as students. Yet this can be done only by the admission into our pages
of folk-song which already bears witness, more or less, to the touch
of an artist working upon material once exclusively communal and
popular.

[12] Folk-lore, mythology, sociology even, must share in this
work. The reader may consult for indirect but valuable
material such books as Frazer's 'Golden Bough,' or that
admirable treatise, Tylor's 'Primitive Culture.'

Returning to our English type, the 'Cuckoo Song,' we are now to ask
what other communal lyrics with this mark upon them, denoting at once
rescue and contamination at the hands of minstrel or wandering clerk,
have come down to us from the later Middle Ages. Having answered this
question, it will remain to deal with the difficult material
accumulated in comparatively recent times. Ballads are far easier to
preserve than songs. Ballads have a narrative; and this story in them
has proved antiseptic, defying the chances of oral transmission. A
good story travels far, and the path which it wanders from people to
people is often easy to follow; but the more volatile contents of the
popular lyric--we are not speaking of its tune, which is carried in
every direction--are easily lost.[13] Such a lyric lives chiefly by
its sentiment, and sentiment is a fragile burden. We can however get
some notion of this communal song by process of inference, for the
earliest lays of the Provencal troubadour, and probably of the German
minnesinger, were based upon the older song of the country-side.
Again, in England there was little distinction made between the singer
who entertained court and castle and the gleeman who sang in the
villages and at rural festivals; the latter doubtless taking from the
common stock more than he contributed from his own. A certain proof of
more aristocratic and distinctly artistic, that is to say, individual
origin, and a conclusive reason for refusing the name of folk-song to
any one of these lyrics of love, is the fact that it happens to
address a married woman. Every one knows that the troubadour and the
minnesinger thus addressed their lays; and only the style and general
character of their earliest poetry can be considered as borrowed from
the popular muse. In other words, however vivacious, objective,
vigorous, may be the early lays of the troubadour, however one is
tempted to call them mere modifications of an older folk-song, they
are excluded by this charac