274 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. 
ship with our novels, plays and poems, but these other forms 
are all anonymous. We are accustomed to demand a defi¬ 
nite written form; but these are fluent, with as many as a score 
of texts, the one asi authoritative as the other. We are accuse 
turned to think of literature as being written; but these 
anomalous forms are spoken, and are perpetuated, not by be¬ 
ing handed down- in an authoritative text with the latest addi¬ 
tions and corrections, but by means of the memory of the in¬ 
dividual who passes it on from his own to the generation 
following. 
These forms are: (1) The Ballad, (2) The Folk-Tale, and 
(3) The Folk-Drama. 
The prevalent method of accounting for these three forms 
is by connecting them! with distinctly literary Works, and hold¬ 
ing that they are the debris of forms which were produced by 
the ordinary methods. Thus the ballad is a broken down form 
of the romance and epic; the folk-tale is a folk memory of 
what was heard in the master’s hall, as the minstrel declaimed 
the deeds of the heroes of old; and the folk-drama is a debased 
form! of the Greek drama filtered down through the church 
to the unlettered class. 1 
As far as the ballad is concerned, this method of accounting 
for origins has been triumphantly combated by Professor F. B. 
Gummere, 2 Professor G. L. Kittredge, 3 and Andrew Lang, 4 
who argue for a popular, non-literary origin; but for the folk¬ 
tale and drama the popular origin has not been so strenuously 
asserted. 5 
1 Representatives of this method are W. J. Courthope, “History of 
English Poetry,” vol. 1, 1895; T. P. Henderson, “Scottish Vernacular 
Literature,” 1901; J. H. Millar, “Literary History of Scotland,” 1903; 
Gregory Smith, “The Transition Period,” 1900 (in “Periods of Euro¬ 
pean Literature”). 
2 “Beginnings of Poetry,” 1901. 
3 Introduction to the Cambridge Edition of Child’s “English and 
Scottish Popular Ballads,” 1904. 
4 Chambers’ “Cyclopaedia of English Literature,” subject “Ballads”; 
Folk-Lore, vol. 14. pp. 147 ff. 
5 Professor Joseph Bedier’s work, “Les Fabliaux,” arrives at a nega¬ 
tive result. While it overthrows Benfey’s theory that European folic- 
