Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 13, 1902.djvu/454

 434 Reviews.

"the Author of IVaver/ey" ; a point on which he makes some very good observations (pp. xiv., xv.). But the effect of this stand- point is that his treatment of the " Romantic Ballads " is far from satisfactory. He is haunted by chronic doubts of their genuineness, and by continual anxiety to prove their modernity, or, at least, their literary origin. So nervously suspicious is he that he omits the music (given in Lockhart's edition) altogether, " as there is no little dubiety as to the genuine antiquity of ballad airs" (p. xxxix.), ignorant apparently that a scientific musician can date and describe a tune as accurately as a palaeographer dates a manuscript. If a ballad is ill-rhymed, prosaic, or vulgar, he decides that it is the composition of the peasant-reciter himself; if it shows poetic feeling, it is due to the collector — Leyden, Sharpe, Hogg, or Laidlaw — who recorded it ; regardless of the difference in style between the ballads in question and the original works of these versifiers of Scott's day. Poetic fire, apparently, is for him a gift bestowed only on the literary and the cultured. No peasant- bred poet, no " mute inglorious Milton," enters into his calcula- tions : a strange exclusiveness in the fellow-countryman of the Ayrshire Ploughman, or even the Ettrick Shepherd. To those who believe that folk-song springs from the folk he attributes the idea, long ago ridiculed by Mr. Joseph Jacobs, that "the collective folk assembled in folk-moot, simultaneously shouted " songs and proverbs by a common inspiration {^Folk-Lore^ iv., 234) ; and we fear it would be vain to try and convince him that he is fighting against windmills.

If forgery cannot be suspected, the poor ballad (if it have no historical basis), is belittled in some other way. Broivn Adam is "not of much account." The Wife of Usher's JVe//has "nothing remarkable in the story." C/er/c Sau7iders is "a mere ( !) varia- tion of the seven hostile brethren tale " ; the commentator not perceiving that, apart from the poetic merit of the ballad, that is just where the interest of the story lies. In fact, he seems unable to perceive either the conditions of the "problem of diffusion " or the issues involved in it. He says "the late Professor Child's list of foreign ballads is in many respects invaluable, but it is possible to overrate or misunderstand its significance"; and credits Mr. Lang with the amazing opinion that many of our ballads must have existed " millions of years before the existence of any human records ! " He then cites Professor Child against the very early