solution; of an age in which improvisation, singing, and dancing are
the most natural and familiar forms of expression. They deal almost
without exception with matters which belong to the community memory
or imagination; they constantly reappear with variations so
noticeable as to indicate free and common handling of themes of wide
local interest. All this is true of the popular ballad; but all this
does not decisively settle the question of authorship. What share did
the community have in the making of these songs, and what share fell
to individual singers?

Herder, whose conception of the origin and function of literature
was so vitalizing in the general aridity of thinking about the
middle of the last century, and who did even more for ballad verse
in Germany than Bishop Percy did in England, laid emphasis almost
exclusively on community authorship. His profound instinct for
reality in all forms of art, his deep feeling for life, and the
immense importance he attached to spontaneity and unconsciousness in
the truest productivity made community authorship not only
attractive but inevitable to him. In his pronounced reaction
against the superficial ideas of literature so widely held in the
Germany of his time, he espoused the conception of community
authorship as the only possible explanation of the epics, ballads,
and other folk-songs. In nature and popular life, or universal
experience, he found the rich sources of the poetry whose charm he
felt so deeply, and whose power and beauty he did so much to reveal
to his contemporaries. Genius and nature are magical words with him,
because they suggested such depths of being under all forms of
expression; such unity of the whole being of a race in its thought,
its emotion, and its action; such entire unconsciousness of self or
of formulated aim, and such spontaneity of spirit and speech. The