have in the general style of ballads a close parallel to the early stages of so-called figures of speech. The primitive word is a metaphor in an unconscious state; as soon as any distinction can be made between a literal expression and a metaphor, the latter becomes conscious and artistic. But the style of a genuine ballad is not a consciously poetical style ; for it is not ballads that form a dialect, it is the schools. From Chaucer to Tennyson,[1] in spite of one reaction after another, the drift of poetry has been to increase and isolate the dialect of the schools; not as a theory, but as a matter of fact, we note in the history of English verse a steady widening of the chasm between the speech of daily life and the language of poetry.[2] A study of German lyric poetry in the twelfth or thirteenth century shows us the same process from a simple popular diction, a style in which there was no thought of expressing individuality, to a complicated and artistic diction, offspring of the schools.
The metre of a ballad,[3] while not obstreperously rough, should be simple; not labored, hardly melodious in our
- ↑ When Tennyson speaks of "the chalice of the grapes of God," or gives the time of day as—
Before the crimson-circled star
Had fallen into her father's grave,he is reviving the obscure scaldic "kenning" and the mythological puzzle of the most artificial phase in all Germanic poetry.
- ↑ See the famous remarks of Wordsworth, in his preface to the Lyrical Ballads, on these "arbitrary and capricious habits of expression," and the faults of "poetic diction."
- ↑ For particulars, see appendix on metre. Undoubtedly the prevailing measure is the medieval septenarius, domesticated in English verse; but this raises a difficult problem. If popular poetry, like Langland's, held so tenaciously to the old Germanic form—still vigorous a century and a half later in Dunbar's well-known verses—why should the ballads, which we assume to represent tradition in its most positive form, turn from the old, and take up the new and
