“The primitive ballad, then, is popular, not in the sense of something arising from and suited to the lower orders of a people. As yet, no sharp distinction of high and low exists, in respect to knowledge, desires, and tastes. An increased civilization, and especially the introduction of book-culture, gradually gives rise to such a division; the poetry of art appears; the popular poetry is no longer relished by a portion of the people, and is abandoned to an uncultivated or not over-cultivated class—a constantly diminishing number.”
But “the popular ballad is not originally the product or the property of the lower orders of the people. Nothing, in fact, is more obvious than that many of the ballads of the now most refined nations had their origin in that class whose acts and fortunes they depict—the upper class—though the growth of civilization has driven them from the memory of the highly polished and instructed, and has left them as an exclusive possession to the uneducated. The genuine popular ballad had its rise in a time when the distinctions since brought about by education and other circumstances had practically no existence. The vulgar ballads of our day, the ‘broadsides’ which were printed in such large numbers in England and elsewhere in the sixteenth century or later, belong to a different genus; they are products of a low kind of art, and most of them are, from a literary point of view, thoroughly despicable and worthless.
“Next it must be observed that ballads which have been handed down by long-repeated tradition have always departed considerably from their original form. If the transmission has been purely through the mouths of unlearned people, there is less probability of willful change, but once in the hands of professional singers there is no amount of change which they may not undergo. Last of all comes the modern editor, whose so-called improvements are more to be feared than the mischances of a thousand years. A very old ballad will often be found to have resolved itself in the course of what may be called its propagation into several distinct shapes, and each of these again to have received distinct modifications. When the fashion of verse has altered, we shall find a change of form as great as that in the Hildebrandslied, from alliteration without stanza to stanza with rhyme. In all cases the language drifts insensibly from ancient forms, though not at the same rate with the language of every-day life. The professional ballad-singer or minstrel, whose sole object is to please the audience before him, will alter, omit, or add, without scruple, and nothing is more common than to find different ballads blended together.
“There remains the very curious question of the origin of the resemblances which are found in the ballads of different nations, the recurrence of the same incidents or even of the same story, among races distinct in blood and history, and geographically far separated.” It is not necessary to go back to a common ancestry to explain these resemblances. “The incidents of many ballads are such as might occur anywhere and at any time; and with regard to agreements that can not be explained in this way we have only to remember that tales and songs were the chief social amusement of all classes of people in all the nations of Europe during the Middle Ages, and that new stories would be eagerly sought for by those whose business it was to furnish this amusement, and be rapidly spread among the fraternity. A great effect was undoubtedly produced by the crusades, which both brought the chief European nations into closer intercourse and made them acquainted with the East, thus facilitating the interchange of stories and greatly enlarging the stock.”
This account of authorship and transmission may be illustrated and supplemented by obiter dicta from The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. “The author counts for nothing;” the ballad is essentially anonymous: that Expliceth quod Rychard Sheale means merely that The Hunting of the Cheviot (162) “was of course part of his stock as minstrel; the supposition that he was the author is preposterous in the extreme.”[136]
Ballads are at their best when “the transmission has been purely through the mouths of unlearned people,” when they have come down by domestic tradition, through knitters and weavers. Glasgerion (67, B) “is mainly of good derivation (a poor old woman in Aberdeenshire).”[137] And “no Scottish ballads are superior in kind to those recited in the last century by Mrs Brown, of Falkland.”[138] Yet even upon Mrs Brown printed literature may have had some influence: in Fause Foodrage (89), “the resemblance in the verse in A 31, ‘The boy stared wild like a gray gose-hawke,’ to one in ‘Hardyknute,’ ‘Norse een like gray goss-hawk stared wild,’ struck Sir Walter Scott as suspicious,” and “it is quite possible that Mrs Brown may unconsciously have adopted this verse from the tiresome and affected Hardyknute, so much esteemed in her day.”[139] A literary treatment of a ballad theme may affect the traditional versions of that ballad. In the case of Child Maurice (83) “the popularity of the play [Home’s Douglas] seems to have given vogue to the ballad. The sophisticated copy passed into recitation, and may very likely have more or less infected those which were repeated from earlier tradition.”[140] A whole ballad may even be completely derived from print, and yet, in the course of time, revert to the popular form. Of this same ballad, Child Maurice, “Mr Aytoun considers that E is only the copy printed in the middle of the last century purged, in the process of oral transmission, of what was not to the popular taste, ‘and altered more.’ There is no doubt that a copy learned from print may be transformed in this way, but it is certain that old tradition does not come to a stop when a ballad gets into print.”[141]
Not only the possible influence of print is to be taken into account; much depends on the material to which the reciter was exposed and upon his selection. “It will not ... help the ballad [Young Bearwell (302)] much that it was not palmed off on Buchan in jest or otherwise, or even if it was learned from an old person by Mr Nicol in his youth. The intrinsic character of the ballad remains, and old people have sometimes burdened their memory with worthless things.”[142] Editors were not the only interpolators; of The Twa Sisters (10), A, a, 11-13, need not have been written, but “might easily be extemporized by any singer of sufficiently bad taste.”[143] The varying memory of reciters, too, was a cause of unintentional change. Thus “Mrs Brown was not satisfied with A b [of Bonny Baby Livingston (222)], which Jamieson had taken down from her mouth, and after a short time she sent him A a. The verbal differences are considerable. We need not suppose that Mrs Brown had heard two ‘sets’ or ‘ways,’ of which she blended the readings; the fact seems to be that, at the time when she recited to Jamieson, she was not in good condition to remember accurately.”[144] In general, however, the folk memory is remarkable for its tenacity. “Most of the [Danish] versions [of Earl Brand (7)] from recitation are wonderful examples and proofs of the fidelity with which simple people ‘report and hold’ old tales: for, as the editor has shown, verses which never had been printed, but which are found in old manuscripts, are now met with in recited copies; and these recited copies, again, have verses that occur in no Danish print or manuscript, but which nevertheless are found in Norwegian and Swedish recitations, and, what is more striking, in Icelandic tradition of two hundred years’ standing.”[145]
The ballad does not remain in the possession of the simple folk, or of reciters of Mrs Brown’s instinctive good taste. Its best fortune is then perhaps to fall into the hands of children, like The Maid Freed From the Gallows (95), of which “F had become a children’s game, the last stage of many old ballads.”[146] Again, “it is interesting to find the ballad [The Twa Brothers (49)] still in the mouths of children in American cities,—in the mouths of the poorest, whose heritage these old things are.”[147] Sir Hugh (155) in the form of Little Harry Hughes and the Duke’s Daughter, was heard, says Mr Newell, “from a group of colored children, in the streets of New York city,” and traced “to a little girl living in one of the cabins near Central Park.”[148]
Less happy is the fate of the ballad when it falls into the hands of professional singers,—the Minstrel Ballad is to be considered presently,—or when it falls into the hands of amateurs of various sorts, who corrupt and debase it. Hind Etin (41) “has suffered severely by the accidents of tradition. A has been not simply damaged by passing through low mouths, but has been worked over by low hands. Something considerable has been lost from the story, and fine romantic features, preserved in Norse and German ballads, have been quite effaced.”[149] Of The Clerk’s Twa Sons o Owsenford (72) “D has some amusing dashes of prose, evidently of masculine origin. [Examples follow]. We have here a strong contrast with both the blind-beggar and the housemaid style of corruption; something suggesting the attorney’s clerk rather than the clerk of Owsenford, but at least not mawkish.”[150] The “blind beggar” is, of course, Buchan’s collector, and whether he or the editor was responsible for the corruptions is not always clear. The blind beggar himself, however, comes in for special condemnation in the comment on The Bent Sae Brown (71): “The introduction and conclusion, and some incidental decorations, of the Scottish ballad will not be found in the Norse, but are an outcome of the invention and the piecing and shaping of that humble but enterprising rhapsodist who has left his trail over so large a part of Buchan’s volumes.”[151] In Brown Robin (97) “the story undoubtedly stops at the right point in A, with the escape of the two lovers to the wood. The sequel in C is not at all beyond the inventive ability of Buchan’s blind beggar, and some other blind beggar may have contrived the cane and the whale, the shooting and the hanging, in B.”[152] As type of the housemaid style of corruption may, perhaps, stand Lizie Lindsay (226). “Leezie Lindsay from a maid-servant in Aberdeen,” wrote Jamieson to Scott of A b.[153] And, “in his preface to B, Kinloch remarks that the ballad is very popular in the North, ‘and few milk-maids in that quarter but can chaunt it.’”[154] “Ballads of this description [155]
Not mere corruption, but serving-man authorship, even, is suggested for Tom Potts (109): “Such events [unequal matches] would be celebrated only by fellows of the yeoman or of the foot-boy, and surely in the present case the minstrel was not much above the estate of the serving-man. Lord Jockey’s reckless liberality throughout, and Lord Phoenix’s in the end, is a mark of the serving-man’s ideal nobleman.”[156] Again as mere corrupter, rather than author, appears the ostler in one version of Bewick and Graham, (211). In the 1833 edition of The Border Minstrelsy “deficiencies were partly supplied and some different readings adopted ‘from a copy obtained by the recitation of an ostler in Carlisle.’” g “is shown by internal evidence to be the ostler’s copy. Both copies [g and h] were indisputably derived from print, though h may have passed through several mouths, g agrees with b—f closely as to minute points of phraseology which it is difficult to believe that a reciter would have retained. It looks more like an immediate, though faulty, transcript from print.”[157] Contrasting styles are suggested in the comment on The Broomfield Hill (43): “The editor [of the broadside, “differing as to four or five@@ words only from F”] remarks that A is evidently taken@ from F; from which it is clear that the pungent buckishness of the broadside does not necessarily make an impression. A smells of the broom; F suggests the groom.”[158] Perhaps not to be classed with these non-professional corrupters or interpolators is the bänkelsänger who is responsible for one of the German versions of Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight (4): “M smacks decidedly of the bänkelsänger, and has an appropriate moral at the tail: animi index cauda!”[159] Perhaps he is to be regarded as a humble sort of minstrel; to the comments on this class we may now turn our attention.