Middle Greek period, there came in a general tendency to relax the exact value of sounds and syllables, and to introduce accent, which is a measure of quality rather than of quantity. A syllable, in modern verse, is heavy or light, according as it is accented or unaccented—that is to say, according as it receives stress from the voice or not. In the word “tulip,” for instance, the syllables are of equal length, but the accent is strongly upon the first. It is mainly a question of force with us, not of time as with the ancients. There is, however, an element of quantity in modern verse, as there was of accent in ancient verse. The foot, in modern verse, takes a less prominent place in itself than it did in Greece, and is regarded more in relation to the whole line of which it makes a part. A mere counting of syllables is useless. In Milton’s
“From haunted spring and dale,
Edg’d with poplar pale,”
an ancient scholiast would have found it impossible to discover any harmony, for he would have had no means of measuring the value of the heavy accent on “edg’d,” followed by a pause, and would have demanded another syllable in the second line to turn the whole into verse. The first poet to whom it occurred that it was needless to attach such predominant importance to quantity was Gregory of Nazianzen (d. 389), a Christian bishop of the Greek Church. In two important poems by Gregory all prosodical discipline is found to have disappeared, and the rule of verse has come to be accentual, with a heavy stress on the penultimate syllable. About the same time, the Greek fabulist Babrius employed a choliambic metre having a strong accent on the penultimate. The poets of the transition loved to cultivate a loose iambic trimeter in twelve syllables, and shorter octo-syllabic forms called “anacreontic,” although they were far enough from repeating the splendid effects of Anacreon. In these the old laws of quantity were more and more generally superseded by stress, and in all this we may see the dawn of the free accentual versification of modern Europe.
Romance Languages.—The prosodies of Provence, France, Italy and Spain were derived from the decayed and simplified forms of Latin verse by a slow and sometimes almost intangible transition. In these modern metres, however, when they came to be independent, it was found that all syllables in the line were of equal value, and that the sole criterion of measure was the number of these in each case. The relics of ancient versification, deprived of all the regulated principles of rhythmical art, received in return the ornament of obligatory and difficult rhyme, without which the weak rhythm itself would practically have disappeared. A new species of rhythm, depending on the varieties of mood, was introduced, and stanzaic forms of great elaboration and beauty were invented. The earliest standard work which exhibits in full the definitions of Romance versification is the Leys d’ Amors of an unknown Provençal grammarian, written in 1356.[1] Another medieval treatise of great importance is the De Vulgari Eloquentia, written by Dante in 1304. There is this difference between these two works, that the former, written long after the flourishing period of the troubadours, analyses what has been accomplished in the past, while the other, standing at the starting-point of Italian poetry, describes what has to be done in the future. Both of these authorities quote the ten-syllable line of five equal feet as most to be admired and as forming the basis of poetry. But the octosyllabic, almost in the earliest times, became a main favourite with the poets, and may be said to be the most frequently used of all lyrical measures in medieval Romance poetry. The earliest specimen of all, however, a mere refrain excepted, is the fragment of the Provençal “Boethius,” and this is decasyllabic, like all French poems of the Charlemagne cycle. The typical French heroic verse, the alexandrine of six feet, is not found in the old epic poetry. In Provençal and early French the position of the caesura in each line was fixed by strict rules; in Italian these were relaxed. Dante gives very minute, although somewhat obscure, accounts of the essence and invention of stanzaic form (cobla in Provençal), in which the Romance poetries excelled from the first. The stanza was a group of lines formed on a regular and recurrent arrangement of rhymes. It was natural that the poets of Provence should carry to an extreme the invention of stanzaic forms, for their language was extravagantly rich in rhymes. They invented complicated poetic structures of stanza within stanza, and the canzo as written by the great troubadours is a marvel of ingenuity such as could scarcely be repeated in any other language. The extreme fulness and elaboration of the Provençal poets, however, has been serviceable as placing a very high ideal of structural skill before the poets of all succeeding times, and it was of immense value in directing the experiments of the earliest poet-artists of Italy and France.
In French poetry, successive masters corrected the national versification and drew closer round it the network of rules and principles. The alexandrine was invented in the 12th century, as a counterpart to the hexameter of the ancients, by Alexander de Bernay. A great part is played in French metre by masculine and feminine verse: the former is a verse which closes with a letter which is not e mute; the latter a verse which closes with e mute, or with e mule followed by s, or by the consonants nt. Masculine rhyme is that which combines two masculine verses, and feminine that which unites two feminine verses; and in regular verse such couplets must be alternated. Elision is the rule by which, in the scansion of a verse, the letter e at the end of a word is suppressed when it immediately precedes e mute or a non-aspirated h. These and other immutable rules were laid down by Malherbe, and by Boileau in his Art Poétique (1674), and for more than a century they were implicitly followed by all writers of verse. It was the genius of Victor Hugo which first enfranchised the prosody of France, not by rebelling against the rules, but by widening their scope in all directions, and by asserting that, in spite of its limitations, French verse was a living thing. The richness of Hugo’s rhymes is proverbial, and the boldness and flow of his alexandrines exceeded everything which had been so much as dreamed of before his time. The revolution he brought about proved universal, and disciples like Theophile Gautier could, say, in the face of the critics and grammarians of the classic school, “If we suspected that Victor Hugo had written a single bad verse, we should not dare to admit it to ourselves, in a cellar, without a candle.” Boileau and Hugo, therefore, have been the two lawgivers of the French Parnassus. The rules of French verse being, in fact, very severe, and weakness, excess of audacity and negligences of all sorts being very harshly repressed, it is not surprising that, as the personal authority of Hugo declined, various projects were started for lightening the burden of prosodical discipline. Since 1880 those projects have been numerous, and a great many poets of genuine inspiration have written in different forms of what is called “free verse.”
Teutonic.—In very early times the inhabitants of the Germanic countries developed a prosodical system which owed nothing whatever to classical sources. The finest examples of this Teutonic verse are found in Icelandic and in Anglo-Saxon. The line consisted of two sections, each containing two strongly stressed syllables, and of these four long syllables three were alliterated. It is plain that there can be detected in ancient Teutonic verse but three severe and consistent rules, viz. that the section, the strong accentuation, and above all the alliteration must be preserved. We find this to be the case in High and Low German, Icelandic, Anglo-Saxon, and in the revived alliterative English poetry of the 14th century, such as “Piers Plowman.” There are differences, however, which depend on such facts as that the Icelandic poems are mainly lyrical and the Anglo-Saxon epics are narrative. As time went on, under the pressure of south European practice, alliteration ceased to be regarded as the sole and sufficient ornament of Teutonic verse, and rhyme was occasionally used, but this was a concession which proved fatal to the type. With this use of rhyme, the High German poetry begins to cease, while England becomes the centre of
- ↑ But see the article Provençal Literature.
