"The warld is room, late them beg thrae life, The warld is room, late them beg thrae life, "And what wul ye leive to your ain mither deir, And what wul ye leive to your ain mither deir, The curse of hell frae me sall ye beir, The ballad surprises are admirably prepared for. They are not betrayed before the right moment, but at that moment they are seen to be no eleventh-hour inspiration but exactly what the story from its first word has been pushing towards. This is not strange. The business of exciting suspense sometimes seems to the novice in story writing highly artificial and unnecessary. But the untutored intuitive story teller knows better. An old wife, who has no thought of art, but who earnestly wishes to make an impression with her tale, instinctively seeks to arouse suspense. She begins "I never was so upset in my life," her first general indication that she has something amazing to impart; then she becomes more specific, "Didn't you suppose that Jane Jones was my friend?" she demands, and proceeds to narrow the field and whet her auditor's interest: "Well, do you think a friend would tell a deliberate malicious falsehood about you?" Her every utterance is to sharpen curiosity regarding the conclusion she has cloudily hinted. Even a child begins, "Guess" or "You can't guess." What wonder then that the ballads that have come down to our time should be those that have employed something of this provocative method that is the very marrow of effective narration? The most conspicuous device by which expectation is excited in the ballads, is the question and answer procedure we are all familiar with in the fairy story-the "Who made my chair so hard I can't sit in it?", "Who made my milk so sour I can't drink it?" of the Three Bears, and Red Riding Hood's questions addressed to the wolf masquerading as her grandmother. The answer repeats the question wholly or in part. The successive questions and answers suggest the issue and keep it in prospect. They produce the effect of a trap set and ready to spring when a series of inevitable maneuvers is accomplished, and we watch the steps that bring the spring nearer, the closing in of doom, with fascinated suspense. The ballad questions and answers with their frequent verbal repetition produce a sort of penitential progress, one step backward and two steps forward; though it often seems in the reading as if it were two steps backward and one forward. But the repetition is "incremental," a new element enters with every repetition, slight, but strong enough to push the story forward a bit toward its goal. This retarded progress, this easy unhurried approach with deliberate rounding up of strays, gives the impression of the master designer who has done it before and is so sure of reaching his objective on time that he isn't nervous about it. Such repetition would be counted too artificial in modern prose, but it was practiced by the "artless" story tellers in prose as well as in verse. The childlike mind enjoys an easily discerned pattern and this the repeated question and answer furnish. The childlike mind enjoys hearing the same story over. It relishes a delectable episode retold or told with variations. Epics are full of iteration and reiteration of striking incidents. Repetition is a marked feature of the Bible stories. Take, for example, that Hebrew epic with its efficiency and good-business hero, Joseph, and note the repetition it contains of Joseph's dream, the episode of Potiphar's wife, and Pharaoh's dreams of the seven fat and lean kine. We all remember the successive plagues, and so on. Such a primitive tale as the Growth of the Soil the better gains its effect by repetition. Ballad repetition, of course, includes the refrain, believed by some to have been a choral refrain through which the audience participated in the performance of the soloist. The lessons we learn from the ballad singers are fundamental lessons. They seem obvious and simple, but to apply them with the effect of naïveté and charm is another matter. LESSONS AND READING ASSIGNMENTS LESSON I. Read: Sir Patrick Spens, The Hangman's Tree, Annie of Lochroyan, The Cruel Brother, The Twa Sisters, Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, Scott's Alice Brand, Lomax's High Chin Bob. Read Chapter on Ballad Writers. LESSON 2. Write a ballad based on some historic incident or on some local episode. INDEPENDENT WORK LESSON I. Make a study of the short stories of some writer other than those studied in the course. Put the results of your reading into form of an analytical study as definite as the studies provided in this text. LESSON 2. Write an original story using the method of the author studied. LESSON 3. Write an original story in what you believe to be most truly your own style. |