“Lilt,” he continued, “is the hardest thing of all to acquire. Thousands attempt it, and hundreds fail. I have it (though I say it who should not) to perfection. It is the quality you will discover in the old ballads, but there it is often marred by curious accidents which I can never properly explain. Their metre is often very irregular, and I fancy that their style (which my Work closely resembles) has suffered by continual copying. No: where you get the true ‘Lilt’ is in the music halls—I am sorry it is so often wasted upon impertinent themes. Do you know ‘It is all very fine and large,’ or ‘At my time of life,’ or again, ‘Now we shan’t be long’?”
I answered I had them all three by heart.
“I shouldn’t say they were worth that,” he answered, as a shade of disappointment appeared upon his delicate, mobile features, “but there is a place where you get it to perfection, and that is Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome. They are my favourite reading. But that is another story.”
“To turn to quite a different point, the Vernacular. It isn’t everything that will go down in ordinary English. Of course I do use ordinary English—at least, Bible English, in my best work. For instance, there is a little thing called ‘In the Confessional,’ which I propose to read to you later, and which has no slang nor swear-words from beginning to end.”
“But, of course, that is quite an exception. Most things won’t stand anything but dialect, and I just give you this tip gratis. You can make anything individual and strong by odd spelling. It arrests the attention, and you haven’t got to pick your words. Did you ever read a beautiful work called Colorado Bill; or, From Cowboy to President? Well, I can assure you that when it was in English, before being turned into dialect, it was quite ordinary-like.”
“But that ain’t all. One has now and then to strike a deeper note, and striking a deeper note is so simple, that I wonder it has not occurred to others of our poets. You have got to imagine yourself in a church, and you must read over your manuscript to yourself in that kind of hollow voice—you know what I mean.”
I swore that I did.
“Now, you see why one puts ‘ye’ for ‘you,’ and ‘ye be’ for ‘you are,’ and mentions the Law in so many words. It is not very difficult to do, and when one does succeed, one gets what I call A1 copper-bottomed poetry.”
He went to a corner of the room, opened a large, scented, velvet-bound book upon a brass reading-desk, looked at me severely, coughed twice, and began as follows: