in 1904, edited by Child's daughter, Mrs. Sargent, and Professor George L. Kittredge; it is described in the Bibliography appended to this Introduction.

Our use of the term ballad is not much older than the

Reliques. Originally ballad or ballet was a dance, then a song sung as an accompaniment to the dance, then any kind of song. What we now know as The Song of Songs was in the Bishops' Bible of 1568 entitled The Ballet of Ballets of Solomon. Percy himself meant by ballad a simple narrative song of the people. He had no idea of connecting it with the dance. We shall soon see, however,

that our ballads, even though they received this name rather by accident, may very well be thought of as dancesongs. One of Percy's editors, Wheatley, says justly: "As a ballad is now a story told in verse, so a ballet is now a story told in a dance. Originally the two were one, and the ballad was a song sung while the singers were dancing."

We may now inquire why ballads are called popular ballads, as in the title of Child's great work.

From Percy on, emphasis was laid more and more on getting the ballads as they were actually sung or recited. Let us examine the facts of oral tradition in the case of one of our ballads, The Twa Sisters.

Of the twenty-five versions printed by Child, sixteen are stated to have been taken down from singing or recitation. Four, taken from collectors' manuscripts, and four more from collectors' editions, may unhesitatingly be assumed to have come the same way, as probably did also the single broadside version. Besides Scotland, the countries represented in this oral tradition are England, Wales, Ireland, and America.

Most instructive is what we read about the persons who recited the ballads. Nine of them are unnamed: "an old woman," "traced to an old nurse," "repeated by an ignorant woman in her dotage," "sung by an old cotter-woman fifty years ago; learned by her from her grandmother," "taken down from the mouth of the spinning wheel, if I may be allowed the expression." When the reciter is named or, like Mrs. Brown of Falkland, is a person of some note, the case is not greatly altered. Mrs. Brown, as Scott tells us, owed her taste for ballads and tales of chivalry to her aunt, Mrs: Farquhar, "a good old woman, who spent the best part of her life among flocks

retained

and herds," and whose "tenacious memory all the songs she had heard from nurses and countrywomen."

Our typical ballads have thus come to us pretty straight from unlettered people living in out of the way places, people of no converse with literature. Most of these, but not all, were women, because women were the last to forget their ballads. If Herd and Scott and Jamieson and Kinloch had collected ballads a century or two earlier, they would have found men as well as women, shepherds as well as milkmaids, who knew them and sang them. Ballads, then, are poetry of the people, learned by ear and transmitted orally, known and sung by the whole community. Not only did they exist, as they do to a limited extent still, independent of written and printed literature, but the introduction of printing and education kills them. "They were made for singing an' no for reading; but ye hae broken the charm now, an' they'll never be sung mair," the mother of the Ettrick Shepherd said to Scott. Some of the old ballads are still sung here and there in remote places. But they are dying out, and as they die, there are no new ones to take their place. Child's collection is complete. Balladry is a "closed literary account."

III

WHERE THE FOLK GOT ITS BALLADS

The enthusiasm awakened by Percy's Reliques ran even higher in Germany than in England. The Germans saw in ballads not only poetry of the people but poetry by the people. Herder eloquently set forth the contrast between poetry that sprang spontaneously out of the

heart of the folk and the poetry produced by the individual efforts of men of letters. Jacob Grimm gave currency to the belief that the folk produces its poetry. That popular poetry is produced by the people as a

whole and not by individual poets, was a statement that many students, quite naturally, found hard to believe. It remained for an American scholar, Professor Francis B. Gummere of Haverford College, to restate it in such a way as to render it acceptable even to the most literalminded.

The beginnings of poetry must be looked for in the

dance "the pantomimic dances which are, almost all over the world, so striking a feature in savage social and religious life." To quote further from Jane Ellen Harrison's Ancient Art and Ritual: "When a savage wants sun or wind or rain, he summons his tribe and dances

a sun dance or a wind dance or a rain dance. When he would hunt or catch a bear, . . . he rehearses his hunt in a bear dance." Savages "do what they want done" for them. But they also reenact what they themselves have done and experienced, a hunt or a battle. The magical dance is a kind of prayer, the commemorative dance a kind of ballad or history. But whether it is the one or the other, the important thing is that it is choral: the whole tribe takes part in it. We have, then, what Gummere calls the communal dancing throng, and usually singing as well as dancing.

What the dance gives to poetry is rhythm. The collective howl of the tribal chorus catches the regular rise and fall of the feet. How this collective howl becomes articulate and finally rises to sensible utterance, we have already indicated in describing the refrain. Once it is sensible utterance, it is poetry. It is poetry of a very low order, but like poetry of the highest order, it is a rhythmic expression of emotion in speech.

An example of choral poetry of this most primitive kind comes to us from Brazil. The Aymorès or Botocudos 1 are described as little better than leaderless hordes living

1 The student should, if possible, hear Victor record 17611-B played. It records the Medicine Song, White Dog Song, and Grass Dance as performed by the Glacier Park tribe of Blackfeet Indians. Though by no means as primitive as the Botocudan dance-songs, these Indian analogues will bring home to the student as nothing else the points under discussion.