Page:Old English ballads by Francis Barton Gummere (1894).djvu/23

Rh we may not now discuss, except to point out how unstable are the results of critical investigations in its domain; witness the Homeric problem. The song, spontaneous outburst of emotion, is so often and so clearly a matter of the individual, that it seldom agrees with the conditions of genuine poetry of the people. There remains the ballad, poetry of the people in survival; and this, in spite of its manifold changes and imperfections, is our best representative of the whole class.

II.

Error in the comprehension of the ballad goes, then, upon two lines,—there is confusion, more or less deplored, in the name of it; and there is confusion, for the most part a matter of carelessness, in the treatment of the thing itself. Metes and bounds are seldom clear; we are confronted not only by the lack of any unequivocal name for this kind of poem, but by a haunting uncertainty in regard to the meaning of the terms used now and then for similar or kindred verse. Thus, when Mr. Sainsbury tells us that " the lack, notorious to this day, of one single original English folk-song of really great beauty, is a rough and general fact," we are at a loss to know how we should understand him. Does he mean by folk-song what a German means by voiksiied, or does he exclude the narrative ballad? Even if he restricts us to the song pure and simple, like that pearl in the " Misanthrope," what does he understand by a