Part 7 (1/2)
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.