abstract diction of the period.[156]