Page:Old English ballads by Francis Barton Gummere (1894).djvu/22

xvi famous scene of " Le Misanthrope," the vain, amatorious sonnet is so deftly ridiculed, and the hero recites that pearl of a song about the lover who would fling back King Henry's gift of Paris itself, if it meant the loss of his sweetheart. All this is away from the purpose. One should have nothing to do with the artificiality and badness of the schools, or with the simplicity and goodness of the rural poets. We can delight in " Childe Waters " without bating a jot of our admiration for "Child Roland "; nor do we lay upon lovers of a good ballad the obligation to hate Pope and to writhe in anguish over the " artificial " periods of our literature.

Akin to this confusion of standards, this lack of perspective and tolerance, is the error about which we have already spoken, and into which so many readers and even critics are led by the inadequate nature of their definitions. They make perpetual confusion between poetry of the people and poetry for the people, between a traditional piece of verse and a song written to please the casual crowd of an alley or a concert-hall, —that "popular " poetry here, as well as in Russia, " laboriously produced in the towns, and unblushingly fathered upon soldiers and gypsies." Poetry of the people is the poetry which once came from the people as a whole, from the compact body as yet undivided by lettered or unlettered taste, and represents the sentiment neither of individuals nor of a class. It inclines to the narrative, the concrete and exterior, and it has no mark of the artist and his sentiment. This poetry is supremely difficult to study; for the conditions of any analysis of it are apt to be the conditions of its own decay and disappearance. In general it assumes three forms,—the epos, the song, and the ballad. The question of epic poetry