Its degeneration.
This degeneration, which is most evident in Davenant and Suckling, but which appears to some, though not to a great extent, in Shirley, and in most others of the play-writers up to the closing of the theatres, should be carefully compared with the initial stage of the measure in English. Then, as we saw, the absence of the guiding and preserving influence of rhyme made writers especially and excessively careful of exact syllabisation, of punctilious though monotonous rhythm, and of meticulous separation of one line from another. So also we have seen that, in the second or great period, the restrictions were loosened—that Shakespeare, preserving perfect metrical harmony, substituted an ordered licence for them all. But even he perhaps a little latterly, and his followers Beaumont and Fletcher much more, exceeded in the redundant syllable. The third generation, though including, as in the three cases specially mentioned above, men of no small poetic talent, made the common, the apparently inevitable, but the disastrous mistake of considering beauty not merely as directly connected with apparent irregularity, but as to be secured by irregularity itself. Much of their blank verse is extremely blank, but not verse at all; nor yet prose, but an awkward hybrid. Not a little is prose pure and simple. It is scarcely surprising that, after the Restoration, the metre should have been regarded as "too mean even for a copy of verses," and discarded, for more than a few years, in drama itself. Except the broken-down rhyme-royal of the fifteenth century (to which it bears a striking resemblance without the excuse there available) there is no more really disgraceful department of English poetry.
Milton's reform of it.
At the very time, however, when this disorganisation of dramatic blank verse was at its worst, and when it had as yet only been used on the rarest occasions for any other purpose, its great restorer began, though he did not for a long time continue, the process of restoration.
Comus.
Milton's Comus (1634) exhibits him as a student, and consequently an imitator, of all the three preceding schools, excepting the contemporary degradation, which was impossible to such a born master of harmony. He has now caught, and often directly reproduces, the single-moulded line of Marlowe; and, on the other hand, he is almost equally inclined to the excessively redundanced endings of Beaumont and Fletcher, even to the extent of frequently making the last foot an anapæst.[82] Yet he not seldom closely approaches Shakespeare himself in the varied modulation, without excessive laxity, of his lines, and in the weaving of them, through overlapping, presence, absence and shifting of pause, and the like, into a verse paragraph. He inserts Alexandrines, but does not use verse-fragments much. And he begins a process—of which he was to be the greatest master—of adding to the colour, and enhancing the form, of lines by striking and important words, especially proper names. But fine as the blank verse of Comus is, it is, when we compare it with the lyrical close of the piece itself, evidently in the experimental stage. And it does not show the complete and assured command which is visible in the octosyllables and mixed lyrics.
Paradise Lost.
When, later, he once more employed blank verse (and this time blank verse only) in Paradise Lost,[83] there was nothing of experiment left in it. The system, in whatever way it may be interpreted, is quite obviously one which the poet has completely mastered, and which he is using without the slightest doubt or difficulty. It has given the pattern for all narrative, in fact for all non-dramatic, blank verse since; it established, though not quite at once, the measure as one of the great staples for this general use; and though there have been times at which it was not generally popular, and persons by whom it was heartily disliked, there has been a sort of general consensus, sometimes grudging, but oftener enthusiastic, that it is one of the greatest achievements of English poetry.
It is therefore inevitable that the partisans of the various systems of that poetry on its formal side, of which accounts were given in the beginning of this Manual, should all try to vindicate it for their own views. Attempts are still made (though chiefly by foreigners who naturally cannot bring the necessary ear) to reduce Paradise Lost to a strict decasyllabic arrangement, no extra syllables being allowed at all. This, of course, is merely hideous, and involves numerous crass absurdities, such as the reduction of, "so oft" to "soft."[84]