No More Learning

In short-and the same, more or less,
is the case with the best exercises of still living poets—the
poem gains little from the form, unless the poet has put in poetry
enough to make it independent of any form in particular. The
fact seems to be that English is somewhat intolerant of measures
which are too regularly and intricately concerted. Bacon's old
and often repeated sarcasm, you may see things oft as good in
tarts,' applies here.
At the same time, with fire enough in the inside—and,
fortunately, there are numerous cases of this--the things can
1 Ernest Dowson was, perhaps, the last of its best younger practitioners.
!


## p. 213 (#229) ############################################

vi]
W. E. Henley
213
be subdued to the poet's most serious purpose excellently well.
And, for playful purposes, whether half tender or wholly burlesque,
these forms are unsurpassable. There are dozens of Lang's pieces,
some of them never yet fished up from the depths of old periodi-
cals, which are perfect in these ways.
To sum up, these artificial forms may be very useful and
can be charming in various respects. But it is difficult, unless
they are very freely treated, to get rid in them of a certain exotic
and constrained air ; and, unless they are undoubted successes,
they are apt to be intolerable.
General appreciation of the poems of William Ernest Henley
has not, perhaps, been helped by coterie admiration, however
generous and eager. But they occupy a peculiar and, in their
way, a commanding position among their fellows. Henley tried
the artificial forms, as has been mentioned above ; but they did
not entirely suit his touch. The best, by far, is the splendid and
quite serious rondeau, What is to come? which concludes his
own collection of them under the sub-title (itself a half confession)
Bric-à-Brac. Next to it, but much lower, may come, in the
lighter kind, the ballade which opens the set I loved you once
in Old Japan.
But, with him, it was a case of 'Not here, O Apollo,' and the
poems by which he obtained, and will keep a place, in English
poetry, as well as the most characteristic of those which may
not have so fair a fate, are markedly different. Henley, from a
rather early period, was a student not merely of modern French
light literature and poetry but of French art; and these influences
probably brought it about that he was almost, if not quite, the
introducer of impressionism into English verse. The extremely
striking Hospital Verses, written during a long sojourn in the
Edinburgh infirmary—where the skill of Lister did what was
possible to minimise an affection of the limbs which left Henley
a cripple—are entirely of this class. When restored to com-
—
parative health, he took to journalism, and, for nearly twenty
years, was an active and, for the whole of the rest of his life, an
occasional contributor or, more frequently and preferably, editor
-an occupation for which he had remarkable talents. His actual
production, however, was never very large, though, both in verse
and prose, it was exceedingly characteristic; and his abstinence
from the excessive collar-work to which most tolerably successful
journalists and working men of letters are tempted gave him time
to write as much poetry as, probably, he would have written in


## p. 214 (#230) ############################################

214
[CH.
Lesser Poets
any case—his bad health and his not long life being duly con-
sidered. Henley's main characteristic in life and letters alike
was masterfulness; and it should be left to individual taste and
judgment to decide whether a quality which almost as often leads
men ill as well instigated more or less than it injured in his case.
It certainly led him to violence and eccentricity of form and
expression ; and (though this affected his prose more than his
verse) to a rather perverse adoption and propagation of opinions,
not so much because he held them himself as because former
writers had held the opposite. It may be doubted whether he
gained much by his fondness for rimeless measures; or by his
symbolist, and almost futurist, if not Blastist (for Henley was
singularly anticipatory of later developments in the fringes of
literature), adoration of speed. ' But, In Hospital can at no time
be read without admiration; and very beautiful things will be
found among the, again characteristically, but, in a way, unfairly,
entitled Echoes. There are echoes (all but the greatest poetry
of the period is an echo, though a multifarious and often a
beautiful one) of old ballads, of standard verse, of modern
singers as various as Tennyson and Emily Brontë and Swinburne.
But, even in these, as, for instance, in the best known of his
verses except, perhaps, the portrait of Stevenson, Out of the
Night that covers me, Henley almost always contrives to blend
an original tone; and, sometimes, the echo is so faint, and
derivable from so many separate sources, many, even, so doubt-
fully present, that the title becomes a mere polite or ironic
apology. Such pieces are In the Year that's come and gone,
Love, his flying feather, and, at least, the beginning and end (for
the middle is not so good) of the splendidly swinging ballad
with the half refrain
I was a king in Babylon
And you were a Christian slave,
with not a few others. In his later books, The Song of the
Sword, Hawthorn and Lavender, London Voluntaries, Rhymes
and Rhythms, including his admirable 'England! my England ! ",'
he sometimes allowed the violence which has been noticed to
remain unchastened, if he did not even lash it up; but this
violence never sprang, as it often does, from weakness, but only
from an erroneous theory, from a naturally fervid temperament
and, beyond all doubt, very largely from the irritation of harassing
disease. Of him, the old parable is surely justified as to the
1 Pro rege nostro,


## p. 215 (#231) ############################################

vi]
Philip Bourke Marston
215
union of sweetness and strength, though the other combination
of sweetness and light may not always have been present.
The dividing year of the century produced two poets, neither
of whom can receive extended notice here but who are worth study
both intrinsically and historically.
Philip Bourke Marston, who, from infancy, was threatened, and
long before his early death struck, with blindness, had domestic
afflictions which aggravated this greatest of personal ones. These,
no doubt, influenced the verse of which he wrote not a little ; nor,
perhaps, in any case, would he have been a poet of great inten-
sity, while his actual production was, in Henley's phrase as to
his own, much 'echoed. ' But, some of his work, especially of his
sonnets, is beautiful ; and the frequent wailing of his verse never
turns to whining-a too natural and common degeneration. The
other, Robert Louis Stevenson-as full, despite some counter-
influences, of buoyancy as Marston was lacking in it—found his
principal and abiding vocation in prose, not verse ; but, in the
latter form, did some remarkable work, entirely, or almost entirely,
free from that 'sedulous aping' which he frankly acknowledged
in prose and which does not always improve his more popular and
permanent tales and essays. A Child's Garden of Verses is,
perhaps, the most perfectly natural book of the kind.
It was
supplemented later by other poems for children ; and some of
his work outside this, culminating in the widely-known epitaph
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill,
has the rarely combined merits of simplicity, sincerity, music and
strength.
Slightly younger than these two, but, as it happened, a friend
of Philip Marston, came Herbert Edwin Clarke, whose verse,
though always well received by competent critics, had, perhaps,
less effect on the public—even such part of the public as reads
poetry—than that of any writer of anything like equal merit
noticed in this chapter. This might have been partly due to
the fact, glanced at in other cases, that his first books, Poems
in Excile and Storm-Drift, appeared at an unlucky time (1879—82),
when there was a great deal of verse of relative excellence, but,
80 to speak, 'held under' by the eminence of the leaders, old and
new ; partly to the pessimism which was displayed in some of the
poems. Owing, it is believed, to discouragement, and, also, to
business occupation, Clarke did not write much for some years,
and his later volumes, Poems and Sonnets and Tannhäuser and


## p. 216 (#232) ############################################

216
[CH.
Lesser Poets
other Poems, though, apparently, rather more widely read, came
into competition, as such competition goes, with a new flight of
verse, some realist, some ultratranscendental, beside which it may
have seemed out of fashion. But those who read poetry for its
own sake will scarcely fail to find it in all his books. Of his
earlier work, three poems (which may be conveniently found
together in the useful thesaurus to be mentioned in the biblio-
graphy)--A Nocturn at Twilight, A Voluntary and Failure-
give different aspects of his verse in very high quality. By the
Washes, Chant d'Amour and certain of his latest sonnets, should,
also, be sought for. And there may be reckoned to Clarke one
signal merit—that, putting a few scattered passages of Tenny-
son aside, his is the only poetry which has done justice (he was
to the manner and matter born, at Chatteris in Cambridgeshire)
to the strange and unique beauty of the fen-country, with its
command—unequalled save at sea and very different from that
given by the sea--of level horizon and unbroken sky.
The remarkable sonnets of Edward Cracroft Lefroy-poems
of a style rather older than their date, and singularly free from
pre-Raphaelite influence--the precocious achievement of Oliver
Madox Brown, in whom that influence was naturally very strong ;
and the somewhat epicene touch (acknowledged long after it
had been recognised by some under the for a long time well-kept
pseudonym Fiona Macleod) by William Sharp, can receive no
extended notice here. But two poets, born towards the close of
the fifties, Francis Thompson and John Davidson, are too notable,
both intrinsically and historically, not to receive as much as can
be given. With two yet younger, but, also, now dead, they may
close our record.
The eldest of the group, John Davidson (in whom some fairly
sober critics have seen the best poet, not now living, who belonged
to the second half of the last century by birth), was not a very early
producer and, for a time, confined himself chiefly to unclassified
dramas, Scaramouch in Naxos, Bruce, Smith, showing great
ability, but too inorganic to establish a reputation. Coming to
London when he was a little past thirty, he fell into a better vein of
chiefly lyric poetry, which, fortunately, he continued to work, but to
which, unfortunately, he was neither able nor, indeed, wholly willing
to confine his energies. Attempts at novel-writing, which showed
the ill-organised character of his early verse with the same kind of
promise; miscellaneous journalism, which was wholly against grain
or collar (whichever metaphor be preferred); and a barren


## p. 217 (#233) ############################################

VI]
John Davidson
217
rebellious pseudo-philosophy, which had its root in temper not in
intellect, partly called him away from the muse, partly spoilt his
sojourns without her. He was, to some extent, saved from
uttermost need by a small civil list pension, but could not
reconcile himself to life (he also thought himself to be threatened
with cancer), and committed suicide by drowning. His work,
which has a faint resemblance to that of Robert Buchanan, but
with much more genius and accomplishment on one side, and to
Henley's, with less leisurely deliberation on another, is, necessarily,
rather unequal; but, from the early Fleet Street Eclogues to
the posthumous volumes, ‘splendid gleams' are never wanting,
and some pieces give a full and steady light throughout. There
is, therefore, hardly any part of Davidson's poetical work which
does not deserve to be read. The blank verse of the early
plays possesses a singular originality ; while, chaotic and 'topsy-
turvified' as is the matter, it wanted but a little more art to be
triumphantly carried off by the form, and may still be so with
a little allowance—no more than reasonable—in the case of
any
who
know poetry when they see it. Of one modern kind of ballad-
that which does not aim at being a pastiche of the old kind, but
at telling a story lyrically in a fairly simple and ordinary kind
of verse-Davidson was a master, and nearly a great master.
The Ballad of Heaven is, though, perhaps, he did not mean it
to be so, one of the best. His miscellaneous lyrics, where his
greatest strength lies, are not poetry for everyone. There is
violence—uncritical, but pathetic because not in the least merely
affected; there is attempted vulgarity, though it was as impossible
for Davidson to be really vulgar as it has been easy for some
poets of higher rank in certain ways. There is frequently
mistake—that is, say, the poet attacks things that he does not
understand and, therefore, makes a mere windmill charge at them.
But there is no mere copying or echo; there is a strange com-
mand of poetic music and always 'the gleam. Kinnoull Hill,
For Lovers, London, The Lutanist may be mentioned in a sort
of random choice out of many of his best poems; but, as was said
before, he must be read as a whole.
A curious complement-contrast is supplied by Francis Thompson,
Davidson's close contemporary from birth to death, and, with him,
almost completely representative of the main tendency of poetry
among men who had reached, but not more than reached, middle
life before the twentieth century began. Thompson, like David-
son, suffered from poverty and ill-health, though this last was
6


## p. 218 (#234) ############################################

218
[CH.
Lesser Poets
partly caused, as it was not in Davidson's case, by imprudence
on his part. But, during the latter years of his life, he was taken
up,' both in person and in reputation, by benevolent persons in
a powerful coterie. He was very much more of a scholar than
Davidson, and was always, or almost always, as definitely devout
as Davidson was the reverse ; nor, though, as has been said, he had
had losses and privations, did he make these much of a subject
for poetry. The two are thus, in many ways, different; but, for
that
very reason, the representative character assigned to them
in regard to the poetry of the latest years of the century is the
more complete.
It has been said that Thompson had strong classical leanings;
he was, also, very much under the influence of Caroline poetry,
especially that of Crashaw, and, in more recent styles, of Coventry
Patmore (the Patmore of the Odes not of The Angel in the
House), a definite suggestion from whom he at least once quite
frankly acknowledges and whose poetry was, perhaps, present
with him oftener than he knew. His most famous poem, The
Hound of Heaven, is, like others of his pieces, irregular Pindaric
of a thoroughly seventeenth-century kind. The opening stanza
a
is undeniably fine; it is the best following of Crashaw in his
Sainte Teresa vein that has ever been achieved, and the rest is
not too unequal to it. But the anticipated pre-Raphaelitism of
the Fletchers has been called in to blend with Crashaw's often
extravagant, but seldom too gaudy, diction; and the result, too
often, approaches the fatal 'frigidity. '
Across the margent of the world I fled,
And troubled the gold gateway of the stars,
Smiting for shelter on their clangèd bars-
Fretted to dulcet jars
And silvern chatter the pale ports o' the moon
makes one think rather of Benlowes (and of Butler upon him)
than of Crashaw. Thompson sometimes played undesirable tricks
with rime and diction, as in "able' and 'babble' and as in the,
certainly 'gritty,' lines
Wise-unto-Hell Ecclesiast!
Who siev'dst life to the gritty last.
But his following of the 'metaphysicals' sometimes resulted in
quite charming results. The Inconstant need not have been
disowned by any captain of the Caroline crew, and the following
led him through pieces that have less of the pastiche about them,


## p. 219 (#235) ############################################

vi]
Ernest Dowson
219
like Absence, to some that have hardly any, such as Penelope.
Whether he ever became entirely free from his various imitations
and attained the true mimesis—the creation or re-creation of
something after his own image and not other people's—whether
the clothes of gorgeous language and an elaborate imagery in which
he swathed himself did not prove as much a hamper as a help are,
perhaps, questions for individual decision. But that he is on the
right side of the dividing line is certain.
The last pair of all our company once more supply, between
them, a representative contrast; but it is of a very different kind.
Ernest Dowson and Richard Middleton, who both died about the
age of thirty, though there were some dozen years between their
births, reproduce once more a situation which has been already
noted twice in surveying nineteenth-century poetry. As, at the
beginning, there were those who had partially, and, later, those who
had fully, shared the influence of the great romantic school from
Wordsworth to Keats; as, later, there was a similar division among
those who felt the power of Tennyson and Browning; so, now, was
it with regard to the school of Rossetti and Swinburne. Both
Dowson and Middleton represent the poetry of youth-and of
youth which has been brought up from the beginning on the
theories of art for art's sake and enjoyment (literary and other)
for enjoyment's sake. Both have had the benefit of that ‘Mar-
cellus allowance,' as it has been called, which is earned by early
death; and, in consequence of sympathy from these various sources,
both have been extravagantly praised. The extravagance, how-
ever, may be thought to have been far better justified in Dowson's
case than in his companion's. He wrote little, his life being,
undoubtedly, shortened by habits destructive of health, peace and
power of mental exertion. His work may be injured to some
tastes, though not to all, by its being largely in the artificial forms
noticed above. Dowson was an excellent French scholar. His
verse is exquisitely finished and curiously appealing. His most
famous poem, I have been faithful to thee, Cynara, in my fashion,
is couched in unusual, but quite defensible, metre and has singular
music and 'cry. A little more virility would have made it a very
beautiful poem, and it is actually a beautiful one. Something else,
and no little thing, may be said in Dowson's favour. There is
scarcely a single poem in his scant hundred and sixty pages of
largely and loosely printed verse which, when one has read it, one
| This is quite different from the poem of the same title sometimes ascribed, and
sometimes denied, to Donne.
>


## p. 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


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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. '


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