Читать книгу The Beginnings of Poetry онлайн

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It has been said that Herder was the prophet of the faith in communal poetry. Herder’s “origins,” so far as this doctrine is concerned, are interesting enough. That the individual is child of his time, child of his race, child of his soil; that he is not only what “suns and winds and waters” make him, but what long ages and vast conspiracies of nature and the sum of human struggle have made him,—strand by strand of this cord can be brought from Hamann, from Blackwell, Lowth, Robert Wood, Hurd, Spence, from Condorcet, Montesquieu, Rousseau; but all that does not make up Herder. It was his grasp of this entire evolutionary process, his belief in it, his fiery exhortation, in a word, his genius, that made him the only begetter of the modern science. Full of scorn for closet verse of his day, he held up the racial or national, the “popular” in its best sense, against the pedantic and the laboured,—poetry that beats with the pulse of a whole people against poetry that copies its exercises from a dead page and has no sense of race. He sundered poetry for the ear from poetry for the eye, poetry said or sung from poetry that looks to “a paper eternity” for its reward. Under his hands, in a word, the dualism became real, a state of things impossible while one was juggling with an adjective like “natural” or with a phrase like “naive and sentimental.” He gathered and printed songs of the folk, as he calls them, or by another title, voices of the nations.^[285] Here, of course, is lack of precision; a peasant’s song and a soliloquy of Hamlet, one because really “popular,” the other because really “national,” are ranged alike as folksongs. But the dualism stands. Oral, traditional, communal poetry, and whatever springs from these, are set clearly against poetry of the schools. Naturally, Herder was unjust to the cause of art, or rather he seems to be unjust. What he does is to bid the artist stand for a community or race and reflect their life, or else fall, a negligible and detached thing. Poetry is a spring of water from the living rock of community or nation; whether Moses, Homer, Shakspere, dealt the unsealing blow, or whether the waters gushed out of their own force, Herder cared not a whit.