Page:Old English ballads by Francis Barton Gummere (1894).djvu/53

INTRODUCTION. xlvii poet ; and whoever has mastered this secret can gain all hearts, high or low. Where, one asks, is this " epos of nature " to be found ? In our old songs of the people, answers Burger ; often, we are told in a pretty passage, often he has listened at twilight under the village lindens, or by the spinning-wheel, to ballads and wayside songs ; and that is the best school for any poet, lyric or epic. All poetry — and this is the claim he makes so boldly — even the higher l)rric, must be tried by the popular standard. The sole muse of poetry, ran his perilous creed, is the muse of the traditional ballad. Now this sweeping assertion not only went far beyond anything Herder had said, but involved Burger in contradictions. Herder, indeed, after his vigorous campaign for poetry of the people, had turned from the matter, much as Goethe did, with an audible tnajora canatnus ; there is a time, he said,^ to talk about songs of the people, and a time to talk of them no more ; for him that latter hour had struck, — and so to fresh pastures. He tosses the whole task of collecting, defending and defining these songs, with a sort of scornful good-will, to the Romantic School. But Biirger has no such divided allegiance ; for him there are no tnajora ; and the song of the people is all in all. In the preface to his collected poems," he affirms this article of faith, " in which I firmly believe, the axis on which turns my whole theory of poetry : all representative and plastic art {bildneret) can be and must be of the people, for that is the seal of its perfection." Of coiu-se, Burger's crux is his definition of folk or people. Having asserted a principle valid for any epoch, he must define " folk " in terms of the present time. He ^ Works, XXV, 545. Herder did not wish to substitute the actual folksong for poetry of higher art : he admits that would be sheer folly. Worksy XXV, 308. 2 It is 1778, the year of Herder's first part of the Volkslieder Digitized by LjOOQIC