Language Part 13

[Footnote 203: I.e., China.]

Probably nothing better ill.u.s.trates the formal dependence of literature on language than the prosodic aspect of poetry. Quant.i.tative verse was entirely natural to the Greeks, not merely because poetry grew up in connection with the chant and the dance,[204] but because alternations of long and short syllables were keenly live facts in the daily economy of the language. The tonal accents, which were only secondarily stress phenomena, helped to give the syllable its quant.i.tative individuality.

When the Greek meters were carried over into Latin verse, there was comparatively little strain, for Latin too was characterized by an acute awareness of quant.i.tative distinctions. However, the Latin accent was more markedly stressed than that of Greek. Probably, therefore, the purely quant.i.tative meters modeled after the Greek were felt as a shade more artificial than in the language of their origin. The attempt to cast English verse into Latin and Greek molds has never been successful.

The dynamic basis of English is not quant.i.ty,[205] but stress, the alternation of accented and unaccented syllables. This fact gives English verse an entirely different slant and has determined the development of its poetic forms, is still responsible for the evolution of new forms. Neither stress nor syllabic weight is a very keen psychologic factor in the dynamics of French. The syllable has great inherent sonority and does not fluctuate significantly as to quant.i.ty and stress. Quant.i.tative or accentual metrics would be as artificial in French as stress metrics in cla.s.sical Greek or quant.i.tative or purely syllabic metrics in English. French prosody was compelled to develop on the basis of unit syllable-groups. a.s.sonance, later rhyme, could not but prove a welcome, an all but necessary, means of articulating or sectioning the somewhat spineless flow of sonorous syllables. English was hospitable to the French suggestion of rhyme, but did not seriously need it in its rhythmic economy. Hence rhyme has always been strictly subordinated to stress as a somewhat decorative feature and has been frequently dispensed with. It is no psychologic accident that rhyme came later into English than in French and is leaving it sooner.[206] Chinese verse has developed along very much the same lines as French verse. The syllable is an even more integral and sonorous unit than in French, while quant.i.ty and stress are too uncertain to form the basis of a metric system. Syllable-groups--so and so many syllables per rhythmic unit--and rhyme are therefore two of the controlling factors in Chinese prosody. The third factor, the alternation of syllables with level tone and syllables with inflected (rising or falling) tone, is peculiar to Chinese.

[Footnote 204: Poetry everywhere is inseparable in its origins from the singing voice and the measure of the dance. Yet accentual and syllabic types of verse, rather than quant.i.tative verse, seem to be the prevailing norms.]

[Footnote 205: Quant.i.tative distinctions exist as an objective fact.

They have not the same inner, psychological value that they had in Greek.]

[Footnote 206: Verhaeren was no slave to the Alexandrine, yet he remarked to Symons, _a propos_ of the translation of _Les Aubes_, that while he approved of the use of rhymeless verse in the English version, he found it "meaningless" in French.]

To summarize, Latin and Greek verse depends on the principle of contrasting weights; English verse, on the principle of contrasting stresses; French verse, on the principles of number and echo; Chinese verse, on the principles of number, echo, and contrasting pitches. Each of these rhythmic systems proceeds from the unconscious dynamic habit of the language, falling from the lips of the folk. Study carefully the phonetic system of a language, above all its dynamic features, and you can tell what kind of a verse it has developed--or, if history has played pranks with its phychology, what kind of verse it should have developed and some day will.

Whatever be the sounds, accents, and forms of a language, however these lay hands on the shape of its literature, there is a subtle law of compensations that gives the artist s.p.a.ce. If he is squeezed a bit here, he can swing a free arm there. And generally he has rope enough to hang himself with, if he must. It is not strange that this should be so.

Language is itself the collective art of expression, a summary of thousands upon thousands of individual intuitions. The individual goes lost in the collective creation, but his personal expression has left some trace in a certain give and flexibility that are inherent in all collective works of the human spirit. The language is ready, or can be quickly made ready, to define the artist's individuality. If no literary artist appears, it is not essentially because the language is too weak an instrument, it is because the culture of the people is not favorable to the growth of such personality as seeks a truly individual verbal expression.