In rapid round the Baron bent;
He sighed a sigh, and pray'd a prayer;
The prayer was to his patron saint—
The sigh was to his ladye fair.
Stout Deloraine nor sigh'd nor pray'd,
Nor saint nor ladye called to aid;
But he stoop'd his head, and couch'd his spear,
And spurr'd his stead to full career.
The meeting of these champions proud
Seem'd like the bursting thunder-cloud."
This, you observe, is practical eloquence,—the perfect pantomime of rhetoric; and, when your eyes have recovered the dazzling shock of the encounter, you shall see William of Deloraine lying on the green sward, with the Baron's spear-head sunk a foot within his bosom. Nothing, in short, can be more conclusive or satisfactory.
Let us now take an instance to the contrary. Few men have written with more fire and energy than Mr Macaulay; and, in the heart of a battle, he handles his falchion like a Legionary. Still, every now and then, the rhetorician peeps out in spite of himself, and he goes through the catalogue of the topics. Nothing can be better or more ballad-like than the blunt declaration by Horatius of his readiness to keep the bridge:—
"Then out spoke bold Horatius,
The captain of the gate:
'To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late;
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his gods?'"
Not one other word should stout old Cocles have uttered, of apology for claiming to himself the post of danger and of death. No higher motive need he have assigned than those contained in the last two lines, which must have gone home at once to the heart of every Roman. But the poet will not leave him there. He interpolates another stanza, which has the effect of diluting the strength of the passage.
"'And for the tender mother
Who dandled him to rest,
And for the wife who nurses
Her baby at her breast;
And for the holy maidens
Who feed the eternal flame,
To save them from false Sextus
That wrought the deed of shame?'"
The whole of this stanza is bad;—the last four lines of it simply and purely execrable. Mr Macaulay is far too judicious a critic not to be fully aware of the danger of any weak passage in a short poem of incident; and we trust, in the next edition, to see this palpable eye-sore removed. But it is in the ballad of Virginia that his besetting tendency towards declamation becomes most thoroughly apparent. You are to suppose yourself in the market-place of Rome;—the lictors of Claudius have seized upon the daughter of the centurion; the people have risen in wrath at the outrage; and, for a moment, there is hope of deliverance. But the name of the decemvir still carries terror with it, and the commons waver at the sound. In this crisis, Icilius, the betrothed of the virgin, appears, and delivers a long essay of some fifty double lines, upon the spirit and tendency of the Roman constitution. This is a great error. Speeches, when delivered in the midst of a popular tumult, must be pithy in order to be effective: nor was Appius such an ass as to have lost the opportunity afforded him by this dialectic display, of effectually securing his captive.
There is no literary legacy the people of Scotland ought to be so thankful as for their rich inheritance of national ballads. In this respect they stand quite unrivalled in Europe; for, although the Scandinavian peninsula has a glorious garland of its own, and Spain and England are both rich in traditionary story, our northern ballad poetry is wider in its compass, and far more varied in the composition of its material. The high and heroic war-chant, the deeds of chivalrous emprise, the tale of unhappy love, the mystic songs of fairy-land,—all have been handed down to us, for centuries, unmutilated and unchanged, in a profusion which is almost marvellous, when we reflect upon the great historic changes and revolutions which have agitated the country. For such changes, though tending essentially towards the production of the ballad, especially in the historical department, cannot possibly be favourable to its preservation; and no stronger proof of the intense nationality of the people of Scotland can be found than this—that the songs commemorative of our earlier heroes have outlived the Reformation, the union of the two crowns, the civil and religious wars of the revolution, and the subsequent union of the kingdoms; and, at a comparatively late period, were collected from the oral traditions of the peasantry. Time had it not in its power to chill the memories which lay warm at the nation's heart, or to efface the noble annals of its long and eventful history. There is a spell of potency still in the names of the Bruce and the Douglas.
By whom those ballads were written, is a question beyond solution. A large portion of them were, we know, composed long before the Press was in existence—some, probably, may date so far back as the reign of Alexander the Third—and to their own intrinsic merit are they indebted for preservation. But we are in ignorance of the authorship even of those which are much nearer to our own immediate period. Much of the Jacobite minstrelsy, and of the songs commemorative, of the Fifteen and the Forty-five, is anonymous; and we cannot tell whether those ditties, which have still the power to thrill our hearts so strangely, were written by gentle or by simple, in the hall or by the cottage fire. After all, it matters not. The poet of Otterbourne will be greater without a name, than fifty modern versifiers whom it would be odious to particularise, notwithstanding the blazon of their Christian and patronymic prefix. Better to live for ever innominate in a song, than to be quoted for a life-time by one's friends, as a self-marked and immolated driveller.
"Give me," said Fletcher of Saltoun, "the making of a nation's ballads, and I will let you make its laws." This was, in our opinion, a speech of considerable boldness; and if Fletcher really made it, he must have had a high estimate of his own poetical powers. Why then, in the name of Orpheus, did he not set about it incontinently? We presume that there was nothing whatever to have prevented him from concocting as many ballads as he chose; or from engaging, as engines of popular promulgation, the ancestors of those unshaven and raucous gentlemen, to whose canorous mercies we are wont, in times of political excitement, to intrust our own personal and patriotic ditties. Seldom, indeed, have we experienced a keener sense of our true greatness as a poet, than when we encountered, on one occasion, a peripatetic minstrel, deafening the Canongate with the notes of our particular music, and surrounded by an eager crowd demanding the halfpenny broadsheet. "This is fame!" we exclaimed to a legal friend who was beside us; and, with a glow of triumph on our countenance, we descended the North Bridge, to indite another of the same. Notwithstanding this, we cannot aver from experience that our ballads have wrought any marked effect in modifying the laws of the country. We cannot even go the length of asserting that they have once turned an election; and therefore it is not unnatural that we should regard the dogma of Fletcher with distrust. The truth is, that a nation is the maker of its own ballads. You cannot by any possibility contrive to sway people from their purpose by a song; but songs—ballads especially—are the imperishable records of their purpose. And therefore it is that they survive, because they are real and not ideal. It is no feigned passion which they convey, but the actual reflex of that which has arisen, and wrought, and expended itself; and each historical ballad is, in fact, a memorial of a national impulse; and wo be to the man who would attempt to illustrate the past, if he cannot again create within himself the sympathies and the motives which led to the deeds he must celebrate. Wo be to him, we say—for as sure as there is truth in the retributive justice of posterity, he will attain an eminent position, not in the roll of beatified bards, but in that of the British blockheads, and be elected by unanimous consent as a proper Laureate for the Fogie Club.