But I have a fourth reason, out of which I might make an apparent
fifth by presenting it to you in two different ways. Those elders
of you who have followed certain earlier lectures 'On the Art of
Writing' may remember that they set very little store upon metre
as a dividing line between poetry and prose, and no store at all
upon rhyme. I am tempted to-day to go farther, and to maintain
that, the larger, the sublimer, your subject is, the more
impertinent rhyme becomes to it: and that this impertinence
increases in a sort of geometrical progression as you advance
from monosyllabic to dissyllabic and on to trisyllabic rhyme. Let
me put this by a series of examples.
We start with no rhyme at all:
Hail, holy Light, offspring of Heaven first born!
Or of the Eternal coeternal beam
May I express thee unblamed? since God is light,
And never but in unapproached light
Dwelt from eternity.
We feel of this, as we feel of a great passage in "Hamlet" or
"Lear," that here is verse at once capable of the highest
sublimity and capable of sustaining its theme, of lifting and
lowering it at will, with endless resource in the slide and pause
of the caesura, to carry it on and on. We feel it to be adequate,
too, for quite plain straightforward narrative, as in this
passage from "Balder Dead":
But from the hill of Lidskialf Odin rose,
The throne, from which his eye surveys the world;
And mounted Sleipner, and in darkness rode
To Asgard. And the stars came out in heaven,
High over Asgard, to light home the King.
But fiercely Odin gallop'd, moved in heart;
And swift to Asgard, to the gate, he came.
And terribly the hoofs of Sleipner rang
Along the flinty floor of Asgard streets,
And the Gods trembled on their golden beds--
Hearing the wrathful Father coming home--
For dread, for like a whirlwind, Odin came.
And to Valhalla's gate he rode, and left
Sleipner; and Sleipner went to his own stall:
And in Valhalla Odin laid him down.
Now of rhyme he were a fool who, with Lycidas, or Gray's "Elegy,"
or certain choruses of "Prometheus Unbound," or page after page
of Victor Hugo in his mind, should assert it to be in itself
inimical, or a hindrance, or even less than a help, to sublimity;
or who, with Dante in his mind, should assert it to be, in
itself, any bar to continuous and sustained sublimity. But
languages differ vastly in their wealth of rhyme, and differ out
of any proportion to their wealth in words: English for instance
being infinitely richer than Italian in vocabulary, yet almost
ridiculously poorer in dissyllabic, or feminine rhymes. Speaking
generally, I should say that in proportion to its wonderful
vocabulary, English is poor even in single rhymes; that the words
'love,' 'truth,' 'God,' for example, have lists of possible
congeners so limited that the mind, hearing the word 'love,' runs
forward to match it with 'dove' or 'above' or even with 'move':
and this gives it a sense of arrest, of listening, of check, of
waiting, which alike impedes the flow of Pope in imitating Homer,
and of Spenser in essaying a sublime and continuous story of his
own. It does well enough to carry Chaucer over any gap with a
'forsooth as I you say' or 'forsooth as I you tell': but it does
so at a total cost of the sublime. And this (I think) was really
at the back of Milton's mind when in the preface to "Paradise
Lost" he championed blank verse against 'the jingling sound of
like endings.'
But when we pass from single rhymes to double, of which Dante had
an inexhaustible store, we find the English poet almost a pauper;
so nearly a pauper that he has to achieve each new rhyme by a
trick--which tricking is fatal to rapture, alike in the poet and
the hearer. Let me instance a poem which, planned for sublimity,
keeps tumbling flat upon earth through the inherent fault of the
machine--I mean Myers's "St Paul"--a poem which, finely
conceived, pondered, worked and re-worked upon in edition after
edition, was from the first condemned (to my mind) by the
technical bar of dissyllabic rhyme which the poet unhappily
chose. I take one of its most deeply felt passages--that of
St Paul protesting against his conversion being taken for
instantaneous, wholly accounted for by the miraculous vision
related in the "Acts of the Apostles":
Let no man think that sudden in a minute
All is accomplished and the work is done;--
Though with thine earliest dawn thou shouldst begin it
Scarce were it ended in thy setting sun.
Oh the regret, the struggle and the failing!
Oh the days desolate and useless years!
Vows in the night, so fierce and unavailing!
Stings of my shame and passion of my tears!
How have I seen in Araby Orion,
Seen without seeing, till he set again,
Known the night-noise and thunder of the lion,
Silence and sounds of the prodigious plain!
How have I knelt with arms of my aspiring
Lifted all night in irresponsive air,
Dazed and amazed with overmuch desiring,
Blank with the utter agony of prayer!
'What,' ye will say, `and thou who at Damascus
Sawest the splendour, answeredst the Voice;
So hast thou suffered and canst dare to ask us,
Paul of the Romans, bidding us rejoice?'
You cannot say I have instanced a passage anything short of fine.
But do you not feel that a man who is searching for a rhyme to
Damascus has not really the time to cry 'Abba, father'? Is not
your own rapture interrupted by some wonder 'How will he bring it
off'? And when he has searched and contrived to `ask us,' are we
responsive to the ecstacy? Has he not--if I may employ an
Oriental trope for once--let in the chill breath of cleverness
upon the garden of beatitude? No man can be clever and ecstatic
at the same moment[1].
As for triple rhymes--rhymes of the comedian who had a lot o'
news with many curious facts about the square on the hypotenuse,
or the cassiowary who ate the missionary on the plains of
Timbuctoo, with Bible, prayer-book, hymn-book too--they are for
the facetious, and removed, as far as geometrical progression can
remove them, from any "Paradise Lost" or "Regained."
It may sound a genuine note, now and then:
Alas! for the rarity
Of Christian charity
Under the sun!
Oh, it was pitiful!
Near a whole city full,
Home she had none!
But not often: and, I think, never but in lyric.