Page:Old English ballads by Francis Barton Gummere (1894).djvu/88

lxxxii Ixxxii INTRODUCTION. Winter has left us no pleasance at ally Lea/age and heather have fled with the fall, Bare is the forest and dumb as a thrall : If the girls by the roadside were tossing the ball, I could prick up my ears for the singing-birds'* call ! ^ The dancing-song has died out with the good old way of dancing, known now by none but children. Neocorus asserts that before 1559 dancing by pairs or couples was unknown among his happy breed of men ; it was the throng, the community, a ring of merry folk going hand in hand, winding and changing, with all voices raised to make the only music. Many considerations already urged, joined with such a statement as that quoted from Bohme in regard to the origin of our oldest narrative folksongs in the dance itself, show how carefully one should regard this singing, dancing, improvising multi- tude, befor^ one says a last word on the origin of the ballad. To be sure, there is much talk about a leader,^ one who begins song as well as step ; but the more prim- itive the dance, the less he had to do.^ Only in later times was conduct of the dance or singing of new verses assigned to one man. Still another advance from prim- itive ways was the separation of the dance from the song ; the former became an affair of couples and instrumental music, the latter, entertainment by a singer with more or 1 Bohme, Tanzy p. 4, is inclined to give " ball " equal rights in the facts and etymology of " ballad." He says that " in the dance our oldest epic poems, — narrative folksongs, — were sung, and the dance was the cause of their making ; the dance, and the game of ball that went with it, gave to these poems the name of ballad.''* 2 " Der des voresingens phlac, Daz was Friderich," says Neidhart in description of a peasants' dance : Deutsche Liederdichter,^ Bartsch- Golther, xxv, vv. 405 f. 8 One must carefully distinguish this leader of a communal dance from the artists in dancing, the gleemen, tumblers, jugglers and glee-maidens who are so frequent in pictures in the old MSS. Digitized by LjOOQIC