[1138]. Joshua Poole, English Parnassus, London, 1677, like Italians just before him, and like Vinesauf and others of earlier time, has an array of kennings whence the poet may pick and choose. Abel, for example (pp. 221 ff.), you may call “death’s first fruit,” or “death’s handsel.” Then there are “forms of invocating Muses” (p. 630), followed, alas, by “forms of concluding letters”—in prose.
[1139]. “The language of the age,” wrote Gray to West, April, 1742, “is never the language of poetry.”
[1140]. Kennings often read like riddles: so in Finnish, “contents of Wainamoinen’s milk-bowl,”—the sunshine. See, moreover, Scherer, Geschichte d. deutsch. Lit., pp. 7, 15; and R. M. Meyer, Altgerm. Poesie, p. 160.
[1141]. In this sketch of differentiation in poetic style only outlines are essayed. The subject is uncommonly attractive, and a book on the history of metaphor would be welcomed by all students of style. Nothing has been said here of symbolic metaphor from animals and the like. See Brinkmann’s study of “Thierbilder in der Sprache,” Die Metaphern, Bd. I. Bonn, 1878. His researches in German, English, French, Spanish, Italian, Latin, Greek, should be extended to half civilized and savage conditions, and should take a historical and genetic range. Of course, the æsthetic side of this whole subject is treated in Gerber’s well known book, quoted several times on preceding pages, Die Sprache als Kunst.
[1142]. It is noteworthy that Aristotle excludes improvisation from poetry; and in modern times Gerber (Die Sprache als Kunst) finds this rude kind of verse so opposed to his definition of poetry (“die Kunst des Gedankens,” ibid., I. 50; “enthusiasm plus deliberation,” I. 77), that he too rules it out, and says it belongs simply to “the art of language.” It is not well to drag such a ball-and-chain by way of definition when one is dealing with primitive poetry.
[1143]. See above, p. [215]. There is a lively if exaggerated account of the rhapsode in Blackwell’s Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer, pp. 104 ff. Limits already transgressed forbid the author to add any material on the minstrel in his relations to the making of poetry. See a brief account, with a few references, in Old English Ballads, pp. 310 ff. Further, see Piper, Spielmannsdichtung (Vol. 2 of the Deutsche National-Litteratur); Scherer, Gesch. d. deutsch. Dichtung im 11 u. 12 Jhrh. (Quellen. u. Forschungen, XII.); Wilmanns, Walther v. d. Vogelweide, especially pp. 39 ff.; the general account in Axel Olrik’s Middelalderens Vandrende Spillemaend (Opuscula Philologica), Copenhagen, 1887; Freymond, Jongleurs und Menestrels, Halle, 1883 (for the Romance side of the question); and portions of many other works, such as Jusserand, Théatre en Angleterre, p. 23, note; F. Vogt, Salman und Morolf, pp. cxxiii f.; notes here and there on Widsith and Déor, the earliest types of English minstrel; and so on.
[1144]. There were pedants before paper, however, in the days of great mnemonic feats. See Max Müller, in the Nineteenth Century, November, 1899, pp. 798 ff.
[1145]. This evolution of the solitary and deliberate poet has been outlined in Chap. IV.
[1146]. Burckhardt, Ren., I. 172. See also p. 250.
[1147]. Della Storia e della Ragione d’ogni Poesia, Vol. I., Bologna, 1739, pp. 155 ff.