Matthew Arnold.
But, in a way, the most remarkable witness to the general tendency of the period was to be found in Mr. Matthew Arnold, who disapproved of Tennyson, and must (though personal friendship seems to have prevented him from saying so) have disapproved of the Brownings still more. For all Mr. Arnold's "classical" tastes, in different senses of that word, he became "romantic" in his variety of lyric forms, in his handling of them, in his dealing with the couplet, and in the adoption of elaborate stanza forms for his longer poems. Only his blank verse is of somewhat classical pattern, and of this he did not write very much.
Later poets—The Rosettis.
In the poets who specially represent the last half of the nineteenth century (with, in one case and the chief of all, an actual extension over nearly the whole of the first decade of the twentieth)—and who consisted mainly of the school often, though not very accurately, called Pre-Raphaelite—these tendencies are exhibited to a still greater extent, and in some cases, beyond all doubt, consciously followed and elaborated. In Dante and Christina Rossetti, brother and sister—more remarkable for genius perhaps than any brother and sister in history, literary or other,—but especially in the brother, the Italian and English elements blended. Dante showed, though in great variety, more of the Italian tendency to slow and stately music; Christina, more of the English to light and rapid movement as well. But both thoroughly mastered the secrets of equivalence, as well as those of largely broken and variegated line-length and stanza-arrangement. The sonnets of both are the finest, on what is called the Italian model, in our language, and Christina's command, both of simple song metres and of regular short verse—almost Skeltonic in apparent character, but far apart from doggerel—is specially noticeable. She is indeed one of the most daring of experimenters in metrical licence, but, even more than Browning's, her verse, with all its audacity, never transgresses the laws of prosodic music.[115]
Earlier to appear than Rossetti, except in little-read periodicals, but a younger man, was William Morris, whose place in the history of English prosody is a very important one. In his first book, The Defence of Guenevere, he tried, with remarkable success, a very large number of lyrical metres, sometimes exhibiting great originality of substitution. He passed from this to a still more remarkable revival of the enjambed decasyllabic couplet in The Life and Death of Jason and part of The Earthly Paradise, following not so much Keats as the best of the early seventeenth-century examples. With this, in The Earthly Paradise itself, he combined octosyllabic couplet of almost more exceptional quality still—very little equivalenced, but varied by pause and fingering in a manner which only Gower in his very finest passage, and Keats in the fragment of the Eve of St. Mark, had achieved. He also wrote excellent rhyme-royal. In Love is Enough, besides many more beautiful lyrical devices, he endeavoured a sort of alliterative semi-metrical rhythm of fifteenth-century kind, which has not pleased every one; but in Sigurd the Volsung, while still hovering about the same period, he pitched upon one of the numerous arrangements of the fourteener and perfected it into a thoroughly great metre.[124]
Mr. Swinburne.
Although not an artist in quite so many kinds of verse as Morris, and confining himself as a rule to strict metre, Algernon Charles Swinburne was, however, by far the greatest metrist of this group and time, and one of the greatest in the history of English poetry. In his copious critical work he did not bestow much explicit attention on matters prosodic; but when he did, made important remarks, and once gave one of the most important to be found definitely expressed by any English poet. This was to the effect, that English would always lend itself readily and successfully to any combinations of iamb, trochee, or anapæst, never to those of dactyl and spondee. He himself produced magnificent verse which looks like dactylic hexameter or elegiac, but is really (and was meant by him for) anapæstic work with anacrusis and catalexis. He wrote beautiful choriambics and more beautiful Sapphics. But these, at least the last two, were merely experiments and tours de force. He also experimented in the artificial French forms (v. inf.). But his principal work was straightforward composition in the direct lines of the English poetical inheritance, utilising to the utmost all the liberties of equivalence and substitution on the principles of Tennyson, but never abusing them, and informing particular metres with a spirit that made them entirely his own. His blank verse, though sometimes exceedingly fine, was also sometimes a little too voluble; and of his couplets much the same may be said in both ways. But in lyric—giving that word the widest possible extension—he is unsurpassed as to variety and individuality of practice, while, in two striking cases, he made improvements of the most remarkable kind on previous improvements made by others.[125]
The first of these was the fresh adaptation (after FitzGerald, but with an important difference) of the decasyllabic quatrain in Laus Veneris. The translator of Omar Khayyám had, with great effect, made the first, second, and fourth lines rhyme together, leaving the third entirely blank. Mr. Swinburne made the third line of each of his pairs of quatrains rhyme as well, a completion of the music which has a very fine effect. And a still greater achievement was the shortening of the last line of the "Praed Metre," which makes one of the most beautiful arrangements to be found in English. But it is perhaps only in these two that even guidance of any definite kind can be assigned. For the most part the prosodic effect is produced by original extension of the general laws, and by entirely individual fingering of particular metres. Nothing in the whole range of English poetry is more remarkable than the handling, in this way, of the ordinary Long Measure with alternate redundance in "At a Month's End";[126] and the examples of other varied metres, also given below, will complete the exposition, as far as it can be done in anything but a monograph of great extent.
Others.
Many poets, in the later years of the nineteenth century, have been remarkable for prosodic accomplishment; but, except in the outside department of experiment in quantitative and classical metres, they have rarely touched principle. Arthur E. O'Shaughnessy[127] and James Thomson the Second showed extraordinary proficiency, the first in the more rapid, the second in the statelier variation of metre. Canon Dixon, who was sometimes extremely happy in lyric,[128] wrote, in Mano, the one long English poem in terza rima, but without removing the objections which seem to hold, in our language, against the arrangement that is so magnificent in the Divina Commedia. In the late 'seventies a fancy came in, and remained for some time, of reviving the artificial French (and to some extent English) metres of the fifteenth and earlier centuries—ballades, rondeaux, triolets, etc. Mr. George Meredith, when he employed verse and not prose, used a considerable number of odd measures unusually rhythmed, as well as others perfectly adjusted to the demands of the ear. Mr. Henley and others carried on the rhymeless revival from Mr. Arnold, and yet others, such as the late Mr. John Davidson, while using rhyme reviled it. A few attempts have recently been made at "stress-metres"—rebellious to any uniform system of scansion, even with full liberty of substitution, and, in fact, irregularly rhythmed prose. But nothing really good and unquestionably poetic has been produced which will not obey the principles set forth in this treatise, and everything really good has furnished fresh illustrations of them.[129]