Wu-river[201] stream mouth evening sun sink,
North look Liao-Tung,[202] not see home.
Steam whistle several noise, sky-earth boundless,
Float float one reed out Middle-Kingdom.
These twenty-eight syllables may be clumsily interpreted: “At the mouth of the Yangtsze River, as the sun is about to sink, I look north toward Liao-Tung but do not see my home. The steam-whistle shrills several times on the boundless expanse where meet sky and earth. The steamer, floating gently like a hollow reed, sails out of the Middle Kingdom.”[203] But we must not envy Chinese its terseness unduly. Our more sprawling mode of expression is capable of its own beauties, and the more compact luxuriance of Latin style has its loveliness too. There are almost as many natural ideals of literary style as there are languages. Most of these are merely potential, awaiting the hand of artists who will never come. And yet in the recorded texts of primitive tradition and song there are many passages of unique vigor and beauty. The structure of the language often forces an assemblage of concepts that impresses us as a stylistic discovery. Single Algonkin words are like tiny imagist poems. We must be careful not to exaggerate a freshness of content that is at least half due to our freshness of approach, but the possibility is indicated none the less of utterly alien literary styles, each distinctive with its disclosure of the search of the human spirit for beautiful form.
Probably nothing better illustrates the formal dependence of literature on language than the prosodic aspect of poetry. Quantitative verse was entirely natural to the Greeks, not merely because poetry grew up in connection with the chant and the dance,[204] but because alternations of long and short syllables were keenly live facts in the daily economy of the language. The tonal accents, which were only secondarily stress phenomena, helped to give the syllable its quantitative individuality. When the Greek meters were carried over into Latin verse, there was comparatively little strain, for Latin too was characterized by an acute awareness of quantitative distinctions. However, the Latin accent was more markedly stressed than that of Greek. Probably, therefore, the purely quantitative meters modeled after the Greek were felt as a shade more artificial than in the language of their origin. The attempt to cast English verse into Latin and Greek molds has never been successful. The dynamic basis of English is not quantity,[205] but stress, the alternation of accented and unaccented syllables. This fact gives English verse an entirely different slant and has determined the development of its poetic forms, is still responsible for the evolution of new forms. Neither stress nor syllabic weight is a very keen psychologic factor in the dynamics of French. The syllable has great inherent sonority and does not fluctuate significantly as to quantity and stress. Quantitative or accentual metrics would be as artificial in French as stress metrics in classical Greek or quantitative or purely syllabic metrics in English. French prosody was compelled to develop on the basis of unit syllable-groups. Assonance, later rhyme, could not but prove a welcome, an all but necessary, means of articulating or sectioning the somewhat spineless flow of sonorous syllables. English was hospitable to the French suggestion of rhyme, but did not seriously need it in its rhythmic economy. Hence rhyme has always been strictly subordinated to stress as a somewhat decorative feature and has been frequently dispensed with. It is no psychologic accident that rhyme came later into English than in French and is leaving it sooner.[206] Chinese verse has developed along very much the same lines as French verse. The syllable is an even more integral and sonorous unit than in French, while quantity and stress are too uncertain to form the basis of a metric system. Syllable-groups—so and so many syllables per rhythmic unit—and rhyme are therefore two of the controlling factors in Chinese prosody. The third factor, the alternation of syllables with level tone and syllables with inflected (rising or falling) tone, is peculiar to Chinese.
To summarize, Latin and Greek verse depends on the principle of contrasting weights; English verse, on the principle of contrasting stresses; French verse, on the principles of number and echo; Chinese verse, on the principles of number, echo, and contrasting pitches. Each of these rhythmic systems proceeds from the unconscious dynamic habit of the language, falling from the lips of the folk. Study carefully the phonetic system of a language, above all its dynamic features, and you can tell what kind of a verse it has developed—or, if history has played pranks with its phychology, what kind of verse it should have developed and some day will.
Whatever be the sounds, accents, and forms of a language, however these lay hands on the shape of its literature, there is a subtle law of compensations that gives the artist space. If he is squeezed a bit here, he can swing a free arm there. And generally he has rope enough to hang himself with, if he must. It is not strange that this should be so. Language is itself the collective art of expression, a summary of thousands upon thousands of individual intuitions. The individual goes lost in the collective creation, but his personal expression has left some trace in a certain give and flexibility that are inherent in all collective works of the human spirit. The language is ready, or can be quickly made ready, to define the artist’s individuality. If no literary artist appears, it is not essentially because the language is too weak an instrument, it is because the culture of the people is not favorable to the growth of such personality as seeks a truly individual verbal expression.
[Index]
Note. Italicized entries are names of languages or groups of languages.
A
- Abbreviation of stem, [(26)]
- [Accent], stress, [(26)] [(36)] [(48)] [(55)] [(61)] [(64)]
- “Accent,” [(44)]
- “Adam’s apple,” [(48)]
- Adjective, [(123)] [(124)] [(125)]
- Affixation, [(26)] [(64)] [(70-6)]
- Affixing languages, [(133)] [(134)] [(137)]
- African languages, pitch in, [(55)]
- [Agglutination], [(140-3)]
- Agglutinative languages, [(130)] [(136-8)] [(139)] [(146)] [(147)] [(148)] [(150)] [(151)] [(155)]
- Agglutinative-fusional, [(148)] [(150)]
- Agglutinative-isolating, [(148)] [(150)]
- [Algonkin] languages (N. Amer.), [(70)] [(74)] [(134)] [(151)] [(229)] [(244)]
- Alpine race, [(223)] [(225)]
- [Analogical leveling], [(193)] [(197)] [(200-3)]
- Analytic tendency, [(135)] [(136)] [(148)] [(150)] [(151)] [(154)] [(216)] [(217)]
- Angles, [(224)] [(225)]
- Anglo-Saxon, [(28)] [(175)] [(183)] [(185)] [(186-8)] [(191)] [(197)] [(198)] [(201)]
- Anglo-Saxon:
- Annamite (S.E. Asia), [(66)] [(150)] [(205)]
- Apache (N. Amer.), [(71)]
- Arabic, [(76)] [(77)] [(135)] [(151)] [(207)]
- Armenian, [(163)] [(212)]
- Art, [(236-40)]
- Articulation:
- Articulations:
- Aryan. See [Indo-European].
- Aspect, [(114)]
- Association of concepts and speech elements, [(38)] [(39)]
- Associations fundamental to speech, [(10)] [(11)]
- [Athabaskan] languages (N. Amer.), [(6)] [(71)] [(77)] [(83)] [(105)] [(209)] [(214)] [(219)] [(228)] [(229)]
- Athabaskans, cultures of, [(228)]
- Attic dialect, [(162)]
- [Attribution], [(101)]
- Auditory cycle in language, [(17)]
- Australian culture, [(221)] [(222)]
- Avestan, [(175)]