Page:Old English ballads by Francis Barton Gummere (1894).djvu/45

INTRODUCTION, xxxix Rowe, taking a plot from the ballads, lauded them distinctly in the preface to his " Jane Shore " ; while men of such opposite tastes as Gray and Garrick were interested in songs of the people. Very different was the state of affairs on the continent. Ballads and songs were looked upon as little better than intellectual outcasts. " Seventy years ago," says Ferdinand Wolf in 1846, at the opening of his classic essay on Spanish Ballads, " seventy years ago, a university professor would have felt insulted by the mere idea of any academic attention to songs of the people, even of his own people." A school of criticism founded on the traditions of the humanists and refinements of Frenchmen like Boileau, would not give the ballad so much as a hearing. Exceptions go for little. Montaigne had said a good word for ballads ; so had Malherbe ; and we remember Molifere . in the " Misanthrope." But nobody looked on the poetry of the people as a serious literary fact. So far as Germany is concerned, signs of change appear about the middle of the eighteenth century ; and this change, as everybody knows, was largely inspired by English example. Words like "genius" and "nature" were bandied about ; and while around the latter term gathered the ideas of Rousseau, the former was more and more associated with Shakspere. ^ Now came a number of important critical treatises, all making in one direction, all insisting on " nature " and "genius." Of- prime importance were Young's " Conjectures on Original Composition," translated at once into German, Robert Wood's remarkable essay 1 In 1737, Germany's leading critic, writing about English drama, had not mentioned the name of Shakspere. In 1762, Wieland's prose translation of his pla3rs was in all hands. Koberstein, Gesch. d. d. Lit.y II, 1342. Digitized by LjOOQIC