In the ballad, as
sung, the words are most important; but it is of vital importance to
remember that the ballads were chanted.

[Footnote 2: See the first essay, 'What is "Popular Poetry"?' in
_Ideas of Good and Evil_, by W. B. Yeats (1903), where this
distinction is not recognised.]

[Footnote 3: _Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard_ (see p. 19, etc.).]

+II. Poetry of the People.+

Now what is this 'poetry of the people'? One theory is as follows. Every
nation or people in the natural course of its development reaches a
stage at which it consists of a homogeneous, compact community, with its
sentiments undivided by class-distinctions, so that the whole active
body forms what is practically an individual. Begging the question, that
poetry can be produced by such a body, this poetry is naturally of a
concrete and narrative character, and is previous to the poetry of art.
'Therefore,' says Professor Child, 'while each ballad will be
idiosyncratic, it will not be an expression of the personality of
individuals, but of a collective sympathy; and the fundamental
characteristic of popular ballads is therefore the absence of
subjectivity and self-consciousness. Though they do not "write
themselves," as Wilhelm Grimm has said--though a man and not a people
has composed them, still the author counts for nothing, and it is not by
mere accident, but with the best reason, that they have come down to us
anonymous.'

By stating this, the dictum of one of the latest and most erudite of
ballad-scholars, so early in our argument, we anticipate a century or
more of criticism and counter-criticism, during which the giants of
literature ranged themselves in two parties, and instituted a
battle-royal which even now is not quite finished. It will be most
convenient if we denominate the one party as that which holds to the
communal or 'nebular' theory of authorship, and the other as the
anti-communal or 'artistic' theory. The tenet of the former party has
already been set forth, namely, that the poetry of the people is a
natural and spontaneous production of a community at that stage of its
existence when it is for all practical purposes an individual. The
theory of the 'artistic' school is that the ballads and folk-songs are
the productions of skalds, minstrels, bards, troubadours, or other
vagrant professional singers and reciters of various periods; it is
allowed, however, that, being subject entirely to oral transmission,