Page:Old English ballads by Francis Barton Gummere (1894).djvu/58

lii lii INTRODUCTION. and a concrete body of song, yet without any mediation of the artist or maker : this was doubtless as difficult in Grimm's eyes, as it seems impossible in our own. He hardly tried to solve the problem. Poetry, for him lay close to religion, — it was religion ; and in his simple rev- erence for the secret of creation and all human life, he was content to leave the matter as belonging, if not to the sphere of miracle, at least to the sphere of mystery. A passage from his earliest complete book^ throws some light on this attitude. Heroic legend, he is remarking, is natural poetry ; the joy and sense of ownership felt by a race towards its great men and kings must have " sung itself " ; and yet, just how this was done, he admits, lies beneath the veil. " One must have faiths Faith is the last weapon with which modern criticism is wont to arm itself ; but even the shrewdest investigators are forced to put up with a deal of mystery, and mystery is what Grimm assumed for the process in question.^ Take the origin of language, a problem always with us. How does a race make its language ? In mass, or by deputy ? Precisely such a problem for Grimm, in whom the lover of words always kept close to the lover of songs, was the communal authorship of poetry ; he believed in it, but could not demonstrate every step of the process. He insisted^ 1 Ueber den altdeutschen Meistergesang, 1811. See especially p. Sff. 2 Save the mark, one is fain to cry, after a course of erudition from the popgun battalion who have been bickering about Grimm's heels and firing so valiantly at his boots, — save the mark 1 Shall we be talking forever of the primitive savage, his blank amazement if he could see his descendants and the work of their hands, his utter inability to comprehend our ways, and shall we allow the^ellow no poor little trick of deed or word which is not all clear and explicable in our eyes ? 8 Ur sprung der Sprache^ in Kl. Schr., I, 297. See also the preface to Deutsche Sagen, p. ix f. Digitized by LjOOQIC