Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/123

Rh is illuminating. To track the individual tale is for the most part to embark upon a hopeless quest; to determine and exemplify the conditions which facilitated its origin and promoted its spread is a far more fruitful task. In the ballad, on the other hand, precision of form is an essential characteristic, and comparison becomes not only possible but fruitful. M. Pineau has clearly perceived this in some instances; his comparisons between definite Scandinavian and French ballads are marked by critical insight. But taking his work as a whole he has in my opinion begun at the wrong end. He should first have clearly surveyed the entire field of Northern ballad literature, instead of dealing with it in sections; he should have analysed it formally and have correlated it, where possible, with the recorded historical conditions through which the Scandinavian peoples have passed; then he should have compared it with the great kindred ballad literatures, those of Continental Germany, of Germanic-speaking Britain, of France and France's Romance-speaking dependents, of Northern Slavdom. Until this preliminary task of historico-literary analysis and comparison has been achieved it will be unsafe to theorise concerning the origin and nature of European ballad literature. And even then such theories must be tested in accordance with general laws of psychological and literary development, for the formulation of which it is necessary to examine the great ballad literatures unconnected, historically, with that of Northern and Western Europe.

Whilst I cannot think that M. Pineau has made a noteworthy contribution to the solution of the ballad problem, I am in general agreement with his view of ballad literature as a whole. It impresses me as a genuine product of popular imagination in an early and archaic stage of culture, surviving to the present day because the folk has progressed little beyond that stage, and revived within the last century and a half because conscious, deliberately artistic, literature was compelled to turn afresh for inspiration and nutriment to the imaginings of the race in its youth.

On the other hand, many recorded ballads have certainly assumed a new and more definite shape within the last four