PRINTED AT THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY form p-5 (xi1-11-19 14c] THE Bulletin is published monthly by The New York Public Library at 476 Fifth Avenue, New York City. Subscription One Dollar a year, current single numbers Ten Cents. Entered at the Post Office at New York, N. Y., as second-class matter, February 10, 1897, under Act of July 16, 1894. Acceptance for mailing at special rate of postage provided for in Section 1103, Act of October 3, 1917, authorized. Printed at The New York Public Library, 476 Fifth Avenue. November, 1919, Volume 23, Number 11, BULLETIN OF THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY ASTOR, LENOX AND TILDEN FOUNDATIONS VOLUME 23 NOVEMBER 1919 NUMBER II S THE ECHO-DEVICE IN LITERATURE BY ELBRIDGE COLBY INCE prefatory remarks are usually intended to tell all the good points of a work and to excuse all the bad ones, it is necessary to state here that this study was undertaken and completed because the author wished to find out something of the use of the echo-device in literature and because he discovered that nothing had been written on the subject, if we are to except a couple of columns in Larousse, a page or so in D'Israeli, a few paragraphs in a curious old French book of 1845, "Bibliothèque de Poche par une Société de gens des lettres et d'erudits," and some scattered references in "Notes and Queries." After collecting about a hundred items, he discussed the matter with Mr. R. S. Forsythe, who exchanged references and made some mention of this matter in a footnote to his volume on "Shirley's Plays and the Elizabethan Drama." Some other friends have been gracious enough to assist, notably, Sir Sidney Lee, Mr. P. Henriquez Urena, Prof. Colbert Searles, and Prof. J. B. Fletcher. To all of these the most sincere thanks are due for the appearance of this paper. It is only with great difficulties that it finally emerges from the press, begun in undergraduate days, continued during an instructorship at Columbia, carried on in the course of a year of study abroad, put into temporary shape amid teaching at Minnesota, read in part before the Central Division of the Modern Language Association, and finally completed in the intervals of more active and necessary military life. Its only excuse for publication is its unique quality, for it is the only study of the sort that has ever been attempted, and it is, I believe, reasonably complete. [ 683 ] I THE INTRODUCTION OF THE ECHO-DEVICE INTO ENGLISh Literature "Dear Pan, Drawing the pipe over thy lips, Abide here, For thou wilt find Echo on these sunny greens." It was very simple and easy for the human imagination to conceive a person in the distance, returning a mocking answer to loud shoutings. As most good things in modern literature and life find their parallels in Greek civilization, so here we find the earliest written personification of “the mountainrock's child Echo," in the "Hecuba" of Euripides (425 B. C.).1 And also in the Greek we find the first echo-dialogue in literature in the complete metrical form in which it will later be defined in this paper.2 The echo-dialogue has been prominent and frequent in literature — in English as well as in that of other nations. English literature, of the Renaissance, owed a great deal in form and phrase, in technique and in substance to continental forms. The echo was commonly introduced into pastorals, and was, whether appearing in the scene of a dramatic piece or in an isolated sonnet or lyric poem, a product of conscious care and precise artistry. It was a sophisticated element, and like most sophisticated elements came from the French and the Italian. But if we try to trace origins we go back and back until we lose ourselves in the night of time. Back to the Greeks we go,3 and there in the famous Anthology which Dr. Johnson used to translate before breakfast we find a poem of the poet Gauradas, evidently dating from the Byzantine period, a period it is to be noted of conscious artistry, and a poem - it is likewise to be noted - written by a man with a reputation for metrical whims, 1Agamemnon hastens in answer to Polymestor's cry for rescue: This in the Greek reads: Hearing a shout, I came; for in no whispers Κραυγῆς ἀκούσας ἦλθον· οὐ γὰρ ἤσυχος 2 There is one in an old Arabic manuscript, which, however, does not personify the echo: "I came to the place of my birth, and cried, The friends of my youth, where are they? And an echo answered, Where are they?" William S. Walsh: "Handbook of Literary Curiosities" (p. 261), suspects that the actual echo-device was used by Euripides in his lost drama Andromeda, "as indicated by Aristophanes' ridicule of it in 'The Thesmophoriazusae' (B. C. 410) 11. 1056-1097, ed. B. B. Rogers, 1904." |