The Principles of English Versification Part 2

_Subst.i.tution_ is simpler. It merely means recognizing the equivalence, and therefore the possibility of interchange, of a long interval with two or more shorter intervals whose sum equals the one long. That is, in music two quarter-notes are equal to a half-note, and they may be anywhere subst.i.tuted one for the other; or a dotted half-note equal three quarter-notes, etc. In verse it means that three syllables (or one, or even four) may be subst.i.tuted for the normal two syllables of a foot if the three (or one or four) are uttered in approximately the same period of time.

The term _subst.i.tution_, however, may be used in a larger sense. Thus far only the purely temporal element of the rhythm has been thought of.

When the two others, stress and pitch, are recalled, it becomes clear that another sort of subst.i.tution is both possible and usual, namely, that of either pitch or stress for duration. In other words, the groups that make up a rhythmic series may be determined or marked off by emphasis of pitch or emphasis of stress as well as by duration of time.

In fact, it is from this habitual interplay of the three elements that most of the complexity of metre arises; as it is the failure to recognize this subst.i.tution which has given the older prosodies much of their false simplicity and their mechanical barrenness.

_Summary._ The fundamental problems of versification are all involved in the principles of rhythm, especially the temporal rhythm of language.

The rhythm of both prose and verse is a resultant of the three attributes of sound: stress, duration, and pitch (the first two being usually the determining elements, the third an accessory element) modified by the thought and emotion of the words. The feeling for this rhythm, or perception of it, has both physical and psychological explanations, and varies considerably among individuals, some being 'timers,' others 'stressers,' apparently by natural endowment. The processes of our perception of rhythm are those of coordination, or partly subjective reduction of actual 'irregularities' to a standard of 'regularity'; this reduction being accomplished mainly by syncopation and subst.i.tution.

CHAPTER II

RHYTHM OF PROSE AND VERSE

It is clear now that all language is more or less definitely rhythmical; and that the two fundamental and determining elements of speech-rhythm are time and stress. It is clear also that the essential thing in our perception of rhythm is the experience or recognition of groups, these groups being themselves distinguished and set off by stress and time.

When there is an easily felt regularity of the groups, when the alternation of stress and unstress and the approximate equality of the time intervals are fairly apparent, then the rhythm is simple. When the regularity is not obvious, the rhythm is complex, but none the less existent and pleasing.[12] In other words, the character of language rhythm is determined by the relative proportion of coincidence and syncopation. In verse, coincidence preponderates; in prose, syncopation (and subst.i.tution). Between absolute coincidence, moreover, and the freest possible syncopation and subst.i.tution, infinite gradations are possible; and many pa.s.sages indeed lie so close to the boundary between recognizable preponderance of the one or of the other that it is difficult to say _this_ is verse, _that_ is prose. Various standards and conventions enter into the decision.

+--------------------------------------------------------------+ [12] When no organization of the irregularity is possible, the language is unrhythmical; and such, of course, is often the case in bad prose and bad verse. +--------------------------------------------------------------+

For practical convenience three main sorts of rhythmic prose may be distinguished: (1) _characteristic prose_, or that in which no regularity (coincidence) is easily appreciable; (2) _cadenced prose_, or that in which the regularity is perceptible, but un.o.btrusive, and (3) _metrical prose_, or that in which the regularity is so noticeable as to be unpleasing. No very clear lines can be drawn; nor should one try to cla.s.sify more than brief pa.s.sages in one group or another. And, obviously, longer selections will combine two or more sorts in succession. A few examples will serve to show what is meant.

_Characteristic Prose._ No prose, as has been said above, is without rhythmic curves; but the best prose, that which always keeps in view the best ideals of prose, carefully avoids consecutive repet.i.tions of the same rhythmic patterns. It is the distinction of verse to follow a chosen pattern, with due regard to the artistic principles of variety and uniformity; it is the distinction of prose to accomplish its object, whether artistic or utilitarian, without encroaching on the boundaries of its neighbor. Prose may be as 'poetic,' as charged with powerful emotion, as possible, but it remains true prose only when it refuses to borrow aids from the characteristic excellences of verse.

To be sure, it is not always easy to avoid regular patterns in writing the most ordinary prose. They come uncalled; they seem to be inherent in the language. Here is, chosen casually, the first sentence of a current news item, written surely without artistic elaboration, and subjected, moreover, to the uncertainties of cable transmission. It was no doubt farthest from the correspondent's intention to write 'numerous' prose; but notice how the sentence may be divided into a series of rhythmic groups of two stresses each, with a fairly regular number of accompanying unstressed syllables:

A general mobilization in Syria has been ordered as a reply to the French ultimatum to King Feisal that he acquiesce in the French mandate for Syria, according to a dispatch to the London Times from Jerusalem.

No one would read the sentence with a very clear feeling of this definite movement; in fact, to do so rather obscures the meaning. But the potential rhythm is there, and the reader with a keen rhythmic sense will be to some extent aware of it.

Again, there is in the following sentence from Disraeli's Endymion a latent rhythm which actually affects the purely logical manner of reading it:

She persisted in her dreams of riding upon elephants.

Here one almost inevitably pauses after _dreams_ (or prolongs the word beyond its natural length), though there is no logical reason for doing so. Why? Partly, at least, because _persisted in her dreams_ and _of riding upon el_-have the same 'swing,' and the parallelism of mere sound seems to require the pause.

For these reasons, then, among others, the most 'natural' spontaneous and straightforward prose is not always the best. Study and careful revision are necessary in order to avoid an awkward and unpleasant monotony of rhythmic repet.i.tion, and at the same time obtain a flow of sound which will form a just musical accompaniment to the ideas expressed. Only the great prose masters have done this with complete success. Of the three following examples the first is from Bacon; the second is from Milton, who as a poet might have been expected to fall into metre while writing emotional prose; the third is from Walter Pater--the famous translation into words of the Mona Lisa painted by Leonardo da Vinci. The first is elaborate but unaffected, the second is probably spontaneous, the third highly studied.

This kind of degenerate learning did chiefly reign amongst the schoolmen: who having sharp and strong wits, and abundance of leisure, and small variety of reading, but their wits being shut up in the cells of a few authors (chiefly Aristotle their dictator) as their persons were shut up in the cells of monasteries and colleges, and knowing little history, either of nature or time, did out of no great quant.i.ty of matter and infinite agitation of wit spin out unto us those laborious webs of learning which are extant in their books. For the wit and mind of man, if it work upon matter, which is the contemplation of the creatures of G.o.d, worketh according to the stuff and is limited thereby; but if it work upon itself, as the spider worketh his web, then it is endless, and brings forth indeed cobwebs of learning, admirable for the fineness of thread and work, but of no substance or profit.

Advancement of Learning, Bk. I, iv, 5.

Truth indeed came once into the world with her divine Master, and was a perfect shape most glorious to look on; but when he ascended, and his Apostles after him were laid asleep, then straight arose a wicked race of deceivers, who, as that story goes of the Egyptian Typhon with his conspirators how they dealt with the good Osiris, took the virgin Truth, hewed her lovely form into a thousand pieces, and scattered them to the four winds. From that time ever since, the sad friends of Truth, such as durst appear, imitating the careful search that Isis made for the mangled body of Osiris, went up and down gathering up limb by limb still as they could find them.

Areopagitica.

Hers is the head upon which all "the ends of the world are come,"

and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite pa.s.sions. ... She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants: and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands.

"Leonardo da Vinci," in The Renaissance.

Here no continuous patterns are recognizable, yet the whole is felt to be musically and appropriately rhythmic. In the next excerpt, however (from John Donne), and in many pa.s.sages in the Authorized Version of the Psalms, of Job, of the Prophets, there is a visible balance of phrases and of clauses, a long undulating swing which one perceives at once, though only half consciously, and which approaches, if it does not actually possess, the intentional coincidence of cadenced prose.

If some king of the earth have so large an extent of dominion in north and south as that he hath winter and summer together in his dominions; so large an extent east and west as that he hath day and night together in his dominions, much more hath G.o.d mercy and justice together. He brought light out of darkness, not out of a lesser light; He can bring thy summer out of winter though thou have no spring; though in the ways of fortune, or of understanding, or conscience, thou have been benighted till now, wintered and frozen, smothered and stupefied till now, now G.o.d comes to thee, not as in the dawning of the day, not as in the bud of the spring, but as the sun at noon to ill.u.s.trate all shadows, as the sheaves in harvest to fill all penuries. All occasions invite His mercies, and all times are His seasons.

_Cadenced Prose._ Cadenced prose is in English chiefly an historical phenomenon of the seventeenth century. It is part of the late Renaissance literary movement, when prose, after vaguely cla.s.sic models, was held worth cultivating on its own account; and is in some degree a tempered afterglow of the crude brilliance of euphuistic balance and alliteration. It made no effort to conceal its definite rhythmic movements--rather, it gloried in them; but was always careful that they should not become monotonous or too palpable.

In the following examples the rhythmic units are for the sake of clearness indicated by separate lines, after the fas.h.i.+on of 'free-verse.' The pa.s.sages should be read first with the line-division uppermost in the attention; then as continuous prose. The result of the second reading will be perhaps a fuller appreciation of the rhythmic richness of the sentences, both as to variety and uniformity. Sing-song and 'pounding' are by all means to be deprecated.

(_a_) Simple two-and three-beat rhythms--

O eloquent just and mighty Death!

whom none could advise thou hast persuaded; what none hath dared thou hast done; and whom all the world hath flattered thou only hast cast out of the world and despised.

Thou hast drawn together all the far-stretched greatness all the pride cruelty and ambition of man, and covered it all over with these two narrow words _Hic jacet_.

SIR WALTER RALEIGH, History of the World, Bk. V, ch. vi.

(_b_) Simple three-and four-beat rhythms--

They that have great intrigues of the world have a yoke upon their necks and cannot look back.

And he that covets many things greedily and s.n.a.t.c.hes at high things ambitiously that despises his neighbor proudly and bears his crosses peevishly or his prosperity impotently and pa.s.sionately he that is a prodigal of his precious time and is tenacious and retentive of evil purposes is not a man disposed to this exercise: he hath reason to be afraid of his own memory and to dash his gla.s.s in pieces because it must needs represent to his own eyes an intolerable deformity.

JEREMY TAYLOR, Holy Dying, ch. ii, sect. 2.

(_c_) Mainly two-beat rhythms--

Now since these dead bones have already outlasted the living ones of Methuselah and in a yard under ground and thin walls of clay outworn all the strong and s.p.a.cious buildings above it, and quietly rested under the drums and tramplings of three conquests; what Prince can promise such diuturnity unto his reliques or might not gladly say 'Sic ego componi versus in ossa velim.'

SIR THOMAS BROWNE, Urn Burial, ch. v.

(_d_) Mainly three-beat rhythms--

What song the Syrens sang or what name Achilles a.s.sumed when he hid himself among women though puzzling questions are not beyond all conjecture.

What time the persons of these ossuaries entered the famous nations of the dead and slept with princes and counsellors might admit a wide solution.

But who were the proprietaries of these bones or what bodies these ashes made up were a question above antiquarism; not to be resolved by man nor easily perhaps by spirits except we consult the provincial guardians or tutelary Observators.

Ibid.

_Metrical Prose._ The above pa.s.sages are daring, but greatly daring. So great is the subtlety, the variety, the art, that they never fail of their intended effect. They are justifiable because they justify themselves--partly by their lofty and dignified content, partly of course by their sheer artistry. But when the same thing is attempted by unskilful hands it fails ingloriously. We say it has "a palpable design upon us," and balk. Gibbon and Burke, as inheritors of the seventeenth-century tradition, sometimes fell into the error; Ruskin, with his 'poetical' style, was sometimes guilty; but the worst and most conspicuous offenders were d.i.c.kens and Blackmore. Examples are abundant.

Not all are equally unpleasant; the individual taste of some readers will approve pa.s.sages which others will reject. With d.i.c.kens and Blackmore, however, the phenomenon approaches downright deliberate trickiness.

The calculation of profit in all such wars is false. On balancing the account of such wars, ten thousand hogsheads of sugar _are purchased at ten thousand times their price_. The blood of man should never _be shed but to redeem the blood of man_. It is well shed for our family, for our friends, for our G.o.d, for our country, for our kind. _The rest is vanity; the rest is crime._ BURKE, Letters on a Regicide Peace, I.

When Death strikes down the innocent and young for every fragile form from which he lets the panting spirit free a hundred virtues rise in shapes of mercy, charity, and love, to walk the world and bless it.

Of every tear that sorrowing mortals shed on such green graves some good is born some gentler nature comes.

d.i.c.kENS, Old Curiosity Shop, ch. 72