The Literature of Ecstasy Part 7

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 repet.i.tion 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 pa.s.sages 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 repet.i.tion 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 circ.u.mstances 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 a.s.sume 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 Muller 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 cla.s.sic or English metres, or of the metres in the later Indian epics when the quant.i.ty 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 quant.i.ty 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 quant.i.ty 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 quant.i.ty 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 _Tain Bo 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 subst.i.tuted 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 _Tain Bo 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. aelfric, 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 pa.s.sages 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 pa.s.sage he cites, however, is no more rhythmical than many pa.s.sages 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 impa.s.sioned 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 repet.i.tion 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 cla.s.sic 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.

CHAPTER VI

BLANK VERSE AND FREE VERSE AS FORMS OF PROSE

The unrhymed iambic pentameter known as blank verse is really a form of free verse; it is a modified form of the unrhymed cla.s.sical measure. It made its appearance in Italy in the early part of the sixteenth century, and was used by Ariosto in his comedies, except that he employed a final additional unaccented syllable, making eleven syllables in each line.

Surrey, who used it in his translation of two books of the _aeneid_, imported it from the Italians. It was called by the Italians _versi sciolti_, "untied or free verse." It was, then, the old cla.s.sical measure with more freedom.

In his essay, _Blank Verse_, John Addington Symonds dwells especially on the plasticity and variety of blank verse, which he says it has more than any other national metre. It may be used for the commonplace and the sublime, the tragic and the comic, etc. It does not have to consist of five iambuses only, but other feet may be subst.i.tuted almost at the caprice of the poet. This, however, practically amounts to saying that blank verse is after all a great deal like prose; indeed, it may be arranged like modern free verse with great ease. Its plasticity and variety are due to the fact that its artificial requirements are less than those of most other metres. It was a fortunate day for English drama and poetry when Marlowe, Shakespeare and Milton, following in the footsteps of Surrey's translation of two books of the _aeneid_, and Sackville's and Norton's play, _Gorboduc_, made blank verse fashionable.

The writers really brought poetry back into prose. For blank verse is but a restricted prose, because there is as often as not no natural pause at the end of the line, and because other feet may be subst.i.tuted for the iambus.

One of the reasons why English verse poetry excels French is because blank verse, a more natural medium than the rhymed Alexandrines, became the chief vehicle for poetry.

In fact, the blank verse of the later Elizabethan dramatists is really prose, for it is less rhythmical than that of Shakespeare. Blank verse was said to have degenerated with them. It is also said to be prosaic as used by Wordsworth. These poets, however, are merely less rhythmical than the alleged masters of blank verse. All blank verse is as near prose as any metrical medium that has been hitherto introduced. Bernard Shaw said he found it easier than prose. It appears very often in prose without the writer being aware of it. d.i.c.kens had a tendency, as also did Ruskin, to drop unconsciously into blank verse in his prose.

The great English blank verse poets and nearly all the poets of England in the nineteenth century used this medium, and are really our supreme prose poets.

The experiment of arranging blank verse in the form of prose and of putting prose in the metre of blank verse has been often tried with success. I have no intention of using this means of showing that blank verse is really a more modulated prose. Any pa.s.sage of blank verse can naturally also be put into modern free verse, into the free rhythms of Whitman, for example.

The lovers of blank verse imagine, however, that its beauty is partly derived from the existence of a pause at the end of the fifth foot and because the next line begins with a capital letter. As a matter of fact, there is no particular virtue in having that pause, and the next line need not begin with a capital letter, and should be continued as of the same line. For the real pauses are, after all, not in these artificial places but where our natural speech and punctuation marks dictate them.

The virtues of blank verse are the virtues of rhythmic prose, which is still freer and more natural than blank verse, just as blank verse is preferable to the heroic couplet.

Our English poets who write in blank verse would have done even better to use prose, rhythmical or unrhythmical. To us moderns there is something of a distortion in chopping up good prose into lines of five feet, each beginning with a capital letter. The more beautiful and natural medium is prose, for blank verse is but a confined prose. It is not fair or right to make characters speak in this fettered prose. It is absurd to state that their speeches become poetry only because of this fettered prose. Every great pa.s.sage in Shakespeare in blank verse would have continued to be poetry in regular prose. We observe that the great prose pa.s.sages of Shakespeare are poetry even though not in blank verse.

English poetry should free itself from the bondage of blank verse, and use prose. However, next to free verse blank verse is the best medium that English poetry has yet found.