i26 THE ASCENT OF BALLADS

narrative, apparently of the strictest neutrality, Heine clears a
channel for his lambent irony. The poem and its congeners are
not Volkstiimlich5; it is not right that poetry not destined for
traditional preservation should ape all the characteristics of the
traditional style. There must be a new creation into something
better and more definitive, whether in form or intention. Heine
discovered that the neutral manner of the 'Romanze' is unrivalled
as a means of letting the terrible things about men and life express
themselves. More recently, G. Duhamel has done the same. Tor-
mented by the sight of useless suffering in the military hospitals
he frequented during the War, Duhamel could find no epithets or
rhetoric which did not diminish the horror of the real thing. The
stark objectivity of his couplets in the Ballade ofFlorentin Prunier,1
without ornament or sentimental disguise, rivets our horrified
gaze on the tragedy itself. Any adjectivation would have afforded
a relief which the poet was determined to refuse. So too with
Heine, though he is more prone to disgust than to horror. In
Heine, on the other hand, pure song reaches a second perfection,
as in his Pine and Palm, inspired by similar allegorical folk-songs
about trees.

It is not capricious to take Germany on our road to considering
the effect of Percy on English poets, since our Romantics were
affected by the German enthusiasm. Southey saw in The Ancient
Mariner a 'Dutch attempt at German sublimity'—to such an
extent had a sublimity characteristically English (or rather Scottish)
come to appear German. Scott, though he collected the Border
Minstrelsy, was also the translator of Burger's Lenore, Goethe's
Erlkonig, and the traditional Sempach and Moringer. It was as a
collector and imitator of ancient ballads that Scott set up business
as a man of letters, developing thence into an author of lays', and
so into a novelist; but the incidental verses in the novels show that
he had not lost his first love. If the ballads have, in a measure, sug-
gested the historical novel, they also, in another measure, initiated
the Romantic revival of the lyric. The Lyrical Ballads owe little
to specific folk-songs, but they aim at attaining two of the excel-
lences to be found in balladry: the imaginative presentation of
ordinary experience, and the humanizing of the supernatural. The
influence of individual pieces is much less in England than in
Germany, though one may mention Lockhart's renderings of

Elegies, 1920. M. Duhamei mentioned these poems to me himself.