The publication of the Percy MS. not only put a large amount of trustworthy material at the disposal of Mr Child; it exposed the full enormity of Bishop Percy's sins against popular tradition. Some shadow of suspicion inevitably fell on all other ballad collections. It was more than ever clear to Mr Child that he could not safely take anything at second hand, and he determined not to print a line of his projected work till he had exhausted every effort to get hold of whatever manuscript material might be in existence. His efforts in this direction continued through many years. A number of manuscripts were in private hands; of some the whereabouts was not known; of others the existence was not suspected. But Mr Child was untiring. He was cordially assisted by various scholars, antiquaries, and private gentlemen, to whose coöperation ample testimony is borne in the Advertisements prefixed to the volumes in the present work. Some manuscripts were secured for the Library of Harvard University—notably Bishop Percy's Papers, the Kinloch MSS, and the Harris MS.,[8]—and of others careful copies were made, which became the property of the same library. In all these operations the indispensable good offices of Mr William Macmath, of Edinburgh, deserve particular mention. For a long series of years his services were always at Mr Child's disposal. His self-sacrifice and generosity appear to have been equalled only by his perseverance and wonderful accuracy. But for him the manuscript basis of The English and Scottish Popular Ballads would have been far less strong than it is.
Gradually, then, the manuscript materials came in, until at last, in 1882, Mr Child felt justified in beginning to print. Other important documents were, however, discovered or made accessible as time went on. Especially noteworthy was the great find at Abbotsford (see the Advertisement to Part VIII). In 1877 Dr David Laing procured, "not without difficulty," leave to prepare for Mr Child a copy of the single manuscript of ballads then known to remain in the library at Abbotsford. This MS., entitled "Scottish Songs," was so inconsiderable, in proportion to the accumulations which Sir Walter Scott had made in preparing his Border Minstrelsy, that further search seemed to be imperatively necessary. In 1890 permission to make such a search, and to use the results, was given by the Honorable Mrs Maxwell-Scott. The investigation, made by Mr Macmath, yielded a rich harvest of ballads, which were utilized in Parts VII-IX. To dwell upon the details would be endless. The reader may see a list of the manuscript sources at pp. 397 ff. of the fifth volume; and, if he will observe how scattered they were, he will have no difficulty in believing that it required years, labor, and much delicate negotiation to bring them all together. One manuscript remained undiscoverable, William Tytler's Brown MS., but there is no reason to believe that this contained anything of consequence that is not otherwise known.[9]
Meanwhile, concurrently with the toil of amassing, collating, and arranging texts, went on the far more arduous labor of comparative study of the ballads of all nations; for, in accordance with Mr Child's plan it was requisite to determine, in the fullest manner, the history and foreign relations of every piece included in his collection. To this end he devoted much time and unwearied diligence to forming, in the Library of the University, a special collection of "Folk-lore," particularly of ballads, romances, and Märchen. This priceless collection, the formation of which must be looked on as one of Mr Child's most striking services to the university, numbers some 7000 volumes. But these figures by no means represent the richness of the Library in the departments concerned, or the services of Mr Child in this particular. Mediæval literature in all its phases was his province, and thousands of volumes classified in other departments of the University Library bear testimony to his vigilance in ordering books, and his astonishing bibliographical knowledge. Very few books are cited in the present collection which are not to be found on the shelves of this Library.
In addition, Mr Child made an effort to stimulate the collection of such remains of the traditional ballad as still live on the lips of the people in this country and in the British Islands. The harvest was, in his opinion, rather scanty; yet, if all the versions thus recovered from tradition were enumerated, the number would not be found inconsiderable. Enough was done, at all events, to make it clear that little or nothing of value remains to be recovered in this way.
To readers familiar with such studies, no comment is necessary, and to those who are unfamiliar with them, no form of statement can convey even a faint impression of the industry, the learning, the acumen, and the literary skill which these processes required. In writing the history of a single ballad, Mr Child was sometimes forced to examine hundreds of books in perhaps a dozen different languages. But his industry was unflagging, his sagacity was scarcely ever at fault, and his linguistic and literary knowledge seemed to have no bounds. He spared no pains to perfect his work in every detail, and his success was commensurate with his efforts. In the Advertisement to the Ninth Part (1894), he was able to report that the three hundred and five numbers of his collection comprised the whole extant mass of this traditional material, with the possible exception of a single ballad.[10]
In June, 1896, Mr Child concluded his fiftieth year of service as a teacher in Harvard College. He was at this time hard at work on the Tenth and final Part, which was to contain a glossary, various indexes, a bibliography, and an elaborate introduction on the general subject. For years he had allowed himself scarcely any respite from work, and, in spite of the uncertain condition of his health,—or perhaps in consequence of it,—he continued to work at high pressure throughout the summer. At the end of August he discovered that he was seriously ill. He died at Boston on the 11th day of September. He had finished his great work except for the introduction and the general bibliography. The bibliography was in preparation by another hand and has since been completed. The introduction, however, no other scholar had the hardihood to undertake. A few pages of manuscript,—the last thing written by his pen,—almost illegible, were found among his papers to show that he had actually begun the composition of this essay, and many sheets of excerpts testified to the time he had spent in refreshing his memory as to the opinions of his predecessors, but he had left no collectanea that could be utilized in supplying the Introduction itself. He was accustomed to carry much of his material in his memory till the moment of composition arrived, and this habit accounts for the fact that there are no jottings of opinions and no sketch of precisely what line of argument he intended to take.
Mr Child's sudden death was felt as a bitter personal loss, not only by an unusually large circle of attached friends in both hemispheres, but by very many scholars who knew him through his works alone. He was one of the few learned men to whom the old title of "Master" was justly due and freely accorded. With astonishing erudition, which nothing seemed to have escaped, he united an infectious enthusiasm and a power of lucid and fruitful exposition that made him one of the greatest of teachers, and a warmth and openness of heart that won the affection of all who knew him. In most men, however complex their characters, one can distinguish the qualities of the heart, in some degree, from the qualities of the head. In Professor Child no such distinction was possible, for all the elements of his many-sided nature were fused in his marked and powerful individuality. In his case, the scholar and the man cannot be separated. His life and his learning were one; his work was the expression of himself.
As an investigator Professor Child was at once the inspiration and the despair of his disciples. Nothing could surpass the scientific exactness of his methods and the unwearied diligence with which he conducted his researches. No possible source of information could elude him; no book or manuscript was too voluminous or too unpromising for him to examine on the chance of its containing some fact that might correct or supplement his material, even in the minutest point. Yet these qualities of enthusiastic accuracy and thoroughness, admirable as they undoubtedly were, by no means dominated him. They were always at the command of the higher qualities of his genius,—sagacity, acumen, and a kind of sympathetic and imaginative power in which he stood almost alone among recent scholars. No detail of language or tradition or archæology was to him a mere lifeless fact; it was transmuted into something vital, and became a part of that universal humanity which always moved him wherever he found it, whether in the pages of a mediæval chronicle, or in the stammering accents of a late and vulgarly distorted ballad, or in the faces of the street boys who begged roses from his garden. No man ever felt a keener interest in his kind, and no scholar ever brought this interest into more vivifying contact with the technicalities of his special studies. The exuberance of this large humanity pervades his edition of the English and Scottish ballads. Even in his last years, when the languor of uncertain health sometimes got the better, for a season, of the spirit with which he commonly worked, some fresh bit of genuine poetry in a ballad, some fine trait of pure nature in a stray folk-tale, would, in an instant, bring back the full flush of that enthusiasm which he must have felt when the possibilities of his achievement first presented themselves to his mind in early manhood. For such a nature there was no old age.
From this ready sympathy came that rare faculty—seldom possessed by scholars—which made Professor Child peculiarly fit for his greatest task. Few persons understand the difficulties of ballad investigation. In no field of literature have the forger and the manipulator worked with greater vigor and success. From Percy's day to our own it has been thought an innocent device to publish a bit of one's own versifying, now and then, as an "old ballad" or an "ancient song." Often, too, a late stall-copy of a ballad, getting into oral circulation, has been innocently furnished to collectors as traditional matter. Mere learning will not guide an editor through these perplexities. What is needed is, in addition, a complete understanding of the "popular" genius, a sympathetic recognition of the traits that characterize oral literature wherever and in whatever degree they exist. This faculty, which even the folk has not retained, and which collectors living in ballad-singing and tale-telling times have often failed to acquire, was vouchsafed by nature herself to this sedentary scholar. In reality a kind of instinct, it had been so cultivated by long and loving study of the traditional literature of all nations that it had become wonderfully swift in its operations and almost infallible. A forged or retouched piece could not deceive him for a moment; he detected the slightest jar in the genuine ballad tone. He speaks in one place of certain writers "who would have been all the better historians for a little reading of romances." He was himself the better interpreter of the poetry of art for this keen sympathy with the poetry of nature.
Constant association with the spirit of the folk did its part in maintaining, under the stress of unremitting study and research, that freshness and buoyancy of mind which was the wonder of all who met Professor Child for the first time, and the perpetual delight of his friends and associates. It is impossible to describe the charm of his familiar conversation. There was endless variety without effort. His peculiar humor, taking shape in a thousand felicities of thought and phrase that fell casually and as it were inevitably from his lips, exhilarated without reaction or fatigue. His lightest words were full of fruitful suggestion. Sudden strains of melancholy or high seriousness were followed, in a moment, by flashes of gaiety almost boyish. And pervading it all one felt the attraction of his personality and the goodness of his heart.