The Literary Status of the English Popular Ballad

Abstract

CHOLARS have generally been inclined to view the English popular ballad not as an aesthetic object but as a relic of an early and primitive state of society, in which the literary process was governed more by instinct than by convention. They have implicitly denied the existence of a purely literary problem, and their speculations about the ballad matrix have had the effect of discouraging criticism of any but an appreciative sort. Yet excellencies appropriate to learned literature have been incidentally claimed for the ballad, and, in contrast to other forms of popular art (e.g., lyrical folk song, folk tale, broadside), it has received extensive notice in anthologies and literary histories. This is not to argue that it deserves less but only to remark the impropriety of assuming value for what, beyond an occasional explication, has escaped close critical scrutiny. The ballad doubtless owes its relative immunity from value judgments to the naturalistic explanation of its origin. Most of the older scholars probably felt that standards derived from literature of the main cultural stream were largely inapplicable to songs which, in the best opinion, came ultimately from the illiterate throng. For some time now, the theory of communal composition has been in the discard, but discussions of the ballad continue to be colored by romantic attitudes toward the ill-defined folk and their creative activity. In important respects the ballad has not been wrenched free of the context in which the eighteenth century placed it by reason of an unconscionably narrow view of literary form. It is my opinion that literature even of the humblest order is completely accessible to criticism and that, accordingly, the ballad, whatever its degree of sophistication, is susceptible to systematic analysis. With the object of clarifying the literary status of