English ear as the ballad metre of fourteen syllables, with the stress on the eighth, or, what is the same thing, the stave of "eight and six." Here, we may remark, by the way, that Dr Johnson's assertion that the ballad stanza of seven accents "taught the way to the Alexandrines of the French poetry," instead of being, as Mitford says, a proof of his ignorance of French poetry, appears to us to indicate his just appreciation of their heroic verse, as belonging to the tetrameter stock and not the trimeter. This ancient narrative metre, which, though almost excluded from the "polite literature" of the eighteenth century, never lost its charm for the people, has lately recovered something of its ancient credit. Its true force, however, can only be shown in more sustained flights than have been attempted in it by modern poets. Properly managed, there is no other metre so well able to represent the combined dignity and impetuosity of the heroic hexameter. This was felt by the old writers, and, accordingly, we have Chapman's Homer, Phaer's Virgil, Golding's Ovid, and other notable translations in that grand measure. Of these, Chapman was the best poet, but Phaer the best metrist; and as this measure is again coming into fashion, we may be allowed to point out one interesting peculiarity in the versification of the latter. It is the use of what is commonly, but erroneously regarded as elision, as a deliberately adopted mode of relieving the cadence and approximating it to the rhythm of the hexameter. Here are four average lines :"Thus, rolling in her burning breast, she strait to Acolia hied, Into the countrie of cloudy skies, where blustering windes abide. King Eolus the wrastling windes in caves he locks full low; In prison strong the storms he keeps, forbidden abroad to blow." In these four lines, we have no fewer than six real anapæsts, counting "wrastling" as one. When we say real anapasts, we mean to exclude those which are commonly called anapæsts, as—

"And we order our subjects of ev'ry degree,

To believe all his verses were written by me."

In this, our common triple cadence, the feet, by temporal measurement of the syllables, are nearer to tribachs or molossi than anapæsts; whereas, in cases of so called elision like the above, two syllables really are read into about the time of one, and such cases constitute the only element of true temporal metre, in the classical sense, of which our language is capable. Many poets have introduced a superfluous syllable for peculiar effects, but Phaer is the only writer we know of who has turned it into a metrical element in this way. The poet who may be courageous enough to repeat, in our day, Phaer's experiment (the success of which, in his time, is proved by its never having been remarked), must fortify himself against the charge of being "rough,"

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musical," and so forth, with the assurance, that, wherever there is true adherence to law and proportion, there is also beauty, though want of custom may often make his law seem license to his readA considerable step has been taken towards the recognition of this element, as a regular part of English metre, in the omission, from the pages of our poets, of the comma indicative of an elision which does not really exist. This little digression may be concluded with Foster's remark, made at a time when the mark of elision was always used, that "the anapæst is common in every place (of English iambic verse), and it would appear much oftener, with propriety and grace, if abbreviations were more avoided."

1

"This tynkerly verse, which we call rhyme," 1 includes, then, all the forms of the tetrameter, the major accents of which could not be expressed to an English ear by any other means, except, perhaps, alliteration, which is a sort of rhyme. We need not inquire into any of the minor and better recognized functions of rhyme in order to secure the student's respect for it.

Campion has given examples of eight kinds of "blank verse;" and with the dogmatism for which his interesting essay is remarkable, he asserts that these are the only kinds of which the language is capable, but it would not be difficult to double that number, reckoning blank staves or strophes as he does. That which limits the number of such measures is the necessity that the lines should be always catalectic, since, in the absence of rhyme, a measurable final pause is the only means of marking the separate existence of the verses, and, furthermore, that the strophes or staves should consist of lines of unequal length, in order to render symmetry possible. The common eight syllable iambic, for example, ceases to be metre in the removal of the rhyme, although the six syllable iambic, which is catalectic on, or has a final pause equal to, two syllables, makes very good blank verse; and a stave of equal lines, like that of Gray's Elegy, on the omission of the rhyme, though it may continue to be verse, has lost the means of symmetrical opposition of line to line, whereby it became an independent whole. But, notwithstanding the practicability of various kinds of unrhymed verse, there is only one which has established itself with us as a standard measure; and that is, of all recognised English metres, the most difficult to write well in, because it, of all others, affords the greatest facilities to that mediocrity which neither gods, men, nor columns, can tolerate. Cowper, whose translation of Homer contains a great deal of the second-best blank verse in the language, says, in his Preface, that the writer in this kind of metre, "in order that he may be musical, must exhibit all the variations, as he

1 Webbe.

is

proceeds, of which ten syllables are susceptible. Between the first and the last, there is no place at which he must not occasionally pause, and the place of the pause must be continually shifted." This is what is commonly supposed to constitute the main requirement of blank verse; but, it seems to us, that this very far from a sufficient statement of the "variety" required by the metre in question. In the first place, pause is but one, and, perhaps, not the most important means of "variety." Milton, who first taught us what this kind of verse ought to be, is careful to vary the movement by an occasional inversion of the iambic accentuation in each of the five places: the variation of the vowel sounds is also most laboriously attended to by him; and rightly, for the absence of the emphasis which is conferred by rhyme, when it exists, upon one vowel sound, renders every repetition of vowel sound, within the space of two or three lines, unpleasant, unless it appears to have had a distinct musical mo tive. But the great difficulty, as well as delight, of this measure is not in variety of pause, tone, and stress, for its own sake. Such variety must be incessantly inspired by, and expressive of, ever-varying emotion. Every alteration of the position of the grammatical pause, every deviation from the strict and dull iambic rhythm, must be either sense or nonsense. Such change is as real a mode of expressing emotion as words themselves are of expressing thought; and when the means exist without reference to their proper ends, the effect of the "variety" thereby obtained, is more offensive to a right judgment, than the dulness which is supposed to be avoided. Hence it is the nature of blank verse to be dull, or worse, without that which only the highest poetical inspiration can confer upon it. We are afraid to say how very small is the amount of good narrative, or "heroic" blank verse, of which our literature can boast, if we have truely stated its essential quality. No poet, unless he feels himself to be above discipline, and therefore above the greatest poets of whose modes of composition we have any record, ought to think of beginning his career with blank verse. It will sound very paradoxical to some of our slovenly versifiers, when we assert that the most inflexibly rigid, and as they are commonly thought, difficult metres, are the easiest for a novice to write decently in. The greater the frequency of the rhyme, and the more fixed the place of the grammatical pause, and the less liberty of changing the fundamental foot, the less will be the poet's obligation to originate his own rhythms. Most rhymed metres have a rhythm peculiar to themselves, and only require that the matter for which they are employed shall not be foreign to their key; that a funeral dirge shall not be set to jaunty choriambies, nor a epithalamium to the grave-yard tune of the six syllable quatrain;

but blank verse has little or no rhythm of its own, and therefore the poet has to create the rhythm as he writes.

At a time like this, when it is as much the fashion to exaggerate the so-called "inspiration" and "unconsciousness" of artistical production, as it used to be to over-estimate the critical and scientific elements, the utility of laws which it is certain will be obeyed, more or less unconsciously, by those who are capable of obeying them at all to any profitable result, is likely to have seemed questionable to some of our readers. The true poet's song is never trammelled by a present consciousness of all the laws which it obeys; but it is science, and not ignorance, which supplies the condition of such unconsciousness. The lives and the works of all great artists, poets or otherwise, show that the free spirit of art has been obtained, not by neglect, but by perfection of discipline. Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, and Goethe, perhaps the highest poetical names of the Christian era, prove clearly enough to any one truly acquainted with their spirit, that the laws of art, as far as those were known at their respective periods, had been studied by them as matters of science, and that it was by working on the platform of such knowledge that they achieved strains of poetry which exceeded the laws and limits of all previous art. The poet is unconscious of the laws by which he writes, just as Thalberg and Benedict are unconscious of the rules by which they exercise their surprising craft upon the pianoforte. This craft has been, in each case alike, the product of years of intensely "conscious" discipline. The poet's discipline is only less obviously legal and laborious than that of other artists, because he alone works with purely intellectual instruments; and we do not fear to assert, that no man ever has, or ever can, become a great poet-that is, one who shall originate laws of his own, which future workers in the same line will have, in their turn, to study—unless he himself has learned to comprehend those which are the legacy of his predecessors. Such learning, indeed, will be more likely to make a pedant than a poet of the man who endeavours to ply this singular vocation without express constitutional aptness for it. Ten lines of the simplest lyrical outpourings of the Ploughman of Scotland are worth more than all the odes and epics that were ever laboured by merely learned metrists; but the faculty which, without laborious culture, is capable of the composition of a good love song or ballad, must have the addition of hard discipline, before it can become the inspiration of a truly great poem."

But poets are the persons, after all, who are the least likely to be directly affected by written criticisms. A good poet can scarcely be other than a good judge of that which concerns his art, though he may not be able, or disposed, to put his knowledge

Labour of True Poets.

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into writing. It is the large class of little critics who are the chief gainers by the enunciation of sound artistic doctrine; and whatever instructs these, confers at least a temporary benefit upon the man whose fame, and, perhaps, worldly prosperity, for the first years of his career, may, in part, depend upon their ability to appreciate his works. It is especially in the matter of good metre that a good poet is likely to be erroneously judged in these days. Most readers of poetry, and we fear we must add, modern writers upon it, know nothing, and feel nothing, of the laws of metre as they have been practised by all great poets. "Smoothness" is regarded as the highest praise of versification, whereas it is about the lowest and most easily attainable of all its qualities. The consummate perfection of the versification of all Milton and Shakespeare, and much of Chaucer, Spenser, Fletcher, and Cowley, would not now be tolerated in a new writer; we should find it held up to ridicule and contempt; facetious critics, stringing together separate lines or short passages, each a brilliant, but, separately, unintelligible, morsel of some mosaic of harmony, would ask, "Is this music? is this verse?" perfectly safe as to the reply, for it is certain that, in the greatest work of the greatest metrist who ever lived, Milton, there is no long and elaborate strain of verse without one or more lines which, though probably the most effective in the passage, will seem to be scarcely verse at all when taken out of it. "Smoothness" might just as reasonably be called the chief merit of natural scenery as of poetry. A capacity for writing smooth verse is certainly essential in a poet, and, as we have indicated, the artistic versifier will occasionally make his thoughts flow along the dead level of the modulus of his metre-that is to say, he will make it perfectly "smooth," just as a landscape painter will generally manage to get in a glimpse of quiet water or level plain, to serve as the guage and foil to all the surrounding varieties of hill and dale, rock and forest; but to speak of "smoothness" as anything more than the negative, merely mechanical and meanest merit of verse, is to indicate a great insensibility to the nature of music in language. Such insensibility is, however, the almost inevitable result upon most minds of the unleisurely habits of reading into which we moderns are falling. We have not time to feel with a good poet thoroughly enough to catch his music, and the consequence is, that good poets have lately been. writing down to our incapacity.

VOL. XXVII. NO. LIII.

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