Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/516

 4/0 Reviews.

English and Scottish Popular Ballads ; edited from the collection of Francis James Child by Helen Child Sargent and George Lyman Kittredge. London, 1905. D. Nutt ; Boston and New York : Houghton Mifflin & Co. 123. 6d. I still remember the smile with which Svend Grundtvig said that " now had ' Denmark's old Folk-ballads ' produced a living offspring" when, during the last year of his life, he one day handed me a stately quarto, the first of Child's great folk-ballad publications. A superficial glance showed that the whole arrangement of text, introduction, and notes conformed very closely to the outward form of " DgF." ^ But besides this there was an inward likeness between the two works. Both were sprung from their authors' lifelong, thorough and con- scientious researches into the ballad-poetry of their native lands, both were the outcome of a very wide knowledge of the folk- poetry of the whole world ; each is rich in parallels, cautious in conclusions. Similar ways of work and a spiritual kinship have made the writers into close comrades. The most char- acteristic feature in both works is the certainty with which true folk-tradition is distinguished from literary emendation. Both authors had a lively sense of what folk-poetry will say, and it is this which makes their productions such a valuable guide, — a sense which unhappily is found all too seldom among the various writers who, since then, have busied themselves with folk-poetry. To put it shortly, they had that which made their age the golden age for the study of folk-poetry ; a compre- hensive survey of the material, an instinct not only for its wider outlines, but also for each individual feature as an expres- sion of the luxuriance of life which marks its whole, an untiring power of work to carry the problem through in all its breadth, a never-failing interest in every new contribution which could be won from far or near.


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A comparison between the two works suggests itself. They stand alone in European literature, still unsurpassed by any

^ Svend Grundtvig, Dantnarks gainle Folkeviser.