WHAT IS A BALLAD? 25

unmeasured, save by a pause at the end and (generally) one about
the fourth syllable. The only scansion applied to them is that of
their music, which is still insufficiently known. Free in form, they
enjoy an amazing freedom of spirit. No ballads show such wild
variations of content. An individual ballad is a nucleus of character
and incident; but the rest may vary without restrictions. The
Ukrainian 'duma' is another ballad manner of this unrestricted
type.

The unsophisticated adventures of many ballad heroes connect
this manner with that of fables and fairy-tales. In Russia, between
the folk-tales (skazki) and the ballads (byliny), there stands a class
of prose-ballads (probyyalsciny), employing the measured formulas
of the ballads, but not the linear arrangement. Elsewhere, also,
ballads are seen to break down into prose or to be deliberately
transformed. This occurs particularly to historical ballads, accepted
as true accounts of events of national importance, and incorporated
in medieval chronicles. So there are ballads behind a number of
chapters of the Spanish Trastamaran chronicles as there are epics
supporting chapters of the earlier General Chronicles. The verse
sources betray their presence by runs of assonance in the prose and
by clauses which are almost metrical.

Returning to the definition offered for balladry, it has been laid
down that a ballad must be short. Short and long are relative
terms, and must be so understood. There are many ballads which
extend to only a few lines, it is true, but there are others which run
into hundreds. The longest of the Spanish ballads, Count Dirlos,
contains some 700 double octosyllables; Stepan Dusharfs Marriage
(Zenidba Dusanova) has almost the same number of decasyllabics;
Russian 'byliny' are extremely variable, but among them we may
cite Kalinin's version of Mihailo Potyk in about 900 lines. There
are also ballad-sequences, such as the long ballads of Robin Hood
in England and Marsh Stig in Denmark which cover much paper
and are longer than some epics. In general, the two eastern types
of ballad tend to be long; those of the west to be shorter. The
strophic form of northern balladry is an encouragement to diffuse-
ness of a parallelistic sort, but tends to limit the length, since
stanzas become wearisome when continued too long, especially to
one tune only. Spanish 'romances' have been shortened by the
tendency to drama, which has led to the omission of as much
narrative as possible so as to leave the dialogue in the forefront of

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