now. With the coming of the minstrel all is changed, the mystic brotherhood is dissolved. He comes with the new social order, with the elements of disruption into classes; his coming coincides with the beginnings of aristocratic government, of high and low, of rich and poor, of power and impotence. For the true minstrel, whether in his lordly or lowly days, is a society entertainer, seeking the company of rank and wealth or, after the invention of printing, a livelihood in the countryside. The true folk-song, the unadorned poetry of the common people would have been his scorn, the scorn of the artist for the vulgar. The singer known in the hall or castle would have been as unwilling to give his talents to the service of the village as they to hear or appreciate his refined and courtly performance. The true minstrel does not pass from the village to the court, nor in bad times from the court to the village; he is the scion of the ruling class to whose taste he ministers, or he is in later days an itinerant musician of the pedlar type.

And when it is said that the progress of the poetic art is marked by the growing silence of the group, and the gradual transference to the individual of the leading part in composition as well as execution, it is not meant that the group really becomes silent, that the countryside or village community ceases to sing and begins to listen, but that as always it continues to sing to itself, following the leadership of one of its own members; it is meant that the centre of historical interest passes clean away from village community to clan or tribe, organised politically, and with it shifts the centre of literary interest. The village life continues indeed, its art remains, but they have become stationary, they have passed from the light into the shadow, for history follows the star of power and the arc of political change, and passing the village by seeks the castles of the chiefs and the palaces of the kings. "Humanum paucis vivit genus." 'Tis for a few the human race exists. The music of the people has no currency with the ruling aristocracy. Pursuing its own ideals, far different ideals, that literature of the aristocracy becomes the official, the national literature, and its poets, growing up with it, are important officers of state, the

chroniclers and historians of the doings of heroes and of princes. Everywhere the subjects of the most ancient song are domestic as the interests of its makers are domestic, and what historian has the village community ever found to chronicle its story, or what story has it to chronicle? Everywhere in primitive folk-song, for example, the place of women is a large one, but with epic or the beginnings of epic we pass into a man's world, the field of politics and war. With the aristocratic minstrel one enters then the field of events which have more than merely human or personal or family significance, which touch the fortunes of a tribe or nation.

In a sense, therefore, there is a flaw or breach in poetic development here: the poetry of the people is not progressive, nor can it reach out towards elaborate forms. Opposed to it are the inexorable limits of the average intelligence. To be distinguished would be fatal to it, to rise above general requirements, the tastes of its audience, it dare not. For the development, in any real sense, of the drama or of narrative the village or rural community can do nothing; it can only continue to minister to its own local and emotional necessities. Higher than that of the lowest intelligence in the interested group its standard can hardly be, at any time or anywhere. Thus its beauty will be an unconscious beauty as of children at play. In appreciative circles under the stimulus of many large and growing interests distinction in art, complexity in material, are welcome; they are distasteful and impossible in the communal group. Briefly advanced art is acceptable only to the alert and advanced intelligence. But the heroic age, the age of epic beginnings, is not primitive, it is really an advanced epoch in the history of civilisation, whose art, like its constitution, is already mature and distinguished. When an audience capable of appreciating his skill is present, the gifted artist puts forth all his powers, since he knows it willing and able to reward him. And with the ruling class, where he is occupied with issues beyond the ken of the countryside, with tribal or national rather than village or domestic, more personal concerns, he is to be found. The affairs of leading men, the doings of princes and chiefs, the

heroic episodes, the splendid achievements claim him and give scope to his talents. Thus in an unlettered age he becomes the official repository of the traditions, the heroic lore of his tribe, he becomes the chronicler of the great and memorable things. In the memory of the bard, the only library of the age, are stored the fact and fable which make the history and religion of his people.

In early art poetic form is closely linked with political constitution. To each change in that constitution it would be easy to show a corresponding change in the history of art. Even the beginnings of epic then are impossible while society is perfectly homogeneous, for epic requires eminent persons, distinguished while they are representative; it requires a sense of nationality and pride in that nationality, it requires a theme of more than domestic interest. But here, it must not be overlooked, in the heroic age, though there are distinctions of class, there is a far closer bond between the chief and his people, a bond of common interests and not dissimilar occupations, than is to be found in later stages of society. The king in heroic times is not, like the knight in the age of feudalism, separated from his followers by a different code, different manners, and different weapons. Hence the lay that is sung in the chief's presence is not unsuited for the recreation of his people. They understand it as well as the nobles, its sentiments are theirs, and it has currency throughout all the classes of which the fighting society is composed.

National poetry-and true epic is national poetry-arises and arises only when there is a national spirit to call for it, and this spirit, which made the nation, which achieved a political unity, which created a constitution and laws, will create poetry also, informed by a similar unity and expressive in like measure of nationality. The achievements, the aspirations of a people are not written in their outward history alone. But the unity which makes epic is at once broad and closely-knit. No mere clan or tribe can compass it, it must rest on foundations so wide that the world has laid few capable of supporting it. Nor is this all. One may speak of the pre-existence of the epic hero.

The epic-making people must find a hero worthy of it-or create him—it must find some deed of national significance wrought by him, or ascribed to his prowess, around which may be placed with easy propriety the details of daily life, the beliefs and customs and traditions of the race, so that as a whole the narrative shall be more than a narrative, a meeting place of all emotions held in common and a source of inspiration, since it ministers not only to national pride, but has constant reference to names, and things, and places familiar.

Epic literature implies, too, as Professor Ker tells us, "not merely certain favourite themes-combats, battles, killing of monsters, escapes, or defences-but a diffused sympathy for the heroic mood among the people for whom the epic is made. We may suppose that when the epic poem flourishes there is, among the contemporary people who are not poetical, something like the epic frame of mind, a rudimentary heroic imagination which already gives to mere historical events and situations a glimmering of their epic magnificence. The 'multitude' in an heroic age interprets life heroically; and it is this common vague sentiment of heroism, not any bare unaccommodated thing in itself, with which the epic poets make their beginning. Their real life is heroic, because it seems so, both to them and to their unpoetic fellows and hearers." 1

Of the Anglo-Saxon poetry which preceded Beowulf no specimens survive. How is it then possible to study the epic process in the ancient literature of our race? Frankly, it is not possible. Yet a process not wholly dissimilar is before us in the development of the modern ballad, if we are willing to allow a certain permanence in human habit, a certain recurrence in the methods of the mind. Our English and Scottish ballads-it matters not when they were composed - probably represent, just as the fo lk-songof Buchan represents, a type older than Beowulf, though Beowulf was no doubt composed seven or nine hundred years earlier. The democratic, the unofficial, the unprogressive type of poetry-which preserves, though it has outgrown, communal features, indicates earlier social conditions, less complex 1 The Dark Ages, p. 84.

interests, and far simpler artistic form-is there in unmistakable guise. These ballads of ours, modern as they are, may in some cases be the lineal descendants of Germanic ballads, composed before the coming of the Saxon. Though not a word remain the same, though every cadence be altered, the relationship is not of necessity affected. For the folk-song has no fixed text, and accommodates itself with easy fluency, in every generation, to local, temporary, or linguistic requirements. It differs at every rendering, for it is no man's property; it can never fall out of date, for if it does not renew itself on the lips of each singer, it passes into complete oblivion. It lives and dies and lives again with each new recital.

Thus, though we cannot trace back any of our existing ballads to the moment when they parted company from their original choral associations, though they may be and usually are indeed in their present shape the work of individual makers, we are deceived if we think of them as the simple and original compositions of the fifteenth-century balladist. Their stuff is the stuff of which primitive or communal poetry is everywhere composed, their form and structure, their sentiments and situations betray an unsophisticated art. Few things are more certain than that popular poetry continued to flourish in most communities while the more advanced individualistic and progressive art in the hands of the gleeman or scôp, to use the names given in our early literature to the professional singer, was elsewhere collecting epic material. To the aristocratic and warring society then we must look for our epic beginnings, to the ruling group, whose acts and sayings are of political importance and become history, whose literature is song and chronicle, concerned with their ancestors and themselves, a literature representative and official.1 Like the early village community in one thing the aristocratic society in its

1 Since writing the above I have seen Mr. Chadwick's recently published and valuable Heroic Age. We may, I think, accept his four stages in the history of heroic poetry-" To Stage I. belong the court poems of the Heroic Age itself "a stage from which nothing has survived; to Stage II. the epic and narrative poems based on these "-like Beowulf and the other Anglo-Saxon poems we possess; "to Stage III. the popular poetry of the eighth and following centuries; to Stage IV. the German poems of the twelfth and following centuries, composed at a time when heroic subjects had again come into favour with the higher classes."