The ballad - Index of

The Ballad
ence " it his bookbinders pared away top and
bottom lines, and he himself, when editing the
Reliques, tore out pages " to save the trouble of
transcribing." Again, a hundred years later, this
manuscript, the foundation of Percy's monument
to English balladry, was strictly preserved
from view by its owners, despite repeated and
urgent appeals from scholars. It was not until
offers of money from Dr. Furnivall and Professor
Child had been made that permission to print
it
was granted.
Yet this laborious acquisition of ballad-texts
was by no means all that had to be done. There
was a long tradition of " "
literary ballad-editorship
to be broken, and a new scientific standard
to be set up. I said at the beginning of this book
that the ballad has no form ; not, of course,
meaning that there is no structure or rhythmic
scheme to be recognised in ballads, for there is.
I have also said that you cannot write a popular
ballad : in truth, you cannot even write it down.
At best you can but record a number of variants,
and in the act of writing each one down you
must remember that you are helping to kill that
ballad. Virum volitare 'per ora is the life of a
ballad ; it lives only
while it remains what the
French, with a charming confusion of ideas, call
" oral literature." The old-fashioned editor of
ballads collated a number of versions of each
ballad and made a synthetic hotchpotch of them
39