The Popular Ballad

PROFESSOR NEILSON’S novel and wellplanned series opens auspiciously with a volume of just the right size from the practiced hand of Professor Gummere.¹ It is a commonplace that the more one knows of a subject, the harder it is to write about it. But Mr. Gummere has dealt with this particular theme — the Ballad — so often, and has always found it so congenial, that he is not at all embarrassed by the astonishing richness and variety of his knowledge. He has succeeded, therefore, in writing a book which, while neglecting no point of importance, and in a high degree compendious, is quite as good reading as if it were not the work of a profound scholar.

Of course the question of origins is discussed, and, equally of course, it is settled in accordance with the wellknown views of the author. Perhaps “well-known” is a rather hasty epithet. For it has been almost comical to note how difficult Mr. Gummere’s critics have found it, time and again, to understand his doctrine of “ communal composition,” or even to discern that there is anything in it to understand. Some of them, in reviewing his previous studies in balladry, seem to have assumed that the theory requires us to believe that “Chevy Chase,” or “The Queen’s Marie,” or “Gil Brenton,” was composed collaboratively by a tribe of neolithic, skin-clad enthusiasts dancing round a campfire to the notes of the tom-tom. Others, who have delved a little deeper, are convinced that the case is desperate unless one can imagine some stanza of some ballad in Mr. Child’s thesaurus as created sua sponte by at least a score of tattooed improvisators chanting in unison. This is not the place to defend Mr. Gummere from misapprehension, for he is quite able to take care of himself; but it is not amiss to say, deliberately, that any person who will read the first chapter of the present volume with an open mind, will have little difficulty in comprehending what Mr. Gummere’s theory of communal composition really is, and how it relates itself to the extant body of English and Scottish popular ballads. For my own part, I do not hesitate to avow that it explains many things not otherwise easily comprehensible, and coördinates in a reasonable way a quantity of well-attested phenomena that seem to belong together. It has its difficulties, to be sure, but they are less serious than those attaching to the rough-and-ready solutions which literary men have usually been content to offer to the riddle of the Ballad Sphinx. One thing, at all events, ought to be axiomatic: it is no answer to the riddle to deny that the riddle exists. Another thing, too, seems rather obvious, though it has been systematically ignored: the problem cannot be settled, off-hand, by any person whose acquaintance with what the French call “oral literature” is merely casual. Such a critic, if he is right, is right by chance only, for he cannot weigh testimony which he has neither heard nor read, and the very existence of which he does not suspect.

“The primitive and original ballad itself,” writes Mr. Gummere, “is not to be recovered, though it can be inferred.” And again, “‘Popular’as a definition by origins, as conveying the idea that ballads were really made by the people, does not mean a single initial process of authorship on the part of a festal throng. . . . The ballad is a conglomerate of choral, dramatic, lyric, and epic elements which are due now to some suggestive refrain, now to improvisation, now to memory, now to individual invention, and are forced into a more or less poetic unity by the pressure of tradition in long stretches of time. In this sense they represent no individual, but are the voice of the people.” It taxes one’s powers of divination to guess how such views can be taken as either reiterating Grimm’s vague idea of a primitive mystery, or as implying the production of a narrative stanza by a pack of wolves howling — like Ralph — “at Cynthia” and making night hideous with their communal impromptu.

But Mr. Gummere’s principal concern is with actual ballads, not with theoretical origins. He writes as historian and critic, not as anthropologist, though his store of curious learning, handled with deftness, and never obtruded, lends his treatment a peculiar fascination for those who have not forgotten what is the proper study of mankind. His survey of ballad material, in the chapter on Classification, does not depend for its interest and value on any theories whatsoever. His pages on ancient traits of myth and custom and primeval creed, in the chapter on Sources, will be read with keen pleasure by persons who neither know nor care whether the Golden Bough was made in Birmingham or grew on some bloodstained oak in the Arician grove. And so will his answers to the questions how ballads are handed down, growing and shifting and fusing in the process; what is to be thought of their migration from land to land; how they have been sung and collected and imitated and forged.

A particular merit of the volume, which distinguishes it from any previous treatment of the subject, is the clearness with which the difference is brought out between choral and epic elements. Never before have the workings of tradition been set forth so well. The point is vital, and to have it settled once for all is comfort and enlightenment unspeakable. Here it is pertinent to mention, with a word of hearty praise, a distinguished — and readable — monograph on Ballad and Epic, recently published by one of Mr. Gummere’s pupils, Professor W. M. Hart,² of the University of California. As the subtitle indicates, Mr. Hart’s book is “a study in the development of the narrative art.” It cannot be neglected by any student of story-telling, whether his concern is with the Homeric question, or with Beowulf, or with the English novel.

Mr. Gummere’s concluding chapter — “The Worth of the Ballad ” — is appreciation pure and simple. It shows the author at his best, both as a critic and as a writer of the English language. He does not overvalue ballads, nor does he set them up as rivals to the poetry of art. They exist, they have worked potently, they still have their own power to sway men’s hearts. What are they, and in what does their charming and compulsive quality consist? To learn the answer one must go to Mr. Gummere’s book.

Nobody else has given it so well, and it would be brutal to excerpt or dismember his compact and vivid paragraphs.

A critic is always expected to pick flaws, either at the outset or in his concluding words. Let me for once dispense with the traditional formula, even in reviewing a volume that deals with tradition. Nothing human is perfect, and all things go by comparison. For my own part, and I say it very deliberately, I never expected to see so good a book in its kind, and I am confident that the subject will never be treated so well again in my lifetime.