In spite of Socrates and his logic we may venture to say, in answer to the question ‘What is a ballad?’--‘A Ballad is The Milldams of Binnorie and Sir Patrick Spens and The Douglas Tragedy and Lord Randal and Childe Maurice, and things of that sort.’

There the reader has it, without need of the definition or of the historical account which this Preface must not attempt. Its author, no doubt, is destined to consign, some day, and ‘come to dust’ with more learned editors: but meanwhile, if one ask ‘What is a Ballad?’--I answer, It is these things; and it is

About the dead hour o’ the night She heard the bridles ring. (Tam Lin)

and

But this ladye is gone to her chamber, Her maydens following bright. (Sir Cawline)

It is

‘O we were sisters, sisters seven; We were the fairest under heaven.’ (Cospatrick)

and

‘I see no harm by you, Margaret, Nor you see none by me.’ (Fair Margaret and Sweet William)

and

In somer, when the shawes be sheyne, And leves be large and long. (Robin Hood and the Monk)

and

O there was horsing, horsing in haste, And cracking of whips out owre the lee. (Archie of Cawfield)

It is even

And there did he see brave Captain Ogilvie A-training of his men on the green. (The Duke of Gordon’s Daughter)

Like the Clown in Twelfth Night, it can sing both high and low: but the note is unmistakable whether it sing high:

O cocks are crowing on merry middle-earth; I wot the wild fowls are boding day. (Clerk Saunders)

Half-owre, half-owre to Aberdour, ’Tis fifty fathoms deep; And there lies gude Sir Patrick Spens, Wi’ the Scots lords at his feet! (Sir Patrick Spens)

‘O Earl Bran’, I see your heart’s bloud!’-- Ay lally, o lilly lally ‘It’s na but the glent o’ my scarlet hood’ All i’ the night sae early. (Earl Brand)

or low

Then up bespake the bride’s mother-- She never was heard to speak so free: ‘Ye’ll not forsake my only daughter, Though Susie Pye has cross’d the sea.’ (Young Beichan)

‘An’ thu sall marry a proud gunner, An’ a proud gunner I’m sure he’ll be.’ (The Great Silkie of Sule Skerrie)

Rise up, rise up, brother Dives, And go with us to see A dismal place, prepared in hell, To sit on a serpent’s knee. (Dives and Lazarus)

or, merely flat and pedestrian:

There was slayne upon the English part For sooth as I you say, Of ninè thousand English men Five hundred came away. (Otterburn)

But it is always unmistakable and like no other thing in poetry; in proof of which let me offer one simple, practical test. If any man ever steeped himself in balladry, that man was Scott, and once or twice, as in Proud Maisie and Brignall Banks, he came near to distil the essence. If any man, taking the Ballad for his model, has ever sublimated its feeling and language in a poem

seraphically free From taint of personality,

that man was Coleridge and that poem his Ancient Mariner. If any poet now alive can be called a ballad-writer of genius, it is the author of Danny Deever and East and West. But let the reader suppose a fascicule of such poems bound up with the present collection, and he will perceive that I could have gone no straighter way to destroy the singularity of the book.

In claiming this singularity for the Ballad I do not seek to exalt it above any other lyrical form. Rather I am ready to admit, out of some experience in anthologizing, that when a ballad is set in a collection alongside the best of Herrick, Gray, Landor, Browning--to name four poets opposite as the poles and to say nothing of such masterwork as Spenser’s Epithalamion or Milton’s Lycidas--it is the ballad that not only suffers by the apposition but suffers to a surprising degree; so that I have sometimes been forced to reconsider my affection, and ask ‘Are these ballads really beautiful as they have always appeared to me?’ In truth (as I take it) the contrast is unfair to them, much as any contrast between children and grown folk would be unfair. They appealed to something young in the national mind, and the young still ramp through Percy’s Reliques--as I hope they will through this book--‘trailing clouds of glory,’ following the note in Elmond’s wood--

May Margaret sits in her bower door Sewing her silken seam; She heard a note in Elmond’s wood, And wish’d she there had been.

She loot the seam fa’ frae her side, The needle to her tae, And she is on to Elmond’s wood As fast as she could gae.

A. Q. C.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] A smaller edition of ‘Child’, excellently planned, by Helen Child Sargent and George Lyman Kittridge, is published in England by Mr. Nutt.

[2] 1864.

[3] This does not hold of small transpositions, elisions of superfluous words, or corrections of spelling. In these matters I have allowed myself a free hand.

[4] On the History of the Ballads, 1100-1500, by W. P. Ker, Proceedings of the British Academy, vol. iv.

CONTENTS