This is not very solid ground and it is hardly likely that
the next generation of scholars and students will linger
upon it. Belief in the origin of the mediæval ballads by
communal improvisation in the dance, and belief in the
extinction, with mediæval conditions, of the ballad as a
literary type, seem to the present writer to have emerged
from and to belong to a period of criticism which deliber-
ately preferred the vague and the mystical for all problems
of literary and, linguistic history -- mythological explana-
tion of the Beowulf story, multi-handed composition of the
Homeric poems, mystical theories of the origin of lan-
guage. These originate in romance but they readily fade
in a literal, anti-romantic period like our own.

To what degree, one is tempted to ask, is the scholarly
and critical enthusiasm for ballads of the last hundred
years, or more, due to this romantic attitude? But for
their fascinating mystery, would the learned world have
preoccupied itself, in the same measure, with ballads?
Perhaps when the cloud of romanticism overhanging it
has vanished utterly, we may again come to look on bal-
ladry as did the cultivated world in the days of
humanism.

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