The Douglas Tragedy.

It may look like taking a liberty with the chart of ballad poetry to label as 'romantic' a single province of this kingdom of Old Romance. It is probably not even the most ancient of the provinces of balladry, but it has some claim to be regarded as the central one in fame and in wealth—the one that yields the purest and richest ore of poetry. It is that wherein the passion and frenzy of love is not merely an element or a prominent motive, but is the controlling spirit and the absorbing interest.

As has been acknowledged, it is not possible to make any hard and fast division of the Scottish ballads by applying to them this or any other test; and mention has already been made, on account of the mythological or superstitious features they possess, of a number of the choicest of these old lays that turn essentially upon the strength or the weakness, the constancy or the inconstancy, the rapture or the sorrow of earthly love. Love in the ballads is nearly always masterful, imperious, exacting; nearly always its reward is death and dule, and not life and happiness. But as it spurns all obstacles, it meets its fate unflinchingly. No sacrifices are too great, no penance too dire, no shame or sin too black to turn aside for an instant the rush of this impetuous passion, which runs bare-breasted on the drawn sword.

It is not to the ballads we must go for example—precept of this or of any kind there is none—in the bourgeois and respectable virtues; of the sober and chastened behaviour that comes of a prudent fear of consequences, of a cold temperament and a calculating spirit. The good or the ill done by the heroes and heroines of the Romantic Ballad is done on the spur of the moment, on the impulse of hot blood. Whether it be sin or sacrifice, the prompting is not that of convention, but of Nature herself. Love and hate, though they may burn and glow like a volcano, are not prodigal of words. It is one of the marks by which we may distinguish the characters in the ballads from those in later and more cultivated fields of literature that, as a rule, they say less rather than more than they mean. They speak daggers; but they are far more apt in using them. At a word or look the lovers are ready to die for each other; but of the language of endearment they are not prodigal; and a phrase of tenderness is sweet in proportion that it is rare.

With the tamer affections it fares no better than with the moral law when it comes in the path of the master passion. Mother and sisters are defied and forsaken; father and brethren are resisted at the sword's point when they cross, as is their wont, the course of true love. It is curious to note how little, except as a foil, the ballad makes of brotherly or sisterly love. It finds exquisite expression in the tale of Chil Ether and his twin sister,

But for this, among other reasons, the genuine antiquity of the ballad is under some suspicion.

In modern fiction or drama the lady hesitates between the opposing forces of love and of family pride and duty; the old influences in her life do not yield to the new without a struggle. But of struggle or indecision the ballad heroine knows, or at least says, nothing. A glance, a whispered word, a note of harp or horn, and she flings down her 'silken seam,' and whether she be king's daughter or beggar maid she obeys the spell, and follows the enchanter to greenwood or to broomy hill, to the ends of the earth, and to the gates of death.

For when the gallant knight and his 'fair may' ride away, prying eyes are upon them; black care and red vengeance climb up behind them and keep them company. The Douglas Tragedy may be selected for its terseness and dramatic strength, for the romance and pathos inwoven in the very names and scenes with which it is associated, as the type of a favourite story which under various titles—Earl Brand and the Child of Elle among the rest—has, time beyond knowledge, captivated the imagination and drawn the tears of ballad-lovers. In the best-known Scots version—that which Sir Walter Scott has recovered for us, and which bears some touches of his rescuing hand—it is the lady-mother who gives the alarm that the maiden has fled under cloud of night with her lover:

In English variants, it is the sour serving-man or false bower-woman who gives the alarm and sets the chase in motion. But there are other differences that enter into the very essence of the story, and express the diverse feeling of the Scottish and the English ballad. In the latter there is a pretty scene of entreaty and reconciliation; the lady's tears soften the harsh will of the father, and stay the lifted blade of the lover, and all ends merry as a marriage bell. But in the Scottish ballads fathers and lovers are not given to the melting mood. In sympathy with the scenery and atmosphere, the ballad spirit is with us sterner and darker; and just as the materials of that tender little idyll of faithful love, The Three Ravens, are in Scottish hands transformed into the drear, wild dirge of The Twa Corbies, the gallant adventure of the Child of Elle turns inevitably to tragedy by Douglas Water and Yarrow. But how much more true to this soul of romance is the choice of the northern minstrel! Lady Margaret, as she holds Lord William's bridle-rein while he deals those strokes so 'wondrous sair' at her nearest kin, is a figure that will haunt the 'stream of sorrow' as long as verse has power to move the hearts of men:

The man who can listen to these lines without a thrill is proof against the Ithuriel spear of Romance. He is not made of penetrable stuff, and need waste no thought on the Scottish ballads.

To close the tale comes that colophon that as naturally ends the typical ballad as 'Once upon a time' begins the typical nursery tale:

Birk and brier; vine and rose; cypress and orange; thorn and olive—the plants in which the buried lovers of ballad romance live again and intertwine their limbs, vary with the clime and race; and just as the 'Black Douglas' of the Yarrow ballad—'Wow but he was rough!'—plucks up the brier, and 'flings it in St. Mary's Loch,' the King, in the Portuguese folk-song, cuts down the cypress and orange that perpetuate the loves of Count Nello and the Infanta, and then grinds his teeth to see the double stream of blood flow from them and unite, proving that 'in death they are not divided.'

The scene of the Scottish story is supposed to be Blackhouse, on the Douglas Burn, a feeder of the Yarrow, the farm on which Scott's friend, William Laidlaw, the author of Lucy's Flittin', was born. Seven stones on the heights above, where the 'Ettrick Shepherd,' with his dog Hector, herded sheep and watched for the rising of the Queen of FaËry through the mist, mark the spot where the seven bauld brethren fell.

But Yarrow Vale is strewn with the sites of those tragedies of the far-off years, forgotten by history but remembered in song and tradition. Its green hills enclose the very sanctuary of romantic ballad-lore. Its clear current sings a mournful song of the 'good heart's bluid' that once stained its wave; of the drowned youth caught in the 'cleaving o' the craig.' The winds that sweep the hillsides and bend 'the birks a' bowing' seem to whisper still of the wail of the 'winsome marrow,' and to have an undernote of sadness on the brightest day of summer; while with the fall of the red and yellow leaf the very spirit of 'pastoral melancholy' broods and sleeps in this enchanted valley. St. Mary's Kirk and Loch; Henderland Tower and the Dow Linn; Blackhouse and Douglas Craig; Yarrow Kirk and Deucharswire; Hangingshaw and Tinnis; Broadmeadows and Newark; Bowhill and Philiphaugh—what memories of love and death, of faith and wrong, of blood and of tears they carry! Always by Yarrow the comely youth goes forth, only to fall by the sword, fighting against odds in the 'Dowie Dens,' or to be caught and drowned in the treacherous pools of this fateful river; always the woman is left to weep over her lost and 'lealfu' lord.' In the Dow Glen it is the 'Border Widow,' upon whose bower the 'Red Tod of Falkland' has broken and slain her knight, whose grave she must dig with her own hands:

An echo of this, but blending with poignant grief a masculine note of rage and vengeance, is the lament of Adam Fleming for Burd Helen, who dropped dead in his arms at their trysting-place in 'fair Kirkconnell Lea,' from the shot fired across the Kirtle by the hand of his jealous rival:

Still older, and not less sad and sweet, is the lilt of Willie Drowned in Yarrow, the theme amplified, but not improved, in Logan's lyric:

Gamrie, in Buchan, contends with the 'Dowie Howms' as the scene of this fragment; but surely its sentiment is pure Yarrow:

But best-remembered of the Yarrow Cycle is The Dowie Dens. One cannot analyse the subtle aroma of this flower of Yarrow ballads. In it the song of the river has been wedded to its story 'like perfect music unto noble words.' It is indeed the voice of Yarrow, chiding, imploring, lamenting; a voice 'most musical, most melancholy.' A ballad minstrel with a master-touch upon the chords of passion and pathos, with a feeling for dramatic intensity of effect that Nature herself must have taught him, must have left us these wondrous pictures of the quarrel, hot and sudden; of the challenge, fiercely given and accepted; of the appeal, so charged with wild forebodings of evil:

of the treacherous ambuscade under Tinnis bank; of the stubborn fight, in which a single 'noble brand' holds its own against nine, until the cruel brother comes behind that comeliest knight and 'runs his body thorough'; of the yearning and waiting of the 'winsome marrow,' while fear clutches at her heart:

lastly, of the quest 'the bonnie forest thorough,' until on the trampled den by Deucharswire, near Whitehope farmhouse, she finds the 'ten slain men,' and among them 'the fairest rose was ever cropped on Yarrow':

The story is said to be founded on the slaughter of Walter Scott of Oakwood, of the house of Thirlstane, by John Scott of Tushielaw, with whose sister Grizel the murdered man had, in 1616, contracted an irregular marriage, to the offence of her kin. On this showing, it is of the later crop of the ballads. But it is well-nigh impossible to think of rueful Yarrow flowing through her dens to any other measure than that which keeps repeating

But, as Wordsworth reminds us, these ever-youthful waters have their gladsome notes. On the not unchallengeable ground that it makes mention, in one version, of 'St. Mary's' as the fourth Scots Kirk at which halt was made after leaving the English Border, The Gay Goshawk has been set down among the Yarrow ballads; and Hogg has confirmed the claim by using the tale as the foundation of his Flower of Yarrow. Even here such happiness as the lovers find comes by a perilous way past the very gates of the grave. The feigning of death, as the one means of escape from kinsfolk's ban to the arms of love, was a device known to Juliet and to other heroines of old plays and romances. But few could have abode the test suggested by the 'witch woman' or cruel stepmother, whose experience had taught her that 'much a lady young will do, her ain true love to win':

And Lord William, at St. Mary's Kirk, was more fortunate than Romeo in the vault of the Capulets; for when he rent the shroud from the face the blood rushed back to the cheeks and lips, 'like blood-draps in the snaw,' and the 'leeming e'en' laughed back into his own:

The Nut-brown Bride and Fair Janet might also be identified as among the Yarrow lays, if only it were granted that there is but one 'St. Mary's Kirk.' In the former, the balladist treats, with dramatic fire and fine insight into the springs of action, the theme that

As in Barbara Allan, a word spoken amiss sets division between two hearts that had beat as one:

In haste he consults mother and brother whether he should marry the 'Nut-brown Maid, and let Fair Annet be,' and so long as they praise the tochered lass he scorns their counsel; he will not have 'a fat fadge by the fire.' But when his sister puts in a word for Annet his resentment blazes up anew; he will marry her dusky rival in despite. With a heart not less hot, we may be sure, his forsaken love dons her gayest robes, and at St. Mary's Kirk she casts the poor brown bride into the shade in dress as well as in looks. Small wonder if the bride speaks out with spite when her bridegroom reaches across her to lay a red rose on Annet's knee. The words between the two angry women are like rapier-thrusts, keen and aimed at the heart. 'Where did ye get the rose-water that maks your skin so white?' asks the bride; and when Annet's swift retort goes home, she can only respond with the long bodkin drawn from her hair. The word in jest costs the lives of three. Fair Janet's is another tragic wedding; love, and jealousy, and guilt again hold tryst in the little kirk whose grey walls are scarce to be traced on the green platform above the loch. 'I 've seen other days,' says the pale bride to her lost lover as he dances with her bridesmaiden:

and, dancing, she drops dead.

Fasting, and fire, and sickness unto death were, however, tame ordeals compared with those which 'Burd Helen' came through, as they are described in the ballad Professor Child holds, not without reason, to have 'perhaps no superior' in our own or any other tongue. Patient Grizel, herself the incarnation in literary form of a type of woman's faithfulness and meek endurance of wrong that had floated long in mediÆval tradition, might have shrunk from some of the cruel tasks which Lord Thomas—the 'Child Waters' of the favourite English variant—lays upon the mother of his unborn child—the woman whose self-surrender had been so complete that she has not the blessing of Holy Church and the support of wifely vows to comfort her in her hour of trial. All the summer day she runs by his bridle-rein until they come to the Water of Clyde, which 'Sweet Willie and May Margaret' also sought to ford on a similar errand:

She stables his steed; she waits humbly at table as the little page-boy; she listens, her colour coming and going, to the mother's scorns and the young sister's naÏve questions. But never, until the supreme moment of her distress, does she draw one sign of pity or relenting from her harsh lord. Then, indeed, love and remorse, as if they had been dammed back, break forth like a flood, that bursts the very door, and makes it 'in flinders flee.' And because

our simple balladist bids us believe that the twain lived happily ever after.

The variations of this ancient tale, localised in nearly every European country, are innumerable; and Professor Veitch was disposed to trace them to the thirteenth century Tale of the Ash, by Marie of France. The 'Fair Annie' of another ballad on the theme seems to have borrowed both name and history directly from the 'SkiÆn Annie' of Danish folk-poetry. Here the old love suffers the like indignity that was thrown upon the too-too submissive Griselda; she has to make ready the bridal bed for her supplanter and do other menial offices, until a happy chance reveals the fact that the newcomer is her sister. Yet neither from Fair Annie nor from Burd Helen comes word of reproach or complaint. The exceeding bitter thought is whispered only to the heart:

And again,

Wide, surely, is the gulf between the Original Woman of old romance and the New Woman of recent fiction. The change, no doubt, is for the better; and yet is it altogether for the better?

According to all modern canons, the conduct of these too-tardy bridegrooms was brutal beyond words; and as for the heroines of the Romantic Ballad, Mother Grundy, had she the handling of them, would use them worse than ever did moody brother or crafty stepmother. But the balladists and ballad characters had their own gauges of conduct. Their morals were not other or better than the morals of their age. They strained out the gnats and swallowed the camels of the law as given to Moses; perhaps if they could look into modern society and the modern novel they would charge the same against our own times and literature. If they broke, as they were too ready to do, the Sixth Commandment, or the Seventh, they made no attempt to glose the sin; they dealt not in innuendo or double entendre. Beside the page of modern realism, the ballad page is clean and wholesome. Human passion unrestrained there may be; but no sickly or vicious sentiment. There is a punctilious sense of honour; and if it is sometimes the letter rather than the spirit of vow or promise that is kept, the knights and ladies in the ballads are no worse than are the Pharisees of our day; and they are always ready to pay, and generally do pay, the utmost penalty.

Thus, in that most powerful and tragic ballad, Clerk Saunders, May Margaret ties a napkin about her eyes that she 'may swear, and keep her aith,' to her 'seven bauld brothers,' that she had not seen her lover 'since late yestreen'; she carries him across the threshold of her bower, that she may be able to say that his foot had never been there. The story of the sleeping twain—the excuses for their sin; the reason why ruth should turn aside vengeance—is told, in staccato sentences, by the brothers as they stand by the bedside of their 'ae sister,' with 'torches burning bright':

And so until the seventh—the Rashleigh of the band—who spake no word, but let his 'bright brown brand' speak for him. What follows rises to the extreme height of the balladist's art; literature might be challenged for anything surpassing it in simplicity and power, in the mingling of horror and pathos:

In the majority of ballads of the Clerk Saunders class there is some base agent who betrays trust and brings death upon the lovers. 'Fause Foodrage' takes many forms in these ancient tales without changing type. He is the slayer of 'Lily Flower' in Jellon Graeme; and the boy whom he has preserved and brought up sends the arrow singing to his guilty heart. Lammiken, the 'bloodthirsty mason,' who must have a life for his wage, is another enemy within the house who finds his way through 'steekit yetts'; and he is assisted by the 'fause nourice.' In other ballads it is the 'kitchen-boy,' the 'little foot-page,' the 'churlish carle,' or the bower-woman who plays the spy and tale-bearer. In Glenkindie, 'Gib, his man,' is the vile betrayer of the noble harper and his lady. Sometimes, as in Gude Wallace, Earl Richard, and Sir James the Rose, it is the 'light leman' who plays traitor. But she quickly repents, and meets her fate in the fire or at the sword's point, in 'Clyde Water' or in 'the dowie den in the Lawlands o' Balleichan.' In Gil Morice, that ballad which Gray thought 'divine,' it is 'Willie, the bonnie boy,' whom the hero trusted with his message, that in malice and wilfulness brings about the tremendous catastrophe of the tale. He calls aloud in hall the words he was bid whisper in the ear of Lord Barnard's lady—to meet Gil Morice in the forest, and 'speir nae bauld baron's leave.'

It is the angry and jealous baron who, in woman guise, meets and slays the youth who is waiting in gude greenwood, and brings back the bloody head to the mother.

Other fine ballads in which mother and son carry on tragic colloquy are Lord Randal and Edward. These versions of a story of treachery and blood, conveyed in the dark hints of a strange dialogue, have received many touches from later hands; but the germ comes down from the age of tradition. It has even been noted that, with the curious tenacity with which the ballad memory often clings to a detail while forgetting or mislaying essential fact, the food with which, in the version Burns recovered for Johnson's Museum, Lord Randal is poisoned—'eels boiled in broo'—is identical with that given to his prototype in the folk-ballads of Italy and other countries. The structure of this ballad, like the beautiful old air to which it is sung, bears marks of antiquity, and its wide diffusion militates against Scott's not very convincing suggestion that it refers to the alleged poisoning of the Regent Randolph. But it lacks the terrible and dramatic intensity of Son Davie, better known in the version transmitted, under the name of Edward, by Lord Hailes to Bishop Percy's Reliques. Here it is the murderer, and not the victim, who answers; and it is the questioning mother, and not the absent false love, with whom the curse is left as a legacy. Despair had never a more piercing utterance than this:

Although Yarrow be the favoured haunt on Scottish soil—may we not also say on the whole round of earth?—of the Romantic Ballad, and has coloured them, and taken colour from them, for all time, yet there are other streams and vales that only come short of being its rivals. 'Leader Haughs,' for instance, which the harp of Nicol Burne, the 'Last Minstrel' who wandered and sang in the Borderland, has linked indissolubly with Yarrow braes, know of ballad strains well-nigh as sweet as those of the neighbour water. But cheerfulness rather than sadness is their prevailing note. Auld Maitland, the lay which James Hogg's mother repeated to Scott, has its scene on Leader side, and at the 'darksome town'—a misnomer in these days—of Lauder. Long before the time of that tough champion, St. Cuthbert and True Thomas had wandered and dreamed and sang by Leader. It was a Lord Lauderdale who rode to Traquair to court, after the older fashion, Katherine Janferie:

He it was, according to the old ballad, who rode to the bridal at the eleventh hour, with four and twenty Leader lads behind him:

and it was Lord Lochinvar (although 'he who told the story later' has taught us so differently) who played the inglorious part of the deserted bridegroom. Scott himself drank in the passion for Border romance and chivalry on the braes of Sandyknowe, between Leader and Eden waters, not far from Smailholm and Dryburgh, and Huntly Bank and Mellerstain, and Rhymer's Tower and the Broom o' the Cowdenknowes. According to Mr. Ford, the ballad which takes its name from this last-mentioned spot is traditionally assigned to a Mellerstain maid named Crosbie, whose words were set to music by no less famous a hand than that of David Rizzio. So that here at least we have a vague echo of the name of a balladist and of a ballad-air composer. Between them, the maid of Mellerstain and 'Davy' have harmonised most musically, albeit with some touch of moral laxity, the spirit of pastoral and of ballad romance:

Nowhere has the ballad inspiration and the ballad touch lingered longer than by Eden and Leader and Whitadder. Lady Grizel Baillie (who also wonned in Mellerstain) had them—

and it still lives in Lady John Scott, who has sung of The Bonnie Bounds of Cheviot as if the mantle of the Border minstrels had fallen upon her.

After all, the ballads of Yarrow and Ettrick, of the Merse and Teviotdale, owe their superior fame as much as anything to the happy chance that the Wizard of Abbotsford dwelt in the midst of them, and seizing upon them before they were forgotten, made them and the localities classical. Other districts have in this way been despoiled to some extent of their proper meed of honour. Fortune as well as merit has favoured the Border Minstrelsy in the race for survival and for precedence in the popular memory. But Galloway, a land pervaded with romance, claims at least one ballad that can rank with the best. Lord Gregory has aliases and duplicates without number. But the scene is always Loch Ryan and some castled island within sight of that arm of the sea, whither the love-lorn Annie fares in her boat 'wi' sails o' the light green silk and tows o' taffetie,' in quest of her missing lord:

Alas! cold is her welcome as she stands with her young son in her arms, and knocks and calls on her love, while 'the wind blaws through her yellow hair, and the rain draps o'er her chin.' A voice, that seems that of Lord Gregory, bids her go hence as 'a witch or a wil' warlock, or a mermaid o' the flood'; and with a woful heart she turns back to the sea and the storm. And when he wakes up from boding dreams to find his true love and his child have been turned from his door, it is too late. His cry to the waves is as vain as Annie's cry to that 'ill woman,' his mother, who has betrayed them:

The shores and basin of the Forth have also their rowth of ballads; and some of them have, like The Lass of Lochryan, the sound of the waves and the salt smell of the sea mingled with their plaintive music. Gil Morice has been 'placed' by Carronside—Ossian's 'roaring Carra'—a meet setting for the story. Sir Patrick Spens cleaves to the shores of Fife; though some, eager for the honour of the North, have claimed that it is Aberdour in Buchan that is spoken of in the ballad. By the powerful spell of this old rhyme, the king still sits and drinks the blood-red wine in roofless Dunfermline tower; the ladies still haunt the windy headland—Kinghorn or Elie Ness—with 'their kaims intil their hands' waiting in vain the return of their 'good Scots lords'; the wraith of Sir Patrick himself in misty days strides the silver strand under the Hawes Wood, reading the braid letter. Near by is Donibristle; and it keeps the memory of the 'Bonnie Earl of Moray,' slain here, hints the balladist—though history is silent on the point—for pleasing too well the Queen's eye at Holyrood.

Edinburgh, too, draws a good part of its romance from the ballad bard. Mary Hamilton, of the Queen's Maries, rode through the Netherbow Port to the gallows-foot:

The Marchioness of Douglas wandered disconsolate on Arthur's Seat and drank of St. Anton's well:

and across the hill lies the 'Wells o' Wearie.' Nowhere else has the wail of forsaken love found such wistful expression—except in The Fause Lover:

From Edinburgh wandered Leezie Lindsay, kilting her coats of green satin to follow her Lord Ronald Macdonald the weary way to the Highland Border; and to its plainstanes came the faithful Lady of Gicht to ransom her Geordie:

And these regions of the North have as much of the 'blood-red wine' of ballad romance coursing through them as Tweedside or Lothian, although it may be of harsher and coarser flavour. Space does not allow of doing justice to the Northern Ballads, some of them simple strains, made familiar by sweet airs, like Hunting Tower, or Bessie Bell and Mary Gray, or the Banks of the Lomond; others, and these chiefly from the wintry side of Cairn o' Mount, 'bleak and bare' as that wilderness of heather; still others, and from the same quarter, gallant, warm-hearted, light-stepping tunes as ever were sung—Glenlogie, for instance:

For the most part they are variants, many of them badly mutilated in the rhymes, that are familiar, under other names, farther south. They gather about the family history and the family trees of the great houses—the Gordons for choice—planted by Dee and Don and Ythan, where Gadie runs at the 'back o' Benachie,' and in the Bog o' Gicht; and they tell of love adventures and mischances that have befallen the Lords of Huntly or Aboyne, the Lairds of Drum or Meldrum, and even the humble Trumpeter of Fyvie.

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