The Literature of Ecstasy Part 6

Poetic prose, however, should not be used on every occasion, but only when an ecstasy is to be expressed. And, above all, it should be avoided--and this is how prose poetry got into disrepute--in expressing sentimental emotions, commonplace ideas, and the merely popular. When we read in eloquent prose, the grand eulogies on the flag, on the purity and redeeming virtues of mother-love, on the dignity of toil, on the glory of dying for one's country, on the goodness of G.o.d, etc., themes which have been celebrated so often that they are nauseous to us because nothing new is said, then we see how ridiculous prose poetry may become.

But as Pater says--impa.s.sioned prose has become the special and opportune art of the modern world, and it can exert all the varied charms of poetry down to the rhythm.

"The muse of prose-literature," says Ma.s.son, "has been hardly dealt with. We see not why, in prose, there should not be much of that license in the fantastic, that measured riot, the right of whimsy, that unbalanced dalliance with the extreme and the beautiful, which the world allows, by prescription, to verse. Why may not prose chase forest-nymphs and see little green-eyed elves, and delight in peonies and musk-roses, and invoke the stars, and roll mists about the hills, and watch the sea thundering through caverns and dashing against the promontories? Why, in prose, quail from the grand or ghastly in the one hand, or blush with shame at too much of the exquisite on the other? Is Prose made of iron?

Must it never weep, never laugh, never linger to look at a b.u.t.terfly, never ride at a gallop over the downs?"

Yet George Moore, a great poet in prose himself, tells us in his _Avowals_ that the greatness of English genius does not appear in its prose, but in its poetry, i. e., in verse. The greatness of English genius _is_ in its poetry, but in the poetry of its prose as well as in the poetry of its verse. It appears in the ordinary dialect of its novels and prose plays.

As a matter of fact, poetic prose has always been used. It is found in the earliest as well as the later literature of every nation. The Bible, Oriental Literature, the medieval romances, early Saxon prose are full of it. It made a reappearance with renewed force in the romantic movement that spread over England, Germany and France in the latter part of the eighteenth and early part of the nineteenth centuries. In an age like the romantic, when the right to live and express emotions was pleaded, poetic prose, seeking restraint from metre, was especially appropriate. George Brandes has studied this movement in his _Main Currents_. Many of the leading writers of the romantic period used impa.s.sioned prose. Saintsbury has found much poetry even in the prose of John Wilson, who is not much read, one who was to some extent an enemy of the romantic movement, and Saintsbury reprints in his _Specimens of English Prose Style_, Wilson's _The Fairy's Funeral_.

America has contributed greatly to the development of prose poetry.

Hawthorne, Poe and Emerson were the first great masters in prose poetry we have had, and I doubt if as poets they have been surpa.s.sed by any of our metrical verse writers. One of the finest poems in American literature is undoubtedly Hawthorne's reflections of his lonely life in the Ivory Tower, when he revisited his old chamber in Salem where he spent so many years. The famous pa.s.sage from his diary, quoted in all big biographies, is as great a poem, though in prose.

Emerson's essays are studied with prose poems. I shall mention only one, the address to the poet, at the conclusion of the essay on "The Poet."

The Hawthorne pa.s.sage is as follows:

Salem, Oct. 4th. Union Street (Family Mansion).--. . . . Here I sit in my old accustomed chamber, where I used to sit in days gone by. . . . Here I have written many tales,--many that have been burned to ashes, many that doubtless deserved the same fate. This claims to be called a haunted chamber, for thousands upon thousands of visions have appeared to me in it; and some few of them have become visible to the world. If ever I should have a biographer, he ought to make great mention of this chamber in my memoirs, because so much of my lonely youth was wasted here, and here my mind and character were formed; and here I have been glad and hopeful, and here I have been despondent. And here I sat a long, long time, waiting patiently for the world to know me, and sometimes wondering why it did not know me sooner, or whether it would ever know me at all,--at least, till I were in my grave. And sometimes it seemed as if I were already in the grave, with only life enough to be chilled and benumbed. But oftener I was happy,--at least, as happy as I then knew how to be, or was aware of the possibility of being. By and by, the world found me out in my lonely chamber, and called me forth,--not, indeed, with a loud roar of acclamation, but rather with a still, small voice,--and forth I went, but found nothing in the world that I thought preferable to my old solitude till now. . . . And now I begin to understand why I was imprisoned so many years in this lonely chamber, and why I could never break through the viewless bolts and bars; for if I had sooner made my escape into the world, I should have grown hard and rough, and been covered with earthly dust, and my heart might have become callous by rude encounters with the mult.i.tude. . . . But living in solitude till the fulness of time was come, I still kept the dew of my youth and the freshness of my heart. . . .

I used to think I could imagine all pa.s.sions, all feelings, and states of the heart and mind; but how little did I know!

. . . Indeed, we are but shadows; we are not endowed with real life, and all that seems most real about us is but the thinnest substance of a dream,--till the heart be touched.

That touch creates us,--then we begin to be,--thereby we are beings of reality and inheritors of eternity. . . .

And the Emerson poem in prose is given herewith:

O poet! a new n.o.bility is conferred in groves and pastures, and not in castles or by the sword-blade any longer. The conditions are hard, but equal. Thou shalt leave the world, and know the muse only. Thou shalt not know any longer the times, customs, graces, politics, or opinions of men, but shalt take all from the muse. For the time of towns is tolled from the world by funereal chimes, but in nature the universal hours are counted by succeeding tribes of animals and plants, and by growth of joy on joy. G.o.d wills also that thou abdicate a manifold and duplex life, and that thou be content that others speak for thee. Others shall be thy gentlemen, and shall represent all courtesy and worldly life for thee; others shall do the great and resounding actions also. Thou shalt lie close hid with nature, and canst not be afforded to the Capitol or the Exchange. The world is full of renunciations and apprenticeships, and this is thine; thou must pa.s.s for a fool and a churl for a long season. This is the screen and sheath in which Pan has protected his well-beloved flower, and thou shalt be known only to thine own, and they shall console thee with tenderest love. And thou shalt not be able to rehea.r.s.e the names of thy friends in thy verse, for an old shame before the holy ideal. And this is the reward; that the ideal shall be real to thee, and the impressions of the actual world shall fall like summer rain, copious, but not troublesome to thy invulnerable essence. Thou shalt have the sole land for thy park and manor, the sea for thy bath and navigation, without tax and without envy; the woods and the rivers thou shalt own, and thou shalt possess that wherein others are only tenants and boarders. Thou true land-lord!

sea-lord! air-lord! Wherever snow falls or water flows or birds fly, wherever day and night meet in twilight, wherever the blue heaven is hung by clouds or sown with stars, wherever are forms with transparent boundaries, wherever are outlets into celestial s.p.a.ce, wherever is danger, and awe, and love,--there is Beauty, plenteous as rain, shed for thee, and though thou shouldst walk the world over, thou shalt not be able to find a condition inopportune or ign.o.ble.

FOOTNOTES:

[86:A] See the selections in _Pastels in Prose_ (1890), and the sympathetic introduction by William Dean Howells.

[88:A] See _The Chapbook_, April, 1921, London. _Poetry in Prose_, Three Essays by T. S. Eliot, Frederic Manning, Richard Aldington.

CHAPTER V

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 ill.u.s.tration 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 pa.s.sage 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.

Musaeus, 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, a.s.suming the form of irregular rhythm and repet.i.tion 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 impa.s.sioned 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 p.r.o.nounced 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, impa.s.sioned 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. Konig 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 Konig 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 pa.s.sages employing parallelisms that are not poetry, while many poems exist in which these are not used. Dr. Edward Konig, 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.