INTRODUCTION

TO THE VOLUME OF BALLADS

WHAT is a ballad?

In the strict sense of the word, it ought to mean a song set to dance music,-a string of verses to accompany the movements of a rustic or courtly ballet. But this original meaning was soon lost and confused in a wider usage. The word was applied to many kinds of poems which were current among the people in the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries. Metrical tales of love and adventure and tragedy, versified satires on the nobility and the clergy, moral exhortations and short sermons in rhyme, lyrics in praise of a sweetheart or a soldier,-almost any piece of poetry that passed from mouth to mouth among the minstrels, or was printed on broadside sheets and sold by the pedlars, who were the bookcanvassers of that day,-might be called a "tragical ballett," or a godly ballett," or a diverting ballett," according to the supposed effect upon the hearer. The chaplain of Henry VIII quoted in one of his sermons, "the ballates off 'Passe tyme with goodde cumpanye' and 'I love unlovydde.'" In the Bishops' Bible the title of Solomon's Song is "The Ballet of the Ballets of Solomon."

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No distinction was made, in those early times, between narrative ballads and other songs; nor between those which had their anonymous origin among the people and those which were carefully wrought out by certain poets. Indeed, the term "ballade," so far as it had a technical sense, was used to describe one of the most artificial and difficult forms of verse, which could be written only by a skilled master.

The attempt to restrict the use of the name "ballad" to story-poems which are traditional in character and purely popular in origin and form, is a somewhat modern invention. Famous collections of such poems have been made; Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, Ritson's Robin Hood, Scott's Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Motherwell's Minstrelsy Ancient and Modern, Child's English and Scottish Popular Ballads, and many other books of the same kind, are filled with the naïve, irregular, graphic, and often strangely beautiful narratives in rhyme which have been handed down to us without an author's name, preserved and transmitted by the loving memory of the people. And these, some critics say, are the only true ballads, because they are not the work of personal poets, but the unconscious flowerings of poetry from the common heart of man. It seems to me that this effort to narrow the meaning of the word is misdirected, and that the reason which the critics give for it begs the whole question.

The fact that no author's name is attached to

the rude and vigorous verses of A Gest of Robyn Hode, or The Battle of Otterbourne, does not prove that they never had an author, but only that he has been forgotten. Verses do not come to the birth without the aid of some minstrel to give them form and set them to music. A community never makes a poem. It is a man who makes it. The community, if the age is poetical, takes the song-story up, and repeats it, in hall and cottage, with changes and variations. So it comes to us, from a time when books were rare and copyright was unknown, in half a dozen different forms, and often with great improvements, but without the name of the original minstrel. This, it seems to me, is the true explanation of what is called communal authorship,"-an unseen poet singing in obscurity,-his song caught up and carried down to us by the love of the people. Coleridge was instinctively right when he wrote of

The grand old ballad of Sir Patrick Spence."

Moreover, even if we accepted at its face value the notion that the primitive ballads were made by a whole village, or a county perhaps, or even an entire kingdom, rhyming in unconscious unison, why should we be more narrow and particular in our definition of ballads than the very people who made them? They were willing to admit that King James's The Kingis Quair and Lord Dorset's "To all you ladies" were ballads.

It is hardly likely that the critics will be able to confine the use of the word "ballad" to the limited sense which some of them have assigned to it. Language has a way of escaping from the control of the learned and making its own connections with human life. There are folk-words as well as folk-songs. And this very word "ballad" which we are considering is one of them. It has followed its own course in common speech and writing. It is no longer applied, it is true, to purely lyrical songs, or to hymns, or to didactic verse. But it is still used to describe poems, differing considerably in form and origin, which have three main characteristics in common.

First, they have a certain simplicity of theme, appealing not to reflection or to philosophic thought (as an epic or an idyll does), but more directly to some strong, common, human feeling of wonder, of admiration, or of pity. Second, they have an interesting story, clear and vivid, either told directly (as in The Bailiff's Daughter), or suggested in the background (as in Fair Helen). Third, they are free and lyrical in spirit and movement, not composed in blank-verse, or in complicated stanzas, but in more flowing and easy forms. These are the three characteristics that have been followed in selecting the ballads in this volume.

I do not suppose that all the good ones are ⚫ here: but I think that all here are good. Some

of them, perhaps, come very near to the borderline of the story in verse, or of the pure lyric:

just as some of the poems in the second and third volumes of this series might possibly be called ballads and included here. The affair of classifying poetry is not like a chemical analysis or a land survey. There is always room for a difference, and sometimes for a change, of opinion.

But, upon the whole, I am satisfied that these poems represent the mastery of the ballad-form and illustrate its history. Ranging from The Death of Robin Hood to Rizpah, from Young Beichan to Amy Wentworth, from Sir Patrick Spens to The Wreck of the Schooner Hesperus, they give a rich and splendid picture of the balladpoetry of love, of fairyland, of adventure, of the sea, of war, and of death and sorrow.

H. v. D.