the room, like one caught in a trap. To do him justice, he had not thought how an alliance with the St. Lions would advance his future. And to do him justice, again, the boyish view of life he had retained while he carried his future. laboriously had prevented his conceiving that a self-possessed woman of the world might fall in love with him. He had not, one must suppose, been greatly attracted by the lady. The atmosphere about her had vaguely attracted him; no doubt he had enough of the national character to remember her connections. One must suppose he was not attracted by herself, for it is certain that he looked alarmed. What on earth was he expected to say? His thoughts flew to Egeria Langton, that sure rock of intellectual conversation. His trial was brief, for Mrs. St. Lion had seen the look of alarm. Who can say what were her thoughts in the second or two that she watched him? Her mouth twitched ever so slightly; ever so slightly she raised her eyebrows. "That's a reductio ad absurdum, isn't it?" she said with a laugh, while the gentleman noticed her pronunciation of the Latin. "But we've really had a good many charming talks about politics; I'm sure I have learnt a great deal from them. I'm afraid this will be the last for some time. I have to go to Paris for several months, and in fact I asked you to-day to say good-bye." So Rupert Smallwood said good-bye. "After all," said Egeria Langton, "there are no pleasures so great as the pleasures of the intellect." "Certainly," Rupert Smallwood said. Everything else brings trouble and disappointment with it. A man has his profession, and of course other things than pure intellect come into that. He may be ambitious, and so on," he looked inscrutable; "but outside that only intellectual pleasures, intellectual conversation, and so on are worth while. Men, intellectual men, I mean, who lead many-sided lives, like Palmerston or Melbourne-er-regret it sooner or later." The statesman sighed and Miss Langton wondered if he had had a romance. It was a handsome face. G. S. STREET. LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS. I AM the son of a poet, and I have tried very hard all my life not to be a poet myself, if poet means a man who tries to make his thoughts dance gracefully in the chains of metre and rhyme. In my own very prosaic work I have had to suffer all my life from suppressed poetry, as one suffers from suppressed gout. Poets will, no doubt, protest most emphatically against so low a view of their art. They assure us that they never feel their chains, and that they are perfectly free in giving expression to their thoughts in rhyme and metre. Some of the more honest among them have even gone further and confessed that their best thoughts had often been suggested to them by the rhyme. Platen may be quite right when he says: Denn was an allen Orten als ewig sich erweist Das ist in gebundenen Worten ein ungebundener Geist. True, very true. You may get that now and then, but in our modern languages it is but seldom that thought soars up quite free on the wings of rhyme. Many and many a thought falls down because of the weight of the rhyme, many and many a thought remains altogether unspoken, because it will not submit to the strait jacket of the rhyme; and if some brilliant thoughts have really been suggested by the rhyme, would it not be better if they had been suggested by something else, whether you call it mind or soul? The greatest masters of rhyme, such as Browning in English or Rückert in German, and even H. Heine, often fall victims to their own mastery. They spoil their poems in order to show that they can find a rhyme for anything and everything, however grotesque the rhyme may be. I remember once being bold enough to ask Tennyson what was the use or excuse of rhyme. He was not offended, but was quite ready with his answer, “Rhyme helps the memory," he said—and that answer was as honest as it was true. But what is useful for one purpose, for the purpose of recollecting, may be anything but useful for other purposes, it may be even hurtful, and in our case it has certainly proved hurtful again and again to the natural flow and expression of thought and feeling. Nor should I venture to say a word against Platen's gebundene Worte. It was only the very necessity of finding a word to answer to time which led me to speak of chains of rhyme. Gebundene Worte are not necessarily rhymed words, they are measured words, and these are, no doubt, quite natural and quite right for poetry. Metre is measure, and metrical utterance, in that sense, was not only more natural for the expression of the highest thoughts, but was probably everywhere more ancient also than prose. In every literature, as far as we know, poetry came first, prose second. Inspired utterance requires, nay produces, rhythmic movements not only of the voice (song and prosodia), but of the body also (dance). In Greek, chorus means dance, measured movement, and the Greek choruses were originally dances; nay, it can be proved that these dancing movements formed really the first metres of true poetry. Hence, it was quite natural that David should have danced before the Lord with all his might. Language itself bears witness to the fact that the oldest metres were the steps and movements of dancers. As the old dances consisted of steps, the ancient metres consisted of feet. Even we ourselves still speak of feet, not because we understand what it means, but simply because the Greeks and Romans spoke of feet. The ancient poets of the Veda also speak of feet, and they seem to have been quite aware why they spoke of metrical feet, for in the names of some of their metres we still find clear traces of the steps of the dances which accompanied their poems. Trishtubh, one of their ancient metres, meant three-step; Anushtubh, the later Sloka, meant by-step or Reigen. The last syllables or steps of each line were called * See M. M., "Vedic Hymns," S.B.E., vol. xxxii. p. 96, the Vritta, or the turn, originally the turn of the dancers, who seem to have been allowed to move more freely till they came to the end of one movement. Then, before they turned, or while they turned, they marked the steps more sharply and audibly, either as jambic or as trochaic, and afterwards marched back again with greater freedom. Hence in ancient Sanskrit the end or turn of each line was under stricter rules as to long and short steps, or long and short syllables, whereas greater freedom was allowed for the rest of a line. Thus Sanskrit I'ritta, the turn, came to mean the metre of the whole line, just as in Latin we have the same word versus, literally the turn, then the whole line. A strophe also was originally a turning, to be followed by the antistrophe or the return, all ideas derived from dancing. The ancient Sanskrit name for metre and metrical or measured speed was Khandas. The verb Khand would correspond phonetically to Latin scandere, in the sense. of marching, as in a-scendere, to march upward, to mount, and de-scendere, to march downward, all expressing the same idea of measured movement, but not of rhyme or jingle. These movements were free and natural in the beginning; they became artificial when they became traditional, and we find in such works as the Sanskrit Vritta-ratnâkara, "the treasury of verse," every kind of monstrosity which was perpetrated by Hindu poets of the Renaissance period, and perpetrated, it must be confessed, with wonderful adroitness. But I must not tire my friends with these metrical mysteries, What I want them to know is that in the most ancient Aryan poetry which we possess there is no trace of rhyme, except here and there by accident, and that everywhere in the history of the poetry of the Aryas, rhyme, as essential to poetry, is a very late invention. It is the same in Semitic languages, though in Semitic as well as in Aryan speech, in fact, wherever grammatical forms are expressed chiefly by means of termin ations, rhyme even in prose is almost inevitable. And this was no doubt the origin of rhyme. In languages where terminations of declension and conjugation and most derivative suffixes have retained a full-bodied and sonorous form, it was difficult to avoid the jingle of rhyme. In Latin, which abounds in such constantly recurring endings as orum, arum, ibus, amus, atis, amini, tatem, tatibus, inibus, &c., good prose writers had actually to be warned against allowing their sentences to rhyme, while poets found it very easy to add these ornamental tails to their measured lines. There can be little doubt that it was the rhymed Latin poetry, as used in the services of the Roman Catholic Church, which suggested to the German converts the idea of rhymed verses. The pagan poetry of the Teutonic races had no rhymes. It was what is called alliterative. In the German dialects the accent remained mostly on the radical syllable of words, and thus served to shorten the terminations. Hence we find fewer full-bodied terminations in Gothic than in Latin, while in later Teutonic dialects, in English as well as in German, these terminations dwindled away more and more. Thus, we say Di'chter when the Romans would have Dicta'tor, Pre'diger for prædica'tor, chan'cel for cancella. In order to bind their poetical lines together the German poets had recourse to initial letters, which had to be the same in certain places of each verse, and which, if pronounced with strong stress or strain, left the impression of the words being knitted together and belonging together. Here is a specimen which will show that the rules of alliteration were very strictly observed by the old German poets, far more strictly than by their modern imitators. The old rule was that in a line of eight arses there should be two words in the first and one in the second half beginning with the same letter, consonant or vowel, and always in syllables that had the accent. Here is a line from the old "Song of Hildebrand," dating from the eighth century: Hiltibraht joh Hadhubrant Hiltibraht and Hadhubrant Rückert has imitated this alliterating poetry in his poem of "Roland": Roland der Ries Im Rathhaus zu Bremen Steht er im Standbild Kingsley has attempted something like it in his "Longbeard's Saga," but with much greater freedom, not to say licence :- NO. XII. (VOL. IV.) 2 |