When the printing press was the mere vehicle of polemics for
the educated minority, and when the daily journal was neither a
luxury of the poor, a necessity of the rich, nor an appreciable
power in the formation and guidance of public opinion, the song and
the ballad appealed to the passion, if not to the intellect of the
masses, and instructed them in all the leading events of the time.
In our day the people need no information of the kind, for they
procure it from the more readily available and more copious if not
more reliable, source of the daily and weekly press. The song and
ballad have ceased to deal with public affairs. No new ones of the
kind are made except as miserable parodies and burlesques that may
amuse sober costermongers and half-drunken men about town, who
frequent music saloons at midnight, but which are offensive to
every one else. Such genuine old ballads as remain in the popular
memory are either fast dying out, or relate exclusively to the
never-to-be-superseded topics of love, war, and wine. The people
of our day have little heart or appreciation for song, except in
Scotland and Ireland. England and America are too prosaic and too
busy, and the masses, notwithstanding all their supposed advantages
in education, are much too vulgar to delight in either song or
ballad that rises to the dignity of poetry. They appreciate the
buffooneries of the "Negro Minstrelsy," and the inanities and the
vapidities of sentimental love songs, but the elegance of such
writers as Thomas Moore, and the force of such vigorous thinkers
and tender lyrists as Robert Burns, are above their sphere, and are
left to scholars in their closets and ladies in their drawing-
rooms.
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