Page:EB1911 - Volume 27.djvu/1072

 The Sapphic runs as follows:— The stanza of Alcaeus runs:—

These marvellous inventions suited the different moods of these strongly contrasted lyrists, the “violet-crowned, pure, softly smiling Sappho,” and the fiery, vehement soldier who was Alcaeus. We must give them peculiar attention, since they were the two earliest models for the lyric passion which has since then expressed itself in so many stanzaic forms, but in none of so faultless a perfection as the original Lesbian types.

The name of Stesichorus of Himera points to the belief of antiquity that he was the earliest poet who gave form to the choral song; he must have been called the “choir-setter” because he arranged and wrote for choirs semi-epic verse of a new kind, “made up of halves of the epic hexameter, interspersed with short variations—epitrites, anapaests or mere syncopae—just enough to break the dactylic swing, to make the verse lyrical” (Gilbert Murray). But it appears to be to Arion that the artistic form of the dithyramb is due. We are all among innovators and creators in this glorious 5th century Simonides gathered the various inventions together, and exercised his genius upon them all: he was the earliest universal lyrist of the world: he treated the styles of verse, as Shelley or as Victor Hugo did, with an impartial mastery.

After the happy event of the Persian War, Athens became the centre of literary activity in Greece, and here the great school of drama developed itself, using for its vehicle, in dialogue, monologue and chorus, nearly all the metres which earlier ages and distant provinces had invented. The verse-form which the dramatists preferred to use was almost exclusively the iambic trimeter, a form which adapted itself equally well to tragedy and to comedy. Aeschylus employed for his choruses a great number of lyric measures, which Sophocles and Euripides reduced and regulated. With the age of the dramatists the creative power of the Greeks in versification came to an end, and the revival of poetic enthusiasm in the Alexandrian age brought with it no talent for fresh metrical inventions, and the time had now arrived when the harvest of Greek prosody was completely garnered.

Latin Metre.—Very little is known about the verse-forms of the original inhabitants of Italy, before the introduction of Greek influences. The earliest use of poetry as a national art in Italy is to be judged by inscriptions in what is called the Saturnian metre. Already, the first Latin epic poets, Livius Andronicus in his Odyssia, Naevius in his Bellum Punicum, the Scipios in their Elogia, combined their rude national sense of folk-song with a consciousness of the quantitative rules of the Greeks. But the same writers, in their dramas, undoubtedly used Greek metres without adaptation, and it is therefore likely that the ancient Saturnian measure was already looked upon as barbarous, and it makes no further reappearance in Latin literature (cf. Gleditsch). The introduction of Greek dramatic metre marks the start of regular poetry among the Latins, which was due, not to men of Roman birth, but to poets of Greek extraction or inhabiting the Greek-speaking provinces of Italy. These writers, bearing the stamp of a widely recognized cultivation, threw the old national verse back into oblivion. Latin verse, then, began in a free but loyal modification of the principles of Greek verse. Plautus was particularly ambitious and skilful in this work, and, aided by a native genius for metre, he laid down the basis of Latin dramatic versification. Terence was a feebler and at the same time a more timid metrist. In satire, the iambic and trochaic measures were carefully adapted by Ennius and Lucilius. The dactylic hexameter followed, and Ennius, in all matters of verse a daring innovator, directly imitated in his Annales the epic measure of the Greeks. To him also is attributed the introduction of the elegiac distich, hexameter and pentameter. The dactylic hexameter was forthwith adopted as the leading metre of the Roman poets, and, as Gleditsch has pointed out, the basis upon which all future versification was to be erected was firmly laid down before the death of Ennius in 169 Lucilius followed, but perhaps with some tendency to retrogression, for the Latin critics seem to have looked upon his metre as wanting both in melody and elasticity. Lucretius, on the other hand, made a further advance on the labours of Ennius, in his study of

Lest, however, this great form of verse should take too exclusive a place in the imagination of the Romans, a younger generation, with Laevius and Terentius Varro at their head, began to imitate the lyrical measures of the Greeks with remarkable success. Varro, who has been styled the earliest metrical theorist of Rome, opened up a new field in this direction by the example of his Menippean satires. These poets left the rigid school of Ennius, and sought to emulate the Alexandrians of their own age: we see the result in the lyric measures used so gracefully and with such brilliant ease by Catullus. The versification of the Romans reached its highest point of polish in the Augustan age, in the writings of Tibullus, Propertius, Virgil and particularly Ovid, who is considered to mark the highest level of various excellence which has ever been reached by a master of Latin versification. In Horace has been traced a tendency to archaism in the study of verse, and in his odes and epodes he was not content with the soft Alexandrian models, but aimed at achieving more vigorous effects by an imitation of the older Greek models, such as Alcaeus and even Archilochus. After the Augustan age, it was no longer the Greek poets, ancient or recent, who were imitated, but the Augustans them- selves were taken as the inapproachable models of Roman verse.

We have hitherto spoken of classical versification as it was regarded by those whom, without offence, we may describe as pedants. But there is precious evidence of the mode in which metre was regarded by poets, and by one of the greatest artists of antiquity. In his Art of Poetry Horace has been speaking of the need of method in composition—" tantum series juncturaque pollet "—and this reminds him that he has said nothing of the art of verse. The succeeding twenty-four lines contain all that this great poet thought it needful to supply on the subject with which Alexandrian grammarians could fill as many volumes. Although he is actually writing in dactylic hexameters, he does not mention this form of verse; he is chiefly occupied in describing, rather unscientifically, the iambic trimeter, and in praising the iamb, pes citus. He applauds, still somewhat vaguely, the stately versification of the precursors, Ennius and Accius, and blames the immodulata poemata of careless modern writers, whose laxity is condoned by popular ignorance. The only way to escape such faults is to study the Greeks by night and by day, but Horace evidently means by his exemplaria Graeca, not the scholiasts with their lists of metres and their laborious rules, but the old poets with their fine raptures. On Italian ground he points to Plautus, and laments that the Romans of his own day, fascinated by softer cadences, have lost their veneration for the vigorous beauty of the Plautinos numeros. And Horace closes with a queer suggestion, which may be taken as we please, that a poet in an age of flagging inspiration must trust to his fingers as well as his ears.

Modern Versification.—The main distinction between classical and modern versification consists in the negligence shown by the moderns to quantity, which is defined as the length or shortness of the sound of syllables, as determined by the time required to pronounce them. This dimension of sound was rigid in the case of Greek and Latin poetry, until, in what is known as the