Page:Old English ballads by Francis Barton Gummere (1894).djvu/63

Rh INTRODUCTION. Ivii " watered in every part by the gushing springs of poetry "? Where is, where was such a community, how are we to find it; and when we find it, what will it do for us? We pass from phrase to phrase, all true and beautiful and good, but of scant help for the solution of our problem. It is not only the German who thus disappoints us. We get this same sort of diet from a man not unlike Uhland, save in length of days, a man of taste, of fine tact in collecting ballads, and a poet of merit in his own right, the Scottish Motherwell. Speaking of the communal nature of ballads, he calls them ^ " that body of poetry which has inwoven itself with the feelings and passions of the people, and which shadows forth, as it were, an actual embodiment of their Universal mind, and of its intellectual and moral tendencies." What we wish above all things to know, is the way in which this Universal mind goes about its work; but neither Uhland nor Motherwell undertakes to tell us. What shall we conclude? There is a simple remedy for our trouble. The cooler heaids of the present, and for some decades past, have been content with an answer that involves no mystery, needs no " con^munity watered by the gushing springs of poetry," and fares very tolerably without a Universal Mind. Modern criti- cism of ballads began in the mists and shadows of the romantic school; its work is now going on in the dry light invoked by a band of sleek-headed men who work by day, sleep soundly o' nights, and are troubled by no dreams and mysteries. They hold, with Schlegel, to a very simple solution of our problem. The whole matter is one of oral tradition on one hand, and of scribe's or printer's ink on the other; and that is all. " Sirs," they tell us, — in the language of one of their predecessors, — as for this ballad, "he hath never fed of the dainties ^ Introduction to the Minstrelsy. Digitized by VjOOQIC