BELLES-LETTRES AND CRITICISM
THE MEASURES OF THE POETS. By M. A. Bayfield, M.A. Cambridge University Press. 5s. net.
A STUDY OF SHAKESPEARE'S VERSIFICATION. By M. A. Bayfield, M.A. Cambridge University Press. 16s. net.
LESSONS IN VERSE-CRAFT. By S. Gertrude Ford. Daniel. 3s. 6d. net.
Mr. Bayfield's Measures of the Poets is meant to be revolutionary. He finds existing systems of prosody neither complete nor sound, and would sweep them away in order to install his own trochaic scheme. Practically every work of a predecessor is ignored, and the author himself regrets that Lanier's Science of English Verse, published forty years ago, did not come to his notice until the present book was written. He does not mention Professor Saintsbury's History or Manual of English Prosody, nor (among other writings, by recent or living metrists) the essays of Patmore and Mr. Robert Bridges. A great deal of contention is thus avoided, but the probabilities of conversion are also reduced. He asserts that the normal foot of English verse is trochaic, and that the iambus cannot form a metrical foot, because the stressed syllable does not come first; while Professor Saintsbury declares that the iambic is the staple foot of English verse and is common to almost all prosodies.
How, then, let us ask the challenger, is the application of the trochaic system justified? In Mr. Bayfield's scheme the plain norm of the "full blank" verse line is an eleven-syllable arrangement of which the first is a "short," followed by five trochees; and the following line (quoted in his second book, which takes up the subject anew) is given as specimen:
I ⁝ come to | bury | Cæsar, | not to | praise him.‖
But the full line does not happen to be the common form, owing to its feminine ending, and so he admits that the prevailing type is the "checked" form:
To ⁝ sleep; per | chance to | dream: ay | there's the | rub.∧‖
The anacrusis or up-beat, marked off by ⁝, is an integral part of the new system; in reality it is the device by which the author changes iambic to trochaic movement. Here, indeed, is the crucial point of the dispute between iambic and trochaic. Under the first, this up-beat or take-off is neither very frequent nor very rare; under the second, it is common. Mr. Bayfield's idiosyncratic use of it is illustrated by himself thus:
My ⁝ heart | aches, and a | drowsy numbness pains,
and—
Or emptied some dull | opiate | to the drains,
and by—
But ⁝ being too | happy in thine happiness;
the reader being left to discover for himself the reason for the difference of prosodic interpretation. If the ear should be satisfied with this difference (and Mr. Bayfield admits that the ear is judge and jury), what might its verdict be as to the validity of a double up-beat, leaving only semi-syllables for the rest of the line?
And thy ⁝ mouth | shúddering | like a | shót | bírd.‖
Here let it be remarked that his system acknowledges monosyllabic feet, but he is not well informed in denying them a place in the iambic system. He complains of "ragtime scansions," in referring to the fact that the iambic system admits trochees whenever it would break down by refusing them, and seems to deplore a resulting loss of "continuity of rhythm." Yet he himself does not scruple to write of one of his own illustrations: "A striking contrast in rhythm may be noted here. That of the first line and a half ... is markedly trochaic; the other line and a half fall into an equally marked iambic rhythm." He has not, in fact, escaped from the difficulties and inconsistencies which beset the prosodist. He does little more than prove that the music of the poets cannot be defeated or disguised by either system. He gives this as containing a quinquesyllabic foot:
Well, ∧ | Juliet, I will | lie with thee to-night,
and dubiously suggests "hire" as a disyllable in:
And ⁝ hire | post-horses; | I will hence to-night.
He is aware that an alternative scansion may in some cases be correct, but does not sufficiently realise that any prosodic system is but an artificiality, formed to explain, and not dictate, the infinitely variable rhythms of poetry. His own particular system, for all its ingenuities, appears more artificial and arbitrary than the iambic. It is interesting to note that his examples are largely drawn from Shakespeare, Tennyson, Swinburne, and Shelley, all fruitful ground; while Milton and Coleridge, Campion and Keats are much less used or left alone altogether. Might not these fascinating and delusive excursions into the mysteries of rhythm be extended to certain living poets—at least to Mr. Hardy and Mr. Bridges?
Shakespeare's Versification is a larger book, in which Mr. Bayfield inquires into the validity of the early texts. His purpose is:
First to give an intelligible and consistent account of the structure and characteristic features of his dramatic verse, the essential principles of which appear to have been wholly misconceived hitherto, and secondly to show that there are many thousands of lines of it that are given in modern texts not as their author intended them to be delivered, but clipped and trimmed to a featureless uniformity that he would have abhorred.
He finds in Antony and Cleopatra the ideal of verse at which Shakespeare was always aiming, and denounces the depravity of the text as it stands—in this as in many other of the plays. The book has a cumulative, even a dramatic interest, for setting out to prove one thing, Mr. Bayfield frankly ends by proving another. With immense care and patience he has examined and compared Quartos and First Folio, and noted quite innumerable places at which the contraction and condensation of words and lines have distorted or ruined the rhythm; and he contends that if the verse is to be presented as the author meant it to be delivered, these must be expanded into their full forms. He begins by considering Shakespeare's use of the "resolved" foot—that is, a foot of more than two syllables—and discovers a constant tendency to reduce these "resolutions" by abbreviation; the result being, for example, that violent becomes vi'lent, desolate des'late, Demetrius Demetr'us, etc. He contends that from the outset Shakespeare employed resolved rhythms more freely than his contemporaries, and gradually increased the proportion with his later plays; and it is, of course, perfectly true that the growing liberation of style which in Shakespeare expresses a psychological development, is equally noticeable in later poets.
Now in comparing the Quartos with the First Folio Mr. Bayfield finds that of all the differences the most conspicuous is the elimination of resolutions, the tendency shown by the Quartos in this direction being aggravated in the Folio. The position is made clear in a Table relating to fourteen Quarto plays, which shows, e.g., that in Othello the Folio eliminates eighty-six resolutions found in the Quarto, and the latter eliminates fourteen which the Folio displays; while a third figure, 84, "enumerates cases where, guided by the whole investigations and the revelations afforded by the first two columns [figures], I believe that a resolution should be restored." His deduction is that the Folio is a metrical reactionary; if it is unsound to prefer its revision to the Quartos, it is equally unsound to rely upon the Folio for the plays not included in the Quartos. He strengthens his argument by showing that the prose (of Julius Cæsar, for instance), which has no metrical obligations, is far more immune from illicit contractions, although prose, being nearer to ordinary speech, might be expected to show very free colloquial abbreviations. We are not prepared to follow Mr. Bayfield blindly; his trochaic passions, hitched to his resolution to "resolve," do not compel unquestioning obedience; we are not convinced by a line like, "From ⁝ Syria to Lydia and to Ionia," when the received text reads:
From Syria
To Lydia and to Ionia, whilst——
and his resort to "Cross Accent" for the scansion of such lines as
Her dowry shall weigh equal with a queen
is yet farther from persuading us, and seems, like so many of his arguments and instances, to be the mere expression of his hatred of the iambic. Nevertheless, his abundant recital of divergencies from the Quartos' resolved lines—to consider only that which is a matter of simple enumeration—can be taken quite apart from the soundness or unsoundness of his metrical prepossessions; and what we have called the cumulative interest of this treatise is most plainly felt in the development of this theme as play after play is examined.
It is in the chapter called "Conclusions" that the interest suddenly becomes dramatic. Mr. Bayfield has been arguing that Shakespeare is not printed as he should be printed—that is, with "the clear and uncramped enunciation of trisyllabic and quadrisyllabic feet"—and that the mangling of these was done for and by the players in order to reduce the verse to the common disyllabic type which alone they could comfortably manage. But now he derives a "flood of light" from the 1616 Jonson folio, the proofs of which are presumed to have been corrected by Jonson himself. From the printing of Sejanus he finds that Jonson's resolutions are abridged even where the line makes their full enunciation essential to the rhythm. Space will not permit the tracing of the new argument here, but Mr. Bayfield at length concludes that what he has supposed in the first three hundred pages of his book to be attributable to the perversities of the Press, are after all merely recognised contractions which were never meant to suggest the clipped pronunciations given to them. His charge, in fact, is no longer levelled against the early texts from which his affluence of instances is drawn, but against the interpretation of them; the very apostrophe (with division) being in reality but a signal calling attention to the resolution which generations of editors, readers, and players have supposed it was meant to abolish. The dramatic interest is complete.
Mr. Bayfield claims for his books the authority justly due from forty-five years' application of prosodic principles to English verse. We can but conclude with wishing Shakespeare's Versification a fuller index and a wide study, and suggest to the author that those who are concerned with verse as writers and not as teachers have not always failed to give the full syllabic value to the common abbreviations of the text.
Miss Ford's book is a "practical" treatise and might have been a valuable one. The first sentence tells us that many of her examples of verse-forms are from her own pen, while Mr. Bayfield has at any rate been content with Shakespeare. Why should she write four stanzas in imitation of Love in the Valley? She thinks it too well known to make quotation advisable, yet gives us the commonest things of Wordsworth and Shelley and Coleridge. She misprints Shakespeare and Wordsworth shamefully, thinks that Professor Saintsbury is dead, and, sparing only four pages for "the lyric," devotes twenty-seven to such forms as roundel, ballade, etc. Her book, we think, has been spoiled by haste; yet she has such enthusiasm and brightness as tempt us to regret that haste and to hope for better work.
ROUSSEAU AND ROMANTICISM. By Irving Babbitt. Houghton Mifflin Company. 17s. net.
Metaphysicians have been forced by the impossibility of obtaining from observed nature either confirmation or disproof of their theories to develop a technique the principal aim of which is coherence. So admirable indeed has this technique become in its logic and complexity that it has been adopted by many workers in other fields, on the whole with disastrous results. In this book Professor Babbitt applies it to literature, although he appears quite able to follow more empirical methods. His reading has been extensive, and his judgments are precise. Unfortunately he is not much interested in or amused by books save as the symptoms of moral and metaphysical observations. He eats nothing out of them. He only covers them with his cobwebs.
Like most metaphysicians, Professor Babbitt thinks in twos. The trick is familiar. Define A. Call not-A B. One is very bad, one very good, and the history of life, or of whatever else is under discussion, is the history of their conflict. For this professor, A is an emotional and naturalistic romanticism, and is very bad indeed. Rousseau is its high prophet, the great war its issue, and "smart young radicals" its dupes. We are invited back to ancient Greece, where A is absent, and B, that is to say classicism, has neither artifice nor formality, back to Socrates, back to Aristotle, back apparently to anyone who is a philosopher and not a poet.
Now there is an essential fallacy in grouping writers like politicians, in ringing a division bell for ever in their ears and furthermore doing their voting for them. This talk of schools and of influences and of disciples is extremely prevalent among the academic critics in America. It may safely be said that they have illuminated nothing thereby. Writers may use the language of their times and their friends, but it is as a vestment and not as a foundation. Of course, the romantic revolution, like the spluttering rebellions of our own day, may have induced some subordinates to produce manifestos and call them works of art. Some young men may be so excited by the eccentricity of their form as to forget the necessity of any content. But such works do not usually occupy the critic for long, and valuable appreciation of literature will not be content with a quasi-botanical classification.
What are we to do, for example, with Charles Lamb? Is he a classicist or a romanticist? Professor Babbitt has no qualms in affixing the latter label. Lamb is as romantic as Wordsworth is, he says, but about towns instead of about the country, and as a proof he refers the reader to a letter in which Lamb, writing to Wordsworth, says: "In London I have formed as many and intense local attachments as any of you mountaineers can have done with dead nature. The lighted shops of the Strand ... the old bookstalls, parsons cheapening books, coffee houses, steams of soup from kitchens, the pantomimes," and so on. Little can be gained for the appreciation of Elia or of the "Lake School" by saying classic or romantic about this, and if this is indeed a child of Rousseau, we may be certain that he would have dropped it with the rest at the door of the foundling hospital.
Probably, however, the professor does not want to foster appreciation. His incursion into literature is a border foray, and he is off at once with his plunder to his ethical highlands. We remain to count our losses. Milton, who "on the whole is highly serious," is not much injured. But Keats is unwise. Browning is only half-educated. Wordsworth, until he began the Ecclesiastical Sonnets, was betrayed by his "penchant for paradox." Shelley was an emotional sophist, with a nympholeptic imagination, who fell into sheer unreality. These judgments contain truth, but a very little of truth. To write thus is too plainly to adopt the methods of a political opponent. Professor Babbitt warns us that if he had attempted rounded estimates these would have been more favourable, but that as it is he is severe because he is laying down principles, principles of discipline and authority as against the unrestrained individualism of the modern.
One wonders, too, whether this massive series—the present volume is the fourth—will contribute much more to ethics than to literature; whether an intensive study of the West European literature of 1790 to 1850 will indeed, as Professor Babbitt may expect, dissuade readers from surrendering to the emotions; whether the indecorum of Rousseau does threaten civilisation with breakdown; and whether the imitation of Sophocles and Dante would morally improve the character.
It is, in short, not very obvious why this book was written, nor who will take pleasure in reading it, except for the enjoyment of a first-class mind, even when it works in a vacuum.
SPRINGTIME AND OTHER ESSAYS. By Sir Francis Darwin. Murray. 7s. 6d. net.
This is an amiable book of gossipy essays, mostly in the key popular at University Extension meetings. Some of them are reviews and rely a little too much on extracts for any one familiar with the books noticed to derive much excitement from them. The title-essay, however, together with that on a Procession of Flowers, and the paper entitled Recollections are both worth attention. The essay on his boyhood and youth shows that Sir Francis has an eye for character, and no little gift for expressing himself neatly about his friends and acquaintances. Here is an admirable vignette of Parslow, the butler:
He had what may be called a baronial nature: he idealised everything about our modest household, and would draw a glass of beer for a postman with the air of a seneschal bestowing a cup of malvoisie on a troubadour. He would not, I think, have disgraced Charles Lamb's friend Captain Burney, who welcomed his guests in the grand manner to the simplest of feasts. It was good to see him on Christmas Day; with how great an air would he enter the breakfast-room and address us: "Ladies and gentlemen, I wish you a happy Christmas," etc. I am afraid he got but a sheepish response from us.
It has something of the air of those charming pictures of Christmas in the country which Randolph Caldecott used to contribute to the Graphic Special Numbers. Sir Francis's paper on Names of Characters in Fiction does not seem to us an adequate treatment of a really fascinating subject. He just touches the fringe of it, but he appears to us over-lenient to the bad old habit of naming characters after their vices, virtues, or idiosyncrasies. That is tolerable in purely allegorical work, such as Bunyan's, but becomes very tiresome in Thackeray—whom Sir Francis rates far too highly—and frequently absurd both in him and minor authors. Women novelists have here shown more sense; you do not meet such terrible monstrosities as Mantrap, Lollypop, Fitzoof, Portansherry, or Nockemorf in the novels of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, or Mrs. Gaskell. A character's name is not perfect if one can imagine it different, and most of the "typical" names are mere labels which have no real, organic connection with their wearers, as have the names of Flaubert's characters, of Balzac's, or of Henry James's.
DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS, SENSATION NOVELISTS: A STUDY IN THE CONDITION AND THEORIES OF NOVEL WRITING IN VICTORIAN ENGLAND. By Walter C. Phillips, Ph.D. New York: Columbia University Press. 8s. 6d. net.
Mr. Phillips is rather a pathologist of fiction than a critic. His thesis here, broadly speaking, is that Dickens, and after him Wilkie Collins and Charles Reade, were drawn into melodramatic invention by the demands of the public and the conditions of publication of their day. His diagnosis is indisputable, though his premises are not. It is not to be denied that Dickens wrote melodrama. He liked that kind of thing, and so did his public. Where Mr. Phillips goes astray is in assuming that Dickens was a tradesman who supplied a craving public. The truth is otherwise. Dickens gained his public with the Pickwick Papers, and after that could do what he pleased. It is quite another thing to say that he was of like mind with his public, and took in melodrama through the pores. It had been in the air for fifty years. But Mr. Phillips sees little else in Dickens, and thereby does his subject and himself injustice. For one false note which that great man struck, the trained ear will detect two dozen true. If some of his monsters—Quilp in particular—are pantomime monsters, and some of his angels pantomime angels, others of them, monstrous or not, have been added to the inhabitants of English-speaking lands, and still walk in our midst. No writer has ever increased the population to the same extent. Mrs. Gamp may be more than woman, or less; she may be a living proverb. It does not matter, since she lives. Dickens, in fact, was a genius. He did what he chose, or what he must, sometimes superlatively well, sometimes incredibly ill. We bolt the bad for the sake of the good. There is no concealment possible of the fact that he had unfortunate and occasionally unwholesome tastes. The worst of them was his pleasure in cruelty. Quilp and his wife, Jonas Chuzzlewit and his, Creakle and his boys, Squeers and his: there is a gloating over such relations which, to our mind, is the worst blot upon Dickens's fame. But Mr. Phillips, absorbed in the commercial aspect of literature, counting the words in the huge novels of that day, calculating circulation, and examining into profits, has not had time for such points. He had been better employed there than in amassing statistics for "The Novelist as Wage-earner." Too much attention has been paid already to the finance of the business. Money-getting did not affect Dickens in the first flights of his genius, when his direction for good and all was determined. It may have stimulated Wilkie Collins and Charles Reade—a very different pair of men. Mr. Phillips is in the right when he hits them off as "virtuosos." "Not even Stevenson," he shrewdly says, "was more exclusively and hopelessly a writer of story-books" than Charles Reade.