The ballad - Index of

It is a " popular " style
The Ballad
in the truest sense of
the word.
How is the ballad-student to attack so fluid
and elusive a conglomerate of problems He
seeks to trace a river to its source, and in the end
finds a spring, bubbling from Mother Earth with
a gurgle of cosmic laughter at his defeat. The
river is one thing, the molecules of condensed
vapour that originate it are another. The Ballad
is one thing, the ballads another. Are they the
degenerate and battered descendants of the conceptions
of an artistic mind, or are they the
triumphant relics of a mass of popular compositions,
the fittest survivors that have withstood
the clarification of oral tradition Do their
stories derive from a common traditional fund of
romance : have they come to us from other
nations : have other nations stolen them from
us : or is it possible to conceive that different
groups of men can independently invent the
same tale
Round these half-dozen questions, and the
others to which they give rise, has been fought a
battle-royal skirmishing is still going on. The
;
science of popular poetry
is in a state less
happy
happier only if innocence is
really
bliss than
those of biology and genetics, for though it may
have had its Darwin and its it
Huxley, has not
found its Mendel. Moreover, a forecast of what
may yet come in the way of refutation of ac-
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