RHYME Less than a God they thought there could not dwell Within the hollow of that shell, That spoke so sweetly and so well. What passion cannot Music raise and quell? 267 It hinders the movement to be brought back so often to the same point, and if one may criticize this stanza at all it would be on the score of the verses being too tightly bound together. Another stanza with a strong backward reference is the quatrain of the form aaba, as in Omar Khayyam: The moving Finger writes; and, having writ, Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it. The quatrain begins with a rhyming couplet, and then adds a line which does not rhyme, and which the reader half supposes to be the first of another rhyming couplet. When, however, the fourth line comes, and, instead of rhyming with the third, reverts to the second and first lines, one gets a sense of frustration, as if the last line had tried to escape from the established rhyme of the first couplet and could not. The quatrains of Omar are all a remarkable illustration of rhythm and rhyme suiting the meaning of a poem. The even flow of the iambics, and the fateful recurrence of the rhyme, consort supremely well with the meaning of the verses and their melancholy philosophy of the inevitable. Rhyme, we said, not only unifies a stanza, but it tends to make a difference in its rate of movement. Stetson, who has made an experimental study of the point, says that rhyme has the effect of shortening the pause at the And still she slept an azure-lidded sleep, In blanched linen, smooth, and lavender'd, Of candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd And lucent syrops, tinct with cinnamon; etc. Thus a fullness of reference to elementary sensation is one of the characteristics of poetic as distinct from prose thought. Poetry and Melancholy. We have mentioned some of the means by which the poet expresses emotion and gives it an agreeable and appropriate setting. It remains to inquire whether one kind of emotion is more fitted than others for poetical expression. Poe says that melancholy is the most legitimate of all the poetical tones. Woodberry writes that sadness prevails in the lyric and in the lyrical temperament. Is there any reason for this? The only explanation that occurs to the present writer is that the supremely beautiful always carries with it so great suggestiveness that the artist and the observer may both feel a sense of painful fullness of meaning. Moreover, one of the characteristics of esthetic consciousness is the absorption of the subject in the object, and it would seem that a complete surrender of this kind is not effected without a pang. This, however, is no more true of poetry than of any other form of art. Whether there is any specific reason why poetry generally, or the lyric in particular, should find melancholy its most legitimate tone would be an interesting inquiry for the psychology of art. POETRY 271 READING REFERENCES WATTS: "Poetry." Art. in Cyc. Brit. POE: "The Poetic Principle." GUMMERE: "Handbook of Poetics." "The Beginnings of Poetry." LEWIS: "The Principles of English Verse." LANIER: "The Science of English Verse." DABNEY: "The Musical Basis of Verse." STETSON: "Rhythm and Rhyme." Harvard Psychol. Studies, vol. i. CHAPTER XVI THE DRAMA THE germ of the drama, it is said, is the representation of an action by an action. But since all life is action and not all life is dramatic, we must still ask what sort of action can be adapted to stage presentation. In the first place we are told that there has got to be a struggle of opposing forces (Freytag et al.), but here, too, we shall need a further restriction of the term. Every voluntary act implies an opposition of forces more or less serious; indeed, in order to have consciousness at all there must be some interruption in our established habits, and a consequent attempt to reorganize our activities. Every voluntary act or decision, then, represents a conflict of impulses or a struggle between different interests. Now there are a great many such struggles, and some of them most interesting to us all, which would not be in the least suitable for stage production. A moral struggle might be carried on without any perceptible outward sign. A ruler weighing the interest of his country against the advantage of his friends might go through the conflict simply within his own mind, without showing any of the steps by which he comes to his final decision. In order to make a struggle dramatic the opposing forces must be in a manner personified and rendered pictorial, as well. When the conflict is between person and person the case is clear. But even when the case is more ideal, as a question between patriotism and religion, there must be a personal advocate for the ideal interest. In other words, the stage demands the presence of people, and these people must be working, whether consciously or not, toward opposed ends. Their action also must be such as appeals to the eye; there must be made apparent before us the interaction of mind upon mind. Writers on the drama point out that not only must there be a struggle, but that the law of cause and effect must be patent in the action. We might put this in another way and say that no action is really presented to us unless both a stimulus and response are exhibited. For instance, we may see A walk up to B and hit him; but this we cannot accept as a complete action in itself; we do not understand really what the action is until we find out the reason which led to it. If we find that A is a bully who simply wanted to pick a fight, that makes it one kind of action; but if we discover that he did it because B needed hitting, that makes it another kind. The physical performance may look to be the same in the two cases, but the "act" is quite different. The act is constituted by stimulus and response together. Obviously it is unsatisfactory to an audience to get only one side of an action; to find it significant they must know both the encitement and the reaction. The demand for causality in a play is but one aspect of the demand for unity or coherence. 1 The Nature of Tragedy. Tragedy, then," said Aristotle, "is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete and of a certain magnitude; in language embel 1 Butcher, "Aristotle's Theory of Poetry and Fine Art." |