CHAPTER V
THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL—ITS PRECURSORS AND FIRST GREAT STAGE
Gray and Collins.
We must now take up, somewhat more minutely, the phenomena mentioned in the last chapter as showing revolt against, and recovery from, the partly beneficial but excessive tyranny of the stopped decasyllabic couplet. These may be considered, still briefly but more particularly, under two heads: the first concerning chiefly the influence of individual poets—Collins, Gray, Chatterton, Burns, Blake; the second, agencies various in kind and source. Neither Collins nor Gray can be said to have directly attacked the task—though Gray at least was, as we see from his Metrum, not ignorant of the facts—of re-leavening and re-illustrating prosody by an infusion of trisyllabic substitution. With rarest exceptions, they still cling to the iamb as a base-foot. But they rearrange its line-groups in a fashion as alien as possible from that of the couplet. Collins even discards rhyme altogether in the quatrains of Evening, and in his famous "Passions" varies his construction as much as possible within the general limits. Gray follows, but improves upon, Dryden in the rhymed decasyllabic quatrain; adapts, with an effect somewhat stiff, but often very beautiful, the Greek system of strophe, antistrophe, and epode in the Progress of Poetry and The Bard; employs Romance-six with singular felicity in both serious and serio-comic verse; and, though retaining a strongly artificial poetic diction, informs this with new touches and spirit from sources as a rule quite closed to his contemporaries and predecessors—Norse and Welsh as well as Greek. Both these poets, in short, disregard, to a large extent, equality of line-length, and employ mixed rhymes. Now equality of line-length and strictly consecutive rhymes were almost as dear to the chief lovers of the couplet as its unvarying syllabic arrangement and its regular accent.
Chatterton, Burns, and Blake.
Gray, it has been said, knew substitution, but did not use it; the ill-fated genius of Chatterton not only knew it, but used it. It is present, and very effective, in Burns; but it was not the chief means of good of which Burns availed himself in regard to prosody. His dialect, with its relief from the conventional "lingo" of eighteenth-century poetry, did much; but the forms which he used, and especially the famous "Burns metre," did more. It would be almost impossible to devise a greater contrast to the couplet; or—since (which is at least worth noting) the six lines of this stanza contain exactly as many syllables (forty) as two ordinary couplets—to arrange these same numbers in ways more rhythmically different. But the first eighteenth-century poet thoroughly to understand and exemplify the powers of equivalence is Burns's slightly older contemporary, William Blake, whose Poetical Sketches appeared as early as 1780, while his Songs of Innocence and Experience, and his remaining poems, display a knowledge of the secrets of this equivalence, and a command over them, which had not been shown since Shakespeare.
Other influences of change.
Blake, however, expressed rather than exercised influence, for his poems remained long almost unknown; and it may be doubtful whether even the others brought about many conscious prosodic changes. The gradual recovery of knowledge of older English literature, and especially of the ballads, had in all probability much more direct power. Durfey's Pills to Purge Melancholy, Philips's Collection of Old Ballads, and Percy's Reliques—with constantly increasing editions of the Elizabethan dramatists and other writers, even such as Skelton and Occleve—could not but awaken men's minds to the fact that (as Gascoigne had put it in a matter closely connected if not absolutely identical) "we had used in times past other kinds of metres" than the stopped couplet. And towards the end of the century revolt of various kinds appeared—copious though usually very tame ballad; multiplied blank verse of the usual kind; and (in imitation partly of some older English models and of Collins, partly of the German) rhymeless verse of different sorts, the chief early practitioner of which was Frank Sayers of Norwich, a physician and man of letters who was more influential on others than important in himself. Bowles (after Warton, whose History of Poetry worked in the same direction) reintroduced the sonnet. William Taylor, another member of the Norwich group, revived (again after the German) English hexameters; and though Hayley, Darwin, and others continued the eighteenth-century couplet unchanged, the spirit of the youth of the period was clearly tending in a different direction.
Wordsworth, Southey, and Scott.
Of the four great champions of reaction who were born about 1770, Wordsworth, though he illustrates the change generally, and never, in his principal work, uses the stopped couplet, is not very noticeable prosodically.[102] The three others are, in different ways, of the first importance. Southey, as early as 1796, not merely practised, but, which is much more, practised deliberately, and definitely defended in a letter to an objecting friend, the use of three syllables for two. Moreover (not confining himself to the ballad metre, which he had employed and which he was specially justifying), he alleged the practice of Milton, frankly stigmatising as "asses" the editors who had endeavoured to disguise this practice as "elision." Scott—assisted perhaps to some extent by hearing a recitation or reading of Coleridge's unpublished Christabel, but undoubtedly also following[103] the example of the innumerable ballad- and romance-writers with whom he was almost better acquainted than any other man in Britain—produced first ballad-pieces, and then, in and after The Lay of the Last Minstrel, continuous narrative poems of great length, for the most part couched in equivalenced octosyllables, but often much varied in rhyme-arrangement and diversified by shorter and longer lines. And there is no doubt that the enormous popularity of these poems of his did more than anything else to familiarise the public ear with metres and cadences as different as possible from the couplet.