That utterance of Wordsworth’s may be recommended to the ardent advocates of Free Verse,—that is, of the verse which boasts itself to be patternless and to come into being in response solely to the whim of the moment. Sooner or later the Free Versifiers will discover the inexorable truth in Huxley’s saying that it is when a man can do as he pleases that his trouble begins.
Since I have ventured these three quotations I am emboldened to make a fourth—from John Morley’s essay on Macaulay. After informing us about the rules which Comte imposed on himself in composition, Morley tells us that Comte
justified his literary solicitude by insisting on the wholesomeness alike to heart and intelligence of submission to artificial restrictions. He felt, after he had once mastered the habit of the new yoke, that it became the source of continual and unforeseeable improvement even in thought, and he perceived that the reason why verse is a higher kind of literary perfection than prose, is that verse imposes a greater number of rigorous forms.
It is because of their rigorous forms that the ballade and the rondeau have established themselves by the side of the sonnet; and the lyrist who has learnt to love them finds in their fixity no curb on his power of self-expression. So in the kindred art of music, the sonata and the symphony are forms each with a law of its own; yet the composer has abundant liberty within the law. He has all the freedom that is good for him; and the prison to which he dooms himself no prison is.
II
There is however a difference between a fixed form, such as the sonata has and the sonnet, and the more flexible formula, such as the arrangement within a framework which La Farge borrowed from the painters of the Italian Renascence. A pattern of this latter sort is less rigid; in fact, it is easily varied as successive artists modify it to suit themselves.
Consider the eighteenth century essay which Steele devised with the aid of hints he found in the ‘Epistles’ and even in the ‘Satires’ of Horace, and which was enriched and amplified by Addison. The pattern of the ‘Tatler’ and the ‘Spectator’ was taken over by a heterogeny of other essayists in the course of four-score years, notably by Johnson in the ‘Idler’ and the ‘Rambler’; and assuredly Johnson if left to himself could never have invented a formula so simple, so unpretending and so graceful. It was only a little departed from by Goldsmith, and only a little more by Irving in the ‘Sketch-Book,’ which is not so much a periodical (altho it was originally published in parts) as it is a portfolio of essays and of essay-like tales. From Irving, Thackeray borrowed more than the title of his ‘Paris Sketch-Book’ and ‘Irish Sketch-Book.’
Consider the earlier and in some measure stricter form of the essay as it had been developed by Montaigne,—the pattern that Montaigne worked out as he put more and more of himself into the successive editions of his essays. He had begun intending little more than a commonplace-book of anecdotes and quotations; and yet by incessant interpolation and elaboration his book became at last the intimate revelation of his own pungent individuality. This is the pattern that Bacon adopted and adapted to his purpose, less discursive and more monitory, but not less pregnant nor less significant. And it is Montaigne’s formula, not greatly transformed by Bacon, which Emerson found ready to his hand when he made his essays out of his lectures, scattering his pearls of wisdom with a lavish hand and not pausing to string them into a necklace. We cannot doubt that the pattern of Montaigne and Bacon and Emerson owed something also to their memory of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius.
Shakspere was as fortunate as Bacon in the fact that he had not to waste time in vainly seeking new forms. He did not invent the sonnet and he did not invent the sonnet-sequence; but he made his profit out of them. Neither the stanza nor the structure of his two narrative poems, ‘Venus and Adonis’ and the ‘Rape of Lucrece,’ was of his contriving; he found them already in use and he did not go in search of any overt novelty of form.
Scott, “beaten out of poetry by Byron,” as he himself phrased it, turned to prose-fiction; and almost by accident he created the pattern of the historical novel, with its romantic heroes and heroines and with its realistic humbler characters. His earliest heroes and heroines in prose were very like his still earlier heroes and heroines in verse; and his realistic characters were the result of his expressed desire to do for the Scottish peasant what Miss Edgeworth had done for the Irish peasant. The first eight of the Waverley novels dealt only with Scottish scenes; then in ‘Ivanhoe,’ and a little later in ‘Quentin Durward,’ Scott enlarged his formula for the presentation of an English and a French theme.