with.  It is no psychologic accident that rhyme came later into English than in French and is leaving it sooner.[206] Chinese verse has developed along very much the same lines as French verse.  The syllable is an even more integral and sonorous unit than in French, while quantity and stress are too uncertain to form the basis of a metric system.  Syllable-groups—­so and so many syllables per rhythmic unit—­and rhyme are therefore two of the controlling factors in Chinese prosody.  The third factor, the alternation of syllables with level tone and syllables with inflected (rising or falling) tone, is peculiar to Chinese.

[Footnote 204:  Poetry everywhere is inseparable in its origins from the singing voice and the measure of the dance.  Yet accentual and syllabic types of verse, rather than quantitative verse, seem to be the prevailing norms.]

[Footnote 205:  Quantitative distinctions exist as an objective fact.  They have not the same inner, psychological value that they had in Greek.]

[Footnote 206:  Verhaeren was no slave to the Alexandrine, yet he remarked to Symons, a propos of the translation of Les Aubes, that while he approved of the use of rhymeless verse in the English version, he found it “meaningless” in French.]

To summarize, Latin and Greek verse depends on the principle of contrasting weights; English verse, on the principle of contrasting stresses; French verse, on the principles of number and echo; Chinese verse, on the principles of number, echo, and contrasting pitches.  Each of these rhythmic systems proceeds from the unconscious dynamic habit of the language, falling from the lips of the folk.  Study carefully the phonetic system of a language, above all its dynamic features, and you can tell what kind of a verse it has developed—­or, if history has played pranks with its phychology, what kind of verse it should have developed and some day will.

Whatever be the sounds, accents, and forms of a language, however these lay hands on the shape of its literature, there is a subtle law of compensations that gives the artist space.  If he is squeezed a bit here, he can swing a free arm there.  And generally he has rope enough to hang himself with, if he must.  It is not strange that this should be so.  Language is itself the collective art of expression, a summary of thousands upon thousands of individual intuitions.  The individual goes lost in the collective creation, but his personal expression has left some trace in a certain give and flexibility that are inherent in all collective works of the human spirit.  The language is ready, or can be quickly made ready, to define the artist’s individuality.  If no literary artist appears, it is not essentially because the language is too weak an instrument, it is because the culture of the people is not favorable to the growth of such personality as seeks a truly individual verbal expression.

INDEX