Page:Old English ballads by Francis Barton Gummere (1894).djvu/101

Rh INTRODUCTION. xcv It is probably safe to say that public poetry of those times was made in public, and by the public* Here is the obnoxious phrase once more, but this time it must be squarely met and squarely explained. It was this phrase, or something very like it, which ten Brink undertook to justify, directly in his fragment, and indi- rectly in his book on the Beowulf. ^ First of all, he bids the critic part company with our modern notion of author- ship. Solitary composition would have been as hard for primitive man to understand as communal authorship is hard for us. Poetry was a common possession; there was no production, to quote ten Brink's admirable phrase, but reproduction. There were variations, additions, — spontaneous and free; but no composition, no originality, as we mean the term. In a sense, too, their song had neither beginning nor end; it was taken up and put down, but never definitely bounded; as they knew neither writer nor writing, so they knew nothing of the literary unit, the poem in and for itself. All was in flux; out of a common store of tradition, by a spontaneous and universal movement, song rose and fell according to the needs of the community.* Now when Grimm bids one think of a race composing songs, one keeps in mind the modern way of composition and therefore calls the phrase nebulous or silly. From ^ Lyric in epic, emotion called forth by facts, is Gaston Paris's idea of primitive poetry; see Romania^ XIII, 617. Ibid.y p. 618, he defends the analogy between these l)rric-epic songs and English ballads of the border; hence, one infers, he regards the latter as a sort of survival of earliest narrative song. 2 Paul's Grundriss^ II, i, 512 ff.; ten Brink, Beowulf ^ Quellen «. Forschungen, LXII. ' SchlegePs famous image of the tower as poetry and an architect as the poet, proves nothing and really begs the question. A cairn is easily raised by a crowd; plan and making go together, and are absolutely communal. But this sort of argument is useless. Digitized by LjOOQIC