phases of culture. It is a vital mistake to explain primitive
conditions by exact analogy with conditions of modern savagery and
barbarism. Certain conclusions, always guarded and cautious to a degree,
may indeed be drawn; but it is folly to insist that what now goes on
among shunted races, belated detachments in the great march of culture,
must have gone on among the dominant and mounting peoples who had
reached the same external conditions of life. The homogeneous and
unlettered state of the ballad-makers is not to be put on a level with
the ignorance of barbarism, nor explained by the analogy of songs among
modern savage tribes. Fortunately we have better material. The making of
a ballad by a community can be illustrated from a case recorded by
Pastor Lyngbye in his invaluable account of life on the Faroe Islands a
century ago. Not only had the islanders used from most ancient times
their traditional and narrative songs as music for the dance, but they
had also maintained the old fashion of making a ballad. In the winter,
says Lyngbye, dancing is their chief amusement and is an affair of the
entire community. At such a dance, one or more persons begin to sing;
then all who are present join in the ballad, or at least in the refrain.
As they dance, they show by their gestures and expression that they
follow with eagerness the course of the story which they are singing.
More than this, the ballad is often a spontaneous product of the
occasion. A fisherman, who has had some recent mishap with his boat, is
pushed by stalwart comrades into the middle of the throng, while the
dancers sing verses about him and his lack of skill,--verses improvised
on the spot and with a catching and clamorous refrain. If these verses
win favor, says Lyngbye, they are repeated from year to year, with
slight additions or corrections, and become a permanent ballad. Bearing
in mind the extraordinary readiness to improvise shown even in these
days by peasants in every part of Europe, we thus gain some definite
notion about the spontaneous and communal elements which went to the
making of the best type of primitive verse; for these Faroe islanders
were no savages, but simply a homeogeneous and isolated folk which
still held to the old ways of communal song.

Critics of the ballad, moreover, agree that it has little or no
subjective traits,--an easy inference from the conditions just
described. There is no individuality lurking behind the words of t