Page:Old English ballads by Francis Barton Gummere (1894).djvu/20

xiv and thus takes rank as the first of our sentimental or distinctly lyric poets.

In what poetry, to come closer to our task, must we look for qualities radically different from this artistry and sentiment? A mere appeal to black-letter will not serve us. What we are wont to call medieval poetry is not the real poetry of the middle ages. We must turn from the printed book; we must forget even that amiable sinner, the clerk who took his fair hour with a breviary in one hand and Ovid's Ars Amatoria in the other; we must seek poetry which springs from the people, which belongs to no one poet, which appeals to the ear rather than to the eye, and which suggests no confidences. Poetry of this sort lay at the foundation of our early epics; in modified guise it sought a home in the unlettered and homogeneous communities of the later middle ages; and with a form yet more changed, it lingered down to our own century in a number of survivals. This seems clear enough, and any one, we say, knows the rural from the lettered muse; as a matter of fact, however, critics have drawn in vaguest possible outline the boundary between real poetry of the people and certain other forms of verse.

With such confusions we must presently reckon in detail; but it is well to point out a more general blunder. Poetry of the schools and poetry of the people are treated as rival claimants for the throne of excellence. At certain revolutions of taste, men forswear