Book of Old Ballads

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A BOOK OF OLD BALLADS

Selected and with an Introduction

by

BEVERLEY NICHOLS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The thanks and acknowledgments of the publishers are due to the
following: to Messrs. B. Feldman & Co., 125 Shaftesbury Avenue, W.C. 2,
for "It's a Long Way to Tipperary"; to Mr. Rudyard Kipling and Messrs.
Methuen & Co. for "Mandalay" from _Barrack Room Ballads_; and to
the Executors of the late Oscar Wilde for "The Ballad of Reading Gaol."

"The Earl of Mar's Daughter", "The Wife of Usher's Well", "The Three
Ravens", "Thomas the Rhymer", "Clerk Colvill", "Young Beichen", "May
Collin", and "Hynd Horn" have been reprinted from _English and
Scottish Ballads_, edited by Mr. G. L. Kittredge and the late Mr. F.
J. Child, and published by the Houghton Mifflin Company.

The remainder of the ballads in this book, with the exception of "John
Brown's Body", are from _Percy's Reliques_, Volumes I and II.

CONTENTS

FOREWORD
MANDALAY
THE FROLICKSOME DUKE
THE KNIGHT AND SHEPHERD'S DAUGHTER
KING ESTMERE
KING JOHN AND THE ABBOT OF CANTERBURY
BARBARA ALLEN'S CRUELTY
FAIR ROSAMOND
ROBIN HOOD AND GUY OF GISBORNE
THE BOY AND THE MANTLE
THE HEIR OF LINNE
KING COPHETUA AND THE BEGGAR MAID
SIR ANDREW BARTON
MAY COLLIN
THE BLIND BEGGAR'S DAUGHTER OF BEDNALL GREEN
THOMAS THE RHYMER
YOUNG BEICHAN
BRAVE LORD WILLOUGHBEY
THE SPANISH LADY'S LOVE
THE FRIAR OF ORDERS GRAY
CLERK COLVILL
SIR ALDINGAR
EDOM O' GORDON
CHEVY CHACE
SIR LANCELOT DU LAKE
GIL MORRICE
THE CHILD OF ELLE
CHILD WATERS
KING EDWARD IV AND THE TANNER OF TAMWORTH
SIR PATRICK SPENS
THE EARL OF MAR'S DAUGHTER
EDWARD, EDWARD
KING LEIR AND HIS THREE DAUGHTERS
HYND HORN
JOHN BROWN'S BODY
TIPPERARY
THE BAILIFF'S DAUGHTER OF ISLINGTON
THE THREE RAVENS
THE GABERLUNZIE MAN
THE WIFE OF USHER'S WELL
THE LYE
THE BALLAD OF READING GAOL

_The source of these ballads will be found in the Appendix at the end
of this book._

LIST OF COLOUR PLATES

HYND HORN
KING ESTMERE
BARBARA ALLEN'S CRUELTY
FAIR ROSAMOND
THE BOY AND THE MANTLE
KING COPHETUA AND THE BEGGAR MAID
MAY COLLIN
THOMAS THE RHYMER
YOUNG BEICHAN
CLERK COLVILL
GIL MORRICE
CHILD WATERS
THE EARL OF MAR'S DAUGHTER
THE BAILIFF'S DAUGHTER OF ISLINGTON
THE THREE RAVENS
THE WIFE OF USHER'S WELL

FOREWORD

By

Beverley Nichols

These poems are the very essence of the British spirit. They are, to
literature, what the bloom of the heather is to the Scot, and the
smell of the sea to the Englishman. All that is beautiful in the old
word "patriotism" ... a word which, of late, has been twisted to such
ignoble purposes ... is latent in these gay and full-blooded measures.

But it is not only for these reasons that they are so valuable to the
modern spirit. It is rather for their tonic qualities that they should
be prescribed in 1934. The post-war vintage of poetry is the thinnest
and the most watery that England has ever produced. But here, in these
ballads, are great draughts of poetry which have lost none of their
sparkle and none of their bouquet.

It is worth while asking ourselves why this should be--why these poems
should "keep", apparently for ever, when the average modern poem turns
sour overnight. And though all generalizations are dangerous I believe
there is one which explains our problem, a very simple one.... namely,
that the eyes of the old ballad-singers were turned outwards, while the
eyes of the modern lyric-writer are turned inwards.

The authors of the old ballads wrote when the world was young, and
infinitely exciting, when nobody knew what mystery might not lie on the
other side of the hill, when the moon was a golden lamp, lit by a
personal God, when giants and monsters stalked, without the slightest
doubt, in the valleys over the river. In such a world, what could a man
do but stare about him, with bright eyes, searching the horizon, while
his heart beat fast in the rhythm of a song?

But now--the mysteries have gone. We know, all too well, what lies on
the other side of the hill. The scientists have long ago puffed out,
scornfully, the golden lamp of the night ... leaving us in the uttermost
darkness. The giants and the monsters have either skulked away or have
been tamed, and are engaged in writing their memoirs for the popular
press. And so, in a world where everything is known (and nothing
understood), the modern lyric-writer wearily averts his eyes, and stares
into his own heart.

That way madness lies. All madmen are ferocious egotists, and so are all
modern lyric-writers. That is the first and most vital difference
between these ballads and their modern counterparts. The old
ballad-singers hardly ever used the first person singular. The modern
lyric-writer hardly ever uses anything else.

II

This is really such an important point that it is worth labouring.

Why is ballad-making a lost art? That it _is_ a lost art there can
be no question. Nobody who is painfully acquainted with the rambling,
egotistical pieces of dreary versification, passing for modern
"ballads", will deny it.

Ballad-making is a lost art for a very simple reason. Which is, that we
are all, nowadays, too sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought to
receive emotions directly, without self-consciousness. If we are
wounded, we are no longer able to sing a song about a clean sword, and a
great cause, and a black enemy, and a waving flag. No--we must needs go
into long descriptions of our pain, and abstruse calculations about its
effect upon our souls.

It is not "we" who have changed. It is life that has changed. "We" are
still men, with the same legs, arms and eyes as our ancestors. But life
has so twisted things that there are no longer any clean swords nor
great causes, nor black enemies. And the flags do not know which way to
flutter, so contrary are the winds of the modern world. All is doubt.
And doubt's colour is grey.

Grey is no colour for a ballad. Ballads are woven from stuff of
primitive hue ... the red blood gushing, the gold sun shining, the green
grass growing, the white snow falling. Never will you find grey in a
ballad. You will find the black of the night and the raven's wing,
and the silver of a thousand stars. You will find the blue of many
summer skies. But you will not find grey.

III

That is why ballad-making is a lost art. Or almost a lost art. For even
in this odd and musty world of phantoms which we call the twentieth
century, there are times when a man finds himself in a certain place at
a certain hour and something happens to him which takes him out of
himself. And a song is born, simply and sweetly, a song which other
men can sing, for all time, and forget themselves.

Such a song was once written by a master at my old school, Marlborough.
He was a Scot. But he loved Marlborough with the sort of love which the
old ballad-mongers must have had-the sort of love which takes a man on
wings, far from his foolish little body.

He wrote a song called "The Scotch Marlburian".

Here it is:--

Oh Marlborough, she's a toun o' touns
We will say that and mair,
We that ha' walked alang her douns
And snuffed her Wiltshire air.
A weary way ye'll hae to tramp
Afore ye match the green
O' Savernake and Barbery Camp
And a' that lies atween!

The infinite beauty of that phrase ... "and a' that lies atween"! The
infinite beauty as it is roared by seven hundred young throats in
unison! For in that phrase there drifts a whole pageant of boyhood--the
sound of cheers as a race is run on a stormy day in March, the tolling
of the Chapel bell, the crack of ball against bat, the sighs of sleep
in a long white dormitory.

But you may say "What is all this to me? I wasn't at Maryborough. I
don't like schoolboys ... they strike me as dirty, noisy, and usually
foul-minded. Why should I go into raptures about such a song, which
seems only to express a highly debatable approval of a certain method of
education?"

If you are asking yourself that sort of question, you are obviously in
very grave need of the tonic properties of this book. For after you have
read it, you will wonder why you ever asked it.

IV

I go back and back to the same point, at the risk of boring you to
distraction. For it is a point which has much more "to" it than the
average modern will care to admit, unless he is forced to do so.

You remember the generalization about the eyes ... how they used to look
_out_, but now look _in_? Well, listen to this....

_I'm_ feeling blue,
_I_ don't know what to do,
'Cos _I_ love you
And you don't love _me_.

The above masterpiece is, as far as I am aware, imaginary. But it
represents a sort of _reductio ad absurdum_ of thousands of lyrics
which have been echoing over the post-war world. Nearly all these lyrics
are melancholy, with the profound and primitive melancholy of the negro
swamp, and they are all violently egotistical.

Now this, in the long run, is an influence of far greater evil than one
would be inclined at first to admit. If countless young men, every
night, are to clasp countless young women to their bosoms, and rotate
over countless dancing-floors, muttering "I'm feeling blue ... _I_
don't know what to do", it is not unreasonable to suppose that they will
subconsciously apply some of the lyric's mournful egotism to themselves.

Anybody who has even a nodding acquaintance with modern psychological
science will be aware of the significance of "conditioning", as applied
to the human temperament. The late M. Coue "conditioned" people into
happiness by making them repeat, over and over again, the phrase "Every
day in every way I grow better and better and better."

The modern lyric-monger exactly reverses M. Coue's doctrine. He makes
the patient repeat "Every night, with all my might, I grow worse and
worse and worse." Of course the "I" of the lyric-writer is an imaginary
"I", but if any man sings "_I'm_ feeling blue", often enough, to a
catchy tune, he will be a superman if he does not eventually apply that
"I" to himself.

But the "blueness" is really beside the point. It is the _egotism_
of the modern ballad which is the trouble. Even when, as they
occasionally do, the modern lyric-writers discover, to their
astonishment, that they are feeling happy, they make the happiness such
a personal issue that half its tonic value is destroyed. It is not, like
the old ballads, just an outburst of delight, a sudden rapture at the
warmth of the sun, or the song of the birds, or the glint of moonlight
on a sword, or the dew in a woman's eyes. It is not an emotion so sweet
and soaring that self is left behind, like a dull chrysalis, while the
butterfly of the spirit flutters free. No ... the chrysalis is never
left behind, the "I", "I", "I", continues, in a maddening monotone. And
we get this sort of thing....

_I_ want to be happy,
But _I_ can't be happy
Till _I've_ made you happy too.

And that, if you please, is one of the jolliest lyrics of the last
decade! That was a song which made us all smile and set all our feet
dancing!

Even when their tale was woven out of the stuff of tragedy, the old
ballads were not tarnished with such morbid speculations. Read the tale
of the beggar's daughter of Bethnal Green. One shudders to think what a
modern lyric-writer would make of it. We should all be in tears before
the end of the first chorus.

But here, a lovely girl leaves her blind father to search for fortune.
She has many adventures, and in the end, she marries a knight. The
ballad ends with words of almost childish simplicity, but they are words
which ring with the true tone of happiness:--

Thus was the feast ended with joye and delighte
A bridegroome most happy then was the young knighte
In joy and felicitie long lived hee
All with his faire ladye, the pretty Bessee.

I said that the words were of almost childish simplicity. But the
student of language, and the would-be writer, might do worse than study
those words, if only to see how the cumulative effect of brightness and
radiance is gained. You may think the words are artless, but just
ponder, for a moment, the number of brilliant verbal symbols which are
collected into that tiny verse. There are only four lines. But those
lines contain these words ...

Feast, joy, delight, bridegroom, happy, joy, young, felicity, fair,
pretty.

Is that quite so artless, after all? Is it not rather like an old and
primitive plaque, where colour is piled on colour till you would say
the very wood will burst into flame ... and yet, the total effect is one
of happy simplicity?

V

How were the early ballads born? Who made them? One man or many? Were
they written down, when they were still young, or was it only after the
lapse of many generations, when their rhymes had been sharpened and
their metres polished by constant repetition, that they were finally
copied out?

To answer these questions would be one of the most fascinating tasks
which the detective in letters could set himself. Grimm, listening
in his fairyland, heard some of the earliest ballads, loved them,
pondered on them, and suddenly startled the world by announcing that
most ballads were not the work of a single author, but of the people at
large. _Das Volk dichtet_, he said. And that phrase got him into a
lot of trouble. People told him to get back to his fairyland and not
make such ridiculous suggestions. For how, they asked, could a whole
people make a poem? You might as well tell a thousand men to make a
tune, limiting each of them to one note!

To invest Grimm's words with such an intention is quite unfair.
[Footnote: For a discussion of Grimm's theories, together with much
interesting speculation on the origin of the ballads, the reader should
study the admirable introduction to _English and Scottish Popular
Ballads_, published by George Harrap & Co., Ltd.] Obviously a
multitude of people could not, deliberately, make a single poem any more
than a multitude of people could, deliberately, make a single picture,
one man doing the nose, one man an eye and so on. Such a suggestion is
grotesque, and Grimm never meant it. If I might guess at what he meant,
I would suggest that he was thinking that the origin of ballads must
have been similar to the origin of the dance, (which was probably the
earliest form of aesthetic expression known to man).

The dance was invented because it provided a means of prolonging ecstasy
by art. It may have been an ecstasy of sex or an ecstasy of victory ...
that doesn't matter. The point is that it gave to a group of people an
ordered means of expressing their delight instead of just leaping about
and making loud cries, like the animals. And you may be sure that as the
primitive dance began, there was always some member of the tribe a
little more agile than the rest--some man who kicked a little higher or
wriggled his body in an amusing way. And the rest of them copied him,
and incorporated his step into their own.

Apply this analogy to the origin of ballads. It fits perfectly.

There has been a successful raid, or a wedding, or some great deed of
daring, or some other phenomenal thing, natural or supernatural. And now
that this day, which will ever linger in their memories, is drawing to
its close, the members of the tribe draw round the fire and begin to
make merry. The wine passes ... and tongues are loosened. And someone
says a phrase which has rhythm and a sparkle to it, and the phrase is
caught up and goes round the fire, and is repeated from mouth to mouth.
And then the local wit caps it with another phrase and a rhyme is born.
For there is always a local wit in every community, however primitive.
There is even a local wit in the monkey house at the zoo.

And once you have that single rhyme and that little piece of rhythm, you
have the genesis of the whole thing. It may not be worked out that
night, nor even by the men who first made it. The fire may long have
died before the ballad is completed, and tall trees may stand over the
men and women who were the first to tell the tale. But rhyme and rhythm
are indestructible, if they are based on reality. "Not marble nor the
gilded monuments of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme."

And so it is that some of the loveliest poems in the language will ever
remain anonymous. Needless to say, _all_ the poems are not
anonymous. As society became more civilized it was inevitable that the
peculiar circumstances from which the earlier ballads sprang should
become less frequent. Nevertheless, about nearly all of the ballads
there is "a common touch", as though even the most self-conscious author
had drunk deep of the well of tradition, that sparkling well in which so
much beauty is distilled.

VI

But though the author or authors of most of the ballads may be lost in
the lists of time, we know a good deal about the minstrels who sang
them. And it is a happy thought that those minstrels were such
considerable persons, so honourably treated, so generously esteemed.
The modern mind, accustomed to think of the singer of popular songs
either as a highly paid music-hall artist, at the top of the ladder, or
a shivering street-singer, at the bottom of it, may find it difficult to
conceive of a minstrel as a sort of ambassador of song, moving from
court to court with dignity and ceremony.

Yet this was actually the case. In the ballad of King Estmere, for
example, we see the minstrel finely mounted, and accompanied by a
harpist, who sings his songs for him. This minstrel, too, moves among
kings without any ceremony. As Percy has pointed out, "The further we
carry our enquiries back, the greater respect we find paid to the
professors of poetry and music among all the Celtic and Gothic nations.
Their character was deemed so sacred that under its sanction our famous
King Alfred made no scruple to enter the Danish camp, and was at once
admitted to the king's headquarters."

_And even so late as the time of Froissart, we have minstrels and
heralds mentioned together, as those who might securely go into an
enemy's country._

The reader will perhaps forgive me if I harp back, once more, to our
present day and age, in view of the quite astonishing change in national
psychology which that revelation implies. Minstrels and heralds were
once allowed safe conduct into the enemy's country, in time of war. Yet,
in the last war, it was considered right and proper to hiss the work of
Beethoven off the stage, and responsible newspapers seriously suggested
that never again should a note of German music, of however great
antiquity, be heard in England! We are supposed to have progressed
towards internationalism, nowadays. Whereas, in reality, we have grown
more and more frenziedly national. We are very far behind the age of
Froissart, when there was a true internationalism--the internationalism
of art.

To some of us that is still a very real internationalism. When we hear a
Beethoven sonata we do not think of it as issuing from the brain of a
"Teuton" but as blowing from the eternal heights of music whose winds
list nothing of frontiers.

Man _needs_ song, for he is a singing animal. Moreover, he needs
communal song, for he is a social animal. The military authorities
realized this very cleverly, and they encouraged the troops, during the
war, to sing on every possible occasion. Crazy pacifists, like myself,
may find it almost unbearably bitter to think that on each side of
various frontiers young men were being trained to sing themselves to
death, in a struggle which was hideously impersonal, a struggle of
machinery, in which the only winners were the armament manufacturers.
And crazy pacifists might draw a very sharp line indeed between the
songs which celebrated real personal struggles in the tiny wars of the
past, and the songs which were merely the prelude to thousands of
puzzled young men suddenly finding themselves choking in chlorine gas,
in the wars of the present.

But even the craziest pacifist could not fail to be moved by some of the
ballads of the last war. To me, "Tipperary" is still the most moving
tune in the world. It happens to be a very good tune, from the
musician's point of view, a tune that Handel would not have been ashamed
to write, but that is not the point. Its emotional qualities are due to
its associations. Perhaps that is how it has always been, with ballads.
From the standard of pure aesthetics, one ought not to consider
"associations" in judging a poem or a tune, but with a song like
"Tipperary" you would be an inhuman prig if you didn't. We all have our
"associations" with this particular tune. For me, it recalls a window in
Hampstead, on a grey day in October 1914. I had been having the measles,
and had not been allowed to go back to school. Then suddenly, down the
street, that tune echoed. And they came marching, and marching, and
marching. And they were all so happy.

So happy.

VII

"Tipperary" is a true ballad, which is why it is included in this book.
So is "John Brown's Body". They were not written as ballads but they
have been promoted to that proud position by popular vote.

It will now be clear, from the foregoing remarks, that there are
thousands of poems, labelled "ballads" from the eighteenth century,
through the romantic movement, and onwards, which are not ballads at
all. Swinburne's ballads, which so shocked our grandparents, bore about
as much relation to the true ballads as a vase of wax fruit to a
hawker's barrow. They were lovely patterns of words, woven like some
exquisite, foaming lace, but they were Swinburne, Swinburne all the
time. They had nothing to do with the common people. The common people
would not have understood a word of them.

Ballads _must_ be popular. And that is why it will always remain
one of the weirdest paradoxes of literature that the only man, except
Kipling, who has written a true ballad in the last fifty years is the
man who despised the people, who shrank from them, and jeered at them,
from his little gilded niche in Piccadilly. I refer, of course, to Oscar
Wilde's "Ballad of Reading Gaol." It was a true ballad, and it was the
best thing he ever wrote. For it was written _de profundis_, when
his hands were bloody with labour and his tortured spirit had been down
to the level of the lowest, to the level of the pavement ... nay, lower
... to the gutter itself. And in the gutter, with agony, he learned the
meaning of song.

Ballads begin and end with the people. You cannot escape that fact. And
therefore, if I wished to collect the ballads of the future, the songs
which will endure into the next century (if there _is_ any song in
the next century), I should not rake through the contemporary poets, in
the hope of finding gems of lasting brilliance. No. I should go to the
music-halls. I should listen to the sort of thing they sing when the
faded lady with the high bust steps forward and shouts, "Now then, boys,
all together!"

Unless you can write the words "Now then, boys, all together", at the
top of a ballad, it is not really a ballad at all. That may sound a
sweeping statement, but it is true.

In the present-day music-halls, although they have fallen from their
high estate, we should find a number of these songs which seem destined
for immortality. One of these is "Don't 'ave any more, Mrs. Moore."

Do you remember it?

Don't 'ave any more, Mrs. Moore!
Mrs. Moore, oh don't 'ave any more!
Too many double gins
Give the ladies double chins,
So don't 'ave any more, Mrs. Moore!

The whole of English "low life" (which is much the most exciting part of
English life) is in that lyric. It is as vivid as a Rowlandson cartoon.
How well we know Mrs. Moore! How plainly we see her ... the amiable,
coarse-mouthed, generous-hearted tippler, with her elbow on countless
counters, her damp coppers clutched in her rough hands, her eyes
staring, a little vacantly, about her. Some may think it is a sordid
picture, but I am sure that they cannot know Mrs. Moore very well if
they think that. They cannot know her bitter struggles, her silent
heroisms, nor her sardonic humour.

Lyrics such as these will, I believe, endure long after many of the most
renowned and fashionable poets of to-day are forgotten. They all have
the same quality, that they can be prefaced by that inspiring sentence,
"Now then, boys--all together!" Or to put it another way, as in the
ballad of George Barnwell,

All youths of fair England
That dwell both far and near,
Regard my story that I tell
And to my song give ear.

That may sound more dignified, but it amounts to the same thing!

VIII

But if the generation to come will learn a great deal from the few
popular ballads which we are still creating in our music-halls, how much
more shall we learn of history from these ballads, which rang through
the whole country, and were impregnated with the spirit of a whole
people! These ballads _are_ history, and as such they should be
recognised.

It has always seemed to me that we teach history in the wrong way. We
give boys the impression that it is an affair only of kings and queens
and great statesmen, of generals and admirals, and such-like bores.
Thousands of boys could probably draw you a map of many pettifogging
little campaigns, with startling accuracy, but not one in a thousand
could tell you what the private soldier carried in his knapsack. You
could get sheaves of competent essays, from any school, dealing with
such things as the Elizabethan ecclesiastical settlement, but how many
boys could tell you, even vaguely, what an English home was like, what
they ate, what coins were used, how their rooms were lit, and what they
paid their servants?

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