OF THE UNIVERSITY OF THE RHYTHMICAL CREATION OF BEAUTY 19 ginning and original from these exercises, being framed in such sweet measure of sentences and pleasant harmony called 'Pueμós, which is an apt composition of words or clauses, drawing as it were by force the hearer's ears even whithersoever it listeth, that Plato affirmeth therein to be contained yonreía, an enchantment, as it were to persuade them anything whether they would or no.” 1 It is a far cry from Plato to de Banville; but they agreed in making the Over-Soul the real poet, the earthly singer being but the mouthpiece. Said Plato: "Had he [the poet] learned by rules of art, he would have known how to speak, not of one theme only, but of all; and, therefore, God takes away the mind of poets, and uses them as His ministers, as He also uses diviners and holy prophets, in order that we who hear them may know that they speak not of themselves, who utter these priceless words in a state of unconsciousness, but that God is the speaker, and that through them He is conversing with us."2 Similarly de Banville, who declares that rhyme is the quality that constitutes the poet; his is "ce mot sorcier, ce mot fee, ce mot magique": "Si vous êtes poëte, vous commencerez par voir distinctement dans la chambre noir de votre cerveau tout ce que vous voulez montrer à votre auditeur, et en même temps que les visions, se présenteront spontanément à votre esprit les mots qui, placés à la fin des vers, auront le don d'évoquer ces mêmes visions pour vos auditeurs. Le reste ne sera plus qu'un travail de goût et de coordination, un travail d'art qui s'apprend par l'étude des maîtres et par la fréquentation assidue de les oeuvres. Si au contraire vous n'êtes pas poëte, vous n'aurez que des visions confuses, que nul peintre ne pourrait, d'après votre récit, traduire d'une manière claire et intelligible; et les mots qui pourront susciter ces mêmes visions dans l'esprit de votre auditeur ne vous viendront pas à la pensée. Car ce n'est ni le bon sens, ni la logique, ni l'érudition, ni la mémoire, qui fournissent ces mots armés d'un si étrange pouvoir; ils ne se présentent à la pensée qu'en vertu d'un don special, qui ne s'acquiert pas.' "3 1 A Discourse of English Poetry; reprinted in Elizabethan Literary Criticism, ed. by G. Gregory Smith, I, 231. 2 Dialogues: Ion (translated by Jowett). 3 Petit Traité de Poésie Française, 50. In the rhythmical creation of beauty, the unity of the arts must never be forgotten. But that unity does not mean that they are equivalent or interchangeable. Instrumental music is not vocal music, nor is sung poetry exactly equivalent to recited poetry. George Saintsbury concludes that "one has, while admitting the great stimulating force of music, to hint or re-hint a doubt whether, by itself, it can do much for prosody save suggest." But such suggestion may be very strong: Stephen C. Foster, the most original American composer, wrote the words and music of his songs simultaneously, fitting the one to the other as he went along. The French critic Camille Mauclair finds in Schumann the union of song and syllabic sonority. Many later critics agree with Sir Philip Sidney in his explicit characterization of music as "the most divine striker of the senses. Poe, certainly most competent to speak, declared verse "an inferior and less capable music." Poe, indeed, included the landscape garden with painting, sculpture, architecture, the dance, and music, as expressive of the poetic sentiment. In this fascinating "land east of the sun and west of the moon," where one may hear colors, and see perfumes, and try to incarnate in this or that art what all feel but never see, modern symbolism has found its veritable home. Hence "tone-pictures"; poems translated into symphonies; and impressionistic fantasias of every kind. Pater was right when he reminded us that in the unity of the arts, as elsewhere, the rule of suum cuique holds. "It is a common and fundamental error to suppose that all of them draw on a single fixed quantity of imaginative thought, whereas actually each has its own special quality of beauty, untranslatable into the terms of any other. All art aspires towards the condition of music towards that perfect fusion of matter and expression that music at its highest exhibits. It follows, then, that the finer the poem the more completely self sufficing is it." It is the function of poetry to excite or elevate the soul. Hence he who sings sweetly must first have seen or felt sincerely. The truest inspiration instinctively turns to the best rhythms and the fittest rhymes. These rhythms and rhymes stir corresponding vibrations in the mind of the hearer or reader, as the sounded violin-string sets a-throbbing its fellow-string in the piano. Rhythmical beauty has not reached its full creation until it is transmitted. III ALLITERATION If our definition of rhyme-the identity or close similarity of stressed sounds in corresponding places-is proper, it follows that alliteration, which is nothing if not this, is as truly rhyme as is end-rhyme. One occurs at the beginning of a sound-group, the other at the end, that is all. We may generalize thus: Rhyme = identity, or close similarity, between stressed sounds in corresponding places. Beginning-rhyme = alliteration; initial-rhyme. Middle-rhyme = assonance: identity or similarity of included vowel-sounds. Spanish assonance also requires the same vowel-sounds, in order, from the last accented vowel to the end of the word. End-rhyme = identity or similarity of final stressed vowels and any following consonants; preceding consonants being different. Schipper, in his treatise on Englische Metrik (I, 31), says: "Die Alliteration, auch Anreim, oder häufiger Stabreim genannt, ist die specifisch altgermanische Reimart und zugleich die älteste in der Poesie der germanischen Völker." Gummere and the best of the authorities since Schipper agree with him and with common sense - in considering alliteration, assonance, and end-rhyme as different expressions of the same thing. One of them has been characteristic of one language or time, another of another, that is all. This is concisely put by F. A. March (Latin Hymns, 320): "Nations who unite prose accent and arsis need to mark off their verses plainly. They do it by rhyme, the rhythmical repe tition of letters. When the rhyming letters begin their words, it is called alliteration; when they end their words, it is called rhyme. Rhyme seems to have grown naturally into use in the later Latin poetry. It will be seen to appear first as an occasional ornament in the hymns, and become regular in form and place by slow degrees. The old Teutonic poetry used alliteration as an essential part of their metrical system, and German and Anglo-Saxon poets often use it freely in their Latin verses." Professor March elsewhere says that alliteration was essential, and other rhyme ornamental, in Anglo-Saxon, Icelandic, and Old Saxon. It is not necessary to hunt for earlier uses of alliteration, in classical or other tongues. In the old Latin line, “O Tite tute Tati tibi tanta tyranne tulisti," it extends to the unusual number of seven letters, but such things are mere sporadic "sports." " 1 Alliteration lent itself easily to the needs of a folk that enjoyed "both singing and striking in front of the war." The Shaper in the mead-hall struck the harp and sang "with gesture, with the beat of his voice and of the hand upon his instrument at each alliterative word of the saga. The use of alliteration "served to indicate at once the place of the rhetorical emphasis and of the rhythmical pause." Hence the minstrel's "natural tendency was to conduct his narrative through a series of abrupt, energetic clauses, packed with those phrases, in immediate apposition with each other, so frequent in Hebrew poetry, and technically called parallelisms; the whole effect being well suited to chanting or recitative." 2 Anglo-Saxon alliteration, according to John Earle, "gratified the ear with a resonance like that of modern rhyme, but it also had the rhetorical advantage of touching the accented or emphatic words; falling as it did on the natural summits of the construction, and tinging them with the brilliance of a musical reverberation." The same Anglo-Saxon scholar deems alliteration superior, in the strength of its effects, to end-rhyme itself: "Rhyme [end-rhyme] is an attendant upon metre; its office is to mark the 'verse' or turn of the metre, where it begins again. 1 S. A. Brooke: History of Early English Literature. |