oured
out a mass of vulgar imitations which not only displaced and destroyed
the ballad of oral tradition, but brought contempt upon good and bad
alike. Poetry of the people, to which our ballad belongs, is a thing of
the past. Even rude and distant communities, like those of Afghanistan,
cannot give us the primitive conditions. The communal ballad is rescued,
when rescued at all, by the fragile chances of a written copy or of oral
tradition; and we are obliged to study it under terms of artistic
poetry,--that is, we are forced to take through the eye and the judgment
what was meant for the ear and immediate sensation. Poetry _for_ the
people, however, "popular poetry" in the modern phrase, is a very
different affair. Street songs, vulgar rhymes, or even improvisations of
the concert-halls, tawdry and sentimental stuff,--these things are
sundered by the world's width from poetry _of_ the people, from the folk
in verse, whether it echo in a great epos which chants the clash of
empires or linger in a ballad of the countryside sung under the village
linden. For this ballad is a part of the poetry which comes from the
people as a whole, from a homogeneous folk, large or small; while the
song of street or concert-hall is deliberately composed for a class, a
section, of the community. It would therefore be better to use some
other term than "popular" when we wish to specify the ballad of
tradition, and so avoid all taint of vulgarity and the trivial. Nor must
we go to the other extreme. Those high-born people who figure in
traditional ballads--Childe Waters, Lady Maisry, and the rest--do not
require us to assume composition in aristocratic circles; for the lower
classes of the people in ballad days had no separate literature, and a
ballad of the folk belonged to the community as a whole. The same habit
of thought, the same standard of action, ruled alike the noble and his
meanest retainer. Oral transmission, the test of the ballad, is of
course nowhere possible save in such an unlettered community. Since all
critics are at one in regard to this homogeneous character of the folk
with whom and out of whom these songs had their birth, one is justified
in removing all doubt from the phrase by speaking not of the popular
ballad but of the communal ballad, the ballad of a community.

With regard to the making of a ballad, one must repeat a caution, hinted
already, and made doubly important by a vicious tendency in the study of
all