Secondly, the frequent conflict between the prose accent and the rhythmical accent, so common in classical verse, would have been intolerable to the French ear, however weak the accent may be in that language as compared to the Germanic languages. An examination of the earlier vers mesurés, such as those of Baïf, will make this clear. In fact it was for that reason that Rapin and others strove to avoid that conflict, but in so doing they made their verses differ in one essential principle from those of the Greeks and Romans. Thirdly, the adoption of rime by the later partisans of vers mesurés, while entailing the introduction of a principle foreign to classical prosody, was at the same time an acknowledgment that one of the principal factors of rhythm in French poetry is rime, without which no French poetry worthy of the name has ever been written. II. ACCENTUAL VERSE. Although no accentual verses were written in French before the nineteenth century, they found an isolated supporter at the beginning of the seventeenth century in the person of one Louis du Gardin, Professor of Medicine in the University of Douay, who in a supplement to his Premieres Addresses du Chemin de Parnasse1 (1630) laid down certain rules for composing French verses on accentual principles, and at the same time rejected the attempts of the earlier writers of quantitative verse. The situation of Douay makes it appear probable that Du Gardin's attempt is due to the influence of the neighbouring German and Flemish-speaking countries, and presumably to a knowledge of one or both of these languages on the part of the Douay professor. Considering that philology did not exist as a science when he wrote, and that it was not till much later that the principles of accentuation in French were determined, the results attained by Du Gardin are remarkably free from error. This will be apparent from the following quatrain in Iambic Trimeters which the author quotes as an illustration (p. 284): The full title of the book is: Les premieres Addresses du Chemin de Parnasse, par M. Louys Du Gardin, Docteur et Professeur ordinaire en Medecine, en l'Université de Douay. Douay, 1630. Bon Dieu, quel confort! quel soulas delícieux! Que je sens au fond de ma bouche et de mon cœur, toy But, new as were Du Gardin's ideas, they do not seem to have penetrated beyond the small university town, and the Premieres Addresses du Parnasse very quickly fell into utter oblivion. The earliest and most remarkable of the poets of the nineteenth century who have tried their hand at accentual verse is André van Hasselt (1815-74), probably Belgium's greatest poet, to whom we owe a whole volume of such verses, included in the third volume of his complete Poésies, under the title of Études rhythmiques. The earliest of these pieces seem to date back to 1836. In the case of Van Hasselt, there is no doubt that his accentual verse is to be explained on ethnological grounds, for it is known that he was of Flemish origin, and also that he composed a certain number of verses in that language 2. The following strophes from the poem Les Rhythmes embody Van Hasselt's new rhythmical program: Allons, mes oiseaux si légers, si fidèles, Au bord de vos nids déployez vos deux aíles; Chantez ! 3 1 It is hardly necessary to point out that confort and délicieux in 1. I are wrongly accented, and also that several words that are accented by Du Gardin are enclitics or proclitics, and consequently not capable of bearing the stress. 2 Compare a curious passage from a poem addressed to the members of the Belgian Academy: Même l'un d'eux prétend, grammairien unique, Qu'il se peut que j'aurais l'esprit trop germanique, Que c'est là procéder abominablement, Et que, toujours épris de rhythme et de cadence, • Études rhythmiques, p. 69. Iambe, trochée, amphimacre, anapeste, Prenez votre essor radieux à travers The heavy, mournful cadence of the metre is less suitable to the subject in this case1: La harpe du printemps résonne dans les cieux. On the other hand, the metre is most appropriate in this strophe from the poem entitled Cloche du Soir 2: Cloche du soir, musíque si douce, Seul au milieu du calme des bois, Or again in the translation of Goethe's Erlkönig3 : Qui chevauche ainsi par la nuit et le vent? C'est le père ayant dans ses bras son enfant The general objection to accentual verse in French is that the stress-accent is not sufficiently marked to sustain the cadence, being not only much less intense than in the Germanic languages, but even less so than in the other Romance languages. Moreover the French ear, being accustomed to freer and more varied rhythmical groups, finds a succession of lines on the same rhythm intolerably monotonous, however effective they may sound in a short poem; so that, while the accentual verses are not absolutely ridiculous, like the quantitative verses written in French, yet they entail certain conditions and requirements that are not compatible with the genius of the French language. It is for that reason that they have been rejected, although the bold experiment of Van Hasselt subsequently called forth a few emulators. In 1856 a certain Ducondut published an Essai de rhythmique 1 Études rhythmiques, P. 4., 2 See p. 119 of Etudes rhythmiques. s Ibid. p. 55. française, in which he recommended the adoption of the Germanic metrical system, and added poems by himself in illustration: Quittez la ville, ô belles! Et vous, pour les charmer, Doux mai, saison d'amour 1! It is difficult to discover any cadence in the above extract; still more so in the following 2: Tous, travaillons! c'est la règle commune. Sont les outils qu'ont reçu les humains. Ducondut has been followed by Louis Dumur3 in the collections of poems entitled Lassitudes and La Néva, but Dumur differs from his predecessors in that he counts the secondary accent as well as the principal accent, as in the following specimen : (La Néva1.) Puissante, magnifique, illustre, grave, noble Reine, my troubled head a heap of thoughts appear. But the principal accent in French not being sufficiently intense to bear the rhythm, it follows that the secondary accent is still less capable of fulfilling that part. So that, if 1 Essai de rhythmique française, p. 140. 2 Ibid. p. 210. 3 M. Louis Dumur is of Swiss origin, so that his experiment can also be explained ethnologically. He expounds his system in the preface to Lassitudes, where he says inter alia: La cadence par l'accent tonique adoptée, je m'en sers pour former des pieds - à l'exemple de l'anglais, de l'allemand, du russe — et en particulier des pieds iambiques et anapestiques, les plus appropriés en français. Compare also Charles Morice, La littérature de tout à l'heure, pp. 316-318. 4 Quoted by Clair Tisseur, p. 34. the principal accents alone are taken into consideration, the lines quoted above no longer have seven beats each, but become ordinary French verses of fourteen syllables: Puissante, magnifique, illustre, grave, noble Reine, O Tsaritza de glaces et de fastes! Souveraine, &c. Some of Dumur's accentual verses resemble more closely Germanic versification in that they show an equal number of accents, but not necessarily an equal number of syllables: Ah! Saint-Pétersbourg a prís des finesses charmantes, Alors qu'un soleil de printemps, ruisselant du ciel d'or, Sur la neige immolée encor sous le froid et qui dórt, La couvrait des baisers qu'épandraient les amants aux amantes1. But they are all the worse for that. The most recent writer of French accentual verse is F. Sabatier, who in 1893 translated Goethe's Faust into the metre of the original 2. 1 Clair Tisseur, p. 34. 2 The exact title is: F. Sabatier, Le Faust de Goethe traduit en français dans le mètre de l'original et suivant les règles de la versification allemande (1893). |