Part 6 (2/2)

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.

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