THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL--ITS PRECURSORS AND FIRST GREAT STAGE
[Sidenote: Gray and Collins.]
We must now take up, somewhat more minutely, the phenomena mentioned
in the last chapter as showing revolt against, and recovery from, the
partly beneficial but excessive tyranny of the stopped decasyllabic
couplet. These may be considered, still briefly but more particularly,
under two heads: the first concerning chiefly the influence of
individual poets--Collins, Gray, Chatterton, Burns, Blake; the second,
agencies various in kind and source. Neither Collins nor Gray can be
said to have directly attacked the task--though Gray at least was, as
we see from his _Metrum_, not ignorant of the facts--of re-leavening
and re-illustrating prosody by an infusion of trisyllabic substitution.
With rarest exceptions, they still cling to the iamb as a base-foot.
But they rearrange its line-groups in a fashion as alien as possible
from that of the couplet. Collins even discards rhyme altogether in
the quatrains of _Evening_, and in his famous "Passions" varies his
construction as much as possible within the general limits. Gray
follows, but improves upon, Dryden in the rhymed decasyllabic quatrain;
adapts, with an effect somewhat stiff, but often very beautiful, the
Greek system of strophe, antistrophe, and epode in the _Progress of
Poetry_ and _The Bard_; employs Romance-six with singular felicity
in both serious and serio-comic verse; and, though retaining a
strongly artificial poetic diction, informs this with new touches and
spirit from sources as a rule quite closed to his contemporaries and
predecessors--Norse and Welsh as well as Greek. Both these poets,
in short, disregard, to a large extent, equality of line-length,
and employ mixed rhymes. Now equality of line-length and strictly
_consecutive_ rhymes were almost as dear to the chief lovers of the
couplet as its unvarying syllabic arrangement and its regular accent.
[Sidenote: Chatterton, Burns, and Blake.]
Gray, it has been said, knew substitution, but did not use it; the
ill-fated genius of Chatterton not only knew it, but used it. It
is present, and very effective, in Burns; but it was not the chief
means of good of which Burns availed himself in regard to prosody.
His dialect, with its relief from the conventional "lingo" of
eighteenth-century poetry, did much; but the forms which he used, and
especially the famous "Burns metre," did more. It would be almost
impossible to devise a greater contrast to the couplet; or--since
(which is at least worth noting) the six lines of this stanza contain
exactly as many syllables (forty) as two ordinary couplets--to arrange
these same numbers in ways more rhythmically different. But the first
eighteenth-century poet thoroughly to understand and exemplify the
powers of equivalence is Burns's slightly older contemporary, William
Blake, whose _Poetical Sketches_ appeared as early as 1780, while his
_Songs of Innocence and Experience_, and his remaining poems, display a
knowledge of the secrets of this equivalence, and a command over them,
which had not been shown since Shakespeare.
[Sidenote: Other influences of change.]
Blake, however, expressed rather than exercised influence, for his
poems remained long almost unknown; and it may be doubtful whether even
the others brought about many conscious prosodic changes. The gradual
recovery of knowledge of older English literature, and especially of
the ballads, had in all probability much more direct power. Durfey's
_Pills to Purge Melancholy_, Philips's _Collection of Old Ballads_,
and Percy's _Reliques_--with constantly increasing editions of the
Elizabethan dramatists and other writers, even such as Skelton and
Occleve--could not but awaken men's minds to the fact that (as
Gascoigne had put it in a matter closely connected if not absolutely
identical) "we had used in times past other kinds of metres" than the
stopped couplet. And towards the end of the century revolt of various
kinds appeared--copious though usually very tame ballad; multiplied
blank verse of the usual kind; and (in imitation partly of some older
English models and of Collins, partly of the German) rhymeless verse of
different sorts, the chief early practitioner of which was Frank Sayers
of Norwich, a physician and man of letters who was more influential on
others than important in himself. Bowles (after Warton, whose _History
of Poetry_ worked in the same direction) reintroduced the sonnet.
William Taylor, another member of the Norwich group, revived (again
after the German) English hexameters; and though Hayley, Darwin, and
others continued the eighteenth-century couplet unchanged, the spirit
of the youth of the period was clearly tending in a different direction.
[Sidenote: Wordsworth, Southey, and Scott.]
Of the four great champions of reaction who were born about 1770,
Wordsworth, though he illustrates the change generally, and never, in
his principal work, uses the stopped couplet, is not very noticeable
prosodically.[102] The three others are, in different ways, of the
first importance. Southey, as early as 1796, not merely practised,
but, which is much more, practised deliberately, and definitely
defended in a letter to an objecting friend, the use of three
syllables for two. Moreover (not confining himself to the ballad
metre, which he had employed and which he was specially justifying),
he alleged the practice of Milton, frankly stigmatising as "asses" the
editors who had endeavoured to disguise this practice as "elision."
Scott--assisted perhaps to some extent by hearing a recitation or
reading of Coleridge's unpublished _Christabel_, but undoubtedly
also following[103] the example of the innumerable ballad- and
romance-writers with whom he was almost better acquainted than any
other man in Britain--produced first ballad-pieces, and then, in and
after _The Lay of the Last Minstrel_, continuous narrative poems of
great length, for the most part couched in equivalenced octosyllables,
but often much varied in rhyme-arrangement and diversified by shorter
and longer lines. And there is no doubt that the enormous popularity
of these poems of his did more than anything else to familiarise the
public ear with metres and cadences as different as possible from the
couplet.
[Sidenote: Coleridge.]
But the influence of Coleridge, independent of that indirectly applied
through Scott, was the most important of all. It was indeed not (as it
should have been) exhibited, at once and in bulk, by the simultaneous
publication of _The Ancient Mariner_ and _Christabel_, the latter of
which, though, at least in great part, written at the same time as the
former, was separated from it in publication by nearly twenty years.
_The Ancient Mariner_ itself is in ballad metre, but ballad metre
treated in the freest possible fashion, not only with equivalence
used at pleasure in individual lines, but with the four lines of the
strict quatrain extended to five, or any number up to nine--thereby
increasing and varying the stanza-effect in the widest possible manner,
though never expanding it into positive paragraphs. More important
still, because more apparently novel, though it had been in fact
preluded both by Chatterton and Blake, and had been recognised by Gray
in the work of Spenser, was the use, in _Christabel_, of continuous
octosyllabic couplets, only sometimes, and rarely, broken into stanza,
but constantly equivalenced and frequently varied by shorter lines. Of
these, Coleridge himself gave in his preface a curiously inadequate
account, regarding them--or at least giving them out--as constructed
on the principle of counting only the accents. They, however, in fact
follow the strictest foot-division, and have been the pattern of all
similar verses, with equivalent substitution, since.
[Sidenote: Moore.]
Moore, who comes in point of date between this group and the
second great trio of Byron, Shelley, and Keats, is very important
prosodically. Since the earlier seventeenth century at latest, music,
though it had had much and rather deleterious influence on theories of
English prosody, had had little on its practice, a few light things
excepted. But Moore was an accomplished musician both in theory and
practice, in composition and in execution; he belonged to a race
distinguished for song-gift; and the great majority of his almost
innumerable lyrics were directly composed for old airs or adapted
to new. The consequence was, almost inevitably, that they present
a variety of cadence and rhythm which had hardly ever before been
seen. Occasionally this variety oversteps the bounds of pure prosody,
allowing, as in the well-known "Eveleen's Bower,"[104] a syllable
which, corresponding to an _appoggiatura_ in music, requires, in strict
scansion, to be slurred or else to be considered extra-metrical, as
in the "Song to a Portuguese Air,"[105] and others, further licences.
He was himself aware of this, and it did little harm; while the
tunefulness of his trisyllabic measures, and the great range of "broken
and cuttit" line-arrangements which his work presented, were both of
the first importance in promoting variety and freedom of metrical
arrangement.
[Sidenote: Byron.]
His expertness in the two arts, however, and his constant combination
of them, as well as perhaps his inferiority (though this is only
relative) in strictly poetical power, somewhat reduce Moore's
importance as compared with that of Byron, Shelley, and Keats. The
first-named was the least of the three in prosody, as in poetry; but
his prosodic merits have, as a rule, been far undervalued, even by
his adorers as a poet. He affected, and perhaps really to some extent
felt, much greater admiration for the eighteenth-century poets, and
for those who mainly or partly followed them in his own time, than for
the innovators of the Romantic school; and he himself wrote the stock
couplet with correctness and vigour. But he chose for his principal
serious poem, _Childe Harold_, the Spenserian, which "regular"
classical critics had always disliked; and, though he never achieved
its proper character, did finely in it sometimes, and undoubtedly
restored its popularity. Again, he chose for his greatest serio-comic
pieces, _Beppo_ and _Don Juan_, the _ottava_; while his minor tales
were in Scott-_Christabel_ octosyllables. In lyric, too, he showed
varied power, and once turned[106] what had been a burlesque before in
its exact, and a very sing-song metre in its restricted, form into a
thing of remarkable prosodic beauty, to be made more beautiful still by
Praed and Mr. Swinburne. His most consummate prosodic achievement is
undoubtedly the above-mentioned octave of _Don Juan_, which can hardly
be surpassed, either in suitability to its subject, or in the way in
which the particular characteristics of the metre itself are brought
out.
[Sidenote: Shelley: his longer poems.]
But the greatest poets are naturally, and almost inevitably, the
greatest prosodists; and this was well seen in the case of the two whom
we have yet to mention, Shelley and Keats, who also present a valuable
and interesting contrast in this as in other ways. It is probable that
in all cases Shelley began with direct though not studious imitation.
His early and almost worthless poems were based on "Monk" Lewis and
others of that type; his first striking thing, the opening of _Queen
Mab_, is a sort of variation on that of Southey's _Thalaba_; and his
first great poem, _Alastor_, had Wordsworth evidently before it; while
_Laon and Cythna_ (_The Revolt of Islam_) would probably not have been
in Spenserians if _Childe Harold_ had not adopted them, nor perhaps
_The Witch of Atlas_ in octaves but for _Beppo_. Yet, as soon as he
has attained poetic gift, he goes off from his models entirely, and,
without much apparent care for preconceived forms, achieves the most
marvellous beauty in whatever he touches. In _Prometheus Unbound_
especially, the blank-verse dialogue, and the abundant lyrical choruses
and interludes, not only exhibit wholly astonishing variety and
individual excellence, but adapt themselves to each other, as nowhere
else in drama. The Spenserians of _Adonais_, taking some liberties,
attain, at their best, absolute perfection; of the octosyllabic
couplets, shortened or not in several minor poems, almost as much may
be said; and the octaves of _The Witch of Atlas_ (with the very best of
Keats's _Isabella_) are the greatest examples of that metre in English
for serious use. He even tries the often failed-in _terza rima_, and
does beautiful things in it, though perhaps not such beautiful examples
of it.
[Sidenote: His lyrics.]
But it is in his lyrics that Shelley's prosodic, like his poetic, power
shows highest. Those in _Prometheus Unbound_ have been spoken of; but
the numerous and glorious short and separate pieces defy enumeration
or specification here. The two popular favourites, "The Cloud" and
"The Skylark," would each serve as a text for an exemplary lecture on
English prosody, and a dozen others, with dozens more added to them,
would do the same. None is ever really "irregular": to say, as has been
said of "The Cloud," that it defies ordinary scansion, is simply to
say that the speaker does not understand either the poem or ordinary
scansion, or both (see above, Book I. p. 100). But almost all exhibit,
in endless variety of relief and colour, the great laws of equivalence
and substitution, and the enormous advantage of varied and even
complicated metre, rhyme, line-length, and stanza-arrangement. Shelley
never seems to have studied metre much, and, as has been said, his
first pattern is the merest starting-point for him. But he touches none
that he does not adorn; none that he does not make matter of delight;
and none, likewise, in which he does not supply a text for infinite
technical instruction as well.
[Sidenote: Keats.]
The case of Keats is curiously different. He too--as indeed practically
everybody does--begins with imitation, but it is imitation of a
different kind. Chapman, Spenser, the sonneteers, the Jacobean poets
probably, Leigh Hunt certainly, supply him not merely with hints
and "send-offs," but with carefully studied models. He hits, in
consequence, first in his _Juvenilia_ and then in _Endymion_, upon a
very much enjambed form of decasyllabic couplet--a form opposed to all
the traditions of Pope, and deemed horrible by the orthodox critics
of the day. But he sees for himself the defect of this, and applies
himself earnestly to the study of Dryden and Milton as tonics and
astringents. The results are the fine, less fluent, still slightly
overrun, but tripleted and Alexandrined heroics of _Lamia_, and the
splendid blank verse of _Hyperion_. But he has not confined himself
to these, or to their lessons; and he has never confined himself to
the mere lessons of any poet or of any period. He produces in turn the
touching octaves of _Isabella_; the magnificent Spenserians of _The Eve
of St. Agnes_; the Sonnets, most of them among the finest examples of
the form in English; the varied stanza-measures of the Odes; the unique
ballad adaptation[107] of _La Belle Dame sans Merci_; and lastly, two
forms of octosyllabic couplet--the mainly catalectic or seven-syllabled
form of some earlier poems, and the complete one of _The Eve of St.
Mark_, which overleaps all other examples back to Gower, picks out the
finest qualities of Gower's own form, and rearranges them in an example
unfinished in itself, but serving as a guide, in the production of a
great body of finished and admirable work, to the late Mr. William
Morris. In no poet is the lesson--which it was the business of this
generation to exemplify, and should be of this chapter to expound--of
ordered variety, in foot, in line, in stanza, more triumphantly shown.
FOOTNOTES:
[102] His greatest prosodic achievement is also his greatest
achievement in poetry, the "Immortality" Ode. But, though he varies
line-length admirably, the prevailing rhythm is merely iambic;
and when, in stanza 4, he tries to vary _it_, the effect is very
unfortunate.
[103] Scott was a debtor for something as well to "Monk" Lewis. See
"List of Poets," Book IV.
[104]
Ă̄nd wēpt | bĕhĭnd [thĕ] clōuds | ŏ'er thĕ māid|ĕn's shāme.
. . . . . . .
Thă̄t stāin | ŭpŏn [thĕ] snōw | ŏf făir Ēv|ĕlĕen's fame.
[105] Where three lines like the following occur:
Shōuld thŏ̄se | fōnd hŏ̄pes | ē'er fŏr|sāke thē̆e,
. . . . . . .
Whĭ̄ch nōw | sŏ̄ swēet|ly̆ thy̆ hēart | ĕmplōy,
. . . . . . .
Ŏn ŏur thrēsh|ŏld ă wēl|cŏme stĭll fōund.
and are quite irreconcilable.
[106] In the "Haidee" song. _V. sup._ Scanned Conspectus, § XLIV.
[107] With "long measure," but with the last line cut down to a
monometer:
what | can ail | thee, knight-|at-arms, Alone | and pale|ly loi|tering?
The sedge | has with|ered from | the lake, And no | birds sing.
This last line being sometimes exquisitely equivalenced in the first
foot:
Ănd hĕr ēyes | wĕre wīld.
. . . . . . .
Ŏn thĕ cōld | hill side.