Page:Old English ballads by Francis Barton Gummere (1894).djvu/44

xxxviii xxxviii INTRODUCTION. and our prosaic time, to judge by a show of hands, is inclined to side with the late Professor Scherer.* He insisted upon oral or written transmission as the only test of poetry of the people and poetry of the schools. "Poetry,^ he declared, "is one and the same at all times ; it is the times which change." Clearly we are not to pronounce an off-hand opinion. However tedious the task, we must review the course of criticism in this field, and then try to come to some conclusion for ourselves. We cannot avoid this question of origins, for it involves the essence and the criteria of all ballads of tradition. We are now to pass in review a century of criticism, and we must naturally begin with the pioneer, — dithyrambic, impetuous Herder, whose almost truculent enthusiasm first secured a hearing for the claims of popular poetry. Herder, not Percy ; for while the bishop nobly heads the list of collectors and editors, he founded no school of criticism. Moreover, England needed no such trumpetings and onslaught ; she had never allowed a certain homebred fondness for this sort of verse to be crushed by foreign standards. At any time when literary interests seemed utterly hostile to the ballad, some one — Sidney, Addison,^ Goldsmith, — was sure to say a good word for it. Garrulous Pepys made his collection of broadsides, and 1 See his Poetik^ Berlin, 1888 ; and his Jacob Grimm ^ 2nd ed., 1885, p. 146. 2 See especially Spectator^ 70, 74 ; we note that Ben Jonson, who poured contempt enough on the ballading gentry, would rather have been the author of Chevy Chace " than of all his works." Sidney's praise is well known : see Cook's edition of the Defense^ p. 29. Dryden had a good opinion of ballads, and so had " the witty Lord Dorset." See Spectator^ 85, and Percy, preface to the Reliques, Digitized by LjOOQIC