Page:Old English ballads by Francis Barton Gummere (1894).djvu/54

xlviii xlviii INTRODUCTION. cannot appeal to the fact of a once homogeneous race or community, and to the expression of that race and time in genuine songs of the people ; he has to fight a desperate battle pro domo as well as for his favorites of the past. All he can do is to " hit the average," to take as standard the general taste of the better classes in any given country, and to bid the poet write for this level just as shoemakers make a shoe for general sale, — on the average measure. But in what confusion, in what contradictions, such a theory must involve us 1 Poetry of the people is thus inextricably tangled with poetry for the people ; and we flounder hopelessly in this bog which has caught so many students of the ballad.* To put the matter briefly, the criticism which we have so far examined was no real criticism at all. Oracle, eloquence, theory, rhetoric have been with us ; but nothing of the careful and sundering criticism which we need. Discussions about what poetry ought to be, and ought to have been, are interesting ; but in our day 4hey are yielding — as witness Scherer's fragmentary, flippant, unequal, but revolutionary and always stimu- lating " Poetik " — to the question of what poetry was, and where it began. Nobody dreams of rapid solution, perhaps even of ultimate solution ; but to come as close to the matter as we can is the task of modern poetics. We turn, therefore, to the founder of Germanic philology, confident that we shall get something better than decla- mation, something more stable than even the righteous eloquence of Herder. 1 This confusion is sharply criticised by Hoffmann von Fallersleben in his book Unsere volksthumlichen Lieder^ 3d ed., Leipzig, 1869. He gives some amusing specimens of the made ballad, " songs of labor " and what not. Digitized by LjOOQIC