THE ASCENT OF BALLADS 119

If one is to be married in Montenegro, the affair must be made to
look like bride-stealing; if one scuffles with a Turkish gendarme,
he must be a 'black Arapin'.

Wine were drinking two good boon-companions , . .
Wine was drinking Kraljevlcu Marko . . .
Wine were drinking three voivods of Serbia . . .

These are the traditional commonplaces, and there are many others.
They serve, doubtless, to ease the strain on the reciter's memory
and to make fresh composition easy; but they also set the tempo for
adventure. The lines are beautiful, or at least efficient, in them-
selves, and there is no need, nor is it desirable, to invent new
expressions for recurring experiences; it would be as unprofitable
as to write out in full a recurring decimal. By their recurrence they
impose a rhythm on the narrative like that which the Homeric
commonplaces give to the Odyssey. How much of the charm of
the Odyssey lies in the inevitable lines: 'thence we sailed yet further
with our hearts full of grief, glad to have escaped our death, though
with loss of our dear companions' ? They are not padding, but the
story itself. The joys and sorrows of the home-coming Greeks are
shaped to the pattern of the line

So sitting there in order due we smote the sounding furrows.

But the final word must be left to the poets, and their testimony
is abundant. The reticence and the frankness of the ballads
delight them; the unfinished music echoes in their minds, and they
are ever ready

to call up him who left half told

the story of Cambuscan bold.

They leave their own work rough-hewn, to achieve a like felicity.
Since the coming of Romanticism the debt of literature to the
ballad has been comparable to that of the Renaissance to the Greek
and Latin classics; the Renaissance demanded enrichment of style
or thought, Romanticism brought rejuvenation. The reckoning is
the same in so many countries that this chapter would become
unduly long, and the reader perplexed, if half the items were to be
entered. It must suffice to work out, by examples taken here and
there, the consequences of two publications: the Antwerp Cancio-
nero of circa 1545, and Percy's Reliques in 1765.

A stout little volume emerged from the famous press of Plantin
at Antwerp, about the year 1545, containing the text of a number of