PREFACE
A
 CRITIC has been known to complain that he could not <
imagine for what sort of reader a given book was devised.
Lest this difficulty should again arise, it may be well to say that
this book counts on one reader: its author. It is an attempt to set
down answers to a number of small questions which have been
nagging at the base of his brain for several years: what are ballads ?
who made them, and for whom ? what purpose do they serve ? why
do they die ? and so on. Once the answers are fair and feateously
written down, no one will have motives more keen than those of
the author to see whether they stand their ground when the en-
thusiasm of invention has died; no one—because past experience
promises that these questions, insufficiently answered, will raise
their heads and nag, nag again.
The author would have been contented to accept any complete
solution. At first indeed, it seemed sufficient to repeat the words
of the masters whenever the course of professional duty brought
up the topic of ballad poetry. (The field happened to be Spanish
ballads, where the masters are insuperable.) Curiosity leading the
writer to follow up some references to the ballads of his own
tongue, he realized that there were other masters holding very
different language. There are, perhaps, no two ideas in common
between Sr. Menendez Pidal and Andrew Lang on this subject.
So new questions raised their heads: are all ballads really the same
thing? are the different explanations compatible within some
larger answer ? The author nibbled at the cheese in some articles on
points of detail, and then it seemed possible to cut a way through
to a solution (since a conviction of ballad oneness was steadily
gaining strength) by comparing the evidence of some of the greatest
national balladries on a few fundamental problems: this was the
purpose of an article in Medium Aevum, vol. i, a comparative study
of Spanish, Danish, -and Yugoslav balladries. What effect that
article had on its readers, if any, is concealed from the present
writer: on himself it had the disconcerting effect of revealing the
insufficiency of his data. To answer the very simplest inquiries
about the nature of ballads, it seemed necessary to traverse all the
ground of dispute. All the ballads of all the nations or communi-
ties in Europe have some evidence to contribute. This was the