Page:Old English ballads by Francis Barton Gummere (1894).djvu/41

Rh INTRODUCTION. IV. The answers to this important question of origins may be divided into two groups. One party, formerly strong, but now in evident minority, declares that the people as a whole and a unit, make what the phrase says they make, poetry of the people. Another party, now in the majority, asserts that poetry of the people is made as any other poetry is made, except that it is subject to purely oral transmission,^ and therefore to infinite varia- tion and the chances of popular control. Before we approach this problem by the long path of a century of criticism, and before we attempt the slow sifting of other material, it seems in order to get a clear idea of what the more aggressive party meant by its claim of communal authorship. Among the last words which came from the pen of ten Brink, in a fragment^ dealing with theories about poetry of the people, that accomplished scholar refers explicitly to an article by Stein thai, in the Journal of Race-Psychology,^ which seems to be a confession of faith on the part of those who, like Jacob Grimm, believe in communal authorship of the ballad. In effect, ten Brink signs this declaration, modifpng it here and there, but adhering to the spirit of it. Again, in that introduction, already quoted, which Grundtvig wrote for the translations of Rosa Warrens,* we find words which go far to rank their distinguished 1 Brandl, in Paul's Grundriss^ II, i, 839. 2 See ten Brink in Paul's Grundr.y II, i, 515; and also the former's Beowulf y p. 7. 8 One fairly flounders in the attempt to English this Zeitschrift fur Volkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft. Individuum als solches, nicht das einfache Menschen-Individuum, als Dichter der Volkspoesie zu betrachten. . ." Digitized by LjOOQIC
 * See the passage (p. xxiii) beginning : " Darum ist das Volks-