[335]. Interest even in the great tragedies has come to be duty rather than inclination. In the Abbé Dubos’s day tragedy was still preferred; but he says that whereas he read Racine with keenest delight at thirty (“lorsqu’il etoit occupé des passions que ces pièces nous dépeignent”), at sixty it was Molière.
[336]. Der Scheidende. Sentiment naturally turns to the cadence of rhythm, while humour feels at home in prose; hence it is easy to see that humour in verse, as with Heine, is ancillary to sentiment, while sentiment in prose, as with Sterne and even Lamb, is ancillary to humour.
[337]. See below, Chap. VII.
[338]. See the author’s Old English Ballads, p. xxx, and reference to Wordsworth’s famous preface. See also Gray’s letter to R. West, April, 1742, “The language of the age is never the language of poetry,” and what follows.
[339]. See the author’s Old English Ballads, Boston, 1894, Introduction (on terminology, origins, criticism), and Appendix I. (The Ballads of Europe). For collections, see, of course, the material in the tenth volume of Child’s great work. On the relations of this communal ballad to the other kind of ballads, see Holtzhausen, Ballade und Romanze, Halle, 1882, and Chevalier, Zur Poetik der Ballade, Programme of the Prague Obergymnasium, in four parts, Prague, 1891-1895.
[340]. “Volkslied und Kunstlied in Deutschland,” Beilage zur Allgemeinen Zeitung, Munich, Nos. 53, 54, March, 1898,—a paper first read in October, 1897.
[341]. Only the narrative song is here considered; for popular lyric see below.
[342]. “Volksdichtung und Kunstdichtung,” in Nord und Süd, LXVIII. (1894), 76 ff. It may be noted here that the temptation to take this easy attitude toward poetry of the people, as toward a fictitious and fanciful affair, is largely due to a misunderstanding of the evolutionary side of the case. The distinction is not one of coexistent forms of poetry so much as of successive stages of evolution. It is no hard matter to take so-called popular poetry of the day and reduce it to terms of art—the lowest terms, of course; but with poetry of the people treated as a closed or closing account, and with historical evidence about it in former times, a very different problem is presented. An important hint to this effect was given by Dr. Eugen Wolff in his paper “über den Stil des Nibelungenliedes,” Verhandlungen der vierzigsten Versammlung deutscher Philologen, etc., Leipzig, 1890, pp. 259 ff.
[343]. Norske Folkeviser, Christiania, 1853, pp. iii f.
[344]. Chants et Chansons Populaires des Provinces de l’Ouest, Niort, 1895, I. 12. For the authorship, Le Braz, remarks, Soniou-Breiz-Izel, Chansons Pop. d. l. Basse-Bretagne, Introd., p. xxv, “à mesure que les productions populaires deviennent plus médiocres, leurs auteurs se font un devoir de conscience de les contresigner.”