e. The scale for the lines. — But although one cannot avoid recognizing the facts just mentioned, it yet remains a very difficult task to determine the male by which the Heb. poet measured the length of his lines. Here comes in the attempt to establish a metrical system for Heb. poetry, which during the last centuries has again and again attracted amateurs and scholars. The theories put forward as the basis of this system exhaust all the possibilities that are to hand, and at the present day almost all of them still stand unrecon- ciled side by side. Some have counted, marked quantity, accented, or combined the hrst or llie second of these processes with the last. Others have taken now the syllable and now the word as the fundamental unit. Others have sometimes been content to take the traditional pronunciation with the vocalization and accentuiition, and to inter|irct metrically, and reduce to rule what lies before us in the iIas.soretic text. At other times, upon tlie ground of a fixed theory, all liberties with the text have been considered allowable, the accent h:is been shifted, the vocaliz;ition altered in whole or in part, and changes of the consonantal text pro- posed to a greater or less extent. Systems have been constructed, which leave much licence open, licence partly of a purely arbitrary kind and partly in strict subordination to the .system ; there have been other systems, again, which permit no deviation to the right hand or to the left, but yield metres carried through with the utmost rigour. Space forbids our going into all these manifold attempts, nor does the ca.se require it.t We must coniine ourselves to a brief description of the most important of the sj'stems put forward at present, indicating at the satiie time the ditli- culties involved, and wo shall fin.illy draw a number of conclusions whose probability we believe it neces-sary to maintain.
J. Leyt operates with the word-accent. Every word that conveys an idea has a tone-syllable, certain words may have more than one. Every tone-syllable forms, along with the jireceding un- accented syllables and the following syllable of the falling tone, one metre. The number of un-
• For the later history of the kinah measure in the OT cf. the present writer's art. 'The Folk-Song of Israel in the mouth of the Frophets ' in The. .\ew World, l»l<:i. p. 2S ft.
t Cf., for the earlier attempts, Siuilschutz, Von der Form dcr heh. /'ortfw, 1825 ; Iludde, ' tJel>cr vermeintliche metrische Formen in der heb. Poesie,' in .S'A*. 1874 ; Briggs, General Itxtro- duction, i>. 361 ff. All the modern systems are fullv explained and criticised in Ed. Konig's SUlittik, lUtetorik, Poetix, etc., 19U0.
I GritndzOfje de» lihythmu^, def Verf- und Strophenlaues in der heb. I'otiie, 1S75, lieitJiuUn if.r Melnkderheb. fottie, 1887, and a great number of articles in various periodicals. Ley has constantly sought to perfect his system.
6
POETRY (HEBREW)
POETRY (HEBREW)
accented syllables makes no difference, so that a signiticant word of a single syllable may have the same metrical value as a whole series of syllables. The kind of verse is determined by the number of such metres, as pentameter, hexameter, octa- meter, decameter, and, further, assumes a much
freater variety of forms through the possibility of ivers cjesuras. The unit ('verse') for Ley (1887) is the verse formed by parallel lines ; the cjEsuras serve to divide the individual lines from one another. In this way it becomes possible to iinite lines of very dillerent lengths in the same verso. Ley accepts the traditional vocalization and accen- tuation, but has lately proposed a moderate number of changes of the text.
G. Bickell * applies the Syriac metre to the OT, holding the next to the last syllable, as in Syriac, to be as a rule the tonic one, and frequently altering the vowel-pronunciation. He counts the syllables of each line, and then makes rises and falls interchange with perfect regularity, in such a way that all lines with an even number of syllables are trochaic, and all w-ith an odd number iambic. He everywhere ends by carrying through with the utmost exactness the metre assumed, and in order to reach this result proposes numerous alterations on the consonantal text, when the liberties taken ^^•ith the vowel-pronunciation prove insufficient.
H. Grimme t bases his system upon a new theory of the accent and the vowels, which above all attributes to the vowel-signs a very different value from that assigned to them on the doctrine held in other quarters. He thus abides by the tra- ditional written signs, but understands them quite differently. His metrical system is at once quan- titative and accentual. It is quantitative, because, in accordance with an ingeniously carried out system of 'morcB,' he attributes to each syllable and to each syllabic beat a definite quantity, a definite number of ' morce ' (Lat. mora, ' lapse of time,' 'stop'). Every final principal-tone syllable of a ' Spreclitakt ' counts as a rise ; whether other syllables are to be reckoned rises or not is deter- mined by counting, according to fixed rules, the value of the 'moroe' of the syllables which fall within the same sphere. The number of rises determines the species of verse. Grimme recog- nizes verses (i.e. hues) with 2, 3, 4, 5 rises, but the verse with 2 rises occurs only as an accompanying metre to that with 4 and 5 rises. Grimme, like Ley, is relatively sparing in the matter of changes of the text.