Page:The Ballads of Marko Kraljević.djvu/45

 The ballads are not divided into separate verses or stanzas, but as a rule the minstrel pauses after every four or five lines and the plaintive cry of the gusle fills in the pause. It is as if one listened to the thin echo of the recitative, and in the proper surroundings the effect has an impressiveness of its own. Many peasants can perform creditably on the instrument, but naturally their repertoire is small compared with that of the professional bard who is now rarely met with in Serbia. That, at least, is my own experience, for during a stay of some four years in the course of which I had occasion to travel through the greater part of the country, I came across no more than three men to whom the term "Guslar" might properly be applied.

An interesting point arises in connection with the poems as chanted or even read aloud. The natural accentuation of the words has to yield to the exigencies of the metre in a very remarkable way, and it has been suggested that this marked peculiarity may have some bearing "on the unelucidated question of Greek accent and quantity ."

The epic songs fall into two divisions:

(a) Those having a long line of fifteen or sixteen syllables, caesura after the seventh or eighth syllable, and a short recurring burden or refrain (pesme dugog stiha).

(b) Those having a decasyllabic line, caesura after the fourth syllable, and no refrain (pesme kratkog stiha).

The former are the older of the two and date back at least as far as the fourteenth century. Only about a hundred have survived, whereas there are thousands of specimens of the decasyllabic poems now extant. The themes of the older verses reappear in many of the later ballads but it is important to note that, whereas the ten-syllable poems are known and sung every-