The Balladists

Burns had an inimitable ear for ballad feeling and for ballad rhythm and music. But, except for some vigorous satiric, political, and bacchanalian chants of his own, and the recasting of a few of the old-fashioned and lively rhymes like The Carl o' Kellyburn Braes that were not out of the need of being cleaned and furbished to please a more fastidious age, he could scarcely be called a ballad writer. His special sphere in the restoration and preservation of the old was in lyrical poetry. What Robert Burns achieved for the songs, however, Walter Scott did for the ballads and prose legends of Scotland. The appearance of the Border Minstrelsy makes 1802 the red-letter year in the later annals of the Scottish Ballad. More than twenty years before, the little lame boy, with the good blood of two Border clans, the Scotts and the Rutherfords, in his veins, had lain on the braes of Sandyknowe, and had drunk in through all his senses the history and romance of the Borderland. He had heard from the 'aged hind,' or at the 'winter hearth,' the old tales of woe and mirth; wild conjurings of superstition or real events that, although nearer then by a hundred years than they are to-day, had already been magnified, distorted, glorified in passing through the medium of the popular memory. His dreaming fancy did the rest. Looking from his point of vantage across the fair valley of the Tweed to the blue chain of Cheviot, every notch in which was 'a gate and passage of the thief,' every fold below it, the site of some battle or story of old,

'Over Tweed's fair flood, and Mertoun's wood,
And all down Teviotdale,'

he was able to repeople the scene as it was when ballad romance was not only written but lived:

'I marvelled as the aged hind
With some strange tale bewitched my mind,
Of forayers, who with headlong force
Down from that strength had spurred their horse.

· · · · ·

And ever, by the winter hearth,
Old tales I heard of woe or mirth,
Of lovers' slights, of ladies charms,
Of witches' spells, of warriors' arms;
Of patriot battles won of old
By Wallace wight and Bruce the bold.'

There could not have been a more 'meet nurse for a poetic child' than the green slopes, the black rocks, and the grey keep, reflected in its still 'lochan,' of Scott's ancestral home at Sandyknowe. Dryburgh, Melrose, and Kelso, are hidden in the valley below. The huge square tower of Hume – 'Willie Wastle's' castle – stands on the same sky-line as Smailholm peel itself, keeping guard along with it over the passes and marches of the ancient Scottish Kingdom. Wrangholm is near by, where St. Cuthbert dreamed and played boyish sports before he set forth on his mission to christianise Northumbria. Bemerside, the Broom o' the Cowdenknowes, and the Rhymer's Tower are not far off; Huntly Bank is also where True Thomas lay alone listening to the throstle and the jay, under the Eildon tree, and

'Was war of a lady gay
Come rydyng ouyr a fair le';

Mellerstain, whence the hero of James Haitlie rode to find favour in the eyes of the king's daughter, and where Grizel Hume and the Mellerstain Maid afterwards sung notes as wild and sweet and fresh as ever came from fairyland; and many a famous spot besides. The three-headed Eildons are in sight, with Dunion, Ruberslaw, Penielheugh, Minto Crags, Lilliard's Edge, and all the Border high places. Here Scott's poetic fancy was born; and he paid it only to the tribute that was due when he made it the scene of the finest of the modern ballads of its class, the Eve of St. John. As a shrine of pilgrimage for the lover of ballad lore, Smailholm and Sandyknowe should rank next after, if they should not take precedence of the Vale of Yarrow. Six years before Scott's birth, while Burns was just a toddler, Bishop Percy's Reliques had seen the light. The chief gathering ground of this celebrated collection was on the English side of the Border, but was not confined to ballad poetry. But it brought to some of the choicest of our ballads, such as Sir Patrick Spens, a fame and vogue such as they had never before enjoyed in the world without; and it profoundly influenced the poetic thought and taste of Scotland, as of every land where song was loved and English speech was spoken. One effect was seen in the more strictly Scottish collections of fragments of ballad verse that began soon after to issue from the press. Herd's, the 'first classical collection of Scottish songs and ballads,' as Scott calls it, appeared in 1769; that of Lord Hailes 1770; and Pinkerton's in 1781 and 1783. The publication in 1787 of the first volume of Johnson's Museum was one of the fruitful results to the national poetry and music of the visit of Robert Burns to Edinburgh; but the impulse that brought it to the light can be traced back by sure lines to Percy. Ritson's learned labours in a still wider field came forth between 1780 and 1794; and Sibbald's Chronicle was of the same year as the Border Minstrelsy.

The age of ballad collection and collation had fairly set in. But this does not deprive the Minstrelsy of the praise that, with the beginning of a new century, it ensured that the search for and rescue from oblivion of the old ballads should thenceforth be a business which, not alone the antiquary and the poet, but the whole people should make their concern. Jamieson's Popular Ballads followed in 1806; and, after a pause, filled up with the appearance of fresh volumes and fresh editions of the earlier collections, the works of Kinloch, Motherwell, and Buchan came with a rush, in the years 1827-8.

Of these, and other repertories of the national ballads, the number is legion, and the merits and methods as varied and diverse. There is not space to discuss and compare them, even were discussion and comparison part of the present plan. Such treatment is apt to reduce a book on ballads and balladists to what Charles G. Leland terms 'mere logarithmic tables of variants.' First came the harvesters; and then those who were content to glean where the others had left. As matter of course and of necessity the readings, and even the structure of the pieces picked up from oral recitation and singing, presented endless points of difference according to the locality and to the individual singer or collector. As has been said, each old piece of popular poetry, before it has been fixed in print, and even after, takes a certain part of its colour and character from the minds and memories through which it has been strained. As an illustration of this, in another field, one might mention that Pastor Hurt, when he set about, a few years ago, gathering the fragments of Esthonian folk literature, obtained contributions from 633 different collectors, most of them simple peasants, and as the result of three and a half years' work, he brought together 'of epics, lyrics, wedding songs, etc., upwards of 20,000 specimens; of tales about 3000; of proverbs about 18,000; of riddles, about 20,000, besides a large collection of magical formulæ, superstitions, and the like.' These figures include variants of the same tale or ballad theme, of which there were in some cases as many as 160.

The Scottish ballads may scarce be so multitudinous and protean a host as this. But the search for them, and the choice of them when discovered, have given infinite exercise to the industry, the judgment, and the patience of successive editors; and literature has no more curious and romantic chapter than that which deals with ballad collecting and collectors. The latter, in Scotland as elsewhere, have not been free from the human liability to err – few men have been less so. As Percy admitted Hardyknut and other examples of the pseudo-antique among his specimens of 'Old Romance Poetry,' Scott's critical acumen did not avail to detect brazen forgeries of Surtees, like Barthram's Dirge and The Death of Featherstonhaugh. In Cromek's Relics of Galloway Song were somewhat palpable 'fakements' of Allan Cunningham; William Motherwell and Peter Buchan made their egregious blunders, and even such careful and experienced antiquaries as Joseph Ritson and David Laing slipped on the dark and broken and intricate paths which they sought to explore. On the whole it can hardly be regretted that our ballad collections bear the impress of the idiosyncrasies of the individual ballad-hunters, as well as of the game they pursued and the district they coursed over.

Scott made his bag, as he tells us, chiefly 'during his early youth,' among 'the shepherds and aged persons in the recesses of the Border mountains,' who 'remembered and repeated the warlike songs of their fathers.' They were gathered on those long pedestrian excursions, with Shortreed or with Leyden (himself a balladist), which were themselves often as full of incident, and of the seeds of future romance, as any old Border raid. The great Master of Romance was, as one of his companions said, 'makin' himsel' a' the time.' Dandie Dinmont, whom the author of Guy Mannering sketches from the traits of a dozen honest yeomen and store farmers, whose hospitality he had shared in his rambles through the wilds of Liddesdale, would a few generations earlier have been a stark moss-trooper, ready to ride to the rescue of Kinmont Willie or to seek his 'beef and kail' in the Merse. The raid on Habbie Elliot of the Heughfoot is but a 'variant' of the lifting of Telfer's kye; and Wandering Willie's Tale, if it had been cast in verse, would have been the pick of our ballads of 'glamourie,' instead of the choicest of short prose stories. The rhyme and air that haunted the memory of Henry Bertram – what are they but an echo out of Scott's own romantic youth – out of the enchanted land of ballad poetry?

'"Are these the Links of Forth," she said,
"Or are they the crooks of Dee,
Or the bonnie woods o' Warroch-head
That I so fain would see?"'

It was on one of these excursions up Ettrick that Scott forgathered with Margaret Laidlaw, the mother of the 'Shepherd,' and the repository of an inexhaustible store of fairy tales, songs and ballads, which, as she declared, the compiler of the Border Minstrelsy 'spoiled' by transmitting to print. But the richest and rarest of his 'finds' was Hogg himself. He was nursed in the lap of the Forest and cradled in ballad and fairy lore. Here was the 'heart of pathos' of the older poetry; the head buzzing with its wild fancies; 'the sang o' the linty amang the broom in the spring'; and along with these the shaggy front, the strong hand-grips, the loyalty, and the sturdy sense that are the far-descended inheritance of the Border farmer and shepherd. Surely, to parody his own words, those who love to listen to Allan Ramsay and Burns and Scott, and to the nameless Balladists who were their masters and teachers, will 'never forget a'thegither the Ettrick Shepherd.'

More important, however, even than the materials gathered by Scott from the lips of Mrs. Hogg and other Border ballad reciters, or from the Glenriddell MSS., was the golden mine of old poetry, for the preservation of which he and the nation were indebted to the taste and retentive memory of Mrs. Brown, daughter of Professor Thomas Gordon, of King's College, Aberdeen, and wife of a minister of Falkland, in the beginning of the century. There are in existence three MSS. of the songs and ballads this lady was able to remember as sung to her on Deeside; and transcription of her father's account of this precious collection, as the story is told by him in a letter to Mr. A. Fraser Tytler, and by him communicated to Scott, may best and most authentically explain its origin: —

'An aunt of my children, Mrs. Farquhar, now dead, who was married to the proprietor of a small estate near the sources of the Dee, in Braemar, a good old woman who spent the best part of her life among flocks and herds, resided in her latter days in the town of Aberdeen. She was possessed of a most tenacious memory, which retained all the songs she had heard from nurses and country-women in that sequestered part of the country. Being maternally fond of my children when young, she had them much about her, and delighted them with her songs and tales of chivalry. My youngest daughter, Mrs. Brown, at Falkland, is blessed with a memory as good as her aunt, and has almost the whole of her songs by heart. In conversation, I mentioned them to your father (William Tytler, the champion of Mary Stuart) at whose request my grandson, Mr. Scott, wrote down a parcel of them as her aunt sung them. Being then a mere novice in music, he added, in the copy, such musical notes as, he supposed, would give your father some notion of the airs, or rather lilts, to which they were sung.'

To all those whose names are mentioned in the above extract, Scotland and poetry owe a deep debt of gratitude. But here again, although men, and men of learning, have borne their part in the salvage, it is to the 'spindle side,' and to simple country ears and memories, that the main acknowledgment is due for saving what it would have been a calamity to lose. What may almost be described as the 'classical text' of some of the finest of our ballads, is that obtained by collation of the Brown 'sets,' of which the fullest is that originally owned by Robert Jamieson, which reappears in revised form in one of the copies possessed by Miss Tytler. From the circumstances of its origin, this text has something of a North Country cast, even where it deals with a South Country theme. But the three divisions of the land, the North, the Centre, and the South, bear a share of the credit of its preservation. The ballads were gathered by Deeside; they were sung and recited under Lomond Law; they were brought before the world by a Borderer.

No such 'finds' are to be looked for any longer. The ground has been for the most part well reaped and gleaned. Only a few ears are to be picked up that have escaped the notice of previous collectors; although, within the last quarter of a century, in quiet corners like the Enzie and Buchan and the Cabrach, the late Dean Christie was still able to gather from the lips of old peasant and fisher women specimens both of ballads and ballad airs that had never been in print. The chief work for half a century has been that of comparing, collating, and critically annotating the materials already found, and reference need only be made to the monumental work in eight volumes of Professor Child, in which the subject of the origins, affinities, variants and genuine text of both the Scottish and English ballads has been thoroughly worked out and brought nearly down to date.

The Ballads themselves have done a greater work. They have permeated and revived the poetry and literature of the century like a draught of rare old wine. The greatest of our modern poets have been proud to acknowledge what they owe to the forgotten minstrels who have not sent down to us out of the darkness, along with their song, so much as their name. Wordsworth, as well as Scott, pored entranced over Percy's Reliques. Coleridge, Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, and a host besides, have drunk delight and found inspiration in the Scottish ballad minstrelsy; and it has awakened a responsive chord in the lyre of the poets of America. As enthusiastic old Christopher North wrote, 'Perhaps none of us ever wrote verses of any worth who had not been more or less readers of our old ballads.'

'The Bards are lost,
The song is saved.'