RHYTHM AS THE ESSENTIAL FACT OF POETRY
For the purposes of this book, poetry is rhythmic utterance, rhythmic
speech, with mainly emotional origin. One must not write a book on
poetry without essaying that _iter tenebricosum_ of a definition—a
definition, too, that will define, and not land the reader in a mere
maze of words. “Rhythmic speech” is a short journey, puts one on solid
ground at the end, and brings about no doublings and evasions in the
subsequent path of investigation. It says what Robert Browning says in
his summary of his art:—
“What does it all mean, poet?—Well,
Your brains beat into rhythm....”
By rhythmic must be understood a regular recurrence which clearly sets
off such speech from the speech of prose; and by speech is meant chiefly
the combination of articulate words, although inarticulate sounds may
often express the emotion of the moment and so pass as poetry. The
proportionate intellectual control of emotion in this utterance is a
matter of human development, and largely conditions the course of poetry
itself. We agree, then, to call by the name of poetry that form of art
which uses rhythm to attain its ends, just as we call by the name of
flying that motion which certain animals attain by the use of wings;
that the feelings roused by poetry can be roused by unrhythmic order of
words, and that rhythmic order of words is often deplorably bad art, or
“unpoetic,” have as little to do with the case as the fact that a
greyhound speeding over the grass gives the spectator quite the
exhilaration and sense of lightness and grace which is roused by the
flight of a bird, and the fact that an awkward fowl makes itself
ridiculous in trying to fly, have to do with the general proposition
that flying is a matter of wings. A vast amount of human utterance has
been rhythmic; one undertakes to tell the story of its beginnings. With
such a definition the task is plain though hard; let go this definition,
and there is no firm ground under one’s feet. The patron and the critic
of poetry, to be sure, must make deeper and wider demands; from the
critical point of view one must find the standard qualities of
excellence to serve as test in any given case, one must ascertain what
is representative, best, highest; poetry for the critic has its strength
measured by the strongest and not by the weakest link in the chain. From
the æsthetical point of view, again, poetry must be defined in terms of
the purely poetic impulse. On the other hand, any comparative and
sociological study must find a definition wide enough for the whole
poetic product, whether of high or of low quality, whether due to this
or to that emotion. It needs a simple and obvious test for the material.
Now as a matter of fact, all writers on poetry take rhythm for granted
until some one asks why it is necessary; whereupon considerable
discussion, and the protest signed by a respectable minority, but a
minority after all, that rhythm is not an essential condition of the
poetic art. This discussion, as every one knows, has been lively and at
times bitter; a patient and comprehensive review of it in a fairly
impartial spirit has led to the conclusion, first, that no test save
rhythm has been proposed which can be put to real use, even in theory,
not to mention the long reaches of a historical and comparative study;
secondly, that all defenders of the poem in prose are more or less
contradictory and inconsistent, making confusion between theory and
practice; and thirdly, that advocates of a rhythmic test, even in
abstract definition, seem to have the better of the argument. Indeed,
one might simply point to the actual use of the word “poetry,” and be
done. However the student and collector may proclaim the rights of prose
to count as poetry, his history, his anthology, shows no prose at all,
and he meekly follows in practice the definition against which, in
theory, he was so fain to strive and cry. Of this, one example, but a
very remarkable example. Baudelaire, in the preface to his _Poems in
Prose_, speaks of one Bertrand[49] as his master in this art, and of a
book, _Gaspard de la Nuit_, as its masterpiece. This book,[50] praised
highly by Sainte-Beuve, this _fantaisie à la manière de Rembrandt et de
Callot_, as its subordinate title runs, makes occasion for a very bold
assertion, and apparently for a great innovation, by one of the editors
of a collection of French poetry.[51] “To admit a prose writer,” he
says, “into a poetic anthology needs to be explained. It is certain
there are poets in prose just as there are prosers in verse,”—the dear
old cry, the dear old half-truth! Now Bertrand is “poet not only by his
sentiment, not only by the pomp and sublimity of his thought, ... but by
the very art itself” which he lavishes upon this poetic prose. True, he
wrote verses also in his _Gaspard_; but his main work is an artistic
marvel of prose. “Louis Bertrand prosodie la prose....” Well, a fine
defence for the prose-poet; and one turns to the selections for an
example of the poetic prose, not only “main work,” but very rare work of
the writer, whose book is most difficult to obtain. And what are the
selections from the prose-poet? Two poems in the most incorrigible
verse! A sonnet, a _ballade_:—
“O Dijon, la fille
Des glorieux ducs,
Qui portes bequille
Dans tes ans caducs,”—
a kind of refrain, and with the rime in -_ille_ running through all the
eight stanzas; and there is no prose at all! _Wozu der Lärm?_ Why this
thunder in the index? Why “admit a prose-writer into a poetic
anthology,” with all this ceremony, only to ignore his prose and to
print his verse?[52]
It is to be noted, first of all, that in ignoring the test of rhythm, so
as to admit great men of letters like Plato and Bacon to the poets’
guild, the advocates of prose fail to set up any other satisfactory
test. Sidney and Shelley, Arcadians both who said noble things about
their calling, are reckoned as defenders of the poem in prose. As to the
younger, all men must feel more deeply and more lovingly about poetry,
for the reading of his essay on that art which “redeems from decay the
visitations of the divinity in man,” memorable words indeed; but his
more exact definition declares poetry to be “the expression of the
imagination.” Nothing is said here of rhythm, for the good reason that
while rhythm can be praised in its own place, it must not be a bar to
claims which Shelley and his fellows deem important. Yet how tender and
how inconsistent is his rejection of the rhythmic test! Rhythm is
“created by that imperial faculty whose throne is curtained within the
invisible nature of man”; and “the language of poets has ever affected a
sort of uniform and harmonious recurrence of sound, _without which it
were not poetry_.”[53] Well, is this not to set up rhythm as a test? No,
for Bacon, as well as Plato, is to be counted with the bards; and how
shall this be done save by condemning “the distinction between poets and
prose writers as a vulgar error,” and by a widening of rhythm, so that
it shall have no bounds, no necessary “traditional forms”? Thus Plato
and Bacon come in, and all hope of a definite, working test of poetry
goes out. Sidney, again, had in his day this mingled tenderness and
contempt for rhythm. “Rhyming and versing” no more make a poet than a
long gown maketh an advocate; but the “senate of poets _hath chosen
verse as their fittest raiment_.” Presently, however, the exquisite
reason for prose in poetry is clear, when Sidney calls Xenophon’s
_Cyropædia_ “an absolute heroical poem.” So, too, there is a saving
clause, which, by the way, nobody denies in its simple form, in Ben
Jonson’s well-known deliverance; a poet “expresses the life of man in
fit measures, number, and harmony,” yet “not he that writeth in measures
only, but that feigneth and formeth a fable and writes things like the
truth.” Now the test of rhythm, which Ben does not really deny, will
work in practice; the test of imagination will not work. Shelley,
putting Plato with the poetic sheep, thrusts Cicero, disciple of Plato,
among the goats of prose. Sound criticism, perhaps; but what is the
formula? And when one is asking, not whom one shall regard as a
poet,—that is, a great poet,—but what one shall regard as poetry, as
material to include in a survey of the rise and progress of poetry at
large, then the test of imagination fails utterly. Sidney was defending
his art; “we are not mere rimers,” so he seems to say, “the root of the
matter is in us, and we are kin with the gods.” J. C. Scaliger, who
insisted on the test of rhythm, and was called many a pretty name for
his pains, had a science of poetry in mind, a survey of it, and cast
about for a test that would work on earth without reference to celestial
origins. The Abbé Dubos[54] was not willing to think so nobly of verse,
and laid main stress on style,[55]—always granting, to be sure, the
conventional test of “genius.” Only genius can unite in lofty degree
within the limits of one verse that “poetry of style” and that
“mechanics of poetry” which go to make up the ideal poem; however, it is
this style that serves as practical test. In short, put genius, or even
imagination, to the practical trial, and confusion reigns at once.
Shelley and many more make a poet of Plato; Sidney brings in Xenophon.
Coleridge,[56] insisting that all the parts of a poem must support “the
purposes and known influences of metrical arrangement,” thus making
rhythm a test, promptly says it is not a test, after all, for along with
Plato, both Bishop Taylor and Burnet must be counted as of the bards.
Beattie[57] calls _Tom Jones_ and the _Merry Wives of Windsor_ “the two
finest comic poems, the one epic, the other dramatical, now in the
world.” Emerson[58] thinks Thomas Taylor the Platonist “a better poet,
or, perhaps I should say, a better feeder to a poet, than any man
between Milton and Wordsworth,”—excellent second thought. Sir Thomas
Browne he regards as a poet. Brought face to face with rhythm, Emerson
hedges; as, indeed, all these good folk do. Goldsmith,[59] for example,
in an unacknowledged essay, calls versification “one of the criteria
that distinguish poetry from prose, yet it is not the sole means of
distinction.” The Psalms of David, and certain Celtic fragments in
prose, “lay claim to the title of poetry.” Hazlitt,[60] speaking of
“poetry in general,” seems favourable to rhythm as a test. Poetry
“combines the ordinary use of language with musical expression”; and
“there is a near connection between music and deep-rooted passion. Mad
people sing.” Then the fear of simplicity gets hold upon him, of
postman’s rimes and the posy in a ring; “all is not poetry that passes
for such,” verse is not absolutely the test; and he stops short of the
inconsistency by saying there are three works “which _come as near to
poetry as possible without absolutely being so_; namely, the _Pilgrim’s
Progress_, _Robinson Crusoe_,[61] and the _Tales of Boccaccio_.” Such
works are “poetry in kind, and _generally fit to become so in name by
being ‘married to immortal verse.’_” Bagehot[62] is quite as cautious;
“the exact line,” he says, “which separates grave novels in verse like
_Aylmer’s Field_ or _Enoch Arden_ from grave novels not in verse like
_Silas Marner_ and _Adam Bede_, we own we cannot draw with any
confidence.” This is to be deplored, perhaps, from Bagehot’s point of
view; but _Adam Bede_ remains prose, and _Enoch Arden_ is commonly set
down as poetry, and there an end. Why, too, should Boccaccio’s Tales, or
the _Pilgrim’s Progress_, be married to immortal verse? Jeremy Taylor’s
beautiful bit of prose about the lark is as satisfying in its own way as
Shelley’s verses are; they are different ways, and one wishes as little
to turn one into verse as to turn the other into prose. Dr. Johnson, who
recognizes no poet till “he has ... distinguished all the delicacies of
phrase and all the colours of words and has learned to adjust their
different sounds to all the varieties of metrical modulation,” yet
concedes that “perhaps of poetry as a mental operation metre or music is
no necessary adjunct,” brings out, with his sturdy common sense, the
clash of theory and practice. _As a mental operation_, that is, as the
poetic impulse and as a matter of theory, poetry is not tested by
rhythm; “it is, however, by the music of metre,” he goes on to say,
“that poetry has been discriminated in all languages,”—in other words,
metre will serve as a practical test. Now this hedging, this confusion
of ideas, this facing one way in theory and another way in practice, is
due partly to a shame and partly to a tradition. Where is the dignity of
the art, if any Bavius can pin this facile badge of rhythm to his coat
and strut about a bard in good standing? Ronsard had this scruple on his
mind; so had Sidney, so even comfortable Opitz, so, in spite of his own
definition, the elder Casaubon. Tradition of the humanists, of days when
poetry held in fee all science, all the gorgeous east of wisdom itself,
rules to this day, and keeps men groping for a subtle and esoteric
definition. Hence, too, a series of futilities and contradictions in
dealing with rhythm as a component part of poetry.
So one comes to the second argument for rhythm as the test of poetry.
Not only does the test of imagination fail to work, but all the
defenders of prose poems fall into contradiction and confusion so soon
as they abandon the other test, so soon as they undertake to put their
ideas into any but a protestant and academic form; moreover, this
protest nearly always rises from the wish to count as poetry some
masterpiece of prose. Take a few typical writers on the theme.
Baumgarten, the founder of æsthetics, wrote[63] an essay in which he
undertook an exact definition of poetry, and finally summed it up as
_oratio sensitiva perfecta_, speech that is both concrete,—calling up in
the mind a distinct picture,—and perfect. A few years later, in his
_Aletheophilus_, he returns to the quest, and asks what a poem really
is. A poem, he answers, is speech so charged with energy that it demands
metrical expression. Yet the more he ponders over the quality of rhythm,
which in the actual definition seemed imperative, the less he feels
inclined to insist upon such a test; at last comes the inevitable
concession of theory, and a piece of prose—here it is _Télémaque_—is
suffered to pass as a poem. After all this conjuring and throwing about
of Latin, one looks for results and finds instead confusion. But
Baumgarten was a dull pedant; set genius to work; call up Friedrich
Schlegel, who is said to have been the first critic to study the “poem
in prose” as it deserved, and whose own performances in _Lucinde_ made
more than one of the judicious grieve. Poetry, he says in one place,[64]
demands rhythm; for only that uniformity which lies in the corresponding
succession of tones can express the uniformity needed in all true art;
yet again,[65] wishing to put Tacitus as well as Plato among the poets,
he makes his wise Lothario say that “_any art or science_” which uses
speech as its expression, works for its own sake, and is at its best,
must be counted as poetry. But let this, too, pass as eccentricity of
genius; call upon some one who has both genius and method,—say
Schleiermacher, who lectured on æsthetics in 1819,[66] and undertook to
reduce to system and clarity this matter of poetry in prose. To help
matters, the subject is halved; drama and epic are “plastic,” and can
dispense with rhythm, while lyric is “musical” from the start. How came
rhythm, then, into drama and epic? Chorus explains the drama, but epic
rhythm cannot rest on any such original union of music and words; there
must be an “inward” reason. Why does “free” productivity in speech seek
after musical form? So one comes back to the difference between poetry
and prose, explained by the nature of human speech; one draws a long
breath and sets upon another exhilarating run round the circle. Two
extremes of speech are possible,—when no syllable is accented at all,
and when all syllables are accented alike; this, of course, will not
differentiate poetry from prose. But speech alternates accent and
no-accent, arsis and thesis; done for logical reasons this alternation
makes prose, for musical reasons, verse. In languages like the
classical, where rhythmical accent utterly neglects logical accent,
there can be little interference of prose with poetry; while in tongues
like the Germanic, where verse-accent and word-accent tend to agree, it
is easy for poetry to pass into prose. Doubtless this is keen thinking;
it explains in some degree why imaginative prose is absent from the
classics as compared with modern drama and romance. But it will not do
for a definition, and Schleiermacher begins a subtle but ineffectual
analysis of poetry old and new. In a Greek drama there was mingling of
measures, now more and now less musical; in modern drama this difference
appears as a mingling of verse and prose. But if one thinks of the
greater musical element in classical verse, then the modern difference
between poetry and prose[67] “_is not much greater than the difference
in classical poetry between epic and dramatic measures_.” Now what has
Schleiermacher really done for the matter in hand? For comparative
literature he has done a distinctly brilliant piece of work; but, even
apart from the fact that no really clear idea of poetry in itself has
been gained, the difference between poetry and prose, and the function
of rhythm, have not been elucidated. It has not been shown, after all,
whether rhythm is or is not a necessary part of poetry. So one turns to
the modern scholar, to the student of poetry as an element in human
life, to one who studies it in the light of psychology; but here is the
same contradiction. Guyau, who thinks this distinction of poetry and
prose a problem of high importance, is in one place[68] quite confident
that “poets” like Michelet, like Flaubert,[69]—he who first of
Frenchmen[70] tried to give to his words an echo of the sensations
described, a vague onomatopœia, and the wider hint of a general
situation,—and like Renan, “have been able to dispense with rhythm.” But
verse, he thinks, is permanent; it will be “the natural language of all
great and lasting emotions”; while in another book,[71] this excellent
and lamented writer not only assigns to rhythm an _importance capitale_,
but calls it “the very mainstay of poetic speech.” And here again is
intolerable confusion.
Into this pit of contradiction have fallen even sane and capable critics
like A. W. Schlegel, and sober philologists like Wilhelm von
Humboldt.[72] Nobody could be more distinctly an advocate of the test of
rhythm than the elder Schlegel was in certain Letters, widely read in
their day, on Poetry, Metre, and Speech;[73] if it be objected, he says,
that outpourings of a full heart ought not to be hemmed by rule, it is
answer enough to say that they always have been under this control, and
that, whatever the possibilities of the case, poetry is and has been
governed by rhythm. Rhythm is born with poetry, and “whether by Ontario
or by the Ganges,” where poetry is, there too is rhythm. As for “the
so-called poetic prose,” Schlegel is very bitter; it “springs from
poetic impotence,” and it “tries to unite the prerogatives of prose and
poetry, missing the perfection of both.” Elsewhere,[74] in an amusing
little dialogue, he sets Grammar and Poetry talking after this wise:
“You speak so simply!” says Grammar. “I must,” answers Poetry, “in order
to distinguish myself from Poetic Prose!” And again,[75] he likens
prose-poetry to the ostrich, which has a gait half flying, half running,
and wholly awkward. Even the dialogue of the drama needs rhythm; for,
thinks Schlegel, its style demands measured and regular movement of
verse. Master of translation, like Herder before him, he is against the
translation of verse save by verse itself; and the context shows that he
is looking upon verse as an indispensable condition of poetry.
When, however, in the lectures at Berlin Schlegel begins to define
poetry and to theorize about it, holding as he does a brief for the
romantic school, for those doctrines of freedom which could not away
with any sovereignty of measured speech over the play of fancy and would
have no set paths through the “moon-flooded night of enchantment,” he
turns squarely upon the test of rhythm.[76] It is a crude notion of the
philistine, he declares, _eine bürgerliche meynung_, that whatever is in
verses is a poem. Nor is much mended by saying only that can be called
poetry which ought to be and has to be composed in verse; of late a kind
of poetry has come to the fore which rejects verse entirely,—the
romance, the novel. And where is yesterday’s scorn for the poem in
prose?[77]
This study of contradictions could be carried into many another field;
but it is time to consider a third point,—that in actual argument
defenders of the test of rhythm seem really to come off better than
their foes. These opponents start in a fog, and fog besets them all
their way. The main authority to which they appeal is Aristotle; but
over certain passages[78] in the _Poetics_, their point of departure,
hangs a haze of uncertainty if not of contradiction. It is doubtful
whether Aristotle really meant to say what champions of poetry in prose
declare him to have said; moreover, these brave texts must be taken
along with a brief but pregnant passage in which he looks at origins and
beginnings of poetry, a passage which lends itself less readily to the
purposes of those who would sweep rhythm from the field. Indeed, sundry
say that this is not Aristotle’s meaning in the brave text itself.
“Language without metre,” observes Whately,[79] is a bad translation; it
should be “metre without music.” Twining,[80] one of the best
commentators, refers to that other passage, where one is told that
“imitation being natural to us, and ... melody and rhythm being also
natural, ... those persons in whom, originally, these propensities were
the strongest, were naturally led to rude and extemporaneous attempts,
which, gradually improved, gave birth to poetry.” Twining makes a
judicious comment. “In this deduction of the art from the mimetic and
musical instincts, Aristotle _includes verse in his idea of poetry_,
which he at least _considered as imperfect without it_. All that he
drops, elsewhere, to the disparagement of metre, must be understood only
comparatively: it goes no further than to say that imitation, that is,
fiction and invention, deserves the title of poetry, or making, better
than verse without imitation.” Elsewhere, too, as Twining shows,
Aristotle puts verse among the requisites of poetry.[81] A good
Aristotelian, J. C. Scaliger, a greater man, by the way, than modern
criticism concedes, who first in his time undertook a science of poetry
and not a mere guide to the art, who broke new ground, and who had at
least the instincts of historical and comparative method, is squarely
for the test of verse.[82] Poetry is imitation in verse. In the opening
sections of his work[83] he calls the poet not so much a maker of
fiction as of verses,[84] defends rhythm almost in Hamann’s phrase as
the mother-tongue of man, derives poetry from singing, and, with a touch
of psychological method, makes appeal to the child who must go to sleep
with song.[85] In the later sections,[86] he vigorously attacks the idea
of poetry in prose. He is followed by another pioneer of the historic
treatment of dogma, G. J. Vossius, who, tossing to the winds any notion
that verse itself makes the poet, declares that verse is nevertheless
condition of the poetic work.[87] For poetry was meant to be sung—the
genetic consideration has a strong and wholesome influence upon these
men—and how can that be sung which has no rhythm? Or take the rhythm
from the Iliads; they turn to mere “fabulous stories.” Briefly, while
metres without the aid of diction and genius can make no poem,
fiction—Aristotelian imitation—is powerless without the help of verse.
To the same purpose and earlier, Isaac Casaubon; the test of poetry is
rhythm, and any utterance which comes under metrical laws is so far a
poem.[88] Scaliger, Vossius, and Casaubon are “good”; and their credit
comes down to them from their betters. Petrarch, with Latin so at his
heart, could never confuse poetry and prose. Dante’s definition[89] is
cold comfort for the heretic about a rhythmic test. Of the smaller fry,
Ronsard certainly cleaves to this test of rhythm in poetry.[90]
Gascoigne, as the title of his little treatise shows, assumes with his
teacher Ronsard that verse is the condition if not the essence of the
art; and Puttenham, Webbe, Campion, Daniel, Harvey, even Spenser,[91]
lean the same way. Sidney, it was shown above, is no real opponent.
Bacon himself, quoted so often to sustain the cause of poetry in prose,
should be read more carefully;[92] he really tosses to the winds all
question of form, and turns to poetry as “one of the principal portions
of learning.”
So the great age thought of poetry; and so the balance inclines as one
comes nearer to our own days. Isaac Vossius, in a curious work[93]
published without his name, holds to his father’s view of the case.
Shaftesbury[94] is peremptory for “metred prose,” but, as both a lord
and a wit, disdains to give his reasons; while another person of
quality, Sir William Temple[95] indeed, regards metred prose as a
monstrosity. Trapp, in his Oxford lectures,[96] is squarely for the
rhythmic test, and will hold it in the teeth of all Aristotelians; so
will another professor of poetry, Polycarp Leyser,[97] of Helmstadt, a
rationalist in his day, who thinks it high time to have a modern system
of poetics not drawn altogether from the ancients.
Across the channel, meanwhile, relations of poetry and prose had been
discussed, now as an eddy in the maelstrom of argument about ancients or
moderns, now as a question for itself. The _Télémaque_ of Fénelon was
defended as a great poem in prose; to the objection that it was not
written in verse, came answers in abundance. One of them, for example,
calls upon the ancients;[98] Aristotle, Dionysius, Strabo, said that
verse is not essential to epic poetry. “One may write it in prose, as
one writes tragedies without rime.” And the old saw—“one can make verses
without poetry, and be quite poetic without making verse”—is followed by
a definition of the whole matter; what constitutes a poem is “the lively
plot, the bold figures, the beauty and variety of the images; it is the
fire, the enthusiasm, the impetuosity, the force, a _je ne sais quoi_ in
the words and in the thoughts which only nature can give.” So run a
dozen other elaborate pleas for prose in poetry; but the arguments
usually end in contradiction, and nothing is brought forward that really
sets aside the feeling long ago expressed by Tom Dekker[99] in his
sputtering, pamphleteer style, that “poetrie, like honestie and olde
souldiers, goes upon lame feete unlesse there be musicke in her,” and
that both poets and musicians are children of Phœbus: “the one creates
the ditty and gives it the life or number, the other lends it voyce and
makes it speake musicke.”
Even those great changes which the second half of the eighteenth century
brought about in the making and in the judging of poetry, left this
matter of prose and verse in its old estate. Whenever the critic has a
writer to set up, a writer to pull down, this test of verse will be
thrust aside; and it is no surprise to find men who belong to the same
literary creed—say Warton and Lowth—failing to see eye to eye in this
one article of faith. Joseph Warton,[100] in his guarded attack upon
Pope, is working slowly to the inference that it is not genius, but a
vast talent, shiftiness of phrase and smoothness of verse, that must
explain Pope’s overwhelming success. Hence Warton, in a reaction from
this polished and accurate rhythm,[101] is sure that real poetry does
not depend on verse. The sublime and the pathetic “are the two chief
nerves of genuine poetry.” Lowth,[102] on the other hand, though quite
in line with the new critical movement, setting about his great work,
and undertaking to make his audience feel and know the Hebrew scriptures
to be poetry, puts metrical questions in the forefront of his study and
will prove that these poems are in verse. He would fain shun this path,
thorny as it is and full of snares; but it is a necessary part of his
journey, for he is sure that poetry is not to be considered apart from
metrical form, and it ceases to be poetry when it is reduced to
prose.[103] Here Lowth and Warton clash not only on the main point, but
on this subsidiary matter of translation. Warton said that by no
“process of critical chymistry,” such as dropping the measure and
transposing the words, can one disguise the _Iliad_, say, or the
_Paradise Lost_, and “reduce them to the tameness of prose.” Reduced to
prose, says Lowth, poetry does cease to be poetry. It is strange to see
how both sides of the controversy in this matter of verse and prose
appeal to translation, and it is mournful to note the unstable character
of what ought to be firm and fundamental facts. A. W. Schlegel, one
remembers, stood for translations in verse. So Whately, following
Lowth’s opinion, appeals to translation for proof that to break the
verse is to shatter the poem;[104] Racine,[105] on the other hand,
appealed to a translation of Isaiah to fortify exactly the opposite
opinion. Or will it be said that Goethe has settled this question in
favour of Warton’s view? Every critic knows the oracle from Weimar which
declared the best part of a poem to be whatever remains when it is
translated into prose; every critic, however, is not at pains to quote
the entire passage, with its important concession to verse and its
reason for the statement as a whole. “I honour,” says Goethe,[106]
“rhythm as well as rime, _by which poetry really comes to be
poetry_;[107] but the thorough and permanent effect, what develops one
and helps one on one’s way, is that which is left of the poet when he is
translated into prose. Here is nothing but the contents pure and
simple,—otherwise often concealed, or, if absent, replaced by a fine
exterior form. _For this reason I think prose translations better than
poetical in the early stages of education._” He goes on to recommend a
prose version of Homer, to praise Luther’s Bible; but it is clear that
the whole extract is no argument against the test of rhythm. Not to
insist on Goethe’s concession that it is rhythm which makes poetry to be
poetry, one may note how little prose translation does for a lyric,
which, after all, is the poet’s poem. What would be left in prose, any
prose, of Goethe’s own _Ueber allen Gipfeln ist Ruh’_? The heart of
poetry is another matter, its spirit, its informing life;[108] the
historian meets it in terms of its bodily appearance, and must have a
concrete test. There is no valid test for the historian save this test
of rhythm. Particularly as sociological and historical responsibility
begins to weigh upon the critic, he finds that such a test is demanded
by his work. Adam Smith[109]—Blair[110] is almost with him, but slips in
a plea for Ossian—is distinctly on the side of verse. So is
Monboddo,[111] a pioneer in anthropology, keen, observant, who did his
thinking for himself, and condemned “all that has been written of late
in the rhapsody style, or measured prose,” declaring that “poetry is
nothing more than measured rhythm.” Sensible things, too, were said on
this matter by men who have left no traces in criticism; one of these
sayings seems to be a pretty conclusion and summary of the whole debate.
Dr. Thomas Barnes, a Unitarian clergyman now forgotten, but one of the
founders of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester, an
interesting group of men, read, in December, 1781, a paper[112] “On the
Nature and Essential Character of Poetry as Distinguished from Prose.”
He turns to origins, and refers to “the common remark that the original
language of mankind was poetical”; he turns to ethnological hints, and,
following Dr. John Brown, speaks of “Indian orators at this day”; then,
summing up the case, he charges for rhythm. “To finished and perfect
poetry, or rather to the highest order of poetic compositions, are
necessary, elevation of sentiment, fire of imagination, and regularity
of metre. This is the summit of Parnassus. But from this sublimest point
there are gradual declinations till you come to the reign of prose. _The
last line of separation is that of regular metre._” Dr. Thomas Barnes is
forgotten; but his statement of the case is memorable above a host of
admired and often quoted deliverances on poetic art.
As one steps into the modern world, one finds the controversy in its old
estate, getting no help from new methods and ridiculous enough, by this
expense of motion without progress, in contrast with the gain made by
sciences of every other sort. Does Coleridge,[113] master of rhythm,
reject rhythm as a test, Poe[114] comes forward to declare it an
essential condition, and to announce “the certainty that music, in its
various modes of metre, rhythm, and rime, is of so vast a moment in
poetry as never to be wisely rejected.” Carlyle himself, reckoned by
sundry critics as a poet in prose, names the “vulgar” definition of
verse only to approve it. Germans, he says,[115] have spoken of
“infinitude” as differencing true poetry from true speech not poetical;
“if well meditated, some meaning will gradually be found in it. For my
own part, I find considerable meaning in the old vulgar distinction of
poetry being metrical, having music in it, being a song.” And he really
adopts the test,—of course, with characteristic riders. “Observe,” he
says, “how all passionate language does of itself become musical ... all
deep things are song.... Poetry, therefore, we will call _musical
thought_.” So, again, the vague and passionate protests of Stuart Mill
beat in vain against such a temperate statement as Whately made in his
_Rhetoric_.[116] “Any composition in verse (and none that is not) is
always called, whether good or bad, a Poem, by all who have no favourite
hypothesis to maintain.... The title of Poetry does not necessarily
imply the requisite beauties of Poetry.” Such a test, cried Mill,[117]
is vulgarest of all definitions, and “one with which no person possessed
of the faculties to which poetry addresses itself can ever have been
satisfied.” This “wretched mockery of a definition” is more than
inadequate; for poetry may exist in prose as well as in verse, may even
do without words, and can speak through musical sounds, through
sculpture, painting, and architecture. It is strange to hear Mill making
a serious formula out of phrases to which one is indulgent enough when
they come in half playful guise.[118] Apart from the uselessness of such
a formula,—fancy the historian of poetry opening a new chapter with “We
will now consider the Parthenon!”—it has no theoretical value, as is
easy to see when Mill begins to run his division lines. Two definitions
of poetry please him, one, by Ebenezer Elliott, that it is “impassioned
truth,” the other, by a writer in _Blackwood_, that it is “man’s thought
tinged by his feelings.” But these “fail to distinguish poetry from
eloquence,” and Mill goes on to say that eloquence is “something heard,”
while poetry is “something overheard.” Something overheard? I mean, he
explains, that “all poetry is in the nature of a soliloquy,” is “the
natural fruit of solitude and meditation.” Now this is sheer nonsense,
although more than one critic has hailed it as an oracle; of that which
comes down to us as poetry, a good part is anything but soliloquy or the
fruit of solitude. “Read Homer,” cried out Herder, perhaps at the other
extreme, but certainly with better reason than Mill, “as if he were
singing in the streets!” It will be shown how vast a proportion of
poetry, too, that belongs to the higher class, was made and sung in
throngs of men. Poetry is a social fact. Mill’s own words defeat him.
“Whosoever writes out truly any human feeling, writes poetry”; and “what
is poetry but the thoughts and words _in which emotion spontaneously
embodies itself_?” A few pages before, it was “the fruit of solitude and
meditation,” a test that would make poetry of Kant’s categorical
imperative, refusing the title to Luther’s outburst at the diet,
although this at once becomes poetry if one accepts the later definition
in terms of emotional spontaneity. And that wrath at the “vulgarity” of
a rhythmic test is nothing more than the old mistake; because, forsooth,
colours and lines fail to account in themselves for the grandeur of
painting, one jumps to the assertion that paintings need not have
colours and lines. Let us cling to vulgarity, if leaving it means to
assert that the Parthenon is a poem, and, by implication, that a sigh is
a statue.
One of the most consistent expositions of poetry is that given by
Hegel.[119] Here is a careful abstract of propositions as carefully
formulated and proved. He has ruled out the “poetic sentence.” Specimens
of the sublime, like that _Let there be light, and there was light_
which Longinus[120] admired, are not poetry. History, too, is excluded,
Herodotus, Tacitus, and the rest,[121] as well as eloquence, and not as
Shelley rejects Cicero, on personal grounds, but because of the law in
the case. Yet this summary is still inadequate as a practical test, and
with it the historian is in a plight no better than when with Sidney or
Coleridge he was including whatever piece of writing seemed certainly
though indefinitely poetic. In the latter case he steered by a compass
which was at the mercy of unnumbered hidden magnets; in the former case
the signs on the card are blurred.[122] But Hegel does not leave the
matter here; purposely or not, he gives a clear test for the historian
when, twenty pages later, he comes to speak of versification. Professors
Gayley and Scott[123] point out that the present writer has made too
much of this concession; instead of saying that verse is “the only
condition absolutely demanded by poetry,” one should say that Hegel
makes verse indispensable. But this is quite enough for the purpose. The
passage in question runs thus: “To be sure, prose put into verse is not
poetry, but simply verse, just as mere poetic expression in what is
otherwise prosaic treatment results only in a poetic prose; _but
nevertheless, metre or rime, being the one and only sensuous aroma,[124]
is absolutely demanded for poetry, and indeed is even more necessary
than store of imagery, the so-called beautiful diction_.” And now for
Hegel’s reason, which quite agrees with the historian’s demand for an
available test. He goes on to say that the fact of verse in any piece of
literature shows at once, as poetry indeed demands there should be
shown, that one is in another realm from the realm of prose, of daily
life; this constraint, if one likes to call it constraint, forces the
poet outside the bounds of common speech into a province wholly
submitted to the laws of art. That poetry has to be something more than
this, that there are other canons, nobody denies; but the first step for
a poet is into this realm of verse where he must prove in sterner tests
and by other achievements whether he is citizen or trespasser.
Hegel, it might be said, is in the clouds; he is out of touch with
science, and with that logic of facts which rules investigations of the
present day. But the same way of thinking holds with a practical
Englishman like Mr. Edmund Gurney,[125] whose feet are planted very
firmly on solid ground, who is distinctly hostile to the poem in prose,
that “pestilent heresy,” as Professor Saintsbury has called it, and
whose idea of art, which always includes an appeal to the sense of form,
demands in poetry a definite metre or rhythm. And the same way of
thinking holds with a student of modern psychology, M. Souriau,[126] who
undertakes to define poetry in terms of science. Poetry itself derives
from music and prose,—presumably he means by prose the speech of daily
life, and not what Walter Pater means in his essay on Style when he
makes “music and prose literature ... the opposite terms of art”; poetry
might therefore be called musical speech.[127] To show how much depends
on the music, M. Souriau turns to translations from foreign poetry into
prose vernacular. “The more poetical this original text, the more it
loses in the change.... This depreciation is due to the change of
process, and not to the change of tongue, for the translation of a piece
of prose would not show these faults.” On the other hand, now, take an
irreproachable piece of verse, with this superiority just shown to be
due to its rhythm, and look at it with regard to logical worth. How
unsatisfying, how “thin,” is the thought in it! Change again the point
of view, and study poetry for its music; one will be no better pleased
than when one hunted for its thought. The rhythm would be intolerably
monotonous in a piece of music. The sonorous words, taken as sound, are
not really pleasing to the ear. Rime, if one will look at it this way,
is a _procédé enfantin_. In sum, poetry is logically inferior to prose,
and musically inferior to pure melody,—and what, then, is its own charm?
It pleases us, not by either one of these elements, but by their
combination; it is harmony, but in a peculiar sense. “It is not the
harmony of thought, logical system, and order, not the harmony of sounds
or musical system, but the harmony between sounds and thoughts. _One
loves to feel the idea bending and adjusting itself to the rules of
verse, and the verse yielding to the demands of the idea._”[128]
It is time to close the poll. For poetry in prose no one has spoken in
such a temperate and yet forcible fashion as Mr. Frederic Harrison,[129]
though his arguments are by no means new. Nothing but “poetry,” he
asserts, can serve as the word to express what one finds in Malory’s
_Death of Arthur_, in chapters of Job and Isaiah. But arguments such as
he makes with energy and eloquence lose their force when confronted with
the cool reasoning of Mr. Bosanquet,[130] who shows clearly that poetry,
whatever else it may be, must be rhythmic utterance. Even in the clash
of opinion between these modern writers, one finds what is to be found
throughout the entire controversy, down from the days of the early
renaissance, that the advocates of a rhythmic test for poetry have the
better of the argument. It has been shown that there is no other test
for the historian of poetry as a social institution; and whenever
another test has been set up, its own advocates have not only abandoned
it in practice, but even in theory have obscured it with a mass of
contradictions.[131]
There remains, of course, the _ambulando_ argument; the champion of
poetry in prose points to the work which passes under this name. A book
could be written on the long series of concessions in matter of
territory which verse has made to prose; but no sensible critic will
allow these transfers to prove that poetry has ceased to be rhythmic
utterance. The most obvious transfer, of course, is translation; is not
the English Bible as noble poetry, one asks, as can be found in any time
or clime? Mr. Theodore Watts[132] is sure of the rhythmic test until he
faces the claims of this noblest prose. Yet surely what appeals to us
here is not poetry, but the genius of the English tongue at its greatest
and best,[133] flinging its full strength upon a task which at the time
lay close to the heart of the English people. The Bible is not the
masterpiece of our poetry, but of our prose; it beats not only with the
divine pulse of its original, but also with that immense vitality and
energy of English religious life in days when to many Englishmen life
and religion were identical. That does not make it poetry. One must not
open the gates of poetry to this or that passage of prose, and shut
them, through whim or shame, upon a thousand other passages.[134] Let in
that great chapter of Job, and anon _Werther_ is there, _Silas Marner_,
_Tom Jones_,—we have marshalled this rout already. No, if the Bible be
poetry, it is because it is rhythmic utterance, not because it is
sublime. That tremendous reach of emotion borne on the cadence of a
style majestic and clear, the voice of a solitary desolation crying to
the desolation of all mankind, the wail of an eternal and unanswered
question—
Wherefore is light given to him that is in misery,
And life unto the bitter in soul?
—is not this a poem? It is almost certainly a poem in the original; it
might be a poem in English, provided the rhythm of the lines, printed as
they now are, with parallelism and cadence properly brought out, seemed
to the reader to have a recurrent regularity which could take it into
the sphere of rhythmic law; otherwise it is prose, the prose of great
literature, indeed, but prose. It must be granted, too, that the latter
view is preferable. As great literature, the book of Job belongs with
Dante, and Milton, and with a few passages, where Goethe touches the
higher levels, in _Faust_; but it is not poetry in the sense that Dante
and Milton and Goethe impress upon one when one reads their great
passages. Longinus writes on the sublime in literature, and he is within
his rights when he puts Thucydides and Homer and Moses upon one plane;
but it is the plane of sublimity in thought and phrase, and it is not
the plane of poetry. Poetry has no monopoly of the emotions; a line that
stirs the heart is poetry when it belongs in a rhythmic whole, and is
prose when it does not. _Tendentesque manus ripae ulterioris amore_ is
Vergil’s verse; “the future balances and the hieroglyphic meanings of
human suffering” is De Quincey’s prose. Carlyle says of his murdered
Princess de Lamballe, “She was beautiful; she was good; she had known no
happiness,”—anvil-strokes as strong as the strongest in English speech.
Webster, over his murdered Duchess of Malfi, makes the brother cry out,
“Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young.” What have phrases
like “poetic prose” to do with great literature of this sort, and how
will one distinguish between these two isolated passages, both throbbing
with an intensity of expression which breaks out in the three short
clauses? Well, the rhythm of one comes to its rights in the full poetic
period where Webster, rough as his verses are, infused a noble harmony;
while the cadence of the other falls naturally into the sweep of
Carlyle’s prose. Dryden, indeed, with his wonted critical felicity,
gives the key of the whole matter. “Thoughts,” he says in his preface to
the _Fables_, “thoughts come crowding in so fast upon me, that my only
difficulty is to choose or to reject, to run them into verse, _or to
give them the other harmony of prose_.”
Since Turgot[135] told France and the world that a new kind of poetry
had come in the guise of Gessner’s prose idylls the poem in prose has
made many claims for Parnassian recognition. At Bertrand we have glanced
already; his scholar Baudelaire[136] made as bold essay; and so, in
quite recent times, the Swede Ola Hansson;[137] all these are Werther
with a difference, and in the last case with a dash of Nietzsche. He,
too, wrote a dithyrambic prose for his hysterical but noteworthy
Zarathustra; yet who does not feel the passage, as into another realm of
art, when one suddenly comes upon that powerful lyric in verse,[138] _O
Mensch, gieb Acht?_ Nietzsche, to be sure, had something to say; but
with the little men these dithyrambic phrases threaten to turn into mere
raving, and often carry out the threat. What saves a poet from this
danger, and the great poets know it, is the dignity, the self-restraint,
and the communal human sympathy of rhythm, which binds one, as in that
old consent of voice and step, to one’s fellows, and checks all
individual centrifugal follies; there are no bounds, no laws, there is
no decorum, in such whirling words, until they whirl in ordered motion
and until cosmos is where chaos was. “Slaves by their own compulsion,”
these sensual and dark things rebel in vain against the laws of poetic
form; pastels and whatever else, they have not even the dignity of truly
great prose. They are out of their sphere; to adapt a line from the
_Dunciad_, prose on stilts is several degrees worse than poetry fallen
lame.
Poetry, then, is still rhythmic utterance, though it has lost great
stretches of territory to prose. Prose, to be sure, makes a tempting
proposition to her impoverished friend. “Let us call ourselves by one
name,” she says, “unite all our power, and so make front against
science.” Such a union has long appealed to the French. Fénelon, one
knows, sought thus to revive the epic; and many pens were set scratching
for or against the _Télémacomanie_. Chateaubriand[139] tried a cadenced
prose in his _Martyrs_, by way of putting new life into sacred poetry.
Flaubert[140] and sundry of his school, above all, the Italian
D’Annunzio, annex poetry to the prose romance, and not poetry as an
informing spirit simply, but the cadences, the colour, the very
refrain.[141] Maeterlinck uses the poetic device of repetition—say in
the _Princesse Maleine_—to the verge of regular rhythm. Rime itself is
not excluded; witness this from D’Annunzio’s novel:[142] “rideva,
gemeva, pregava, cantava, accarezzava, singhiozzava, miniaciava; ilare,
flebile, umile, ironica, lusinghevole, disperata, crudele.”[143] Is
poetry, then, fallen by the wayside, and has prose spoiled her of her
raiment, so as to stand hereafter in her stead? No. Whatever Walter
Pater may have done for English or these men for Italian and French,
they have at best set up a new euphemism[144] of no real promise and
permanence. When the final balance is struck, these writers will perhaps
take a place in prose analogous, even if in a contrary spirit, to the
place of Swift in verse. Swift’s “unpoetic verse” is remorselessly
clear, remorselessly direct; one must read his poetry, and in great
measure admire, even like it, for its compelling energy and lucidity of
style. Yet, after all, one feels that these are alien virtues, imported
from the realm of prose; and one reads Swift’s poems much as one listens
to a foreigner conversing correctly, admirably, in one’s own tongue. And
as with Swift’s prose excellence in poetry, so with this poetic
excellence in prose; in the long account, _laudatur et alget_. It makes
the vain attempt to move landmarks set up, not by men, but by man, by
human nature itself.
So much for the theories; but it must now be proved beyond question that
rhythm is the vital and essential quality in the beginnings of poetic
art. Where to draw the line between prose and verse, between the
recurrence which is regular and which is called for our purposes rhythm,
and the recurrence that is not regular, is hard indeed; but perhaps a
satisfactory rule may be given in the words of Professor Budde, a
distinguished student of that Hebrew poetry to which so many advocates
of the prose poem have made appeal. “The fundamental law of form in all
poetry,” he says,[145] “by which in every race and at all times verse is
distinguished from prose, is that while in prose the unchecked current
of speech flows consistently as far as the thought carries it, the range
of thought and the length of the sentence changing often and in many
ways, verse, on the other hand, divides its store of thought into
relatively short lines which appeal to the ear as distinct not only by
this shortness, but also by relations determined by laws definite,
indeed, but varying with different races and languages. Whenever the
formal factors of poetry are enriched, these smallest units, the verses
or lines, tend to join, by a new bond, in a higher unit of form.”[146]
This formal factor may be now alliteration, now rime; with the Hebrews,
says Budde, it was the thought, which made a higher unit of the short
and separated units of line or verse. Lowth’s _parallelismus membrorum_
does not quite cover the rhythmical structure of Hebrew verse; no matter
if a fixed metre has not yet been found, the rhythm is evident, and its
law is essentially equal length of the verses within the group.[147] For
a test, one must fall back upon that original organ of poetry, the human
voice. Slave to the eye, one often reads as prose what one could read,
or what could be read to one, as poetry.[148] In any case, there will be
debatable ground, perhaps neutral ground; but it is safe to say from
theory, from the practical trial, from arguments of the learned, that so
far the effort to obliterate verse or rhythm as the real boundary line
of poetic territory, has proved a failure, and is likely to prove a
failure as often as it shall be tried. The case must be taken to the
court of human history and human progress; brought hither, all the
arguments for poems in prose lose their power. If, as Bücher says, one
is unwilling nowadays to let rhythmic speech pass, merely in so far as
it is rhythmic speech, for poetry, that is because ages of culture, with
increasing æsthetic demands, have quite naturally added new conditions;
but the beginning of poetry as an æsthetic fact was in the sense of
rhythm. The poem now laboriously wrought at the desk goes back to the
rhythm of work or play or dance in the life of primitive man, and the
element of rhythm is the one tie that binds beginning and end; if poetry
denies rhythm, it denies itself.
This statement itself, however, certain of the learned now vehemently
oppose, and bring reasons for their attitude quite different from such
arguments as we have been considering for the prose poem. Rhythm itself,
they maintain, is the outcome of prose. It is the child, says one bold
German, of grammatical inflections and the stress of oratory. Here is
fine revolution, indeed, if they have the trick to show it. Strabo, in a
classic sentence,[149] laid down the law which writer after writer has
taken without question as undisputed and indisputable authority; poetry
came before prose. “Flowery prose,” he said, “is nothing but an
imitation of poetry,” which is the “origin of all rhetorical language,”
and was at first always sung; “the very term _prose_,” he concludes,
“which is applied to language not clothed in metre, seems to indicate
... its descent from an elevation, or chariot, to the ground.” Hence the
_sermo pedestris_ of Latin writers. Against this, now, come sundry
scattered hints and at least two elaborate arguments. Vigfusson and
Powell,[150] after a consideration of old Scandinavian poetry, are fain
to think that Germanic rhythm was at the start simply “excited and
emphatic prose,” and make rhythm in general not an essential so much as
an accomplishment and aftergrowth of poetry. Finding no metre in this
same Norse poetry, none in Hebrew, Gottsched,[151] while he allowed that
songs were the earliest poetic form, thought them to have been simple
unmetrical chants, as if a child should sing the Lord’s prayer. Many
ballads, even English and Scottish, seem to show with other supposed
primitive traits a rough and faulty structure of verse, so that certain
critics, in their haste, make the lack of smooth metres a test of
age,—an idea which long prevailed in regard to Chaucer’s versification.
It is said[152] that until the beginning of the seventeenth century
Hungarian poetry was “quite without system, without rhythm, full of bad
rimes, and mainly made up of verses joined in long, monotonous rows”;
this, however, as in India, may have been the case not with lyric, but
only with epic. Comparetti thinks that the _Kalevala_ was founded upon
earlier poetic or roughly rhythmic prose,—again a matter of epic; and
earliest Japanese poetry, so far as it has been preserved, “is not far
removed from prose.”[153] Now and then, but not often, one is told that
savage songs have no regular rhythm and no settled order in the verse.
If it be true that mere counting of syllables was the earliest form of
common Aryan versification, it is at first sight not so unreasonable to
assume some sort of excited prose as a common basis for this system as
well as for the systems of quantitative and of accentual rhythm.
Moreover, as will be shown in later pages, there is a feeling abroad
which runs counter to any notion of spontaneity, and insists upon a
process of invention and imitation; this, too, would make against a
natural rhythm,[154] would throw out rhythm as an essential and
primitive part of poetry.[155] So much for scattered hints and
observations; there are more elaborate attacks.
In a treatise by Norden[156] on ancient artistic prose, one has under
one’s hand all the evidence which can be gathered from the classics,
particularly the Greek, for this view of the relations between prose and
verse; here, too, are ranged certain arguments against that old notion
of the precedence of poetry.[157] Musical sense, rhythm, was given to
man with the spoken word itself, as in historical times to the Hellenic
folk, whose melodious sentence is as inaudible as the music of the
spheres to an ear dependent upon modern speech. Now before poetry was
developed, Norden assumes, there was a rhythmic prose distinguished by
some kind of emphasis from the speech of daily life; thence sprang on
one hand the rhythm of regular poetry, and on the other hand a rhythm of
impassioned, oratorical prose. The oratory of Greece was a kind of
chanting, and the gestures that went with it were a species of dance;
but these in no way could be called identical with the singing or
recitation of poetry. Then came confusion. Gorgias began a new era when
he imported certain elements of poetry into his prose; even the rimed
prose of the Middle Ages Norden[158] calls “the result of a thousand
years of development from the time of Gorgias.” The early results,
however, were destructive. Tragedy, thinks our author, was ruined in
Hellas because all barriers were broken down between poetry and prose,
and rhetoric overwhelmed the drama; great epos yielded to great history;
gnomic poetry vanished; epigram supplanted elegy; dithyramb made room
for lofty prose at large.[159] But this is nothing more than a process
in civilized Greece analogous to the process in our own day described a
few pages above. Even the tradition of the classical writers pointed
back to an age of poetry which preceded prose; for while Strabo, in the
passage already considered, and Varro,[160] speak of actual literature
which they had in hand, Plutarch, writing on the Pythian oracle, made
poetry the product of primitive times and prose the outcome of
prehistorical decadence. Against this tradition, which he makes a mere
glorification of the golden age, Norden argues with learning and
acuteness, and from material furnished by Greek literature itself. But
Greek literature is surely no criterion for primitive song; persistent
as this prejudice is,[161] Norden sees that ethnology has better points
of view, and in one or two places he calls upon it for aid.[162] The
distinction between poetry and prose is, for him, “secondary, not
essential,” for the reason that he cannot find this distinction in the
earliest expression of formal or solemn language known to the various
races of man, whether on highest or lowest planes of culture. His
summary may be quoted, temperate and reasonable as it is; it appeals to
ethnological arguments, which would be close upon convincement if they
did not utterly neglect, as nearly all writers on poetry have neglected,
the communal basis of the art, and the fundamental consideration that
earliest poetry is more a social than an individual expression. Norden’s
eye is fixed upon the priest, the poet, the medicine man, the lawgiver;
he forgets the throng, and he forgets that the throng was mainly active
and rarely passive in the primitive stages of poetry. But let his own
summary be heard.[163] The line now drawn between poetry and prose, he
maintains, was unknown to primitive races. Forms of magic, the language
of the laws, ceremonial religious rites, were everywhere made in prose;
not, however, in the prose of daily conversation, but in a prose removed
from common conditions by two factors: first, it was spoken in measured,
solemn tones, and so became rhythmical,—not the regular rhythm of song,
but a sort of chant or recitation,[164] so that one may figure the early
priest like his modern brother, the snowy-banded, delicate-handed one,
at his intoning; and, secondly, it was furnished, for emphasis and for
the help of memory, with certain vocal expedients, such as alliteration
and rime, which are inborn alike in the most civilized and in the
wildest races. This kind of prose existed before there was any artistic
poetry. Norden would like to see more work done in the field of early
legal and religious forms; old Latin prayers, old Germanic laws, for
example, have been coaxed or bullied into some metrical scheme, and made
to pass as poetry. Elsewhere he takes the case of that prayer to Mars
which Westphal and Allen called Saturnian verse; by Norden’s reckoning,
this is mainly alliterative, rhythmic prose; only the second half can be
called metrical; and he is convinced that Saturnian verse itself is
nothing but the later metrical equipment of what was once rhythmic prose
solemnly spoken with two sections to the line. _Carmen_, he goes on to
say, is originally any solemn formula whether spoken or sung, whether
rhythmic prose, even simple prose, or verse;[165] that is “settled.” It
is a clever suggestion, too, that rhythmic prose belongs with what one
now calls the loose sentence, while artistic prose, contemporary with
artistic and metrical poetry, came into prominence with the periodic
structure;[166] so the tale, like Grimm’s familiar “There was once a
king’s son, and he was very beautiful ...,” in its uninvolved,
consecutive phrases, would give one an idea of the early rhythmic prose.
All this is useful and suggestive; but it by no means does away with the
fact of regular rhythmic utterance for primitive times. Who, for
example, is going to believe that rime and alliteration were developed
before regular rhythm,—regular rhythm, as will presently be shown,
standing out as the one fact about savage poetry to which nearly all
evidence of ethnology gives assent? Who will deny that quite as early as
any priest recited his prayer or buzzed his magic in solemn prose, there
was a throng of folk dancing and singing with a rhythm as exact as may
be? Did the priests, even, recite in “irregular rhythmic prose” that
repeated _enos Lases juvate_ of the Arval rites, sung as they beat the
ground in concerted measure of the dance? “So long,” says Usener[167] in
his book on old Greek verse, “so long as human societies turned in
solemn and festal manner to the divinities, so long they made petition,
thanks, laud, in measured and rhythmic verse, and the words were
inseparable from singing and the steps of the march.” For purposes of
this kind, and such purposes are the very soul of primitive social life,
chanted prose is out of the question. An excellent authority in musical
matters, Dr. Jacobsthal,[168] points out that the rhythm, if one may so
call it, of the chant stands to real rhythm as prose stands to verse,
and that the song to which a throng must dance, as in primitive times,
_can “in no case” lack the regular rhythm_. Who, moreover, that has read
Bücher’s essay can overlook the fact that primitive labour must have
begotten an exact rhythm, and very early must have given meaning to this
rhythm by more or less connected words? The proof, offered not only by
Norden but in those scattered hints already noted, breaks down when
confronted with hard facts. Ballad metres are often rough in the copies
which have come down to us, but a hundred considerations show this to
have been the fault of the copy itself, not of the makers and
singers,[169] and to have been due to the transfer from oral to written
conditions. There seems to be no reason why a letter should not be
quoted which the late Professor Child wrote in 1885 to the author of the
present book; “any _volkslied_,” he said, “shows as good an ear as any
Pindaric ode by Gray or whomever else.” It is the sense of complicated
metres which is due to culture and intellectual development, and not the
sense of exact and simple rhythm. As regards that protoplasmic prose of
the popular tale, which Norden calls “the essential test of primitive
speech,” how can he prove that it is the essential test of primitive
song? How different Bruchmann, who admits early prose narrative, but
says distinctly that early poetry, lyric outpouring of emotion, was
song; “the earliest of all poetry” for him is communal song, _gesang in
gemeinschaft_, golden words indeed! Grosse is to the same effect. Who
denies the tale, the loose prose style in short sentences verging on
rhythmic effects? Of course the entertainer told his tale betimes; but
earlier than this tale, the dance of the throng, as well as the labour
of daily life, had from the very beginning mated sounds and words with
rhythm, precise rhythm, as a festal and consenting act. A mass of
evidence, soon to be considered, is overwhelmingly for this state of
things. Norden appeals for the form of the tale to Radloff, a great
authority; let us do the same for the form of the song. In an article on
poetic forms among the Altaic Tartars,[170] Radloff remarks that in
these isolated tribes popular literature, without even the faintest
influence from the lettered world, has been developed in a quite natural
way. Especially worthy of note, he says, is the strictness of metrical
form in their poetry. He notes, moreover, the inseparable character,
under such conditions, of poetry and song. The specimens which he gives
are anything but rhythmic prose, and the rhythmic law is anything but
loose. The tales on the other hand are quite different; “these are not
sung,” he says, “but recited,” although now and then the reciter sings a
verse or so. Which came first, the entertainer and his audience, or the
festal, singing throng? Evidence of ethnology and conclusions of
sociology certainly put the singing, dancing throng as a primary social
fact, and the relation of audience to entertainer as a secondary social
fact. Mr. Joseph Jacobs[171] has hailed the _cante-fable_ as protoplasm
alike of the metrical ballad and of the prose tale, one omitting prose,
the other omitting verse; and while this does not really help Norden’s
claim, it is worth the while to note how it assumes a development which
is counter to all the facts. Even on its chosen ground of Celtic tales,
this theory meets indications that the verse is original and the prose
of later date.[172] The _cante-fable_ seems like a late form, a device
of the entertainer; the scraps of verse are survivals, just as the
chorus in a Greek drama is the survival of a drama in which all took
part, with no division into actors and spectators. In the Chinese
drama[173] an Occidental ear is offended by a remarkable confusion of
speaking and singing; even a single sentence in the dialogue is so
divided that part is spoken and part is sung. This is no primitive and
protoplasmic state; it is rather the confusion of contraries, than the
germ of related and naturally developed forms of art. Poetry and prose
in historic times have been approaching each other, not diverging, and
the curve of evolution would indicate a wide distinction at the start.
Mixture of prose, as Professor Sievers sees it, is a sign of decay in
the _Muspilli_, in the Hildebrand Lay.[174] On the other hand, in
vigorous poetry like the Roumanian ballad there is no mixture of prose,
while the Roumanian popular tale is sprinkled with verses; yet here is
precisely where the protoplasmic state ought to be found for both arts,
since the poetical style is “simple as possible,” has often no relative
clauses for whole pages, and is full of repetition.[175] Under simple
conditions, poetry often breaks up into prose, but prose is not found in
its transition to poetry; for proof it is enough to quote a recent
writer on German ballads.[176] “More and more,” he says, “the ballads
disintegrate into prose, a process which has been noted for Spain,
Sweden, Scotland, Portugal, and is also known in Germany.”[177] He gives
quotations and references to support his assertion, going on to name
several well-known ballads which began as such and then, in the guise of
prose tales, won as wide and as great a vogue as the originals had
enjoyed before. Perhaps in the case of poetic composition at a time when
intellect has mastered emotion, prose may be the basis of poetry, but
this case has no bearing on primitive conditions. Whether a poet
nowadays conceives his work in prose, as Goethe did in the _Iphigenie_,
or begins with the “brains beat into rhythm,” is an individual matter.
“When Gautier wished to do a good piece of work, he always began in
verse,” say the Goncourts.[178] Tradition makes Vergil write out his
_Æneid_ in prose and then turn it into verse; Vida[179] commends this
method for the prentice in poetry. There is a curious passage in
Goethe’s letter to Schiller of 5 March, 1798, about renewed work on
_Faust_. “Some tragic scenes were done in prose; by reason of their
naturalness and strength they are quite intolerable in relation to the
other scenes. I am, therefore, now trying to put them into rime, for
there the idea is seen as if under a veil, and the immediate effect of
this tremendous material is softened.” This, however, has nothing to do
with primitive conditions of poetry; the simplicity of modern prose is
an effort of art, and belongs with the intellectual empire, while
rhythm, particularly in its early form of repetition, is the immediate
and spontaneous expression of emotion, and likely to be more pronounced
and dominant the nearer one is to the primitive state of things.