The Ballad

Excerpt from The Ballad

The inclusion of the Ballad as a subject to be treated in a series of manuals devoted to the study and analysis of various forms of literature ought to produce a shock similar to that which a visitor to the Zoological Gardens would experience on coming across a case containing an ichthyosaurus. Such a person, moreover, provided he were sufficiently perspicacious, would be struck by a contradiction in terms - the ichthyosaurus being known to be extinct, and "zoological" implying life - parallel to that which I must force upon the reader's attention at the outset. Because we are still under the influence of an age that regarded ballads as it regarded literature, and because we are still instinctively liable to the error of estimating the value of ballads by means of the criteria we apply to letters, it is necessary to emphasise, even at the expense of overstating, the contrast between the primitive and the more sophisticated forms of human expression.

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