Book of Old English Ballads | Page 5

hanging on the words of an old man, of
kindly face, expressive eyes, and melodious voice, from whose lips
flowed a marvellous song; grave and gay by turns, monotonous and
passionate in succession; but wonderfully fresh, picturesque, and
fascinating. The listener soon became aware that he was hearing, for
the first time, the famous story of "Sadko, the Merchant of Novgorod."
It was like being present at the birth of a piece of literature!
The fact that unwritten songs and stories still exist in great numbers

among remote country-folk of our own time, and that additions are still
made to them, help us to understand the probable origin of our own
popular ballads, and what community authorship may really mean. To
put ourselves, even in thought, in touch with the balladmaking period
in English and Scotch history, we must dismiss from our minds all
modern ideas of authorship; all notions of individual origination and
ownership of any form of words. Professor ten Brink tells us that in the
ballad-making age there was no production; there was only
reproduction. There was a stock of traditions, memories, experiences,
held in common by large populations, in constant use on the lips of
numberless persons; told and retold in many forms, with countless
changes, variations, and modifications; without conscious artistic
purpose, with no sense of personal control or possession, with no
constructive aim either in plot or treatment; no composition in the
modern sense of the term. Such a mass of poetic material in the
possession of a large community was, in a sense, fluid, and ran into a
thousand forms almost without direction or premeditation. Constant use
of such rich material gave a poetic turn of thought and speech to
countless persons who, under other conditions, would have given no
sign of the possession of the faculty of imagination.
There was not only the stimulus to the faculty which sees events and
occurrences with the eyes of the imagination, but there was also
constant and familiar use of the language of poetry. To speak metrically
or rhythmically is no difficult matter if one is in the atmosphere or
habit of verse-making; and there is nothing surprising either in the feats
of memory or of improvisation performed by the minstrels and
balladists of the old time. The faculty of
improvising was easily
developed and was very generally used by people of all classes. This
facility is still possessed by rural populations, among whom songs are
still composed as they are sting, each member of the company
contributing a new verse or a variation, suggested by local conditions,
of a well-known stanza. When to the possession of a mass of traditions
and stories and of facility of improvisation is added the habit of singing
and dancing, it is not difficult to reconstruct in our own thought the
conditions under which popular poetry came into being, nor to
understand in what sense a community can make its own songs. In the

brave days when ballads were made, the rustic peoples were not mute,
as they are to-day; nor sad, as they have become in so many parts of
England. They sang and they danced by instinct and as an expression of
social feeling. Originally the ballads were not only sung, but they gave
measure to the dance; they grew from mouth to mouth in the very act of
dancing; individual dancers adding verse to verse, and the frequent
refrain coming in as a kind of chorus. Gesture and, to a certain extent,
acting would naturally accompany so free and general an expression of
community feeling. There was no poet, because all were poets. To
quote Professor ten Brink once more:--
"Song and playing were cultivated by peasants, and even by freedmen
and serfs. At beer-feasts the harp went from hand to hand. Herein lies
the essential difference between that age and our own. The result of
poetical activity was not the property and was not the production of a
single person, but of the community. The work of the individual
endured only as long as its delivery lasted. He gained personal
distinction only as a virtuoso. The permanent elements of what he
presented, the material, the ideas, even the style and metre, already
existed. 'The work of the singer was only a ripple in the stream of
national poetry. Who can say how much the individual contributed to it,
or where in his poetical recitation memory ceased and creative impulse
began! In any case the work of the individual lived on only as the ideal
possession of the aggregate body of the people, and it soon lost the
stamp of originality. In view of such a development of poetry, we must
assume a time when the collective consciousness of a people or race is
paramount in its unity; when