Page:Old English ballads by Francis Barton Gummere (1894).djvu/18

xii men, and was product as well as property of the schools. The poetry of the masses was objective and impersonal; and even among the learned, despite those conditions which made for a personal attitude, we find poets steadily tending to the objective, and writing generically, merely as representatives of a class. "It seems," says Nyrop, "as if the medieval author held it improper to join his name to a literary composition"; and even Dante, most personal of all poets, names himself but once in the whole Commedia. Our modern period began when the public at large came to be the public of the man of letters, when the poet, full of his own dignity as an artist, went abroad and made friends of all men. With this change, death fell upon that other sort of poetry, so little represented in manuscripts, but so vital and so abundant throughout the middle ages, the poetry which was made for the ear and not for the eye, a poetry full of life, "in which everybody believed and which everybody could have made." With the spread of letters among the people, this poetry of the unlettered passed away; the revival of learning, the secularization of art, brought in their train the lapse of impersonal and objective poetry and the rise of the confidential and sentimental poet.

The question of innovations must not delay us. Frenchmen say that Villon brings into their poetry the earliest