Page:Old English ballads by Francis Barton Gummere (1894).djvu/48

xlii xlii INTRODUCTION, too, was the epos of Homer, such the poems of Ossian ; and these, like all early poetry, were imprompttis. Else- where he couples Homer and Moses as two of the ^ greatest " singers of the people." " Read Homer as if he were singing in the streets ! " After the great period of primitive verse we meet the minstrels, who walked a like spontaneous path of poetry, but with weaker and weaker steps, until, says Herder, " art came along, and extinguished nature." Poetry lost its strength, its inevitableness, and became a tottering thing, like the " corrected exercises of a schoolboy." This is all in the familiar eighteenth century hysterics ; bnt we get a hint of cause and effect, of sober origins, in a prize-essay "On the Causes of Decadence and Corruption in Taste." ^ Hom^r, says our author, was great because of his contact with an age when " writing and prose were not invented," and when heroic traditions still living in the mouths of the people " of themselves took on poetic fortn,^^ Here is one of those oracular and nebulous phrases which the age presently hugged so to its heart ; but with Herder it is no theory of origins. It is simply a remark incidental to his purpose of heaping scorn upon the puny schools of his day, and of lauding the poetry of nature and of spontaneity.^ For he is convinced that the chief shock came to poetry with the invention of printing, with learned verse, and the consequent separation of it from the common people. 1 Works, V, 593 ff. See also 6oi f., 6i3f.,6i6ff. On p. 617 one seems to be reading Taine. 2 See the essay on Effect of Poetry upon Popular Morals, etc., Works,V, 334 ff* I^ another place, however, (XXV, 332 f.) he tells us that if the spirit of a ballad be good, actual contents are of little moment ; for the bad will of itself fall away with time, and the stanzas will right themselves into harmony. But we cannot hold Herder to any theory of origins, because of such figurative talk. Digitized by LjOOQIC