wn to future generations.

But this process of purging and refining the ballad, so that it shall
become--like the language, the proverbs, the folklore and nursery tales,
and the traditional music of a nation--the reflection of the history and
character of the race itself, if it is to be genuine, must go on
unconsciously. As soon as the ballad is written down--at least as soon
as it is fixed in print--the elements of natural growth it possesses are
arrested. It is removed from its natural environment and means of
healthy subsistence and development; and from a hardy outdoor plant it
is in danger of becoming a plant of the closet--a potted thing, watered
with printer's ink and trimmed with the editorial shears. Ballads have
sprung up and blossomed in a literary age; but as soon as the spirit
that is called literary seizes upon them and seeks to mould them to its
forms, they begin to droop and to lose their native bloom and wild-wood
fragrance. It is because they neglect, or are ignorant of, literary
models and conventions, and go back to the 'eternal verities' of human
passion and human motive and action--because they speak to 'the great
heart of man'--that they are what they are.

Few of our ballads have escaped those sophisticated touches of art,
which, happily, are easily detected in the rough homespun of the old
lays. Walter Scott, the last of the minstrels, to whom ballad literature
owes more than to any who went before or who has come after him, was
himself not above mending the strains gathered from the lips of old
women, hill shepherds, and the wandering tribe of cadgers and hawkers,
so that one is sometimes a little at a loss to tell what is original and
what is imitation. But even the Wizard's hand is not cunning enough to
patch the new so deftly upon the old that the difference cannot be
detected. The genuine ballad touch is incommunicable; to improve upon it
is like painting the lilies of the field.

In the ranks of the Balladists, then, we do not include the many writers
of merit--some of them of genius--who have worked in the lines of the
elder race of singers, copying their measures and seeking to enter into
their spirit. The studied simplicity, the deliberate archaisms, the
overstrained vigour or pathos of these modern ballads do but convince us
that the vein is well-nigh worked out. The writers could not help
thinking of their models and materials; the old minstrels sang with no
thought but telling what