No More Learning

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his meeting at Rose’s with specimens of the unpublished Christabel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


## p. 244 (#260) ############################################

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
a


## p. 246 (#262) ############################################

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.


## p. 247 (#263) ############################################

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. A remarkably original, in some respects very acute, but,
in others, slightly chimerical, student of the subject (who, like most
persons of this blend, has exercised much influence lately) was
Coventry Patmore, author of The Angel in the House. He,
next to Tillbrook and Guest, and rather more than the latter, took
full cognisance of previous prosodic theory, and his later poetical
work (the earlier was rather facile, metrically speaking) showed
good knowledge of poetic practice. But he was somewhat given
to what the eighteenth century, with its usual practical wisdom,
would have called 'airy notions. ' It is mostly from him that a
rather favourite modern fancy of a sort of eternal fisticuffs
between the law of metre and the freedom of language? is derived,
though the hexameter controversies also started this. He held
very singular theories as to pauses and pause-endings, and, on the
whole, his prosody may be described in the terms of the modern
scientific foes of Bacchus as rather a stimulant than a food.
Towards the close of the sixties—perhaps owing to the great
developments of actual poetry during that decade, perhaps not-
a remarkable number of prosodic works appeared. In the single
year 1869 came Edward Wadham's English Versi fication, with
an entirely new terminology of a most fantastic character, not
much knowledge of the history of the subject and a certain
return to the eighteenth-century views about trisyllabic feet;
R. F. Brewer's A. Manual of English Prosody (since republished
and renamed), which is a useful magazine of fact, but does not
show much grasp of the subject from any point of view; a shorter,
1
Dons, undergraduates, essayists and public, I ask you.
(Herameter-Cayley. )
They, of Amor musing, rest in a leafy cavern.
(Pentameter—Clough. )
Is my weary travel ended ? much further is in store.
(Hexameter-Stone. )
? This, after the old manner, was taken up by the Germans and passed back again
to us; so that these conflict' theories have very recently assumed great prominence.
That a contrast, rather than a conflict, between rhetorical and metrical arrangement
is, in some cases, observable, cannot be denied, and is often very interesting to trace.
But to elevate it into a principle is, probably, a very great mistake; and would certainly,
if insisted on too much, lead to a new prosodic chaos.
>


## p. 248 (#264) ############################################

248 The Prosody of the Nineteenth Century [CH.
equally practical and sounder book, The Rules of Rhyme, by the
younger Thomas Hood; and the prosodic part of Abbott's
A Shakespearian Grammar, in which strict syllabic, and strict
accentual, doctrines are combined in the most peremptory fashion.
In the next few years there were added Sylvester's The Laws of
Verse, a book somewhat abstruse in appearance but very lively
and suggestive in fact; the prosodic section of Earle's Philology
of the English Tongue, and, a little later, the work of Henry
Sweet, both of them specially devoted to the sound value of
words and syllables; and (another starting point of much sub-
sequent writing) J. A. Symonds's Blank Verse, an interesting
but somewhat anarchical tractate which denies the possibility
of scansion on any scheme. Meanwhile was begun and carried
on the most elaborate of all treatises on English pronun-
ciation, that of A. J. Ellis, which includes an extraordinarily
intricate and minute scheme, extending to forty-five different
items, of syllabic value from the point of view, single and com-
bined, of pitch, force, weight, length and strength.
Later still, and in the last quarter of the century, may be
noticed Gilbert Conway's Treatise of Versification (1878), written
on uncompromising accentual principles, and reverting to such
pronunciations as 'int'resting,' 'am'rous,' 'del'cate'; the charac-
teristic eccentricity of Ruskin's Elements of English Prosody
(1880); and parts of two most interesting books by the late Edmund
Gurney, very strongly musical in system. These last, like two
later works by persons of distinction, the first in philosophy, the
second in physical science, Shadworth Hodgson and Fleeming
Jenkin, were largely influenced by the republication of Guest in
1882; and they all represent the attempts of men of distinguished
ability in certain specialised ways to theorise on prosody. They
are all, in the highest degree, ingenious and suggestive, and one is
loth to apply to them the obvious terms which are often used in
regard to excursions from the outside into technical subjects; but
they certainly suggest somewhat insufficient acquaintance with the
facts and the history of the matter. No such suggestion can be
made in respect of J. B. Mayor's Chapters on English Metre and
A Handbook of Modern English Metre, books in the highest degree
valuable for their general view of the subject and specially for
their criticism of Guest and of not a few of the writers just
mentioned.
Only three more prosodists can be individually noticed here.
In 1888 appeared an anonymous treatise (or part of one, for the


## p. 249 (#265) ############################################

VII] Principles here adopted 249
promised continuation never appeared) entitled Accent and
Rhythm explained by the law of Monopressures. This doctrine,
which was afterwards taken up and applied by Skeat, rests
the whole prosodic matter on, and practically confines it to,
a physiological basis—speech being regarded as only possible in
jets governed by the glottis. No examination of this can be given
here, but the objection brought against it that these jets, if they
exist, must be the raw material of prose and verse alike' seems
almost fatal of itself and could be carried a great deal further.
A year later appeared the most important book by a poet on poetics
that has ever been issued in English, Robert Bridges's Prosody
of Milton, which, later much expanded, has almost become a
treatise of stress prosody, while the actual history of the subject
was, for the first time, set before the public with full bibliographical
and large, if not exhaustive, critical detail by T. S. Omond.
Before concluding these remarks, or as an appendix to them, it
may not be impertinent to sum up very briefly the chief points of
the prosodic system from which (though it is believed without
prejudice to other views) they and the whole of their predecessors
in the prosodic chapters in this History have been made. For it
is a constant-whether in all cases or not a quite well justified-
complaint that writers on prosody do not make themselves clear
-that the reader does not understand what they mean. The
principle of the system-drawn from no a priori ideas as to metre
or rhythm, to quantity or to accent, but from simple observation
of the whole range of English poetry—is that it can, from the time
of the blending of romance and Teutonic elements in Middle
English, be best accounted for by admitting 'feet' corresponding
-as, indeed, all such things, whether called 'feet,''bars,'
'groups,'
'sections' or anything else, must, of mathematical necessity, cor-
respond to those of the classical languages, but composed of
syllables the contrasted metrical quality of which (called for
similar convenience ‘length' and 'shortness') is not arrived at
in exactly the same way as in Greek or in Latin. There, length
depended usually on vowel quantity or on “position, technical
accent' having nothing to do with it; though 'stress' could have
exceptional effect on what was called arsis and thesis. In English,
all these act, but, in the case of vowel-value and position, with
a much lesser and more facultative effect; while accent acquires an
almost unlimited power of lengthening syllables and can be dis-
regarded with impunity in few cases. With a reasonable accentual
system which, objecting to the word 'quantity' for this or that
-
6
>


## p. 250 (#266) ############################################

250 The Prosody of the Nineteenth Century [CH.
extraneous reason (such as that 'quantity’implies 'time '), formu-
lates its arrangements with the substitution of “accented' and
unaccented' for 'long' and 'short,' there need be no irreconcilable
quarrel; though such a system may be thought cumbrous and
open to a constant danger, which has often become disastrous, of
unduly neglecting the unaccented syllables, and their powers of
affecting the integral character of the accent-group. But, with
any system which simply strides from accent to accent, neglecting
or slurring other syllables, still more with any which would have
sequences of similar lines to be composed of discretionary bars or
sections varying like the rhythm clauses of prose, it may be
admitted that no concordat is possible ; nor any with those yet
cruder systems which, starting from a purely syllabic basis, would,
as did Bysshe and (partly) Johnson, either force extra syllables
into unnatural coalescence or forbid them altogether as illegitimate.
Nevertheless, an endeavour has been made to prevent colouring
the actual history unduly with opinion; and, as it would hardly be
possible to find anyone who can write on prosody without holding
prosodic opinions of some sort, serious objection to the method
adopted can hardly be taken.
As noted above, the history of the practical prosody of the last
two thirds of the century may be taken in three stages, the last of
which may be said to be still existing and, as has rarely happened
in our history, owes something directly to preceptist studies. In
the first, from the thirties to the sixties, the ever-developing genius
of Tennyson and Browning developed, in its turn, as has been
partly observed already, the prosodic enfranchisement of the first
romantic school, with definite, if not always with conscious, refer-
ence to that school's work. On almost every poet of the tiine
(except men who practically belonged not merely to the last
generation but to the last century), the lesson of equivalence
taught by Coleridge had its effect almost unresisted, though some-
times not fully understood, and nothing can be stranger than
Coleridge's own inability to recognise that in, for instance, The
Dying Swan, this lesson is simply exemplified—that you can
expound it out of his own mouth. The blank verse of Wordsworth,
on the other hand, had very great influence on Browning, less on
Tennyson, who may be said almost to have developed a fresh variety
of his own straight from Milton, but with very strong idiosyncrasy
of blend. Metrically, the influence of Keats on him, strong in
other ways, was less perceptible than that of Shelley, which, in
those same other ways, is not so noteworthy as it is on Browning


## p. 251 (#267) ############################################

VII]
Tennyson Browning Arnold
251
Nobody, indeed, before Matthew Arnold (and he only to relinquish
it) adopted the enjambed couplet of Endymion. But the so-called
‘irregular' lyric forms of both these great and too early removed
poets exercised the widest power, not merely in respect of abstract
form, but in directing the principal efforts of both their successors
towards lyrical poetry. If anyone demurs to this, let him perpend
the striking lesson of the first and second editions of Tennyson's
Princess, the first without, the second with, lyrical insets.
These two great poets continued, the one for nearly, the other
for more than, sixty years, to multiply examples of their metrical,
as of their poetical, powers. Towards the close of his career,
Tennyson perhaps exaggerated that free admission of trisyllabic
feet which he had made the differentia of his blank verse; and
Browning, in the same vehicle, undoubtedly carried to excess the
almost pedestrian looseness of his style. But, by this time, each
had made excursion into almost every principal province of
English metre, and in no one excursion had failed. The charge of
over-sweetness in 'numbers' brought against Tennyson was merely
a crotchet; that of over-discord brought against Browning had
more apparent, and even real, justification, but, on the whole, was
a mistake. And it is difficult to know where to look for other
examples of a metrical system-for it was really the same in both
despite its apparent differences of administration'-justified by
such entirely novel displays of craftsmanship as Tennyson's in the
anapaests of The Voyage of Maeldune and Browning's in the
Alexandrines of Fifine at the Fair, each written half a century
after the writer's first appearance as a poet.
The younger and lesser verse-writers of this time cannot be
reviewed here, but the prevalent tendency need not be better
illustrated than by the example already glanced at, in part, of
Matthew Arnold. His wellknown classicism and anti-Tennyson-
ianism might have been thought likely to lead him to discard
variety of rhythm, and did, indeed, produce a somewhat stiffer if
statelier form of blank verse in Sohrab and Rustum. But his best
and best beloved poems—The Forsaken Merman, The Scholar-
Gipsy and its sequel, the two Nights and others—are all in care-
fully and, for the most part, originally researched' metres, while,
in Tristram and Iseult, he alone, between Keats and William
Morris, tried and tried most successfully the enjambed heroic
couplet, and his wellknown experiments in unrimed (but not in
1 Some remarks may be found in the chapter specially devoted to them.


## p. 252 (#268) ############################################

252 The Prosody of the Nineteenth Century [CH.
the ordinary restricted sense 'blank') verse, from The Strayed
Reveller onwards, are characteristic of his time.
The school which made its appearance (the work of its eldest
member Dante Rossetti being accidentally held back except in
fragments) towards the close of the fifties cannot be said to
exhibit any general change from the prosody of Tennyson and
Browning, though it exhibited some very interesting minor de-
velopments. The most peculiar of these, which was chiefly taken
up and worked by rather younger men, and which produced some
very charming work, was the revival of the artificial forms of verse
-ballades, rondeaux, roundels, and so forth—which had been the
favourite occupation of French poets from the thirteenth century
till well into the sixteenth, and which, in the late fourteenth and
fifteenth, had been pretty largely practised in England. This
revival, however, after some years died off, chiefly, as it seems to
the present writer, because no poet had cared or dared, save in a
very few cases, to ease off the syllabic rigidity of the originals into
that equivalence which is the soul of English verse. But Dante
Rossetti himself, perhaps at the call of his Italian blood, wrote
sonnets in the more favourite Italian forms with an effect only
matched by those of his sister Christina; and showed, besides,
remarkable mastery of English measures, ballad, and other.
William Morris, besides reviving not merely, as has been said, the
overlapped Keatsian decasyllabic couplet, in The Life and Death
of Jason, but the hitherto unfollowed octosyllabic of The Eve of
St Mark, used both, and especially the latter, with extraordinary
effect in The Earthly Paradise. In Love is Enough, he tried
a bolder and, in most judgments, less successful archaism by
reviving alliterative and rimeless movements; but, later, in
Sigurd the Volsung, he adjusted this and the old rimed fourteener
(in fact, the Gamelyn metre)? into a really splendid metre for
narrative purposes.
Meanwhile, Swinburne combined the widest exercise in
prosodic practice with not a little definite theorising on the
subject. The most important result of the latter was his distinct
formulation of the doctrine that spondaic-dactylic measures in
English have a tendency to pass into anapaestics; it would be
impossible to analyse his practice fully in any space possible here.
In metrical 'virtuosity, it may be doubted whether he has ever
had a superior, and the immensely long lines in which, latterly,
this tempted him to indulge, though seldom, if ever, actual
1 See, ante, vol. II, chap. VII.


## p. 253 (#269) ############################################

VII)
Summary
253
.
failures, have too much of the tour de force about them. So, too,
the extreme fluency of language, which was often charged against
him, had a tendency to make both his blank verse and his couplets
too voluble. He may be said, indeed, to have combined, in a very
curious fashion, the characteristics of both Tennyson and Browning
in blank verse. But his more compassed and studied exercises in
this were frequently admirable; while a finer example of a peculiar
kind of couplet-again blended of stop and overlap—than the
opening of Tristram of Lyonesse it would be difficult to find. It
stands as a sort of contrast to the other remarkable blend in
Tennyson's Vision of Sin. But the sharper and more fretted
outline of lyric was what was wanted to bring out Swinburne's
prosodic power to the full, and no poet has ever exemplified those
general principles which have been kept in view during this
chapter as he did. The variation of the Praed metre into that
of Dolores, and of FitzGerald's quatrain in Laus Veneris, together
with the elaborate and triumphant stanza of The Triumph of
Time—these are only three out of scores, or almost hundreds, of
experiments which, however daring, never fail in bringing off the
musical and rhythmical effect.
This remarkable blend of sureness and freedom in rhythm may
be said to be the full result of the successive processes which have
been pointed out above in reference to the late seventeenth, the
eighteenth and the nineteenth century respectively. The period
in which Dryden and Pope ruled drove out—if, possibly, by too
severe a tariff of penalty and restriction—the indulgence in un-
certain, if not positively arrhythmic, caprices, which had marred not
merely the fifteenth but (after a premature resipiscence from Wyatt
to Gascoigne) the magnificent accomplishment of the late sixteenth
and early seventeenth centuries. Then, the Shakespeares and the
Miltons did as they would, but always did right; others, not always
much less than great, did as they would and frequently did wrong.
So, English verse had to return into the go-cart and stayed there for
a century and a half. Then it got free, and arose, and walked and
flew. But, about the time of which we are now specially speaking,
there began, partly in the realms of prosodic discussion, partly in
those of poetic production, and, now and then, in quarters where
the dissidents could both sing and say, a revolt against even quali-
fied regularity. The different schemes which have been glanced at
above of scansion by systems of irregular stress in corresponding
lines; by 'bars' of varying, and in none but a very loose way,


## p. 254 (#270) ############################################

2 54 The Prosody of the Nineteenth Century [CH. VII
equivalent length; and so forth, could not but suggest something
very different from that general identity as opposed to variety of
rhythmical arrangement which had hitherto been taken as the
great differentia of verse as compared with prose. And verse to
match the theory was, almost a generation ago, composed and has
been since attempted on methods of increasing 'impressionism’;
some recent examples being admittedly intended to be read like
prose, without any regard to supposed antecedent forms of corre-
spondence, or mainly to illustrate the theory, noticed above, of
a sort of prophetical cockpit-fight between quantity and accent,
metre and rhetoric, and, perhaps, other pairs also, which may be
left to suggest themselves.
But what success the efforts met
This story will not say--as yet,
to alter very slightly the famous and much discussed phrase in
Cadenus and Vanessa. To some tastes, this success has not been
great; the good verse produced being always scannable by the old
methods and that recalcitrant to those methods being, to such tastes,
not so good. But the whole principle of these prosodic chapters
has been to take good English verse at every time and exhibit its
characteristics of goodness without attempting to dictate. If
anyone continues to apply that rule to the present and future
efforts of English poets, he is not very likely to go far wrong.


## p. 255 (#271) ############################################

CHAPTER VIII
NINETEENTH-CENTURY DRAMA
a
THE drama in the nineteenth century was much affected, as
drama always must be, by social conditions, and by theatrical
conditions which social development brought about. When the
earlier years of the century had passed, and the fall of Napoleon
had relieved England of much danger and anxiety, the less educated
and the uneducated parts of the population began to improve in
manners and in mind; and one of the means of refinement of which
they showed a desire to avail themselves was the drama. Hitherto,
to a very great extent, the theatre had been the amusement of
educated classes only. The pit was still occupied by the acutest
critics, members of the professional or the higher commercial classes.
The people had not yet begun to take any wide or keen interest
in the drama. The nineteenth century saw the influx of the
populace into the theatre. And the populace, though ready to have
its taste improved, brought with it its love of sensational incident
and of broad humour. Not for it the elegant, if rather bloodless,
tragedy, and the fine comedy, of high life, which had been the
educated theatre-goers' staple fare. Caring nothing for poetry or
for the subtler shades of feeling, it needed a hearty kind of play,
full of excitement and written in expressive, high-flown language ;
it needed stories of passion, or terror, or lively fun. And, little by
little, the demand created the supply. The nineteenth century
saw the drama become, for the first time since the days of queen
Elizabeth, a popular amusement. For the most part, educated
classes and the higher ranks of society ceased to attend the
theatre. It needed the attraction of some famous actor-Kemble,
the two Keans, or Macready-to draw them back to what had
been their special province; and, until some years later than the
middle of the century, the creation of any drama of high quality
was dependent upon the fame of some great actor who could draw
refined and educated people to witness it.


## p. 256 (#272) ############################################

256
Nineteenth-Century Drama [CH.
Even so, it was presented under theatrical conditions that gave
it small chance of a fair hearing. The theatre was still under the
control of the court; and the only theatres which the court, as
represented by the lord chamberlain, recognised were the two
patent' houses, Drury lane and Covent garden, and the theatre
in the Haymarket. But the increasing number of theatre-goers
rendered these three insufficient for the public need. The patent
houses, and especially Drury lane, were enlarged until they reached
a size in which no drama of any delicacy or subtlety, none, indeed,
which was not spectacular and, in some manner, violent, could
be thoroughly effective. A quarter of the audience could neither
see nor hear; many of the rest could neither see nor hear well.
A theatre of enormous size had been no bar in Athens to the
existence of a noble drama ; but, in nineteenth-century London,
the conditions were different. Plays were not, as will be seen,
a vehicle for religion : religion chose to regard the theatre as an
enemy, and the theatre took what was, on the whole, a very mild
revenge. Moreover, since James I had turned the Globe and
Blackfriars company into an appanage of his court, the whole
tendency had been to divorce the drama from the national life.
The great size, therefore, of Drury lane and of Covent garden
meant that these were no fit places for the representation of the
plays enjoyed by educated classes ; and, considering the growth
in importance, volume and interest of the novel, it is not sur-
prising that educated classes stayed away from the theatre, except
when it was occupied by the fashionable Italian and French
opera and ballet, and left the drama almost entirely to the new
class of theatre-goers, drawn from the people. Meanwhile, the
demand for theatrical entertainment on the part of the populace,
and of the man of average refinement and intelligence, could
not be satisfied by three theatres only. In defiance of the law,
other theatres sprang into existence. By many undignified shifts,
these theatres succeeded in avoiding sudden extinction at the
hand of the lord chamberlain, and in increasing their number and
importance. But dramatists who wrote for them were, necessarily,
ill-paid, and the drama which they produced was, necessarily,
ephemeral. For not only was every such theatre liable to be
closed at a moment's notice ; each work of dramatic art had to
masquerade as something other than a play-to be interspersed
with music or dancing or exhibitions of performing animals-in
order that its producers might persuade themselves, or the lord
chamberlain, that they were not breaking the law. Not till the


## p. 257 (#273) ############################################

VIII]
The Decline of Tragedy
257
year 1843 did the Theatre Regulation act legalise the position
of illegitimate' houses. To these disabilities must be added
the deterrent effect of the lord chamberlain's power to forbid the
performance of plays on the grounds of seditious, blasphemous or
immoral matter in them. The effect of this power was to prevent
the drama from concerning itself with any of the subjects about
which intelligent people think and feel; and this restriction
militated against the production of good plays long after the
act of 1843 had given the public the right to have practically
as many theatres as it liked in which to develop the kinds of
dramatic production which it required.
Under these conditions, the plays of the first half of the century
were not likely to be endowed with much merit; and, in this
period, we reach the low-water mark of the English drama in
quality, together with a great increase in quantity. The death of
tragedy; the swift decline of the romantic or poetical drama and
the coarsening of comedy into farce are scarcely outweighed by
the rapid growth of an honest and fairly spontaneous, but crude,
domestic play suitable to the taste of the new theatrical public.
Theatrical conditions, rather than social, prevented the amalga-
mation of the popular drama with the existing drama into a
national drama that should, like that of Shakespeare, satisfy the
tastes of refined and homely alike. On the one hand, the ‘legiti-
mate' play declined into 'lugubrious comedy and impossible
tragedy, and the poetic play found itself wholly dependent
upon the popularity of some great actor to restore it to brief
semblance of life ; on the other hand, there came into existence
a vigorous school of little artistic merit, lacking the finer
qualities which the great Elizabetbans had contrived to combine
with the homelier.
6
” as
'Sophocles and Shakespeare,' wrote G. H. Lewes, are as "sensational”
Fitzball or Dumas; but the situations, which in the latter are the aim and
object of the piece, to which all the rest is subordinated, in the former are the
mere starting-points, the nodes of dramatic action’i.
In The London Magazine for April 1820, Hazlitt ‘proved,
very satisfactorily, and without fear of contradiction-neither
Mr Maturin, Mr Sheil, nor Mr Milman being present—that no
modern author could write a tragedy. The age was 'critical,
didactic, paradoxical, romantic,' but not dramatic. The French
revolution had made of the English a nation of politicians and
1 G. H, Lewes, On Actors and Acting (1875), p. 15.
E. L. XIII,
CH, VIII.
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258
Nineteenth-Century Drama [ch.
6
9
newsmongers ; and tragedy, being 'essentially individual and
concrete, both in form and power' was irreconcilable with this
'bias to abstraction' in the general. There had hardly been a
good tragedy written, he declared, since Home's Douglas. Never-
theless, tragedy was written in considerable quantities. It was
a favourite exercise with men of letters, whether or no they
possessed any power of dramatic invention. Wordsworth tried
his hand at tragedy ; Coleridge, Godwin, lord Byron, Mary
Russell Mitford, Disraeli and many others, whose writings are
dealt with elsewhere in this work, composed tragedies, some of
which were produced upon the stage, while others remained polite
exercises in a literary form. The present chapter will touch upon
the minor tragedians, of whom the three mentioned in the quo-
tation from Hazlitt given above are the first to call for notice.
Richard Lalor Sheil, who is more famous, perhaps, as politician
than as dramatist, first came before the public with Adelaide ; or,
The Emigrants, a tragedy of the French revolution, which was
produced in Dublin in 1814 and at Covent garden, where it occupied
the stage for one night only, in 1816. The savagery of Hazlitt's
attack upon this tragedy in The Examiner may be due, in great
measure, to his resentment of the author's endeavour to drench
an English audience with French loyalty' to the house of Bourbon.
In spite of this, Hazlitt's condemnation is scarcely excessive, though
there are passages of modest merit in the verse. Sheil's second
tragedy, The Apostate, produced at Covent garden in 1817, met
with more success. A tragedy of the Moors in Spain, this piece
pleased Hazlitt a little better, because it contained a passage on
the horrors of the inquisition; but he is just in his strictures,
that the tragic situations are too violent, frequent and improbable,
and that the play is full of a succession of self-inflicted horrors.
It is effective stage-work, if far from being fine tragedy; and the
versification has an appearance of vigour which, possibly, might
conceal from the hearer, though it cannot from the reader, its
essentially commonplace character. There are lines in it which
amused even its first hearers-notably the heroine's exclamation :
"This is too much for any mortal creature ! Sheil's next tragedy,
Bellamira; or, The Fall of Tunis (produced at Covent garden in
1818), is the best of his original plays. The language is purer and
less extravagant, though by no means free from sound and fury;
but Leigh Hunt, in The Examiner for 26 April 1818, was right in
censuring
the tendency to mistake vehemence for strength, the impatience of lowness


## p. 259 (#275) ############################################

VII]
Sheil and Maturin
259
for the attainment of height, and excessive tragic effect physically over-
powering for real effect at once carrying away and sustaining.
In other words, Bellamira is, again, a telling piece of stage-work,
and an inferior piece of dramatic art. Sheil was more successful
as dramatic artist in his next play, Evadne ; or, The Statue,
produced in 1819 ; but, here, he had the advantage of a foundation
taken from Shirley's play, The Traytor. It may seem strange that
a play of 1631 connected with the Italian renascence should be able
to steady a dramatic author of the early part of the nineteenth
century; but so it was. Sheil altered the plot, dispensing, among
other things, with the slaughter at the close of The Traytor; and,
in adapting the play a little more closely to the tragic ideals of his
own day, indulged less freely than was his wont in extravagance of
incident or language. Hazlitt took Evadne for the text of the last
of his lectures on the dramatic literature of the age of Elizabeth ;
and Leigh Hunt found the 'truly feminine and noble character of
Evadne 'a delightful relief from the selfish and extravagantly
virtuous wives who have been palmed upon us of late for women. '
The Huguenot, written in 1819, but not produced till two or three
years later, shows a return to the aim at violence of effect, and an
appeal through strangeness of scene and incident to emotions which
the nature and sufferings of the characters could not arouse by
themselves. And that its failure on the stage was ascribed by the
author and others to the absence of Eliza O'Neill from the cast shows
how dependent the drama had become upon the popularity of this
or that player. After the failure of The Huguenot, Sheil gave up
play-writing ; but previous to its production he had written Montoni
(produced in 1820), a poetical drama founded on the French, and
remarkable for some of Sheil's wildest extravagance in incident
and for some of his best verse ; had adapted Massinger and Field's
The Fatall Dowry; and had revised Damon and Pythias, a tragedy
by John Banim, which turned out a better piece of work than any
play written by Sheil alone.
Hazlitt's last lecture on the dramatic literature of the
age
Elizabeth is largely concerned with German influence on the tragedy
and romantic drama of his day. That influence can be clearly
discerned in the plays of Charles Robert Maturin, an Irish clergyman,
whose three tragedies—Bertram ; or, The Castle of St Aldobrond ;
Manuel; and Fredolfo—were produced in London in the years 1816
and 1817. Bertram was a famous and successful play in its time.
It was brought to the notice of Edmund Kean by Walter Scott and
Byron; it was the object of an attack by Coleridge in The Courier,
of
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260
Nineteenth-Century Drama [CH.
which, in its turn, roused a notorious attack by Hazlitt on Coleridge.