Yet the wild-eyed warriors, keeping time by a rude triumphal chant to the dance about the watch-fire, were mentally as children, with keen senses and eager imagination, but feeble reason, with fresh and vigorous emotions, but without elaborate language for these emotions. Swaying and shouting in rhythmic consent, they came slowly to the use of ordered words and, even then, could but have repeated the same phrases over and over. The burden—sometimes senseless to our modern understanding—to be found in the present form of many of our ballads may be the survival of a survival from those primitive iterations. The "Blaw, blaw, blaw winds, blaw" of The Elfin Knight is not, in this instance, inappropriate to the theme, yet we can almost hear shrilling through it a far cry from days when men called directly upon the powers of nature. Such refrains as "Binnorie, O Binnorie," "Jennifer gentle an' rosemaree," "Down, a down, a down, a down," have ancient secrets in them, had we ears to hear.
One of the vexed questions of criticism regarding these refrains is whether they were rendered in alternation with the narrative verses or as a continuous under-song. Early observers of Indian dances have noted that, while one leaping savage after another improvised a simple strain or two, the whole dancing company kept up a guttural cadence of "Heh, heh, heh!" or "Aw, aw, aw!" which served the office of musical accompaniment. This choral iteration of rhythmic syllables, still hinted in the refrain, but only hinted, is believed to be the original element of poetry.
In course of time, however, was evolved the individual singer. In the earlier stages of society, song was undoubtedly a common gift, and every normal member of the community bore his part in the recital of the heroic deeds that ordinarily formed the subject of these primeval lays. Were it the praise of a god, of a feasting champion, or of a slain comrade, the natural utterance was narrative. Later on, the more fluent and inventive improvisers came to the front, and finally the professional bard appeared. Somewhere in the process, too, the burden may have shifted its part from under-song to alternating chorus, thus allowing the soloist opportunity for rest and recollection.
English ballads, as we have them in print to-day, took form in a far later and more sophisticated period than those just suggested; yet even thus our ballads stand nearest of anything in our literature to the primitive poetry that was born out of the social life of the community rather than made by the solitary thought of the artist. Even so comparatively small a group as that comprehended within this volume shows how truly the ballad is the parent stock of all other poetic varieties. In the ballad of plain narrative, as The Hunting of the Cheviot, the epic is hinted. We go a step further in A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode,—too long for insertion in this collection, but peculiarly interesting from the antiquarian point of view, having been printed, in part, as early as 1489,—and find at least a rough foundation for a genuine hero-lay, the Lytell Geste being made up of a number of ballads rudely woven into one. A poem like this, though hardly "an epic in miniature,"—a phrase which has been proposed as the definition of a ballad,—is truly an epic in germ, lacking the finish of a miniature, but holding the promise of a seed. Where the narrative is highly colored by emotion, as in Helen of Kirconnell or Waly Waly, the ballad merges into the lyric. It is difficult here to draw the line of distinction. A Lyke-Wake Dirge is almost purely lyric in quality, while The Lawlands o' Holland, Gilderoy, The Twa Corbies, Bonny Barbara Allan, have each a pronounced lyric element. From the ballad of dialogue we look forward to the drama, not only from the ballad of pure dialogue, as Lord Ronald, or Edward, Edward, or that sweet old English folk-song, too long for insertion here, The Not-Browne Mayd, but more remotely from the ballad of mingled dialogue and narrative, as The Gardener or Fine Flowers i' the Valley.
The beginnings of English balladry are far out of sight. From the date when the race first had deeds to praise and words with which to praise them, it is all but certain that ballads were in the air. But even the mediteval ballads are lost to us. It was the written literature, the work of clerks, fixed upon the parchment, that survived, while the songs of the people, passing from lip to lip down the generations, continually reshaped themselves to the changing times. But they were never hushed. While Chaucer, his genius fed by Norman and Italian streams, was making the fourteenth century reecho with that laughter which "comes never to an end" of the Canterbury story-tellers; while Langland, even his Teutonic spirit swayed by French example, was brooding the gloomy Vision of Piers the Plowman,—gloom with a star at its centre; while those "courtly makers," Wyatt and Surrey, were smoothing English song, which in the hands of Skelton had become so
"Tatter'd and jagged,
Rudely raine-beaten,
Rusty and moth-eaten,"
into the exquisite lyrical measures of Italy; while the mysteries and miracle-plays, also of Continental impulse, were striving to do God service by impressing the Scripture stories upon their rustic audiences,—the ballads were being sung and told from Scottish loch to English lowland, in hamlet and in hall. Heartily enjoyed in the baronial castle, scandalously well known in the monastery, they were dearest to the peasants.
"Lewd peple loven tales olde;
Swiche thinges can they wel report and holde."
The versions in which we possess such ballads to-day are comparatively modern. Few can be dated further back than the reign of Elizabeth; the language of some is that of the eighteenth century. But the number and variety of these versions—the ballad of Lord Ronald, for instance, being given in fifteen forms by Professor Child in his monumental edition of The English and Scottish Popular Ballads; where "Lord Ronald, my son," appears variously as "Lord Randal, my son," "Lord Donald, my son," "King Henrie, my son," "Lairde Rowlande, my son," "Billy, my son," "Tiranti, my son," "my own pretty boy," "my bonnie wee croodlin dow," "my little wee croudlin doo," "Willie doo, Willie doo," "my wee wee croodlin doo doo"—are sure evidence of oral transmission, and oral transmission is in itself evidence of antiquity. Many of our ballads, moreover,—nearly a third of the present collection, as the notes will show,—are akin to ancient ballads of Continental Europe, or of Asia, or both, which set forth the outlines of the same stories in something the same way.
It should be stated that there is another theory altogether as to the origin of ballads. Instead of regarding them as a slow, shadowed, natural growth, finally fossilized in print, from the rhythmic cries of a barbaric dance-circle in its festal hour, there is a weighty school of critics who hold them to be the mere rag-tag camp-followers of mediaeval romance. See, for instance, the clownish ballad of Tom Thumbe, with its confused Arthurian echoes. Some of the events recorded in our ballads, moreover, are placed by definite local tradition at a comparatively recent date, as Otterburne, Edom o' Gordon, Kinmont Willie. What becomes, then, of their claims to long descent? If these do not fall, it is because they are based less on the general theme and course of the story, matters that seem to necessitate an individual composer, than on the so-called communal elements of refrain, iteration, stock stanzas, stock epithets, stock numbers, stock situations, the frank objectivity of the point of view, the sudden glimpses into a pagan world.