Page:Old English ballads by Francis Barton Gummere (1894).djvu/56

1 INTRODUCTION. vidual poet behind it, and is a product of the whole folk. This was a hard saying even to some men of the Romantic School ; and phrases were bandied about in regard to such a " spontaneous generation " of the ballad. To others it seemed as natural an assumption that a whole nation could create songs, could sing itself into verse, as that a whole nation could govern itself. But we must hear Grimm's own words. In one of his earliest papers,^ he insists that it is useless to seek after the author of the Nibelungen Lay, " as, indeed, must be the case with all national poems, because they belong to the folk as a whole, and thus everything subjective is kept in the background." Again, in the same year,^ " it is inconsistent," he says, "to think of composing an epos, for every epos must compose itself, must make itself, and can be written by no poet." In another arti- cle, somewhat later, he notes the great interest felt for songs of the people, sunders epic from dramatic compo- sition, — the former as poetry of nature, the latter as poetry of art, — asserts the identity of oldest history and oldest poetry as the true expression of the nation which so records itself, and declares that " in epic poetry, deeds give forth, as it were, a sound of themselves, which must make its way throughout all the race." When formal history begins, when learning and culture arrive, poetry takes flight to the unlettered people, and there lives on, narrowed in scope, and influenced here and there by culture, but still a pure ancestral song, the inherited poetry of the race. Here, of course, belongs the ballad ; for the ballad is an epos in little. Five years later,* we have the same note in Grimm's "Thoughts on Myth, Epos and History." In the epos, he contends, 1 1807. See his KUinere SchrifUn, IV, 4. 2 Ibid., IV, 10, note. 8 Ibid., IV, 74. Digitized by LjOOQIC