[323]. See next chapter.
[324]. Becker, Ursprung der romanischen Versmasse, Strassburg, 1890, pp. 6 f., notes that a mediæval hymn by no means expressed mediæval life; it was an individual affair, as was proved at length by Wolf, Lais, pp. 86 ff., who calls the hymns “kunstmässige Gedichte (carmina)” by known and named churchmen. These often had classical models in mind. Later the hymns were suited to congregational purposes.
[325]. See p. 172; and cf. the passage about the solitary way of the poet, p. 175: “Les animaux lâches vont en troupes. Le lion marche seul dans le désert. Qu’ainsi marche toujours le poëte.”
[326]. Gervinus thinks that the individual came to his rights in the crusades, when Christian ideals were substituted for ancient ideals. But the classical traditions of authorship, if not of wider issues, were one with the individual spirit of Christianity. The struggle was against communal conditions of life in general.
[327]. “To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow....”
[328]. A pretty study in communal feeling, as compared with artistic and individual sentiment, could treat the use of a supernatural element in the ballad Clerk Saunders and in Keats’s La Belle Dame sans Merci.
[329]. See Texte, Rousseau, pp. 330 ff.
[330]. Cult. Ren. in Ital., II. 72.
[331]. Even Icelandic sagas, which show considerable artistic skill, make the diction of their heroes anything but pathetic, whatever the situation. See Heinzel, “Beschreibung d. isländ. Saga,” Sitzungsberichte Wiener Akad., XCVII. 119.
[332]. Work quoted, I. 167.