ABSTRACT
The American Francis Child took up key features of Motherwell’s work. His monumental editing of The English and Scottish Popular Ballads follows from Motherwell’s conception of ballads as persisting in tradition in variants whose integrity must be respected. Motherwell’s conviction of an authentic and pure oral tradition likewise influenced Child. Although Child died before writing a comprehensive introduction to his collection, he supplies a clear articulation of his approach to ballad tradition in the discussion here. Echoing previous commentators, he writes with reference to the preoccupation with an heroic past and national identity that threads earlier scholarship. In the “primitive” ballad, child sees connections to a “truly national poetry,” whose heroic stamina, like Percy’s “romantic wildness,” he opposes to the artificialities of an overcultivated art. Striking in Child’s discussion is an almost pastoral conception of an ideal ballad community—“anterior to the appearance of the poetry of art”—in which “no sharp distinction of high and low exists.” An expression of this community of people “living in much closer relations than now,” the popular ballad as a form represents “the mind and heart of the people as an individual, and never of the personality of individual men.” Civilization and especially the introduction of book-culture rent this unified world into class divisions, leaving the remnants of the oral ballad tradition, to its detriment, “as an exclusive possession to the uneducated.” I have omitted Child’s concluding bibliography.
