Book of Old English Ballads | Page 3

people, or a creation of the
imagination of the people; but the tradition or fact which it preserves is

of local, rather than national importance. It is indifferent to nice
distinctions and delicate gradations or shadings; its power springs from
its directness, vigour, and simplicity. It is often entirely occupied with
the narration or description of a single episode; it has no room for
dialogue, but it often secures the effect of the dialogue by its
unconventional freedom of phrase, and sometimes by the introduction
of brief and compact charge and denial, question and reply. Sometimes
the incidents upon which the ballad makers fastened, have a unity or
connection with each other which hints at a complete story. The ballads
which deal with Robin Hood are so numerous and so closely related
that they constantly suggest, not only the possibility, but the probability
of epic treatment. It is surprising that the richness of the material, and
its notable illustrative quality, did not inspire some earlier Chaucer to
combine the incidents in a sustained narrative. But the epic poet did not
appear, and the most
representative of English popular heroes
remains the central figure in a series of detached episodes and
adventures, preserved in a long line of disconnected ballads.
This apparent arrest, in the ballad stage, of a story which seemed
destined to become an epic, naturally suggests the vexed question of
the author ship of the popular ballads. They are in a very real sense the
songs of the people; they make no claim to individual authorship; on
the contrary, the inference of what may be called community
authorship is, in many instances, irresistible. They are the product of a
social condition which, so to speak, holds song of this kind in solution;
of an age in which improvisation, singing, and dancing are the most
natural and familiar forms of expression. They deal almost without
exception with matters which belong to the community memory or
imagination; they constantly reappear with variations so noticeable as
to indicate free and common handling of themes of wide local interest.
All this is true of the popular ballad; but all this does not decisively
settle the question of authorship. What share did the community have in
the making of these songs, and what share fell to individual singers?
Herder, whose conception of the origin and function of literature was
so vitalizing in the general aridity of thinking about the middle of the
last century, and who did even more for ballad verse in Germany than

Bishop Percy did in England, laid emphasis almost exclusively on
community authorship. His profound instinct for reality in all forms of
art, his deep feeling for life, and the immense importance he attached to
spontaneity and unconsciousness in the truest productivity made
community authorship not only
attractive but inevitable to him. In his
pronounced reaction against the superficial ideas of literature so widely
held in the Germany of his time, he espoused the conception of
community authorship as the only possible explanation of the epics,
ballads, and other folk-songs. In nature and popular life, or universal
experience, he found the rich sources of the poetry whose charm he felt
so deeply, and whose power and beauty he did so much to reveal to his
contemporaries. Genius and nature are magical words with him,
because they suggested such depths of being under all forms of
expression; such unity of the whole being of a race in its thought, its
emotion, and its action; such entire unconsciousness of self or of
formulated aim, and such spontaneity of spirit and speech. The
language of those times, when words had not yet been divided into
nobles, middle-class, and plebeians, was, he said, the richest for
poetical purposes. "Our tongue, compared with the idiom of the savage,
seems adapted rather for reflection than for the senses or imagination.
The rhythm of popular verse is so delicate, so rapid, so precise, that it is
no easy matter to defect it with our eyes; but do not imagine it to have
been equally difficult for those living populations who listened to,
instead of reading it; who were accustomed to the sound of it from their
infancy; who themselves sang it, and whose ear had been formed by its
cadence." This conception of poetry as arising in the hearts of the
people and taking form on their lips is still more definitely and
strikingly expressed in two sentences, which let us into, the heart of
Herder's philosophy of poetry: "Poetry in those happy days lived in the
ears of the people, on the lips and in the harps of living bards; it sang of
history, of the events of the day, of mysteries, miracles, and signs. It
was the flower of a nation's character, language, and country; of its
occupations,