Page:The Ballads of Marko Kraljević.djvu/15

 N the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, before Western Europe suspected the existence of a great traditional folk-poetry among the Southern Slavs, the literati of Ragusa had occasionally amused themselves by writing down the songs and ballads current among the people. These manuscript copies were handed round and read within the very small and select circle of the initiate, but remained unknown to the outer world until the middle of the nineteenth century. There was one important exception. This was the work of the Franciscan monk Andrija Kačić Miošić, who, in 1756, published in Venice his Razgovor ugodni naroda slovinskoga, a book which had immediate success in Dalmatia and the islands. It was not a collection of genuine folk-songs, although the old traditional themes formed the basis of it. Kačić was fired with a missionary zeal for what he conceived to be historical truth, and as he was deeply read in the chronicles of his race, he altered, adapted and supplemented his material accordingly. The result which he aimed at, and which he achieved, was to produce an ordered account of Slavonic kings and heroes in such form as would make the strongest appeal to his fellow-countrymen by stimulating their pride of race. In the whole collection there are only two or three indubitable folk-ballads, and even these have been manipulated in the interest of an illusory truth to fact. Notwithstanding the artifice of the work,