But there is not only this negative evidence to dispose of the “I” in ballads. Hebrew poetry has been thought to touch the highest individual note in the “I” of the Psalms; but the best Hebrew scholars[406] now accept to a greater or less extent the notion that in many places, if not in all, this “I” is communal, and means the house or congregation of Israel. Smend[407] goes so far as to take the “I” throughout in this sense, and doubtless he goes too far; Budde[408] is on safer ground. But the consent of the best scholars is that “I” often means the community, and this, so Smend insists, not as a deliberate “personification” of Israel as a church, but in the unconscious and communal spirit of a homogeneous and intensely emotional body of people. So the Greek chorus, not simply the leader but the whole chorus,[409] speak often as “I”; and Smend quotes a stanza to the same effect from Horace’s _Carmen Sæculare_. It is clear that one is on the traces of a primitive habit which seems impossible to us only because we have no homogeneous conditions to bring about such a state of mind. Now and then a hint is gained from some survival, however faint, of these conditions. It is said that a Scot of the Border coming home to find his house plundered, could tell by sundry signs what hostile band had done the deed, and would invariably call them by the place where they lived: “Ettrickdale has been here!” One thinks of the tribes of Israel and of the way in which their names were used. Reuben, runs the text, “Reuben had great searchings of heart.” But here is theological ground, and we hasten back to the “I” of folksong. To this subject Professor Steenstrup devotes the third chapter of his book on Scandinavian ballads,[410] which are mainly heroic and strongly objective, in contrast to the more subjective and deliberate ballads of Germany. Now many of the Scandinavian ballads begin with the familiar phrase, “I will sing you—or tell you—a song,” and proceed in the second stanza with actual narrative; a comparison of manuscripts, however, shows that it is mainly late copies which begin with this “I” stanza, while earlier copies omit it. In English ballads the “I” is quite as separable and negligible; sometimes, in songs and catches, it is used for mystification:[411]—