The Golden Verses of Pythagoras — with commentary (1917)

Ronsard had felt the difficulty most. Accustomed as he was to read Greek and Latin works in the original, he had seen clearly that what prevented the French tongue from following their poetic movement was particularly the restraint of the rhyme ; he had even sought to free it from this servitude, endeavouring to make the French verses scan according to the ancient rhythm; but, in another way he had not appreciated the genius of that tongue which refused to follow this rhythm. Jodelle, Baif, Passerat, Desportes, Henri-Etienne, and certain other savants, have made at different times the same attempt, and always without results.^ Each tongue has its own character which it is necessary to know; ours has not at all the musical prosody of the Greek and Latin; its syllables are not determined, long and short, by the simple duration of time, but by the different accentuation and inflection of the voice. Among our writers the one who has best understood the nature of this prosody is certainly the abbe d'Olivet : he declared firstly that he did not believe it possible to make French verses

■ Pasquier, Hist, et Recherck. des Antiq., 1. vii., ch. 12. Henri-Etienne, PrScellence du Lang. FranQ., p. 12. D'Olivet, Prasad., art. i., § 2. Delislede-Sdlles, Hist, de la Trag., t. i., p. 154, k la note.

74 The Golden Verses of Pythagoras measured by rhythm; and secondly, that even in the case where this might be possible, he did not see how this rhythm could be conformable to that of the Greeks and Latins. '

I am absolutely of his opinion on these two points; I am furthermore, en partie, on what he says of the rhyme.

I know as he, that it is not an invention of the barbarous ages; I know even more, that it is the luxurious production of a very enlightened age; I must say that it has brought forth thousands of beautiful verses, that it is often to the poet like a strange genius which comes to the assistance of his own.^ God forbid that I pretend to separate it from French verse of which it is a charm.

Rhyme is necessary, even indispensable, to romantic poetry and to all that is derived from it; and songs, ballads, vaudevilles, sylves of whatever sort they may be, whatever form, whatever length they may have, cannot pass away. It adds an infinite grace to all that is sung or recited with the chivalrous sentiment. Even the lyric style receives from it a romantic harmony which accords with it. All the secondary styles admit of this.

It can, up to a certain point, embelUsh descriptive verse, soften didactic verse, add to the melancholy of the elegy, to the grace of the idyl ; it can at last become the ornament of dramatic art such as we possess — that is to say, chivalrous and impassioned; but as to real Eumolpceia and Epopceia — ^that is to say, as to what concerns intellectual and rational poetry, pure or mingled with the enthusiasm of the passions; prophetic verses or hymns, emanated from the Divinity or destined to be raised to it; philosophical verse adapted to the nature of things and developing the diverse moral and physical systems; epic verses uniting talent to allegorical genius and joining together the intelligible world to the sentient world; with all these, rhyme is incompatible.

As much as it delights in works of the mind just so much is it rejected by genius. Fiction harmonizes with it, allegory is opposed to it. It is chivalrous and not

' D'Olivet, Prosod., art. V., § i. ' Ibidem.

The Essence and Form of Poetry 75 heroic; agreeable, brilliant, clever, melancholy, sentimental, but it could never be either profound or sublime.

Let us clear this up with the light of experience, and now that we can do it to good purpose, let us make a rapid survey of the poetic condition of the principal nations of the earth.

§VI