No More Learning

" This notion that such a thing as a
"folk-spirit" can create art, and that the art which it does create must
be somehow better than other art, is, I suppose, the offspring of
democratic ideas in politics. The chief objection to it is that there
never has been and never can be anything in actuality corresponding to
the "folk-spirit" which this notion supposes. Poetry is the work of
poets, not of peoples or communities; artistic creation can never be
anything but the production of an individual mind. We may, if we like,
think that poetry would be more "natural" if it were composed by the
folk as the folk, and not by persons peculiarly endowed; and to think so
is doubtless agreeable to the notion that the folk is more important
than the individual. But there is nothing gained by thinking in this
way, except a very illusory kind of pleasure; since it is impossible
that the folk should ever be a poet. This indisputable axiom has been
ignored more in theories about ballads--about epic material--than in
theories about the epics themselves. But the belief in a real
folk-origin for ballads, untenable though it be in a little examination,
has had a decided effect on the common opinion of the authentic epics.
In the first place, a poem constructed out of ballads composed, somehow
or other, by the folk, ought to be more "natural" than a work of
deliberate art--a "literary" epic; that is to say, these Rousseau-ish
notions will admire it for being further from civilization and nearer to
the noble savage; civilization being held, by some mysterious argument,
to be deficient in "naturalness. " In the second place, this belief has
made it credible that the plain corruption of authentic epic by oral
transmission, or very limited transmission through script, might be the
sign of multiple authorship; for if you believe that a whole folk can
compose a ballad, you may easily believe that a dozen poets can compose
an epic.

But all this rests on simple ignoring of the nature of poetic
composition. The folk-origin of ballads and the multiple authorship of
epics are heresies worse than the futilities of the Baconians; at any
rate, they are based on the same resolute omission, and build on it a
wilder fantasy. They omit to consider what poetry is. Those who think
Bacon wrote _Hamlet_, and those who think several poets wrote the
_Iliad_, can make out a deal of ingenious evidence for their doctrines.
But it is all useless, because the first assumption in each case is
unthinkable. It is psychologically impossible that the mind of Bacon
should have produced _Hamlet_; but the impossibility is even more
clamant when it comes to supposing that several poets, not in
collaboration, but in haphazard succession, could produce a poem of vast
sweeping unity and superbly consistent splendour of style.
So far as
mere authorship goes, then, we cannot make any real difference between
"authentic" and "literary" epic. We cannot say that, while this is
written by an individual genius, that is the work of a community.
Individual genius, of whatever quality, is responsible for both. The
folk, however, cannot be ruled out. Genius does the work; but the folk
is the condition in which genius does it. And here we may find a genuine
difference between "literary" and "authentic"; not so much in the nature
of the condition as in its closeness and insistence.

The kind of folk-spirit behind the poet is, indeed, different in the
_Iliad_ and _Beowulf_ and the _Song of Roland_ from what it is in Milton
and Tasso and Virgil. But there is also as much difference here between
the members of each class as between the two classes themselves. You
cannot read much of _Beowulf_ with Homer in your mind, without becoming
conscious that the difference in individual genius is by no means the
whole difference. Both poets maintain a similar ideal in life; but they
maintain it within conditions altogether unlike. The folk-spirit behind
_Beowulf_ is cloudy and tumultuous, finding grandeur in storm and gloom
and mere mass--in the misty _lack_ of shape. Behind Homer it is, on the
contrary, radiant and, however vehement, always delighting in measure,
finding grandeur in brightness and clarity and shining outline. So,
again, we may very easily see how Tasso's poetry implies the Italy of
his time, and Milton's the England of his time. But where Homer and
Beowulf together differ from Tasso and Milton is in the way the
surrounding folk-spirit contains the poet's mind. It would be a very
idle piece of work, to choose between the potency of Homer's genius and
of Milton's; but it is clear that the immediate circumstance of the
poet's life presses much more insistently on the _Iliad_ and the
_Odyssey_ than on _Paradise Lost_. It is the difference between the
contracted, precise, but vigorous tradition of an heroic age, and the
diffused, eclectic, complicated culture of a civilization.