The ballad - Index of

The Ballad
form never had a refrain ;
and we have ballads
of which the surviving texts both include and do
not include refrains.
It is none the less dangerous to carry such a
generalisation too far in application to our
popular ballads. We are looking back on aeons
of man's social history ; seeking to resolve into
its constituent parts a pudding, composed of
many material ingredients and many volatile
essences (some of which we suspect have had a
permanent chemical influence, others of which
we may guess have vanished entirely), and stirred
But
by myriads of spoons throughout the ages.
it does seem possible
to distinguish in the consistency
of this pudding two elements which have
nowhere so completely amalgamated as to defy
analysis.
These result from two natural propensities
of the average human being what :
may
be called love of drama and love of narrative.
They are clearly distinct aesthetic interests the
;
former active, the latter passive ;
the former implying
collective passion, the latter implying the
satisfaction of an individual desire. Every one
must know the difference between children playing
a game together, and the same children listening
to a story.
The one propensity has produced
and innumerable mix-
Drama, the other Epic ;
tures of the two have produced an almost infinite
series of variations. The Homeric poems display
several of the characteristics of ballads ;
the