[1128]. St. Evremond thinks them distracting; in any case he will banish such things from drama. Œuvres Meslées, London, Tonson, 1709, III. 72 f., in an essay, “Sur les poëmes des Anciens.”
[1130]. It is the case with later reaches of poetry. Chaucer, for example, offers very few figures or metaphors as compared with later poets; “no other author in our tongue,” says Professor Lounsbury, Stud., III. 441, “has clung so persistently to the language of common life.”
[1131]. The Anglo-Saxon Metaphor, Halle, 1881. The theory of the metaphor there advanced was due to the study of poetical material alone, and had no help from psychology. The latter, however, is quite favourable to the theory of poetic evolution as stated in the text. See the quotations from Taine and others in the essay of Dr. Buck. The false conclusions of Heinzel in regard to simile and metaphor are of little moment compared with the general value of the essay which contains them: Ueber den Stil der altgermanischen Poesie, Strassburg, Q. F., 1875, a stimulating piece of work.
[1132]. Modern Language Notes, I. 83.
[1133]. Logically Gerber is right, Die Sprache als Kunst, I. 256, in putting interjections at one end of the linguistic process and metaphor at the other; but chronologically, historically, genetically, the assumption fails to hold.
[1134]. The subject is too wide for further treatment, and can be regarded here only in its relations to the beginnings of poetry. See, however, for the early stages of a metaphor, J. Grimm’s essay on “Die Fünf Sinne,” Kleinere Schriften, VII. 193 ff.; and F. Bechtel, Ueber die Bezeichnungen der sinnlichen Wahrnehmungen in den indogerm Sprachen, Weimar, 1879, where he shows how the idea of “bright” underlies so many of our words,—“glad,” for instance, which even in Anglo-Saxon meant “gleaming.” See, too, in this book the confusion, or flexibility, of words for the “bright” and the “loud,” seeing and hearing; also J. Grimm, “Die Wörter des Leuchtens und Brennens,” Kl. Schr., VIII. 263 ff.
[1135]. Allegory, now a huge projection of metaphor from the style into the subject-matter, is a consistent series of personifications not unlike the later stages of myth; in fact, late myth is allegory.
[1136]. On the tendency of rhythm and music to suggest images and stir the powers of language, see the wild but interesting words of Nietzsche, Geburt d. Tragödie, p. 48.