34 PERFORMANCE

as to the words. His work was continued by Franz Bohme, and
has resulted in a collection which serves for model to the rest of
Europe.! Germany still leads the world in the number and orderli-
ness of her studies of tunes. In other countries practice varies
considerably, and, as those books which record tunes do not often
record all the tunes of a given ballad, it is extremely difficult to
determine their interrelations. American collectors record tunes
and words of living ballads, and lovers of English ballads are
deeply indebted to S. Baring-Gould, Cecil Sharp, and other enthu-
siasts' We lack, however, such a compendium of words and tunes
together as would give us the advantages that Germany enjoys.2
"For their remissness in this respect the older collectors have been
severely censured. It has been suggested that 'perhaps the fairest
explanation is that literary scholars are tone-deaf, and as incapable
of being moved by the melodies of Lord Gregory or Geordie as, for
the most part, they are of appreciating that, from a literary point
of view, the most significant thing about The Wife of Usher's Well
or Edward is that the one will cause strong men to weep, and the
other make their hairs stand on end'. The names exempted from
this rule, however, are those of the scholars who have attained the
highest perfection in ballad studies; and there are, in any case,
some palliating pleas. To print texts only is a tradition dating back
to the ballad collections of the sixteenth century in Spain. The
reason was not tone-deafness, since these texts served as aids to
the memory in concerts of chamber music. The publisher could
rely on his clients to know the traditional tunes, though they might
trip over the words; or, alternatively, they might prefer to sing the
words to one of the new polyphonic settings which contemporary
composers produced in abundance. On either supposition, those
who bought the books of words did so because of their fondness for
music. Further, though a ballad is not a ballad except when sung,
there is no indissoluble connection between the tune and the
words. There being no other scansion than the music, ballads were
composed to tunes already existing;3 an unemotional style is

* L. Erk und F. Bohme, Deutscher Liederhort, Leipzig, 1893-4.

\ Mr, J. Goss's Ballads of Britain, London, 1937, is an excellent anthology
giving a standardized ballad text and a choice of tunes. It is valuable on this
account For comparative purposes, however, one requires atfthe tunes, and these
shouldberelated,asinErkundB5hme, each to its own proper variant of the ballad.

. kee the headings m R. Liliencron's Histomche Volkslieder der Deutschen
Leipzig, 1865-9. '