What, now, are the tests and characteristics about which writers on the ballad are agreed? All agree that it is a narrative song usually preserved by oral tradition of the people. With few and unimportant exceptions, it is agreed that a ballad must be the expression and outcome of a homogeneous and unlettered community;[371] the dispute is about origins. Grimm and sundry of his day declared that the community itself made the ballad; Grundtvig said the same thing, and Ten Brink, following certain modifications of Steinthal, held the people, and not an individual poet, responsible for the making as well as the singing. Ferdinand Wolf[372] was sturdy enough in his scorn for the “nebulous poet-aggregate called folk,” although he clung to the homogeneous community as absolute condition; and his task was to find a representative who could make the ballad to express such a community. Since ballads deal mainly with knights and persons of rank, he concluded, as Geijer had done, that they were due to “a person of quality”; Prior, the translator,[373] went even a step farther and was inclined to think that for Scandinavian ballads, and presumably other poems of the class, one is indebted “to the ladies.” Prior is negligible. But Wolf was careful in his statement; and when he noted the predominance of aristocratic persons in the deeds which these ballads sing, he knew that it was a common trait in all heroic and early epic. Germanic poems of this class, the _Béowulf_, the Hildebrand Lay, what not, regard only such characters and not the common man. As Dr. R. M. Meyer points out, this is even carried into the lifeless world, and all things are in superlative; all is splendid, unusual, extreme.[374] Even Icelandic sagas deal only with the representative man, with distinguished and notable folk.[375] So Wolf simply said that the ballad was made in this class of society, in a homogeneous class, a _volk von rittern_ as he calls it,[376] who mainly “sang their own deeds,”—an important concession. Even if one granted this, and allowed the court poet himself to appear in an impersonal way as deputy of the knights in singing about their deeds, it would still be far from individual and deliberate poetry of art, but rather poetry of the guild with a definite theme, traditional form, and recurrent phrases from the common poetic stock.[377] However, the homogeneous and unlettered conditions of a ballad-making community are in themselves enough to account for this preference of rank; the knight, chieftain, warrior, represented his folk, and was hardly raised above them in any intellectual way. Not only were all the members of a community consolidated, at first, against hunger, cold, and hostile tribes, the primitive homogeneity of the horde, but even later, in mediæval civilization, the same roof often covered the knight and his humblest retainer, the same food fed them, and both were marked by the same standards of action, the same habit of thought, the same sentiments, the same lack of letters,[378] of introspection, of diversified mental employment. Even in rural England such conditions lingered long; Overbury’s franklin[379] “says not to his servants, Goe to field, but Let us goe;” and at the harvest home, where old songs prevail even in modern times, there is “no distinction of persons, but master and servant sit at the same table, converse freely together, and spend the remainder of the night in dancing and singing, on terms of easy familiarity.”[380] How this state of things is intensified in the Highland clan, every one knows; and in going back to the horde there can be no doubt in regard to the sharp curve toward communal conditions and communal expression. Now as to those aristocratic personages of the ballad, the canticles of love and woe which come from such a community would of course put in the foreground of action persons who actually filled the foreground of its life. The ballad represented a compact communal life, and this passed into song in the person of its best representative; hence the panegyric found in all early poetry, the praise of great men who are made one with “the fathers who begat us,” not to be explained away as work of Scherer’s primitive minstrel, liar and entertainer passing about his hat for primitive pence. It is with modern conditions of life, and with the diversity of modern thought, that art comes down to the middle classes,—what throes were needed to bring the domestic or citizen tragedy to light!—then to the artisan, to peasants, and finally to the outcast, the criminal, the degenerate, as in sundry clever sketches of Alexander Kielland.