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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Few English poets have been more faithful to their literary loves than Swinburne. His devotion to Landor, his passion for the Elizabethan drama, his adoration of Hugo are well-known illustrations of this truism. Not so familiar, but none the less genuine, was his admiration of the popular ballads. John Addington Symonds reports that Swinburne once purposed to translate them into French for Hugo. The poet cherished the memory of an old gamekeeper's praise of his youthful verses as being worthy of comparison with the ballads. Border minstrelsy was a topic often discussed at The Pines. Pride of ancestry and love of country and its traditions—feelings which swayed both Scott and Swinburne—led the latter to criticize his beloved predecessor for giving to “one of the most valuable books in our language” the “mendacious title” of Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border.
1 Horatio F. Brown, Letters and Papers of J. A. Symonds (New York, 1923), p. 51.
2 See Public Opinion, vii (May 4, 1889), 91.
3 Cf. Clara Watts-Dunton, The Home Life of Swinburne (London, 1922), p. 206.
4 See Swinburne's fragmentary preface to Ballads of the English Border, ed. William A. MacInnes (London, 1925), p. xiii.
5 See Georges Lafourcade, La Jeunesse de Swinburne, ii, 272. In Rosamond Swinburne made use of Thomas Deloney's Fair Rosamond, which he had read in Percy's Reliques (Lafourcade, ii, 237).
6 Swinburne's Collected Poetical Works (London, 1927), i, xviii.
7 In the second series of Poems and Ballads (1878), as sometimes in the first, ballad is used in the French sense, for ballade.
8 Eleven, if Swinburne's version of The Earl of Mar's Daughter be included.
9 This badly edited book has erroneous statements in the introduction and misprints in the text. The arrangement of Swinburne's poems in groups is especially reprehensible. Lady Isabel, Clerk Saunders, and The Earl of Mar's Daughter, are, for instance, included with Swinburne's original ballads.
10 The dates of publication are, of course, not indicative of the time of composition. Several ballads printed in 1889, often with changes of text, were originally incorporated in the unpublished novel Lesbia Brandon. Cf. Bonchurch Edition, xx, 152–155.
11 For brief treatments see MacInnes's introduction and Lafourcade, op. cit., ii, 144 ff.
12 The available evidence, none too reliable (it consists chiefly of the watermarks on the MSS. and the date of the most recent collection which the poet read), points to 1861 as the time when Swinburne was working on his edition. But he may have begun it earlier.
13 The Ballad of Aikenshaw (Bonchurch Edition, iii, 235; entitled Border Ballad in the privately printed A Lay of Lilies and Other Poems and in MacInnes) is exceptional. It hints of disaster which befalls twenty men, all but four of whom are slain, evidently in border warfare.
14 Cf. Constance Rummons, “The Ballad Imitations of Swinburne,” Poet Lore, xxxiii (spring, 1922), 58–84.
15 Reprinted in Francis James Child's English and Scottish Ballads, I (Boston, 1857), 386–392; first published in Hutchinson's History of Northumberland. Cf. Gosse's introduction to Posthumous Poems (London, 1917), xii ff.
16 Printed in Scott's Minstrelsy, where the poem is accompanied by a sketch of the historical and legendary Lord Soulis.
17 With the name Borolallie compare the Burlow Beanie of King Arthur and King Cornwall (30) or the Belly Blin of Young Bekie (53C). Cf. Rummons, op. cit., p. 71.
17a In the romance Partonope de Blois (Bödtker's edition, p. 19, vv. 684–687) the hero passes twenty perilous waters. On “The Otherworld Journey” see Lowry Charles Wimberly, Folklore in the English and Scottish Ballads (Chicago, 1928), pp. 108 ff.
18 The Sea-Swallows was published in Poems and Ballads.
19 Rummons, op. cit., p. 77.
20 Bonchurch Edition, i, 78–79.
21 See in J. G. Frazer's Golden Bough series Taboo and the Perils of the Soul (London, 1911), pp. 33 ff. and pp. 177 f. In his discussion of the Scandinavian analogues of Leesome Brand (15), Professor Child mentions ballads in which a bird serves as a vehicle for the soul of a dead girl. See also Wimberly, op. cit., pp. 33 ff. and 44 ff.
22 Cf. Rummons, op. cit., p. 79.—I may note here that the incomplete A Fragment of a Border Ballad (published in the privately printed Poetical Fragments, edited by Clement Shorter in 1916, and reprinted by MacInnes) introduces a father who keeps a maiden from her lover by imprisoning her in a tower.
23 It may be a coincidence that Jamieson gave the husband in his version of The Bonny Birdy the name of Lord Randal—a name which occurs in other ballads.
24 Cf., too, a famous passage by A. E. Housman, who writes in A Shropshire Lad, xxvi (“Along the fields as we came by”), of what the aspen said to itself. Here also should be mentioned A Lyke-Wake Song, which is philosophical rather than narrative but employs the ballad-idiom. A Lyke-Wake Dirge in Scott's Minstrelsy has been compared to it.
25 Op. cit., ii, 461.
26 H. R. von Schröter, Finnische Runen (Stuttgart and Tübingen, 1834), pp. 150–155.
27 Francis James Child, English and Scottish Ballads, ii (Boston, 1857), 350–352.
28 The German is simply,
29 In his Degeneration Max Nordau calls attention to The King's Daughter in order to denounce the poet's use of symbolism, to Nordau the equivalent of the delirious.
30 Cf. the situation in The Cruel Brother; or The Bride's Testament (11), where a bride names her bequests after being stabbed.
31 A note on May Janet, which ends with a happy wedding, is appropriate here. This poem tells of two lovers who have been forbidden to marry. The girl's impetuous father, hearing of the young man's determination to have her, tears off his daughter's gown and casts her into the water. Her lover rescues her. Their subsequent journey together becomes a triumphal procession. They travel to four different towns, and at each the lover purchases something for his bride's wardrobe. The series of statements, “The first town they came to,” “The second town they came to,” is similar to a commonplace which occurs, for example, in Johnie Scot (99) and The Fause Lover (218). The last stanza of The Fause Lover, indeed, begins:
May Janet was marked “Breton” when first published, in Poems and Ballads.
32 Bonchurch Edition, i, 80–81.
33 Cf. Rummons, op. cit., p. 64.
34 See The Collected Works of William Morris (London, 1911), vii, 389 ff.
35 The Loeb Library edition of Ovid's Metamorphoses, i, 334.
36 See especially the Loeb Library edition of Seneca's Tragedies, ii, 168 ff.
37 Cf., also, The Lady Isabella's Tragedy, in Percy's Reliques. The frenzied Dido, too, thinks of an opportunity for revenge which she has missed, the possibility of serving Ascanius as a feast to his father. See the Æneid, Book iv, ll. 601–602.
38 In the Lines at the end of the pamphlet The Ride from Milan and Other Poems (London, 1918), two stanzas are identical with two in The Ballad of Dead Men's Bay and a third contains slight variations. Gosse's preface ignores this fact.
39 Published by MacInnes, pp. 126–127.
40 In Posthumous Poems, pp. 94–97; Bonchurch Edition, vi, 352–354.
41 Bonchurch Edition, xviii, 178.