FOOTNOTES:
Lo! where Mæotis sleeps, and hardly flows
The freez|ĭng Tănă | is through a waste of snows.
The Dunciad, iii. 87, 88.
[98] In the actual case, of course, dissyllabic feet for trisyllabic; but this could not but suggest the converse process in dissyllabic verse. And the octosyllable was not used for light verse only; Dyer in Grongar Hill (1726) revived the Miltonic form of L'Allegro, etc., with an effect all the more certainly excellent, that it was demurred to by the mistaken critics of the time.
[100] Among whom Lord Roscommon deserves honourable mention.
[101] As by Watts the hymn-writer, John Philips, and Gay.
CHAPTER V
THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL—ITS PRECURSORS AND FIRST GREAT STAGE
Gray and Collins.
We must now take up, somewhat more minutely, the phenomena mentioned in the last chapter as showing revolt against, and recovery from, the partly beneficial but excessive tyranny of the stopped decasyllabic couplet. These may be considered, still briefly but more particularly, under two heads: the first concerning chiefly the influence of individual poets—Collins, Gray, Chatterton, Burns, Blake; the second, agencies various in kind and source. Neither Collins nor Gray can be said to have directly attacked the task—though Gray at least was, as we see from his Metrum, not ignorant of the facts—of re-leavening and re-illustrating prosody by an infusion of trisyllabic substitution. With rarest exceptions, they still cling to the iamb as a base-foot. But they rearrange its line-groups in a fashion as alien as possible from that of the couplet. Collins even discards rhyme altogether in the quatrains of Evening, and in his famous "Passions" varies his construction as much as possible within the general limits. Gray follows, but improves upon, Dryden in the rhymed decasyllabic quatrain; adapts, with an effect somewhat stiff, but often very beautiful, the Greek system of strophe, antistrophe, and epode in the Progress of Poetry and The Bard; employs Romance-six with singular felicity in both serious and serio-comic verse; and, though retaining a strongly artificial poetic diction, informs this with new touches and spirit from sources as a rule quite closed to his contemporaries and predecessors—Norse and Welsh as well as Greek. Both these poets, in short, disregard, to a large extent, equality of line-length, and employ mixed rhymes. Now equality of line-length and strictly consecutive rhymes were almost as dear to the chief lovers of the couplet as its unvarying syllabic arrangement and its regular accent.
Chatterton, Burns, and Blake.
Gray, it has been said, knew substitution, but did not use it; the ill-fated genius of Chatterton not only knew it, but used it. It is present, and very effective, in Burns; but it was not the chief means of good of which Burns availed himself in regard to prosody. His dialect, with its relief from the conventional "lingo" of eighteenth-century poetry, did much; but the forms which he used, and especially the famous "Burns metre," did more. It would be almost impossible to devise a greater contrast to the couplet; or—since (which is at least worth noting) the six lines of this stanza contain exactly as many syllables (forty) as two ordinary couplets—to arrange these same numbers in ways more rhythmically different. But the first eighteenth-century poet thoroughly to understand and exemplify the powers of equivalence is Burns's slightly older contemporary, William Blake, whose Poetical Sketches appeared as early as 1780, while his Songs of Innocence and Experience, and his remaining poems, display a knowledge of the secrets of this equivalence, and a command over them, which had not been shown since Shakespeare.
Other influences of change.
Blake, however, expressed rather than exercised influence, for his poems remained long almost unknown; and it may be doubtful whether even the others brought about many conscious prosodic changes. The gradual recovery of knowledge of older English literature, and especially of the ballads, had in all probability much more direct power. Durfey's Pills to Purge Melancholy, Philips's Collection of Old Ballads, and Percy's Reliques—with constantly increasing editions of the Elizabethan dramatists and other writers, even such as Skelton and Occleve—could not but awaken men's minds to the fact that (as Gascoigne had put it in a matter closely connected if not absolutely identical) "we had used in times past other kinds of metres" than the stopped couplet. And towards the end of the century revolt of various kinds appeared—copious though usually very tame ballad; multiplied blank verse of the usual kind; and (in imitation partly of some older English models and of Collins, partly of the German) rhymeless verse of different sorts, the chief early practitioner of which was Frank Sayers of Norwich, a physician and man of letters who was more influential on others than important in himself. Bowles (after Warton, whose History of Poetry worked in the same direction) reintroduced the sonnet. William Taylor, another member of the Norwich group, revived (again after the German) English hexameters; and though Hayley, Darwin, and others continued the eighteenth-century couplet unchanged, the spirit of the youth of the period was clearly tending in a different direction.
Wordsworth, Southey, and Scott.
Of the four great champions of reaction who were born about 1770, Wordsworth, though he illustrates the change generally, and never, in his principal work, uses the stopped couplet, is not very noticeable prosodically.[102] The three others are, in different ways, of the first importance. Southey, as early as 1796, not merely practised, but, which is much more, practised deliberately, and definitely defended in a letter to an objecting friend, the use of three syllables for two. Moreover (not confining himself to the ballad metre, which he had employed and which he was specially justifying), he alleged the practice of Milton, frankly stigmatising as "asses" the editors who had endeavoured to disguise this practice as "elision." Scott—assisted perhaps to some extent by hearing a recitation or reading of Coleridge's unpublished Christabel, but undoubtedly also following[103] the example of the innumerable ballad- and romance-writers with whom he was almost better acquainted than any other man in Britain—produced first ballad-pieces, and then, in and after The Lay of the Last Minstrel, continuous narrative poems of great length, for the most part couched in equivalenced octosyllables, but often much varied in rhyme-arrangement and diversified by shorter and longer lines. And there is no doubt that the enormous popularity of these poems of his did more than anything else to familiarise the public ear with metres and cadences as different as possible from the couplet.
Coleridge.
But the influence of Coleridge, independent of that indirectly applied through Scott, was the most important of all. It was indeed not (as it should have been) exhibited, at once and in bulk, by the simultaneous publication of The Ancient Mariner and Christabel, the latter of which, though, at least in great part, written at the same time as the former, was separated from it in publication by nearly twenty years. The Ancient Mariner itself is in ballad metre, but ballad metre treated in the freest possible fashion, not only with equivalence used at pleasure in individual lines, but with the four lines of the strict quatrain extended to five, or any number up to nine—thereby increasing and varying the stanza-effect in the widest possible manner, though never expanding it into positive paragraphs. More important still, because more apparently novel, though it had been in fact preluded both by Chatterton and Blake, and had been recognised by Gray in the work of Spenser, was the use, in Christabel, of continuous octosyllabic couplets, only sometimes, and rarely, broken into stanza, but constantly equivalenced and frequently varied by shorter lines. Of these, Coleridge himself gave in his preface a curiously inadequate account, regarding them—or at least giving them out—as constructed on the principle of counting only the accents. They, however, in fact follow the strictest foot-division, and have been the pattern of all similar verses, with equivalent substitution, since.
Moore.
Moore, who comes in point of date between this group and the second great trio of Byron, Shelley, and Keats, is very important prosodically. Since the earlier seventeenth century at latest, music, though it had had much and rather deleterious influence on theories of English prosody, had had little on its practice, a few light things excepted. But Moore was an accomplished musician both in theory and practice, in composition and in execution; he belonged to a race distinguished for song-gift; and the great majority of his almost innumerable lyrics were directly composed for old airs or adapted to new. The consequence was, almost inevitably, that they present a variety of cadence and rhythm which had hardly ever before been seen. Occasionally this variety oversteps the bounds of pure prosody, allowing, as in the well-known "Eveleen's Bower,"[104] a syllable which, corresponding to an appoggiatura in music, requires, in strict scansion, to be slurred or else to be considered extra-metrical, as in the "Song to a Portuguese Air,"[105] and others, further licences. He was himself aware of this, and it did little harm; while the tunefulness of his trisyllabic measures, and the great range of "broken and cuttit" line-arrangements which his work presented, were both of the first importance in promoting variety and freedom of metrical arrangement.
Byron.
His expertness in the two arts, however, and his constant combination of them, as well as perhaps his inferiority (though this is only relative) in strictly poetical power, somewhat reduce Moore's importance as compared with that of Byron, Shelley, and Keats. The first-named was the least of the three in prosody, as in poetry; but his prosodic merits have, as a rule, been far undervalued, even by his adorers as a poet. He affected, and perhaps really to some extent felt, much greater admiration for the eighteenth-century poets, and for those who mainly or partly followed them in his own time, than for the innovators of the Romantic school; and he himself wrote the stock couplet with correctness and vigour. But he chose for his principal serious poem, Childe Harold, the Spenserian, which "regular" classical critics had always disliked; and, though he never achieved its proper character, did finely in it sometimes, and undoubtedly restored its popularity. Again, he chose for his greatest serio-comic pieces, Beppo and Don Juan, the ottava; while his minor tales were in Scott-Christabel octosyllables. In lyric, too, he showed varied power, and once turned[106] what had been a burlesque before in its exact, and a very sing-song metre in its restricted, form into a thing of remarkable prosodic beauty, to be made more beautiful still by Praed and Mr. Swinburne. His most consummate prosodic achievement is undoubtedly the above-mentioned octave of Don Juan, which can hardly be surpassed, either in suitability to its subject, or in the way in which the particular characteristics of the metre itself are brought out.
Shelley: his longer poems.
But the greatest poets are naturally, and almost inevitably, the greatest prosodists; and this was well seen in the case of the two whom we have yet to mention, Shelley and Keats, who also present a valuable and interesting contrast in this as in other ways. It is probable that in all cases Shelley began with direct though not studious imitation. His early and almost worthless poems were based on "Monk" Lewis and others of that type; his first striking thing, the opening of Queen Mab, is a sort of variation on that of Southey's Thalaba; and his first great poem, Alastor, had Wordsworth evidently before it; while Laon and Cythna (The Revolt of Islam) would probably not have been in Spenserians if Childe Harold had not adopted them, nor perhaps The Witch of Atlas in octaves but for Beppo. Yet, as soon as he has attained poetic gift, he goes off from his models entirely, and, without much apparent care for preconceived forms, achieves the most marvellous beauty in whatever he touches. In Prometheus Unbound especially, the blank-verse dialogue, and the abundant lyrical choruses and interludes, not only exhibit wholly astonishing variety and individual excellence, but adapt themselves to each other, as nowhere else in drama. The Spenserians of Adonais, taking some liberties, attain, at their best, absolute perfection; of the octosyllabic couplets, shortened or not in several minor poems, almost as much may be said; and the octaves of The Witch of Atlas (with the very best of Keats's Isabella) are the greatest examples of that metre in English for serious use. He even tries the often failed-in terza rima, and does beautiful things in it, though perhaps not such beautiful examples of it.
His lyrics.
But it is in his lyrics that Shelley's prosodic, like his poetic, power shows highest. Those in Prometheus Unbound have been spoken of; but the numerous and glorious short and separate pieces defy enumeration or specification here. The two popular favourites, "The Cloud" and "The Skylark," would each serve as a text for an exemplary lecture on English prosody, and a dozen others, with dozens more added to them, would do the same. None is ever really "irregular": to say, as has been said of "The Cloud," that it defies ordinary scansion, is simply to say that the speaker does not understand either the poem or ordinary scansion, or both (see above, Book I. p. [100]). But almost all exhibit, in endless variety of relief and colour, the great laws of equivalence and substitution, and the enormous advantage of varied and even complicated metre, rhyme, line-length, and stanza-arrangement. Shelley never seems to have studied metre much, and, as has been said, his first pattern is the merest starting-point for him. But he touches none that he does not adorn; none that he does not make matter of delight; and none, likewise, in which he does not supply a text for infinite technical instruction as well.
Keats.
The case of Keats is curiously different. He too—as indeed practically everybody does—begins with imitation, but it is imitation of a different kind. Chapman, Spenser, the sonneteers, the Jacobean poets probably, Leigh Hunt certainly, supply him not merely with hints and "send-offs," but with carefully studied models. He hits, in consequence, first in his Juvenilia and then in Endymion, upon a very much enjambed form of decasyllabic couplet—a form opposed to all the traditions of Pope, and deemed horrible by the orthodox critics of the day. But he sees for himself the defect of this, and applies himself earnestly to the study of Dryden and Milton as tonics and astringents. The results are the fine, less fluent, still slightly overrun, but tripleted and Alexandrined heroics of Lamia, and the splendid blank verse of Hyperion. But he has not confined himself to these, or to their lessons; and he has never confined himself to the mere lessons of any poet or of any period. He produces in turn the touching octaves of Isabella; the magnificent Spenserians of The Eve of St. Agnes; the Sonnets, most of them among the finest examples of the form in English; the varied stanza-measures of the Odes; the unique ballad adaptation[107] of La Belle Dame sans Merci; and lastly, two forms of octosyllabic couplet—the mainly catalectic or seven-syllabled form of some earlier poems, and the complete one of The Eve of St. Mark, which overleaps all other examples back to Gower, picks out the finest qualities of Gower's own form, and rearranges them in an example unfinished in itself, but serving as a guide, in the production of a great body of finished and admirable work, to the late Mr. William Morris. In no poet is the lesson—which it was the business of this generation to exemplify, and should be of this chapter to expound—of ordered variety, in foot, in line, in stanza, more triumphantly shown.