The Principles of AestheticsParker, De Witt H. (De Witt Henry)
Philosophy
The Principles of Aesthetics
Parker, De Witt H. (De Witt Henry)
Aesthetics
But speech has not only its natural rhythm of stress-undulation and
thought-pulsations; it has also, as we saw in the last chapter, a
melody. The rise and fall of stress goes hand and hand with a rise and
fall of pitch. The different forms of discourse, and the different
emotions that accompany them, are each expressed with characteristic
variations in pitch. Accepting Wundt's summary of the facts, we find
that, generally speaking, in the declarative statement and the command,
the pitch rises in the first thought-division, to fall in the second;
while in the question and the condition, the pitch rises and falls in
the first, and then rises again in the second. Doubt, expectation,
tension, excitement--all the forward looking moods of
incompleteness--tend to find expression in a rising melody; while
assurance, repose, relaxation, fulfillment, are embodied in a falling
melody. The high tones are dynamic and stimulating; the low tones,
static and peaceful. Now in ordinary speech and prose, the change from
one tone to another is constant and irregular, following the variation
of mood in the substance of the discourse. How is it with verse? There
is a simplification and tonality--identity in tone--which is absent
from prose. The melody is more obvious and distinctive, because there
is a greater simplicity in sentence structure and a higher unity of
mood. Yet there is no absolute regularity; and the amount of it differs
with the different kinds of poetry: there is more in the simple lyric
than in the complex narrative; more, for example, in Shakespeare's
sonnets than in his dramas. The inexpressible beauty of some lines of
verse comes doubtless from a fugitive melody which we now grasp, now
lose.
The existence of speech melody and the tonalities of rime, assonance,
and alliteration suggest an analogy between verse and music. For some
people, this analogy is decisive. Yet the fundamental difference between
music and verse must be insisted on with equal force; the purity of
tone and fixity of intervals between tones, which is distinctive of
music, is absent from verse. In comparison with music, the melodiousness
of verse is confused and chaotic; and this condemns to failure any
attempt to identify the laws of the two arts. Still, we are not yet
at the end of the analogy. Those who interpret verse in terms of music
believe that, underlying or supplanting the rhythm of stress, there
is another rhythm, similar to time in music, and capable of expression
in musical language. There is, it is claimed, an equality of duration
between one line and another, and between one foot in a line and
another; these larger and lesser stretches of duration being divided
up between syllables and pauses, each syllable and pause occupying a
fixed quantity of time; just as in music each bar is divided up between
notes and rests of definite value. Lanier, for example writes the first
line of Poe's "Raven" as follows:--[Footnote: The Science of English
Verse, p. 128.]
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