Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/250

 244 Seiberth consciousness be not too heavily taxed. So that a time like the 6/4 is one of the most complex of the rhythms employed in music.

TJ I] U U U U The psychological law, determining the rhythmical line, is here incisively presented. The rhythm of the hexameter cor- responds to Wundt's observation, for it consists of two 3 accent parts. To the ear this is quite perceptible, while for the eye the division is not marked in the traditional way of printing the line. It would be more correct to indicate the break in the middle in some way, or else to write the two parts over each other. In this way the real character of the line would be more exactly expressed as a rhythmical couplet of two 3 stress parts. By uniting the two into one line a compound form with six stresses is reached which, as the 6/4 time in music is a maximum rarely exceeded. The rhythmical effect of the two in conjunc- tion, is that of a rising and falling movement, yielding a form of a higher order. We see the same combination in the allitera- tive line of the early Germanic epic, with its caesura, and also in the metre of Nibelungen and Gudrun epics. Here, however, the unity of the two parts is mainly marked and supported by a later device, namely, rhyme. Arranging motives in couplets is the usual thing in the simple song forms of music. The motive recurs, i.e. the rhythmical movement is repeated, giving the effect of confirmation. Or there may be an inversion of the melodic movement, or a change of the harmonic basis. Such changes are made without endangering the recognition of the motive. However, a change of rhythm, or a shifting of the main accent make it unrecognizable. While poetry holds to a regular rhythmical movement, throughout one composition, music has gone far in the inner differentiation and variety of its rhythms. One might pause here to ask, why it is that poetry has not fol- lowed music further in this direction. Poetry being the art of the word, hence essentially conceptual, could manifestly not keep pace with music in rhythmic-melodic development, while music, depending on melody and rhythm solely as its means of