Immagini della pagina
PDF
ePub

Rhyme has developed its luxuriance in its native regions, that is to say, in the Romanesque dialects. The rhyming faculty was not born with our speech, and it is still but imperfectly naturalised among us. The English language is found to be poor in rhymes when it is put to the proof, as in the essay of translating Dante in his own terza rima.

Of all the forms which the Romanesque metres have assumed in the English language, the blank verse is that which we have most completely nationalised and made our own. And the probable explanation of this is, that Rhyme is too confining for our native rhythm, when it would put forth its full strength. On the other hand, Metre, though it restrains, does unquestionably help to sustain the elevation, by the way in which it brings out the subordinate pauses and finer articulations in the rhythm. I would ask the reader to consider the following lines, lending his ear especially to the verse-endings which close without punc

tuation:

'A gracious spirit o'er this earth presides,
And o'er the heart of man: invisibly
It comes, to works of unreproved delight,

And tendency benign, directing those

Who care not, know not, think not what they do.

The tales that charm away the wakeful night

In Araby, romances; legends penned

For solace by dim light of monkish lamps;

Fictions, for ladies of their love, devised

By youthful squires; adventures endless, spun
By the dismantled warrior in old age,

Out of the bowels of those very schemes

In which his youth did first extravagate;

These spread like day, and something in the shape
Of these will live till man shall be no more.

Dumb yearnings, hidden appetites, are ours,

And they must have their food. Our childhood sits,
Our simple childhood, sits upon a throne

That hath more power than all the elements.'

William Wordsworth, The Prelude, Bk. V.

All true poetry feels after, and grows towards, a sweet low

musical accompaniment, which sounds to the ear of the mind. like the thing described, even though it should be the process of nature, which marches in silence. The following lines, from an unknown poet who signs G. M., display this harmony of the rhythm with the description :

'On that opposing hill, as on the stage

Of rural theatre, or Virgil's page,

I watch the shifting scenes of country life,―
Man's patient labour and his world-old strife.
First, the stout team drags on the biting plough;
Thro' the hard clods it cuts and pierces slow;
The careful yeoman guides the furrow'd way,
The rook succeeds, and lives another day.
Then come the sowers, who with careless skill
Scatter the grain and every fissure fill;
Then the light harrow the smooth soil restores,
And soon the field feels life in all her pores.
Next some bright morning, as I mark the scene,
My fancy soothes me with a shade of green,
Which after every shower more vivid grows,
Till em'rald brightly o'er the surface glows,
Then yellow clothes the scene, and soon, too soon,
Red ears bow heavy to the harvest moon.'

In making a poetical translation, the first thing is to get hold of a melody. The metre, and even in some measure the grammar, must be secondary; else there can be no rhythm, and therefore no unity. Your verses may parse, and they may scan, and be but doggerel after all. The master-principle then is rhythm. In the following lines from Mr. Griffith's translation of the Rámáyana, we have not only words and phrases and metre, but we have also a rhythm, which gives the whole a unity and an individuality, making it 'like something'; and we, who do not read Sanskrit, can enquire whether that is a faithful rendering of the effect of the original:

⚫ Balmy cool the air was breathing, welcome clouds were floating by, Humming bees with joyful music swelled the glad wild peacock's cry. Their wing-feathers wet with bathing, birds slow flying to the trees Rested in the topmost branches waving to the western breeze.'

But no English reader, with a cultivated ear, would be likely to ask whether the following bore any resemblance to Horace, simply because, through lack of rhythm, it has no unity, and it leaves on the mind no impression of having any likeness or similitude of its own:—

'Methinks Dame Nature to discriminate

What's just from what's unjust entirely fails;
Though doubtless fairly she can separate
What's good from what is bad, and aye prevails
What to avoid, what to desire, to state;

And Reason cannot prove that in the scales
The man who broke another's cabbage-leaf

Should weigh as guilty as the sacrilegious thief.'

It would lead us too far if we attempted to exemplify in detail the conclusion at which these latter pages are pointed. It is this:-Our language has passed on beyond the stage at which the chime of words is a care to the national ear, and it has adopted instead thereof the pleasure of a musical rhythm, which pervades the sentence and binds it into one. Ewald has happily described the perception of rhythm as Sinn fürs Ganze-a feeling or sentiment for the Whole. When the English language is now used so as to display a sonorous aptness in the words, we call it Word-painting.

We will conclude this final chapter by a few illustrations to the same effect drawn from the inceptive stages of speech. The first dawn of intelligence, the first smile of the infant on the mother, is in response to the tones of her maternal encouragements:

'Incipe parve puer risu cognoscere matrem.'

Vergil, Eclogue iv. 60.

'Smile then, dear child, and make thy mother glad.'

Translation by H. D. Skrine, 1868.

Before speech is attained by the infant, he gets a set of notes or tones to express pleasure or offence, assènt or refusal. The first attempts to speak are mere chirruppings and warblings; that is to say, it is the music of what is said that is caught at first, while the child has as yet no ears for the harder sense. By a beautiful and true touch of nature, and all the more noticeable because it is not a commonplace of poetry, a poet of our own day has coupled the early speech of children with the singing of birds:

'I love the song of birds,

And the children's early words.'

Charles Mackay, A Plain Man's Philosophy.

John Keble has justified the teaching of divine truths to children, on the ground that, if the sense is beyond them, there is a certain musical path of communication:

'Oh! say not, dream not, heavenly notes

To childish ears are vain,

That the young mind at random floats,
And cannot reach the strain:

Dim or unheard the words may fall,
And yet the heaven-taught mind
May learn the sacred air, and all
The harmony unwind.'

The general effect of such observations is towards this:— That the sentient and emotional parts of human nature have a greater share in the origins of language than the intellectual faculty. The first awakener of language is love.

I knew a little orator who, at the age of five years, would make speeches of irresistible force, though he was more than usually backward in grammatical sequence. It being one morning said in his presence that he had been found half out of bed, and the cause surmised that his brother elbowed him out, he exclaimed, 'Yes, he elbowed me

[ocr errors]

harder and harder-could be!' In modulation this was a perfect utterance: the voice had risen very gradually and plaintively so far as harder and harder'— then a pause, as he was feeling after a climax -- and then out broke in an octave higher the decisive words 'could be!'

It was the same boy who once said it was not his bed time this 'reckly,' a compromise between 'this minute' and 'directly,' but which, in the way it was delivered, very far surpassed either of these forms of expression.

The fact is that children have a greater appreciation of sound than of sense, and that accordingly their early words are in good melody and bad grammar. Their judgment of the fitness of words for the office they fill, will often be very distinctly pronounced. And this judgment rests, as indeed it can rest, on nothing else than the chime of the sound with their notion of the thing indicated. The judgment of children is often found so firm and distinct on this matter, that we must conclude a great part of the early exercise of their wakening minds has been concerned with the discrimination of sounds. A little watching might supply many illustrations on this head; what is here produced is not the result of any careful selection, but just what offered itself about the time that this chapter was in preparation.

A father who took an interest in some pigeons that were kept for the amusement of his children, had the whim to call them all by some fanciful name; and as they multiplied it became harder to invent acceptable names. So it happened that, after many familiar names, there came in some from classical sources. Of these it was observed (months after) that one had fixed itself in the memory of the children. They were playing with the kitten, and their inward glee was venting itself in the name of Andromache,

« IndietroContinua »