Page:Old English ballads by Francis Barton Gummere (1894).djvu/98

xcii xcii INTRODUCTION. we may be inclined to regard its later forms, with an evident survival of what we are fain to call communal poetry. Significant is the gathering of harvesters, — once perhaps a whole tribe, or at least, a community, in united religious rites; significant are the dance and its impro- vised song. Even the scurrilous quatrain points the same way; it is the spontaneous conversion of a situation into a ballad; and how well this ancient " chaff " could rival the very wheat of our modern and labored revilings — Robert Browning on Fitzgerald, for instance, or Mr. Swinburne in his severely humorous moments — is matter of record. Plenty of evidence is forthcoming to prove how far a peasant even now surpasses, in this power of spontaneous verse-making, the man of culture and of learning.^ As regards the main question, moreover, it is well to note that a recent critic combats the deriva- tion of isolated quatrains from some longer poem,^ and maintains that such forms as the schnaderhiipfel are in themselves the original, here and there form- ing a ballad by the slow accretion of many separate songs.^ There is, then, no doubt in regard to the frequency of improvisation down to this day, not of the ballad, to be sure, but of what in better times would have gone to the making of the ballad. Even some modern ballads seem to have this spontaneous if not communal origin. In the preface written for a translation of contemporary ^ G. Meyer, p. 352, speaks of Weimar peasants who sit in company and make couplet after couplet, mostly merry, and often coarse. 2 Ibid.^ p. 375 f. Landstad, in his treatment of the stev^ leaned to this theory of fragments. tendency to the quatrain, with added refrain or chorus, and also with the assonance and other peculiarities of an old ballad. See Newell, Games and Songs of American Children^ p. 10 f. Digitized by LjOOQIC
 * It is interesting to note in the rimes used for children's games a