Page:Old English ballads by Francis Barton Gummere (1894).djvu/46

xl xl INTRODUCTION. "On the Original Genius of Homer," and Lowth's Oxford lectures " On the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews." The old idols began to totter, as when Joseph Warton appeared with an urbane protest against Pope. Nature and humanity should be the field of the poet, and in naturalness and original genius should lie his power. Poetry, said Blair in his Rhetoric, " is the language of the emotions." To this candle-light of the students came the wildfire of Ossian, ^ and at last, in 1765, the sunrise of the Reliques. Meanwhile, Germany had nearer promptings. About this time were published, in whatever faulty shape, the Nibelungen Lay, the Songs of the Minnesingers, and many of the old Scandinavian poems. Gleim revived the ballad, seriously, and not simply in burlesque, as a form for modern imitation ; and even Lessing, who thought but little of the Nibelungen, had a good word for ballads of the better sort.^ Then came an oracle ; the famous Magician of the North spoke certain mighty, but nigh unintelligible, words about the nature of poetry.^ All literary production, contended Hamann, is successful only when it concentrates the entire mental and moral force of the writer upon his work. Divided power is wasted power. The emotions and intellect must work together, and nowhere is this so true as in poetry. ' Grotesque but well-meant imitations of the ballad were made by Percy's friend Shenstone {Jemmy Dawson^ about 1745), and later by Mickle'^ {Hengist and Mey^ a ballad, 1772 ; and the song, There's nae luck about the House), Actual forgery qf the ballad had already begun ; Lady Wardlaw*s Hardy knut ^o^^qslx^^ in 17 19. 2 See No. 33 of the Briefe die neueste Literatur betreffendy 19 April, 1759. 8 See Goethe's admiring account of Hamann, Wahrheit u, Dicht- ungy Hempel ed., Ill, 63 ff. Devil's advocate, however, is Gervinus {Gesch. d. d. Lit,, IV, 436 ff., ed. 1843), who thinks Hamann more than half imbecile. Digitized by LjOOQIC