Page:Journal of American Folklore vol. 12.djvu/461

Rh might very well have originated in one mind, at one place, and been accompanied by distinguishing circumstances, which in course of time it abdicated with the result of becoming more vaguely human. Unless we had the original version, we should not be able to speak of any particular author of the New England ballad; in the course of its currency it has received additions and undergone changes which cause its variants to represent different minds; it has, in this respect, had many authors. None the less, the composition had its birth in one mind, composing with perfectly clear consciousness, and in the ordinary literary manner. So far, the ballad of Isaac Orcutt or of the Merrick youth may be taken to represent the entire ballad literature. The theory that ballads were born out of a mental state quite independent of any conditions familiar to literature, that they represent an unconscious cerebration, that, to use a phrase which to my mind conveys no distinct meaning, they possessed "communal origins," has no more application to the songs of old England than of New England, no more place in the twelfth century than the eighteenth. So far as the existing stock is concerned, and that is all of which we have knowledge, such mystical phrases are calculated to promote nothing save confusion of thought and expression.

Again, the history of the song forcibly illustrates the manner in which popular tradition, setting out from a basis more or less answering to real life, ordinarily absorbs romantic elements, loses relation to the original surroundings, and may develop into a fanciful narrative; while again, the sentiments, which originally were profoundly serious and even solemn, in a more cultivated and sophisticated period are vulgarized and rendered prosaic, until at last the primitive earnestness survives only as a jest.

In regard to custom, we have encountered a usage which seems at least to have been local in western Massachusetts, the habit of chanting at funerals, and in the form of a dirge, the death story of the departed. There is not at hand sufficient evidence to permit the assumption that such observance, if indeed it should prove to have been frequent in this neighborhood, represented a general practice. It is nevertheless obvious that the probabilities are all in favor of an ancient origin for such a usage existing in a remote and isolated community. In all probability the chant would not have been allowed on a solemn occasion, unless it had old precedent. The New England village communities were exactly those in which we might expect to encounter relics of a habit abandoned in Great Britain. Very likely, if the whole truth could be known, the rite observed in the case of Orcutt, and perhaps also of Merrick and Beckwith, may have had roots extending to the times at which it was