THE BALLADS OF SCOTLAND

Otago Witness, Issue 3881, 31 July 1928, Page 76

THE BALLADS OF SCOTLAND

Fortunate are those through whose infancy ran the chant of the old Scots ballads, whose earliest pulses answered the wild measures of her songs. Not fortunate in a worldly sense, probably, for the blood went dreamy with that old wiite; through the soul the great lamentation for dead beauty began to call and cry; and childish wits were burdened with a vision of pride and passion that seemed to ride with a ringing of silvdr reins to the headsman’s block or the dagger-stroke, at best to a quiet grave where the red rose married the white. But they left a residue of intense and lovely rhythm, and a' sense of the burning strangeness of life. There are many kinds of Scots; the best arc those who follow the tradition of the desperate, chivalrous Battle of Floddcn. It is of such flowers as then were “ a’ wede awa* ” that the ballads are made, because they have most delighted the folk of Scotland, a people in which aristocratic and democratic elements still meet in a paradox that confounds the stranger. The folk of Scotland has written its greatest literature, has written it in the Gaelic, and in the Northern English dialect, easy enough for all to read, of her ancient ballads and lyrics. Of these there are sometimes English versions; but whether they suffered from earlier printing in crude chap-books, or whether the national character differed acutely from the Northern during the balladmaking era, they hardly ever rise to the stark, imaginative height of the Scots stories. Johnny-Armstrong is a kingly outlaw beside the amiable Robin Hooo, and Chevy Chace is almost a bourgeois affair compared with the Battle of Otterburn, with its high courtesy and dreams of doom. But mediaeval England was evidently more completely christened than her neighbour. We have no unique piece of devotional fantasy like “Th? Falcon,” and the tender humilities of the best carols are not in unison with the tragic pride of the Scot. The ballad is a story in verse that no one man has written. Away in the beginning, perhaps, it was chanted verse by verse by people dancing in the spring or remembering round the winter fire Perhaps now and then somebody with a sensitive ear wrought over a whole ballad with his own technique, and mad' it a unity. It does not matter. The Scots ballads are as impersonal as poetry may be. There is no moralising, hardly any comment; a vague sigh of sorrow, perhaps, or an undernote of irony. Tile rhythm can do all the moaning. They retain much of their origins, the«e masterless poems—at their great moments flaming with the ethereal rose flame that flickers over a fire of turve? when the great darkness and the fordless rivers bide their time outside; at their irradiant hours fragrant with white lilies and moving like May dancers. Thv ballad metre is the simplest in the lan guage; but it must be kept singing. Some of the ballads are evidently of very ancient descent, for they hav< cousins in Scandinavia and Iceland, though the Scots mood always gives them a peculiar turn. Others, again, are musical rumours of contemporary hir tory, of romance, rather. Of the* older kind, some are of pure magic, like “ Kempion,” or the lilting “ Machrel of the Sea,” remarkable for the disdain with which the enchanted girl refuses to allow her step-mother to undo her transforming spell. Some are mysterious fragments hinting at the incest motive that haunts primitive expression. Brothers kill sisters, conscious or unconscious of their peculiar bond; mothers darkly intervene. Even in later ballads family history provides instances of extreme love and extreme hat«, its shadow. There remains something darkly sacrosanct about the intimat”, mysterious blood-tie. In “ The Twa Brothers,’ with its touching dying responses, one brother kills the other bv accident. In “The Twa Sisters” of “Binnorie,” one sister kills the other by design, since “Y e was fair,’ and I was dun.” One bright bride perishes because her groom “ forgot to speak to her. brother John.” The mother' has a kind of daemonic force, sometimes for good, more often for evil.

Douglasses, Graemes, Gordons, Stuarts, and many other people of legendary and faery blood move behind these tragic, triumphal tales. A strange race hal been commingled in the East and South of Scotland; Celt and.. Norseman and Norman, with even more exotic visitants, had wrought in a people arrogant, passionate, reckless, fatalistic. In the Lowland the Northumbrians had added to the coih Away up in Shetland they sang of “ Ring Orfeo,” the Greek lyrist appearing as a king of the West seeking a queen of the West, who has hems ravished by the King of Faerie. Such faint gleams of Greece glance about in the Highlands, and colour like rainbow ends the Gaelic invocations.

They are a pagan people. Away in the West the mild, sweet Virgin and Christ of the Culdees walk on the amethyst waters, and Bride of. the beautiful girdle, and. the Archangel Michael, Lord of the Seas. To the ballads Love and Death and Fate are the only real gods. The people are too proud for much saining and shriving; and their dead come sadly, whether from heaven or hell. Yet they are a brilliant

and audacious company who ride the woods with the hawks and hounds that seem part of their conspiracy. And of all romantic ladies those of the Scots ballads are the most spirited. The Scotswoman has never been a squaw of any kind; she needed not to acquire freedom, for she was free born. The ballads reveal her haughty as her lord, his equal lover or enemy. If she lose her falcon ways, it is merely by the fatality of some unreasonable enchantment of passion. Her speech is sharp and fine. She is a fastidious creature. If May Colvin is lured by sweet harping to Weary Well, her wits bring her back again. So shy is another that her lover feigns a lykewaite as a device to seize her. One accepts a wild challenge, and yet docs “ gae maiden hame,” as she said she would. She is soft as roses; but her “ little penknife ” is hidden in her breast or dangles by her knee. But she can give all for love and count the world well lost. She sits sewing at her silken seam, and is drawn away to magic love in the “ gay greenwood.” She fearlessly drinks her sleeping-draught, and, when borne in her gold and silver coffin to her plotted tryst, she opens her eyes to laugh:—

Oh ! ae sheave o’ your bread, my lord, And ae cup o' your wine! Lady Maisie, burned alive for her treasonable love, mocks at her kindred through the flame. Janet prepares herself very precisely to., gq to the ordeal of rescuing Tam Lin:—A-

Janet has kilted her green' kirtle A little abune her knee. And she has snooded her yellow hair A little abune her tree. The men are their match, fierce lovers and great fighters, sons of darkness and flame, riding through the sundering floods: — Oh ! ae sheave o’ your bread, my lord, Tiqur stream rins wondrous strang: Mak’ me your wrack as I come back. But spare me as I gang. They move in a dim country where the waters are mighty. River and loch and sea cool the eyes and fill the ears with the peace of moving water. In the greenwood are birken bowers, and before the castle slopes the lily leven. But always at Martinmas, when winds are chill and ghosts drift about with the leaves, the darkness is lit by great houses aflame; fair sad mothers wrapt in silk float on the stormy sea; candles shin e on the dark river-pool where voting Riedan lies drowned, bonder darkle Whinny Muir and Brig o’ Dreid where pass the* parted souls, listening to their own lykewake dirge. And on the western marches is fair Elfland, whence the queen will come riding in grass-green silk on a milk white steed hung with silver bells; and True Thomas will follow her undaunted. It was mirk, mirk night, there was nae starlight, - , They wa..ed thro’ red blude to the knee. For a the blude that’s shed on the earth \ Rms through the springs o’ that countrie. The ballads are steeped with splendour. There is nothing frugal in the' Scots imagination. Ours is a land of waste spaces; but the wild rose runs triumphing, the golden iris floods the vV est, and' beauty’s feet are wonderful on ' iolet mountain and desolate moor. The ballad folk are clothed luxuriously even to the silken sark. In robes of red and robes of green and robes of silver the ladies go, and- pearls lie heavily about their slim waists. The bowers are strewn with roses and thyme; the ships have masts of beaten gold r- i o f taffety. When Fair Annot goes to confront the nut-brown bride sue shimmers all white and gold on her white steed; and when she sits down she “ enlightened a’ that place.” The later ballads have all the Renaissance adoration of a splendid figure, whose sole virtue is its grace and high quality of bearing. So Gil Moriee dreams, combing his golden hair in the wood; and the bonnie Earl o’ Moray goes “ sounding through the town,” delighting everybody, for

The Bonnie Earl o’ Moray, He was the Queen’s Love. They have long white hands and slender feet, and their golden curls fall heavily. They are perfumed from France and Italy, for the volatile James IV early has his foreign musicians, and the demon lover, trying to Calm the lady, promises for all felicity:— I will show you where the white lilies grow On the banks of Italy. st L th- language these gleaming people speak that gives them their great authority in matters of love and war. they are concerned yvith final things, and their words have the daggered quality of extreme simplicity, qualified only at « m. es the P° c . uliar ir °ny of the Seots Ihe Twa Corbies ” js a masterpiece of dramatic irony. The poignant ballad of Mary Hamilton ” is sharp with it; thsad evasions of “Edward” are weary with it. Villon occasionally got effects ike the Scots ballads; and, more occasionally, the Elizabethan dramatists. Listen to the Douglas remembering his weary dream of Skye, or -Sir Andrew Barton saying he’ll but Be down and bleed awhile, or Mary Hamilton’s tired cadence of appeal:— Ride hqoly. booty, gentlemen, Ride hooly, now wi’ me. One could speak endlessly of the Seots ballad, with its magnificent attacks and amazing dialogues, of the strange psychology m “Edom o’ Gordon,” of the piercing replies of Fair Annie of Lochroyan, the unearthly beauty of “The Wife of Usher’s Well,” and the crooning resigned tragedy, of Lord RandaL For me the greatest miracle among them is " Clerk Saunders,” pieced though it may be. It is a mystery of love and death realised to the last nerves of apprehen-

sion, and contains enough psychology fo, a Shakespearian drama. Those gilh flowers, too, “ set about our Lord’s knee, bring to it an unparalleled note of sweet ncss.

If you read, all the ballads, and then turn westward to the lovely dove coloured fabric of Gaelic legend and song and incantation, you will know something of the soul of Scotland, of the hidden part with which the stranger, and some of her own Lowlanders, never become communicant.—Rachel Annami Taylor, in the Spectator.