Page:EB1911 - Volume 21.djvu/921

Rh be usefully compared If the wings of the Persian imagination are heavy with beauty, those of the later Arabian imagination are bright with beauty-brilliant as an Eastern butterfly, quick and agile as a dragon-ily or a humming-bird. To the eye of the Persian poet the hues of earth are (as Firdausi says of the garden of Afrasiab) “like the tapestry of the kings of Ormuz, the air is perfumed with musk, and the waters of the brooks are the essence of roses.” And to the later Arabian no less than to the Persian the earth is beautiful, but it is the clear and sparkling beauty of the earth as she “ wakes up to life, greeting the Sabaean morning ”; we feel the light more than the colour. But it is neither the Persian's instinct for beauty nor the Arabian's quenchless wit and exhaust less animal spirits that go to the making of the Great Lyric, far from it. In a word, the Great Lyric, as we have said, cannot be assigned to the Asiatic temper generally any more than it can be assigned to the European temper.

In the poetry of Europe, if we cannot say of Pindar, devout as he is, that he produced the Great Lyric, what can we say of The Oda any other European poet? The truth is that, like the Great Drama, so straight and so warm does it seem to come from the heart of man in its highest moods that we scarcely feel it to be literature at all. Passing, however, from this supreme expression of lyrical imagination, we come to the artistic ode, upon which subject the present writer can only reiterate here what he has more fully said upon a former occasion. Whatever may have been said to the contrary, enthusiasm is, in the nature of things, the very basis of the ode; for the ode is a mono-drama, the actor in which is the poet himself, and, as Marmontel has well pointed out, if the actor in the mono-drama is not affected by the sentiments he expresses, the ode must be cold and lifeless. But, although the ode is a natural poetic method of the poet considered as prophet although it is the voice of poetry as a fine frenzy—it must not be supposed that there is anything lawless in its structure. “ Pindar, ” says the Italian critic Gravina, “ launches his verses upon the bosom of the sea, he spreads out all his sails; he confronts the tempest and the rocks, the waves arise and are ready to engulf him; already he has disappeared from the spectator's view, when suddenly he springs up in the midst of the Waters, and reaches happily the shore.” Now it is this Pindaric discursiveness, this Pindaric unrestraint as to the matter, which has led poets to attempt to imitate him by adopting an unrestraint as to form. Although no two odes of Pindar exhibit the same metrical structure (the Aeolian and Lydian rhythms being mingled with the Doric in different proportions), yet each ode is in itself obedient, severely obedient, to structural law. This we feel; but what the law is no metricise has perhaps ever yet been able to explain.

It was a strange misconception that led people for centuries to use the word “ Pindaric ” and irregular as synonymous terms; whereas the very essence of the odes of Pindar (of the few, alas! which survive to us) is their regularity. There is no more difficult form of poetry than this, and for this reason: when in any poetical composition the metres are varied, there must, as the present writer has before pointed out, be a reason for such freedom, and that reason is properly subjective-the varying form must embody and express the varying emotions of the singer. But when these metrical variations are governed by no subjective law at all, but by arbitrary rules supposed to be evolved from the practice of Pindar, then that very variety which should aid the poet in expressing his emotion crystallizes it and makes the ode the most frigid of all compositions. Great as Pindar undoubtedly is, it is deeply to be regretted that no other poet survives to represent the triumphal ode of Greecethe digressions of his subject matter are so wide, and his volubility is so great.

In modern literature the ode has been ruined by theories and experiments. A poet like La Mothe, for instance, writes execrable odes, and then writes a treatise to prove that all odes should be written on the same model. There is much confusion of mind prevalent among poets as to what is and what is not TRY

an ode. All odes are, no doubt, divisible into two great classes: those which, following an arrangement in stanzas, are commonly called regular, and those which, following no such arrangement, are commonly called irregular.

We do not agree with those who assert that irregular metres are of necessity in1m1cal to poetic art. On the contrary, we believe that in modern prosody the arrangement of the rhymes and the length of the lines m any ihymed metrical passage may be determined either by a fixed stanzaic law or by a law infinitely deeper-by the law which impels the soul, in a state of poetlc exaltation, to seize hold of every kind of metrical aid, such as rhyme, caesura, &c. for the purpose of accentuating and marking off each shade of emotion as it arises, regardless of any demands of stanza. But between the irregularity of makeshift, such as we find it in Cowie and h1s imitators, and the irre ular1ty of the “ fine frenzy ” of such a poem, for instance, as Coleri§ ge's Kubla Khan, there is a difference in k1nd. Strange that it 1s not in an ode at all but 1n this un1que lyric Kubla Khan, descriptive of imag1nat1ve landscape, that an English poet has at last conquered the crowning difficulty of writing in irregular metres. Having broken away from all restraints of couplet and stanza-having caused his rhymes and pauses to fall just where and just when the emotion demands that they should fall, scorning the exigencies of makeshift no less than the exigencies of stanza-he has found what every writer of irregular English odes has sought 1n vain, a music as entrancing, as natural, and at the same time as inscrutable, as the mus1c of the w1nds or of the sea. The prearranged effects of sharp contrasts and antiphonal movements, such as some oets have been able to compass, course come under tfie present definitlon of irregular metres at all. If a metrical passage does not gain immensely by being written independently of stanzaic law, it loses immensely; and for this reason, perhaps, that the great charm of the music of all verse, as d1st1n uished do not of

Stnnzalc

Law and

Emotional

Law.

from the music of prose, is inevltableness of cacfence. In regular metres we enjoy the pleasure of feeling that the rhymes will inevitably fall under a recognized law of couplet or stanza. But if the passage Hows independently of these, It must still flow inevitably-it must, in short, show that it 1s governed by another and a yet deeper force, the inevitableness of emotional expression. The lines must be long or short, the rhvmes must be arranged after this or after that interval, not because it is convenient so to arrange them, but because the emotion of the poet inexorably demands these and no other arrangements. When, however, Coleridge came to try his hand at irregular odes, such as the odes “To the Daéparting Year ” and “ To the Duchess of Devonshire, " he certainly d1 not succeed.

As to Wordsworth's magnificent “Ode on Intimations of Immortality, ” the sole impeachment of it, but it is a grave one, IS that the length of the lines and the arrangement of the rhymes are not always inevitable; they are, except on rare occasions, governed neither by stanzaic nor b emotional law. For instance, what emotional necessity was there for the following rhyme-arrangement “ My heart is at your festival,

My head hath its coronal,

The fu ness of your bliss I feel—I feel it all. Oh, evil day' if I were sullen,

While earth herself is adorning,

This sweet May morning;

And the children are culling,

On every side,

In a thousand valleys far and wide,

Fresh flowers."

Beautiful as is the substance of this entire passa e, so far from gaining, it loses by rhyme-loses, not in perspicuity, Ior Wordsworth like all his contemporaries (except Shelley) is mostly perspicuous, but in that metrical emphasis the quest of which is one of the impulses that leads a poet to write 1n rhyme. In spite, however, of its metrical defects, this famous ode of Wordsworth's is the finest irregular ode in the language; for, although Coleridge's “Ode to the Departing Year" excels it 1n Pindaric fire, it is below Wordsworth's masterpiece in almost every other quality save rh thm. Among the wrlters of English irregular odes, next to Worcisworth, stands Dryden. The second stanza of the “ Ode for St Cec1lia's Day ” is a great triumph.

Leaving the irregular and turning to the' regular ode, it is natural to divide these into two classes: (I) those which are really Pindaric in so far as they consist of strophes, antlstrophes and epodes, variously arranged and contrasted; and (2) those which consist of a regular succession of regular stanzas. Perhaps all Pindaric odes tend to show that this form of art is in English a mistake. It is easy enough to write one stanza and call it a strophe, another in a different movement and call it an anti strophe. a third in a different movement still and call it an epode But in modern prosody, disconnected as it is from musical and from terpsichorean science, what are these? No poet and no critic can say What is requisite is that the ear of the reader should catch a great metrical scheme, of which these three varieties of movement