A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century Part 20

[12] Five hundred copies, says Walpole, were struck off December 24, 1764.

[13] "The Mysterious Mother," begun 1766, finished 1768.

[14] "The Castle of Otranto" was dramatized by Robert Jephson, under the t.i.tle "The Count of Narbonne," put on at Covent Garden Theater in 1781, and afterward printed, with a dedication to Walpole.

[15] James Beattie, "Dissertation on Fable and Romance." "Argenius," was printed in 1621.

[16] "The Dictionary of National Biography" miscalls it "Earl of Canterbury," and attributes it, though with a query, to _John_ Leland.

[17] See also, for a notice of this writer, Julia Kavanagh's "English Women of Letters."

[18] Maturin's "Melmoth the Wanderer" (1820) had some influence on the French romantic school and was utilized, in some particulars, by Balzac.

[19] Following is a list of Mrs. Radcliffe's romances: "The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne" (1789); "Sicilian Romance" (1790); "Romance of the Forest" (1791); "Mysteries of Udolpho" (1794); "The Italian" (1797); "Gaston de Blondville" (1826). Collections of her poems were published in 1816, 1834, and 1845.

[20] See "Childe Harold," canto iv, xviii.

[21] "Roundabout Papers," "A Peal of Bells." "Monk" Lewis wrote at sixteen a burlesque novel, "Effusions of Sensibility," which remained in MS.

[22] "O Radcliffe, thou once wert the charmer Of girls who sat reading all night: They heroes were striplings in armor, Thy heroines, damsels in white."

--_Songs, Ballads and Other Poems_.

By Thos. Haynes Bayly, London, 1857, p. 141.

"A novel now is nothing more Than an old castle and a creaking door, A distant hovel, Clanking of chains, a gallery, a light, Old armor and a phantom all in white, And there's a novel."

--_George Colman, "The Will."_

[23] Several of her romances were dramatized and translated into French.

It is curious, by the way, to find that Goethe was not unaware of Walpole's story. See his quatrain "Die Burg von Otranto," first printed in 1837.

"Sind die Zimmer sammtlich besetzt der Burg von Otranto: Kommt, voll innigen Grimmes, der erste Riesenbesitzer Stuckweis an, and verdrangt die neuen falschen Bewohner.

Wehe! den Fliehenden, weh! den Bleibenden also geschiet es."

[24] Ossian.

[25] See her "Journey through Holland," etc. (1795)

[26] _cf._ Keats, "The Eve of Saint Agnes":

"The arras rich with hunt and horse and hound Flattered in the besieging wind's uproar, And the long carpets rose along the gusty floor."

[27] "Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne."

[28] See Julia Kavanagh's "English Women of Letters."

CHAPTER VIII.

Percy and the Ballads.

The regeneration of English poetic style at the close of the last century came from an unexpected quarter. What scholars and professional men of letters had sought to do by their imitations of Spenser and Milton, and their domestication of the Gothic and the Celtic muse, was much more effectually done by Percy and the ballad collectors. What they had sought to do was to recall British poetry to the walks of imagination and to older and better models than Dryden and Pope. But they could not jump off their own shadows: the eighteenth century was too much for them.

While they anxiously cultivated wildness and simplicity, their diction remained polished, literary, academic to a degree. It is not, indeed, until we reach the boundaries of a new century that we encounter a Gulf Stream of emotional, creative impulse strong enough and hot enough to thaw the cla.s.sical icebergs till not a floating spiculum of them is left.

Meanwhile, however, there occurred a revivifying contact with one department, at least, of early verse literature, which did much to clear the way for Scott and Coleridge and Keats. The decade from 1760 to 1770 is important in the history of English romanticism, and its most important t.i.tle is Thomas Percy's "Reliques of Ancient English Poetry: Consisting of Old Heroic Ballads, Songs, and Other Pieces of our Earlier Poets," published in three volumes in 1765. It made a less immediate and exciting impression upon contemporary Europe than MacPherson's "Poems of Ossian," but it was more fruitful in enduring results. The Germans make a convenient cla.s.sification of poetry into _Kunstpoesie_ and _Volkspoesie_, terms which may be imperfectly translated as literary poetry and popular poetry. The English _Kunstpoesie_ of the Middle Ages lay buried under many superinc.u.mbent layers of literary fas.h.i.+on.

Oblivion had overtaken Gower and Occleve, and Lydgate and Stephen Hawes, and Skelton, and Henryson and James I. of Scotland, and well-nigh Chaucer himself--all the mediaeval poetry of the schools, in short. But it was known to the curious that there was still extant a large body of popular poetry in the shape of narrative ballads, which had been handed down chiefly by oral transmission, and still lived in the memories and upon the lips of the common people. Many of these went back in their original shapes to the Middle Ages, or to an even remoter antiquity, and belonged to that great store of folk-lore which was the common inheritance of the Aryan race. a.n.a.logues and variants of favorite English and Scottish ballads have been traced through almost all the tongues of modern Europe.

Danish literature is especially rich in ballads and affords valuable ill.u.s.trations of our native ministrelsy.[1] It was, perhaps, due in part to the Danish settlements in Northumbria and to the large Scandinavian admixture in the Northumbrian blood and dialect, that "the north countrie" became _par excellence_ the ballad land: Lowland Scotland--particularly the Lothians--and the English bordering counties, Northumberland, Westmoreland, and c.u.mberland; with Yorks.h.i.+re and Nottinghams.h.i.+re, in which were Barndale and Sherwood Forests, Robin Hood's haunts. It is not possible to a.s.sign exact dates to these songs.

They were seldom reduced to writing till many years after they were composed. In the Middle Ages they were sung to the harp by wandering minstrels. In later times they were chanted or recited by ballad-singers at fairs, markets, ale-houses, street-corners, sometimes to the accompaniment of a fiddle or crowd. They were learned by ancient dames, who repeated them in chimney corners to children and grandchildren. In this way some of them were preserved in an unwritten state, even to the present day, in the tenacious memory of the people, always at bottom conservative and, under a hundred changes of fas.h.i.+on in the literary poetry which pa.s.ses over their heads, clinging obstinately to old songs and beliefs learned in childhood, and handing them on to posterity.

Walter Scott got much of the material for his "Ministrelsy of the Border"

from the oral recitation of pipers, shepherds, and old women in Ettrick Forest. Professor Child's--the latest and fullest ballad collection--contains pieces never before given in print or ma.n.u.script, some of them obtained in America![2]

Leading this subterranean existence, and generally thought unworthy the notice of educated people, they naturally underwent repeated changes; so that we have numerous versions of the same story, and incidents, descriptions, and entire stanzas are borrowed and lent freely among the different ballads. The circ.u.mstance, _e.g._, of the birk and the briar springing from the graves of true lovers and intertwisting their branches occurs in the ballads of "Fair Margaret and Sweet William," "Lord Thomas and Fair Annet," "Lord Lovel," "Fair Janet," and many others. The knight who was carried to fairyland through an entrance in a green hillside, and abode seven years with the queen of fairy, recurs in "Tam Lin," "Thomas Rymer,"[3] etc. Like all folk-songs, these ballads are anonymous and may be regarded not as the composition of any one poet, but as the property, and in a sense the work, of the people as a whole. Coming out of an uncertain past, based on some dark legend of heart-break or blood-shed, they bear no author's name, but are _ferae naturae_ and have the flavor of wild game. They were common stock, like the national speech; everyone could contribute toward them: generations of nameless poets, minstrels, ballad-singers modernized their language to suit new times, altered their dialect to suit new places, accommodated their details to different audiences, English or Scotch, and in every way that they thought fit added, retrenched, corrupted, improved, and pa.s.sed them on.

Folk-poetry is conventional; it seems to be the production of a guild, and to have certain well understood and commonly expected tricks of style and verse. Freshness and sincerity are almost always attributes of the poetry of heroic ages, but individuality belongs to a high civilization and an advanced literary culture. Whether the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey"

are the work of one poet or of a cycle of poets, doubtless the rhetorical peculiarities of the Homeric epics, such as the recurrent phrase and the conventional epithet (the rosy-fingered dawn, the well-greaved Greeks, the swift-footed Achilles, the much-enduring Odysseus, etc.) are due to this communal or a.s.sociative character of ancient heroic song. As in the companies of architects who built the mediaeval cathedrals, or in the schools of early Italian painters, masters and disciples, the manner of the individual artist was subdued to the tradition of his craft.

The English and Scottish popular ballads are in various simple stanza forms, the commonest of all being the old _septenarius_ or "fourteener,"

arranged in a four-lined stanza of alternate eights and sixes, thus:

"Up then crew the red, red c.o.c.k, And up and crew the gray; The eldest to the youngest said ''Tis time we were away.'"[4]

This is the stanza usually employed by modern ballad imitators, like Coleridge in "The Ancient Mariner," Scott in "Jock o' Hazeldean,"

Longfellow in "The Wreck of the Hesperus," Macaulay in the "Lays of Ancient Rome," Aytoun in the "Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers." Many of the stylistic and metrical peculiarities of the ballads arose from the fact that they were made to be sung or recited from memory. Such are perhaps the division of the longer ones into fits, to rest the voice of the singer; and the use of the burden or refrain for the same purpose, as also to give the listeners and bystanders a chance to take up the chorus, which they probably accompanied with a few dancing steps.[5] Sometimes the burden has no meaning in itself and serves only to mark time with a _Hey derry down_ or an _O lilly lally_ and the like. Sometimes it has more or less reference to the story, as in "The Two Sisters":

"He has ta'en three locks o' her yellow hair-- Binnorie, O Binnorie-- And wi' them strung his harp sae rare-- By the bonnie mill-dams of Binnorie."

Again it has no discoverable relation to the context, as in "Riddles Wisely Expounded"--

"There was a knicht riding frae the east-- _Jennifer gentle and rosemarie_-- Who had been wooing at monie a place-- _As the dew flies over the mulberry tree._"

Both kinds of refrain have been liberally employed by modern balladists.

Thus Tennyson in "The Sisters":

"We were two sisters of one race, _The wind is howling in turret and tree;_ _ _She was the fairer in the face, _O the earl was fair to see."_

While Rossetti and Jean Ingelow and others have rather favored the inconsequential burden, an affectation travestied by the late Mr. C. S.

Calverley:

"The auld wife sat at her ivied door, (b.u.t.ter and eggs and a pound of cheese) A thing she had frequently done before; And her spectacles lay on her ap.r.o.ned knees.

"The farmer's daughter hath soft brown hair (b.u.t.ter and eggs and a pound of cheese), And I met with a ballad, I can't say where, Which wholly consisted of lines like these."[6]

A musical or mnemonic device akin to the refrain was that sing-song species of repetend so familiar in ballad language:

"She had na pu'd a double rose, a rose but only twa."

"They had na sailed a league, a league, A league but barely three.