Page:Old English ballads by Francis Barton Gummere (1894).djvu/100

xciv

Early poetry was undoubtedly choral, and mainly in the service of communal religious ceremonies; leader or vorsinger becomes more important as the arts are developed and the individual makes himself felt, very much as in the growth of Greek tragedy the chorus retired in favor of the actor. In one way, we must leave, even amid the most primitive relations, ample verge and room enough for an incipient artist in verse. The lover made a love-song; but it was for singular and practical purposes. It is true that erotic songs were often choral, with epic and dramatic leanings; as making of the individual, however, they were like the modern Finnish or Italian love-lays about which collectors tell us, and were meant by the lover for his beloved alone. Private sentiment had no public interest. To publish for money one's aifairs of the heart would have struck primitive man, as it strikes the modern peasant girl, as absurd in the extreme; while the making of love-lays to nobody in particular would have baffled primitive logic