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\ I LIBRARY V OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. 33114- THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE A SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF THE PRINCIPLES OF POETIC COMPOSITION By J. P. DABNEY ITY LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO, 91 AND 93 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK LONDON AND BOMBAY 1901 HAL COPYRIGHT, 1901, BY LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. All rights reserved Press of J. J. Little & Co. Astor Place, New York See ' ' deep enough and you see musically. CARLYLE. PREFACE I WAS led to the inception of this work by my recogni- tion of the need a need felt grievously in my own stud- ies, but even more in the attempt to direct those of others of a working hypothesis of the Science of Verse which should be at once rational, coherent, and simple such a working hypothesis as every music student has at his right hand. The study of all the a priori text-books founded as they are upon a complicated system which will not fit our modern verse proved a weariness and vexation to the spirit; for, from Puttenham (" Arte of English Poesie," 1589) to our own day, although there is much delightful reading upon the essence of verse, there is little light upon the paths of metre, but endless ignes fatui. To follow the various disquisitions of the various metrists is like wandering through a vast Daedalian labyrinth, wherein, if at any time some true clew seems to offer itself, it will be presently snipped away and another diametrical one substituted in the all ; and, end, lead no-whither. This, because in every case the supposed true way has been an artificial and arbitrary one, not the natural one founded law the laws of like upon primary ; primary verse, those of music, being laid upon the bed-rock of acoustics. The first clear note of truth we hear struck is from " " Coleridge, when, in his preface to Christabel (1816), " he announced that he had discovered a new principle of versification to of This declara- ; wit, that accents." " tion raised a storm of abusive criticism from the Edin- Vlll PREFACE burgh Review," and from other quarters, and there the matter would seem to have ended ; but he had, however elementarily, made as great a discovery as Sir Isaac Newton, when, from a falling apple, he deduced the law of gravitation. " In 1881 Sidney Lanier published his brilliant Science of English Verse," this being the first deliberate attempt to analyse verse upon its true lines; viz., by musical notation. Lanier's book did not have the revolutionis- ing effect which the promulgation of so great and radical should have had because the a principle ; partly, perhaps, book is somewhat abstruse for the general reader, but also partly, it seems to me, because it is not always wholly logical with itself. Many of the verse-notations, using as they do the foot-divisions and not the true bar-divi- sions measured from accent to accent, would seem to be an attempt to reconcile quantity with accent; whereas, belonging as they do to different periods, with their differing metrical standards, they have no correlation. Also, I do not comprehend the classing together of such " " diverse verse as Hamlet's Soliloquy," Poe's Raven," " " and Tennyson's Charge of the Light Brigade as all in 3-beat measure; because, as I have pointed out (page 49), the 3-beat rhythm cannot exist without such a pre- dominance of three notes (syllables) to a bar as shall give the whole verse its organic stamp. Lanier's supreme glory is that he was a pioneer. Like Columbus, he plunged boldly into the unknown and dis- covered a new world; and the world is ours, to possess as we will. In the present work, besides the exposition of primary verse-rhythm, as illustrated by the bar-measurements of music, I have endeavoured to elucidate a quality of verse I noticed in work on metre which have never seen any ; PREFACE ix viz., motion, and the dynamic relation of verse-motion to its theme. The purpose of this book being analytic, and not syn- thetic with the mechanism of verse rather than ; dealing with its meaning though the two are not wholly separa- ble I must be exonerated from any intention of trench- ing upon the realm of literary criticism, except as inci- dental to the exposition and development of the logical lines of my subject. In all arts there is the art of the art and the science of the art. The former concerns itself chiefly with the sub- of the artist the with his concrete jective genius ; latter, or method method another name for expression, ; being universal law, and so reducible to an exact science. Truth, wherever we find it, is superlatively simple. Through whatever channel we follow the developments of human thought, we shall find it to be a denuding process, a removing of the dead husks which ignorance or superstition or convention have folded about the precious kernel. All true art is at bottom unified and concrete; so also the best exposition, or science, of art will be unified and concrete. " In this treatise upon the Musical Basis of Verse" I have endeavoured to state, rationally, coherently, and simply, what seem to me to be the principles of verse- technique, these principles being, finally, purely a matter of vibration. I have to acknowledge the courtesy of the various copyright owners who have allowed me to use poems and extracts in illustration of my text: Mrs. Fields; Mrs. Lanier; Mr. John Lane (Mr. William Watson's " " " Hymn to the Sea and England, My Mother," and " Mr. Watts Dunton's The Sonnet's Voice"); Messrs. X PREFACE Macmillan & Co. (Tennyson, Arnold, and Kingsley); Messrs. A. & C. Black and The Macmillan Co. (Mr. Symonds's "Greek Poets"); Messrs. Small, Maynard & Co., and Messrs. Charles Scribner's Sons. Permission has also been obtained from Messrs. Ellis & Elvey " " " to quote D. G. Rossetti's The Portrait and The Wine of Circe," and from Messrs. Smith, Elder & Co., to use extracts from copyright poems by Robert Browning. CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. THE INHERENT RELATION BETWEEN Music AND VERSE . i II. THE ARTS OF SOUND 16 III. DIFFERENTIATED MOTION 60 IV. MELODY . 99 V. METRIC FORMS 134 VI. HEROICS 189 VII. BEAUTY AND POWER . 242 !TY The Musical Basis of Verse CHAPTER I THE INHERENT RELATION BETWEEN MUSIC AND VERSE, HISTORICALLY CONSIDERED IN the beginning, out of the mists of Time, hand in hand, came those twin sisters of Art, Music and Verse. Man, in the exuberant infancy of the race, instinctively danced, and as he danced he sang. The rhythm of his lips gave the rhythm to his foot, and the rhythm of his foot gave the rhythm to his lips; the two interchangeably linked. Thus was the birth of literature in music. When we study the history of primitive peoples, we find that their first instinctive expression before their c ^ ose un i n and sense the of EX ressionof with, of, mystery primitive nature has been dulled by developing civilisa- tion is poetic. Imagination dominates in all nascent societies, and the first concrete expression of im- agination is song, or more correctly, chanting. It is either connected with religious rites or the rehearsal of the deeds of local heroes. Not infrequently this is accompanied by dance. The ghost-dances, snake-dances, and others, of our Indian tribes, are instances in point in our own day, The older races connected the origin of music with " religion. Emil Nauman, in his History of Music," says : 2 THE MUSICAL BASIS OF VERSE " ' In the Rigveda,' one of the four primordial books of the Brahmins, written in Sanscrit and known under the ' oldest Hindu name of the Vedas,' there are hymns intended songs f or mus j c> The existence of these books is supposed to date from the year 1500 B.C. Their ' (the Hindus') oldest songs are to be found in the Vedas/ The sacred songs contained in these holy books were saved from destruction by being written in verse, com- mitted to memory and chanted a custom common to the civilised peoples of antiquity. We also meet in India with musical dramas, the invention of which is attributed to the demi-god Bharata. Gitagowinda, an idyllic musical drama of very ancient origin, which tells of Krishna's quarrels with the beautiful Radha, consists of the songs of the two lovers, alternating with the chorus of friends of the Radha." (Book I., chap, i.) Of the Phrygians, Lydians, and Phoenicians, Nauman " further says: Amongst all these people we find sculp- tured reliefs and mural paintings of women and maidens performing on different instruments, singers beating time with their hands, and dancing youths and maidens play- ing the tambourine." (Book I., chap, ii.) " Carsten Niebuhr notices the custom resorted to by Egyptian men and women so often represented on the oldest Egyptian monuments of marking the rhyth- mical measures of their song by clapping hands in the absence of drums to serve this purpose." (Nauman, Book I., chap, ii.) But it is when we approach the high civilisation of the Greeks that we find the finest efflorescence of the unified arts. I cannot do better here than to insert " some passages from John Addington Symonds' Greek Poets": -" Casting a glance backward into the remote shadows RELATION BETWEEN MUSIC AND VERSE 3 of antiquity, we find that lyrical poetry, like all art in Greece, took its origin in connection with primitive Na- of referred to Musicai ture-worship. The song Linus, rituals of by Homer in his description of the shield of Achilles, was a lament sun^ by reapers for the beautiful dead youth who symbolised the decay of sum- mer's prime.

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