Page:Old English ballads by Francis Barton Gummere (1894).djvu/36

xxx XXX INTRODUCTION. have in the general style of ballads a close parallel to the early stages of so-called figures of speech. The primitive word is a metaphor in an unconscious state ; as soon as any distinction can be made between a literal expression and a metaphor, the latter becomes conscious and artistic. But the style of a genuine ballad is not a consciously poetical style ; for it is not ballads that form a dialect, it is the schools. From Chaucer to Tennyson,^ in spite of one reaction after another, the drift of poetry has been to increase and isolate the dialect of the schools ; not as a theory, but as a matter of fact, we note in the history of English verse a steady widening of the chasm between the speech of daily life and the language of poetry.^ A study of German lyric poetry in the twelfth or thirteenth century shows us the same process from a simple popular diction, a style in which there was no thought of express- ing individuality, to a complicated and artistic diction, offspring of the schools. The metre of a ballad,* while not obstreperously rough, should be simple ; not labored, hardly melodious in our 1 When Tennyson speaks of " the chalice of the grapes of God," or gives the time of day as — Before the crimson-circled star Had fallen into her father's grave^ he is reviving the obscure scaldic " kenning " and the mythological puzzle of the ftiost artificial phase in all Germanic poetry. 2 See the famous remarks of Wordsworth, in his preface to the Lyrical Ballads, on these " arbitrary and capricious habits of expres- sion," and the faults of " poetic diction." ^ For particulars, see appendix on metre. Undoubtedly the pre- vailing measure is the medieval septenarius, domesticated in English verse; but this raises a difficult problem. If popular poetry, like Langland's, held so tenaciously to the old Germanic form — still vigorous a century and a half later in Dunbar's well-known verses — why should the ballads, which we assume to represent tradition in its most positive form, turn from the old, and take up the new and Digitized by LjOOQIC