Page:Old English ballads by Francis Barton Gummere (1894).djvu/40

xxxiv INTRODUCTION. dance to his own shame.^ More than this, if the ballad wins general applause it remains from year to year a permanent source of pleasure and diversion. A more striking antithesis to our ordinary notions could hardly be found ; the poet or artist vanishes ; the singer, reciter, publisher, takes the background; and in the fore- ground stands the object — not subject merely — of the song. Instead of the poet^s mood, the poet*s sensations and manner, we have the mood, sensations and manner of the object which called out the ballad. What reversal of attitude, compared with Keats and his nightingale ! This gregarious song of satire, as opposed to the personal attack, brings us, as the opposition of traditional and made ballads brought us, to our knottiest problem. If the chief characteristics of a ballad are those which belong to the product of a community rather than to the work of an artist, and so force us to abandon certain ideas inseparable from recent poetry, how far are we to go in this surrender of the modern standard, and in what degree shall we hold the community responsible for the actual making of a ballad ? Where, if at all, are we to admit an individual poet in the process ? 1 The editor is indebted to Professor G. L. Kittredge for a reminder of the "communal spontaneity" in that vivid scene of Bj^mson's Fiskerjenten (Chap. V), where the mob sings an insulting song before poor Petra*s door ; and, further, for a reference to O'Curry, Manners and Customs of the Ancient Irisky II, 70, where ^e are told that Laidcenn, in revenge for the slaughter of his son, poured forth for a year his poetic satire upon the men of Heinster, " so that neither com, grass, nor foliage could grow for them during the whole year." (See II, 216 ff.) The connection of satiric poetry with older magic, with runes, charms, and the like, is too wide a subject for further comment here. Digitized by LjOOQIC