Saute, blonde, ma joli’ blonde....
and Béranger sings:—
Une plainte touchante
De ma bouche sortit;
Le bon Dieu me dit, Chante,
Chante, pauvre petit!
it is not only wrong to take simplicity as the differencing factor of the communal song, for Béranger is quite as simple, but it will not do to fall back on mere self-delineation as end of the matter in art. Half of the folksongs of Europe are self-delineations of the singing and dancing crowd, in mass or by deputed “I.” The real difference lies in the shifting of the point of view; song, once the consolation and expression of the festal crowd, comes to be the consolation and expression of the solitary poet. “I do not inquire,” Ribot remarks,[[297]] “whether this sort of isolation in an ivory tower is a gain or a loss for poetry; but I observe its growing frequency as civilization advances, the complete antithesis to its collective character in the earliest ages.” To study such a change in the long reaches of poetic progress would be an almost impossible task even if the material were at hand; it is best to take a comparatively short range of time and a definite place,—say the literature of modern Europe from its beginning in the Middle Ages down to the present time. The extremes are fairly sundered. Europe had lapsed from civilization to a half barbarous state, from the height of the Roman empire to the depth of the dark ages, with a corresponding decline of intellectual power and a great inrush of communal force. Out of these communal conditions, individual and intellectual vigour made its difficult way; how difficult, how tortuous that way, every one knows; and it is along this route, and about the time of the renaissance, that one may best watch the differencing elements of artistic and individual poetry as they come slowly into view.
As the individual[[298]] frees himself from the clogs of his mediæval guild, in literature as in life, there begins the distinctly modern idea of fame, of glory, as a personal achievement apart from community or state; and there, too, begins the idea of literary property. Fame of the poet had its classical tradition, and was asserted in a conventional, meaningless way by mediæval poets, chiefly in Latin; but the market value of a poem is something new.[[299]] From this time on there is a pathetic struggle in the poet’s mind whether he shall regard his poem as offspring to cherish or as ware to sell. Randolph, writing to his friend, Master Anthony Stafford, takes the nobler view:—
Let clowns get wealth and heirs: when I am gone ...
If I a poem leave, that poem is my son.