To these refrains of the dance we shall return in due time; the bulk of popular lyric is simple, rural, but not communal. There remain the epic survival, the ballad, and popular rimes. Epic in the larger sense is not to be considered here; for it comes down to us at the hands of art, communal as it may have been in its beginnings, and it is not a simple contemporary note of deeds which have a merely local and social interest, a stage of development common to most traditional ballads.[[367]] One sees, if one will glance at the actual ballad, why theories of Niebuhr and of Buckle about the foundation of history in artless chronicles of this communal type must be taken with great reserve[[368]] and reduced to very slender assertion. Not in early history, not even in the great epics, not even by help of the Homeric question, can one study communal elements to the best advantage, but rather in simple ballads of tradition, in the communal narrative song.[[369]] It is sung, danced,—hence the rhythm of it; it tells of some communal happening—“the germ of folksong is an event,” says Böckel,[[370]]—hence the narrative.
What, now, are the tests and characteristics about which writers on the ballad are agreed? All agree that it is a narrative song usually preserved by oral tradition of the people. With few and unimportant exceptions, it is agreed that a ballad must be the expression and outcome of a homogeneous and unlettered community;[[371]] the dispute is about origins. Grimm and sundry of his day declared that the community itself made the ballad; Grundtvig said the same thing, and Ten Brink, following certain modifications of Steinthal, held the people, and not an individual poet, responsible for the making as well as the singing. Ferdinand Wolf[[372]] was sturdy enough in his scorn for the “nebulous poet-aggregate called folk,” although he clung to the homogeneous community as absolute condition; and his task was to find a representative who could make the ballad to express such a community. Since ballads deal mainly with knights and persons of rank, he concluded, as Geijer had done, that they were due to “a person of quality”; Prior, the translator,[[373]] went even a step farther and was inclined to think that for Scandinavian ballads, and presumably other poems of the class, one is indebted “to the ladies.” Prior is negligible. But Wolf was careful in his statement; and when he noted the predominance of aristocratic persons in the deeds which these ballads sing, he knew that it was a common trait in all heroic and early epic. Germanic poems of this class, the Béowulf, the Hildebrand Lay, what not, regard only such characters and not the common man. As Dr. R. M. Meyer points out, this is even carried into the lifeless world, and all things are in superlative; all is splendid, unusual, extreme.[[374]] Even Icelandic sagas deal only with the representative man, with distinguished and notable folk.[[375]] So Wolf simply said that the ballad was made in this class of society, in a homogeneous class, a volk von rittern as he calls it,[[376]] who mainly “sang their own deeds,”—an important concession. Even if one granted this, and allowed the court poet himself to appear in an impersonal way as deputy of the knights in singing about their deeds, it would still be far from individual and deliberate poetry of art, but rather poetry of the guild with a definite theme, traditional form, and recurrent phrases from the common poetic stock.[[377]] However, the homogeneous and unlettered conditions of a ballad-making community are in themselves enough to account for this preference of rank; the knight, chieftain, warrior, represented his folk, and was hardly raised above them in any intellectual way. Not only were all the members of a community consolidated, at first, against hunger, cold, and hostile tribes, the primitive homogeneity of the horde, but even later, in mediæval civilization, the same roof often covered the knight and his humblest retainer, the same food fed them, and both were marked by the same standards of action, the same habit of thought, the same sentiments, the same lack of letters,[[378]] of introspection, of diversified mental employment. Even in rural England such conditions lingered long; Overbury’s franklin[[379]] “says not to his servants, Goe to field, but Let us goe;” and at the harvest home, where old songs prevail even in modern times, there is “no distinction of persons, but master and servant sit at the same table, converse freely together, and spend the remainder of the night in dancing and singing, on terms of easy familiarity.”[[380]] How this state of things is intensified in the Highland clan, every one knows; and in going back to the horde there can be no doubt in regard to the sharp curve toward communal conditions and communal expression. Now as to those aristocratic personages of the ballad, the canticles of love and woe which come from such a community would of course put in the foreground of action persons who actually filled the foreground of its life. The ballad represented a compact communal life, and this passed into song in the person of its best representative; hence the panegyric found in all early poetry, the praise of great men who are made one with “the fathers who begat us,” not to be explained away as work of Scherer’s primitive minstrel, liar and entertainer passing about his hat for primitive pence. It is with modern conditions of life, and with the diversity of modern thought, that art comes down to the middle classes,—what throes were needed to bring the domestic or citizen tragedy to light!—then to the artisan, to peasants, and finally to the outcast, the criminal, the degenerate, as in sundry clever sketches of Alexander Kielland. Homogeneous conditions are first broken by cities, and linger longest in the country; they were particularly strong in primitive agricultural life;[[381]] and it is in communities of this sort, remote, islanded in the sea of civilization, that most of the traditional ballads have been found. When one thinks of this poetry at its best estate, one must have the old continent and not these sinking islands before one’s thought. Nor is the lowest form of culture, degraded and sordid, even when of this homogeneous kind, to be taken as model for the past. One is loath to think of the old ballad community in terms of Zola’s Terre.
There is, however, another way by which one could account for aristocratic personages and doings of the ballad; this wayside strolling muse may be dressed in the clothes cast off by her high-born sisters of epic and romance. This, as was said above, F. Wolf[[382]] denied; but J. F. Campbell[[383]] defines the ballad somewhat in such terms. Mr. Newell[[384]] thinks the folk-tale a degenerate form, in low levels of culture, of something composed on higher levels and at an earlier time; as if once D’Urberville, now Durbeyfield. Often true for the material of an individual ballad, this is not true of its real elements, of the ballad qua ballad, and of its form and vital characteristics. The pattern of ballads whence one will;[[385]] the stuff of the ballad is communal. If the ballad as a form of poetry were a mere ragbag of romance, one would find in it tags of old phrases, ambitious figures, tricks and turns of speech, change in metrical structure, and all manner of crumbs from the literary table; but these are conspicuous by their absence. The ballad as ballad is original. Count Nigra[[386]] gives an important reason for this point of view when he notes that the materials of a ballad go anywhere, pass all borders, while metre, rime, and form in general, are borrowed only from popoli omoglotti. The ballads employ speech at first hand, no borrowed phrases, a simple, living language; and always the feeling and the expression are coördinate. The ballad is no foul and spent stream that has turned millwheels, run through barnyards, and at last found its way to a ditch; it is wild water, and not far from its source in the mountains. One proof lies in the drinking of it. Ballads still hold their own as the nearest approach to primitive poetry preserved among civilized nations, scanty as the records are; and after infinite discussion of Homeric and other theories, the ballad remains in its old position at the gates of every national literature.[[387]] The farther one comes into the conditions which made for the ballad, this homogeneous community, this unlettered and undeliberative habit of mind, so much wider one finds diffused the power of improvising and singing verses in a style which is easy to bring into line with the style of traditional ballads. For the ballad in its purity was always sung, and singing is a primary process; romances were recited. In other words, power to make poetry of this sort does not begin with the rich and foremost few, and spread slowly among the lower classes; it begins, this is beyond all doubt,[[388]] as a universal gift, and only with the rise of classes and the diversity of mental training, lettered against unlettered, is the power restricted to a narrow range.
Well, the ballad as species is no making of mediæval aristocrats, ladies or knights, no shards of chivalry and romance; but what of the minstrel? Bishop Percy, Scott, and of late Professor Courthope and Mr. Henderson, have looked to the minstrel to explain the ballad and all its ways. Doubtless many a minstrel made ballads, or rather sang them into modern shape; but the minstrel is merely a link between later artistic poetry and older communal song. He cannot explain this communal song, for he cannot explain the elements of it,—festal crowd, dance, singing, rapid and universal improvisation, repetition, refrain; he inherits what these leave as they vanish from living poetry; and that is all. He does not explain them, but they explain him. Professor Child distinguishes between the “minstrel ballad” and the “popular ballad”;[[389]] but one is willing to hand over better stuff to this amiable rover and allow him a share in many good songs, without prejudice of any kind to the real communal theory. Gustav Meyer, however, one of the ablest scholars that modern Germany has produced, puts[[390]] the wane of balladry at the point where improvisation by men and women in the fields and round the village linden ceases, and where the minstrel brotherhood, whether blind singers, rhapsodes, or what not, begins.[[391]] The minstrel ballad is only a stage on that broad road which ends in the stalls; while, conversely, a ballad of the stalls may often hide real poetry of tradition under an ignoble garment. It is clear, then, that the “I” of a ballad ought to disturb the idea of communal origins as little as the borrowed subject does; but when one forgets the singing, dancing, improvising crowd, and thinks of poetry only in terms of modern literary composition, inference is made that ought not to be made at all. Professor Francke,[[392]] for example, thinks that the “I” of a German folksong, or that tag at the end which declares the song to have been made by a student, a pilgrim, a fisherman, is proof positive that ballads had individual authorship. The song is a folksong, he says, simply and solely because folk take it up and sing it; thus the often quoted Limburg Chronicle noted that “this year” the folk sang so-and-so, and all men know that in 1898 the American “folk” sang by preference There’ll be a Hot Time. Böhme,[[393]] indeed, thinks that a leprous monk[[394]] mentioned in the Limburg Chronicle, whose tunes and songs had such a vogue five hundred years ago, brings to light the secrets of the origins of popular poetry. It is odd, however, that Böhme goes on to show how popular poetry differs from the poetry of art, and asks, with great naïveté, why one should ever ask for the author of a folksong, seeing that it was never really composed at all! “It was a masterless and nameless affair,” he says; and proceeds to quote—Jacob Grimm. But for serious answer, it is plain that folksong is an equivocal term. Most of the popular songs, by their nature, must be individual; the universal appeal, the fact that all the world loves a lover, does not make them communal. It was a lad and a lover who sang Innsprück, ich muss dich lassen; and it needs no signature. But from this ich to the “I” of the tags which one finds at the end of narrative ballads of tradition, is a far cry; indeed there is a gulf between them. When one comes to the refrain, which always expresses or implies a “we,” there is absolutely no chance for “I”; but writers on ballads give the refrain a wide berth. However, leave this refrain out of the reckoning; even in actual ballads the “I” is oftenest a mere recorder’s signature, and simply mediates between the reader and communal origins. With most English and Scottish ballads there is no “I” in the case; but even if one could find for each and all of these ballads signs of such a singer, editor, recorder, there would still remain behind this “I” certain facts, certain elements, which demand a totally different explanation. Let us look at another declaration of authorship. A Breton song,[[395]] called The Good Old Times and sung by workingmen, ends with these verses:—
This song was made on the eve of Lady Day after supper.
It was made by twelve men dancing on the knoll by the chapel.
Three are ragpickers; seven sow the rye; two are millers.
And so it is made, O folk, so it is made, and so it is made, this song!
Suppose, on the other side of the account,[[396]] one should proclaim this as a great find to offset the leprous monk; here, by explicit statement, is a ballad made by twelve labourers of one mind,[[397]] here is the communal song,—and so forth! But the statement, interesting as it is, does nothing for any theory of authorship; what concerns one here is the evident dance, the folk assembled, the knoll by the chapel, the repetition, and the refrain, which is more prominent in other parts of the long ballad: in a word, the communal elements. Let us hear what these elements really are. “So,” runs Villemarqué’s note to this ballad, “so the mountain folk sing, holding one another by the hand, and continually making a half-circle from left to right, then right to left,[[398]] raising and dropping their hands in concert to the cadence, and leaping after the fashion of the ritornello.” In fact, as Villemarqué had already said in his preface, “the greater part of these songs and ballads of the people are made in the same way. Conversation stirs the throng to excitement; ‘let us make a dance-song!’ cries some one, and it is done.... The texture, due to the general mood, has unity, of course, but with a certain variety of parts. Each one weaves in his flower, according to his fancy, his humour, his trade.” This matter will be regarded more closely under the head of Improvisation; but the gemeinsames dichten is a fact, and the communal background is cleared of at least a part of the haze which hides it from modern view. In any case, these signatures[[399]] prove nothing either way; one must go below the surface and behind the signature, if one will come at the differencing qualities of communal poetry. Once more be it said that the present object is not to assert communal authorship, in any literal sense, for the ballad of the collections, but to show in it elements which cannot be referred to individual art, and which are of great use in determining the probable form and origins of primitive poetry. True, one might go farther; there are some strong statements made by scholars of great repute which definitely deny individual authorship, in any modern sense, for the ballad. Böckel,[[400]] speaking of more recent ballads, rejects, of course, the theory of Grimm, but makes the ballad spring from improvisation of a stanza or so in connection with traditional stanzas of the communal stock. That one ballad has one author, and is made in the way of modern composition of poetry, Böckel, who has studied the remains of rustic balladry with great care and thoroughness, denies again and again. Count Nigra, in the work just quoted, is very emphatic on this point. “This popular narrative song,” he says, “is anonymous. It is not improvised by a popular poet more or less known.” It requires “a period of incubation, upon which follows a long elaboration, which goes on with divers phases and changes, until the song falls, little by little, into oblivion, or else is fixed in the record.” All popular verse, he declares, like language, “is a spontaneous creation, essentially racial.”[[401]] M. Gaston Paris, too, would not lay much stress upon the “I” of a ballad; early popular poetry, he asserts,[[402]] is “improvised and contemporaneous with its facts”; and such songs[[403]] are not only “composed under the immediate impression of the event, but by those and for those who have taken part in it.” In line with evidence to be set forth below, he[[404]] cares little for the professional minstrels as a source of early popular song, and doubts their existence among the primitive Germans; for the skill to make and sing verses was as common then as the skill to fight, and warriors sang the songs which they themselves had made.[[405]]
But there is not only this negative evidence to dispose of the “I” in ballads. Hebrew poetry has been thought to touch the highest individual note in the “I” of the Psalms; but the best Hebrew scholars[[406]] now accept to a greater or less extent the notion that in many places, if not in all, this “I” is communal, and means the house or congregation of Israel. Smend[[407]] goes so far as to take the “I” throughout in this sense, and doubtless he goes too far; Budde[[408]] is on safer ground. But the consent of the best scholars is that “I” often means the community, and this, so Smend insists, not as a deliberate “personification” of Israel as a church, but in the unconscious and communal spirit of a homogeneous and intensely emotional body of people. So the Greek chorus, not simply the leader but the whole chorus,[[409]] speak often as “I”; and Smend quotes a stanza to the same effect from Horace’s Carmen Sæculare. It is clear that one is on the traces of a primitive habit which seems impossible to us only because we have no homogeneous conditions to bring about such a state of mind. Now and then a hint is gained from some survival, however faint, of these conditions. It is said that a Scot of the Border coming home to find his house plundered, could tell by sundry signs what hostile band had done the deed, and would invariably call them by the place where they lived: “Ettrickdale has been here!” One thinks of the tribes of Israel and of the way in which their names were used. Reuben, runs the text, “Reuben had great searchings of heart.” But here is theological ground, and we hasten back to the “I” of folksong. To this subject Professor Steenstrup devotes the third chapter of his book on Scandinavian ballads,[[410]] which are mainly heroic and strongly objective, in contrast to the more subjective and deliberate ballads of Germany. Now many of the Scandinavian ballads begin with the familiar phrase, “I will sing you—or tell you—a song,” and proceed in the second stanza with actual narrative; a comparison of manuscripts, however, shows that it is mainly late copies which begin with this “I” stanza, while earlier copies omit it. In English ballads the “I” is quite as separable and negligible; sometimes, in songs and catches, it is used for mystification:[[411]]—