Page:Old English ballads by Francis Barton Gummere (1894).djvu/33

Rh INTRODUCTION, xxvii As a mere makeshift, however, one might use the word " communal." A communal ballad is a narrative ballad of tradition which represents a community or folk, not a section or class of that community, and not a single writer. III. Two great authorities, Svend Grundtvig and Ferdinand Wolf, failed to agree in their report about that vexatious matter, the authorship of the ballad ; but on one point they were perfectly united. Alike they insisted that the ballad must be the outcome and the expression of a whole community, and that this community must be homogeneous — must belong to a time when, in a common atmosphere of ignorance, so far as book-lore is concerned, one habit of thought and one standard of action animate every member from prince to ploughboy.^ Ballads of the primitive type, — of course we do not know them in their original form, — were the product of a people as yet undivided into a lettered and an unlettered class. When learning came among the folk, it drove the ballad first into byways, and then altogether out of living literature. Ballads cannot be made now, at least among civilized races ; nor can a cheap pathos, in slovenly or vulgar ^ Grundtvig wrote an introduction for translations by Rosa War- rens, Ddnische Volkslieder d. Vorzeity Hamburg, 1858 ; see especially pp. xvii f., xxii. Wolf did a like office for the same translator in her Schwedische Volkslieder d. Vorzeity 1 8 57. See p. xiv ff. See also Motherwell's attempt {Minstrelsy^ Amer. ed., I, 16 ff.) to draw " thebounding-line which exists between what is the Oral and what is the Written poetry of a people." This homogeneous character of a ballad-making folk, by the way, is quite enougl^to explain the high rank of most personages iYi the ballads, — princes, knights and so on, — without recourse to Wolfs assumption of a direct origin in aristocratic circles (Introd., p. xix). Translator Prior {Ancient Danish Ballads^ i860, I, ix) gallantly concludes that for most of the Scandinavian ballads we are indebted to the original composi- tion "of the ladies." Digitized by LjOOQIC