If, now, we assume for this root the name of communal poem, and if we bear in mind the dominant importance of the individual, the artist, in advancing stages of poetry, it is easy to understand why for civilized and lettered communities the ballad has ceased to have any vitality whatever.  Under modern conditions the making of ballads is a closed account.  For our times poetry means something written by a poet, and not something sung more or less spontaneously by a dancing throng.  Indeed, paper and ink, the agents of preservation in the case of ordinary verse, are for ballads the agents of destruction.  The broadside press of three centuries ago, while it rescued here and there a genuine ballad, poured out a mass of vulgar imitations which not only displaced and destroyed the ballad of oral tradition, but brought contempt upon good and bad alike.  Poetry of the people, to which our ballad belongs, is a thing of the past.  Even rude and distant communities, like those of Afghanistan, cannot give us the primitive conditions.  The communal ballad is rescued, when rescued at all, by the fragile chances of a written copy or of oral tradition; and we are obliged to study it under terms of artistic poetry,—­that is, we are forced to take through the eye and the judgment what was meant for the ear and immediate sensation.  Poetry for the people, however, “popular poetry” in the modern phrase, is a very different affair.  Street songs, vulgar rhymes, or even improvisations of the concert-halls, tawdry and sentimental stuff,—­these things are sundered by the world’s width from poetry of the people, from the folk in verse, whether it echo in a great epos which chants the clash of empires or linger in a ballad of the countryside sung under the village linden.  For this ballad is a part of the poetry which comes from the people as a whole, from a homogeneous folk, large or small; while the song of street or concert-hall is deliberately composed for a class, a section, of the community.  It would therefore be better to use some other term than “popular” when we wish to specify the ballad of tradition, and so avoid all taint of vulgarity and the trivial.  Nor must we go to the other extreme.  Those high-born people who figure in traditional ballads—­Childe Waters, Lady Maisry, and the rest—­do not require us to assume composition in aristocratic circles; for the lower classes of the people in ballad days had no separate literature, and a ballad of the folk belonged to the community as a whole.  The same habit of thought, the same standard of action, ruled alike the noble and his meanest retainer.  Oral transmission, the test of the ballad, is of course nowhere possible save in such an unlettered community.  Since all critics are at one in regard to this homogeneous character of the folk with whom and out of whom these songs had their birth, one is justified in removing all doubt from the phrase by speaking not of the popular ballad but of the communal ballad, the ballad of a community.