So, too, what one calls objective in modern poetry is not objective in the communal, mediæval sense; and what one thinks to be sentimental or even subjective in the ballads or other communal song is not subjective or sentimental in any modern way. A throng in those homogeneous conditions was unsentimental in its poetical expression for the good reason that a throng has emotions distinct from the emotions of an individual; this, too, is why sentiment and individualism have kept step in the progress of poetry. Tennyson is objective enough in his verses about the widow of a slain warrior and her rescuing tears when her child is brought to her. But this is not really objective, not communal; it is sentiment, of a high order to be sure, but sentiment. What a different point of view in the commonplace of the ballads! Was the head of the house slain and the widow left lamenting, invariably,—
Up spake the son on the nourice’s knee, “Gin I live to be a man, revenged I’ll be;”
that is true communal and objective emotion. Scott, who was saturated with ballads and ballad lore, was the last of English poets who could write in an impersonal and communal way. After him always, as mostly before him, the subjective and sentimental note came canting in even where severest objectivity is supposed to reign. If one wishes to feel this in Scott,—for it is a thing to feel and not to prove by syllogisms,—one has only to read the final stanza of _Bonnie Dundee_; not great verse, indeed, but full of a certain unforced simplicity, a large air, a communal vigour, an echo of unpremeditated, impersonal, roundly objective song.[328]
There is another process in the poetry of art which serves to disguise the real tendency toward individual instead of communal emotion. Communal poetry had a wide, free, outdoor life; the modern poet is bounded in a nutshell,—but he has his dreams. With intense subjectivity comes the need to cover a vast range of space and time; in place of the clan or the community, its grief and joy, set forth by the communal song, one finds a solitary poet, a sort of sick king in Bokhara, dealing with the universe, and putting into his lines that quality which is best expressed in general by the often abused name of _weltschmerz_, and in particular by those countless passages in modern lyric like the poem which Shelley wrote “in dejection,” or that verse of Keats which expresses so admirably the modern lyric attitude in contrast with a singing and dancing throng:—