PROSE PRECEDES VERSE HISTORICALLY
One of the frequent sayings in the text books of literary history is
that the literature of a nation always begins with poetry in verse, and
that good prose is a later development. England and Greece are
especially cited as examples, since Homer lived before Herodotus and the
author of _Beowulf_ before King Alfred.
Scholars follow one another often like sheep. When a man of prominence
utters an idea, it is taken up by a disciple and soon becomes a
convention. The academic critics and professors usually enshrine the
idea and it becomes a heresy to question it. The best illustration of
this is the almost universal adherence given to the idea that verse
poetry came before prose, a view first set forth by the geographer
Strabo in speaking of Homer in the beginning of his _Geography_. His
views were not entertained, I believe, by Plato or Aristotle. The
passage is worth quoting as I know of no other in literature that has
raised so much confusion and misapprehension as to the nature of poetry:
Prose discourse--I mean artistic prose--is, I may say, an
imitation of poetic discourse; for poetry as an art first came
upon the scene and was first to win approval. Then came
Cadmus, Pherecydes, Hecataeus and their followers, with prose
writing in which they imitated the poetic art, abandoning the
use of metre, but in other respects preserving the qualities
of poetry. Then subsequent writers took away, each in his
turn, something of these qualities, and brought prose down to
its present form, as from a sublime height. In the same way we
might say that comedy took its structure from tragedy, but
that it also has been degraded from the sublime height of
tragedy to its present "prose-like" style, as it is called.
_Geography_, 1. 2. 6.
Most critics have accepted this view. Scaliger, however, in the middle
of the sixteenth century repudiated it. He asked whether the first
so-called poems, the metrical records in temples, antedated everyday
speech.
Strabo was led to his error by the fact that the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_
were among the very few survivals of the end of an epoch of verse
poetry, and also because some of the pre-Socratic philosophers like
Parmenides and Empedocles wrote in verse. Now scholars are all agreed
that the authors of the Homeric poems had many predecessors in the art
of composing poetry for many ages back down into legendary times. The
perfected poems in a pattern as regular as the dactylic hexameter were a
stage of evolution and did not spring up out of the darkness of an age
which had no literature. The Delphians claim that their first priestess
invented the dactylic hexameter; the Delians said that Olen, a mythical
singer from Asia Minor, first used it, but it was, of course, a
development. Prose was not a development from verse, as Strabo thought.
On the contrary, all verse, including Greek verse, was a development
from rhythmical prose. The stories about Troy were first told in prose;
next they were sung in ballads; then they were combined into epics.
Musæus, one of the earliest legendary poets, antedating Homer, was said
to have composed prose.
As the earliest literatures of most nations have not been preserved to
us, we can examine various literatures in their earliest stages only; we
shall in almost every case find that these are written in rhythmical
prose or possess the beginning of a pattern hardly differing from
rhythmic prose. It is against all human experience to conclude that an
elaborate work of art following laws of measure could precede the
production in prose that represents the transcription of the natural
language of people which is in prose. We shall discover, however, that
in some cases, like the _Sagas_ of Iceland, we have in prose, the very
first poetical compositions, while other poetical compositions, like the
epics of Ireland, show us the prose along with the metrical development
in the body of the compositions.
First let us briefly note the characteristics of the poetry of natural
savages. This is always in rhythmical prose, or free verse, and this may
be seen in the anthology of Indian poems collected by Cronyn in _The
Path of the Rainbow_. The writer of the preface, Mary Austin, ventures
the opinion that the writers of free verse poems in America are merely
returning to the primitive form of poetry written by the native
Americans. Similarly the emotional outbursts of native African tribes
are in rhythmical prose. The only form of pattern in the poems of
savages as well as of people in an early stage of civilization is a
tendency to repeat the same phrase. But in their most emotional stories,
fables and legends, in their proverbs and crude moral and religious
philosophizing they use plain prose. This prose, especially that of the
legends, contains their first poetry, and of course there is no pattern
here. The pattern, assuming the form of irregular rhythm and repetition
of phrase, appears chiefly in hymns and chants, and these are only two
aspects of poetry.
The first change that occurs in a later stage of the hymn is that the
phrase or clause, instead of being repeated exactly, is varied by a
change of words, having a similar import. In short, we have the
beginning of parallelism. There is parallelism in the poems of all
early civilizations. It reaches its fullest development in an age of
civilization, as we observe in the poems of the Bible.
Probably the oldest poetry we have is that of the Egyptians and the
Babylonians, and there is no regular metre of any kind in these except
parallelism. The works are all irregularly rhythmical and in many cases
the lines are arranged like modern free verse, to call attention to this
irregular rhythm.
Dr. James H. Breasted, speaking of the Pyramid Texts, in his _Religion
and Thought in Ancient Egypt_, says: "Among the oldest literary
fragments in the collection are the religious hymns and these exhibit an
early poetic form, that of couplets displaying parallelism in
arrangement of word, and thought--the form which is familiar to all in
the Hebrew Psalms as 'parallelism of members.' It is carried back by its
employment in the Pyramid Texts in the fourth millennium B.C., by far
earlier than its appearance anywhere else. It is indeed the oldest of
all literary forms known to us. Its use is not confined to the hymns
mentioned, but appears also in other portions of the Pyramid Texts,
where it is, however, not usually so highly developed."
All the poems of the Egyptians were written simply in rough, irregular
lines of rhythmical prose. Read the famous _Song of the Harper_ where an
epicurean life is praised; it is impassioned rhythmical prose. Take up
the love poems, elegies, fairy tales and prayers of the ancient
Egyptians. They have no device of metre, rhythm or rhyme. The only
pattern is the parallelism. A few hymns are arranged in stanzas of ten
lines with a break in the middle of each line, but no definite metrical
laws existed for the lengths of lines or number of feet, so as to make a
uniform rhythmical pattern of the composition.
The Egyptians wrote much of their poetry in parallelistic prose. If we
do not know how they pronounced their vowels, we know enough of their
literature to see that regularity of accents and equal numbers of
syllables were not characteristic of their poetry.
The epic of _Gilgash_, the chief poem of the Babylonians, and the
various hymns translated by Professor Langdon, are all in irregular
rhythmical prose. These may be older than the poetry of the Egyptians,
but in form they are a great deal alike--simply prose with a rough
rhythm, frequent parallelism, but no uniform device. The lines are
arranged often like free verse. "It is difficult to draw the line
between their poetry and the higher style of prose," says Francis
Brown.[100:A] "There is a primitive freedom and lack of artificiality in
the poetic movement, much greater than in the Hebrew Psalms. Metre is
felt and observed at times, but then abandoned--the thought carrying
itself along beyond the strict boundaries of metrical division."
We have seen that critics find in the hymns of the Egyptians and
Babylonians the irregular rhythm and parallelisms of the Psalms, in
short, impassioned rhythmical prose.
Let us now examine the form of the poetry of the Bible.
W. Robertson Smith in an able article, "The Poetry of the Old
Testament," posthumously collected in _Lectures and Essays_, showed that
Hebrew poetry was rhythmic without possessing laws of metre, for the
rhythm of thought created a naturally rhythmic prose. Rhythm is the
measured rise and fall of feeling and utterance, to which the rhythm of
sound is subordinate. Prosodic rules are not necessary, "for the words
employed naturally group themselves in balanced members, in which the
undulations of the thought are represented to the ear." When poetry
becomes more artificial people do not trust to the rhythm of thought but
attribute importance to metre and finally "we are apt to forget its
essential subordination to rhythmic flow of thought."
There has been no more amusing game than the ever-renewed attempt to
find metres in the Bible. One of the most ridiculous claims, at one time
widely in vogue, was that the Greek metres were to be found in the
Bible. Vossius and the younger Scaliger denounced these views, first
advanced by Josephus and Philo.
We are beginning to see to-day that the chief characteristic of the form
of the poetry in the Bible is parallelism in irregular rhythm.
Dr. König and other scholars agree that it is this irregular rhythm
based on accent of syllable that distinguishes Hebrew poetry. Each line
had a number of accented syllables ranging from two to five, but the
lines did not regularly or alternately have the same number of accented
syllables. The unaccented syllables were also not counted. The poem
became nothing more than rhythmical prose. Sir George A. Smith says, in
his _The Early Poetry of Israel_, that the Hebrew poets indulged
deliberately in the metrical irregularities of verse. They deviated more
than Shakespeare, who did not always confine himself to the iambic foot
and pentameter line in his blank verse. "In every form of Oriental art
we trace the influence of what may be called Symmetrophobia, an
instinctive aversion to absolute symmetry, which if it knows no better,
will express itself in arbitrary and even violent disturbances of the
style or pattern of the work." The more correct view, however, is that
this symmetry was never intended by the Hebrew poets; that the
irregular arrangement of accents with occasional symmetry was the rule.
Both Smith and König cite G. Dalman, who says that this irregular rhythm
is found in the songs of Arabia to-day sung in Palestine. These songs
are made up of lines of from two to five syllables, of which one to four
are unaccented, the poet being bound by no definite numbers. This is the
irregular rhythm of Hebrew poetry, and also, by the way, of the
_Nibelungen Lied_. It is the rhythm of all early poetry, the Egyptian
and Babylonian.
But even those who have given up the hope of finding metres in Hebrew
poetry insist that a regular metrical form was used for the Kinoth or
lamentations. Professor Budde held that the Kinoth had a regular metre.
But the discovery merely amounted to this: that a long line was followed
regularly by a short line. There was no uniformity of accented syllables
in successive or alternate lines. There are two, three and four
syllables in them almost at the will of the poet.
We may then conclude that rhythm is never regular in the poetry of the
Bible.
All ancient Hebrew poetry was in rhythmical prose; prophecies, elegies,
songs, hymns, parables, and dialogues. The irregular rhythmical form was
a natural outflow of the ecstatic element.
But what about the parallelism? Does this make the Bible verse? Bishop
Lowth, in his _Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews_, delivered
at Oxford in the middle of the eighteenth century, no doubt performed
great service in calling attention to the parallelisms of Hebrew poetry.
The importance of these in ancient Hebrew poetry has, however, been
overestimated. Parallelism did not create poetry, but was often its
garment. There are passages employing parallelisms that are not poetry,
while many poems exist in which these are not used. Dr. Edward König, in
his article on Hebrew Poetry in the _Jewish Encyclopedia_, concludes
that the poets of the Bible were not bound by parallelism, often setting
it aside and not using it.
In his account of _The Literary Study of the Bible_, Professor Richard
G. Moulton has given an excellent study of the parallelism of the Bible,
but he admits that parallelisms of clause are also prose devices. If
parallelism, then, is also a property of prose, we cannot say that
parallelism alone is sufficient to distinguish poetry from prose, or
even Hebrew poetry from Hebrew prose. Moulton finds that prose and
poetry overlap each other in the Bible. All this merely proves that
parallelisms were no doubt anciently used to differentiate prose
literature conveying emotions from prose literature barren of feeling.
But parallelism was not indispensable to the literature of ecstasy.
Yet we cannot deny the fact that parallelisms occur in the Bible with
such frequency as almost to have become a pattern of Hebrew poetry.
Bishop Lowth thought the origin of the parallelism was due to the system
of chanting hymns where there was a response by the congregation, and
that the practice of the parallelism soon extended to all poetry. But,
for example, proverbs from their very epigrammatic nature tend towards
parallelism. The origin was most likely due to the variations of phrase
introduced by individuals who tired of the incessant, silly repetition
of similar words such as are indulged in by savages.
There is parallelism in all poetry, in _Beowulf_ and the _Kalevala_, and
even in prose. For it must be admitted that under emotion a man tends to
repeat an idea, in the same or in a synonymous language.
There can be no doubt that parallelism was consciously and deliberately
indulged in by the Hebrew poets, but it is as absurd to confuse it with
Hebrew poetry as to confuse metre with English poetry. There are
poetical passages in the Bible containing no parallelisms. It should
also be borne in mind that parallelism developed as a perfect pattern
when poetry was at a high stage. Like all patterns it was a product of a
type of civilization. No rude state of society can develop a pattern,
which is the result of evolution.
Parallelism is not used frequently to-day as a pattern of verse, though
it can be found in all modern literature. Yet it is a more natural means
of expressing one's emotions than rhyme or metre.
The only pattern of importance, then, that appears extensively in the
Bible is that of parallelism. There is no pattern of rhythm at all, for
this is free. The result is that the poetry of the Bible is in what may
be called prose, for the repetition of the idea and language in the
parallelism is natural even in prose. Parallelism in the Bible did not
create a distinct branch of literature called verse, as metre did. Those
Psalms that have parallelism are very little different from those Psalms
where it is absent. They are both really prose.
It was unfortunate that Hebrew poetry later eschewed the rhythmic prose
used in the Bible and adopted first rhymed prose and then rhymed metre.
There were several circumstances that led to this.
It has been usually recognized that rhymed prose was first used among
the Hebrews in the Liturgy by Jannai, who flourished in the seventh
century. Metre was introduced in the tenth century by Dunash ben Labrat.
Both these poets followed Arabic models. Saadyah, the Hebrew
philosopher, blamed Dunash for having ruined the beauty and naturalness
of the Hebrew language for poetry. Even Jehudah HaLevi, the great
national poet who used Arabic meters, regretted, in his philosophical
work, _Hacuzari_,[105:A] that these foreign Arabian influences should
prevail among the Hebrew poets.
The oldest Arab poetry was also in prose. The earliest pattern for
poetry among the Arabians was the Saj (cooing), or rhymed but unmetrical
prose. Goldziher calls the Saj the oldest form of poetic speech; it
continued to exist even after the regular metres were established, the
Koran, for instance, being in Saj. At first it was unrhymed, as
Goldziher says; the earliest Arabic poetry was in unmetrical prose.
From Saj arose Rajaz (trembling), which is partly metrical, and forms
the transition to the artificial Arabic meters.
The earliest surviving Arabic poetry, the seven poems of the
_Muallaqat_, composed before Mohammed, are so perfect in form that all
Arabic scholars assume they were produced after a long period extending
through many years of poetic practice. They were not rude products, but
had an historical background, as did the _Iliad_. They are written in
perfected and complicated metres, but the Saj is older than these.
We have two other proofs that poetry was in early times written in
rhythmical prose, or at least in a rhythm that makes only a slight
approach to metre. These are to be found in two of the oldest Aryan
literary monuments extant, the _Rigveda_ of India and the _Avesta_ of
Iran.
Two-fifths of the hymns of the _Rigveda_ are composed in a metre called
trishtubh, the most frequent measure in the _Veda_. It is made up of
stanzas of four lines, each of eleven syllables, the last four of which
only have to follow a pattern, this consisting of two iambuses or an
iambus and a spondee. This requirement left a good deal of liberty to
the poet. Here is an example of it, in the _Hymn to Dawn_, in
MacDonnels' _Sanskrit Literature_ (P. 83):
Arise! the breath, the life again has reached us:
Darkness has gone away and light is coming.
She leaves a pathway for the sun to travel:
We have arrived where men prolong existence.
Max Müller in his translation in prose has adhered in many cases to the
original metre, and the reader feels he is reading prose. The Hindus,
like the free verse writers, merely arranged their lines to call
attention to the rhythm, but it was really prose employing metrical
rules only at the end of the line. It has none of the hampering
qualities of classic or English metres, or of the metres in the later
Indian epics when the quantity of every syllable was determined.
The _Rigvedas_ are fixed by some scholars at 1500 B.C.
When we come to the _Avesta_ of the Iranians who left India and wrote
their work in a language that is almost Sanskrit, we find more liberty
as regards the metres. The _Gathas_, which are said to be the oldest
portions of the work, the work of Zoroaster himself, have the same or
nearly the same kind of metre as the Vedic hymns, but there is greater
liberty. The syllables need not be of a uniform quantity at the end of
the line, but each line, as in the _Rigvedas_, also has the same number
of syllables. The third of the five _Gathas_ uses the trishtubh or most
frequent metre of the _Veda_, four lines of eleven syllables, but
without restrictions as to quantity of final vowels.
Of course the reader can see that such verse is really prose, for there
are no limitations as to when accent or quantity should uniformly be
used. L. H. Mills in his translation of the _Gathas_ keeps close, as he
tells us, to the original metres. He wisely breaks up the metrical line,
based merely on the counting of syllables, and the result reads like
prose, which it really is in the original.
A study of the five "metres" of the five _Gathas_ appears in Martin
Haug's _Essays in the Sacred Language, Writings and Religion of the
Parsis_.
The _Gathas_ were written about the fourteenth century B.C. by Zoroaster
and hence are not much later than the _Rigvedas_.
In the _Rigvedas_ and _Gathas_ we have the first stage of metre used by
Aryan nations; these are the basis of all later metres. They were
written, it must be recalled, not in ages of barbarism, and represent
the transition from prose to regular metre. They are so near prose that
only an arrangement into lines makes us call them metrical. After all,
they do not differ much from the rhythmical prose in which the poetry of
Ancient Egyptians, Babylonians and Hebrews was written. We see thus that
rhythmical prose was the first language wherein poetry was written, and
that hampering metre is always late in the literary development of a
nation. We learn how great is the delusion of literary historians that
metrical poetry is the first literature of all nations and that prose is
a later growth.
The earliest poetry of a country is expressed first in prose by word of
mouth. It is then put down first in writing in prose, and later versions
sometimes change the prose into meter. Often the earlier prose version
is lost and it is then concluded that a literature of a nation begins in
verse.
Let us examine the form of the earliest Irish literature. The oldest
stories in Irish literature center around the exploits of Cuchulinn, who
is reputed to have died at the beginning of the Christian era. This
means that the tale about him was told by word of mouth up till the time
they were written down in the seventh or eighth century. The versions of
a few centuries later are the copies we now have in the epic _Táin Bó
Cualnge_. According to Edmund C. Quiggin's article on Irish Literature
in the _Britannica_, the original Tain consisted of prose interspersed
with rhythmical prose called rhetoric. Later metrical poems were largely
substituted for the rhetoric. As Mr. Quiggin says, the Tain is of
interest as showing the preliminary stage through which the epics of all
other nations had gone. No doubt even the _Iliad_ was originally told in
prose (and probably written in prose) while the verse versions are the
latest we have of the story.
Eleanor Hull, in _A Text Book of Irish Literature_, also says in Vol. 1,
p. 95, that there are few verse poems in the earlier _Táin Bó Cualnge_,
most of the poetry being usually in declamatory prose style known as
rosg, while in the later version long verse poems are frequent.
The earliest Teutonic verse was rather rhythmical prose, with some
alliteration. It is often hard to distinguish Anglo-Saxon prose from
Anglo-Saxon verse. Ælfric, who is regarded by many as one of the fathers
of English prose, wrote his _Lives of the Saints_ in rhythmical prose,
arranged in irregular lines just like our modern free verse. The reader
may consult Professor Skeat's edition. This arrangement, needless to
say, did not make poetry of it. But free verse, as we see, was written
in England in 1000 A.D.
Dr. Edwin Guest, in his _History of English Rhythms_, says that the
Anglo-Saxon writers sometimes gave a very definite rhythm to their
prose, and he cites a few passages characterizing King William, from the
Chronicle attributed to Wulfstan in the latter part of the eleventh
century. Dr. Guest adds that in his opinion this rhythmical prose was
one of the instruments in breaking up the alliterative system of the
Anglo-Saxons. The passage he cites, however, is no more rhythmical than
many passages in modern English prose. Anglo-Saxon prose, then, often
was rhythmical, and even arranged like free verse, but it became
genuine poetry only when the element of ecstasy was present. Even the
middle-English impassioned alliterative prose poem, _The Wooing of Our
Lord_, of the thirteenth century, does not differ much from Anglo-Saxon
verse.
The earliest Teutonic poetry was emotional prose, and only later did
definite rules bind it. The author of _Beowulf_, though the first
English verse poet, is not the oldest Teutonic poet; he had predecessors
in rhythmic prose. "When we consider primitive Teutonic verse closely,"
says Gosse in his article in the _Britannica_ on Verse, "we see that it
did not begin with any conscious art, but as Vigfussen had said, 'was
simply excited and emphatic prose' uttered with the repetition of catch
words and letters. The use of these was presently regulated." English
poetry, then, began in the use of excited and emphatic prose. One of the
best pieces of Anglo-Saxon prose poetry is the _Sermon to the English_
on the ravages of the Dane by Archbishop Wulfstan of York in the early
part of the eleventh century. It reads like Anglo-Saxon verse. One sees
the unconscious influence of Anglo-Saxon prose poetry as late as
Drummond's _The Cypress Grove_ (1623), an ecstatic prose poem against
death.
The fact that the _Sagas_, the earliest literature of Iceland, were
written in perfect prose has puzzled those who claim that the early
literature of all nations is verse poetry, and that prose is a later
development. The events which the _Sagas_ celebrate took place in the
tenth century, and the following century was the period of their
narration. They were written down in the present form chiefly in the
thirteenth century. Ari Frodi (1067-1148) is considered by many the
first inventor of classic Norse prose. The most famous of the _Greater
Sagas_ is the _Njala_ written about the middle of the thirteenth century
and celebrating events of the beginning of the eleventh century.
Earlier Icelandic verse poetry did exist, but it does not belong to
Iceland proper. The great strength of real Iceland poetry was in the
_Sagas_, which Morris calls "unversified poetry." Some of these existed
as early as the first part of the tenth century. It seems anomalous to
the literary historian that a nation should at the very beginning of its
literary history have developed prose before verse, that it should have
celebrated its heroes in prose instead of verse song. All stories among
ancient people were, however, originally told in prose; the first
expression was always in rhythmical poetical prose.
It is not true, then, that verse is the first form in which a nation's
poetry is written, or that prose developed from verse. Prose was the
original language of poetry, and to prose it should return. The pattern
was a gradual development.
FOOTNOTES:
[100:A] "The Religious Poetry of Babylonia." _Presbyterian Review_,
1888, p. 76.
[105:A] There is an English translation of this work.