But doubtless the real reason for the hard division of epic poetry into
two classes, and for the presumed inferiority of "literary" to
"authentic," lies in the application of that curiosity among false
ideas, the belief in a "folk-spirit." 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