The Valet's Tragedy, and Other Studies Part 24

He wakens at last, and all is well. In a Romaic ballad the deserted girl, meeting her love on his wedding-day, merely reminds him of old kindness. He answers--

Now he that will may scatter nuts, And he may wed that will, But she that was my old true love Shall be my true love still.

This incident, the strange, often magically caused oblivion of the lover, whose love returns to him, like Sophia, at, or after, his marriage, is found in popular tales of Scotland, Norway, Iceland, Germany, Italy, Greece, and the Gaelic Western Islands. It does not occur in 'Lord Bateman,' where Mr. Thackeray suggests probable reasons for Lord Bateman's fickleness. But the world-wide incidents are found in older versions of 'Lord Bateman,' from which they have been expelled by the English genius for the commonplace.

Thus, if we ask, how did Sophia at first know of Bateman's existence?

The lovely and delicate daughter of the Turk, doubtless, was unaware that, in the crowded dungeons of her sire, one captive of wealth, n.o.ble birth, and personal fascination, was languis.h.i.+ng. The Annotator explains: 'She hears from an aged and garrulous attendant, her only female adviser (for her mother died while she was yet an infant), of the sorrows and sufferings of the Christian captive.' In ancient versions of the ballad another explanation occurs. She overhears a song which he sings about his unlucky condition. This account is in Young Bekie (Scottish: mark the name, Bekie), where France is the scene and the king's daughter is the lady. The same formula of the song sung by the prisoner is usual. Not uncommon, too, is a TOKEN carried by Sophia when she pursues her lost adorer, to insure her recognition. It is half of her broken ring. Once more, why does Sophia leave home to find Bateman in the very nick of time? Thackeray's version does not tell us; but Scottish versions do. 'She longed fu' sair her love to see.' Elsewhere a supernatural being, 'The Billy Blin,' or a fairy, clad in green, gives her warning. The fickleness of the hero is caused, sometimes, by constraint, another n.o.ble 'has his marriage,' as his feudal superior, and makes him marry, but only in form.

There is a marriage in yonder hall, Has lasted thirty days and three, The bridegroom winna bed the bride, For the sake o' one that's owre the sea.

In this Scottish version, by the way, occurs--

Up spoke the young bride's mother, Who never was heard to speak so free,

wrongly attributed to Mr. Thackeray's own pen.

The incident of the magical oblivion which comes over the bridegroom occurs in Scandinavian versions of 'Lord Bateman' from ma.n.u.scripts of the sixteenth century.* Finally, the religious difficulty in several Scottish versions is got over by the conversion and baptism of Sophia, who had professed the creed of Islam. That all these problems in 'Lord Bateman' are left unsolved is, then, the result of decay. The modern vulgar English version of the pot-house minstrel (known as 'The Tripe Skewer,' according to the author of the Introduction to Cruikshank's version) has forgotten, has been heedless of, and has dropped the ancient universal elements of folk-tale and folk-song.

*Child, ii. 459-461.

These graces, it is true, are not too conspicuous even in the oldest and best versions of 'Lord Bateman.' Choosing at random, however, we find a Scots version open thus:

In the lands where Lord Beichan was born, Among the stately steps o' stane, He wore the goud at his left shoulder, But to the Holy Land he's gane.

That is not in the tone of the ditty sung by the Tripe Skewer. Again, in his prison,

He made na his moan to a stock, He made na it to a stone, But it was to the Queen of Heaven That he made his moan.

The lines are from a version of the North of Scotland, and, on the face of it, are older than the extirpation of the Catholic faith in the loyal North. The reference to Holy Land preserves a touch of the crusading age. In short, poor as they may be, the Scottish versions are those of a people not yet wholly vulgarised, not yet lost to romance. The singers have 'half remembered and half forgot' the legend of Gilbert Becket (Bekie, Beichan), the father of St. Thomas of Canterbury. Gilbert, in the legend, went to Holy Land, was cast into a Saracen's prison, and won his daughter's heart. He escaped, but the lady followed him, like Sophia, and, like Sophia, found and wedded him; Gilbert's servant, Richard, playing the part of the proud young porter. Yet, as Professor Child justly observes, the ballad 'is not derived from the legend,'

though the legend as to Gilbert Becket exists in a ma.n.u.script of about 1300. The Bateman motive is older than Gilbert Becket, and has been attached to later versions of the adventures of that hero. Gilbert Becket about 1300 was credited with a floating, popular tale of the Bateman sort, and out of his legend, thus altered, the existing ballads drew their 'Bekie' and 'Beichan,' from the name of Becket.

The process is: First, the popular tale of the return of the old true love; that tale is found in Greece, Scandinavia, Denmark, Iceland, Faroe, Spain, Germany, and so forth. Next, about 1300 Gilbert Becket is made the hero of the tale. Next, our surviving ballads retain a trace or two of the Becket form, but they are not derived from the Becket form.

The fancy of the folk first evolved the situations in the story, then lent them to written literature (Becket's legend, 1300), and thirdly, received the story back from written legend with a slight, comparatively modern colouring.

In the dispute as to the origin of our ballads one school, as Mr. T. F.

Henderson and Professor Courthope, regard them as debris of old literary romances, ill-remembered work of professional minstrels.* That there are ballads of this kind in England, such as the Arthurian ballads, I do not deny. But in my opinion many ballads and popular tales are in origin older than the mediaeval romances, as a rule. As a rule the romances are based on earlier popular data, just as the 'Odyssey' is an artistic whole made up out of popular tales. The folk may receive back a literary form of its own ballad or story, but more frequently the popular ballad comes down in oral tradition side by side with its educated child, the literary romance on the same theme.

Cf. The Queen's Marie.

Mr. Henderson has answered that the people is unpoetical. The degraded populace of the slums may be unpoetical, like the minstrel named 'Tripe Skewer,' and may deprave the ballads of its undegraded ancestry into such modern English forms as 'Lord Bateman.' But I think of the people which, in Barbour's day, had its choirs of peasant girls chanting rural s.n.a.t.c.hes on Bruce's victories, or, in still earlier France, of Roland's overthrow. If THEIR songs are attributed to professional minstrels, I turn to the Greece of 1830, to the Finland of to-day, to the outermost Hebrides of to-day, to the Arapahoes of Northern America, to the Australian blacks, among all of whom the people are their own poets and make their own dirges, lullabies, chants of victory, and laments for defeat. THESE peoples are not unpoetical. In fact, when I say that the people has been its own poet I do not mean the people which goes to music halls and reads halfpenny newspapers. To the true folk we owe the legend of Lord Bateman in its ancient germs; and to the folk's degraded modern estate, crowded as men are in noisome streets and crushed by labour, we owe the c.o.c.kney depravation, the Lord Bateman of Cruikshank and Thackeray. Even that, I presume, being old, is now forgotten, except by the ancient blind woman in the workhouse. To the workhouse has come the native popular culture--the last lingering shadow of old romance.

That is the moral of the ballad of Lord Bateman.

In an article by Mr. Kitton, in Literature (June 24, 1899, p. 699), this learned d.i.c.kensite says: 'The authors.h.i.+p of this version' (Cruikshank's) 'of an ancient ballad and of the accompanying notes has given rise to much controversy, and whether d.i.c.kens or Thackeray was responsible for them is still a matter of conjecture, although what little evidence there is seems to favour Thackeray.'

For the ballad neither Thackeray nor d.i.c.kens is responsible. The Old Woman's text settles that question: the ballad is a degraded Volkslied.

As to the notes, internal evidence for once is explicit. The notes are Thackeray's. Any one who doubts has only to compare Thackeray's notes to his prize poem on 'Timbuctoo.'

The banter, in the notes, is academic banter, that of a university man, who is mocking the notes of learned editors. This humour is not the humour of d.i.c.kens, who, however, may very well have written the Introduction to Cruikshank's version. That morceau is in quite a different taste and style. I ought, in fairness, to add the following note from Mr. J. B. Keene, which may be thought to overthrow belief in Thackeray's authors.h.i.+p of the notes:--

Dear Sir,--Your paper in the 'Cornhill' for this month on the Mystery of Lord Bateman interested me greatly, but I must beg to differ from you as to the authors.h.i.+p of the Notes, and for this reason.

I have before me a copy of the first edition of the 'Loving Ballad'

which was bought by my father soon after it was issued. At that time--somewhere about 1840--there was a frequent visitor at our house, named Burnett, who had married a sister of Charles d.i.c.kens, and who gave us the story of its production.

He said, as you state, that Cruikshank had got the words from a pot-house singer, but the locality he named was Whitechapel,* where he was looking out for characters. He added that Cruikshank sung or hummed the tune to him, and he gave it the musical notation which follows the preface. He also said that Charles d.i.c.kens wrote the notes. His personal connection with the work and his relation to d.i.c.kens are, I think, fair evidence on the question.

I am, dear Sir, Yours truly, J. B. KEENE.

Kingsmead House, 1 Hartham Road, Camden Road, N., Feb. 13,1900.

Mr. Keene's evidence may, perhaps, settle the question. But, if d.i.c.kens wrote the Introduction, that might be confused in Mr. Burnett's memory with the Notes, from internal evidence the work of Thackeray. If not, then in the Notes we find a new aspect of the inexhaustible humour of d.i.c.kens. It is certain, at all events, that neither d.i.c.kens nor Thackeray was the author of the 'Loving Ballad.'

P.S.--The preface to the ballad says Battle Bridge.

XI. THE QUEEN'S MARIE

Little did my mother think That day she cradled me What land I was to travel in, Or what death I should die.

Writing to Mrs. Dunlop on January 25, 1790, Burns quoted these lines, 'in an old Scottish ballad, which, notwithstanding its rude simplicity, speaks feelingly to the heart.' Mr. Carlyle is said, when young, to have written them on a pane of gla.s.s in a window, with a diamond, adding, characteristically, 'Oh foolish Thee!' In 1802, in the first edition of 'The Border Minstrelsy,' Scott cited only three stanzas from the same ballad, not including Burns's verse, but giving

Yestreen the Queen had four Maries, The night she'll hae but three, There was Marie Seaton, and Marie Beaton, And Marie Carmichael and me.

In later editions Sir Walter offered a made-up copy of the ballad, most of it from a version collected by Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe.

It now appeared that Mary Hamilton was the heroine, that she was one of Queen Marie's four Maries, and that she was hanged for murdering a child whom she bore to Darnley. Thus the character of Mary Hamilton was 'totally lost,' and Darnley certainly 'had not sufficient for two.'

Darnley, to be sure, told his father that 'I never offended the Queen, my wife, in meddling with any woman in thought, let be in deed,' and, whether Darnley spoke truth or not, there was, among the Queen's Maries, no Mary Hamilton to meddle with, just as there was no Mary Carmichael.

The Maries were attendant on the Queen as children ever since she left Scotland for France. They were Mary Livingstone (mentioned as 'Lady Livinston' in one version of the ballad),* who married 'John Sempill, called the Dancer,' who, says Laing, 'acquired the lands of Beltree, in Renfrews.h.i.+re.'**

*Child, vol. iii. p. 389.

**Laing's Knox, ii. 415, note 3.

When Queen Mary was a captive in England she was at odds with the Sempill pair about some jewels of hers in their custody. He was not a satisfactory character, he died before November 1581. Mary Fleming, early in 1587, married the famous William Maitland of Lethington, 'being no more fit for her than I to be a page,' says Kirkcaldy of Grange. Her life was wretched enough, through the stormy career and sad death of her lord. Mary Beaton, with whom Randolph, the English amba.s.sador, used to flirt, married, in 1566, Ogilvy of Boyne, the first love of Lady Jane Gordon, the bride of Bothwell. Mary Seaton remained a maiden and busked the Queen's hair during her English captivity. We last hear of her from James Maitland of Lethington, in 1613, living at Rheims, very old, 'decrepid,' and poor. There is no room in the Four for Mary Hamilton, and no mention of her appears in the records of the Court.

How, then, did Mary Hamilton find her way into the old ballad about Darnley and the Queen?

To explain this puzzle, some modern writers have denied that the ballad of 'The Queen's Marie' is really old; they attribute it to the eighteenth century. The antiquary who launched this opinion was Scott's not very loyal friend, Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe. According to him, a certain Miss Hambledon (no Christian name is given), being Maid of Honour to the Empress Catherine of Russia, had three children by an amour, and murdered all three. Peter the Great caused her to be, not hanged, but decapitated. Sharpe took his facts from 'a German almanac,'

and says: 'The Russian tragedy must be the original.' The late Professor Child, from more authentic doc.u.ments, dates Miss Hambledon's or Hamilton's execution on March 14, 1719. At that time, or nearly then, Charles Wogan was in Russia on a mission from the Chevalier de St.

George (James III.), and through him the news might reach Scotland.

Mr. Courthope, in his 'History of English Poetry,' followed Sharpe and Professor Child, and says: 'It is very remarkable that one of the very latest of the Scottish popular ballads should be one of the very best.'