Читать книгу The Beginnings of Poetry онлайн

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More weighty objections are to be found in an article by R. de la Grasserie.^[185] Spoken words, he says, fall into prose as expression of thought, and into poetry as expression of sentiment; prose is fundamental, while poetry gets its material from prose, and follows it in point of time, although it is conceded that the full development of poetry precedes the full development of prose. At first it would seem that the author regarded verse as essential to poetry; the poet and the verse-maker, he says, must be united as a single productive power. But at once he goes on to ask whether verse be the sole poetic expression, and answers in the negative. Poetry is creation, “subjective discovery” of any sort, as opposed to the objective discoveries of science, where nothing is created. Didactic, mnemonic verse is not poetry, for it is merely the verse that is mnemonic; and the reason why poetry has come to be confounded with versification is simply that verse was needed for the recording or memorizing of poetry.^[186] This teleological explanation of rhythm is a very weak joint in De la Grasserie’s armour; it shows how easily common sense can make itself ridiculous in its excess, a tendency commonly ascribed to sentimental and enthusiastic ideas alone. Facing the splendours of rhythm, knowing how it has held itself abreast of the lordliest doings of poetry, one laughs at the notion that its only credentials on Olympus should be its mnemonic convenience; and De la Grasserie thrusts his explanation handily away among the mists of primitive song. Then he turns to his theory of poetic growth. Poetry passed through three stages of expression,—first, prose; next, rhythmic prose; last, verse. How did poetry begin in prose? Well, it was “prose à courte haleine,”^[187] prose with thought-pauses as frequent as rhythmic pauses, so that there was no distinction between prose and verse,—and no good reason, the reader is tempted to add, why this same prose should not be called verse outright. Exactly what thought-pauses have to do with a period when poetry consisted in the indefinite repetition of a very short phrase or even of a single word, and when, by all evidence, the pause is rhythmic entirely, the author does not say; he is dealing with a theory and not with facts, and so he assumes a majestic periodic prose as primitive utterance. Next after “prose” came “rhythmic prose,” and then verse; but the evolutionary process goes on, and from verse, as in these latter days, one turns back to prose in rhythm, and yet again to prose outright. If one asks for a bill of particulars, if one asks how verse came out of rhythmic prose, one is told that two propositions may have had the same number of words, just as in Arabic, just as in the Avesta,^[188]—that the “two propositions” were once mere repetition, and sung in perfect time is, of course, not noted,—so that the psychic pause grows to be one with the rhythmic pause. But, accepting the impossible terms of the case, what proof is offered that word-counting and syllable-counting are of higher date than actual rhythm? Granting this, to be sure, the next step is easy; interior symmetry now comes into play, the measure of feet, the perfect rhythm of Greek and Latin verse. What cause, then, was at work thus to develop verse out of prose? Music and singing, answers the ingenious essayist; but the ingenious essayist has calmly shut out all facts save such as suit his case, and one is curious to know what he would do with ethnological evidence in regard to the priority and primacy of dance and song. Did man come to this fine mastery of metres and this subtle sense of quantities before he had begun to dance to his own singing?