Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 02.djvu/490

BALLAD. handed down orally, and thus underwent con- stant changes. Accordingly, unlike modern po- ems, the popular ballad has no individual author, and the treatment of the theme, whether war, crime, love, or enchantment, was thus always objective, there being no poet to thrust forward his own emotions. These ballads make their ap- peal directly to the common feelings of love, hate, fear, shame, and grief, by means of a great va- riety of incident. Some of them are humorous, being merely fabliaux in ballad-measure; some are versions of current romances, but the best of them spring from native tradition. It was long ago observed that the ballads of various na- tions are frequently based upon the same or simi- lar incidents ; and the tracing of the development of these primitive MiircJicii, whether they were carried from people to people by wandering min- strels or are the common inheritance of the Indo- European races, is of more interest and value to the student of folk-lore than is the study of their form to the historian of poetry.

All the British ballads, in their present form, are of comparatively recent date; the oldest manuscript now c-visting is assigned to the first quarter of the Fifteenth Century. But there are allusions to Robin Hood, by Langland. fifty or more years earlier; and, according to Child, this story undoubtedly began to assume a ballad form as early as the Thirteenth Century. There is no reason, in any case, to doubt that the Anglo- Saxons had their narrative songs; indeed, Taci- tus speaks of certain carniina among the Ger- manic peoples, though none of these have survived independently, being fused in such connected works as Seoiriilf and the Nibelungenlied. Of British ballads, tho.se in the Scotch dialect are the best, being nmch more spirited than those composed in England. This may be accounted for partly by tlie fact that in the North their traditional form was long preserved, while in the South they got into print early, and ^vere thus sul)jcctcd to a kind of revision which amounted to mutilation. It is difficult to make a selection, owing to the abundance of material, but among the best known are the "Gest of Robin Hood." a scries of liallads forming a miniature epic; "The Hunting of the Cheviot;" "Sir Patrick Spens;" "Mary Hamilton;" "The Wife of Usher's Well;" "The Twa Corbies;" "Clerk Saunders," and "Fair Helen of Kirkconnel Lea." All these old ballads were intended for a musical setting. If short, they were sung; if of considerable length, they were chanted, often by professional minstrels, to the accompaniment of some instrument, as the harp or fiddle. The typical stanza (though sub- ject to variations) consists of tworhyraingverses, each having seven accents, divided into lines of four and three accents. Ballads were always popular in England, althougli after the invention of printing they were not so commonly sung. In the Eighteenth Century, a great revival of inter- est in the older ballad literature took place, stiuuilated largely by the pulilication, in I7(i3, of Percy's ItcUi/iies of Ancient ICiiriUsh I'octry, de- rived mainly from a Seventeenth Century manu- script. Other famous collections followed: Scott's Border M instrelsy (1802-03) and iMother- well's Minstrelsy, Ancient and Modern (1827). The influence of Percy's book was very great, in both England and (iernuiny. It led to a whole class of imitative ballad literature, of which may be mentioned Biirger's "Lenore," Coleridge's "Ancient JIariner," Tennyson's "Re- engc, ''and Rossetti's"King's Tragedy." Such imi- tators, however, have rather taken suggestions from than held close to the older ballad form, and have especially departed from their models in the in- trusion of the su'njective note characteristic of modern poetry. In fact, the paramount interest of the revival of balladry lies in the fact that it broke up the exclusive domination of the heroic couplet, and led to freer versification.

The oldest extant German ballad of the kind described under this title is the famous Uildc- hrandslied, which can be traced to the Eighth Century, and is the only survivor of its period and class. By the middle of the Twelfth Cen- tury, the development of German poetry, despite all Romance influences, had definitely won its greatest triumphs in the field of native ballad literature. By 1300, the courtly minnesinger had begun to give place to the bourffcois meister- singer; and the latter, for two centuries, summed up the poetical life of the nation in their ballads. The Si.Kteenth Century was a period of rapid de- cline, as in England; and it was not, as already indicated, until Percy's influence on Herder and Burger had caused a revival of interest that the ballad again came to the front, and was during the Nineteenth Century a subject of wide literary interest.

Among the Latin nations the Spaniards possess the richest ballad literature. Here the fact that the ballad preceded the romance is easy of demon- stration. The simjde emotions of the people are vividly depicted in the capias, seguidillas, and tnui'iciras which sjirang up in great numbers. The octosyllabic line was the commonest metre, and assonance was used instead of rhyme.

The ballads (pjesme) of Servia, while com- paratively little known, deserve an important place in any general treatment of the subject. Their history is at least as long as that of the Western ballads ; and the researches of recent scholars, especially Vuk Stephanovich ( 1787- 1864), have succeeded in accumulating in per- nument form a vast mass of them which possess the same general characteristics in subject as the other ballads, while as to form the older ones are generally composed in fifteen and sixteen syllable lines, the modern in decasyllabic metre. As a nation comparatively untouched by modern unifying civilization, the Servians are still pro- ducing, or maintaining in popular use, ballads which look upon life from the simple primitive point of view, which has long been lost in the West.

. For English and Scottish ballads, Percy, Folio Manuscript, 3 vols., ed. Hales & Furnivall (London, 1807-68) : a good preparatory book is Ginnmere, Old English ballads (Boston, 1804); the best general work, Child, English and Scottish Popular Ballads, 5 vols. (Boston, 1883-98) ; the last volume contains an almost exhaustive bibliography.

For the German, Uhland, Alte hoch- und nic- dercTeutsche VolksUcder, 4 vols., 3d ed. (Leipzig, 1892) ; Scherer, Die schiinsten deutschen Volks- iieder (Leipzig, 1808) ; Simrock, Lieder der Minnesinger (Elberfeld, 18.57).

For the Spanish, Marin, Cantos populares espai'wles, 5 vols. (Madrid, 1882-83); Biblioteca de las tradiciones populares, 11 vols. (Seville, 1883) ; Biihl von Faber, Floresta de rimas anti- giias casfcUauas, 3 vols. (Hamburg, 1821-25) ;