WHAT IS A BALLAD? 31

ful ballad texts; far more than were contained in the repertoire of
any traditional minstrel; but humanism, however pious, is a deadly
opponent of the genre. It takes ballads out of the line of oral trans-
mission, into the textual; they are the less heard or performed, the
more they are read and discussed. The advance of the habit of
reading involves the shrinkage of oral entertainment. As they lose
the better sort of patronage, ballads fall off in art and vigour; they
are driven from the centres of mental life into outlying provinces;
their topics lose elevation. In place of tragedy there comes horror;
for energy, puffy pretentiousness; for humour, personal abuse and
levity; for heroes, brigands and malefactors; for events of some
consequence, crimes and casualties. Such vulgar ballads of the
decline are very different from those of the best period. Chaucer
summoned Wordings' to listen to the rhyme of Sir Thopas:

Now listen, lordings, to mine intent,
and I wol telle you verrayment
of mirth and of solas.

Chaucer was probably not serious when he penned these lines; but
a Swedish minstrel is rightly in earnest when he sang of his hero:

Him shall men praise

in courtly lays

amid squires and dames.

The ballad people—the whole people without distinction, lords
and commons alike—danced in Ribe:

There dance the knights in scarlet braid—

(Tread it sofeatly, noblemen!)
and there goes Chrissie, so fair a maid—

(for men honour young ladies in the dance).

The dance goes down through Ribe's street,
the knights they dance both glad and fleet.

The dance goes down the Ribe's stream,
the knights they dance in shoes that gleam.

Sir Riber-Wulf he danced the first—

(Tread it sofeatly, noblemen!)
King's man was he in truth and trust—

(for men honour young ladies in the dance).

With the swirling polkas of the sixteenth century the old knightly
round dances of Denmark retired to their present-day fastnesses