Unus homo mille mille mille decollavimus
which Professor Courthope scans as trochaic verse, [Footnote: History of English Poetry, vol. 1, p. 73.] seems to me nothing but "stress" verse, like
"Hay-foot, straw-foot, belly full of bean-soup—Hep—Hep!"
Popular accentual verse persisted, then, while the more cultivated Roman public acquired and then gradually lost, in the course of centuries, its ear for the quantitative rhythms which originally had been copied from the Greeks.
Furthermore, according to our ingenious college teachers, there was still a third principle of versification to be reckoned with, not depending on Quantity or Stress, but merely Syllabic, or syllable-counting. This was immemorially old, it seemed, and it had reappeared mysteriously in Europe in the Dark Ages.
Dr. Lewis cites from a Latin manuscript poem of the ninth century:
[Footnote: Foreign Sources, etc., p. 3.]
"Beatissimus namque Dionysius ¦ Athenis quondam episcopus,
Quem Sanctus Clemens direxit in Galliam ¦ propter praedicandi
gratiam," etc.
"Each verse contains 21 syllables, with a caesura after the 12th. No further regularity, either metrical or rhythmical, can be perceived. Such a verse could probably not have been written except for music." Church-music, apparently, was also a factor in the development of versification,—particularly that "Gregorian" style which demanded neither quantitative nor accentual rhythm, but simply a fair count of syllables in the libretto, note matching syllable exactly. But when the great medieval Latin hymns, like Dies ire, were written, the Syllabic principle of versification, like the Quantitative principle, dropped out of sight, and we witness once more the emergence of the Stress or accentual system, heavily ornamented with rhymes. [Footnote: See the quotation from Taylor's Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages printed in the "Notes and Illustrations" for this chapter.] Yet the Syllabic method reappears once more, we were told, in French prosody, and thus affects the verse of Chaucer and of subsequent English poetry, and it still may be studied, isolated as far as may be from considerations of quantity and stress, in certain English songs written for music, where syllable carefully matches note. The "long metre" (8 syllables), "short metre" (6 syllables) and "common metre" (7 syllables, 6 syllables) of the hymn books is a convenient illustration of thinking of metre in terms of syllables alone.
6. The Appeal to the Ear
At this point, perhaps, having set forth the three theories of Quantity, Stress and Syllable, our instructors were sensible enough to make an appeal to the ear. Reminding us that stress was the controlling principle in Germanic poetry,—although not denying that considerations of quantity and number of syllables might have something to do with the effect,—they read aloud to us some Old English verse. Perhaps it was that Song of the Battle of Brunanburh which Tennyson has so skilfully rendered into modern English words while preserving the Old English metre. And here, though the Anglo-Saxon words were certainly uncouth, we caught the chief stresses without difficulty, usually four beats to the line. If the instructor, while these rude strokes of rhythm were still pounding in our ears, followed the Old English with a dozen lines of Chaucer, we could all perceive the presence of a newer, smoother, more highly elaborated verse-music, where the number of syllables had been cunningly reckoned, and the verse-accent seemed always to fall upon a syllable long and strong enough to bear the weight easily, and the rhymes rippled like a brook. Whether we called the metre of the Prologue rhymed couplets of iambic pentameter, or rhymed couplets of ten-syllabled, five-stressed verse, the music, at least, was clear enough. And so was the music of the "blank" or unrhymed five-stress lines of Marlowe and Shakspere and Milton, and as we listened it was easy to believe that "stress" and "quantity" and "syllable," all playing together like a chime of bells, are concordant and not quarrelsome elements in the harmony of modern English verse. Only, to be richly concordant, each must be prepared to yield a little if need be, to the other!