in a way, the
conditions under which the English and Scotch ballads were originally
composed. The Roumanian peasants sing their songs upon every
occasion of domestic or local interest; and sowing and harvesting,
birth, christening, marriage, the burial, these notable events in
the life of the country side are all celebrated by unknown poets;
or, rather, by improvisers who give definite form to sentiments,
phrases, and words which are on many lips. The Russian peasant
tells his stories as they were told to him; those heroic epics whose
life is believed, in some cases, to date back at least a thousand
years. These great popular stories form a kind of sacred
inheritance bequeathed by one generation to another as a possession
of the memory, and are almost entirely unrelated to the written
literature of the country. Miss Hapgood tells a very interesting
story of a government official, stationed on the western shore of
Lake Onega, who became so absorbed in the search for this
literature of the people that he followed singers and reciters from
place to place, eager to learn from their lips the most widely known
of these folk tales. On such an expedition of discovery he found
himself, one stormy night, on an island in the lake. The hut of
refuge was already full of stormbound peasants when he entered.
Having made himself some tea, and spread his blanket in a vacant
place, he fell asleep. He was presently awakened by a murmur of
recurring sounds. Sitting up, he found the group of peasants
hanging on the words of an old man, of kindly face, expressive eyes,
and melodious voice, from whose lips flowed a marvellous song; grave
and gay by turns, monotonous and passionate in succession; but
wonderfully fresh, picturesque, and fascinating. The listener soon
became aware that he was hearing, for the first time, the famous
story of "Sadko, the Merchant of Novgorod." It was like being
present at the birth of a piece of literature!

The fact that unwritten songs and stories still exist in great
numbers among remote country-folk of our own time, and that additions
are still made to them, help us to understand the probable origin of
our own popular ballads, and what community authorship may really
mean. To put ourselves, even in thought, in touch with the
ballad-making period in English and Scotch history, we must dismiss from
our minds all modern ideas of authorship; all notions of individual
origination and ownership of any f