A strong predilection to reproduce the ancient metres in their
vernacular poetry was prevalent among the scholars of Europe; but, what
is not less remarkable, the attempt everywhere terminated in the same
utter rejection by the popular ear. What occasioned this general
propensity of the learned, and this general antipathy in the unlearned?
These repeated attempts to restore the metrical system of the Greeks and
the Romans would not only afford a classical ear, long exercised in the
nice artifices of the ancient prosody, a gratification entirely denied
to the uninitiated; but at bottom there was a deeper design--that of
elevating an art which the scholar held to be degraded by the native but
unlettered versifiers; and, as one of them honestly confessed, the true
intent was to render the poetic art more difficult and less common. Had
this metrical system been adopted, it would have established a
privileged class. The thing was practicable; and, even in our own days,
iambics and spondees, dactyls and tribrachs, charm a few classical ears
by their torturous arrangement of words without rhythm and cadence.[1]
Fortunately for all vernacular poetry, it was attempted too late among
the people of modern Europe ever to be substituted for their native
melody, their rhythm, the variety of their cadences, or the consonance
of rhyme.
With us the design of appropriating the ancient metres to our native
verse was unquestionably borrowed from Italy, so long the model of our
fashions and our literature. There it had early begun, but was neither
admired nor imitated.[2] The nearly forgotten fantasy was again taken
up by Claudio Tolommei, an eminent scholar, who composed an Italian poem
with the Roman metres. More fortunate and profound than his neglected
predecessors, Tolommei, in 1539, published his _Versi e Regole della_
POESIA NUOVA--the very term afterwards adopted by the English
critics--and promised hereafter to establish their propriety on
principles deduced from philosophy and music. But before this code of
"new poetry" appeared the practice had prevailed, for Tolommei
illustrates "the rules" not only by his own verses, but by those of
other writers, already seduced by this obsolete novelty. But what
followed? Poets who hitherto had delighted by their euphony and their
rhyme, were now ridiculed for the dissonance which they had so
laboriously struck out. A literary war ensued! The champions for "the
new poetry" were remarkable for their stoical indifference amid the loud
outcries which they had raised; something of contempt entered into their
bravery, and it was some time before these obdurate poets capitulated.
In France the same attempt encountered the same fate. A few scholars,
Jodelle, Passerat, and others, had the intrepidity to versify in French
with the ancient metres; and, what is perhaps not generally known,
later, D'Urfe, Blaise de Vigneres, and others, adopted _blank verse_,
for Balzac congratulates Chapelain in 1639 that "Les vers sans rime sont
morts pour jamais." French poetry, which at that period could hardly
sustain itself with rhyme, denuded of this slight dress must have
betrayed the squalidness of bare poverty. The "new poetry" in France,
however, seems to have perplexed a learned critic; for with the learned
his prejudices leaned in its favour, but as a faithful historian the
truth flashed on his eyes. The French antiquary, Pasquier, stood in this
awkward position, and on this subject has delivered his opinions with
great curiosity and honest naivete. "Since only these two nations, the
Greeks and the Romans, have given currency to these measures without
rhymes, and that on the contrary there is no nation in this universe
which poetises, who do not in their vulgar tongue use rhymes, which
sounds have naturally insinuated themselves into the ear of every people
for more than seven or eight centuries, even in Italy itself, I can
readily believe that the ear is more delighted by our mode of poetry
than with that of the Greeks and the Romans."[3]
The candour of the avowal exceeds the philosophy. Our venerable
antiquary had greater reason in what he said than he was himself aware
of; for rhyme was of a far more ancient date than his eight centuries.
It was in the Elizabethan period of our literature that, in the
wantonness of learned curiosity, our critics attempted these experiments
on our prosody; and, on the pretence of "reformed verse," were for
revolutionising the whole of our metrical system.
The musical impression made by a period consisting of long and short
syllables arranged in a certain order is what the Greeks called
_rhythmus_, the Latins _numerus_, and we _melody_ or _measure_. But in
our verse, simply governed by accent, and whose rhythm wholly depends on
the poet's ear, those durations of time, or sounds, like notes in music,
slow or quick, long or short, which form the quantities or the time of
the measured feet of the ancients, were no longer perceptible as in the
inflection, the inversion, and the polysyllabic variety of the voluble
languages of Greece and Rome. The artificial movements in the hexameter
were inflicting on the ear of the uninitiated verse without melody, and,
denuded of rhyme, seemed only a dislocated prose, in violation of the
genius of the native idiom.
Several of our scholars, invested by classical authority, and carrying
their fasces wreathed with roses, unhappily influenced several of our
poets, among whom were Sidney and Spenser, in their youth subservient to
the taste of their learned friend Gabriel Harvey, to submit their
vernacular verse to the torturous Roman yoke. Had this project of
versification become popular it would necessarily have ended in a
species of poetry, not referring so much to the natural ear affected by
the melody of emotion, as to a mechanical and severe scansion. To this
Milton seems to allude in a sonnet to Lawes, the musician--
Harry, whose tuneful and well-measured song
First taught our English music how to span
Words with just _note_ and _accent_, not to scan
_With Midas' ears, committing short and long_.
The poet of all youthful poets had a narrow escape from "dark
forgetfulness" when from the uncouth Latin hexameters, his "Fairy Queen"
took refuge in the melodious stanza of modern Italy. STANYHURST has left
a memorable woful version of Virgil, and the pedantic GABRIEL HARVEY had
espoused this Latin intruder among the English muses. The majestic march
of the Latin resounding lines, disguised in the miserable English
hexameters, quailed under the lash of the satirical TOM NASH, who
scourged with searching humour. "The Hexameter verse I grant to be a
gentleman of an ancient house (so is many an English beggar), yet this
clime of ours he cannot thrive in; our speech is too craggy for him to
set his plough in; he goes twitching and hopping in our language like a
man running upon quagmires, up the hill in one syllable, and down the
dale in another, retaining no part of that stately smooth gait which he
vaunts himself with among the Greeks and Latins."
A treatise on "the New Poetry," or "the Reformed Verse," for it assumed
this distinction, was expressly composed by WILLIAM WEBBE,
recommendatory of this "Reformation of our English verse."[4] Some years
after Dr. THOMAS CAMPION, accomplished in music and verse, a composer of
airs, and a poet of graceful fancy in masques, fluent and airy in his
rhymes, seating himself in the critic's chair, renewed the exotic
system. Notwithstanding his own felicity in the lighter measures of
English verse, he denounces "the vulgar and inartificial custom of
RIMING, which hath, I know, deterred many excellent wits from the
exercise of English poetry."[5] He calls it "the childish titillation of
rime."
We may regret that Dr. Campion, who composed in Latin verse, held his
English in little esteem, since he scattered them whenever he was called
on, and not always even printed them. The physician, for such was
Campion, held too cheap his honours as a poet and a musician; however,
he was known in his days as "SWEET MASTER CAMPION," and his title would
not be disputed in ours. In dismissing his critical "Observations," he
has prefixed a poem in what he calls "Licentiate Iambicks," which is our
blank verse; it is a humorous address of an author to his little book,
consisting only of nearly five leaves:--
Alas, poor book, I rue
Thy rash selfe-love; go spread thy papery wings;
Thy lightness cannot helpe, or hurt my fame.
The poet DANIEL replied by his "Defence of Rime," an elaborate and
elegant piece of criticism, to which no reply was sent forth by the
anti-rhymers.
It has often been inquired how came the vernacular rhyme to be wholly
substituted for the classical metres, since the invaders of the Roman
empire everywhere adopted the language of Rome with their own, for in
the progress of their dominion everywhere they found that cultivated
language established. The victors submitted to the vanquished when the
contest solely turned on their genius.
A natural circumstance will explain the occasion of this general
rejection of the ancient metres. These artificial structures were
operations too refined for the barbarian ear. Their bards, who probably
could not read, had neither ability nor inclination to be initiated into
an intricate system of metre, foreign to their ear, their tastes, and
their habits, already in possession of supremacy in their own poetic
art. Their modulation gave rhythm to their recitative, and their musical
consonance in their terminable sounds aided their memory; these were all
the arts they wanted; and for the rest they trusted to their own
spontaneous emotions.
Rhyme then triumphed, and the degenerate Latinists themselves, to court
the new masters of the world, polluted their Latin metres with the
rhymes too long erroneously degraded as mere "Gothic barbarisms." Had
the practice of the classical writers become a custom, we should now be
"committing long and short," and we should have missed the discovery of
the new world of poetic melody, of which the Grecians and the Latins
could never have imagined the existence.