Page:Old English ballads by Francis Barton Gummere (1894).djvu/61

Rh INTRODUCTION. Iv It is quite another matter with Uhland, a gentle soul, whose treatise on poetry of the people/ left incomplete, and published after his death, is perhaps the most import- ant work of the kind. It has a single purpose, and employs all its writer's store of investigation to one end ; while Grimm's utterances on the subject are mainly obiter dicta. Yet it suffers, so far as the matter of origin is concerned, from indecision ; and we find it hard to say whether Uhland's attitude towards Grimm must be called guarded opposition or modified approval. Uhland accepts, of course, the doctrine of a homoge- neous people as a condition of this sort of poetry, and its dependence upon oral tradition. " Growth or decay of communal poetry," he says,^ " always depends absolutely upon the part played in it by the race as a compact whole. If the nobler souls draw back, and turn to written literature, communal poetry sinks into poverty and the commonplace." Legend and oral tradition are opposed inevitably to literature and the community of letters. The race must be poetic as a race, as a unit. In the idea of popular poetry, he goes on to say, and in the phrase itself, rests a demand that not only shall the song be popular, but also that the common culture and the popular mode of thought shall be poetic. This is the case with a people in whom the whole intellect is still under control of those mental powers which make for poetry, — powers of imagination, of emotion, — and where the popular intellectual life is saturated with such an influence, and expresses it in speech, in proverbs, in laws, in legends, in songs. Oral tradition, added to 1 See Abhandlung uber die deutschen Volksliedery Vol. Ill, and Anmerkungen zu den Volksliedern, Vol. IV, of Uhland's collected works. There is also material in his Sagengeschichte d. germ. u. rbm. VolkeryWly 3 ff. ^Schr., VII, 7. Digitized by LjOOQIC