Читать книгу The Beginnings of Poetry онлайн

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The catholicity and discernment of Montaigne, the careless approval of Sidney, the comparative vein in Puttenham, had really no following in Europe until Herder’s time. Poetry of the people remained a literary outcast; and as late as 1775 a German professor “would have felt insulted by the mere idea of any attention” to such verse.^[284] Englishmen, to be sure, began long before this to collect the ballads, to print them, and even to write about them in a shamefaced way; but this was eccentricity of the kind for which, according to Matthew Arnold, continental folk still make allowance. Ambrose Phillips, or whoever made the collection begun in 1723, is very bold in his first volume; he “will enter upon the praise of ballads and shew their antiquity;” in the second volume he weakens, and will “say as little upon the subject as possibly” he can; while in the third volume he actually apologizes for the “ludicrous manner” in which he wrote the two other prefaces. He had suggested that the ballads were really “written by the greatest and most polite wits of their age”; but nobody in England paid much heed to the subject of origins, barring a little powder burnt over the thing by Percy and Ritson; and the making of a theory, the founding of ballad criticism and research as a literary discipline, was left to German pens.