Book of Old English Ballads | Page 3

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, its prejudices, its passions, its aspirations, and its soul." In these words, at once comprehensive and vague, after the manner of Herder, we find ourselves face to face with that conception not only of popular song in all its forms, but with literature as a whole, which has revolutionized literary study in