PEOPLE AND POETS 3

the face of hymns and moral poems. Patience is needed to win the
confidence of those who know ballads, to overcome their coyness.
Once they have been persuaded to sing, they bring forth things old
and new. Not only are many of Child's ballads still alive in the
American mountains; but the use of old scales proves that the tunes
are equally ancient. The historical sense is vague, though there
are some pieces recognized as 'way back yonder songs'. By way
of compensation, the sense of immediacy is such that traditional
ballads are given a new setting as events within living memory. In
Scotland the details of The Douglas Tragedy have been fitted to the
Yarrow at Douglas Craig; but Miss Scarborough encountered in
Virginia a ninety-year-old gentleman who claimed to have been a
witness. 'The Seven Sleepers (he told her) was a true song. It
happened way back yonder in Mutton Hollow. I was there myself.
Somebody got killed over the girl. I was there soon after it
happened. Another man was after the girl and one man shot him.'
Frequently the reciter's memory fails, and mention is made of some
relative who had known the song much better. At other times, one
will exclaim, fOh, if only I were driving the cows home I could
sing it at once!' so closely are the words of the song associated with
some feature of the singer's usual vocation.

Crete and Asia Minor have proved fruitful sources of Greek
ballads, thanks to their remoteness; in Spain the Asturian valleys
have given asylum to archaic versions. The remoteness of the four
East Baltic states is linguistic rather than geographical. Shut in to
the use of their own resources, they have each developed copious
and versatile balladries. In the larger states of western Europe
social groups may approximate to the conditions of a ballad people,
since-their interests may be centred on themselves as a well-defined
community. Sir William Craigie has told me that at St. Andrew's
University in his day it was customary for students to gather out-
side the mathematical class-room before a lecture, to sing for half
an hour. Among the songs one might encounter genuine, if late
plebeian, ballads, such as Clementine or Riding down from Bangor.
The gathering of these and other songs into Students' Song Books
seems to have had the untoward effect of converting students'
songs into concert pieces, having burst open the oral tradition
which was their firmest guarantee. In the United States new
ballads have arisen out of the conditions of cowboy life and among
the negroes. The great conscript armies of Europe create self-