With regard to the making of a ballad, one must repeat a caution, hinted already, and made doubly important by a vicious tendency in the study of all phases of culture.  It is a vital mistake to explain primitive conditions by exact analogy with conditions of modern savagery and barbarism.  Certain conclusions, always guarded and cautious to a degree, may indeed be drawn; but it is folly to insist that what now goes on among shunted races, belated detachments in the great march of culture, must have gone on among the dominant and mounting peoples who had reached the same external conditions of life.  The homogeneous and unlettered state of the ballad-makers is not to be put on a level with the ignorance of barbarism, nor explained by the analogy of songs among modern savage tribes.  Fortunately we have better material.  The making of a ballad by a community can be illustrated from a case recorded by Pastor Lyngbye in his invaluable account of life on the Faroe Islands a century ago.  Not only had the islanders used from most ancient times their traditional and narrative songs as music for the dance, but they had also maintained the old fashion of making a ballad.  In the winter, says Lyngbye, dancing is their chief amusement and is an affair of the entire community.  At such a dance, one or more persons begin to sing; then all who are present join in the ballad, or at least in the refrain.  As they dance, they show by their gestures and expression that they follow with eagerness the course of the story which they are singing.  More than this, the ballad is often a spontaneous product of the occasion.  A fisherman, who has had some recent mishap with his boat, is pushed by stalwart comrades into the middle of the throng, while the dancers sing verses about him and his lack of skill,—­verses improvised on the spot and with a catching and clamorous refrain.  If these verses win favor, says Lyngbye, they are repeated from year to year, with slight additions or corrections, and become a permanent ballad.  Bearing in mind the extraordinary readiness to improvise shown even in these days by peasants in every part of Europe, we thus gain some definite notion about the spontaneous and communal elements which went to the making of the best type of primitive verse; for these Faroe islanders were no savages, but simply a homeogeneous and isolated folk which still held to the old ways of communal song.

Critics of the ballad, moreover, agree that it has little or no subjective traits,—­an easy inference from the conditions just described.  There is no individuality lurking behind the words of the ballad, and above all, no evidence of that individuality in the form of sentiment.  Sentiment and individuality are the very essence of modern poetry, and the direct result of individualism in verse.  Given a poet, sentiment—­and it may be noble and precious enough—­is sure to follow.  But the ballad, an epic in little, forces one’s attention to the object, the scene, the story, and away from the maker.