The ballad - Index of

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in
The Ballad
its essentials, not literary, and, as we shall see,
has no single form. It is of a genre not only
older than the Epic, older than Tragedy, but
older than literature, older than the alphabet.
It is lore, and belongs to the illiterate.
The first difficulty, therefore, is to define the
ballad, for it has some of the qualities of an
abstract thing. It is essentially fluid, not rigid
nor static. A river is perpetually changing its
content and often its course ;
a school or college
changes its personnel and may change
its site and
buildings but
; college, river and ballad maintain
existence, individuality, and traditional characters
in despite. The ballad, moreover, being
demonstrably oral in is origin, associated with the
youthful sciences of anthropology and psychology
sciences of the inexact type in their nature, and
at present consisting of little more than attempts
to find truth by the balancing of probabilities
and the elimination of improbabilities. Such
elusiveness is to some minds anathema ;
to others
it forms the whole charm of the quest.
The
literary student of (say)
Milton can see with his
own eyes what the poet wrote or at worst what
he dictated and can thereby secure an authentic
text ;
but the ballad student has no such certainty.
He is not confined to a single author ;
he is not even restricted to one language ;
all
nations and all ages may have contributed something
to the object of his researches.
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