Page:Old English ballads by Francis Barton Gummere (1894).djvu/34

xxviii xxviii INTRODUCTION. English, even when backed by all the eccentricities of a printing-room, be foisted upon us as poetry of the people. All writers on the communal ballad are at one in regard to its entire freedom from the subjective element. Nobody has defined so well as Sidney Lanier^ this triumph of the personal artist in modern letters : — Awful is Art because Uis free. The artist trembles o'er his plan Where men his Self must see. Who made a song or picture ^ he Did it, and not another, God nor man. But to this solitary act of the artist in verse, an act which is only heightened by the mirrorings and reactions wrought through transmission on paper, we must oppose, for poetry of the people, a public production and a purely oral and unappropriated transmission. In line with this general necessity, moreover, we may note certain recognized traits of the ballad. Of course, they are characteristic traits of the early community ; " naivete, sympathy, faith," says Weckerlin, ^ not too incisively ; and Wilhelm Grimm is still more hazy in his assertion ^ that what distinguishes a ballad from poems of art is that it "knows no deserts, but thinks of the world as all green and fresh and alive with poetry, with heaven above, and all the hairs counted on every head. There- fore " — like Chaucer's Clerk — " it says nothing but what is needed, what corresponds to reality ; and it despises external splendor." . . . Ferdinand Wolf goes more into particulars, though one must admit that these ^ Hymns of the Marshes, II. ^ La Chanson Populaire, Paris, 1886, p. 21. ' He is speaking of the Danish ballads, Altddnische Heldenlieder, p. iii. " Like heather on the hill and the birch in the glen " is a similar definition by J. S. Blackie, Scottish Song, p. 6 ; another definition, p. 21. Digitized by LjOOQIC