Page:Old English ballads by Francis Barton Gummere (1894).djvu/76

lxx Ixx INTRODUCTION. for it the same conditions of growth and propagation in a soil where it is the hardy product of nature. It is one thing to grant the agency of a singer in gathering and reporting poetry of the people ; it is quite another thing to say that such poetry, as it shades back into scraps of early traditional verse, and then, sheer combination and inference, escapes us in the darkness of prehistoric times, was always of this character, was always something dependent upon the artist. It is one thing to grant the possibility of personal authorship, somewhat in our modern sense, for a ballad like "Bewick and Grahame " ; it is another thing to say that the impersonal character of the ballad itself, a pervading quality which even the " I " of the singer is powerless to affect, rests upon the mere fact of oral transmission. Granted that this impersonal character differences all ballads, what is behind it ? If the ultimate reason for this quality lies in certain conditions of authorship by one man, then the axe is laid to the root of that distinction, still so carefully maintained by good critics, between volksthiimliche poesie and volkspoesie. If M. Loquin is right, we need nothing more than a lively tune and words that take popular fancy, in order to make a ballad now ; and there is no reason why balladry of the best kind should be a closed account. But even modern criticism declares that it is a closed account. What, then, if this impersonal element in the ballad were simply the last active state of a distinct fashion of poetry, once common enough, but vanishing under the triumph of the schools ? What if this impersonal character of the later ballad were due to the purely communal elements of the primitive ballad? Unfortu- nately, one cannot make proper connection between tfie two ; for in English and Scottish ballads one Is dealing not with a sequence but with a survival. We have a series of ballads made from the beginning of the Digitized by LjOOQIC