Page:Old English ballads by Francis Barton Gummere (1894).djvu/60

liv liv INTRODUCTION. and some of his severest censure fell upon Jacob Grimm's theory of primitive song. A poem, affirmed the brilliant critic, implies always a poet; a work of art, as every poem must be, whether good or bad, implies an artist ; and for poems of any reach or grace, we must assume an artist of the highest class. Legend and epos and song might well belong to the people as their property ; but the making of this verse was never a communal process. A stately tower, argued Schlegel, or any building of beauty, means, it is true, that a host of workmen have carried stones from the quarry and reared the walls ; but behind them is the shaping thought of the architect. All poetry rests upon a union of nature and art ; even the earliest poetry has a purpose and a plan, and therefore belongs to an artist. Nor was it all a world of truth and beauty, mirrored, as Grimm had fabled, in the clear waters of song; there stood the minstrel, ready for hire and salary to sing his master's deeds, to tickle his vanity, and, like a picture- dealer of our day, to furnish a whole row of valiant and deified ancestors. Thus, and with more of the same caustic argument, the self-made song is waved away.^ Grimm and Schlegel, the pioneer and the critic, spoke each after his kind and from frankly opposite points of view. Whether we approve or blame either one of them, we have no reason to complain of an indistinct utterance. ^ There is no doubt that Lachmann shared in a way this opinion about the nebulous and distant character of Grimm's teaching. In 1816 he quotes SchlegePs criticism with approval (see Lachmann, Kl. Schr., I, 2, 65). In his review of von der Hagen's Nibdungen (1820) he is more favorable to Grimm : the "poet" of the lay, he says is " the People." His most explicit statement on this subject, however, so far as the present writer can speak, is in his paper on the Hildebrand-Lay, Kl. Schr.^ I, 407 ff., where he insists that invention and presentation of a folk-song are always separate processes, and further assumes (p. 443) that the folk-singer stands to his material of legend as a poet to the language in which he writes. Digitized by LjOOQIC