Drama, then, in the widest sense, is the “imitation” of life by means of remembered and repeated movements, induced by the feeling of social elation, and made possible by the cadence of social consent in the dance, accompanied by sounds which instinctively follow this cadence of the action and find their stay as well as their suggestion in the regular recurrence of rhythm. It must have followed hard upon the discovery of consent in common step and common cry, which, if one choose, one may call primitive lyric; the other may pass as primitive drama. In perspective they seem almost contemporaneous in origin. The question of priority, debated with so much warmth, thus becomes a question of names, and not a very important question at best. It is a matter of differentiation and growth from a common origin, which may be described as dramatic or lyric, according as one understands the terms, and which certainly had both elements in it. It was rhythmic, and it was an outlet for communal emotion; it was imitated action, with momentary and spontaneous suggestions; and it can be called narrative or epic only by unwarranted stretching of the words, though the slightly reminiscent factor in the case may be called an epic germ. Finally, the differentiation and growth from this communal poetry of a primitive stage of culture must have been mainly the work of improvisation, or individual assertion, acting on the communal elements, and leading to disintegration and new combinations in processes which varied with the conditions of race and environment.[[1091]] One suggestive fact, however, is to be noted. The drama, in a broad sense, is the beginning of poetry; it is also the end and perfection of the art, and this by a communal reaction. There are centripetal as well as centrifugal forces; if the individual is forever breaking away from the throng and carrying poetry into lonely paths of deliberation, sentiment, artistry, the throng, mainly by that subtle suggestion of consent in rhythm, is forever calling the poet back to his communal point of departure. We have seen how slowly the communal beginnings of poetry,—to us like geological periods, because they have sent down to us no records, and only a few hints of their existence,—yielded even to the tentative progress of individual art, and what long ages must have contented themselves with songs of the horde and the iteration of the refrain in a tribal dance; it is equally true that the communal instinct still summons poetry back from its hiding-place with the poet in that “ivory tower,” and bids it tread the ways of open and crowded life. In the drama poetry may, indeed, find its final form, as Goethe declared, but it is also coming back in some degree to the instincts and habit of its prime; it is recalling its forces from the scattered and lonely paths of individual thought for a distinctly communal reaction. Even the opera, the ballet,[[1092]] though in less marked degree, show this reactionary communal spirit. The communal elements of action, dance, music, scene,[[1093]] all of which Aristotle had reckoned along with drama and epos as a part of poetry, are thus variously restored. Narrative is banished in favour of the plot, which at least seems to be natural action; deliberate lyric effort, the solitary thought, is rejected for what at least seems to be improvised or spontaneous speech of the actors; dancing and festal expression may or may not be present, and so with music, but the rhythm is deputy for the cadence of dancing feet; and finally there is what seems to be the real world of men, the scene. These realistic effects, these chariot-races and locomotives on the stage, whatever one despises most heartily in the degenerate drama of the day, are the reaction from excesses of subjective poetry toward actual life and the tendency toward communal conditions which art always shows when it deals with a public and abandons the confidences of author and reader.[[1094]] It is perhaps too much to assert that the drama was done to death through excess of that “lyric cry,” and by a tendency which developed character at the expense of action; but the counter movement has been toward the mass and rude effects of force. In the eyes of some uncritical folk, the lack of distinct individual characters, the effect of a homogeneous mob of actors, the crude but vigorous course of events, in early histories and miracle plays, would make better claim to the title of drama than the subtile characterization of Shakspere and the humours of Jonson; arma, they might maintain, should come before virum for the playwright; and if any comfort can be gathered from our deplorable modern drama, it may possibly lurk in this idea of the return to communal art. In any case, it is the price which our age has to pay for the piercingly subjective character of its lyric poetry. Epic, in any objective and vital form, has vanished, and the drama, desperate in its struggle for life, turns to demos as to a long-forgotten friend.
Before one leaves the beginnings of poetry, its earliest disintegration in point of treatment and theme, and goes back to that improvising poet, in order to glance again at the beginnings of artistry and the decline of communal power, one has two elements of the main subject with which it is well to come to terms. Besides the subject-matter of poetry, there is its style, its form; between the style, or figurative element in poetry on one hand, and on the other hand, its material divisions of drama, epos, lyric, is that vast and ill-defined province assigned to myth. Now claimed as metaphor, and offspring of earliest language, now as drama of nature, now as the tale told by primitive fancy in response to primitive curiosity, now as the lyric or hymn which embodied man’s first religious impulse, this fugitive and exquisite creature has had as many masters, has been dragged over as many paths, and has kept as unimpaired beauty, as that famous daughter of the soudan of Babylonia, affianced to the king of Garbo. Of all these temporary masters none is so comprehensive in his gallantry as A. W. Schlegel,[[1095]] who hails myth as the source of poetry, of philosophy even, as the soul of primitive language, as “nature in poetic robes,” and goes so far as to say that modern physical science could easily be stated in terms of ancient mythology. Myth, indeed, is such a wide word with Schlegel that it covers the romances of Arthur and Charlemagne;[[1096]] and when one reflects that folklore has since claimed its share of mythological territory, while, on the other hand, brutal folk who speak for a new euphemerism call myth an impudent baggage with no religion in her and only a touch or so of poetry, the case is complicated. Over a path so riddled with pitfalls one is not anxious to walk; but to treat the beginnings of poetry without touching myth is out of the question, and a few steps must be made if only to secure a point of view. We shall consider myth in its relation to primitive verse, and shall then turn to the kindred topic of early figurative language and poetical style.
Concerning the source and function and meaning of myths[[1097]] a long battle has been waged, and noise of it is still ringing in our ears; but the fiercer struggle seems just now to have come to a kind of truce, and the warriors, as in that other contest over the origin of language, appear to be lying on their arms. The more one knows of early civilization, it would seem, the less one feels inclined to dogmatize about the source of myths; while with regard to their meanings, that exhilarating and harmless pastime, where scholar after scholar came forward with his solution, where Bacon in older days turned classic myth into the wisdom of the ancients, and where, in later times, Simrock gave a haec fabula docet for every shred of Germanic fancy and fable;[[1098]] where Uhland, in his beautiful book on the Myth of Thor, blew one of the most exquisite and iridescent bubbles that ever delighted the poetic eye and broke at the touch of common sense; where Max Müller and his friends converted the primitive Aryan now into a fellow of the prettiest and most fanciful habit of mind, with his interest in sunsets, and stars, and vanishing dewdrops, now into a resolute and saner Lear bent on knowing the cause of thunder; a pastime, finally, in which even Jacob Grimm, for all his “combining” powers, refused to join,—this mania for the direct interpreting of myths has had its day and ceased to be. The end came with the establishment of two facts, one negative and one positive. Anthropology, ethnology, a close study of the history of culture, of social institutions, of religion, led to the sound conclusion that whatever else it might be, the mythology of early man was not conterminous with the religion of early man;[[1099]] for religion in those stages is chiefly a matter of ceremony and ritual forms. Suppose a person ignorant of the rites of the Roman church undertaking to get a notion of its ceremonies, and of the heart of its faith, by a study of the Legenda Aurea, or any such body of tales! That was the negative fact; the myth is not primitive religion, and is rarely primitive creed. Again, anthropology, notably through its great exponent Professor Tylor, established the positive fact that myths are due to a kind of poetic faculty in primitive man, the habit of animating, or, in modern phrase not quite accurate for early stages of culture, of personifying what went on about him.[[1100]] Mr. Andrew Lang, while following Professor Tylor in principle, has made room for the obscene, the brutal, the silly, which can be found so plentifully in savage myth and sporadically in the myths which we call classical. To these ways of thinking came the sturdy Müllenhoff, and after him, Mannhardt, an avowed student of customs and popular thought; with Mannhardt’s later work, myth-guessing, in which he had once been as wild as any,[[1101]] came to an end. It is now conceded that the source as well as the meaning of most myths is veiled in the obscurity of early animistic processes, while their later development belongs to the poet altogether. “I have learned,” wrote Mannhardt[[1102]] to Müllenhoff, “to value poetical and literary production as an essential factor in the formation of mythology.” Indeed, it is not considering too curiously when Burckhardt[[1103]] declares that the renaissance in Italy so thoroughly revived the gods of old pagan belief, that poets made new myths in the ancient spirit.
It is a great mistake, however, to infer with certain bold followers of Mr. Herbert Spencer—the German Lippert, for example—that myths have nothing to do with primitive religion and belong altogether to the poetic or fantastic instinct. True, myths of the classic kind, barring the names of god and goddess, were pretty well divorced from faith; but Homer and Hesiod told tales unknown to the primitive worshipper of Greece, and he had myths of his own. Schwartz, a valiant guesser, but rational on certain lines, pointed out forty years ago[[1104]] that perspective must be observed, and that the origin of a myth must be held apart from its development; often, indeed, by a hint here and a survival there, one can feel one’s way back from the graceful, celestial romance to a rude myth with all the awe of belief upon it. It may be said with confidence that early myth excluded mere tales of nature, drama of the shifting seasons, the flash of sunlight on the waves, and all the romance of blushing dawns and shepherded or wandering stars; these tales of later origin belonged to the poet and his fantasy. Early man did not go about commercing with the skies, nor did any spur of occasion put him upon the telling of a natural process, duly observed, in terms of a human history proportioned and duly recorded. That is a definite poetical or allegorical process, and means that the mind has a clear idea of two separate systems, and can hold apart the world of fancy and the world of fact, welding them together in conscious purpose. It is poetry,[[1105]] not primitive myth, which sees the heavens as the psalmist saw them: in them hath he set a tabernacle for the sun, which is as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, and rejoiceth as a strong man to run a race. Myth, indeed, may now and then lie at the heart of such poetical achievement; but that elementary myth, the work of unconscious animism, is rude and shapeless by comparison with this finer stuff. Primitive myth is a block of marble with more or less resemblance to some creature, a kind of fetish; poets come and carve it into definite shape, individualize, idealize, polish; next is formed the group, the celestial romance, figures as on the frieze of a temple, with the loves and the quarrels of the gods; and then, last stage of all, allegorical and satirical poets, a Lucian, a singer like him of the Norse Lokasenna, make free with those fragments of myth where no awe of belief can linger and hardly even the vital grace of imagination. In all this coil but one stage has interest for us; what can be said of the beginnings of poetry in their relation to the beginnings of myth?
A good test for the primitive stage of myth is first the necessity, not the possibility of it, and secondly, the unconscious character of the animating process. Dawn, starlight, and laughing waters put no stress of questioning upon early man; but the bolt from a stormcloud which laid low the sheltering tree, or struck down members of the horde, a nameless Terror bursting out of the unknown, came in more questionable shape, and must have found expression in those statements which a communal chorus, as was seen in the case of the Botocudos, is fain to make about the fate and doings of the horde itself. Mere ancestor-worship is not enough to explain such a case;[[1106]] every analogy of human action fails in the presence of this flash and roar and destruction; the unknown was there, as with modern phrase—“it” thunders[[1107]]—and the statement, repeated in indefinite chorus, had in it the awe and fear and yearning about the unknown which still go a long way to make up the idea of religion. But it was unconscious, this process of animism; before one consciously attributes personality to a force of nature, one must have the two distinct ideas before the mind, and for early man such a clear view was out of the question. Moreover, the idea of a definite force, a definite personality, hardly belongs to the primitive stage of myth; one must look at environment[[1108]] and the social organization. It is known that even the sacred bull, and still more the “father” of the spirits, the chief god, reflect nomadic life under a leader; while the leaderless horde is girt about with a horde of spirits, the “they” of primitive worship corresponding to the “we” of the social group.[[1109]] In this stage of culture only the horde itself, the social group, can be in the case; poetic fancy on one side, ordered bands of deities, high and low, with a supreme god over all, on the other side, must be excluded. Earliest myth is simply communal emotion, in choral statement, provoked by some overwhelming act of vague and unseen powers. Early poetry is always “occasional”; what strikes, like this thunderbolt, into the life of the horde,[[1110]] is a theme quite as solicitous as good hunting, or the fight with rival clans, to fill a refrain with repeated statement of fact, and, in time, to tempt the improvising soloist into a phrase of wonder, awe, pity, propitiation. Here, then, is a common ground for the beginnings of poetry and the beginnings of myth,[[1111]]—in communal, choral statement. True, explanation of these doings of nature may be a fertile source of myth in the later period when poetry and science are allied in a search after causes; but it is clear that stating a fact is a process anterior to any explanation of a fact. Is there not for modern man himself a comfort in the lucid statement of things even before the things are explained? The lawyer who states his case clearly has half explained it and has prepared the jury to accept his explanation of the facts. Scherer says that myth is due to some primitive genius who listened to a thunderstorm, wished to explain it, and conjectured that “the gods were fighting,”[[1112]] a theory adopted by the fellow-citizens of this genius, who thus had “founded” a myth. But communal statement, with unconscious animism in the terms of it,—communal, that is, in its expression, and religious in its source,—is the only formula for early myth which will agree with the conditions of primitive life. To the cadence of the dance, in iterated refrain, the horde as a social group took comfort in getting the facts into a coherent statement; to repeat, in a rhythm which made repetition easy and coherence possible, that the “they” in question had done things which the “we” were now recording, was a process not far removed from the iterated statement that “we” had found a good hunt, made a good catch, or what not. From the awful and inevitable, this communal choral statement could pass to less destructive doings; and from the pandemonium, the rout of spirits, step by step with differentiation of the horde, with the rise of tribal leaders, with the coming of an improvising singer, this statement could pass to the pantheon[[1113]] and hierarchy of gods.
That myths of this sort, statements based on the feeling for animated nature in its more obtrusive forms, were as early as the worship of ancestral spirits, is denied by Mr. Herbert Spencer and his school, but without good cause. It is illogical to affirm the beginnings of reason and in the same breath to deny the beginnings of fancy. If ancestor-worship, belief in “them,” was one of the earliest inferences of the human mind, if one of the first conclusions which man made outside the round of his daily struggle for food and safety was to animate an unseen world, as early an act, earlier indeed, was to animate the world he saw. Statements about the doings of an animated nature, a horde of echoes, movements, violent activities, girdling the horde of men, were thus in all probability the earliest form of myth. This statement, however, had less of that scientific leaning than Scherer would make one believe; childish fear of harm and childish hope of gain is a more likely attitude of mind in primitive folk than childish curiosity about causes. The choral statement, one may assume, took most easily a reference to human needs and so became a hymn. The hymn is essentially choral, and even under literary conditions implies a congregation; the majesty and power of a real hymn like Luther’s is out of all proportion to its merit as a poem. It is the source of the hymn in a communal emotion, and the direction of it to unseen forces, that give it this majesty; and the poorest words gain might from these conditions alone. A rude hymn of the horde to those spirits unseen but felt, was therefore the probable beginning of myth,—not a performance of the shaman before a passive throng, and not a tale of celestial doings invented by some early genius who took it upon him to pry into the mystery of things. Of course there are fetish myths which have come to be brutal and obscene, but were not brutal and obscene when they were first formed;[[1114]] there are also myths invented in a later stage of culture to account for a ritual or a belief[[1115]] come down from early and obscure origins, often with something of the fetish in them, as is probably the case with the myth of Rome and the wolf; and there are crude tales, due to as crude scientific instinct, to account for physical phenomena, popular everywhere and in all times down to the day of Uncle Remus. But all evidence of ethnology, all the facts which have served to trace the line of poetical evolution, go to make probable the social and communal and choral beginnings of the myth which has the awe of belief upon it. As might be expected, fragments of this old choral refrain which bound the myth to the community and to its religious emotion, have come down to us embedded in later and poetical myth; and it has been shown that a refrain of grief[[1116]] for the loss or departure of a god, demigod, hero, has often been made a proper name and the nucleus for a new myth. This choral cry of the horde has great interest for the student of myths; and if the etymology be probable which makes the word “god” mean “one that is called upon,” here is more beckoning that way. Heavier stress should be laid upon the choral hymn as expression of emotion from a homogeneous horde of men toward a homogeneous horde of spirits, and upon the dance and symbolic action which went with the song, taking in time now a ritual and now a dramatic guise.[[1117]] In other words, this choral hymn, danced and sung,—if one will, danced and sung about some symbol of animated and superhuman but by no means individualized or “personified” powers, and with accompaniment of sacrifice, with festal recapitulation, even, of action inspired by the help of these powers,—was on one hand the source of religious ceremony, which later, in its mutilated and incomprehensible refrains held so stubbornly in festal worship, with the worshipped powers hovering about unseen, and, on the other hand, source of a secular drama, where, as in Greece, only an altar remained as visible hint of sacred origins, and only the intervention of gods and the abiding sense of fate kept alive the old purpose of the hymn. This chorus, dealing with the doings of spirits, like the chorus that dealt with labour and hunt and communal experience at large, was also the beginning of myths which, like the older refrain, fell under the power of improvisation and so passed into poetic control, keeping pace with the tribal development of hero, chieftain, conqueror, king, blending with legend, and at last finding record in the epos.
The impression of natural forces upon man, and the reactionary process which imposes man’s imagination upon natural forces, have another side; they make up not only the material of poetry, but also its manner, its style. The second process, when it animated nature with something like human will, human passion, human fate, and while it did this with the awe of belief upon it, has been seen to pass into myth. Roughly speaking, one may say that the early and unconscious process is myth, and the later, conscious process, when directed not to a statement or story but only to a word or phrase, is the figure or trope of personification. The first process, however, where human life is treated in terms of nature, is conveniently known as metaphor, although precision in the use of these terms is not so much observed as desired; and metaphor, too, must be regarded as first an unconscious and then a conscious process.
Myth and personification need no further comment, and we shall now consider the metaphor as mainstay of poetical style; one word, however, may be in place for an early and unconscious form of personification, which deals with language rather than with fact, and so must be sundered from myth—the grammatical gender of words.[[1118]] A bit of myth may lie, of course, in those expressions which hover between the natural and the grammatical gender, and is not always easy to explain from the primitive point of view, however appropriate the choice may seem to a modern mind; why is the sun feminine in all Germanic languages, and the moon masculine? Day is masculine, night is feminine; earth seems always feminine, and “mother” is no new epithet for her. Death, pestilence, sickness, have personifications that are more than gender; Servians think of the plague as a woman in white who steals upon her victims, and to modern Greeks sickness is also a woman, blind and old, who feels her way from house to house.[[1119]] But even now the process may be unconscious, as one observes in languages like English, which have lost their inflections and can give gender only by pronouns; Grimm’s elaborate categories for the three genders are sadly baffled by the habit which calls a ship a “man-of-war” and bids the bystander watch “her” sail by.[[1120]] Again, there is transfer to reckon with; the first name for an object, as will be shown presently to be the case with metaphors, yields later to a name more precise; and when a ship, or the like, is in question, motion and seeming life could give one vague name, while later and nearer acquaintance found an appellation in technical qualities. On the whole, it will be best if we leave gender to animism, to incipient myth, unconscious metaphor, and whatever other forces went to the making of words, and turn to metaphor itself.
To those who hold with the Abbé Dubos[[1121]] that poetic style is the most important factor in differencing poetry from prose, and demands the greatest genius in the poet, it may seem a hard saying to call the early stage of figurative language unconscious metaphor. The habit of describing primitive poetry in terms of modern verse imposes on these early stages a teleological element quite foreign to the conditions which ethnology and the sense of evolution compel one to assume for the beginnings of such an art. Poetry, says Cardinal Newman, in his little essay,[[1122]] has to adopt metaphorical language as “the only poor means allowed for imparting to others its intense feelings,” which refuse “the feebleness of ordinary words”; and with this raison d’être for the metaphor, one goes on to inquire how it is made. The transfer from a literal to a figurative or metaphorical expression, one finds, is made on the basis of a comparison and an observed resemblance, so that a metaphor is compressed or abridged simile, and the simile must be the fundamental figure in poetry. So the schools have taught time out of mind.[[1123]] Even Scherer,[[1124]] eager to hit the new note, and fixing his gaze on primitive conditions, is sure that poetical figures spring from the innate love of comparison; even Dr. R. M. Meyer,[[1125]] studying old Germanic poetry, finds that its metaphors prove the fundamental character of the simile from which they spring.[[1126]] A little reflection, however, ought to convince candid minds that in the chronological, if not in the logical, order of development, the metaphor comes first and the simile is an expanded metaphor; this is proved not only by the psychological argument, but by the facts in the case. Those similes from Polynesian poetry given by Letourneau[[1127]] represent no primitive stage, and to the long comparisons of Homer[[1128]] no wise man will now appeal as examples of the artless and natural in poetic style. Savages, like Mr. Shandy, may dearly love a comparison; but it is a logical process, a kind of incipient science, in any case subsequent to the unconscious stage of metaphors. For, as a matter of fact, wherever one finds verse which all tests of value show to have the primitive quality, similes and the comparative impulse in general conspicuously fail; this is the case with ballads,[[1129]] with choral and refrain of communal origins everywhere, and with the ruder stages of our old Germanic poetry.[[1130]] Anglo-Saxon poetry, though all its artistic and literary influences urged it to comparison, simile, allegory,—the latter a peculiarly Christian invention,—is absolutely hostile to the simile except in passages copied almost slavishly from a literary source; and this consideration led the present writer[[1131]] twenty years ago to find ground for opposing the traditional doctrine of metaphors as founded in the first instance upon an observed likeness. Everybody grants that early metaphor differs from late; a child calls the bird’s nest a house, not because it compares the nest with a house, but because it has the idea of house and has not the specific idea of nest; and so it would and does call the horse’s stable, the rabbit’s burrow, what not, a house, until wider knowledge and specific information give a distinct name for each. Then, and not until then, with two separate ideas before the mind, is the metaphor based upon a definite comparison, and the transfer a conscious process. In other words, the metaphor was not a metaphor at the start, save in the unconscious force of it; so with the early myth, where there was no thought of comparing a force of nature and a human act, but simply an effort to express the force along the only possible path, the path of animism. This, moreover, is at first nothing but direct statement. In all primitive verse, including its survival, the ballad, it is simple statement, and not metaphor in any modern shape, that constitutes the style. One cannot express the literal by the figurative until one has got a conception of literal and figurative as discrete things; the first stage of metaphor, then, is unconscious, a confusion, if one will, or, better, a flexibility in application of the small stock of words. In a little article[[1132]] on metaphor and poetry, the writer proposed this sequence of development in poetical figures: metaphor pure and simple, what has just been called the unconscious metaphor, stands first;[[1133]] then comes metaphor with the literal peeping through, that is, where literal and figurative are joined, but in a separable fashion, the literal statement involving but not expressing contradiction in its terms; lastly the quite conscious metaphor, where both terms are expressed, and where the mind is fully alive to the gap between reality and trope, a metaphor which may be either the implied simile (“he is a lion”) or the stated simile (“he is like a lion”). Evidently now, there comes a stage in poetic expression where that need for freshness and force sends the poet back over this path; the logical expression of resemblance is too literal, and he turns to the metaphor again, and so justifies the standing definition of it as a compressed or abridged simile. That, however, is not the history of its evolutionary growth.[[1134]]
Turning to the nearer subject, we may now ask how the differentiation came about in poetic speech, and where it belongs in the beginnings of poetry. It is more than probable that earliest language was social in a sense now hard to understand; so tremendous was this step from brute forms of intercourse to human speech that it must have taken place under a social pressure infinitely removed from conditions of what now passes for “conversation.” As with the earth itself, these psychical changes were volcanic. The refrain of concerted labour, upon which Bücher has wisely laid such stress, the refrain of festal emotion over a victorious fight, the cadenced sounds in concert with consent of individual energies alert for a common cause,—it was under such vast and unusual social pressure that the greatest of social triumphs came about. Hence it may well seem absurd to talk of earliest song in words as a “heightened” or emotional speech, speech raised above the level of ordinary conversation; for what needs could have produced ordinary conversation before the wholly imperative and extraordinary occasions which called out the greatest resources of social effort? It is to be denied, therefore, that “poetic” expression was lifted out of ordinary and conversational expression; and it may well have been that choral hymns with earliest statement of myth,[[1135]] choral song with earliest statement and gestured imitation of communal achievement, and choral refrains of labour, formed the beginnings of speech, which was mainly a recapitulation of action, and therefore mainly a matter of verbs. It is conceded that verbs came before substantives, for action, as in labour, is easily paired with gesture and sound; names for things, the substantives, the singular forms of the pronoun, are a different affair, and lend themselves more readily to the individual and to improvisation. A statement of action, subjective or objective, contemporary or reminiscent, is easily made by a chorus, whether of primitive men, or of modern children with their “Now we go round the mulberry-bush”; and the statement as naturally repeats itself as refrain to the dancing or whatever cadenced motion is in the case. This is the communal or centripetal impulse. The centrifugal, individual impulse lays hold of an unvaried repetition of rhythm,[[1136]] and evolves couplet and stanza, with variations of rime, assonance, and the like; laying hold of the expression itself, and by a parallel process applied to style instead of to form, this impulse leads to variation in expression,[[1137]] to something in one verse very like the corresponding part of the preceding verse, yet different. Step by step, with the aid of the “Apollinian” instinct, metaphor becomes conscious of itself and of its own effort; it works out a poetic dialect, which, contrary to the common notion, is an increasing and not a decreasing factor in poetry. It begins with flexibility of application, unconscious of a difference, for there is no difference; sees at last a gap between itself and the literal, which has been formed by the rise of a conversational and “ordinary” language; avoids this literal, and shuns this ordinary, until in absurd excess it reaches the scaldic kenning, or finds a pedant[[1138]] making dictionaries of metaphors proper for the poet to use in this or that case. Finally, it returns upon itself, seeking simplicity, if it can find it, with a Wordsworth, but still refusing to join hands with the talk of everyday life.[[1139]] Be all this as it may be, the metaphor of the verb is both older and more communal than the metaphor of the substantive, which better fits the inventor’s case and may well have been the origin of the riddle,[[1140]] conceded to be a very ancient form of literature. As in the beginning, so even now. The more individual, artistic, and subjective poetry becomes, the more it tends to deal in intricate metaphor, the less it has of the simplicity due to statement of action in simple because communal phrase; and whenever reactions set in toward that communal state of things, action comes to the front, intricate figure vanishes, verbs have more to do, substantives less, and adjectives almost nothing.[[1141]] A reactionary movement of this sort lies before us in the verse of Mr. Kipling.