The ballad - Index of

The Ballad
tage. The zoologist Richard Owen, it is said,
could reconstruct from a single fossil bone the
skeleton, if not the bodily form, of the beast to
which it had belonged. We, unfortunately, have
no traffic with concrete things ;
we are dealing
with anthropology, psychology, linguistics,
and
their allies.
To Owen his fossil bone was literature
;
we have only lore. Folk-lore itself is one
of the youngest of sciences, an infant whose very
name is hardly seventy years old. Nevertheless,
if we cannot claim that the story of the ballad is
a venerable building, of old oak timber and
ancient brick, we may
affirm that, since the study
of folk-lore and of the origin of poetry was
seriously and scientifically undertaken, a sound
fabric has been constructed of reinforced concrete
: of an accumulation of theories cemented
and corroborated by
steel bars of fact.
Moreover, we may remember with advantage
that, in considering primitive conditions, we are
not necessarily forced to go back to primitive
times ;
besides the assistance promised by the
baby and the savage, we may derive help from
the fact that we are ourselves primitive in our
instincts from time to time. A modern civilised,
even cultured, young person on a holiday on
(i.e.
an occasion when Culture is disposed to relax
her constraint) tends to revert to the primitive ;
and I would dare to assert that a company of such
persons, under such conditions, can and do pro-
B 17