ABSTRACT
Despite a disavowal of “William” Grimm and pointed avoidance of the word “folk,” Child’s Emersonian ideal of a ballad community draws from German theories of Volkslied and das Volk. Francis Gummere, following Child, took up the Grimms’ formulation of the earlier search for national identity with more enthusiasm and less circumscription. Gummere’s project, eventually known as the “theory of communal origins,” identified ballad tradition as a form of “savage” poetry characterized by a natural and improvisatory spontaneity as opposed to the “arts” of invention and imitation. Gummere thus took up the contrast between nature and art already evident in Addison’s “natural,” native-born “humanity.” Springing “not from the artist” but from a “dancing, singing, improvising multitude” imagined in Aristotelian terms as a kind of “festal” chorus, balladry represents for Gummere a national reliquary from a more primitive stage of the native culture (its “childhood,” to echo Scott). Referring to the transformative socioeconomic changes that stand as a backdrop to the study of ballads and other “primitive” forms, Gummere states his position in a telling analogy: “communal poetry” is to “the ancient village community” as “artistic poetry” is to “the modern individual ownership of land.” However untenable Gummere’s ideas appear now, they cogently articulate currents of thought that have shaped ballad study from the beginning.
