When these lines are sung, rough as they are, the ear is satisfied by the absolute identity of the final vowel, upon which the voice lingers—while the final consonant is elided or almost suppressed. It may be doubted whether one in a hundred of those who heard these songs ever discovered any deficiency in the rimes. In more literary ballads only an exact rime attains to the sterling standard; but in folk-songs, ancient and modern, assonance seems to be legal tender by tacit convention. When Benedick was trying to make a copy of verses for Beatrice, he declared that he could “find out no rime to lady but baby, an innocent rime”—a remark which shows us that Benedick’s theory of riming was much the same as Mr. Harrigan’s.
Probably, however, the attempt to substitute assonance for rime would be resented by many of the readers who are tolerant toward such departures from exactness as heaven and shriven or grove and dove. That is to say, the unliterary ear insists on the identity of the vowel while careless as to the consonant, and the literary ear insists on the identity of the consonant while not quite so careful as to the vowel. And here is another reason for exact accuracy, which satisfies alike the learned and the unlearned, and is also in accord with Herbert Spencer’s principle. It is true, probably, that such minor divergencies as the mating of home and alone and of shadow and meadow—to take one of each class—are not generally conscious on the part of the poet himself. Nor are they generally noticed by the reader or the auditor; and even when noticed they are not always resented as offensive. But just so long as there is a chance that they may be noticed and that they may be resented, they had best be avoided. The poet avails himself of his license at his peril. That way danger lies.
It is in the ‘Adventures of Philip’ that Thackeray records his hero’s disapproval of a poet who makes fire rime with Marire. Even if the rime is made accurate to the ear, it is only by convicting the lyrist of carelessness of speech—not to call it vulgarity of pronunciation. But Dr. Holmes himself, sharp as he was upon those who rimed dawn and morn, was none the less guilty of a peccadillo quite as reprehensible—Elizas and advertisers. Whittier ventured to chain Eva not only with leave her and receive her, which suggest a slovenly utterance, but also with give her, river, and never, which are all of them wrenched from their true sounds to force them unto a vain and empty semblance of a rime. A kindred cockney recklessness can be found in one of Mrs. Browning’s misguided modernizations of Chaucer:
Now grant my ship some smooth haven win her;
I follow Statius first, and then Corinna.
In each of these cases the poet takes out a wedding license for his couplet, only at the cost of compelling the reader to miscall the names of these ladies, and to address them as Marire, Elizer, Ever, and Corinner; and tho the rimes themselves are thus placed beyond reproach, the poet is revealed as regardless of all delicacy and precision of speech. Surely such a vulgarity of pronunciation is as disenchanting as any vulgarity in grammar.
Not quite so broad in the mispronunciation that makes these rimes are certain of Mr. Kipling’s, as to which we are a little in doubt whether he is making his rime by violence to the normal sound or whether his own pronunciation is so abnormal that the rime itself seems to him accurate:
Railways and roads they wrought
For the needs of the soil within;
A time to scribble in court.
A time to bear and grin.
Long he pondered o’er the question in his scantly furnished quarters,
Then proposed to Minnie Boffkin, eldest of Judge Boffkin’s daughters.
I quarrel with my wife at home.
We never fight abroad;
But Mrs. B. has grasped the fact,
I am her only lord.
Far less offensive than this wilful slovenliness, and yet akin to it, is the trick of forcing an emphasis upon a final syllable which is naturally short, in order that it may be made to rime with a syllable which is naturally long. For example, in the exquisite lyric of Lovelace’s, ‘To Althea from Prison,’ in the second quatrain of the second stanza we find that we must prolong the final syllable of the final word:
When thirsty grief in wine we steep,
When healths and draughts go free,
Fishes that tipple in the deep
Know no such liberty.