Discussion and research into the origin of folk-songs, or epic poetry, or children’s games, afford permanent recreation to a number of learned hands; and so they have ever since we left off taking things for granted. If nobody except the explorer is any the better, nobody except the other explorers is any the worse. There the ballads are, fruit for the thirsty mouth, as they were to Sir Philip Sidney. But research is good hunting, and discussion good talk: all makes for pattern and diversity in a life which, for most of us, runs too easily into drab. Whether Homer was written by Homer, or “by another man of the same name,” has been, and still is being, debated. Herr Wolff started the ingenious suggestion that, instead of one or two Homers, there were dozens of him. The late Mr. Butler put up a woman for author of the Odyssey, and gave her a name. But Mr. Butler loved two things above all else in life: little jokes and annoying other people. He must not be taken seriously. Similarly, the authorship of the ballads has ever been in debate. The man of our time who knew more about them than any man who ever lived--Professor Child, to wit--knew so much about them that he never committed himself to any hypothesis of their origin. That showed indeed the supreme of knowledge of his subject. But Professor Kittredge, who followed him, built himself a little bungalow of theory; and Professor Gummere presently reared a mansion of it; and now comes Professor Louise Pound from Nebraska with pick and crowbar to level them with the ground. It is very good fun, as I have admitted, except perhaps for Professors Kittredge and Gummere.
Professor Gummere gets the worst of it; but then he has put himself up a mansion of surmise. Professor Kittredge went no further than to declare a peasant-origin for ballad-poetry. Professor Gummere, according to his present housebreaker, erected a theory of something like spontaneous generation--a truly daring conception, one which makes ballad-poetry unlike any other poetry in the world. Throng-inspiration does not commend itself to me, knowing something of throngs and of inspiration. As Professor Pound has no difficulty in establishing, such a thing never happens now, and never happened to anything else, unless Horace Walpole’s account of the effect of putting horsehair into a bottle of water may be accepted. But if it may not, and if it never happened to any other kind of poetry, why should it have happened to ballad-poetry? _Queste cose non si fanno._ These things are not done.