He was • brew gallant, And he played at the glove; And the bonny Earl of Murray, Oh he was the Queen'. love! A moment's reflection will show how suit able such a device is to communal improvisa tion and how naturally it is derived from it. As for the refrain, the part played by the crowd in the singing of it does not need to be argued.
It is not implied that all ballads showing incremental repetition and preserving refrains were thus composed by a throng. For most, perhaps for all, of our extant ballads it is probably safe to assume a single original au thor, whose name and circumstances are now hopelessly lost, but who first gave each ballad a definite form. But even when making this assumption, we must bear in mind the fact that he worked after models which went back ultimately to communal products, that he worked in a period when it was still possible to compose in the communal spirit, that he used for the most part popular material and, finally, that his product has been transmitted orally through generations who altered and modified till whatever of personal existed in the first form has been obliterated. Thus, if the famous phrase, gdas Volk dichtet,' can not be used of the ballads we read to-day in the sense in which it was true of the earliest communal chants, it still holds to this extent that, in so far as a given specimen approaches the pure ballad type, it fails to exhibit the marks of any handiwork but that of the folk.
The ballad thus stands at the remote end of that line of development at the hither end of which we find the modern subjective lyric such as the sonnet. The curve which lies be tween shows the tendency running through the history of poetry to have been to empha size more and more the individuality of the author, to relegate the people more and more to the place of mere audience. We are pre pared to find, then, many features in the his tory_ of ballads highly dissimilar and even con tradictory to those of modern literature. Thus the life of a modern poem begins when it is committed to paper: a ballad then begins to die. It lives only while it is still being trans nutted orally from generation to generation, receiving from each its stamp. A modern poem has one authentic text: a ballad may have many texts, varying in number with the extent of territory over which it was sung, but no single authoritative text. A modern poem avoids explicit borrowing: the ballad absorbs and assimilates freely numbers of *commonplaces,"— phrases, lines and even sets of stanzas that appear with equal appropriate ness in half a dozen different ballads and are the exclusive property of none. Such are the formulas for sending a messenger, O whaur will I get a bonny boy, etc.; for ordering .a horse, O saddle me the black, the black, 0 saddle me the brown; for describing a journey, They gaen • mile, a mile, A mile t barely three; for concluding a romantic tragedy, The Sane was burried in Mary's kirk The tither in Mary's quire, And out of the ane there grew a birk, And out of the ither • brier, etc.
A modern poet seeks novelty of epithet: the ballad clings to the traditional description; the gold is red, the lady is fair, her dress is grass green, her hair is yellow, her tears are salt, the moon's light is clear, the porter is proud, brothers are bold, a bower is and so on.
Equally characteristic is the treatment of incident and plot in the ballad. There is sel dom any introduction: we plunge at once into the midst of the action. The stanzas leap from peak to peak of the narrative, with no attempt to supply the less important links, yet seldom with any real sacrifice of clearness. The events in the uncontaminated ballad are unmoralized and • unsentimentalized; the bald fact is left without comment or criticism from the singer. Conscious figures of speech are rare and the background is seldom filled in. Thus the gen eral result is that of rapidity of motion, direct ness and unconsciousness of effect, an absence of artistic suggestion. Whenever we find a moral drawn or a dwelling on the pathetic, in terpolation by a modern would-be artist is to be suspected.
From what has been said of origins, it is clear that little can be guessed as to the date of composition of ballads. Some, notably those simple, highly typical stories like