Page:Old English ballads by Francis Barton Gummere (1894).djvu/78

lxxii Ixxii INTRODUCTION. impossible to follow the actual ballad, is to follow its elements, and so determine what a rational inference ought to conclude about their origin. Jacob Grimm set up a primitive mystery ; Scherer sets up a primitive " entertainer," a singer of songs, teller of tales, lecturer on " the cause of thunder," ^ in short, an aesthetic purveyor to the Probably Arboreal nobility and gentry. One process is quite as reasonable, and quite as acrobatic, as the other. What are these elements of the ballad which make for communal origin ? Aside from the story, which may be tradition, popular tale, or a loan from abroad, one must reckon with the melody, or the singing of ballads, with the dance, with the refrain or chorus, and with the important element of spontaneity. As a negative but essential element, one must include absolute ignorance of solitary composition and of the ideas attached to literary ownership as we know it. VIII. No one denies the singing of ballads, and for early times no one will deny the prevailingly social character of singing. We know of many ballad-tunes, some of them still current ; ^ and evidence is overwhelming that an unsung ballad may go for a contradiction in terms. With later ballads, instrumental accompaniment had its place ; ' but singing is always the chief consideration. 1 See Scherer, Poetik, p. ii6, on the origin of myths. 2 See Chappell, Bohme, and other collections. Motherwell, in the Appendix to his Minstrelsy^ gives thirty-three such tunes taken down from the singing. See also F. Wolf, Proben portugiesischer . . . Volksromanzeftj above, p- 45. 8 For the instruments, see Chappell, I, 247 f., and Ritson, Anc. Songs and Ballads, p. xHx ff., together with Drayton's PolyolbioUy Song iv. Digitized by LjOOQIC