Читать книгу The Beginnings of Poetry онлайн
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In a treatise by Norden[156] on ancient artistic prose, one has under one’s hand all the evidence which can be gathered from the classics, particularly the Greek, for this view of the relations between prose and verse; here, too, are ranged certain arguments against that old notion of the precedence of poetry.[157] Musical sense, rhythm, was given to man with the spoken word itself, as in historical times to the Hellenic folk, whose melodious sentence is as inaudible as the music of the spheres to an ear dependent upon modern speech. Now before poetry was developed, Norden assumes, there was a rhythmic prose distinguished by some kind of emphasis from the speech of daily life; thence sprang on one hand the rhythm of regular poetry, and on the other hand a rhythm of impassioned, oratorical prose. The oratory of Greece was a kind of chanting, and the gestures that went with it were a species of dance; but these in no way could be called identical with the singing or recitation of poetry. Then came confusion. Gorgias began a new era when he imported certain elements of poetry into his prose; even the rimed prose of the Middle Ages Norden[158] calls “the result of a thousand years of development from the time of Gorgias.” The early results, however, were destructive. Tragedy, thinks our author, was ruined in Hellas because all barriers were broken down between poetry and prose, and rhetoric overwhelmed the drama; great epos yielded to great history; gnomic poetry vanished; epigram supplanted elegy; dithyramb made room for lofty prose at large.[159] But this is nothing more than a process in civilized Greece analogous to the process in our own day described a few pages above. Even the tradition of the classical writers pointed back to an age of poetry which preceded prose; for while Strabo, in the passage already considered, and Varro,[160] speak of actual literature which they had in hand, Plutarch, writing on the Pythian oracle, made poetry the product of primitive times and prose the outcome of prehistorical decadence. Against this tradition, which he makes a mere glorification of the golden age, Norden argues with learning and acuteness, and from material furnished by Greek literature itself. But Greek literature is surely no criterion for primitive song; persistent as this prejudice is,[161] Norden sees that ethnology has better points of view, and in one or two places he calls upon it for aid.[162] The distinction between poetry and prose is, for him, “secondary, not essential,” for the reason that he cannot find this distinction in the earliest expression of formal or solemn language known to the various races of man, whether on highest or lowest planes of culture. His summary may be quoted, temperate and reasonable as it is; it appeals to ethnological arguments, which would be close upon convincement if they did not utterly neglect, as nearly all writers on poetry have neglected, the communal basis of the art, and the fundamental consideration that earliest poetry is more a social than an individual expression. Norden’s eye is fixed upon the priest, the poet, the medicine man, the lawgiver; he forgets the throng, and he forgets that the throng was mainly active and rarely passive in the primitive stages of poetry. But let his own summary be heard.[163] The line now drawn between poetry and prose, he maintains, was unknown to primitive races. Forms of magic, the language of the laws, ceremonial religious rites, were everywhere made in prose; not, however, in the prose of daily conversation, but in a prose removed from common conditions by two factors: first, it was spoken in measured, solemn tones, and so became rhythmical,—not the regular rhythm of song, but a sort of chant or recitation,[164] so that one may figure the early priest like his modern brother, the snowy-banded, delicate-handed one, at his intoning; and, secondly, it was furnished, for emphasis and for the help of memory, with certain vocal expedients, such as alliteration and rime, which are inborn alike in the most civilized and in the wildest races. This kind of prose existed before there was any artistic poetry. Norden would like to see more work done in the field of early legal and religious forms; old Latin prayers, old Germanic laws, for example, have been coaxed or bullied into some metrical scheme, and made to pass as poetry. Elsewhere he takes the case of that prayer to Mars which Westphal and Allen called Saturnian verse; by Norden’s reckoning, this is mainly alliterative, rhythmic prose; only the second half can be called metrical; and he is convinced that Saturnian verse itself is nothing but the later metrical equipment of what was once rhythmic prose solemnly spoken with two sections to the line. Carmen, he goes on to say, is originally any solemn formula whether spoken or sung, whether rhythmic prose, even simple prose, or verse;[165] that is “settled.” It is a clever suggestion, too, that rhythmic prose belongs with what one now calls the loose sentence, while artistic prose, contemporary with artistic and metrical poetry, came into prominence with the periodic structure;[166] so the tale, like Grimm’s familiar “There was once a king’s son, and he was very beautiful ...,” in its uninvolved, consecutive phrases, would give one an idea of the early rhythmic prose.