HALT AND RETROSPECT--CONTINUATION ON HEROIC VERSE AND ITS COMPANIONS
FROM DRYDEN TO CRABBE
[Sidenote: Recapitulation.]
It is desirable, if not absolutely necessary, at this point (_circa_
1660, which, though not in strict number of years or centuries, is in
fact the central stage of English prosody) to halt and recapitulate
what had been done since the formation of Middle English by the
influence of Latin and French upon Old. The conditions of the blend
having necessitated a new prosody, that prosody was, as was natural,
slowly elaborated; but the lines which it was to take, in consequence
of the imposition of strict form upon a vigorous and strongly
characterised but rather shapeless material, appeared almost at once.
Metre replaced the unmetrical rhythm of Anglo-Saxon; but this metre had
to take forms greatly more elastic than the strict syllabic arrangement
of French, and differently constituted from the also mainly syllabic
arrangement of Lower Latin. And so, in the verse of the thirteenth and
earlier fourteenth century, a foot-system, with allowance of equivalent
substitution, makes its appearance--roughly, but more and more clearly.
Nor is this at all affected by the alliterative revival of the
last-mentioned period, which partly makes terms with metre and rhyme,
partly pursues its own way--to reach its highest point with Langland,
and to die away soon after the close of the fifteenth century. At
the very same time with Langland himself, the pure metrical system
is brought to its highest perfection by Chaucer. But this perfection
depends on a state of the language which is "precarious and not at all
permanent," and in the fifteenth century English metre, as far as the
Southern and main division of the language is concerned, falls, to a
great extent, into anarchy.
From this anarchy it is rescued, no doubt, as a general determining
influence by the settling once more of pronunciation, but directly
and particularly by the efforts of Wyatt, Surrey, and their minor
successors from 1525 to 1575. Then Spenser comes, and performs
almost more than the work of Chaucer, inasmuch as his material is
more trustworthy and has fewer seeds of decay in it. He, like his
predecessors, recoiling from the frightful disorder of the preceding
century, inclines, save in his earliest work, to a rather strict form
of verse, mostly dissyllabic. But the mere exigencies of the stage, the
nature of blank verse itself when once established, and the genius of
Shakespeare, restore there the liberty of trisyllabic substitution, and
the influence of music helps to bring in trisyllabic measures--"triple
time"--as such. In Shakespeare first the whole freedom, as well as
nearly the whole order, of English prosody discovers itself. But
this freedom is pushed by others to licence, and blank verse becomes
practically as ruinous a heap as the rhyme-royal of the fifteenth
century, with one form of decasyllabic couplet keeping it company, if
not quite in actual cacophony, at any rate in disorderly slackness.
Then Milton restores blank verse to almost all the freedom and more
than the order of Shakespeare, infusing also into all the other
metres that he touches this same combination; so that in these two
practically everything is reached. But poetic fervour dies down; blank
verse becomes for a time unpopular; the age calls for the more prosaic
subject-kinds of verse--satire, didactics, etc.; prevailing standards
of prosody are strictly regulated to an accomplished but decidedly
limited "smoothness." The results of this, with a few exceptions
reserved, we are to see in the present chapter.
[Sidenote: Dryden's couplet]
It was fortunate that the poet under whom this "Reign of Order" was
introduced, was one who had in himself a certain irrepressible vigour
and _verve_, which would not tolerate mere monotony. John Dryden wrote
most of his most famous poems in the couplet, and in a stopped form
of it; but he did not confine himself thereto, using also the heroic
quatrain (which he made an exceedingly fine measure); "Pindarics" (of
which the same may be said); occasional, though few, octosyllabics;
and lyrical measures of the most varied kind, both dissyllabic and
trisyllabic, which sometimes do not fall far short of all but the very
best work of the preceding generation. His couplet itself, moreover,
was not quite rigidly stopped; and even if it had been, was so
largely varied by the licences of triplet, Alexandrine, and sometimes
these two combined, that the purely or mainly mechanical effect with
which his successor Pope is charged, and which is undoubtedly to be
observed in that successor's imitators, does not impress itself. Even
had these devices (which may be said themselves to have something
mechanical about them) not been present, the extraordinary nerve and
full-bloodedness of Dryden's verse would have been almost if not quite
sufficient to remove the reproach. The antithetic yet never snip-snap
explosion of his distichs; the way in which they fling themselves
against the object; the momentum given to them by striking words
strikingly placed, ingenious manipulation of pause, unexpected and
exciting turns of phrase--are unprecedented. His prosody may be called
a somewhat rhetorical prosody, but it is the very highest of its own
kind. It exercised strong and good influence over the whole classical
period with which we are dealing in this chapter; a little after the
middle of the eighteenth century it effected a diversion from the too
monotonous limitation of Pope; and in the very hey-day of the Romantic
movement it taught new devices, and revealed new sources of prosodic
beauty, to Keats.
Great, however, as are the merits of this couplet verse of Dryden's,
and incomparably well as it is adapted for argument, satire,
exposition, and other things somewhat extra-poetical in themselves,
there is something artificial in its limitations. And it is a matter
of experience, that when you make artificial rules for a game, this
artificiality always tends to make itself more artificial. Moreover,
it is not only fair, but important, to allow that Dryden's licences
of triplet and Alexandrine (in the latter case sometimes extended
even to a fourteener) require ability and judgment, equal to his own,
to prevent mismanagement of them. In clumsy hands something almost
as amorphous as the broken-down blank verse and the unduly enjambed
couplet of the preceding generation might easily come of them. It is
therefore not surprising that, the attention of the average poet being
more and more concentrated on this couplet, attempts should be made to
reduce the liberties, and perfect the correctness, as much as possible.
[Sidenote: and Pope's.]
They are visible even in such writers as Garth, between Dryden
and Pope; they are still more visible in Pope himself, when, some
decade after Dryden's death, he began to publish verse. He does not,
especially at first, entirely discontinue triplet and Alexandrine, but
he uses them more and more sparingly, and indeed sneers at the latter.
He draws the pause more invariably to the centre, and sets up a more
distinct division between the halves of his line. While separating his
couplets more closely, he lightens the vowel-effects of his rhymes, so
that there shall be no temptation to linger at couplet-ends. And though
he is traditionally said to have had a special fancy for a couplet of
his which contains an almost indestructible trisyllabic foot,[97] such
feet, as a rule, are quite smoothed out of his verse.
[Sidenote: Their predominance.]
The unmatched regularity, harmony (as far as it went), and
accomplishment of Pope's couplet, and his great superiority to all
other poets in these respects during the second, third, and fourth
decades of the eighteenth century, assisted the general taste, which
has been mentioned, in raising his form of couplet to the highest
place in popular estimation, as well as--sometimes expressly, sometimes
by a sort of silent taking for granted--in formal discussions of
poetry. Savage to some extent, Churchill still more, and after him
Cowper, reverted, as has been said, to a standard nearer Dryden's. But
Johnson, Goldsmith, and others, with the whole mob of inferior writers,
followed Pope; as did also Crabbe, who maintained the practice of the
form till the very time of the appearance of Tennyson. The defects, or
at least the limitations, of it were indeed sometimes seen, and were
commented on, in striking though not fully informed fashion, by poets
like Shenstone in the first half of the century, and Cowper again in
the second. But it constituted, none the less, the orthodox mode of
the whole time, and longer; and when, nearly at the end of the first
quarter of the nineteenth century, Keats's critics found fault with his
ignorance or mismanagement of the structure of the English heroic line
and couplet, what they meant was, whether they knew it or not, that he
managed that line and that couplet differently from Pope.
[Sidenote: Eighteenth-century octosyllable and anapæst.]
Although, however, the stopped couplet thus gradually established
in the latter part of the seventeenth century, and exercised during
the whole of the eighteenth, a sort of tyranny, not every poet nor
every metre bowed his or its head to this. Even in the first half
of the eighteenth, poets like Collins and Gray practically shook it
off, the first using it only in his early and immature work, the
second hardly at all. They will therefore be reserved for the next
chapter. Others, though using it, also practised metres different
from it, and some of these were of a character peculiarly suited to
counteract any bad influence that it might have. Among these the most
important and the earliest--for both of them passed a considerable
portion of their lives in the seventeenth century itself--were Prior
and Swift, both of whom, but especially Prior, were proficients in
the "Hudibrastic" octosyllable and in the new continuous anapæstic.
The octosyllable, with its easy ambling pace, its fluent overlapping,
and its often prolonged and fanciful rhymes, corrected the somewhat
stiff snip-snap of the larger couplet; while the anapæst peremptorily
brought back trisyllabic rhythm, with all its marvellous refreshments
and advantages, and, if only for convenience, suggested substitution
of feet.[98] The great literary authority and popularity of these
two poets, and the intrinsic charm of Prior, established, for metres
that they used, a safe position throughout the period of decasyllabic
domination. Even Bysshe put "lines of eight and seven syllables"
almost on a level with those of "ten or eleven"; and though he sneered
at anapæsts, and introduced them by a singular roundaboutness of
expression,[99] did not absolutely bar them in fact.
[Sidenote: Blank verse]
Blank verse--than which, in its perfection, there is no more powerful
guard and corrective as regards the possible errors of the stopped
couplet--was not put in operation, except by Milton at the very
beginning of the period, so early as these. In fact, as has been said,
it was the degradation of blank verse, almost as much as anything
else which encouraged the growth of this form of rhyme. Nor was the
all-powerful influence of Milton himself at once felt, except by a
very few persons;[100] while, when it began to be felt, it was not
fully understood. Attempts, however, were by degrees made in it;[101]
and, some sixty years after the appearance of _Paradise Lost_, the
beginning of Thomson's _Seasons_ brought to bear a new, popular, and
powerful agency. Although Thomson may have been under the elision and
"apostrophation" delusions of his time, he did not attempt to avoid
what his younger contemporary, Shenstone, called "virtual" trisyllabic
feet. One of his best lines, for instance--
The yellow wall-|flŏwĕr, stāin|ed with iron-brown,
contains such a foot naturally, though you may slur and "apostrophate"
it into "flow'r"; and there are endless others, ready to suggest
themselves to a nice ear, whenever you come across such words as
"pastoral" and "impetuous" in--
Shines o'er | the rest | the pas|tŏrăl quēen, | and rays
. . . . . . .
Impet|ŭŏus rūsh|es o'er | the sound|ing void.
But an even more valuable effect of blank-verse practice was the
inevitable reappearance of the verse-paragraph, with its necessary
constituents the verse-sentences and verse-clauses, which need
not--and, if a good effect is to be produced, _must_ not--be made of
successive batches of complete lines, still less of batches of equal
size. In forging the verse-paragraph, variation of pause, overrunning
of sense as regards line-ends, strong breaks in the actual lines (a
thing almost abused by Thomson himself, and quite so by his followers,
but in itself a caustic to one of the evils of couplet verse), are
necessary implements and materials. Accordingly the staunchest devotees
of the couplet, such as Johnson, always dislike blank verse; and
when, later, a poet like Cowper takes it up, his action is similarly
connected with dislike to the "mechanic warbling" of the Popian
style. In his hands, especially in the late and splendid example of
"Yardley Oak," almost the full Miltonic variety is recovered. But
always, and throughout its practice during the eighteenth century, it
acts as a foil, a relief and a refuge to and from the limitations and
restrictions of the couplet itself.
[Sidenote: and lyric.]
Lastly, a similar enfranchising influence was exercised by lyric; but
to a comparatively limited extent. The genius of the latest seventeenth
century and of almost the whole eighteenth, except in a few poets
(mostly to be kept as exceptions, with Gray and Collins, who were of
them, to the next chapter), was by no means lyrical. The healthiest
influence of it was supplied by anapæstic forms, especially in light
verse. "Pindarics" were at first much used, but were too often of
a most prosaic character. "Romance-six" was affected to an almost
surprising degree, but for the most part in a rather _Sir Thopas_-like
form, exact and sing-song. This was also the fault of most of the
common measure or ballad-quatrain, such as the well-known examples of
Percy and Goldsmith; though the _Reliques_ of the former gave better
models (somewhat tampered with by the editor) forty years before
1800; and the miscellaneous collections of Durfey and Philips had to
some extent done so nearly as much earlier still. The Evangelical
revival, by infusing more passion and reality into hymns, had a good
effect; and when we come to Cowper, this influenced his profane as
well as his sacred poetry. Nor should we omit to mention--as a really
powerful counter-agent to the couplet, with its monotonous regularity,
unqualified rhyme, and so on--the irregularly rhythmed prose of
Macpherson's _Ossian_, which appeared about the same time as the
_Reliques_, and attracted much attention.
[Sidenote: Merit of eighteenth-century "regularity."]
By all these things, and by the special influence of the poets to be
mentioned in the early part of the next chapter, useful testimony was
continuously given, to the effect that, after all, the decasyllabic
couplet, especially in the prevailing form, was not the only metre,
nor even the only important metre, in English. But its predominance
continued, and its characteristics, as has been said, to some extent
infected or inoculated its rivals. "Inoculated" rather than "infected,"
for, once more let it be repeated, this predominance undoubtedly beat
into the English tongue, ear, and mind a sense of the importance of
real and regular rhythm--a sense which, for another hundred years and
more, has prevented, in the freest expatiation of released prosody, any
kind of return to the disorder of the whole fifteenth century, and in
some respects, at any rate, of the mid-seventeenth.
FOOTNOTES:
[97]
Lo! where Mæotis sleeps, and hardly flows
The freez|ĭng Tănă | is through a waste of snows.
_The Dunciad_, iii. 87, 88.
[98] In the actual case, of course, dissyllabic feet for trisyllabic;
but this could not but suggest the converse process in dissyllabic
verse. And the octosyllable was not used for light verse only; Dyer in
_Grongar Hill_ (1726) revived the Miltonic form of _L'Allegro_, etc.,
with an effect all the more certainly excellent, that it was demurred
to by the mistaken critics of the time.
[99] _V. inf._ pp. 242-5.
[100] Among whom Lord Roscommon deserves honourable mention.
[101] As by Watts the hymn-writer, John Philips, and Gay.