t one
may call poetry of the schools. Very early in the history of the ballad,
a demand for more art must have called out or at least emphasized the
artist, the poet, who chanted new verses while the throng kept up the
refrain or burden. Moreover, as interest was concentrated upon the words
or story, people began to feel that both dance and melody were separable
if not alien features; and thus they demanded the composed and recited
ballad, to the harm and ultimate ruin of that spontaneous song for the
festal, dancing crowd. Still, even when artistry had found a footing in
ballad verse, it long remained mere agent and mouthpiece for the folk;
the communal character of the ballad was maintained in form and matter.
Events of interest were sung in almost contemporary and entirely
improvised verse; and the resulting ballads, carried over the borders of
their community and passed down from generation to generation, served as
newspaper to their own times and as chronicle to posterity. It is the
kind of song to which Tacitus bears witness as the sole form of history
among the early Germans; and it is evident that such a stock of ballads
must have furnished considerable raw material to the epic. Ballads, in
whatever original shape, went to the making of the English 'Beowulf,'
of the German 'Nibelungenlied.' Moreover, a study of dramatic poetry
leads one back to similar communal origins. What is loosely called a
"chorus,"--originally, as the name implies, a dance--out of which older
forms of the drama were developed, could be traced back to identity with
primitive forms of the ballad. The purely lyrical ballad, even, the
_chanson_ of the people, so rare in English but so abundant among other
races, is evidently a growth from the same root.

If, now, we assume for this root the name of communal poem, and if we
bear in mind the dominant importance of the individual, the artist, in
advancing stages of poetry, it is easy to understand why for civilized
and lettered communities the ballad has ceased to have any vitality
whatever. Under modern conditions the making of ballads is a closed
account. For our times poetry means something written by a poet, and not
something sung more or less spontaneously by a dancing throng. Indeed,
paper and ink, the agents of preservation in the case of ordinary verse,
are for ballads the agents of destruction. The broadside press of three
centuries ago, while it rescued here and there a genuine ballad, p