THAMYRIS

TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW SERIES

Other Volumes in Preparation

E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY

THAMYRIS

OR

Is there a Future for Poetry?

BY R. C. TREVELYAN

New York E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 681 Fifth Avenue

Copyright 1925 By E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY

All Rights Reserved

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

[Pg vii]

To

The Memory of

OSWALD SICKERT

CHAPTER I The Muses in Heaven

There is an old Teutonic legend that every year, upon All Souls’ Day, the archangel Raphael is sent down to the classical ward of Hell, where the dispossessed deities of heathendom are confined, with a summons for the nine Muses to appear and give a command performance before the throne of Jehovah and the assembled Host of Heaven. So the poor embarrassed[Pg 2] ladies, ushered before that critical and unsympathetic audience, reluctantly tune their lyres, and begin some ancient Hellenic chant, some ode, it may be, that they had once sung in the feasting-hall of Olympus, or at the marriage of Cadmus and Harmonia. At first their strange pagan minstrelsy seems harsh and unpleasing to blessed ears, accustomed only to the angelical modes of “saintly shout and solemn jubilee”; but before long, in spite of themselves, the angels are touched and troubled by this disquieting music, burdened with all the passions and sighs of humanity, until at last celestial visages are stained with tears, and the sound of weeping is heard in Heaven.

But on one of these occasions, not so very long ago, after the Muses had come to the end of their program, several of the more literary archangels expressed a desire to hear some examples of post-classical poetry, of which they knew little or nothing. As the Muses[Pg 3] could not gratify their curiosity, Satan, who, as in the Book of Job, was paying one of his rare visits to the court of Jehovah, stepped into the breach, and beguiled several hours with poetical specimens from different periods, which he had picked up during his ceaseless wanderings to and fro upon the earth. At first his audience was enchanted. He had an excellent ear and memory, and could reproduce perfectly the several styles of the troubadours and minnesingers, and of the various courtly or popular minstrels of the Middle Ages. But gradually a change came over his performance. The saints and angels grew puzzled and restless, as the element of song, and even of intonation, progressively disappeared, until at last they found themselves listening with pain and indignation to mere naked, spoken

verse. And what verse? Rime they were familiar with in their hymns, and liked. But soon even rime began to fade, and threatened to vanish[Pg 4] altogether. Metre too dissolved and degenerated from all regular recognisable form; and when finally Satan jerked out the latest jewel of American vers libre, he was greeted, as once before in Hell, with a dismal universal hiss, the sign of public scorn. The Muses had long ago fled down horror-stricken to Hades; and Satan, who always dislikes unpopularity, smiled, bowed, and retired. The choirmaster, Gabriel, tapped the desk with his baton, and a moment later the Heavenly Host was purging its offended ears with the strains of a noble Gregorian chant.

Now what lesson, if any, may we draw from this apologue? Were the angels right or wrong, or perhaps neither? Has the history of poetry been merely a deplorable tale of decadence, a progressive impoverishment and deterioration, through senility and second-childishness, towards an unlamented death in a bastard and[Pg 5] graceless prose? Or on the contrary has the gradual divorce of poetry from music and intoning meant its liberation for subtler and more rational, but no less truly poetic purposes? Before attempting to answer such questions, let us first look at the historical facts.

Homer, the fountain-head of Hellenic, and so of European poetry, though originally sung to the accompaniment of a lyre, was in later times intoned by professional rhapsodists, much as most Oriental poetry is intoned to this day. Greek lyrical poetry was of course always sung, whether chorally or by soloists. The dialogue of Greek plays was not sung, but was probably intoned, or at least declaimed in a highly conventional and rhythmical manner, which was perhaps not so very unlike the still-surviving tradition of the Japanese Nō play-actors. It is uncertain whether Horace intended his Odes to be read, or to be sung to the lyre: but Lucretius and Virgil undoubtedly[Pg 6] wrote their poems to be read. Virgil indeed gave public readings of his Eclogues. Probably, could we hear gramophone records of his performances, we should say that he was intoning rather than reading. However that may be, his example set a fashion that was disastrous for Latin poetry. His successors wrote more and more with a view to declamation, not in the noble Homeric manner, but in a style that was

both bombastic and amateurish; and so poetry soon degenerated into stale rhetoric and boredom.

When after the lapse of centuries poetry emerged again, rejuvenated, its infant energies were still schooled by the same two mistresses, music and intonation. The art of the rhapsodists of the Chanson de gestes may have been ruder than that of the Homeridae, but its æsthetic character and its social function were much the same. And for centuries the medieval lyric was intended[Pg 7] to be sung, not read. But with the multiplication of books the inevitable change began to operate, and the medium of poetry came more and more to be verse spoken and read, rather than performed.

The poetical drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was, from a historical point of view, no more than a brief and glorious episode. The declamation of dramatic verse may well have been a great art on the English, French and Spanish stage; but, if so, it has not survived into our own time, and shows little sign of resurrection. The development of polyphonic and instrumental music, while it has made modern opera and the Lieder of Schubert and Brahms possible, seems to have destroyed all hope of an equal marriage between music and lyrical poetry. Modern polyphony is a great art, but a tyrannous; and though a beautiful poem may still inspire a beautiful setting, the medium of the[Pg 8] resulting work of art will be musical, and not poetic. Verse no doubt can still be declaimed, whether on the stage or elsewhere; but actors have generally neither taste nor tradition; the poets themselves have seldom enough skill or training to be effective; and professional reciters are “abominable, unutterable, and worse.” Thus it would seem

that all the avenues which might lead to the public performance of poetry are blocked. There are either no roads at all, or those that exist are in the possession of road-hogs. Is this state of things a disaster or no? And if it be a disaster, are there any remedies to be found?

It is no doubt possible that so summary a diagnosis may be quite misleading. Chaucer, it might be objected, already wrote for readers; and so did Milton. Yet many of us find them, and some of their successors, still quite readable. Surely then great poetry can still be both produced and[Pg 9] enjoyed, even when it is completely divorced from music or intonation. All this may be true. Yet it is well to remember that Chaucer was the immediate successor on the one hand of the English and French minstrels, and on the other of Dante and Boccaccio, whose art in its turn grew directly out of that of the troubadours and the Italian minstrels. And who have been the inheritors of Chaucer’s art? Spenser, let us say, and in our time William Morris. Is it not possible that both Chaucer and Dante were peculiarly fortunate, in that their art had only quite recently emerged from the discipline of a more primitive musical stage? Their successors may be said to have deteriorated, the more purely literary they became, and the further

removed from the Pierian fountain-head of minstrelsy. Then again Milton, though more than any other English poet he was consciously the heir to all the ages, inherited his medium[Pg 10] and his metrical technique directly from Shakespeare’s verse that was written, not for reading, but for dramatic performance, although no doubt Milton modified it considerably for his own undramatic purposes. As to the inheritors of Milton’s art, such as Wordsworth and Keats, Matthew Arnold and Mr. Bridges, considerable as have been their achievements, are there not some signs, even in their own work, and still more in the tendency of recent experiments, of an impulse to break away from Miltonic and Shakespearian usage, as though the medium of blank verse could no longer be profitably explored, not at least in its old traditional form?

Nevertheless it might plausibly be maintained that although the poets of the future are not likely to repeat the particular successes of Chaucer and Milton and their school, there is no reason why they should not exploit the medium of spoken verse in quite new[Pg 11] ways, just as successfully as did their predecessors. First however it would be as well to become somewhat clearer as to the nature of this medium of spoken and silently read verse, and how it differs from more primitive poetry.

[Pg 13]

CHAPTER II The Medium of Spoken Verse

When we read Homer or Aeschylus to ourselves, we do not as a rule attempt to imagine what their poems must have sounded like, when they were recited or sung. We transpose them, as it were, into a medium more or less resembling that of modern poetry. Let us try to measure what our loss must be, and what, if any, the compensations. To begin with, the elements of music and intonation, and also, in drama, of acting and dancing, have disappeared altogether. The intensity and mass of our emotions cannot possibly be the same as they would have been, could we have heard and beheld the living reality of which the text is but a pale,[Pg 14] colourless shadow. It is true that rhythm is still there, and the general proportions of the whole: but rhythm and movement, unembodied and uninterpreted by performers, are far more difficult for us to realise by the less sensuous, more purely mental process of reading; while in the absence of musical and histrionic contrasts and emphasis, even the general proportions are likely to be somewhat

obscured. It is as though we were studying a photograph or a monochrome copy of a painted picture; or rather we might be said to experience the same kind of difficulties as when we are contemplating colourless fragments of Greek sculpture against the background of a museum wall, at a distance and in a light that were never intended for them by their creators. How different would be our emotions, could we see the figures of the Olympian or Parthenon pediments placed in their right relation to the architecture and to the landscape,[Pg 15] unmutilated, and glowing with colour which harmonised with that of the temples of which they were an organic part! It is a poor compensation that by long loving study we may perhaps become more intimate with the indestructible beauty of certain details, than we could ever have been, had we seen them less closely as elements of a complex work of art.

In some ways our plight with regard to ancient poetry is less unhappy. Many of our texts are unmutilated, and when we read the Oedipus to ourselves, it should seem to us as much an organic unity as Othello. There may also be a real gain in our sensitiveness to the more purely literary qualities, such as verbal, as distinguished from musical colour, the suggestive values of words and combinations of words, their overtones, and the complicated reverberations they evoke in our minds. As none of the work is being done for us by performers, our imagination, thrown[Pg 16] back on its own unaided resources, should be all the more wide awake and active. A line drawing is often a more effective stimulus to the mind than a painting, an unaccompanied violin sonata than an orchestral symphony; and in the same way poetry, when merely read to ourselves, though it cannot so imperiously dominate our physical senses, may well make a subtler and profounder appeal to the intellectual imagination.

All that has been said with regard to the reading of poetry that was intended to be sung or chanted, should be even more true of modern verse that has been written solely in order to be spoken or read. Such poetry is in fact composed in quite a different medium to the poetry of Homer and Aeschylus; and I must now try to make it clear what this medium seems to me to consist of. In order to do so, I must venture upon a brief excursion over the perilous quicksands of metrical theory. To save[Pg 17] time I shall speak dogmatically, while well aware that none of my assertions can at best do more than express a part of the truth.

When we read aloud a leading article, or any other piece of utilitarian and unemotional prose, we are not as a rule in the least aware of the rhythm of the sentences. But suppose we were to read the same leading article with a simulated mock-heroic emotion, we should then find, if we cared to observe, that we were now emphasising the before latent rhythm in two ways: we should be stressing certain syllables with greater force; and at the same time we should be making the intervals between these stressed syllables, not indeed rigidly equal, but far more nearly equal than they were, when we read the passage with the lack of emotion which it merited. And we shall find that the same thing happens whenever we read prose that genuinely moves us. Emotion in fact always[Pg 18] tends to regularise and emphasise rhythm, even in prose. Now the main function of verse is deliberately, by its structure, to regularise rhythm, and so to create emotion artificially. Let us take a normal English verse: “The curfew tolls the knell of parting day.” The five stressed syllables, cur-, tolls, knell,

par-, day, are felt to be equi-distant in time. No doubt they are in fact only approximately equi-distant. The human voice is not an instrument like a piano or a violin, by means of which we can divide time into mathematically equal spaces. However, the normal bars, or feet, are felt to be equal in time; and that is sufficient. The rhythmically indeterminate words and phrases of everyday speech are forced into this mould, or rather stretched upon this framework; and that process is a continuous series of Procrustean operations, of slight lengthenings or contractions, and imperceptible changes of stress and emphasis. Almost the[Pg 19] most important difference between good and bad verse is that in good verse this process of moulding and stretching words increases their emotional expressiveness, whereas in bad verse it does not. Of course the versification of a good poem is never continuously regular. Accents are dropped or displaced; unstressed syllables are left out, or extra syllables inserted. But we are, or should be, always conscious of the underlying pattern, the

ideal rhythmical base.

Such metrical irregularities are necessary not merely in order to prevent monotony: for any writer who knows his business they are a powerful instrument for controlling and modifying the emotional values of language. In Milton’s line,

there are only three stressed syllables. If these words were to occur in a newspaper[Pg 20] article we should probably read them so rapidly that they would not sound like a blank verse at all. In order that they may become a verse, we must either put artificial stresses upon to and of, and read, “Trans- | fíx us | tó the | bóttom | óf this | gúlf,” which, though formally a blank verse, is not English; or else we must linger upon certain syllables, and stretch them out sufficiently to compensate for the absent stresses: “Trans | fíx us | to the | bóttom | of this | gúlf.” What happens here is something of the same nature as syncopation in music. The two pairs of syllables, -fix us and bottom, are each dwelt upon and prolonged, so that they expand and bulge over from their own bars into the bars that follow them, and so push away the unemphatic syllables to and of from the positions at the beginning of the bar, where a stress would normally occur. We are in fact compelled, if the line is to make metrical[Pg 21] sense, to read the words slowly and spaciously, which

produces the rhetorical and emotional effect that Milton intended. The following lines from Milton are instances of the opposite process of forcing into the rhythmical mould words which in ordinary prose speech would claim more elbow-room than the metre allows them:

The natural way of spacing these words, if they were prose, would be: “Rócks, | cáves, | lákes, | féns, | bógs, | déns, and | shádes of | déath.” But the metrical framework compels us to crowd these monosyllables together, and read them twice as rapidly as we should in prose. This hurry and constipation produces an effect of effort and strain, which is just what is required. An extreme case of[Pg 22] this power of metre to mould and so give life to a phrase, is the line,

If this be read as a line with four stresses, thus: “And | máde him | bów to the | góds of his | wíves,” it is then not a Miltonic blank verse at all. Yet, since we cannot read it, “And | máde him | bów tó | thé góds | óf his | wíves,” the only thing to be done is to put a kind of level staccato accent on the last six syllables, thus: “And máde him bów tó thé góds óf hís wíves,” which spaces the words out, so that they sound like a blank verse, or at least do the best they can to sound like one. Thus not only is our ear sufficiently reminded of the underlying metrical base, but we are obliged to give to the phrase a kind of fierce indignant or ironic emphasis, which again is, I think, exactly what Milton intended. I could multiply instances;[Pg 23] but these should be sufficient to illustrate the way in which verse, if it be well written, adds imaginative expressiveness to words, by forcing us to space them out and emphasise them, till they acquire new values that they would not have had in prose.

Another obvious function of a constant metrical framework is that of heightening the values of words and phrases by mere position, much as the structure of a cathedral may do with sculpture. Any passage of Milton, or of Keats’ mature work, might be used to illustrate this principle.

If then the main function of spoken verse be this of building a framework upon which we may place words in significant and beautiful relations both with each other and with the rhythmical structure itself, and upon which we may also stretch out and contract them, in order to increase their emotional values, it would seem to be necessary that this framework should[Pg 24] be definite and constant. And it is this necessity that is, I think, the chief objection to some modern experiments in free verse. Whatever advantages there may be in emancipation from regularity, we should not forget the price that has to be paid for it in the loss or diminution of this power of moulding and vivifying language. It is true that there have been many successful experiments in more or less free verse, from the choruses in Samson Agonistes to, let us say, Mr. Waley’s translations of early Chinese poetry; but I suggest that as a general rule the success is in proportion to the degree in which we are made aware of a fixed metrical base underlying the irregularities. But what are we to think of this

kind of thing?

Have these words, by being divided[Pg 25] into two lines, acquired any kind of value they would not have had if they had been printed as prose, in which case they might be enjoyed as an amusing satirical outburst? But it would almost seem that at times free verse is no more than an excuse for uttering futilities and ineptitudes that we should not have dared to express in honest prose.