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 compose a ballad, you may easily believe that a dozen poets can compose an epic.

But all this rests on simple ignoring of the nature of poetic composition.  The folk-origin of ballads and the multiple authorship of epics are heresies worse than the futilities of the Baconians; at any rate, they are based on the same resolute omission, and build on it a wilder fantasy.  They omit to consider what poetry is.  Those who think Bacon wrote Hamlet, and those who think several poets wrote the Iliad, can make out a deal of ingenious evidence for their doctrines.  But it is all useless, because the first assumption in each case is unthinkable.  It is psychologically impossible that the mind of Bacon should have produced Hamlet; but the impossibility is even more clamant when it comes to supposing that several poets, not in collaboration, but in haphazard succession, could produce a poem of vast sweeping