Читать книгу The Beginnings of Poetry онлайн

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This democratic thought of the eighteenth century had an outer and an inner circle, answering in great measure to the notion of humanity and the notion of the people or “folk.” It was Vico who put men upon the first trail, who reformed scientific methods, and who, with all his antiquated theories, is often so surprisingly modern. He bade men look for the mind of humanity, the soul of it, as revealed in history, poetry, law, language, religion. He traced something of the inner circle as well, tossing aside Homer’s personality, and saying that Homer was the Greek people itself as it told the story of its deeds. He set up the antithesis between imagination and reason, and gave the formula of culture as a decrease of the one and an increase of the other. Herder said these things seventy years later, and indeed his mere plea for humanity and nationality^[278] adds little to the ideas of Vico; what the German added of his own was on the larger scale a substitution of people for race, and on the smaller scale a plea for the actual folk about one, the community of rustics, the village throng, not idealized shepherds and subjects of the Saturnian reign. From Vico to Herder, then, democracy was in the air, pervading the rationalism that so easily turned into sentiment and the naturalism that so readily fabled a new supernaturalism. Particularly in its theories of poetry the eighteenth century responded to the democratic impulse along three lines, the scientific, the historical, and what one would now call the ethnological and sociological.^[279] A detailed account of these three currents of thought in their effect upon the study of poetry would be of interest and profit in the present work, but demands too much space; it must be reserved for separate treatment. We must confine our attention to the movement for communal or popular verse, and even that must be described in merest outline.