| ALL
good art is a growth as much as all Nature is, and every
poet writes by a method that is the result of his own
personal development. The natural method is his own
method. But in order to use this natural method, it
is necessary to have a great deal of instinctive and
acquired knowledge. "A good poet," says Ben
Jonson, "is made as well as born."
A poet must
have something to say, and he must know how to say it.
What he has to say depends on how great a man is, and
how wide and deep is his experience of life. How he
says it depends on his knowledge of the laws and the
possibilities of expression in the language he uses.
It is true that his knowledge of these laws and his
command of these possibilities must have become instinctive
and unconscious before what he writes can be called
poetry. But instincts are only knowledge become automatic.
All that man does unconsciously he had first to do consciously.
What we possess we must first conquer. There was a time
when Shakespeare could not say ba-ba, not to
speak of saying "Hamlet."
The development
of a babbling baby into that crown and summit of human
genius, a poet, is, in the strictest sense of the word
a matter of education. The great part of the education
of poets (and, indeed, of everybody) has been left for
the most part to chance and blind experiment. But if
it could be shown that all Art rests upon necessary
principles of expression, and that many of these principles
are known, it would be clear that the scientific study
of such principles would, to put it at its mildest,
save the artist in words, as well as all other artists,
from much waste of time and unnecessary groping.
François
Delsarte did analyze scientifically the facts of expression
and did discover many unquestionable laws. He did not
apply them himself to the criticism of poetry, tho he
must have seen that such an application was inevitable;
but, if the laws he discovered be, as Delsarteans believe,
the true inherent laws of Art and not a system of formal
rules, then it follows that, since poetry is an art,
they must also be the laws of poetry.
Any outline
of these laws would lead us far beyond the limits of
such an article as this. But a few illustrations may
reveal a glimpse of the scope of Delsartean research
in this direction. We find by analysis that every syllable
contains one vowel (or diphthong), and that most syllables
are made up of three parts—an initial consonant
or consonant-group, a vowel or diphthong, and a final
consonant or consonant-group. Further we find that in
pronouncing words, by dwelling on the final consonants
we make our expression passionate and physical, by dwelling
on the initial consonants emotional, and by dwelling
on the vowels we exaggerate the ideas of the words we
use. If any one will take the word "long,"
for instance, and pronounce it in these three ways,
he will see in an instant the truth of this statement.
Applying the
same principle to metrical feet as to syllables, we
find that feet like the troches, which are accented
on the first syllable, are emotional in expression,
and feet like the English pseudo-anapest, which are
accented on the final syllable, are physical. Now it
must be remembered that meter is itself the physical
part of poetry, and that therefore to use a physical
meter is to express one's self by very primitive and
undifferentiated means. This accounts for the ridiculous
ease with which English anapests can be ground out,
and for their comparative meaninglessness after the
grinding. The iambus presents a little more complexity.
At first sight one would say that it, too, was accented
on the final time-unit of the measure, but further investigation
shows that this is not so. The iambus is a short syllable
followed by a long one; and if we count the long equal
in value to two shorts, as it is, we perceive that the
foot contains three time-units, the second and third
usually coalescing. If, however, as frequently happens,
a foot of three short syllables be substituted for variety
in an iambic line, the accent falls on the second, as
a long series of inductions demonstrates beyond question.
So the iambus is a foot of triple time, accented on
the middle syllable, which, in turn, usually absorbs
the final syllable. Accordingly, we find that it is
mental in expression.
Passing beyond
Versification, or the use of words with respect to their
qualities of tone, we come to the subject of Esthetic
Linguistic, or the use of words as words. Every word
has, as such, three distinct qualities: First, it has
its conventional meaning as set down with varying accuracy
in the definitions of the dictionaries; this is the
mental part of the word's significance. In addition
to this, it may convey this meaning with greater or
less vigor, as we say that "go" is a stronger
word than "depart," "begin" than
"commence," etc. Finally, words differ in
what, for lack of a better word, we must call color.
With the possible exception of Volapük, in which
for this very reason no one but a statistician would
ever think of writing poetry, there is no language in
existence in which the words are merely conventional
symbols of the ideas for which they stand. Every word
we speak has a pedigree that goes back to Adam. It has
been developing into what it now is, through uncounted
accretions and curtailments and transformations, ever
since man was, and, since Professor Garner's experiments
with monkeys, we may suspect even a little longer; and
in the course of that long, eventful history it has
gathered to itself a multitude of little associations
which, without presenting themselves directly to the
understanding, modify, enrich and color the effect of
the primary meaning, like the overtones of a musical
note. Without this colorific value of words, we could
express little more by speech than by the symbols of
algebra. This is the chief difficulty of the translator,
and one that he can never surmount.
The third
branch of the science of poetry deals with those pictures
and actions which are suggested to the mind's eye by
the medium of words. Unless he express his thought through
these imaginations the writer is but a versifier or
a rhetorician. They constitute the most distinctive
feature of poetry, and so this branch of the subject
may be appropriately styled Poetics proper.
It deals with the methods by which words may be so used
as to convey concrete sensuous images to the fantasy,
with the construction of these images into a coherent
unity, usually a story, and with the characterization
and motiving which fuses the poet into continuity and
inevitableness.
A salient
Delsartean principle which has important applications
in all of these subdivisions, is that of opposition,
succession and parallelism. There is no possible expression
which does not use one of these modes. Parallelism,
especially, is of great importance in poetry. Rhymes,
alliterations and syzygies are parallelisms of sound;
the grammatical agreements of person, number, etc. are
parallelisms of word-forms; similes and metaphors are
parallelisms of imagery. Oppositions are hardly less
essential; antitheses, dramatic situations and the like
all come under this head. Rhythm itself is primarily
opposition. According to Mr. Herbert Spencer, whom we
may trust in a matter of this kind, all rhythm is the
result of the action of antagonistic forces. Antagonism
by itself, however, is not rhythm. The same antagonism
must be repeated, thus introducing a parallelism. Successions
are too complicated to be more than referred to in this
connection.
All poetic
phenomena fall under one of the three sciences mentioned:
Versification, Esthetic Linguistics and Poetics. Versification
subdivides into Rhythmic, which deals with the quantity
of syllables as grouped by accents and pauses, Phonetic,
which treats of the qualities of tone of which syllables
are composed, and Synectic, which includes rhyme, alliteration,
syzygy, and binding together the rhythm. Linguistic
is composed of Diction, Rhetoric and Grammar. Poetics
includes Dramatics, Imagery and a third sub-division
which has to do with the means by which cohesion and
truth is imparted to the dramatic structure and for
which, since it is so intimately related to the poet's
penetrative insight. I propose the name Theoria.
A very important
contribution to our knowledge of Synectic is Professor
Sylvester's "Laws of Verse," from which the
name Synectic and some other technical terms are adopted.
The few words of Professor Sylvester upon this subject
show an insight which makes it positively irritating
that he should have said so little. He seems to have
used several characteristically Delsartean methods in
his analysis, and probably by right of his own discovery;
for we have no reason to suppose that he was acquainted
with the work of the great Frenchman. It may surprise
some that a mathematician should write the first important
book on the science of verse; but poetry is more nearly
allied to mathematics than is supposed, and a poet is
usually a good mathematician.
Following
Sylvester's hints we have Sidney Lanier's "Science
of English Verse," which confines itself to versification
and especially to rhythm. Lanier did not attempt, except
incidentally, to show the precise relations between
verse-forms and their expression. But his treatment
of the forms themselves is, to my mind, the first and
only substantial contribution to a scientific study
of poetry that has yet been written. On his work all
future investigation must base itself.
NEW
YORK CITY. |
