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INTRODUCTION: WACKERNAGEL /
consciously adapted to literary ends, prose may count as the
younger sister or, better, the daughter of poetry, for in all
cases centuries must go by before a literary prose
is attained;
there are in existence peoples of ancient origin that possess
none yet.
A literary prose arises first at the point where a nation
passes out of the stage of naive simplicity into the more
conscious life of an artificial civilization. Up to this point
the whole literature is poetical: history is known only in the
saga; that is, there is no prying into the events of the past
for the naked and unadorned truth; there is retained of those
events only the poetically garbed idea in its living beauty;
the saga, imaginative in its
very nature, assumes also an
imaginative outer form, as ballad or as song. During this
species
stage what Tacitus says of the ancient Germans holds good
for all races:
" Their traditional songs are their one and only
of record and chronicle." The intellect itself continues
more or less submerged in poetry; its instruction is
given such a relation to imagination and feeling as to border
on poetical vision. This we have already at some length
shown to be the case with the didactic epic and the didactic
9
lyric.
In these, even where the attempt is essentially unsuc-
;1,
the particular doctrine inculcated must put up with
at least the external semblance of poetry; so little suspicion
is there as yet of any other form of exposition. At this stage
even Ir^al maxims, for example, are put in meter, and always
with a certain poetical coloring in the diction. We have
frequent testimony concerning the existence of such saws
among Hellenic and Celtic tribes; and instances enough are
rved for us in the case of the Germans.
Little by little, however, the crucial point approaches,
and at length the intellect comes to a consciousness of its
ri^lu and property in literature. Growing displeased with
what fancy has made out of history,
it finally rejects fancy