The Balladists

'"Awake!" she cried, "thy true love calls,
Come from her midnight grave;
Now let thy pity hear the maid
Thy love refused to save."'

Of a long antiquity most of these Mythological Ballads must be, if not in their actual phraseology, in the dark superstitions they embody and in the pathetic glimpses they afford us of the thoughts and fears and hopes of the men and women of the days of long ago – the days before feudalism; the days, as some inquisitors of the ballad assure us, when religion was a kind of fetichism or ancestor worship, when the laws were the laws of the tribe or family, and when the cannibal feast may have been among the customs of the race. We cannot find a time when this inheritance of legend was not old; when it was not sung, and committed to memory, and handed down to later generations in some rude rhyme. The leading 'types' were in the wallet of Autolycus; and he describes certain of them with a seasoning of his grotesque humour, to his simple country audience. There were the well-attested tale of the Usurer's Wife, a ballad sung, as ballads are wont, 'to a very doleful tune' – obviously a form of the Supernatural Birth; and the story, true as it is pitiful, of the fish that turned to woman, and then back again to fish, in which he that runs may read an example from the Mermaid Cycle. They are to be found to-day, often in debased and barely recognisable guise, in the hands of the peripatetic ballad-mongers who still haunt fairs and sing in the streets, and in the memories of multitudes of country folks who know scarce any other literature bearing the magic trademark of Old Romance.

CHAPTER V

THE ROMANTIC BALLAD

'O they rade on, and farther on,
By the lee licht o' the moon,
Until they cam' to a wan water,
And there they lichted them doon.'

    The Douglas Tragedy.
It may look like taking a liberty with the chart of ballad poetry to label as 'romantic' a single province of this kingdom of Old Romance. It is probably not even the most ancient of the provinces of balladry, but it has some claim to be regarded as the central one in fame and in wealth – the one that yields the purest and richest ore of poetry. It is that wherein the passion and frenzy of love is not merely an element or a prominent motive, but is the controlling spirit and the absorbing interest.

As has been acknowledged, it is not possible to make any hard and fast division of the Scottish ballads by applying to them this or any other test; and mention has already been made, on account of the mythological or superstitious features they possess, of a number of the choicest of these old lays that turn essentially upon the strength or the weakness, the constancy or the inconstancy, the rapture or the sorrow of earthly love. Love in the ballads is nearly always masterful, imperious, exacting; nearly always its reward is death and dule, and not life and happiness. But as it spurns all obstacles, it meets its fate unflinchingly. No sacrifices are too great, no penance too dire, no shame or sin too black to turn aside for an instant the rush of this impetuous passion, which runs bare-breasted on the drawn sword.

It is not to the ballads we must go for example – precept of this or of any kind there is none – in the bourgeois and respectable virtues; of the sober and chastened behaviour that comes of a prudent fear of consequences, of a cold temperament and a calculating spirit. The good or the ill done by the heroes and heroines of the Romantic Ballad is done on the spur of the moment, on the impulse of hot blood. Whether it be sin or sacrifice, the prompting is not that of convention, but of Nature herself. Love and hate, though they may burn and glow like a volcano, are not prodigal of words. It is one of the marks by which we may distinguish the characters in the ballads from those in later and more cultivated fields of literature that, as a rule, they say less rather than more than they mean. They speak daggers; but they are far more apt in using them. At a word or look the lovers are ready to die for each other; but of the language of endearment they are not prodigal; and a phrase of tenderness is sweet in proportion that it is rare.

With the tamer affections it fares no better than with the moral law when it comes in the path of the master passion. Mother and sisters are defied and forsaken; father and brethren are resisted at the sword's point when they cross, as is their wont, the course of true love. It is curious to note how little, except as a foil, the ballad makes of brotherly or sisterly love. It finds exquisite expression in the tale of Chil Ether and his twin sister,

'Who loved each other tenderly
'Boon everything on earth.

"The ley likesna the simmer shower
Nor girse the morning dew,
Better, dear Lady Maisrie,
Than Chil Ether loves you."'

But for this, among other reasons, the genuine antiquity of the ballad is under some suspicion.

In modern fiction or drama the lady hesitates between the opposing forces of love and of family pride and duty; the old influences in her life do not yield to the new without a struggle. But of struggle or indecision the ballad heroine knows, or at least says, nothing. A glance, a whispered word, a note of harp or horn, and she flings down her 'silken seam,' and whether she be king's daughter or beggar maid she obeys the spell, and follows the enchanter to greenwood or to broomy hill, to the ends of the earth, and to the gates of death.

For when the gallant knight and his 'fair may' ride away, prying eyes are upon them; black care and red vengeance climb up behind them and keep them company. The Douglas Tragedy may be selected for its terseness and dramatic strength, for the romance and pathos inwoven in the very names and scenes with which it is associated, as the type of a favourite story which under various titles —Earl Brand and the Child of Elle among the rest – has, time beyond knowledge, captivated the imagination and drawn the tears of ballad-lovers. In the best-known Scots version – that which Sir Walter Scott has recovered for us, and which bears some touches of his rescuing hand – it is the lady-mother who gives the alarm that the maiden has fled under cloud of night with her lover:

'Rise up, rise up, my seven bauld sons,
And put on your armour so bright,
And take better care of your youngest sister,
For your eldest 's awa' the last night.'

In English variants, it is the sour serving-man or false bower-woman who gives the alarm and sets the chase in motion. But there are other differences that enter into the very essence of the story, and express the diverse feeling of the Scottish and the English ballad. In the latter there is a pretty scene of entreaty and reconciliation; the lady's tears soften the harsh will of the father, and stay the lifted blade of the lover, and all ends merry as a marriage bell. But in the Scottish ballads fathers and lovers are not given to the melting mood. In sympathy with the scenery and atmosphere, the ballad spirit is with us sterner and darker; and just as the materials of that tender little idyll of faithful love, The Three Ravens, are in Scottish hands transformed into the drear, wild dirge of The Twa Corbies, the gallant adventure of the Child of Elle turns inevitably to tragedy by Douglas Water and Yarrow. But how much more true to this soul of romance is the choice of the northern minstrel! Lady Margaret, as she holds Lord William's bridle-rein while he deals those strokes so 'wondrous sair' at her nearest kin, is a figure that will haunt the 'stream of sorrow' as long as verse has power to move the hearts of men:

'"O choose, O choose, Lady Marg'ret," he cried,
"O whether will ye gang or bide?"
"I 'll gang, I 'll gang, Lord William," she said,
"For you 've left me no other guide."

He lifted her on a milk-white steed,
And himself on a dapple grey,
With a buglet horn hung down by his side,
And slowly they both rade away.

O they rade on, and farther on,
By the lee licht o' the moon,
Until they cam' to a wan water,
And there they lichted them doon.

"Hold up, hold up, Lord William," she said,
"For I fear that ye are slain."
"'Tis naething but the shadow of my scarlet cloak
That shines in the water so plain."'

The man who can listen to these lines without a thrill is proof against the Ithuriel spear of Romance. He is not made of penetrable stuff, and need waste no thought on the Scottish ballads.

To close the tale comes that colophon that as naturally ends the typical ballad as 'Once upon a time' begins the typical nursery tale:

'Lord William was buried in St. Mary's Kirk,
Lady Margaret in St. Mary's Quire;
And out of her grave there grew a birk,
And out of the knight's a brier.

And they twa met and they twa plait,
As fain they wad be near;
And a' the world might ken right well
They were twa lovers dear.'

Birk and brier; vine and rose; cypress and orange; thorn and olive – the plants in which the buried lovers of ballad romance live again and intertwine their limbs, vary with the clime and race; and just as the 'Black Douglas' of the Yarrow ballad – 'Wow but he was rough!' – plucks up the brier, and 'flings it in St. Mary's Loch,' the King, in the Portuguese folk-song, cuts down the cypress and orange that perpetuate the loves of Count Nello and the Infanta, and then grinds his teeth to see the double stream of blood flow from them and unite, proving that 'in death they are not divided.'

The scene of the Scottish story is supposed to be Blackhouse, on the Douglas Burn, a feeder of the Yarrow, the farm on which Scott's friend, William Laidlaw, the author of Lucy's Flittin', was born. Seven stones on the heights above, where the 'Ettrick Shepherd,' with his dog Hector, herded sheep and watched for the rising of the Queen of Faëry through the mist, mark the spot where the seven bauld brethren fell.

But Yarrow Vale is strewn with the sites of those tragedies of the far-off years, forgotten by history but remembered in song and tradition. Its green hills enclose the very sanctuary of romantic ballad-lore. Its clear current sings a mournful song of the 'good heart's bluid' that once stained its wave; of the drowned youth caught in the 'cleaving o' the craig.' The winds that sweep the hillsides and bend 'the birks a' bowing' seem to whisper still of the wail of the 'winsome marrow,' and to have an undernote of sadness on the brightest day of summer; while with the fall of the red and yellow leaf the very spirit of 'pastoral melancholy' broods and sleeps in this enchanted valley. St. Mary's Kirk and Loch; Henderland Tower and the Dow Linn; Blackhouse and Douglas Craig; Yarrow Kirk and Deucharswire; Hangingshaw and Tinnis; Broadmeadows and Newark; Bowhill and Philiphaugh – what memories of love and death, of faith and wrong, of blood and of tears they carry! Always by Yarrow the comely youth goes forth, only to fall by the sword, fighting against odds in the 'Dowie Dens,' or to be caught and drowned in the treacherous pools of this fateful river; always the woman is left to weep over her lost and 'lealfu' lord.' In the Dow Glen it is the 'Border Widow,' upon whose bower the 'Red Tod of Falkland' has broken and slain her knight, whose grave she must dig with her own hands:

'I took his body on my back,
And whiles I gaed and whiles I sat;
I digged a grave and laid him in,
And happed him wi' the sod sae green.

But think nae ye my heart was sair
When I laid the moul's on his yellow hair;
O think nae ye my heart was wae
When I turned about awa' to gae.

Nae living man I 'll love again,
Since that my lovely knight is slain;
Wi' ae lock o' his yellow hair
I 'll chain my heart for evermair.'