The ballad - Index of

inclusion of the Ballad as a subject
to be treated in a series of
manuals devoted to the
THE
study and
analysis of various forms of literature
ought to produce a shock similar to that
which a visitor to the Zoological Gardens would
experience on coming across a case containing an
ichthyosaurus. Such a person, moreover, provided
he were sufficiently perspicacious, would be
struck by
a contradiction in terms the ichthyosaurus
being known to be extinct, and " zoological
implying
"
life parallel to that which I
must force upon the reader's attention at the
outset. Because we are still under the influence
of an age that regarded ballads as it
regarded
literature, and because we are still instinctively
liable to the error of estimating the value of
ballads by means of the criteria we apply to
letters, it is necessary to emphasise, even at the
expense of overstating, the contrast between the
primitive and the more sophisticated forms of
human expression. A ballad is,
and always has
been, so far from being a literary form that it is,