Page:Old English ballads by Francis Barton Gummere (1894).djvu/37

INTRODUCTION. xxxi sense of the word, never saccharine, it should show a clear and certain sense of general harmony. Assonance must often do the work of rime ; and sometimes the most heroic " slurring " fails to bring order out of the chaos ; in such moments, however, we must think of grammatical changes, of local forms, and of the chances of print. The antithesis of schools and people would cause us to expect little from ballads in the way of trope or figure ; and this we find to be the case.^ Figures are few and recurrent, always unforced, and for the most part uncon- scious. Steenstrup, in his excellent study of Scandi- navian ballads, says that they " talk like a mother to her child " and have " scarcely a kenning " ; '^ while Wilhelm Grimm long ago noted the absence of figures in the Nibe- lungen Lay as compared with the poems of Wolfram.* " intellectualized ** measure? Where, moreover, were the Anglo- Saxon ballads.^ Chappell rejects with some sharpness (II, 796) the notion that English popular music was taken or imitated, in the first instance, from the music of the church ; but ballad measure and even rime — though this is not at all sure — are now generally referred to such a source. 1 Here again we have a contrast with Anglo-Saxon poetry, and apparent breach with tradition. Instead of the riot of tropes, the constant *< variation," ballads give us naked and literal language. But this is not so hard to explain. We have no simple, popular verse from Anglo-Saxon times ; monk and minstrel had made a school. 2 Vore Folkevisery pp. 196, 204. ^ Heldensage^ p. 287. — The absence of similes from old German poetry is so marked that Miillenhoff and Scherer considered the assumption of them sufficient to condemn a certain interpretation, — Denkmdler^ II, 131. It is the good pastor's zeal, rather than his accuracy, which leads Neocorus {Chronik, ed. Dahlmann, I, 176) to remark of the ballads of the Cimbrian peninsula, " dat fast nicht ein Tropus edder Figura in der edlen Redekunst, so nicht in einen edder mehr Gesengen konde gewist werden." Miillenhoff {Sagetiy u.s.w., p. xxxiv) notices that the ballads of this same country have really "few figures and comparisons." Digitized by LjOOQIC