FOOTNOTES:

[102] His greatest prosodic achievement is also his greatest achievement in poetry, the "Immortality" Ode. But, though he varies line-length admirably, the prevailing rhythm is merely iambic; and when, in stanza 4, he tries to vary it, the effect is very unfortunate.

[103] Scott was a debtor for something as well to "Monk" Lewis. See "List of Poets," [Book IV].

[104]

[105] Where three lines like the following occur:

and are quite irreconcilable.

[106] In the "Haidee" song. V. sup. Scanned Conspectus, § XLIV.

[107] With "long measure," but with the last line cut down to a monometer:

This last line being sometimes exquisitely equivalenced in the first foot:

Ănd hĕr ēyes | wĕre wīld.
. . . . . . .
Ŏn thĕ cōld | hill side.

CHAPTER VI
THE LAST STAGE—TENNYSON TO SWINBURNE

From Keats to Tennyson.

The lesson of the last chapter, if properly learnt, will have shown the substitution of a more really "correct," because wider and freer, view of English prosody than that which had produced the narrow and blinkered pseudo-correctness of the eighteenth century, and the way in which this extension was, whether consciously or unconsciously, utilised by the great poets of 1798-1830. Consciously, however, this lesson was not learnt by all of these poets themselves; yet it spread, and rapidly became the general, if not yet the acknowledged, principle of English poetry. It is observable in most and in all the best of what have been called the "Intermediates"—the poets who were born between 1790 and 1810, such as Beddoes and Darley,[108] Macaulay and Praed. But in Tennyson at once and in Browning—the one born just before, the other just after, the end of the first decade of the nineteenth century—it manifests itself in the most unmistakable degree; so much so, indeed, as to have actually puzzled, if not shocked, Coleridge himself, the greatest restorer of its mainspring. Tennyson's first volumes are open to many just criticisms. But if the student will turn to the scanned examples of the "Hollyhock Song" and the "Dying Swan" given previously, he will see that the young poet, so far from having "begun to write without knowing very well what metre is," had begun with an almost absolutely perfect knowledge of it, whatever his shortcomings in other matters might be.[109]

Tennyson himself.

The variety of metres in which this accomplishment was shown was extraordinary, and was no doubt felt by contemporaries to be bewildering. Even from the poets of the first Romantic school they had been principally (though of course not entirely) accustomed to lines of the same length, couched in more or less uniform metre throughout. The pieces which composed the two volumes of 1830 and 1832, even before they were revised and augmented in 1842, contained a greater variety of metres than had been seen in the same bulk of work of any single English poet from Chaucer to Keats. There was blank verse, if not at first quite of the absolute perfection which it reached ten years later, of a new and remarkable pattern, adjusting the Miltonic paragraph to a much more fluent movement, and quite discarding the Thomsonian stiffness. There were Spenserians (in the opening of the "Lotos-Eaters") of the very best kind. There was a little very fine decasyllabic couplet. But the great majority of the poems were lyrics, couched in a dazzling variety of metres. It was not only that the poet expanded the apparent but not real "irregularity" of Shakespeare into examples such as the two noted above. It was not merely that, as in the "Lotos-Eaters" itself and "The Vision of Sin,"[110] he arranged different metres in the same piece on the principles of an elaborate musical symphony. The way in which he handled metres previously known must have startled—indeed we know that it did startle—the precisians still more.

Special example of his manipulation of the quatrain.

A good instance of this is the threefold rehandling of the old decasyllabic quatrain, familiar to everybody from Dryden's Annus Mirabilis and Gray's Elegy. This quatrain itself, as a consequence of its gravity, is rather apt to be monotonous. Simple shortening of the even verses gives rather better outline, but not much less—in fact even greater—monotony. In three different poems Tennyson handles it in three different ways. "The Poet"[111] is couched in 10, 6, 10, 4, giving a succinct and rather sententious metre, which suits admirably for the sharply cut cumulative phrases of that fine piece. But, by this shortening, ten syllables, the equivalent of a whole line, were lost; and this gave too little room for description, and especially for the series of pictures, in scene- or figure-painting, which form so large a part of the other two poems and communicate to them such extraordinary charm. So, in the "Palace of Art," Tennyson "eked" the stanza, extending the second line to eights and the fifth to sixes.[112] This, besides actually giving a little more room, admits more varied "fingering," together with an effect of outline, which is wonderfully attractive—a taper, but with a swell in it. In the "Dream of Fair Women"—more narrative and with larger aims—he wanted more space still, and a form that would link itself better. He gets this by keeping three decasyllables with a final six.[113] This is an exceedingly cunning as well as beautiful device, for, on the one hand, the large majority of decasyllables, batched in threes, assists the narrative effect, which is always hard to achieve with stanzas of very irregular outline; and, on the other, the short final line serves at once as finial to the individual stanza, and hinge to join it to the next.

Many examples could be given, and may be found in the larger History, but these will suffice, with the addition that Tennyson continued his experimentation to the very last, as in the remarkable metre of "Kapiolani," and that his handling of blank verse, like Shakespeare, became almost perilous in its freedom, by the temptation that it offered to others to traverse the bounds, though he himself never actually did so.

Browning.

Browning, who was to illustrate the prosodic lesson of the century with, if possible, an even greater variety, did not exactly begin in that direction; though his prosodic practice was almost equally independent after the very first. That "very first"—Pauline—showed a distinct effort to imitate the blank verse of Shelley; and this was continued, though with more idiosyncrasy, in the dramatically arranged, but not really dramatic, Paracelsus, which had, however, one or two beautiful lyrics of a kind also to some extent Shelleyan. The blank verse in these two is not much equivalenced, nor even very much enjambed, but it runs with a peculiar breathlessness from verse to verse, even if each be fairly complete in itself. And this breathlessness continues—being, indeed, the main source of the much-talked-of "obscurity" of the piece—in Sordello. Here the couplet used is utterly opposed to that of the eighteenth century; but, once more, it is by no means the enjambed variety of the seventeenth. It is almost a kind to itself, progressing in immense involved paragraphs (often largely parenthetic) after a fashion which almost drowns the rhyme, even if there be definite stops at the end of the verses.

Fortunately, after this, in Bells and Pomegranates, he devoted a large part of his attention to lyric, in which he produced examples exquisite in quality and inexhaustible in variety.[114] His octosyllables in Christmas Eve and Easter Day are daringly equivalenced, and rhymed still more daringly, but very effective; and much later, in Fifine at the Fair, he almost succeeded in making the continuous Alexandrine a real success. But the bulk of his immense work in later days was written in blank verse, as strongly equivalenced as his octosyllables. Browning was never an incorrect prosodist; even his rhymes, though frequently extravagant, are almost always defensible; and it is a vulgar error to think him even rough in verse, though he was so in diction. But he, once more, pushed the lesson of variety to its extreme in one way.

Mrs. Browning.

His wife, both before and after she became his wife, gave a third important example of this attention to lyric, and this determination to give it the most multitudinous and original forms. She had one unfortunate, and indeed disgusting, prosodic defect—a toleration of, if not a positive preference for, really atrocious rhymes. But her ear for metre was quite differently tuned, and often exquisite; though (as was not the case with her husband) her bad rhymes, and, as was the case with him, though in a different way, her extravagant diction, sometimes created a false idea of metrical carelessness.

Matthew Arnold.

But, in a way, the most remarkable witness to the general tendency of the period was to be found in Mr. Matthew Arnold, who disapproved of Tennyson, and must (though personal friendship seems to have prevented him from saying so) have disapproved of the Brownings still more. For all Mr. Arnold's "classical" tastes, in different senses of that word, he became "romantic" in his variety of lyric forms, in his handling of them, in his dealing with the couplet, and in the adoption of elaborate stanza forms for his longer poems. Only his blank verse is of somewhat classical pattern, and of this he did not write very much.

Later poets—The Rosettis.

In the poets who specially represent the last half of the nineteenth century (with, in one case and the chief of all, an actual extension over nearly the whole of the first decade of the twentieth)—and who consisted mainly of the school often, though not very accurately, called Pre-Raphaelite—these tendencies are exhibited to a still greater extent, and in some cases, beyond all doubt, consciously followed and elaborated. In Dante and Christina Rossetti, brother and sister—more remarkable for genius perhaps than any brother and sister in history, literary or other,—but especially in the brother, the Italian and English elements blended. Dante showed, though in great variety, more of the Italian tendency to slow and stately music; Christina, more of the English to light and rapid movement as well. But both thoroughly mastered the secrets of equivalence, as well as those of largely broken and variegated line-length and stanza-arrangement. The sonnets of both are the finest, on what is called the Italian model, in our language, and Christina's command, both of simple song metres and of regular short verse—almost Skeltonic in apparent character, but far apart from doggerel—is specially noticeable. She is indeed one of the most daring of experimenters in metrical licence, but, even more than Browning's, her verse, with all its audacity, never transgresses the laws of prosodic music.[115]

Earlier to appear than Rossetti, except in little-read periodicals, but a younger man, was William Morris, whose place in the history of English prosody is a very important one. In his first book, The Defence of Guenevere, he tried, with remarkable success, a very large number of lyrical metres, sometimes exhibiting great originality of substitution. He passed from this to a still more remarkable revival of the enjambed decasyllabic couplet in The Life and Death of Jason and part of The Earthly Paradise, following not so much Keats as the best of the early seventeenth-century examples. With this, in The Earthly Paradise itself, he combined octosyllabic couplet of almost more exceptional quality still—very little equivalenced, but varied by pause and fingering in a manner which only Gower in his very finest passage, and Keats in the fragment of the Eve of St. Mark, had achieved. He also wrote excellent rhyme-royal. In Love is Enough, besides many more beautiful lyrical devices, he endeavoured a sort of alliterative semi-metrical rhythm of fifteenth-century kind, which has not pleased every one; but in Sigurd the Volsung, while still hovering about the same period, he pitched upon one of the numerous arrangements of the fourteener and perfected it into a thoroughly great metre.[124]

Mr. Swinburne.

Although not an artist in quite so many kinds of verse as Morris, and confining himself as a rule to strict metre, Algernon Charles Swinburne was, however, by far the greatest metrist of this group and time, and one of the greatest in the history of English poetry. In his copious critical work he did not bestow much explicit attention on matters prosodic; but when he did, made important remarks, and once gave one of the most important to be found definitely expressed by any English poet. This was to the effect, that English would always lend itself readily and successfully to any combinations of iamb, trochee, or anapæst, never to those of dactyl and spondee. He himself produced magnificent verse which looks like dactylic hexameter or elegiac, but is really (and was meant by him for) anapæstic work with anacrusis and catalexis. He wrote beautiful choriambics and more beautiful Sapphics. But these, at least the last two, were merely experiments and tours de force. He also experimented in the artificial French forms (v. inf.). But his principal work was straightforward composition in the direct lines of the English poetical inheritance, utilising to the utmost all the liberties of equivalence and substitution on the principles of Tennyson, but never abusing them, and informing particular metres with a spirit that made them entirely his own. His blank verse, though sometimes exceedingly fine, was also sometimes a little too voluble; and of his couplets much the same may be said in both ways. But in lyric—giving that word the widest possible extension—he is unsurpassed as to variety and individuality of practice, while, in two striking cases, he made improvements of the most remarkable kind on previous improvements made by others.[125]

The first of these was the fresh adaptation (after FitzGerald, but with an important difference) of the decasyllabic quatrain in Laus Veneris. The translator of Omar Khayyám had, with great effect, made the first, second, and fourth lines rhyme together, leaving the third entirely blank. Mr. Swinburne made the third line of each of his pairs of quatrains rhyme as well, a completion of the music which has a very fine effect. And a still greater achievement was the shortening of the last line of the "Praed Metre," which makes one of the most beautiful arrangements to be found in English. But it is perhaps only in these two that even guidance of any definite kind can be assigned. For the most part the prosodic effect is produced by original extension of the general laws, and by entirely individual fingering of particular metres. Nothing in the whole range of English poetry is more remarkable than the handling, in this way, of the ordinary Long Measure with alternate redundance in "At a Month's End";[126] and the examples of other varied metres, also given below, will complete the exposition, as far as it can be done in anything but a monograph of great extent.

Others.

Many poets, in the later years of the nineteenth century, have been remarkable for prosodic accomplishment; but, except in the outside department of experiment in quantitative and classical metres, they have rarely touched principle. Arthur E. O'Shaughnessy [127] and James Thomson the Second showed extraordinary proficiency, the first in the more rapid, the second in the statelier variation of metre. Canon Dixon, who was sometimes extremely happy in lyric,[128] wrote, in Mano, the one long English poem in terza rima, but without removing the objections which seem to hold, in our language, against the arrangement that is so magnificent in the Divina Commedia. In the late 'seventies a fancy came in, and remained for some time, of reviving the artificial French (and to some extent English) metres of the fifteenth and earlier centuries—ballades, rondeaux, triolets, etc. Mr. George Meredith, when he employed verse and not prose, used a considerable number of odd measures unusually rhythmed, as well as others perfectly adjusted to the demands of the ear. Mr. Henley and others carried on the rhymeless revival from Mr. Arnold, and yet others, such as the late Mr. John Davidson, while using rhyme reviled it. A few attempts have recently been made at "stress-metres"—rebellious to any uniform system of scansion, even with full liberty of substitution, and, in fact, irregularly rhythmed prose. But nothing really good and unquestionably poetic has been produced which will not obey the principles set forth in this treatise, and everything really good has furnished fresh illustrations of them.[129]

FOOTNOTES:

CHAPTER VITHE LAST STAGE—TENNYSON TO SWINBURNE

CHAPTER VI
THE LAST STAGE—TENNYSON TO SWINBURNE