The ballad - Index of

II
BALLADS belong to the people, and therefore belong
also most strictly to one another as, indeed,
do human beings. A man is a member of a
number of concentric communities ;
his family,
his village, his county, his native land, his race,
the world. Inverting the order, a ballad of
universal vogue may have an occidental genus, a
British species, English and Scottish variants, and
local adaptations ;
and it always has one particular
version which is the best one's own.
But to the eye, or rather to the ear, it is as
different from an artistic lyric
as a man from a
bird. From what has been said above it is clear,
I hope, that if the poetry of art is, as Wordsworth
" said, emotion recollected in tranquillity,"
the poetry of the folk is emotion crystallised
in
a crowd.
We have now to leave the outer rings, and concentrate
as far as possible upon the English and
Scottish ballads still ; putting in at every turn
the caveat, that the stuff of these can be called
" ours
" with no greater degree of justification
than Somersetshire can claim sole proprietary
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