“Late at e’en, drinking the wine,
      And ere they paid the lawing,
    They set a combat them between,
      To fight it in the dawing.”

With this, an indirect, allusive way of telling the story, which Goethe mentions in his prefatory note to “Des Saengers Fluch,” as a constant note of the “Volkslied.”  The old ballad-maker does not vouchsafe explanations about persons and motives; often he gives the history, not expressly nor fully, but by hints and glimpses, leaving the rest to conjecture; throwing up its salient points into a strong, lurid light against a background of shadows.  The knight rides out a-hunting, and by and by his riderless horse comes home, and that is all: 

    “Toom[9] hame cam the saddle
      But never cam he.”

Or the knight himself comes home and lies down to die, reluctantly confessing, under his mother’s questioning, that he dined with his true-love and is poisoned.[10] And again that is all.  Or

“—­In behint yon auld fail[11] dyke, I wot there lies a new-slain knight; And naebody kens that he lies there, But his hawk, his hound, and lady fair.

    “His hound is to the hunting game,
    His hawk to fetch the wild-fowl hame,
    His lady’s ta’en another mate,
    So we may mak our dinner sweet.”

A whole unuttered tragedy of love, treachery, and murder lies back of these stanzas.  This method of narration may be partly accounted for by the fact that the story treated was commonly some local country-side legend of family feud or unhappy passion, whose incidents were familiar to the ballad-singer’s audience and were readily supplied by memory.  One theory holds that the story was partly told and partly sung, and that the links and expositions were given in prose.  However this may be, the artless art of these popular poets evidently included a knowledge of the uses of mystery and suggestion.  They knew that, for the imagination, the part is sometimes greater than the whole.  Gray wrote to Mason in 1757, “I have got the old Scotch ballad [Gil Maurice] on which ‘Douglas’ [Home’s tragedy, first played at Edinburgh in 1756] was founded.  It is divine. . .  Aristotle’s best rules are observed in it in a manner which shews the author never had heard of Aristotle.  It begins in the fifth act of the play.  You may read it two-thirds through without guessing what it is about; and yet, when you come to the end, it is impossible not to understand the whole story.”

It is not possible to recover the conditions under which these folk-songs “made themselves,"[12] as it were, or grew under the shaping hands of generations of nameless bards.  Their naive, primitive quality cannot be acquired:  the secret is lost.  But Walter Scott, who was steeped to the lips in balladry, and whose temper had much of the healthy objectivity of an earlier age, has succeeded as well as any modern.  Some of his ballads are more perfect artistically than his long metrical romances; those of them especially which are built up from a burden or fragment of old minstrel song, like “Jock o’ Hazeldean"[13] and the song in “Rokeby”: