asy to show that survivals out of
this stage of inartistic lyric poetry linger in the early epic poetry of
Homer and in the French _epopees_, and that the Greek drama sprang from the
sacred choruses of village vintagers. In the great early epics, as in
popular ballads, there is the same directness and simplicity, the same use
of recurring epithets, the "green grass," the "salt sea," the "shadowy
hills," the same repetition of speeches and something of the same barbaric
profusion in the use of gold and silver. But these resemblances must not
lead us into the mistake of supposing Homer to be a collection of ballads,
or that he can be properly translated into ballad metre. The _Iliad_ and
the _Odyssey_ are the highest form of an artistic epic, not composed by
piecing together ballads, but developed by a long series of noble [Greek:
aoidoi], for the benefit of the great houses which entertain them, out of
the method and materials of popular song.

We have here spoken mainly of romantic ballads, which retain in the refrain
a vestige of the custom of singing and dancing; of a period when "dance,
song and poetry itself began with a communal consent" (Gummere, _The
Beginnings of Poetry_, p. 93, 1901). The custom by which a singer in a
dancing-circle chants a few words, the dancers chiming in with the refrain,
is found by M. Junod among the tribes of Delagoa Bay (Junod, _Chantes et
contes des Ba Ronga_, 1897). Other instances are the Australian song-dances
(Siebert, in Howitt's _Native Tribes of South-East Australia_, Appendix
1904; and Dennett, _Folk-Lore of the Fiort_). We must not infer that even
among the aborigines of Australia song is entirely "communal." Known men,
inspired, they say, in dreams, or by the All Father, devise new forms of
song with dance, which are carried all over the country; and Mr Howitt
gives a few examples of individual lyric. The history of the much
exaggerated opinion that a whole people, as a people, composed its own
ballads is traced by Prof. Gummere in _The Beginnings of Poetry_, pp.
116-163. Some British ballads retain traces of the early dance-song, and
most are so far "communal" in that, as they stand, they have been modified
and interpolated by many reciters in various ages, and finally (in _The
Border Minstrelsy_) by Sir Walter Scott, and by hands much weaker than his
(see _The Young Tamlane_). There are cases in which the matter of a ballad
has been derived by a popular singer from medieval l