The poetical miscellanies of the later Elizabethan time, and the lyrical work of Sidney, Drayton, Jonson, Campion, and many others, brought out the song capacity of English as it had never been brought out before; and in the later portion of the period the poets specially known as "Caroline"—that is to say, of the period of Charles the First, with a smaller but remarkable contingent from the earlier days of his son—Herrick, Carew, Crashaw, Vaughan, Stanley, King, and almost dozens of others down to Rochester, Sedley, and Afra Behn—tried almost infinite varieties of line-length and line-adjustment with delightful results. And it is specially to be noticed that this lyric never broke down as couplet and blank verse were doing—that it always retained the tradition of metrical harmony which Wyatt and Surrey had reintroduced into English literary poetry, and which Spenser had perfected.

CHAPTER IV
HALT AND RETROSPECT—CONTINUATION ON HEROIC VERSE AND ITS COMPANIONS FROM DRYDEN TO CRABBE

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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—

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—

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.

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.

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.

CHAPTER V
THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL—ITS PRECURSORS AND FIRST GREAT STAGE

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.