A Study of Poetry Part 9

_3. Conflict and Compromise_

And everywhere in the arrangement of syllables into the patterns of rhythm and metre we find conflict and compromise, the surrender of some values of sound or sense for the sake of a greater unity. To revert to considerations dealt with in an earlier chapter, we touch here upon the old antinomy--or it may be, harmony--between "form" and "significance,"

between the "outside" and the "inside" of the work of art. For words, surely, have one kind of value as _pure sound_, as "cadences" made up of stresses, slides, pauses, and even of silences when the expected syllable is artfully withheld. It is this sound-value, for instance, which you perceive as you listen to a beautifully recited poem in Russian, a language of which you know not a single word; and you may experience a modification of the same pleasure in closing your mind wholly to the "sense" of a richly musical pa.s.sage in Swinburne, and delighting your ear by its mere beauty of tone. But words have also that other value as _meaning_, and we are aware how these meaning values shift with the stress and turns of thought, so that a given word has a greater or less weight in different sentences or even in different clauses of the same sentence.

"Meaning" values, like sound values, are never precisely fixed in a mechanical and universally agreed-upon scale, they are relative, not absolute. Sometimes meaning and sound conflict with one another, and one must be sacrificed in part, as when the normal accent of a word refuses to coincide with the verse-accent demanded by a certain measure, so that we "wrench" the accent a trifle, or make it "hover" over two syllables without really alighting upon either. And it is significant that lovers of poetry have always found pleasure in such compromises.

[Footnote: Compare the pa.s.sage about Chopin's piano-playing, quoted from Alden in the Notes and Ill.u.s.trations for this chapter.]

They enjoy minor departures from and returns to the normal, the expected measure of both sound and sense, just as a man likes to sail a boat as closely into the wind as he conveniently can, making his actual course a compromise between the line as laid by the compa.s.s, and the actual facts of wind and tide and the behavior of his particular boat. It is thus that the sailor "makes it," triumphantly! And the poet "makes it" likewise, out of deep, strong-running tides of rhythmic impulse, out of arbitrary words and rebellious moods, out of

"Thoughts hardly to be packed Into a narrow act, Fancies that broke through language and escaped,"

until he compels rhythm and syllables to move concordantly, and blend into that larger living whole--the dancing, singing crowd of sounds and meanings which make up a poem.

_4. The Rhythms of Prose_

Just here it may be of help to us to turn away for a moment from verse rhythm, and to consider what Dryden called "the other harmony" of prose.

For no one doubts that prose has rhythm, as well as verse. Vast and learned treatises have been written on the prose rhythms of the Greeks and Romans, and Saintsbury's _History of English Prose Rhythm_ is a monumental collection of wonderful prose pa.s.sages in English, with the scansion of "long" and "short" syllables and of "feet" marked after a fashion that seems to please no one but the author. But in truth the task of inventing an adequate system for notating the rhythm of prose, and securing a working agreement among prosodists as to a proper terminology, is almost insuperable. Those of us who sat in our youth at the feet of German masters were taught that the distinction between verse and prose was simple: verse was, as the Greeks had called it, "bound speech" and prose was "loosened speech." But a large proportion of the poetry published in the last ten years is "free verse," which is a.s.suredly of a "loosened"

rather than a "bound" pattern.

Apparently the old fence between prose and verse has been broken down. Or, if one conceives of indubitable prose and indubitable verse as forming two intersecting circles, there is a neutral zone,

[Ill.u.s.tration: Prose / Neutral Zone / Verse]

which some would call "prose poetry" and some "free verse," and which, according to the experiments of Dr. Patterson [Footnote: _The Rhythm of Prose_, already cited.]

may be appropriated as "prose experience" or "verse experience" according to the rhythmic instinct of each individual. Indeed Mr. T. S. Omond has admitted that "the very same words, with the very same natural stresses, may be prose or verse according as we treat them. The difference is in ourselves, in the mental rhythm to which we unconsciously adjust the words."

[Footnote: Quoted in B. M. Alden, "The Mental Side of Metrical Form,"

_Modern Language Review_, July, 1914.]

Many familiar sentences from the English Bible or Prayer-Book, such as the words from the _Te Deum_, "We, therefore, pray thee, help thy servants, whom thou hast redeemed with thy precious blood," have a rhythm which may be felt as prose or verse, according to the mental habit or mood or rhythmizing impulse of the hearer.

Nevertheless it remains true in general that the rhythms of prose are more constantly varied, broken and intricate than the rhythms of verse. They are characterized, according to the interesting experiments of Dr.

Patterson, by syncopated time, [Footnote: "For a 'timer' the definition of prose as distinguished from verse experience depends upon a predominance of syncopation over coincidence in the coordination of the accented syllables of the text with the measuring pulses." _Rhythm of Prose_, p. 22.]

whereas in normal verse there is a fairly clean-cut coincidence between the pulses of the hearer and the strokes of the rhythm. Every one seems to agree that there is a certain danger in mixing these infinitely subtle and "syncopated" tunes of prose with the easily recognized tunes of verse.

There is, unquestionably, a natural "iambic" roll in English prose, due to the predominant alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables in our native tongue, but when d.i.c.kens--to cite what John Wesley would call "an eminent sinner" in this respect--inserts in his emotional prose line after line of five-stress "iambic" verse, we feel instinctively that the presence of the blank verse impairs the true harmony of the prose.

[Footnote: Observe, in the "Notes and Ill.u.s.trations" for this chapter, the frequency of the blank-verse lines in Robert G. Ingersoll's "Address over a Little Boy's Grave."]

Delicate writers of English prose usually avoid this coincidence of pattern with the more familiar patterns of verse, but it is impossible to avoid it wholly, and some of the most beautiful cadences of English prose might, if detached from their context, be scanned for a few syllables as perfect verse. The free verse of Whitman, Henley and Matthew Arnold is full of these embedded fragments of recognized "tunes of verse," mingled with the unidentifiable tunes of prose. There has seldom been a more curious example of accidental coincidence than in this sentence from a prosaic textbook on "The Parallelogram of Forces": "And hence no force, however great, can draw a cord, however fine, into a horizontal line which shall be absolutely straight." This is precisely the "four-stressed iambic" metre of _In Memoriam_, and it even preserves the peculiar rhyme order of the _In Memoriam_ stanza:

"And hence no force, however great, Can draw a cord, however fine, Into a horizontal line Which shall be absolutely straight."

We shall consider more closely, in the section on Free Verse in the following chapter, this question of the coincidence and variation of pattern as certain types of loosened verse pa.s.s in and out of the zone which is commonly recognized as pure prose. But it is highly important here to remember another fact, which professional psychologists in their laboratory experiments with the notation of verse and prose have frequently forgotten, namely, the existence of a type of ornamented prose, which has had a marked historical influence upon the development of English style. This ornamented prose, elaborated by Greek and Roman rhetoricians, and constantly apparent in the pages of Cicero, heightened its rhythm by various devices of alliteration, a.s.sonance, tone-color, cadence, phrase and period. Greek oratory even employed rhyme in highly colored pa.s.sages, precisely as Miss Amy Lowell uses rhyme in her polyphonic or "many-voiced" prose. Medieval Latin took over all of these devices from Cla.s.sical Latin, and in its varied oratorical, liturgical and epistolary forms it strove to imitate the various modes of _cursus_ ("running") and _clausula_ ("cadence") which had characterized the rhythms of Isocrates and Cicero.

[Footnote: A. C. Clark, _Prose Rhythm in English_. Oxford, 1913.

Morris W. Croll, "The Cadence of English Oratorical Prose," _Studies in Philology_. January, 1919.

Oliver W. Elton, "English Prose Numbers," in _Essays and Studies_ by members of the English a.s.sociation, 4th Series. Oxford, 1913.]

From the Medieval Latin Missal and Breviary these devices of prose rhythm, particularly those affecting the end of sentences, were taken over into the Collects and other parts of the liturgy of the English Prayer-Book.

They had a constant influence upon the rhythms employed by the translators of the English Bible, and through the Bible the cadences of this ancient ornamented prose have pa.s.sed over into the familiar but intricate harmonies of our "heightened" modern prose.

While this whole matter is too technical to be dealt with adequately here, it may serve at least to remind the reader that an appreciation of English prose rhythms, as they have been actually employed for many centuries, requires a sensitiveness to the rhetorical position of phrases and clauses, and to "the use of sonorous words in the places of rhetorical emphasis, which cannot be indicated by the bare symbols of prosody."

[Footnote: New York _Nation_, February 27, 1913.]

For that sonority and cadence and balance which const.i.tute a harmonious prose sentence cannot be adequately felt by a possibly illiterate scientist in his laboratory for acoustics; the "literary" value of words, in all strongly emotional prose, is inextricably mingled with the bare sound values: it is thought-units that must be delicately "balanced" as well as stresses and slides and final clauses; it is the elevation of ideas, the n.o.bility and beauty of feeling, as discerned by the trained literary sense, which makes the final difference between enduring prose harmonies and the mere tinkling of the "musical gla.s.ses."

[Footnote: This point is suggestively discussed by C. E. Andrews, _The Writing and Reading of Verse_, chap. 5. New York, 1918.]

The student of verse may very profitably continue to exercise himself with the rhythms of prose. He should learn to share the unwearied enthusiasm of Professor Saintsbury for the splendid cadences of our sixteenth-century English, for the florid decorative period of Thomas Browne and Jeremy Taylor, for the eloquent "prose poetry" of De Quincey and Ruskin and Charles Kingsley, and for the strangely subtle effects wrought by Pater and Stevenson. But he must not imagine that any laboratory system of tapping syncopated time, or any painstaking marking of macrons (-) breves (u) and caesuras ( ) will give him full initiation into the mysteries of prose cadences which have been built, not merely out of stressed and unstressed syllables, but out of the pa.s.sionate intellectual life of many generations of men. He may learn to feel that life as it pulsates in words, but no one has thus far devised an adequate scheme for its notation.

_5. Quant.i.ty, Stress and Syllable_

The notation of verse, however, while certainly not a wholly simple matter, is far easier. It is practicable to indicate by conventional printer's devices the general rhythmical and metrical scheme of a poem, and to indicate the more obvious, at least, of its incidental variations from the expected pattern. It remains as true of verse as it is of prose that the "literary" values of words--their connotations or emotional overtones--are too subtle to be indicated by any marks invented by a printer; but the alternation or succession of long or short syllables, of stressed or unstressed syllables, the nature of particular feet and lines and stanzas, the order and interlacing of rhymes, and even the devices of tone-color, are sufficiently external elements of verse to allow easy methods of indication.

When you and I first began to study Virgil and Horace, for instance, we were taught that the Roman poets, imitating the Greeks, built heir verses upon the principle of _Quant.i.ty_. The metrical unit was the foot, made up of long and short syllables in various combinations, two short syllables being equivalent to one long one. The feet most commonly used were the Iambus [short-long], the Anapest [short-short-long], the Trochee [long-short], the Dactyl [long-short-short], and the Spondee [long-long].

Then we were instructed that a "verse" or line consisting of one foot was called a monometer, of two feet, a dimeter, of three, a trimeter, of four, a tetrameter, of five, a pentameter, of six, a hexameter. This looked like a fairly easy game, and before long we were marking the quant.i.ties in the first line of the Aeneid, as other school-children had done ever since the time of St. Augustine:

_Arma virumque cano Trojae qui primus aboris_.

Or perhaps it was Horace's

_Maecenas, atavis edite regibus_.

We were told, of course, that it was not all quite as simple as this: that there were frequent metrical variations, such as trochees changing places with dactyls, and anapests with iambi; that feet could be inverted, so that a trochaic line might begin with an iambus, an anapestic line with a dactyl, or _vice versa_; that syllables might be omitted at the beginning or the end or even in the middle of a line, and that this "cutting-off"

was called _catalexis_; that syllables might even be added at the beginning or end of certain lines and that these syllables were called _hypermetric_; and that we must be very watchful about pauses, particularly about a somewhat mysterious chief pause, liable to occur about the middle of a line, called a _caesura_. But the magic pa.s.sword to admit us to this unknown world of Greek and Roman prosody was after all the word _Quant.i.ty_.

If a few of us were bold enough to ask the main difference between this Roman system of versification and the system which governed modern English poetry--even such rude playground verse as

"Eeny, meeny, miny, mo, Catch a n.i.g.g.e.r by the toe"--

we were promptly told by the teacher that the difference was a very plain one, namely, that English, like all the Germanic languages, obeyed in its verse the principles of _Stress_. Instead of looking for "long" and "short" syllables, we had merely to look for "stressed" and "unstressed"

syllables. It was a matter, not of quant.i.ty, but of accent; and if we remembered this fact, there was no harm but rather a great convenience, in retaining the technical names of cla.s.sical versification. Only we must be careful that by "iambus," in English poetry, we _meant_ an unstressed syllable, rather than a short syllable followed by a long one. And so with "trochee," "dactyl," "anapest" and the rest; if we knew that accent and not quant.i.ty was what we really had in mind, it was proper enough to speak of _Paradise Lost_ as written in "iambic pentameter," and _Evangeline_ in "dactylic hexameter," etc. The trick was to count stresses and not syllables, for was not Coleridge's _Christabel_ written in a metre which varied its syllables anywhere from four to twelve for the line, yet maintained its music by regularity of stress?

Nothing could be plainer than all this. Yet some of us discovered when we went to college and listened to instructors who grew strangely excited over prosody, that it was not all as easy as this distinction between _Quant.i.ty_ and _Stress_ would seem to indicate. For we were now told that the Greek and Roman habits of daily speech in prose had something to do with their instinctive choice of verse-rhythms: that at the very time when the Greek heroic hexameters were being composed, there was a natural dactylic roll in spoken prose; that Roman daily speech had a stronger stress than Greek, so that Horace, in imitating Greek lyric measures, had stubborn natural word-accents to reconcile with his quant.i.tative measures; that the Roman poets, who had originally allowed normal word-accent and verse-pulse to coincide for the most part, came gradually to enjoy a certain clash between them, keeping all the while the quant.i.tative principle dominant; so that when Virgil and Horace read their verses aloud, and word-accent and verse-pulse fell upon different syllables, the verse-pulse yielded slightly to the word-accent, thus adding something of the charm of conversational prose to the normal time-values of the rhythm.

In a word, we were now taught--if I may quote from a personal letter of a distinguished American Latinist--that "the almost universal belief that Latin verse is a matter of quant.i.ty only is a mistake. Word-accent was not lost in Latin verse."

And then, as if this undermining of our schoolboy faith in pure Quant.i.ty were not enough, came the surprising information that the Romans had kept, perhaps from the beginning of their poetizing, a popular type of accented verse, as seen in the rude chant of the Roman legionaries,

_Mille Francos mille semel Sarmatas occidimus_.

[Footnote: See C. M. Lewis, _Foreign Sources of Modern English Versification_. Halle, 1898.]

Certainly those sun-burnt "doughboys" were not bothering themselves about trochees and iambi and such toys of cultivated "literary" persons; they were amusing themselves on the march by inventing words to fit the "goose-step." Their

_Unus h.o.m.o mille mille mille decollavimus_

which Professor Courthope scans as trochaic verse, [Footnote: _History of English Poetry_, vol. 1, p. 73.]

seems to me nothing but "stress" verse, like

_"Hay-foot, straw-foot, belly full of bean-soup--Hep--Hep!"_

Popular accentual verse persisted, then, while the more cultivated Roman public acquired and then gradually lost, in the course of centuries, its ear for the quant.i.tative rhythms which originally had been copied from the Greeks.

Furthermore, according to our ingenious college teachers, there was still a third principle of versification to be reckoned with, not depending on Quant.i.ty or Stress, but merely _Syllabic_, or syllable-counting. This was immemorially old, it seemed, and it had reappeared mysteriously in Europe in the Dark Ages.

Dr. Lewis cites from a Latin ma.n.u.script poem of the ninth century: [Footnote: _Foreign Sources_, etc., p. 3.]

_"Beatissimus namque Dionysius Athenis quondam episcopus, Quem Sanctus Clemens direxit in Galliam propter praedicandi gratiam_," etc.