It is the name given to a type of
verse of unknown authorship dealing with
episode or simple motive rather than sustained theme, written in a
stanzaic form or less fixed and suitable
for oral transmission and in its expression and treatment
showing little or nothing of the finesse of deliberate art. This is not an attempt at definition for that is
hard indeed, if not impossible. The
familiar hints as to the character of the ballad, that it is “short”, “adapted for
singing”. Simple in plot and metrical structure” and more emphatically,
that it is “impersonal”, help us to
identify the genre. For
practical purposes it
is that kind of verse preserved in Sir Walter Scott’s
Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border
and in Prof.
Child’s English and Scottish Popular
Ballads. All the English material
we have and are likely to get will be found in the latter. By general
consent these Scottish
and English ballads
and mainly the
former are the
best and the
most typical.
At the outset two warnings
may be given. First, that there is danger of
laying stress on the lexicographical associations of the word(back too
late Latin ballare,
to dance) and of finding for the known form a tradition originating
in the dance. This is said not to
anticipate any consideration of the communal
dance theory but as reminder of the misnaming and loose attribution of which our dictionaries and
literary histories can offer so many examples . Secondly that the extended use of
the term as shown in the non-descript varieties of later verse
so-called, or in its
technical application in music, is
out of place in the present account.
Interest
in the form
and history of the
ballad was awakened
late. The Robin Hood
gests issued by
the first printers
the broadsides of
the 17-th century, and
the collection of
written and printed
texts by Pepys
and others are
but evidence of
business intelligence or the “ curiosity”
of the antiquary. When Sidney
is moved by
“the old song
of Percy and
Douglas”, he cannot forget
the incivility of
the style and
what a Pindar
might have made
of it; and when
Addison, in the Spectator, praises the
“perfection of simplicity”, he is
merely thanking “our
poet” for relief
from the “wrong
artificial taste” of
his day. As this
sense of contrast
grew throughout the
18-th century, collectors like
Percy and the
poetical experts in
“imitation” gave the
public what it
wanted to swell
the protest against
classical complacency, but the interest was
that of anew
fashion and adventure
in art. Now and
then there are
hints of more
serious critical concern-in
the method of
editors such a
Herd and Ritson-but
it is not
till the beginning
of the 19-th
century when Scott
publishes his Minstrelsy
of the Scottish
Border(1802-03) and in
the edition of
19830 his “Introductory Remarks
on Popular poetry”, that the foundation
of the study
of the ballads
was truly laid
in Great Britain. In
the romantic fervor
of the period there
was encouragement to
increase the number
of ballads by
search or by
faking, and it was
by the growth
of this material, and especially
by the discovery
of different texts, oral
or written that the
desire to judge the
comparative merits and
discover the earliest
and purest versions
was aroused. From this
to the vexed
questions of origin
and transmission was
a logical and
immediate move.
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