Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/125

Rh French and Scandinavian ballads; all the variants, and especially those of the British Isles, must be examined in this connection. I may note that in two of the five cases M. Gaston Paris holds Celtic Brittany to be the original home of the ballad, whence it spread, independently, to France and Scandinavia.

Even if M. Gaston Paris is right in his specific contention of exportation from France in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and, sporadically, at an earlier date of ballad themes, I would still urge that it has not the importance he assigns to it. There have been two other romantic export periods in French history. In the twelfth century France exported the heroic and romantic cycles of Charlemagne and Arthur; in Germany, Italy, Spain, and to a less extent in England and the Scandinavian North, new and vigorous literary movements were originated. At the end of the seventeenth century Perrault and his imitators exported folk-tale themes. These sometimes ousted, sometimes modified older forms native to the countries into which they penetrated; they did not, because they could not, originate a novel or a flourishing literary genre. I would urge that French mediæval and post-mediæval ballad exportation, such as it was, was akin to the second rather than to the first of these movements. It may have slightly modified, slightly increased an existing ballad stock; could it have originated one? The very period of ballad expansion according to this hypothesis was one of religious, social, and literary changes which affected both the higher and lower classes of the borrowing countries, and which were essentially hostile to the spirit and to the form of the ballad. Was Germanic-speaking Europe of 1450—1550 a fruitful soil in which the magnificently fantastic, savagely archaic ballad literature of Britain and the North could be developed from French seeds?

M. Pineau's reference of the Scandinavian ballad to a pre-Germanic, Celtic population seems to me unnecessary and contrary to such evidence as we have. The archaic conceptions of life and society in which the ballads have their root and from which they draw their nutriment was, I hold, common to both Celts and Germans when we first meet them in history, whilst as regards their specific literary embodiment, the ballad, so far from being a characteristic product of Celtic-speaking peoples throughout historic times, is conspicuous by its absence from all Celtic literatures save that of Brittany. Very early Germanic poetry