Now if any one thinks that these things are worth much toil and great effort, he is, according to Demosthenes, decidedly in the right. Nay, if he considers the credit which attends success in them and the sweetness of the fruit they yield, he will count the toil a pleasure. I beg pardon of the Epicurean choir who care nothing for these things. The doctrine that “writing,” as Epicurus himself says, “is no trouble to those who do not aim at the ever-varying standard” was meant to forestall the charge of gross laziness and stupidity.
CHAPTER XXV. HOW PROSE CAN RESEMBLE VERSE
Now that I have finished this part of the subject, I think you must be eager for information on the next point — how unmetrical language is made to resemble a beautiful poem or lyric, and how a poem or lyric is brought into close likeness to beautiful prose. I will begin with the language of prose, choosing by preference an author who has, I think, in a pre-eminent degree taken the impress of poetical style. I could wish to mention a larger number, but have not time for all. Who, then, will not admit that the speeches of Demosthenes are like the finest poems and lyrics: particularly his harangues against Philip and his pleadings in public law-suits? It will be enough to take the following exordium from one of these: —
“Let none of you, O ye Athenians, think that I have come forward to accuse the defendant Aristocrates with intent to indulge personal hate of my own, or that it is because I have got my eye on some small and petty error that I am thrusting myself with a light heart in the path of his enmity. No, if my calculations and point of view be right, my one aim and object is that you should securely hold the Chersonese, and should not again be deprived of it by political chicanery.”
I must endeavour, here again, to state my views. But the subject we have now reached is like the Mysteries: it cannot be divulged to people in masses. I shall not, therefore, be discourteous in inviting those only “for whom it is lawful” to approach the rites of style, while bidding the “profane” to “close the gates of their ears.” There are some who, through ignorance, turn the most serious things into ridicule, and no doubt their attitude is natural enough. Well, my views are in effect as follows: —
No passage which is composed absolutely without metre can be invested with the melody of poetry or lyric grace, at any rate from the point of view of the word-arrangement considered in itself. No doubt, the choice of words goes a long way, and there is a poetical vocabulary consisting of rare, foreign, figurative and coined words in which poetry takes delight. These are sometimes mingled with prose-writing to excess: many writers do so, Plato particularly. But I am not speaking of the choice of words: let the consideration of that subject be set aside for the present. Let our inquiry deal exclusively with word-arrangement, which can reveal possibilities of poetic grace in common everyday words that are by no means reserved for the poets’ vocabulary. Well, as I said, simple prose cannot become like metrical and lyrical writing, unless it contains metres and rhythms unobtrusively introduced into it. It does not, however, do for it to be manifestly in metre or in rhythm (for in that case it will be a poem or a lyric piece, and will absolutely desert its own specific character); it is enough that it should simply appear rhythmical and metrical. In this way it may be poetical, although not a poem; lyrical, although not a lyric.
The difference between the two things is easy enough to see. That which embraces within its compass similar metres and preserves definite rhythms, and is produced by a repetition of the same forms, line for line, period for period, or strophe for strophe, and then again employs the same rhythms and metres for the succeeding lines, periods or strophes, and does this at any considerable length, is in rhythm and in metre, and the names of “verse” and “song” are applied to such writing. On the other hand, that which contains casual metres and irregular rhythms, and in these shows neither sequence nor connexion nor correspondence of stanza with stanza, is rhythmical, since it is diversified by rhythms of a sort, but not in rhythm, since they are not the same nor in corresponding positions. This is the character I attribute to all language which, though destitute of metre, yet shows markedly the poetical or lyrical element; and this is what I mean that Demosthenes among others has adopted. That this is true, that I am advancing no new theory, any one can convince himself from the testimony of Aristotle; for in the third book of his Rhetoric the philosopher, speaking of the various requisites of style in civil oratory, has described the good rhythm which should contribute to it. He names the most suitable rhythms, shows where each of them is clearly serviceable, and adduces some passages by which he endeavours to establish his statement. But apart from the testimony of Aristotle, experience itself will show that some rhythms must be included in prose-writing if there is to be upon it the bloom of poetical beauty.
For example, the speech against Aristocrates which I mentioned a moment ago begins with a comic tetrameter line (set there with its anapaestic rhythms), but it is a foot short of completion and in consequence escapes detection: μηδεὶς ὑμῶν, ὦ ἄνδρες Ἀθηναῖοι, νομίσῃ με. If this line had an additional foot either at the beginning, in the middle, or at the end, it would be a perfect anapaestic tetrameter, to which some give the name “Aristophanic.”
Let none of you, O ye Athenians, think that I am standing before you, corresponds to the line
Now then shall be told what in days of old was the fashion of boys’ education.
It will perhaps be said in reply that this has happened not from design, but accidentally, since a natural tendency in us often improvises metrical fragments. Let the truth of this be granted. Yet the next clause as well, if you resolve the second elision, which has obscured its true character by linking it on to the third clause, will be a complete elegiac pentameter as follows: —
Come with intent to indulge personal hate of my own, similar to these words: —
Maidens whose feet in the dance lightly were lifted on high.
Let us suppose that this, too, has happened once more in the same spontaneous way without design. Still, after one intermediate clause arranged in a prose order, viz. ἥκειν Ἀριστοκράτους κατηγορήσοντα τουτουί, the clause which is joined to this consists of two metrical lines, viz. μήτε μικρὸν ὁρῶντά τι καὶ φαῦλον ἁμάρτημα ἑτοίμως οὕτως ἐπὶ τούτῳ. For if we were to take this line from Sappho’s Bridal Song —
For never another maiden there was, O son-in-law, like unto
this one, and were also to take the last three feet and the termination of the following comic tetrameter, the so-called “Aristophanic”
When of righteousness I was the popular preacher, and temperance
was in fashion, and then were to unite them thus —
οὐ γὰρ ἦν ἀτέρα πάις, ὦ γαμβρέ, τοιαύτα ‹ποτα› καὶ σωφροσύνη
‘νενόμιστο,
it will precisely correspond to μήτε μικρὸν ὁρῶντά τι καὶ φαῦλον ἁμάρτημα, ἑτοίμως οὕτως ἐπὶ τούτῳ. What follows is like an iambic trimeter docked of its final foot, προάγειν ἐμαυτὸν εἰς ἀπέχθειαν. It will be complete if a foot is added and it takes this shape: —
προάγειν ἐμαυτὸν εἰς ἀπέχθειάν τινα.
Are we once more to neglect these facts as if they were brought about not on purpose but by accident? What, then, is the significance of the next clause to this? For this too is a correct iambic trimeter line —
ἀλλ’ εἴπερ ἆρ’ ὀρθῶς ἐγὸ λογίζομαι, if the connective ἄρα has its first syllable made long, and if further — by your leave! — the words καὶ σκοπῶ are regarded as an intermediate excrescence by means of which the metre is obscured and vanishes from sight. The clause placed next to this is composed of anapaestic feet, and extends to eight feet, still keeping the same form: —
πρὸ τοῦ Χερόν�
�σον ἔχειν ἀσφαλῶς ὑμᾶς καὶ μὴ παρακρουσθέντας,
like to this in Euripides —
O King of the country with harvests teeming,
O Cisseus, the plain with a fire is gleaming.
And the part of the same clause which comes next to it — ἀποστερηθῆναι πάλιν αὐτῆς — is an iambic trimeter short of a foot and a half. It would have been complete in this form —
ἀποστερηθῆναι πάλιν αὐτῆς ἐν μέρει.
Are we to say that these effects too are spontaneous and unstudied, many and various as they are? I cannot think so; for it is easy to see that the clauses which follow are similarly full of many metres and rhythms of all kinds.
But lest it be thought that he has constructed this speech alone in this way, I will touch on another where the style is admitted to show astonishing genius, that on behalf of Ctesiphon, which I pronounce to be the finest of all speeches. In this, too, immediately after the address to the Athenians, I notice that the cretic foot, or the paeon if you like to call it so (for it will make no difference), — the one which consists of five time-units, — is interwoven, not fortuitously (save the mark!) but with the utmost deliberation right through the clause —
τοῖς θεοῖς εὔχομαι πᾶσι καὶ πάσαις.
Is not the following rhythm of the same kind —
Cretan strains practising, Zeus’s son sing we?
In my judgment, at all events, it is; for with the exception of the final foot there is complete correspondence. But suppose this too, if you will have it so, to be accidental. Well, the adjacent clause is a correct iambic line, falling one syllable short of completion, with the object (here again) of obscuring the metre. With the addition of a single syllable the line will be complete —
ὅσην εὔνοιαν ἔχων ἐγὼ διατελῶ.
Further, that paeon or cretic rhythm of five beats will appear in the words which follow: τῇ πόλει καὶ πᾶσιν ὑμῖν τοσαύτην ὑπάρξαι μοι παρ’ ὑμῶν εἰς τουτονὶ τὸν ἀγῶνα. This, except that it has two broken feet at the beginnings, resembles in all respects the passage in Bacchylides: —
This is no time to sit still nor wait:
Unto yon carven shrine let us go,
Even gold-aegis’d Queen Pallas’ shrine,
And the rich vesture there show.
I have a presentiment that an onslaught will be made on these statements by people who are destitute of general culture and practise the mechanical parts of rhetoric unmethodically and unscientifically. Against these I am bound to defend my position, lest I should seem to let the case go by default. Their argument will doubtless be: “Was Demosthenes, then, so poor a creature that, whenever he was writing his speeches, he would work in metres and rhythms after the fashion of clay-modellers, and would try to fit his clauses into these moulds, shifting the words to and fro, keeping an anxious eye on his longs and shorts, and fretting himself about cases of nouns, moods of verbs, and all the accidents of the parts of speech? So great a man would be a fool indeed were he to stoop to all this niggling and peddling.” If they scoff and jeer in these or similar terms, they may easily be countered by the following reply: First, it is not surprising after all that a man who is held to deserve a greater reputation than any of his predecessors who were distinguished for eloquence was anxious, when composing eternal works and submitting himself to the scrutiny of all-testing envy and time, not to admit either subject or word at random, and to attend carefully to both arrangement of ideas and beauty of words: particularly as the authors of that day were producing discourses which suggested not writing but carving and chasing — those, I mean, of the sophists Isocrates and Plato. For the former spent ten years over the composition of his Panegyric, according to the lowest recorded estimate of the time; while Plato did not cease, when eighty years old, to comb and curl his dialogues and reshape them in every way. Surely every scholar is acquainted with the stories of Plato’s passion for taking pains, especially that of the tablet which they say was found after his death, with the beginning of the Republic (“I went down yesterday to the Piraeus together with Glaucon the son of Ariston”) arranged in elaborately varying orders. What wonder, then, if Demosthenes also was careful to secure euphony and melody and to employ no random or untested word or thought? For it appears to me far more reasonable for a man who is composing public speeches, eternal memorials of his own powers, to attend even to the slightest details, than it is for the disciples of painters and workers in relief, who display the dexterity and industry of their hands in a perishable medium, to expend the finished resources of their art on veins and down and bloom and similar minutiae.
These arguments seem to me to make no unreasonable claim; and we may further add that though when Demosthenes was a lad, and had but recently taken up the study of rhetoric, he naturally had to ask himself consciously what the effects attainable by human skill were, yet when long training had issued in perfect mastery, and had graven on his mind forms and impressions of all that he had practised, he henceforth produced his effects with the utmost ease from sheer force of habit. Something similar occurs in the other arts whose end is activity or production. For example, when accomplished players on the lyre, the harp, or the flute hear an unfamiliar tune, they no sooner grasp it than with little trouble they run over it on the instrument themselves. They have mastered the values of the notes after much toiling and moiling, and so can reproduce them. Their hands were not at the outset in condition to do what was bidden them; they attained command of this accomplishment only after much time, when ample training had converted custom into second nature.
Why pursue the subject? A fact familiar to all of us is enough to silence these quibblers. What may this be? When we are taught to read, first we learn off the names of the letters, then their forms and their values, then in due course syllables and their modifications, and finally words and their properties, viz. lengthenings and shortenings, accents, and the like. After acquiring the knowledge of these things, we begin to write and read, syllable by syllable and slowly at first. And when the lapse of a considerable time has implanted the forms of words firmly in our minds, then we deal with them without the least difficulty, and whenever any book is placed in our hands we go through it without stumbling, and with incredible facility and speed. We must suppose that something of this kind happens in the case of the trained exponent of the literary profession as regards the arrangement of words and the euphony of clauses. And it is not unnatural that those who are ignorant of this or unversed in any profession whatsoever should be surprised and incredulous when they hear that anything is executed with such mastery by another as a result of artistic training. This may suffice as a rejoinder to those who are accustomed to scoff at the rules of the rhetorical manuals.
CHAPTER XXVI. HOW VERSE CAN RESEMBLE PROSE
Concerning melodious metrical composition which bears a close affinity to prose, my views are of the following kind. The prime factor here too, just as in the case of poetical prose, is the collocation of the words themselves; next, the composition of the clauses; third, the arrangement of the periods. He who wishes to succeed in this department must change the words about and connect them with each other in manifold ways, and make the clauses begin and end at various places within the lines, not allowing their sense to be self-contained in separate verses, but breaking up the measure. He must make the clauses vary in length and form, and will often also reduce them to phrases which are shorter than clauses, and will make the periods — those at any rate which adjoin one another — neither equal in size nor alike in construction; for an elastic treatment of rhythms and metres seems to bring verse quite near to prose. Now those authors who compose in epic or iambic verse, or use the other regular metres, cannot diversify their poetical works with many metres or rhythms, but must always adhere to the same metrical form. But the lyric poets can i
nclude many metres and rhythms in a single period. So that when the writers of monometers break up the lines by distributing them into clauses now one way now another, they dissolve and efface the regularity of the metre; and when they diversify the periods in size and form, they make us forget the metre. On the other hand, the lyric poets compose their strophes in many metres; and again, from the fact that the clauses vary from time to time in length and form, they make the divisions unlike in form and size. From both these causes they hinder our apprehension of any uniform rhythm, and so they produce, as by design, in lyric poems a great likeness to prose. It is quite possible, moreover, for the poems to retain many figurative, unfamiliar, exceptional, and otherwise poetical words, and none the less to show a close resemblance to prose.
And let no one think me ignorant of the fact that the so-called “pedestrian character” is commonly regarded as a vice in poetry, or impute to me, of all persons, the folly of ranking any bad quality among the virtues of poetry or prose. Let my critic rather pay attention and learn how here once more I claim to distinguish what merits serious consideration from what is worthless. I observe that, among prose styles, there is on the one side the uncultivated style, by which I mean the prevailing frivolous gabble, and on the other side the language of public life which is, in the main, studied and artistic; and so, whenever I find any poetry which resembles the frivolous gabble I have referred to, I regard it as beneath criticism. I think that alone to be fit for serious imitation which resembles the studied and artistic kind. Now, if each sort of prose had a different appellation, it would have been only consistent to call the corresponding sorts of poetry also by different names. But since both the good and the worthless are called “prose,” it may not be wrong to regard as noble and bad “poetry” that which resembles noble and contemptible prose respectively, and not to be in any way disturbed by mere identity of terms. The application of similar names to different things will not prevent us from discerning the true nature of the things in either case.
Delphi Complete Works of Dionysius of Halicarnassus (Illustrated) (Delphi Ancient Classics Book 79) Page 132
