Book of Old English Ballads | Page 5

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 the intellectual life of each is nourished from the same treasury of views and associations, of myths and sagas; when similar interests stir each breast; and the ethical judgment of all applies itself to the same standard. In such an age the form of poetical expression will also be common to all, necessarily