irregularity depended on the incompetence of the versifier; for balladists, in every land and time, are satisfied with assonance. Mono-rhyme, as in Provençal, for a time, was deemed a peculiar merit. Then came the fanciful array · so well befitting the French language and so ill the English of the ballade, chantroyal, triolet, rondeau, rondel, virelai, sextine, pantoum, villanelle. From the days of Chaucer to those of Dobson, not all the ingenuity of English verse-wrights has succeeded in giving any one of them an indispensable place in the British anthology. Of all that English can show in its attempts to popularize these forms, two of the best are separated by five centuries: Chaucer's Ballade to his Lady and Dobson's The Ladies of St. James's. In the ballade, whatever the number of syllables in the line or the number of lines in the stanza (from eight to twelve), the stanzas must follow the same rhyme-order; each stanza, and the four-lined "envoi" at the close of the poem, ending with the same line. The ababbcbc system of the eight-line stanza and the ababbccdcd system of the ten-line stanza give something of the effect of both Chaucer's ababbcc Troilus and Cressida stanza and the Spenserian ababbcbcc stanza; while the refrain makes its usual impression. The chant-royal is a ballade with five eleven-lined stanzas, and an envoy, the normal rhyme-scheme of the stanzas being ababccddede, and of the envoy ddede — only five rhymes for sixty lines. Rhyme-royal is of course a different and much simpler thing: a seven-line stanza, iambic pentameter, rhymed ababbcc. The triolet has eight lines, with two rhymes, abaaabab; the first, fourth, and seventh lines being identical, and the second and eighth. It has all of the demerits and none of the merits of iteration.1 1 Edmund Gosse has called the notice of readers to the following elementary triolet by Henri de Croy (thirteenth century): "Je Bois; Since then the little business of manufacture has been simple enough; for, according to the late W. E. Henley, "Easy is the triolet If you really learn to make it! The rondeau and rondel, of varying structure, always repeat the opening words in the middle (roughly) and at the end. The virelai, still freer in structure, rhymes the longer lines with the longer and the shorter with the shorter, in the first stanza, this arrangement being shifted in the next stanza, in which the long-line rhymes are dropped (to reappear in the last stanza), and the short-line rhymes transferred to the long. In the sextine, or sestina, there are no rhymes, but the six endwords of the first six-lined stanza are repeated in the five subsequent stanzas, in variant ways; while in a closing three-line stanza half of the end-words are given in the middles of the lines and half at the ends. The result of this clever intricacy, when transferred to English, is hardly distinguishable from blank-verse. The pantoum ingeniously combines all the faults of both the virelai and the sextine by an interminable number of four-line stanzas, in which the second and fourth lines of the first stanza, of but four lines, become the first and third of the next, and so on, the first and third lines of the first stanza reappearing as the second and fourth of the closing one. The villanelle, in five three-line stanzas and a four-line conclusion, has but two rhymes, arranged aba and abaa. Furthermore, lines 1, 6, 12, and 18 are identical, and lines 3, 9, 15, and 19. This, like the great terza rima itself, nearly destroys any stanzaeffect on the English ear. French poetry, in its essential principles of structure and expression, differs from classical verse on the one hand and modern Teutonic on the other. With quantity (time, length, stress) it has little to do. Alliteration is usually an accident, an ornament, or an eccentricity. French scansion depends chiefly upon the count of syllables in the line, and in a less degree upon accent, which, of course, exists in French, but not in the English or German sense. Such a line as Tennyson's "Break! break! break!" would be impossible in French, nor could a French poet pride himself, like Coleridge, upon having, in a poem with four stresses in each line, four syllables in some lines and thirteen in others. Of the "foot" as determined by intensity of stress, French hardly knows anything; trochee and iambus have little relativity to the French line; indeed, these terms, though used by the older French prosodists in the classical period, are generally ignored by modern authorities, as having small significance. Mitford thought French the poorest of languages in harmony, and incapable of constituting measure save by numbering syllables, or of indicating measure save by rhyme and pause, rhyme being "the powerful and almost only indicant of measure in French verse." To Poe the French heroic was "the most wretchedly monotonous verse in existence." The French language, he went on to say, is "without accentuation and consequently without verse." Profoundly as French poetry has been influenced by the classical spirit, the forms of classical verse become mere shadows when imitated in French. Indeed, the syllable itself is sometimes called the foot. In the all-prevalent alexandrine one has to think of the twelve syllables rather than of any six stresses, with a strong caesura, as in English. Rhyme of some sort is therefore an essential of French poetry, in which blank verse can hardly be made distinguishable from good prose.1 Assonance was satisfactory to the hearers of the Chanson de Roland, and, indeed, was so accordant with the genius of the 1 If an accumulation of metaphors may be taken as an adequate expression of indebtedness, certainly Sainte-Beuve's address to Rhyme is a sufficient acknowledgment of its service to the French language: and so on through seven more stanzas. A recent critic (Edmund Wright, in The Contemporary Review) says flatly that "French blank verse is not verse at all, as M. Maeterlinck and other modern experimenters in new rhythms have sadly discovered. The unstable French accents cannot by themselves, however skilfully they are placed, give to French poetry the structure which distinguishes it from prose. The fetters of rhyme are necessary to this end." language that it might naturally have survived longer than was the case, had it not lacked the regular place-emphasis of its successor end-rhyme. Consonance, in French verse, is the identity of consonants following the tonic (in English the accented) vowel - thus, mille: belle. It is, for consonants, what assonance is for vowels. But even the French ear hardly distinguishes the two; and in English, where the thought rests on the stressed vowel, consonance, thus defined, seems merely like an end-rhyme that is slightly less imperfect than ordinary assonance. Indeed, consonance, in English, is a term of such wandering meaning as to be useless; some writers make it synonymous with assonance, and Puttenham with end-rhyme. The rime riche of French-amant: charmant; sommeil: vermeil; orages: courages; etc. is now scarcely allowable in English, though entirely satisfactory to the French ear.1 The rime superflue (offensée: pensée) carries identity of spelling back of the final syllable; though here French, of course, has no penultimate rhyming accent. As regards "eye-rhymes," French and English are not unlike: - cacher: cher is no more allowable in the one tongue than tough: though in the other. But the French rather dislike alliez: écoliers, as the English hardly sanction rotten: cotton. In some cases the usages of the two languages are squarely opposite; thus French forbids aimer: danger, but sanctions danger: songer. French retains the permissibility of rhymes between identical words with entirely different meanings; thus pas (negative): pas (step); porte (gate): porte (carries), etc., — a practice discontinued in English hundreds of years ago. One language, or one time, regards a contrast as agreeable which is intolerable to another language or time. Rhyme, in French, being more necessary than in other languages to distinguish verse from verse, is less frequently accompanied by the enjambement or completion of the phrase in a second line. Meaning, accent, and rhyme must usually coincide, even in English; in French they are seldom separated in the lines of the classical drama. With the advent of the romantic school, 1 Compare page 78. runover lines multiplied, as giving a sense of freedom; just as they increased in English when the formal couplets of Pope gave way to the liberty of the Wordsworth-Coleridge school. mute e. Masculine and feminine rhymes in French are used more strictly and labelled more carefully than in English, though most of the effects secured in French are attainable in English. The only possible feminine rhyme in French is where the line ends in In rimes plates, or suivies, two feminine rhymes alternate with two masculine; "in strict classical plays this sequence is not broken even at the end of a scene or act." 1 Rimes croisées are simply alternations of feminines and masculines; embrassées the inclusion of two feminines between two masculines, or vice versa. In English such variations are not deemed sufficiently noticeable to deserve titles; a fact which shows the greater dependence upon rhyme in French. Rimes mêlées, resulting in vers libres, are those in which masculine and feminine rhymes occur as the poet's wish may dictate. Vers libres, when the term is transferred to English, would more readily suggest lines of Whitman. But even in this free verse of the French, adjoining masculine or feminine rhyme-words must rhyme together, and any given rhyme cannot be repeated more than three successive times, the very reverse of the system originally imposed by the Provençal poets. Another device is the rime fraternisée, in which the last syllable of a line is repeated, in sound or in identity, as the first of the next line. Such repetition is rather common in English as an occasional device for emphasis, in a particular case; but when carried through a poem becomes very tedious.2 Whether, as some claim, the French is peculiarly the precisionlanguage of the world, it is certain that its lack of strong rhythm is largely compensated by the extraordinary poetic beauty of many of its words, considered as thought-symbols. What can be more mellifluous and also suggestive than "L'ombre passe et repasse, Sans repasser l'homme passe"? 1 A Companion to French Verse, by H. J. Chaytor, 28. 2 See citations in French and English, in C. Alphonso Smith's Repetition and Parellelism in English Verse, 23-25. |