CHAPTER III
The Evolution of Technique
I have now made it as clear as I am able what I believe the medium of modern spoken verse to be; and I have tried to indicate some of the dangers that lie in wait both for poets and their readers. The best safeguard is that we should fully realise both what the medium is and what it is not. All art consists in exploiting the possibilities and limitations of a medium; and any art of which the medium is misunderstood, and so misused, is likely to degenerate into gracelessness or triviality, and perish as it deserves.
Now that poetry is generally no longer performed, but read, it is obvious that its nature has to a certain extent grown more like that of prose, and that there has been a corresponding increase both in subtlety of expression, and in the possible range of material. Let us take full advantage of this change: but let us also remember that “everything is what it is, and not another thing”; that poetry still is, and always must be, a different art from prose; and that so long as it retains its integrity, it will have its own proper subject-matter, which though it may sometimes resemble, will never be the same as that of any other art.
Let us also honestly admit the truth that poetry has ceased to be a great popular and social art. It is no longer possible for it to be publicly recited or performed in any way. When it ventures upon the stage, it becomes a cause either of boredom or of laughter, unless it be travestied until it is unrecognisable. When associated with music, it is absorbed in the more dominating medium. It is of course possible, though unlikely, that music will evolve in the direction of greater simplicity or that some few musicians may grow sufficiently interested in poetry to devise a special kind of music, so tenuous and transparent that poetry will be able to live and breathe through it. It is also conceivable that, although the public of the commercial theatre will not tolerate poetry on the stage, satisfactory amateur productions of verse plays may become more common. I have never heard verse spoken on the stage more beautifully than by Ulysses and Agamemnon in the Cambridge Marlowe Society’s Troilus. If such successes were to become more frequent, we might hope in time to establish a tradition for performing verse plays, and to create a fit audience for them, which would encourage poets to take poetical drama seriously. But if that is to happen, then modern experiments will have to be risked, and produced as carefully and as frequently as classical revivals are now.
But though in this direction we may see a kind of dawning hope for poetical drama, yet I fear it is no more than a dubious glimmering. Poetry will still have to be written in the main for readers. And if poets are to continue to find readers, in spite of the growing competition of the more popular arts of music, the prose drama, the cinema, and the novel, they will have, I fancy, to take thought how they may put away childish things, and become, not perhaps more serious, but more rational, more daring, in fact more interesting. The material for poetry is the whole realm of the sensuous and intellectual imagination, and that is infinite. At present poets seem to be somewhat timid and unenterprising explorers. And I would suggest that experiments and innovations in technique are likely to be the most hopeful means of extending the range of expression and of discovering new material. In every art changes and developments of the medium require and call forth the invention of appropriate subject-matter; and the greatest art has always been produced where inspiration has been refreshed and quickened by technical changes, which have made possible the exploitation of unfamiliar themes. It would be rash to foretell with any confidence the directions in which poetical technique will develop in the future. The poets themselves will go their own ways, for better or for worse. But I may perhaps venture to indicate what seem to me the most natural and profitable lines of development.
Whatever may be our theory as to the true æsthetic and emotional function of metre, the conscious governing principle, according to which English verse has been written from the time of Chaucer until recent years, has been that of syllable-counting. Wherever a decasyllabic line contained more than ten syllables, elision, or the fiction of elision, was assumed as the explanation. Milton indeed formulated for himself certain definite rules, which he observed with great strictness, at least in Paradise Lost. But already in Shakespeare we may perceive a tendency to determine rhythm by stress rather than by the number of syllables; and during the last hundred years we find stress becoming more and more the dominant principle of English prosody. When Mr. Abercrombie writes:
And I will show
This mask the devil wears, this old shipman,
A thing to make his proud heart of evil
Writhe like a trodden snake;