No More Learning

220 (#236) ############################################

220
[CH.
Lesser Poets
does not want to read again, and which does not leave an echo of
poetry, fainter or less faint, in the mind's ear.
Richard Middleton, latest born of all the writers who can be
mentioned in this chapter, was only twenty-nine when he died ;
and he is said to have written little, if any, verse for some time
before his death. The actual volume which contains what he did
write (for the most part, if not wholly, reprinted from periodicals)
has, no doubt, what may be called the exterior character of poetry.
There is a good deal of especially Swinburnian pastiche in it,
though, also, there is something that is not. But it may be said
to present rather another catching, and, to some extent, condensing
and uttering of the general poetic aura of the period, than any very
strong idiosyncrasy. The searcher of the perilous ways of poetry
can see behind him many Richard Middletons of former ages, each
with that age's differential chances. But, in most cases (not, of
course, in all), they had later chances of showing their power if they
had it. He had no such chance, and, apparently, might not have
taken it if he had. He is not, in what he has actually left, an unequal
poet; one may almost say, without paradox or unfairness, that it
might have been better if he had been, as there would have been
more chance of discovering where his strength lay. A good sense
of form ; a fair command of picturesque language; a decidedly
'young' expatiation in sensuous imagery and fantasy; a still
younger tendency to 'shock'-these and other familiar things
occur throughout his work. But their fermentation was not
over ; and a critical palate can hardly judge what was likely to
have been the achieved flavour of the wine. As it is, it leaves
(in this respect contrasting most unfavourably with Dowson's)
hardly any flavour at all or any reminiscence. The very name
Cynara calls up the sad tune and burden of the celebration of her
to anyone who has once heard it: that of Middleton's Irene-
though we have two poems about her—touches no chord at all.
It would be a pity to leave this chorus vatum, comprising more
than a century of persons and extending, in point of time of poetical
production, over more than seventy years, without some general
remarks, which need be neither forced nor perfunctory, and which
certainly need not indulge in the rhetorical fioriture too often
recently associated with criticism. Colour on colour, whether it
be bad heraldry or not, is bad history. We have regimented our
poets, to some extent, as to classes differenced by subject, by sex
and other considerations ; but it has been freely acknowledged


## p. 221 (#237) ############################################

-
>
vi]
Summary
221
that the greater number are rebels to any such process. It does
not, however, follow that they are a mere throng, or that the
general poetical production of the last two-thirds of the nineteenth
century (and, in some cases, a little of the twentieth) affords no
symptoms to the systematic student of literary history. It may,
therefore, be briefly considered from this point of view.
A theory-or, if that be too dignified a term, at least a notion-
glanced at above suggests that the commanding and protracted
influence of the two greatest poets of the period, Tennyson and
Browning, especially that of Tennyson, has not, on the whole, been
favourable; and an extension of this idea might urge something
similar, as regards the later time, with respect to Swinburne and
Rossetti. It was, however, also hinted, on the former occasion,
that this theory will not stand examination. In order that it
might do so, it would be necessary to establish the fact that the
lesser poetry of 1810—1900 was, generally and individually, worse
than the lesser poetry of the period immediately preceding it.
Now this, as it may be hoped the dispassionate examination
of these two periods, in chapters of some length, has shown, is
far, indeed, from being the case. In the second place, granting, for
a moment, and for the sake of argument merely, that there was
such deterioration, it would have to be established that it was due
to these influences--a more difficult task still. The influence of
Tennyson may have been apparently disastrous on such a writer
as Lewis Morris; but to say that Tennyson's influence produced
the badness, or, rather, the nullity, of Lewis Morris's verse would
be not so much uncritical as purely absurd. Perhaps those who
hold the view referred to may contend that it is not so much
definite imitation that they mean as a certain overawing and
smothering influence—that the lesser poets of the period felt like
Cassius in regard to Caesar, as petty men in the presence of the
colossus Tennyson, and dared not show their real powers. To this,
again, it can be answered that there is no evidence of it whatever,
and that, if they did so feel, they must have been a feeble folk from
whom no great poetry could be expected in any circumstances? .
Brushing all this, and other fantasies, aside and taking the
ford as we find it,' there is, beyond all question, in this long
period and among this crowd of lesser singers, an amount of
1 As a matter of simple historic fact, revolt of one kind or another from Tennyson
is, from the days of Matthew Arnold, downwards, much more noticeable than servile
imitation of him. It is, perhaps, permissible and even desirable to add that this
summing up is strictly directed at, and limited to, the actual subjects of the chapter.
No innuendo is intended as regards poets who are still living.
a


## p. 222 (#238) ############################################

2 2 2
[ch.
Lesser Poets
a
diffused poetry which cannot be paralleled in any other age or
country except, perhaps, in our own land and language between
1580 and 1674. At no period, not even then, has the standard of
technical craftsmanship been so high ; at none has there been
anything like such variety of subject and, to a rather less
extent, of tone. Nor can we exactly charge against these writers,
as, it was claimed, we might against the 'intermediates' of the
earlier century, an uncertainty of step or object-an obviously
transitional character. If a fault can be found with this poetry
generally—and it is a fault which, as the detailed criticism offered
above should show, presses lightly on some, though heavily on
others—it is a want at once of spontaneity and of concentration,
which results in a further want of individuality. And this may be
regarded as due, not to the imitation of this or that contemporary
poet, but to a too general literariness—to what has been called
'the obsession of the printed book. ' These poets, as a rule, have
read rather too much; and, if the reading has polished their form,
it has sometimes palled and weakened their spirit.
We may extend the ungracious task of the devil's advocate
a little further, partly returning upon and collecting points hinted
at already. In, perhaps, no period of poetry has there been, even
allowing the proper average for gross bulk of production, so large
a number of first books of verse which have excited the hopes
even of experienced and somewhat sceptical critics, only to
disappoint the hopes and confirm the scepticism by subsequent
failure-or, at any rate, failure to improve. At no time—this
point, no doubt, is, in many cases, pretty closely connected with
the last-has there been such a dissipation, in the waste and
evaporating waters of mere journalism or journey-work, of powers
which might well have ripened into more generous and lasting
wine of poetry. And, even in the case of those who have never
left their first loves, there has seldom been produced such a bulk of
what we have here several times in individual cases, unconcentrated
work-poetic negus, as one might designate it-sweet and spiced
and pleasant to the taste and fairly comforting, but watered and
sophisticated. Undoubtedly, these things are very largely due to
those very circumstances which have just been mentioned-to the
positive inability of a large proportion of the poets concerned to
indulge that engrossing and exclusive disposition of the muse
which has been often noticed ; perhaps to some general con-
ditions of the time—social, political, religious and other; certainly
to that over-literariness which has been admitted. Yet, these


## p. 223 (#239) ############################################

vi]
Summary
223
allowances and explanations are still allowances and explanations
only. They do not remove or alter the fact.
Nevertheless, these poets have given us a pretty extensive
paradise of sometimes very dainty delights to wander in and feed
upon; and it should be not impossible to play the Parkinson to
some of its classes of flower and fruit—the Paterson to its main
roads and places. The whole region is dominated by the two
general principles of the earlier romantic movement, the increased
and ever increasing appeal to the senses of the mind; the in-
gemination of varied sound; and the multiplication of varied
form and colour. A second notable thing, connected closely with
the first, is the prevalence of lyric in the widest sense, including
sonnets, ballads, odes, short poems of more or less single situation,
emotion or thought, and the like, in whatever form. The closet
drama and the long poem are, of course, attempted and even some-
times with a certain popularity, if only for a time; but never with
entire success to the satisfaction of critical judgment by any poet
surveyed in this chapter. 'Songs and sonnets,' in the old accep-
tation, are your later nineteenth-century poet's only-or, at least,
his chief and principal- wear and ware. Further, there are
curious strains or veins of poetic manner which emerge at the
beginning and continue to manifest themselves until, practically,
the end. One is the 'spasmodic,' which has never been without
representatives, for better for worse, from Bailey to Davidson.
The style most opposite to this is the quietly classical, having
its most powerful exponent outside our list in Matthew Arnold,
but represented not unworthily in that list itself. A most promi-
nent feature is that revival and extension of aureate language
which was one of the main objects of the pre-Raphaelites, and
has never had, not even in Rossetti sixty years since, a more
audacious practitioner than Francis Thompson, who died but the
other day. We have noted, too, in the last twenty or thirty years,
a kind of what has been called 'violence'-a development in one
direction of the spasmodic association itself with the so-called
'realist' tendencies of the time. The artificial forms practised by
no mean poets for a considerable period must, also, keep their
place, whatever it be, in history.
But the attraction and the charm of poetry—though it is
a vulgar error to suppose that they are in the least injured or
lessened, palled or withered, by applying to them historical and
analytic considerations--are, after all, independent of these. "Is
there good and delightful poetry here? ' that is the question; and


## p. 224 (#240) ############################################

224
[CH. VI
Lesser Poets
6
it can be most unhesitatingly answered 'There is. ' A new Johnson
or Anderson or Chalmers, containing all the works of all the
poets noticed in this chapter would be a vast collection-one
would have to be, or to employ, a very skilful and industrious
'caster-off' to estimate its extent. It would certainly far exceed
the twenty-one volumes of Chalmers and might come near the
scores or hundreds of the Parnaso Italiano. Some volumes or
parts of volumes (which need not be again indicated) would be
seldom disturbed and rapidly left alone again by the few dis-
turbers. But, on the whole, an astonishing amount of poetic
pleasure would be available in the collection—some of it for all,
and all of it for some, who care for poetry. This chapter, perhaps,
is already too long; but it may be permitted to lay a little
final stress on the remarkable absence, in the period and pro-
duction considered as a whole, of monotony. The very excess of
literariness' which has been admitted escapes this condemnation
(easily applicable to some other times), because of the immense
extent of the literature from which suggestion has been taken.
Classical literature, and medieval, foreign of all nations and
languages in modern times-history, religion, philosophy, art of
all times and kinds—have been drawn upon, as well as the never-
ending resources of nature and of life. Neither, it may be
confidently affirmed, despite the admissions which have been
required, has this vast variety of subject and of form failed to
meet an at least fairly corresponding diversity of talent and even
of genius in the poets dealing with it.


## p. 225 (#241) ############################################

CHAPTER VII
THE PROSODY OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
In the last chapter on this subject? , we confined ourselves
strictly to the prosody and the prosodists of the eighteenth century
proper, postponing not merely the remarkable developments which
took place at the close of that century, but, also, certain phenomena
of actual versification, some of which appeared when the century was
little more than half over. These designed omissions must now be
made good, as necessary preliminaries to the account of the prosody
of the nineteenth-in fact, as practically the first section of the
history of that prosody itself. In many, if not in all, cases, refer-
ence to the notices of the several poets (and, sometimes, the prose-
writers) referred to will enlarge and comment what is here given;
the present summary is strictly confined to its own title.
The important occupants of that vestibule or antechamber of
the subject above referred to are Ossian, Percy's Reliques and
the poems of Chatterton and Blake. From them, we must proceed
to the various signs of prosodic upheaval shown, at the extreme
end of the century, in the ballad verse of Southey and Coleridge,
with the tendency to rimelessness, and to the imitation of classical
metres, of which the same poets are the chief, but not the only, or
the first, exponents. It will, next, be necessary to survey the chief
prosodic developments of nineteenth century poetry itself in its
two great divisions, and to follow up in each of those divisions the
account of treatises on the subject. The matter to be dealt with
is extremely voluminous, and the account of it cannot, it is feared,
be very short.
The four books or 'works' mentioned above as holding the
first place are not merely of importance, individually and as a
group,
for intrinsic character and as influences on others; they are,
also, curiously combined and cross-connected in themselves. For,
1 Ante, vol. xi, chap. XI.
E. L, XIII.
CH. VII.
15


## p. 226 (#242) ############################################

226 The Prosody of the Nineteenth Century [cHCH
.
6
verse.
Ossian undoubtedly influenced Blake's 'prophetic' writing: and
Percy, as undoubtedly, influenced both Chatterton's and Blake's
As a whole, they may be taken, from our point of view, not
merely as influences, but even more remarkably as symptoms of
the growing discontent with the limited practice, and almost more
limited theory, of prosody in the century wherein they appeared.
But the several constituents of the group illustrate this discontent
in curiously different ways. Ossian and Blake's Prophetic Books,
the latter deliberately and explicitly, revolt against the ‘fetters,' the
‘mechanism,' of poetry, which was, certainly, never more fettered or
more mechanical than in their time. They carry this revolt to the
point of intentionally discarding the uniformity of metre altogether,
and of preferring the variety of prose-rhythm, subject to divisions
less rhythmically continuous, but somewhat more parallel to each
other than those of prose proper. They do not, however (and
Macpherson fails here specially), succeed in doing this without
including large proportions of imbedded metre, which constantly
produce regular lines, often regular couplets and not seldom actual
stanzas-occasionally, even, suggestive of something like rime.
Blake's greater power in actual poetry commonly saves him from
this; but, on the other hand, it tempts him to make his rhythmical
staves more like loosened and enlarged variations on certain kinds
of verse-especially the 'fourteener. '
The lesson of Reliques, felt strongly in spirit, and partly in
form, by almost all later poets of the century, was not, in its
most important prosodic point—the licence of substitution in
ballad-metre-perceived or, at least, boldly adopted by anyone
(except Chatterton and Blake again) till quite the close of the
period. Even then, a lover of English verse like Southey's friend
Wynn protested against that poet's innovations, in this respect, as
faulty; and such pusillanimity accounts for the painful sing-song of
most ballad imitation from Percy himself, through even Goldsmith,
to Mickle-a sing-song which gave its main point to Johnson's
disrespectful parodying of the ballad. But Chatterton saw the
truth and followed it; Blake saw it and followed it still further
and more boldly; while Burns's practice-inherited, not, indeed,
from Percy but from Scots originals came to reinforce the
movement.
It would appear difficult for some people, even yet, to perceive
either the importance or the novelty of these examples of substi-
tution (or admission of trisyllabic feet) in English poetry. The
great prevalence, during the last hundred years, of a purely


## p. 227 (#243) ############################################

Vii]
The New Practices
227
6
accentual system of prosody disguises the importance—for it
suggests that, supposing you get your requisite number of accented
syllables in a line, the rest may, as it has been put, be ‘left to take
care of themselves. The absence of attention to historic facts
disguises the novelty. But it is difficult to think that anyone with
a delicate ear can, when his attention is called to it, fail to perceive
that the difference between ‘Like a rogue for forgery' and 'Like
rogues for forgery' is much greater than that between singular
and plural only; or to see how much rhythmical gain there is in
The wild winds weep
And the night is a-cold,
compared with
The wild winds weep
And night is cold,
though in each case the number of accents is exactly the same.
And it is almost as difficult to conceive how anybody with a
logical mind can fail to see the force of Shenstone's almost timid
championship of what he calls the dactyl’in the first half of the
century, or of Wynn's distinct protest against it some sixty years
later, taken with its actual absence between these dates in the verse
of almost every poet except those named.
The revived fancy for rimelessness and for classical metres
which the extreme end of the century saw runs in a curricle
rather with the Ossianic hybrid verse-prose than with the new
use of substitution; but it is quite as much a sign of discontent
with the favourite metres and metrification of the century as
either. It also, of course, had precedents—though, perhaps, not
very happy ones—to plead in English, though the immediate
stimulus was, possibly, German. Frank Sayers? was able to muster
(and might, even, have further strengthened) a tolerable bod
of such precedents for his rimeless stanzas; and English hexa-
meters, sapphics and the like could bring forward undoubted,
though rather dangerous, ancestry. But it is nearly certain
that disgust with the tyranny of the stopped rimed couplet, and
craving for a change—the most decided change possible-was the
chief agent in the matter. The rimeless Pindarics were to produce
two remarkable poems of some length and of no small merit in
Southey's Thalaba and Shelley's Queen Mab; little good came, as
little good has ever come, of English classical forms. But, as
direct or indirect protests, both have a value which is not to be
neglected.
When the actual turn of the tide took place, in the very closing
1 See, ante, vol. XI, pp. 179, 180.
15-2


## p. 228 (#244) ############################################

228 The Prosody of the Nineteenth Century [CH.
years of the century, it was impossible that some attention should
not be paid to the theoretical as well as to the practical aspect of
the turning. Whether Southey and Coleridge talked on the subject,
during that meeting at Oxford which was only less fateful than
the subsequent meeting of Coleridge and Wordsworth, there is not,
it is believed, any documentary evidence to show. Both, certainly,
became, very shortly afterwards, champions of substitution in
practice; and Southey's already referred to profession of faith
on the subject is much earlier than any similar pronouncement
that we have by Coleridge. There are, in addition to Coleridge's
long known metrical experiments, and the famous note on the
metre of Christabel, further and only recently published exercises
by him ; and it would be possible (and worth while) to arrange
a considerable cento of scattered remarks on the subject from
Southey, at all periods of his life up to the very eve of the failure
of his powers. Even Scott, the least ostentatiously theoretical of
poets or of men of letters, has some. But Wordsworth chose to
speak as if he believed that prosody, like reading and writing,
came by nature’; the remarks of Landor, from whom something
might be expected, are few and disappointing; and, generally
(and not at all disappointingly), the greater and even the lesser
agonists in the romantic battle obeyed the precept “Go and do,'
without reasoning much on the manners and theories of the doing.
We shall be able, therefore, without difficulty or impropriety, to
separate the practice from the principles, if not from the dealers
with principle, and that not merely in regard to the first half of
the century. For it so happens that one of the most important
turning-points of English prosodic study, Guest's A History of
English Rhythms (1838), coincides nearly enough with the definite,
though not as yet generally recognised, establishment of a new
era in poetry, by Tennyson's volumes of 1842 and Browning's
Bells and Pomegranates (1841 ff. ).
Perhaps the importance of Bysshe's The Art of English Poetry
cannot receive a better completion of proof than by showing that
a
the general characteristics of the prosody of 1798—1830 are simply
anti-Bysshism. Whether or not it is probable that any poet of
mark thought of Bysshe is quite immaterial; though it is likely
that Coleridge, and pretty certain that Southey, knew him. The
point of importance is that, not merely the theoretical observations
of Coleridge and Southey, but their practice, and the practice of the
whole group (with exceptions proving the rule, as aforesaid) goes
directly against the principles first formulated by Bysshe. He had


## p. 229 (#245) ############################################

VII]
Bysshism Reversed
229
said that English verse was to be strictly measured by syllables ;
they disregarded the syllabic limitation continually, and, in some
cases, deliberately refused-in almost all neglected—the aid of
'elision. ' He and the whole eighteenth century after him had limited
the preferred orders of our verse to two or three groups only; the
poets now under discussion made their lines of any number of
syllables they liked, from one to fourteen or fifteen. He had
distinctly barred stanza-writing as obsolete ; they, in many if not
most cases, preferred any stanza to the couplet. The effect, and, in
some instances, the expressed effect, of his rules, had been to snub
triple time; to insist on middle pauses; to deprecate overlapping
of couplet if not even of line. In every one of these respects, more
or fewer of them in one or two all-adopted practices diametrically
opposed to his laws. If ever in prosodic history there was a case
of taking the “not” out of the commandments and putting it into
the creed,' that case occurred as regards the new nineteenth century
poetry and the old eighteenth century formulas.
No good, however, has ever yet come of a merely negative
revolt, and the anti-Bysshism of poets from Wordsworth to
Keats had quite definite and positive objects. These objects may
be described briefly as, in the first place, the liberty to use any
form which might suit the poet's subject and temper, and, secondly,
the special selection of forms and the special adaptation of them
when selected, to the new varied appeal to ear and eye, mental as
well as bodily, and not merely to the pure understanding.
The difference is susceptible of being put to a test which, to some
readers, may seem too mechanical, but which has a real cogency.
Run the eye over a fairly considerable number of pages of any
eighteenth century poet. In the long poems, with the very rarest
exceptions, you will find the regular outline of the couplet or of
blank verse; in the great majority of the short ones, symmetrical
sequences of sixes and eights in various, but still few, arrange-
ments. Apply the same process to poets of the earlier nineteenth
century. In long poems, you will, of course, still find a very
considerable proportion of blank verse; but that of the heroic
couplet will be greatly reduced; Spenserian and other stanzas, with
octosyllables, regular or irregular, will constantly obtrude them-
selves, and more eccentric outlines still will not be wanting. But,
when you come, in turn, to the collections of shorter pieces, all
attempts at a few rigid specifications will have to be thrown to the
winds. Length and grouping of line become, at first sight, absolutely
'at discretion, or, as the older critics would hold it, 'indiscretion. '
>


## p. 230 (#246) ############################################

230 The Prosody of the Nineteenth Century [chCH
.
6
And, when you examine the lines themselves, the arrangement of
rimes and so forth, you find that what the eighteenth century
prudishly called “mixed' measure and sparingly allowed licence to
—that is to say, substitution of trochee for iamb—gives way or is
extended to what it would have thought the most lawless and
promiscuous debauchery of indulgence in iamb, trochee, spondee,
anapaest, dactyl and (you may sometimes think) even in other
combinations of quantity or stress.
For detailed accounts of prosodic characteristics of greater
poets recourse must be had to the chapters concerning them;
but a brief juxtaposition of these characteristics from the general
prosodic point of view can hardly fail to be of use. Crabbe
and Rogers, as survivals, require next to no notice ; but it is note-
worthy that Campbell, who belongs to the same general school
and is even definitely eighteenth century in his longer poems,
adopts measures of distinct idiosyncrasy, and decidedly nineteenth-
century character, for his great battle songs. Landor, not, perhaps,
by any unnecessary connection with his 'classicality' of one kind,
is, also, distinctly classical in his neglect or refusal of frequent
substitution in line, as well as in his sparing use of varied outline
in line-group. But he had a definite, though surely a mistaken,
idea that the variations of English verse were, comparatively,
few; and a corresponding belief, of which he very satisfactorily
;
availed himself, that those of prose were much more numerous.
Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey and Scott, among the first group,
Moore, Byron (classical as he would have liked to be), Shelley and
Keats, among the second, took almost every possible advantage,
though in varying degrees, of the new scale ; and we might add
some remarkable instances from the minors of a generation slightly
younger, though still older than that of Tennyson and Browning,
such as Hood, Darley, Praed, Beddoes and Macaulay?
Wordsworth, as might be expected, allows himself less freedom
than any of the others, yet his own range of metre is considerable.
The great Immortality Ode would, by itself, supply large, if
not exhaustive, texts for dealing with new methods; and the
handling of his best blank verse embodies, to the full, that constant
shifting of the values and cadences of the line by alteration of
pause, by insertion of words of special weight or colour and the
like, against which Johnson had partially protested, but which the
joint study of Shakespeare and Milton is, of itself, sufficient to
suggest and to authorise. Nor is it necessary to point out, at any
? See, ante, vol. XII, chap. V and this vol, chap. vi.


## p. 231 (#247) ############################################

a
vii] Coleridge's Theory and Practice
231
length, that the mere revival of the sonnet—especially its adoption
in the forms which do not consist of regular quatrains and a final
couplet—is a sign of profession and mark of difference. ' It was
not for nothing that the late seventeenth century and nearly
the whole of the eighteenth were shy of the sonnet. Its great
scope as a metrical unit, the intricate arrangement of its rimes,
the close-knit structure of successive lines and the absolute im-
possibility of maintaining a middle pause right through without
destroying the whole principle of the form, were enough to set
any eighteenth-century writer against it, quite independently of
vain imaginations about the unadjustable differences between
English and Italian, the paucity of rimes in our language, or the
artificial, trivial character of the thing in itself.
Coleridge was certain to be interested in this matter; and,
whether the famous introductory note to Christabel be a satis-
factory statement of the nature of the Christabel metre or not-
whether his notion that the principle was new can or cannot be
reconciled with his undoubted knowledge of previous examples
thereof-the statement itself remains one of the most important
and epoch-marking, if not epoch-making, in the history of the
subject. Even when we make the fullest allowance for his
peculiarities in the way of not doing things, it is extraordinary
that, in the welter of individual utterances that we have from him,
there is not more on the matter. If he had only indicated to
his nephew the exact grounds of his remarkable dissatisfaction
with Tennyson's prosody, we might have had more to go upon.
But it is now known that, in addition to the pretty numerous
metrical experiments which have long been in print, he made
others of a much more interesting character, directly on the lines
which Tennyson himself pursued ; and some of them, if not all,
have already been published. They all show—as does Christabel,
whichever side be taken in the accent v. foot battle about it; as
do other pieces of his strictly English versification; and, as do even
those very pretty and most remarkable dodecasyllabic hendeca-
syllables of the 'old Milesian story'—that his natural ear, assisted
by his study more especially of Shakespeare, had made him
thoroughly-if not, to himself, explicitly-conscious of that principle
of substitution which, more than anything else, and almost by itself,
strikes the difference between the old (or rather middle) prosody
and the new, and which The Ancient Mariner and Christabel,
each in its way, were to beat, inextricably, into the heads of the
next three generations.
6


## p. 232 (#248) ############################################

232. The Prosody of the Nineteenth Century [CH.
a
6
Although Southey never reached any point near the heights
of Coleridge in poetical practice; although, except in parts of
Thalaba, Kehama and a few shorter poems, his actual prosodic
touch is somewhat blunt; there are very few poets who have
shown so direct a knowledge of the root of the matter in theory,
and still fewer technical prosodists who have been able to
put their theories into anything like such poetic practice. The
possible cento of remarks from his letters and works has been
referred to above. It was he who, first of all English poets, gave
precision to Shenstone's vague hankerings after the dactyl’; and
indicated a more scientific system than Coleridge's rough and
ready indication of accents as all that mattered, by remarking
to Wynn, in the letter above referred to, that 'two syllables may
be counted as one : they take up only the time (that is, the
technical time]' of one,' and justifying his principles and practice
not merely from the balladists but from Milton. It is quite clear
that he had arrived at the secret simply through his wellknown
early, extensive and accurate reading of English poetry.
So, again, whatever may be thought of his rimeless verse, and
of his classical verse, they are, at any rate, testimonies of the
strongest kind to his prosodic 'curiosity,' in the Johnsonian and
good sense. And there is to be added to his credit, in the case of
each, that he avoided the great prosodic danger of irregular rime-
lessness (the constant drop into blank verse), and that, if he did not
cure, he saw, the diseases of the English hexameter. His blank
verse is not, as a rule, masterly, and he was much too fond of
writing it ; but, if it never, at its best, approaches anything like the
best of Wordsworth's, it never, at its worst, comes near the flatness
of Wordsworth's average. And-once more specially to his credit
from the present point of view-he knew the dangers that he
dared. He perceived, as none of its numerous enemies in the
eighteenth century had perceived, and as too few of its less
numerous friends had seemed to perceive, that instead of being
an easier, blank verse is, in fact, a much more difficult, metrical
vehicle than rime, whether in couplet or stanza; and he had the
combined insight and frankness to point out that it had the special
drawback of setting the weakest parts of the composition in the
clearest lights. The loss of his intended review of Guest, which,
by reason of his interest in, and knowledge of, the subject, would,
probably, have extended to the length of a long pamphlet or
short book, may almost be set beside those other losses of the
1 Bracketed passage in italics inserted by the present writer.


## p. 233 (#249) ############################################

VII] Scott's Theory and Practice 233
prosodic works of Jonson and Dryden which have been noticed
formerly.
If Southey is the poet from whom we should most expect such
studies, Scott is certainly the one from whom we should expect
least; yet the omnipresence, expressed or 'understood,' of the
matter is visible in him also. At least one remarkable evidence
of study of the shortcomings of eighteenth-century versification
occurs in his prefatory discourses, and, as to practice, he stands
almost in the very first rank. It may be true (and he, according
to his habit, acknowledged it himself with more than generosity) that
his meeting at Rose’s with specimens of the unpublished Christabel
had a great effect upon, if it did not actually determine, the
metre of The Lay of the Last Minstrel. But Coleridge's erroneous
idea that the principle of this metre was new blinded his own
eyes (as it has less excusably blinded those of others since) to the
real state of the case. Scots dialect had (and Burns is a sufficient,
and, in the circumstances, much more than sufficient, example of
this) preserved the principle of substitution better than had
southern English ; and Scott's own wide and unrivalled acquaintance
with romance, combined with his knowledge of Spenser and of
Shakespeare, would have put a far inferior poet in a position to
understand and work out the powers of the equivalenced octo-
syllable. Moreover, The Lay and its successors avail themselves
of variety in treatment of this much more than does Christabel,
and somewhat more than Christabel and The Ancient Mariner,
even when combined, can be said to do.
But Scott's contribution to, and his exemplification of, the new
principles of prosodic variety were far from being limited to his
voluminous and various experiments in the manipulation of what
his contemporaries would persist in calling ‘Hudibrastics,' though
the metre had existed in English for nearly five hundred years
before Hudibras appeared. His best exercises in blank verse were
confined to those extraordinary 'old play' fragments where, in
editions in which the real Simon Pures have not been distinguished
from the others by commentatorial labour, it is almost impossible
to tell (except from actual personal knowledge of the older texts)
which is genuine Elizabethan and which is wholly or mainly
Scott's own. He evidently did not care much for the stopped
heroic couplet; and, though he must have known it from his
6
1 Introduction to The Lay of the Last Minstrel, on the possibility of cutting down
the usual heroic to octosyllables by the omission of otiose epithets. It is characteristic
that Scott disclaims all originality in this suggestion.


## p. 234 (#250) ############################################

234 The Prosody of the Nineteenth Century [CH.
seventeenth-century reading, he did not try the enjambed.
But
his Spenserians are much better than is generally thought; and
his command of 'fingering' in lyrical measures—both complete
pieces and scraps-is a really wonderful thing, which cannot be
(as it has been, by some, in Moore's case) dismissed as merely due
to following of music. That he caught the best and rarest cadences
of the ballad in a hundred different instances (the finest of which
are, perhaps, the girl's song at Ellangowan and Elspeth Cheyne's
ballad of the Harlaw) may be thought, though with doubtful
sufficiency, to be accounted for by his acquaintance with original
ballad literature. But no one before him, from the unknown
author of Mary Ambree downwards, had put into the serious
anapaest, continuously used, anything like the varied fire and
colour of Bonnie Dundee and Lochinvar; the metre of the
unapproachable Proud Maisie is very rarely, if, as an accomplished
thing, ever, to be found in the old ballad ; and there are not a few
others that might be cited. Moreover, it has to be remembered
that the enormous popularity and consequent diffusion of Scott's
verse scattered the seed of these varied measures to an unequalled
degree.
With respect to Moore, on the other hand, the debt to music,
though it may be exaggerated, certainly exists. It has been a
critical observation, ever since dispassionate reviewing came into
occasional existence, that the rhythm of Irish poets, though some-
times a little facile and jingly, is usually varied and correct;
whether this, in its turn, has something to do with any general
musical attitude need not be discussed. In his longer poems,
Moore, perhaps, shows the correctness rather than the variety;
and he has a considerable liking for that heroic couplet to which,
as we have seen, no one of the greater elders born in the same
decade with himself was much inclined. In fact, there is no metre
like this for poetical satire; and it need hardly be said that Moore
is a very expert satirist in verse. But it is when we come to his
lyrics that the strength of his prosodic power, its exemplification
of the new variety, colour and outline, and, withal, its direct con-
nection with actual 'setting,' are clearly seen. Most of these, as is
well known, are definitely adjusted to certain musical airs; and it
is probably not rash to say that Moore (who, it must be remembered,
was a skilled composer as well as practitioner of music) never
wrote a lyric without an actual or possible accompaniment sound-
ing in his ears at the time. But it is greatly to his credit that this
has not resulted either (as has been too frequent with others) in


## p. 235 (#251) ############################################

VII]
Moore's and Byron's
235
6
mere facile sing-song, or (as has not been unknown) in mechanically
rhythmical but spiritless stuff, in which the whole burden of charm
is left to the musical setting itself. And no ear that is an ear can
possibly deny, even if it tries to discount, the sound-charm of not
a little of Moore's lyrical work. Also, he has a virtuosity, in this
respect, which it is difficult to discover anywhere else. Some of
the airs to which he composed 'words' are, as he most frankly
confesses (accompanying the confession with a really unnecessary
apology), so odd and catchy' that it is necessary to violate at
least eighteenth-century laws to get their equivalent in metre at
all. The once enormously popular Eveleen's Bower and the less
known but much more beautiful At the mid Hourl are capital
instances. But Moore has conquered the difficulty by an exten-
sion certainly—but only by an extension at least occasionally
licensable of those laws of equivalence and substitution which,
perhaps, he himself doubtfully approved and, in theory, may have
hardly comprehended.
The great differences which exist as to the merits of Byron as
a poet fortunately need not affect estimate of his prosody in the
very least. His expressed-and, probably, to, at least, some extent,
his real-tastes were for eighteenth-century norms; and he
wrote heroic couplet of the orthodox type with acknowledged
expertness, while his blank verse, which, on occasion, could be very
fine, was an interesting variety, not, perhaps, too fancifully to be
called an unrimed heroic with a certain, but not large, admixture
of the newer style. For his Spenserians he went, as he has practi-
cally confessed, rather to Beattie than to Spenser or even Thomson,
and the result was not altogether fortunate; the metre, in his
hands, losing that flow as of mighty waters meandering, eddying,
sweeping, 'without noise or foam,' which is its proper character,
and attaining in exchange, at best, a somewhat declamatory
construction and intonation. He could manage the continuous
anapaest well, but not consummately, as may be seen by comparing
The Assyrian came down with Bonnie Dundee or Young
Lochinvar. His continuous octosyllabics, whether pure or mixed,
have, at their best, a greater intensity than Scott's, but lack variety.
Still, if reservations have to be made on some of these heads, it
must be admitted that this is a remarkable tale of metres to be
achieved without what can be fairly called a failure in a single case;
while it has to be added that some of the lyrics actually attain the
peculiar 'fingering' which is necessary to complete success.
1. At the mid hour of night, when stars are weeping I fly. '
6


## p. 236 (#252) ############################################

236 The Prosody of the Nineteenth Century [CH. .
But Byron's greatest metrical triumph is, assuredly, to be found
in the octaves of Beppo and Don Juan. He had, of course, Frere
before him as a pattern ; and, also, he had the Italians who had
been patterns to Frere. But, patterns are of curiously little use
in prosody; and each consummate practitioner is, in fact, a new
inventor. For light narrative and satiric running commentary, as
well as for description of the kind required, this octave of Byron
simply cannot be excelled. At any rate, it never has been ; and,
despite his vast popularity and the consequent fact that the pattern
was long in everyone's hands, it has scarcely ever been equalled
and very rarely even approached.
The prosodic variety of Shelley is immense ; there is, perhaps,
hardly a poet–certainly there was none up to his time—who has
written so consummately in so large a number of measures. But,
one of the most interesting points about him, and about the
contrast which is constantly presenting itself between him and
Keats, is the peculiar character of his following of others. That
this following should appear in his early and curiously worthless
apprentice-work might be expected; but in the later and larger
poems—not in the smaller—there is to be found one of the
strangest compounds of imitation and originality that meets us
in the entire range of prosodic study. Queen Mab follows Thalaba,
and declares the following in the very opening stanza with that
astonishing naïveté which is one of Shelley's great characteristics.
But, although he had, by this time, hardly got out of his novitiate,
the necessity for him to become unlike everyone else, even in
apparent endeavour to be like them, appears; and the total effect
of the Queen Mab stanza is utterly different from that of Southey's
arrangements. The same, in a more remarkable degree, is the case
with Alastor, where the blank verse is obviously Wordsworthian
in suggestion, but acquires even more obviously a colour entirely
its own; and with The Revolt of Islam, where the Spenserians
pretty certainly start with a touch of Byron, but transform them-
selves into something not much more like Childe Harold than
Adonais itself was subsequently.
It is possible, of course, to take exception to some of the
devices (such as the large employment of double rimes in Adonais)
by which Shelley impresses his own mark on these famous old
measures ; but it is not possible to fail to discern in them the
most perfect products yet of emancipated prosody. And, when we
turn to his shorter poems, it is still more impossible to discern
even suggestion from any previous model, while the variety is


## p. 237 (#253) ############################################

VII]
Shelley's and Keats's
237
>
a
innumerable without a single failure to produce beauty. There
are those who hold that, in one or two places, Shelley outsteps
even the large room given by the new prosody and passes off
lines—and beautiful lines—which no principle of mere substitution
of equivalent values will justify. The present writer doubts this
very much. Very rarely can you trace Shelley's exact processes,
even when you can trace some origin and discern the difference
of his result; but that result, at least after the date of Alastor,
if not, prosodically speaking, after that of Queen Mab, can almost
always be justified on the new principles which have been and will
be sketched in this chapter. And, where it cannot, it is, at least,
fair to remember that his text, if not exactly corrupt, can in very
few cases be said to have undergone definitive revision at its
author's hands.
In the case of Keats, the results of prosodic study of his methods
are curiously different. In him, we have, not a poet who catches
up a suggestion and in whose mind that suggestion transmutes
itself, one can hardly tell how, but a 'sedulous ape' of a glorified
kind who takes a definite model and works on that model in a way
the processes of which can be traced with tolerable exactness. In
the early pieces, as one would expect, the workmanship is crude and
the hand uncertain. But, in the three longest poems, Endymion,
Lamia and Hyperion, the prosodic process is perfectly distinct,
and in Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes and The Eve of St Mark
and the odes and smaller poems hardly less so, though there are, as
a rule, even more striking examples of the completed fusing of the
various elements. As a prosodic example, Endymion is not the
least remarkable. Leigh Hunt had, indeed, ventured to revive the
heroic couplet by recourse to the overlapped form of the seven-
teenth century. Keats may have followed Hunt. But, at least
some of the not very numerous persons who are familiar with the
Jacobean and Caroline originals feel pretty sure that Keats knew
them too. He has, to some extent, imitated their vices? ; but he
has attained a constant sweetness which is nowhere in The Story
of Rimini, and an occasional strength which is seldom found in
Chalkhill or in Chamberlayne.
He himself, however, knew that he had let this sweetness
become cloying and had occasionally, at least, turned softness into
flaccidity; and he set to work to tone up his strings. He did this by
arduous, and evident joint, study of the prosodies of Milton and of
Dryden. In the first place, he still clave to Dryden's form-couplet.
1 For which see, ante, vol. vii, chap. iv.


## p. 238 (#254) ############################################

238 The Prosody of the Nineteenth Century (CHch
.
a
The result was the fine verse of Lamia, with triplets and Alex-
andrines restored, and with a good deal of Miltonic phraseology.
But it was almost impossible that this should not attract Keats
to Milton's metre as well as to his phrase : and so there was
Hyperion. Yet, no one of the three poems is open to the reproach,
constantly and sometimes justly urged, against work which shows
the existence of a model-of being a mere imitative exercise. The
poet has infused sufficient of himself into all of them, and hardly
the dullest critical ear could fail to distinguish a specimen of
Endymion from Pharonnida, of Lamia from any of the Fables,
or even of Hyperion from Paradise Lost. The octaves of Isabella
show less definite following; and, perhaps, despite some extremely
beautiful things, less individuality in the success ; but the two Eves
again show us something of the earlier phenomenon. Spenser had
now been so often and so variously imitated, and the peculiar
combination of character and adaptability in the metre had been
so freely shown, that the finished poem, from this point of view, is
less surprising than it is beautiful. But the unfinished Eve of
St Mark is, again, a most remarkable prosodic study. Its octo-
syllable is usually traced to Chaucer ; but, to the present writer,
Gower seems to be much more in evidence and the way in which
Keats flushed Gower's too frequently insignificant flow with
colour and spirit, undulated its excessive evenness, stocked
the waves with gold and silver fish and paved the channel with
varicoloured pebbles, is, indeed, a marvel. In the odes and smaller
pieces it is still more difficult to separate study of the prosody
from praise of the poetry; but, in La Belle Dame sans Merci, at
least, the modification of the ballad lesson would take a whole
paragraph to display it fully.
Not less indicative of the course of prosodic events is the group
of poets, in one way minor in another transitional, discussed
in an earlier chapter? They were by no means all of one literary
school or sect. Beddoes and Darley were what their slightly
younger contemporaries in France would have hailed with joy
had they known them, romantiques à tous crins ; Hood was
not quite that, but a decided follower of the earlier and more
sober romantic school, deriving straight from Elizabethan litera-
ture. Praed was an accomplished classical scholar, of the type
of Canning and Frere but with more lyrical gift; and Macaulay the
same, with, perhaps, something of a taste more 'classical,' in the
transferred sense, and, thus, less romantic than any of the others.
1 See, ante, vol. XII, chap. v.


## p. 239 (#255) ############################################

VII]
The Lesser Poets'
239
Yet, even he, and much more the rest, would give a sufficient
text, even without any of the greater poets just dealt with, for
illustrating the present discourse. The adoption of the metre
of the Lays for their subject would, in fact, be enough; still more
the execution. But the contrast of Macaulay's two best poetic
things—Epitaph on a Jacobite, at once stately and pathetic, with
its firm memory of Dryden and Pope, fretted and chased with
touches very different from theirs; and The Last Buccaneer, one
of the uttermost stretches of the new prosodic licence, perfectly
justifiable, indeed, but justifiable only so—marks his prosodic
character far more unmistakably.
Only brief reference can be made to Praed's equally exquisite
manipulation of the old three-foot anapaest of Gay and Byrom and
Pulteney, of Shenstone and Cowper and Byron', into the metre of
the Letter of Advice; to the triumphant irregularity of The Red
Fisherman bettering Southey's instruction; and to other things
by him. The too little remarked skill of Hood, not merely in what
may be thought the deliberate acrobatism of his comic pieces, but
in The Haunted House, in The Bridge of Sighs and in more than
one or more than half a dozen of his songs, requires no long com-
ment. But these two, like Macaulay, are specially valuable for
the purpose, because no one can decline to accept them—though
some still decline to accept the authors of Death's Jestbook and
Sylvia—as formal and duly qualified representatives of their
period in English literature. Yet, it will be exceedingly difficult
for the recusants, unless they adopt some of the purely arbitrary
doctrines of the prosodists to whom we are coming, to deny to
Beddoes and Darley perfect prosodic correctness of the new kind.
Both were, no doubt-Beddoes to a proven certainty-influenced
by Shelley; and both carried even further the liberty of combining
lines of almost any length into stanzas of almost any shape. We
have glanced at the danger of this process shown by the old
* Pindaric' writers ad nauseam and by some of the present school,
with Southey occasionally among them—that is to say, the con-
struction of merely mechanical aggregations of line which have no
symphonic effect. But, neither Darley nor Beddoes can be charged
with this ; and we can turn from them to theoretic dealers with
subject, as from almost typical examples of its practice.
After what has been said of the professional prosodists of the
1 An intermediate between Cowper and Byron, very likely to have been known to
the latter, has been recently noted by W. P. Ker in that curious person Charlotte
Smith, who gave Scott the name Waverley. '


## p. 240 (#256) ############################################

240 The Prosody of the Nineteenth Century [CH.
last years of the eighteenth century, no experienced reader will
expect much from those of the early nineteenth. Nor will such
a person be in the least surprised to find that the lessons of the
practice of the new school of poets exercised very slow influence
on prosodic' critics, even when they were not indignantly or
scornfully rejected by them. One of the chief counts in Croker's
indictment against Endymion in The Quarterly, when nearly a
fifth of the century had passed, was that 'there is hardly a complete
couplet enclosing a complete idea throughout the book. ' Nearly
ten years later, when all the greatest poetry in varied form of the
first school had been written and, on the eve of Tennyson, Crowe,
himself a small poet, public orator at Oxford, and a very amiable
and scholarly writer, denounced, in his Treatise on English versifi-
cation, the combination of short and long lines, and stigmatised
contemporary verse, generally, as ‘slovenly. ' Nor, though it is
impossible wholly to omit, would there be much good in dwelling
upon the prosodists of the nearly forty years between Foggl and
Guest. Walker, of the famous dictionary, writing towards the end
of the eighteenth century, sneers at the whole subject, but practi-
cally repeats what Bysshe had said at the beginning, that a line
has so many syllables, and ictus in such and so many places.
Lindley Murray, of the still more famous grammar, is muddled
and inadequate, with some terrible scansions, but, perhaps, deserves
to be saved from utter condemnation by his remarkable phrase,
'We have all that the ancients had; and something they had not';
which, though a little oracular, is perfectly true, and might easily
be expanded into a sound system of prosody.
John Warner's Metronariston (1797) is a remarkable book,
dealing partly with classical, partly with English, prosody, and is
well worth the study of specialists ; but it is not easy to give brief
account of it. Steele’snotions, after lying for some time neglected,
attracted attention from three writers: Odell, a Cambridge man;
the revolutionist and elocutionist Thelwall; and Richard Roe of
Dublin. Of these, Odell deals with the subject chiefly a priori,
his starting-points and methods being either musical or phonetic;
and Roe is an intensified Odell. But Thelwall goes farther than
either of them in the direction of repeating and exaggerating
Steele's impossible scansions. One will do:
To momentary | consciousness awoke.
.
The hexameters of Southey's A Vision of Judgment naturally
i See, ante, vol. XI, chap. XI, p. 250.


## p. 241 (#257) ############################################

VII] English Hexameters Guest
241
caused not a little discussion; in fact, if what was written on them
a
were taken with the renewed discussions about the time of Long-
fellow's Evangeline, and with the third stage of the controversy
reached in more recent years, the whole of this chapter could
easily be occupied by summary and criticism. A writer in The
Edinburgh Review not merely disapproved of the English hexa-
meter as such, but expanded the reasons for his disapproval into
a general anathema on equivalence, and a reaffirmation, in the
strongest terms, of the old belief, not merely in the allowable-
ness, but in the necessity, of pronouncing (feath’ry' and 'wat’ry. '
Another enemy of the verse, but, in this case, a friend of the
versifier, Tillbrook of Peterhouse, was almost the first to show
real acquaintance with earlier prosodists from Elizabethan
times downwards, but did not treat his subject quite in the right
way.
Some others, Herbert, Gregory, Blundell and even such better
known names as Hookham Frere and Payne Knight, must be only
names for us here. But not in such silence or quasi-silence, nor
with the slight notice accorded to others in the last two pages, can
we pass Edwin Guest, master of Gonville and Caius college, and
first historian of English rhythms in any sense worthy of the title.
In comparison with him, all his predecessors, even Mitford, are
merely fumblers with history; while the enormous majority of
them never attempt the historical method at all, and show constant
ignorance of facts vital to their subject. Guest knows, uses and,
in selection, cites the whole range of English poetry from Caedmon
to Coleridge, and, though he supplies no positive evidence of
knowledge of younger contemporaries such as Tennyson, there
are hints in his work which, if they do not directly suggest such
knowledge, are, at least, not inconsistent with it. And he applies
this knowledge, in the whole of his second volume and in part
of his first, with such industry and such method that, subject
to a reservation-unfortunately rather a large one-to be made
presently, it would be difficult to conceive, and a great deal more
difficult to execute, a more thorough conspectus of the forms of
English poetry up to circa 1830, continuously illustrated by
specimens of every age and more particularly from those depart-
ments of Old and Middle English verse which, in his time, were
largely inaccessible, and which, even now, are not to be found in
every library of fair size.
Unfortunately—and there is no undue begging of the question
in the use of the adverb, since Guest himself, revising his work some
16
E, L. XIII.
CH. VII.


## p. 242 (#258) ############################################

242 The Prosody of the Nineteenth Century [ch.
time after he had begun and even printed part of it, made large
admissions; while, even those who share part of his views hardly
in a single case adopt the whole—this laborious, excellently
arranged and almost exhaustively informed survey was made
under the influences of some of the most arbitrary assumptions
and some of the strangest prepossessions that ever affected
a work of scholarship. We must not include among these the
doctrine that English prosody is wholly accentual and syllabic;
for that doctrine, in part or whole, has been and is shared by
many, though it seems to others partly erroneous and wholly
inadequate. Nor, though there may be more doubt here, is his
system of 'sections' (starting with three, and possibly extending to
eleven, syllables), in place of the 'feet' which he will not admit,
incapable of defence, though the same remark applies to it. The
influences that injure, if they do not spoil, his work for all but very
discreet users of it are different.
The first of them was an extraordinary idea-utterly at variance
with that historic view which, in other respects, be took so well-
that the laws of Old English verse must govern those of modern.
The second (again absolutely unhistorical and, to do him justice,
apparently the subject of misgivings on his part before he published
the book) was that, during the Middle English period, there was
no blending, but merely the intrusion of an alien versification,
and that the rhythm of the foreigner' (i. e. that of the vast
majority of English verse, since Chaucer at least) is an unclean
thing.
These two huge assumptions were partly necessitated, partly
accompanied, by the strangest arbitrarinesses of minor judgments :
such as that no two adjoining syllables can be accented; that the
adjective ought to be always more strongly accented than the
substantive; that accented rhythm implies a fixed caesura or
pause; that no more than two unaccented syllables can come
together, and so forth. And these, in their turn, result in such
verdicts on particular verse as that Milton has no business to write
The Cherub Contemplation;
that Shakespeare's
Dead
Is noble Timon,
is opposed to every principle of versification'; and that Burns's
Like a rogue for forgery
'has very little to recommend it. '
1
1
1
1


## p. 243 (#259) ############################################

VII]
Victorian Prosody
243
In other words, Guest may be described, by borrowing an old
formula, as 'indefatigable in collecting and arranging examples,
not trustworthy in judging them'; and it may be questioned whether
his book has done more good or harm, especially since its republica-
tion in 1882 after his death. But, for the present, we may leave it
and its earlier or later successors for treatment hereafter and
return to the actual prosody of the second great period of the
nineteenth century, that of the strictly Victorian division of
poets.
Between the prosodic practice of the later and larger part of
the nineteenth century and that of the earlier, there is no such
difference of principle as had prevailed between the earlier
practice and the orthodox prosody of the eighteenth, so that,
despite the number and importance of Victorian poets, we shall
be able to treat them here more shortly than their teachers. But
there are still three, not ill-marked, shades of division—the last
of them as yet not clearly determinable but, possibly, of great
importance-between the stages of this Victorian poetry itself;
and there is at the opening, and not there only, a phenomenon
which, though once more not at all surprising when duly con-
sidered, is certainly remarkable. Moreover, the actual prosodists
of the sixty years are an almost formidable multitude, belonging
to various prosodic nations and speaking, as it were, different
prosodic languages; so that we shall have to give them more
room as we give the poets less. And the most logical order of
arrangement will be to deal with the special phenomenon above
referred to first; to take the theorists next and to end with the
sweeter mouths of the poets themselves.
The point to start with is the fact that, though we can, it is
believed, prove the general identity of method in the verse of
1798—1830, this was not by any means generally recognised, and
the absence of recognition was, undoubtedly, at the root of the
prosodic confusion of tongues which has succeeded. It has been
mentioned, and cannot be mentioned too often, that Coleridge
'could hardly scan' some of Tennyson's verses ; that he thought
the younger poet 'did not very well know what metre is,' and
wished him to write for two or three years in none but well
known and correctly defined' measures. Now, at the present day,
there is not the slightest difficulty, not merely in scanning Tenny-
son's metres throughout, even in the unfinished forms in which
Coleridge saw them in 1833, but in perceiving and proving that
they proceed wholly on that very same principle of equivalence
16-2


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244 The Prosody of the Nineteenth Century [CH.
which accounts for The Ancient Mariner and Christabel. Fifteen
years later, and half a dozen after the definitive exhibition of
Tennyson's genius and method in the 1842 volumes, a critic by no
means despicable and far from generally hostile, William Smith,
uttered a wail of agonised despair over the 'Hollyhock’ song-
every principle and almost every line of which can be defended
and paralleled from Shakespeare—as outlandish 'ear-torturing’
and altogether metrically indefensible and unintelligible. Bearing
these things in mind, and bearing in mind, also, the strange
paralogisms of Guest, rather less than midway between Smith and
Coleridge, we shall not be unprepared to find that neither the
return to the study of Elizabethan poetry, nor the great practice
of the first romantic school, nor the strictly historical, though
unfortunately misdirected, enquiries of Guest himself, saved the
prosodists of Victorian times from all sorts of contradictory will-
worships, of which the best thing that can usually be said is that
one often exposes the faults of another.
For at least twenty-indeed, one might almost say for thirty-
years after Guest, prosodic study in England was, though not
wholly, mainly devoted to the vexed question of English hexame-
ters, which, already revived seriously? by A Vision of Judgment,
was made active a second time in 1841 by Longfellow's Children
of the Lord's Supper, and, a few years later, by the immense
popularity of his Evangeline. Generally, prosodic study, even
when not directly concerned with this question, was still very
largely classicalised. One of the curiosities of the subject is
Evans's Treatise of Versification (1852), where the author,
slightly to our surprise, busies himself with a subject which he
frankly declares to be wholly unsatisfactory. No one acquainted
with the classics 'can possibly feel any satisfaction with blank-
verse'; 'an evil genius has always presided over our lyric
poetry'; English poetry generally is deficient in richness and
6
1 The main stepping-stones between the collapse of the Elizabethan efforts and
Southey's attempt may be conveniently arranged thus:
Later seventeenth century. Some specimens by Robert Chamberlain (not the author
of Pharonnida) in 1638; and by a very obscure person named Hockenbull in 1657;
with, between them, both example and discussion by the famous mathematician, John
Wallis, in his English Grammar (1652).
Eighteenth century. An anonymous work entitled Greek and Latin Measures in
English Poetry (1737), which is thought to have supplied Goldsmith with the grounds
of his recommendation of English hexameters (and sapphics—Watts's ? for Cowper's
were not then known) in bis 16th Essay. Some references in the prosodic work of Tucker
and Herries (see ante, vol. xi). Last and most influential, William Taylor's rendering
of German, in the last decade of the century, which acted directly on Southey.


## p. 245 (#261) ############################################

VII)
The Hexameter again
245
variety of sound. The quotations will probably be sufficient,
but it must be owned that they are interesting. The names of
O'Brien, Latham, Dallas, lord Redesdale, Sydney Walker, Masson,
may be mentioned as helps to those who wish to work up the
subject thoroughly, but they can receive no detailed discussion
here.
On the other hand, the hexameter controversy requires some
careful general notice, but few of the combatants can be in-
dividually dealt with. It was, perhaps, unavoidable—though the
present writer frankly admits that it does not seem to him to be
really 80—that this controversy should be, if not exactly confused
with, almost inextricably joined to, the old accent v. quantity
battle. As this is one of the somewhat numerous discussions in
which it seems impossible to arrange a set of terms which the
combatants will accept in the same sense, it is pretty hopeless;
but the matter can, perhaps, best be dealt with by a series of short
propositions presenting the views of various parties, reproduced, so
far as possible, in uncontroversial language, if not as to the whole
question (for there are hardly any two persons who agree on that),
yet as to its general subject and constituent parts.
First, as to the metre in itself:
1. There are those who, like the writer in The Edinburgh
Review above referred to, altogether deny the possibility or, at
least, the legitimacy of it in English on the simple ground that
we have no quantity.
II. Others, and, in fact, the vast majority, whether they like or
dislike the result, admit the possibility of the verse; but dispute
whether its constituent feet are to be connected with a view only
to accent, as in the verse of Southey, Coleridge, Longfellow and
some of Clough's; or by quantity, determined in various ways (see
post) but non-accentually.
III. A very few have maintained that the combination of
dactyl and spondee is practically impossible, or, at least, a cacopho-
nous jingle in English, and that, though good verses simulating the
hexametrical form can be, and have been, produced (as especially
in Kingsley's Andromeda), they are always really five-foot ana-
paests with anacrusis (initial syllable or syllables outside the first
foot) and hypercatalexis (ditto after last ditto). This view
seems not improbably to have been held, though it is never
clearly expressed, by Campion and other Elizabethans ; it was
formulated in relation to Greek by the eccentric John Warner,
was deliberately championed and exemplified by Swinburne and
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246 The Prosody of the Nineteenth Century [ch
CH.
was long ago independently arrived at by the present writer,
whose conviction of its truth has grown stronger and stronger.
As to the construction of it:
I. Southey, who bestowed considerable pains (see his Preface)
on the theory of the matter, came to the conclusion that spondees
were scarcely available in English, and contented himself with
trochees as a substitute--a licence of no great importance to
those who hold that a very large number of syllables are 'com-
mon' in our tongue. He also claimed, but did not really often
exercise, the right to begin the line with a short syllable, which
can hardly be so well allowed? The result was a cantering
.
measure, rather ‘ungirt,' if not actually ricketty, with a special
tendency to break itself, not into irregular halves as a hexameter
should, but into a rocking-horse rhythm of three parts, two feet in
a
each, yet sometimes providing fine lines, which, however, always
suggest the anapaestic arrangement above referred to. This
metre was, in turn, taken up by Longfellow, who made it rather
more tunable as a whole, but even looser and more ricketty.
II. On the other hand, strict believers in quantity, as necessi-
tating either long-vowel sound or 'position,' revolted against the
acceptance of stressed syllables as “long,' and began in various
ways to meet their own difficulty. Some met it by selecting for
their long syllables such as combined stress with one or both of
the other qualifications; and the most successful examples of this
plan are Tennyson's experiments—of which, however, he himself
saw the futility.
But yet others, including some persons of unquestionable
scholarship and talent, not to say genius-Spedding, Cayley,
Calverley, Clough in his later experiments, and others down to
the late W. J. Stone, with the support of the present poet laureate-
determined either to neglect accent, or (in some cases basing
themselves on certain theories as to practice in the ancient
languages) to pit quantity against it, and to produce verses which
should scan by the first in the teeth of the second. The novelty
and startling character of these proceedings, and the undoubted
abilities of some of the practitioners, have given, at different times,
a certain amount of vogue to the system. As usual, nothing will
be attempted here beyond presenting a selection of the fruits for
judgment of the nature and merits of the tree. If the examples
given below are possible and euphonious English verses of
Frere, and one or two others, went further, and postulated an additional
('anacrustic ') syllable at the beginning.


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VII]
Later Prosodists
247
hexametrical, i. e. dactylic-spondaic rhythm, then that system is
admissible : and if not, not?
For some years, on each side of the very middle of the century,
attention was chiefly directed to this question; but, by degrees, it
widened, and the last forty or fifty years have been the most
fertile in prosodic study of any similar periods in English literary
history.