Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/124

98 ; also within that period there has been an interchange of specific ballad forms between Romance- and Germanic-speaking peoples. As regards the first point, advocates of the comparatively modern origin of ballads lay stress upon what may be called their mediæval setting. On closer inspection it proves, if I mistake not, to be a setting only, and the fact itself is easily explained. In the Middle Ages there still existed a popular poetry, drawing theme and inspiration from traditional sources, appealing to and comprehensible by almost all classes; its professors, handling as they did far older themes, inevitably vested them in the costume of their day. Where social conditions have remained comparatively unchanged, where a school of folk-poetry has retained its vitality, the specific mediæval setting will be found, I think, to have yielded to a more modern one. But where those conditions have altered, where the lettered, cultured classes are divorced from the folk, and the folk-conceptions of nature and society have suffered atrophy, have become mere survivals, then the mediæval setting is retained as more consonant to the spirit of the decaying literature. The mediæval baron is closer to the man of the "folk," than is the gentleman in a frock coat.

There is nothing to wonder at if the ballads contain traits upon which the critic can lay his finger and say "this cannot be older than 1450, that belongs to the early seventeenth century." All that is proved thereby is the existence of folk-poets in full touch alike with tradition and with the average social environment of the time. What should surprise is the persistent continuance, in full plastic energy, of conceptions alike of nature, society, and literary form which even in the Middle Ages were becoming alien to the highest culture, and which must have been incomprehensible or repugnant to certain classes of society at the very period when so many of the ballads assumed, substantially, their present shape.

The interchange of ballads in comparatively recent times between Romance- and Germanic-speaking peoples opens up far more complicated and difficult questions. When the fact seems proved, M. Pineau would look upon Scandinavia as the lender. M. Gaston Paris, on the other hand, after examining the five examples especially insisted upon by M. Pineau, thinks it more likely the ballads common to Scandinavia and the rest of Northwestern Europe have been imported into Scandinavia. I do not think the question can be settled by the simple comparison of