Page:Old English ballads by Francis Barton Gummere (1894).djvu/72

lxvi flattery or cunning must bear the blame. Again, the same story may have been told in different settings or about different people; a striking incident in one ballad may have been transferred to another ballad; and finally the temper of the singer and the character of his audience may so change with time as to alter the nature of the events, the dignity of the characters, and even the outcome of the story. In English ballads one can often follow this degeneration, with its lapse in vivid character, and its effacing or rationalizing of the supernatural.^ Akin, moreover, to the fates of transmission from age to age, are the chances of migration from race to race. True, it is to be conceded that the simpler tragic or dramatic motives need no theory of borrowing; human fate and human emotion—partout les passions, partout l'inexorable destin —are enough to account for such epics of the countryside. But there are other motives and other stories which force us to assume either a common origin, or a passage from land to land; the distribution and relations of the ballad are as undoubted in the way of fact as they are difficult in the way of explanation, and it is clear that they play no small part in the ballads of this collection.