Page:Old English ballads by Francis Barton Gummere (1894).djvu/80

lxxiv Ixxiv INTRODUCTION. the longer English ballads were often sung, as Chappell distinctly affirms ; and the ordinary ballad, probably all primitive ballads whatsoever, were inseparable from song. Ballads were made for singing, and to some extent were made in singing. The melody was by no means the device of a minstrel to entertain the throng, of King Horn were recited, the dialogue — always in stricter stanzaic forai — was sung ; and this would somewhat resemble the mixed song and story (in prose) mentioned by Motherwell in his account of certain Scottish ballads {Minstrelsy, Amer. ed., I, 19 ff.) and exemplified by Pitcaim's version of " The Lass of Roch Royal," note to Child, Ballads, II, 225 (Part III) Version C, or by Version H in "The Maid Freed from the Gallows," II, 354, — here, however, in a vanishing ratio of recitation or comment. It should be remembered that not only does Scherer (see p. lix, above) regard this mingling of prose and verse as the primitive form of epic, but Joseph Jacobs (note to " Childe Rowland," in English Fairy- Tales, p. 240), discussing the cante-fable, remarks : " It is indeed unlikely that the ballad itself began as continuous verse, and the cante-fable is probably the protoplasm out of which both ballad and folk-tale have been differentiated." That " unlikely," however, very prettily begs the whole question ; and Jamieson's account {Illustrations of Northern Antiquities, p. 408) of the romance under discussion, as it was told to him by a country tailor, "an ignorant and dull good sort of man," who " recited in a sort of formal, drowsy, measured, monotonous recitative," will most admirably fit the " say " of our formula, the artist's half of it, but not the " sing," which belongs to ballads of the crowd. Indeed, this seems the best solution of the whole question. "Sing and say" is the antithesis of throng and artist, a dancing multitude and a reciting " entertainer." — It is hardly necessary, so far as ballads are concerned, to take sides in the controversy between Sievers {Entstehung d. deutschen Reimverses, Paul-Braune, Beitrdge, XIII, 135 f.) and MoUer, (Z«r althochdeutschen Alliterationspoesie, 146 ff.). Whether early Ger- manic verse had no ordered sense of melody and time, — Vigfiisson indeed, speaks of " emphatic prose " {Corpus Poeticum Boreale, I, 434), — as Sievers asserts, or whether MoUer is right in his claims for takt, it may be safely assumed that actual ballad verse was always stanzaic and always sung. It was quite distinct from the continuous epic verse. Digitized by LjOOQIC