Page:Old English ballads by Francis Barton Gummere (1894).djvu/21

Rh thin potations in literature, will not hear of Keats or Shelley, and will have nought but verse dealing with what Mr. R. L. Stevenson has lately praised as the better part of existence,—"the eternal life of man spent under sun and rain, and in rude physical effort." We take a stanza of "Johnnie Armstrong":

and we say that here is unaccommodated man, "the thing itself." We say this rightly, and ought to be content with such praises; but we are not content. We go on to set this rude and bracing verse over against the "Ode to a Nightingale," or the "Stanzas Written in Dejection near Naples," and flout the latter heartily, as if, because fresh air is a good thing, a man ought to open the window and let a December gale blow upon his back while he reads before a study-fire. Vilmar, that excellent German, thought thus to crush Heine with a ballad; but neither he nor the more temperate critic has any reason to set up one standard for two kinds of poetry. An estimate of poetry of the people based upon the standard of the schools must lead us into error, as it led Dr. Johnson into absurdity; and when enthusiasts for the ballad like Biirger, or even Jacob Grimm, attempt to judge poetry of the schools by tests which belong entirely to poetry of the people, we have confusion even more deplorable. Outworn poetry of the schools is fain to put on a rural manner, to catch the trick of simplicity, as when Prudentius, in his "ballad" about a certain martyr, must bid his hero "give ear to a rustic poet"; or when, in a