The ballad - Index of

The Ballad
It is naturally objectionable to the scientific
mind to be confronted with the existence of
something for which it cannot account ;
the
theorist's ultimate question, " How can it be
"
otherwise is to him simply a refuge for the
destitute. But it is the comparative triviality of
the ballad a form of mere human amusement
that has allowed its origin and history to become
obscured, and has challenged, in the last century
or so, the investigation of scholars. We have
gradually awakened to the fact that there are in
existence, the world over, a number of narrative
tales in stanzaic verse, essentially simple and impersonal,
which display not only a distinctive
stylepbut a common international stock of subjects,
ideas, conventions and phraseology. To
put it at the lowest, it is queer that the various
European races should tell the same story
in the
same metre in several different languages. It is
curious that in the twentieth century you should
be able to hear an illiterate rustic sing a song
almost in the very words in which you have read
it in an ancient manuscript. It seems to require
the attention of students, when English peasants
of to-day shyly evoke from their memories a
carol containing legends recorded in the pseudo-
Gospels. Surely the scientist is more needed
than the literary scholar
The Miltonic investigator, to recur to our
former instance, having before him a number of