THE ASCENT OF BALLADS 113

measure by an absolute poetic standard, is habitually overrated, per-
haps mainly from reasons of sentiment. It is forgotten that the master-
pieces, like Sir Patrick Spens or Chevy Chase, are exceptional and rare
—how rare and how different to the nick the perusal of a single volume
of Child should convince any unbiassed person.1

'If we are to measure by an absolute poetic standard'—and if,
perchance, such a standard exists. The classic and the critic
demand the application of such standards; but the search for a
poetry that shall be pure dissolves even the greatest works of art
into unrecognizable fragments. The Divine Comedy, considered
absolutely, becomes a cento of lyrics set in a long theological novel,
and the Lusiads 'will always remain one of the world's greatest
poems by reason of its magnificent lyric flights'. The lyric alone is
short enough to sustain such scrutiny, and it would appear that the
modern aesthetic has just skill enough to appreciate that which our
waning poetical genius just suffices to produce—the artistic lyric.
The poetry of the commonalty we neither produce nor admire.
Those who, like Kipling and Watson, seek to express what many
men feel are the more lightly esteemed for their art; while, on the
other hand, the tribe of those who refine and polish and sublimate
their art is left to prophesy before a void. It is not so that much
of the world's greatest poetry has been composed, and it is not
the way of the ballad. The greatest poets have written neither to
extrovert their personalities nor to comply with the demands of
taste, but to voice the common thought of masses of men. So
Homer has been, in a sense, the voice of the Hellenes, and Virgil
of imperial Rome; Dante, Cervantes, and Shakespeare were each
the fruition of an age; Camoes unburdened the 'illustrious Lusi-
tanian breast', and Spenser and Milton gave utterance to a Puritan-
ism, either sweetly reasonable or embattled and dogmatic. There
have been great poems which can be assessed as 'pure poetry', such
as the Orlando Furioso; but to the men of the sixteenth century
Ariosto's masterpiece seemed wanting in substance or seriousness.
We cannot be sure that it expresses something clamouring for
utterance—

Glory and generous shame,

the unconquerable mind, and Freedom's holy flame.

But these are the themes of a * God-gifted organ-voice', and these,
rather than absolute perfection, assure survival in literature. And

1 W. R. Halliday, Folk Studies, London, 1924, p. xi.

4615 Q