Page:Old English ballads by Francis Barton Gummere (1894).djvu/47

Rh "Poetry," said he, in memorable phrase, " is the mother-tongue of man"; the less this large utterance is hampered by learned restrictions, the better for poetry and for mankind. Poetry must be spontaneous, immediate, no work of reflection. Now, all these things, and many more, tending to glorify primitive and popular poetry, fell with oracular force upon the ears of Herder.

To study Herder, that eupeptic Carlyle, is to study poetry of the people. His criticism follows a straight path. He is fain to establish the canons and tests of poetry as lying chiefly in its immediate dependence upon nature, upon genius, free from rule or model. He would bring all poetry into connection with its environment of race and country. Following lines which led him through the philosophy of language to the philosophy of history, he treats the human race as a whole, and insists that its childhood was the golden age of poetry, as well in language as in sentiment. "What," he asks, in his essay on the Origin of Language, "what was earliest speech but a collection of the elements of poetry ? . . . A dictionary of the soul — what else is poetry?" In his "Letters about Ossian and the Songs of Ancient Races," he tells an imaginary correspondent that "wild," when applied to a primitive race and its poetry, means "livelier, freer, more sensuous, of greater lyric power and range." The further a race is removed from learned habits of thought, the better its "lyrical, living, and dance-like songs." He translates our own ballad "Edward " as a specimen of such natural poetry. Such,