Page:Old English ballads by Francis Barton Gummere (1894).djvu/43

Rh INTRODUCTION, xxxvii must be quite uniform in the uncivilized community, — what one feels, all feel. A common creative sentiment throws out the word, and makes language, — throws out the song, and makes poetry. No one owns a word,^ a law, a story, a custom. No one owns a song. " Singing," says Steinthal, is what we ought to say, not "song"; for all is in flux. Dip from the brook a pailful of water, and one has captured no brook ; write down a version of some folksong, and it is no folksong more. There is no sta- bility about it ; among Russians or Servians, a song of eight or ten lines has endless variations. An Italian girl sang a song several times, but each time sang it with a difference ; when asked the reason, she said she could not help it, as the thing came to her so, — mi viene cosh With these and other arguments,^ Steinthal sought to put on the basis of psychology and common sense a theory of the ballad already held by many to be vague, contradictory, and mistaken. Ten Brink plainly tells us, however, that from this article he has "learned the most" in regard to the nature and origin of poetry of the people ; and we shall presently see how he tries to supply what Steinthal left undone. The weak place of the essay is its failure to answer the question of ways and means. How got the apples in ? How does a song cross the gulf between this spirit of the race, this latent community of sentiment, and the concrete fact of melody and words? If, indeed, we could only assume the primitive community to have been like the folk whom Alice met in Wonderland, all "thinking in chorus," it would be a plain matter. But it is not a plain matter ; 1 Scherer*s Poetik defends the primitive artist even as a maker of words, and throughout pleads for the unity of poetry against any hard and fast division into poetry of the people and poetry of the schools. 2 Dealing with that outcome of a certain class of ballads, the Epos. Digitized by LjOOQIC