CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY ENGLISH COLLECTION THE GIFT OF JAMES MORGAN HART PROFESSOR OF ENGUSH Cornell University Library arW37650 The science of English verse 3 1924 031 787 413 olin.anx The original of tliis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924031787413 THE SCIENCE OF ENGLISH VERSE BY SIDNEY LANIER So preye I God that nonmyswrite the, Ne the mysmetere for defaute of tonge. Chaucer: Troylus and Cryseyde. If . . . some perfect platform or Prosodia of versifying were . . . ratifyed and sette downe. — Webbe: Discourse of Eng. Poeirie. -A Poet, no Industrie can make, if his owne Genius bee not carried imto it. . . , Yet . . . must the highest flying wit have a Dedalus to guide him, — Sir Philip Sidney: Apol.for Poetrie. . . . Gif Nature be nocht the cheif worker in this airt, Reulis wilbe bot a band to Nature . . . ; quhair as, gif Nature be cheif, and bent to it, reulis will be ane help and staff. ... — King James I. : Reulis and Cautilis, 1 2 A c r 3 A : r I r To whom I r should I c r com-plain 4 A I r - t c ? Did I : r r r tell this Here we find the actual movement of the voice in read- ing the line to coincide with the rhythmic movement in the type until we get to the fourth bar, where an adroit arrangement of the words so as to suggest a rest for the interrogative pause, and an indignant stress on " Did," combine to vary the distribution • • into the distribution 1 • • which is equivalent to it in the sum of the time-values, each being equal to three iT's, or " g." But the next line shows a much greater diver- gence from the type. The place of the accent is changed in the first bar, and the time-values of several notes are relatively re-arranged ; yet the time-value of each bar is maintained and the music of the line runs into that of the next with the suavest connection. Writing its notation under that of the type, we have : ii6 Science of English Verse. I 2 3 A A A t r t r : r A A r r c r ,c ^ Who would be - lieve me? Type. Line. Words. In the first bar a process exactly reversing that hitherto described for the triole is used with singular effect. 4 S A A t r • • A A t t ' : r o per - il - ous mouths! A triole », for example, indicates that the three notes rrr ^'■^ to tie played in the time of two J's ; but we may reverse this and indicate that two ^s are to occupy the time of three ^'s. This is what Shakspere has done in the bar now under review. The normal time-value of each of these bars is, as marked at the beginning, "3, or three J's : but, wishing a certain measured and wondering strangeness of stress at the beginning of this line, Shakspere has used words which suggest it by suggesting a change of accent from the second to the first note and a re- distribution of rhythmic times from three notes to two which occupy the same time. The third and fourth bar* also present adroit redistributions. That in the third bar may be particularly noticed. Just after the question " Who would believe me "> " comes the rest at the place of the typical accented note. Nothing could be more effective than this intensified rest, which amounts to an accentuation of the silence after the question and of the hopelessness that fills it. It is by the constant use of such redistributions that Shakspere has brought such marvellous and subtle music out of the bare type of blank verse. As he grew older and got his art more in hand he used these Summary of First-Order Rhythm. 1 17 variations more and more liberally, just as he used the run-on lines with increasing plentifulness. The run- on lines, indeed, are merely an extension, into the prov- ince of metre or fourth-order rhythm, of the primary rhythmic variations just now described. From what has appeared in the present chapter and the previous sections relating to the same subject, the following principles should have clearly emerged. (i) Primary rhythm is the result of simple time- relations between individual verse-sounds. (2) The English habit of utterance in current speech is to deliver the sounds in some sort of primary rhythm. (3) The particular sort of primary rhythm thus given varies with different speakers, but only within such limits as allow every speaker to preserve without diffi- culty the larger time-relations of bar to bar in secon- dary rhythm. (4) In consequence of the habit mentioned, words have become so associated with their rhythms as to suggest them when written or printed and thus to become a system of notation for rhythm. (5) But this system is equivocal to the extent of being liable to different interpretations according to different habits of utterance; and the musical system, which is adequate to the minutest variations and precise in their expression, is therefore valuable in verse. (6) As varying habits of utterance change the rela- tive time-values of verse-sounds within a bar without changing the absolute value of the bar, so varying habits of versification among poets result in similar internal distributions within the bar. (7) These habits are purely musical and are to be interpreted in the light of the corresponding processes in music. ii8 Science of English Verse. CHAPTER IV. OF SECONDARY RHYTHM : ITS NATURE AND TYPES. The following chapter will treat : (i) of the func- tion of the rhythmic accent in grouping individual verse-sounds into bars which constitute a second order of rhythmic units for the measurement of secondary rhythm ; (2) of the principle that this grouping is practically always a grouping either into threes or into fours, which originates two great classes of rhythm, namely, 3-rhythm and 4-rhythm ; (3) of the three forms in which 3-rhythm appears and the two forms in which 4-rhythm appears, as con- stituting together five main types of rhythm to which all the varieties of English rhythms are clearly referable ; (4) of the manner in which 2-rhythm and 5-rhythm and other such types are really included, in their only practicable forms, in the two types given, so that the list, 3-rhythm and 4-rhythm, is exhaustive as to all rhythmic phenomena in English verse; (5) of a complete view of the possible variations of 3-rhythm and 4-rhythm according as the rhythmic ac- cent is placed on the first, the second, or other, unit of each bar ; (6) of a complete view of the possible variations of 3-rhythm and 4-rhythm according as the time-value of each bar is distributed among different numbers of sounds. Secondary Rhythm. 119 As matter of fact, established by observation, the ear seems to find more and more pleasure in any series of sounds presented to it according as it can make more and more varieties of exact co-ordinations of those sounds. We have ^already found that the ear makes three very widely-differing classes of co-ordinations in listening to sounds, namely, those which result in rhythm, those which result in tune, and those which result in tone-color; and it will help us to appreciate the ear's desire for great numbers of these co-ordina- tions if we recall at this point that the six species of co-ordination we are now studying are all pleasure- giving variations of only the first-named genus of co-ordi- nations — rhythm. The last chapter discussed the co-ordinations of indi- vidual sound with sound which result in the perception of what we have agreed to call primary rhythm : the present chapter, advancing a step, is to discuss those next-larger co-ordinations of group-of-sounds with group- of-sounds which result in the perception of what we have agreed to call secondary rhythm. In listening to a poem the ear is enabled to make these co-ordinations by hearing a rhythmic accent recur at a given interval of time. This rhythmic accent marks off given periods of time for the ear : and the ear's power of exactly co-ordinating the duration of sounds enables it to say, as each group passes in review before it, whether all the sounds of each group (bar) fulfil in duration the given period of time which is the normal duration or typic time-value of each group. To these sequent summings-up and comparisons of particu- lars of time the ear attaches a peculiar delight, which is traced in some form over all the human race. Such I20 Science of English Verse. summings-up into bars are all made by means of ac- cent. But mention has already been made, in various con- nections and with only partial explanations, of three kinds of accent, to wit : rhythmic accent, pronunciation accent, and logical accent. It is now necessary to dis- criminate these with precision. This may be done by inquiring what are their common incidents by virtue of which they are all named "accent," and then what are their peculiar incidents by virtue of which they are distinguished into the three kinds, rhythmic accent, pronunciation accent, and logical accent. Their common function is : to call the ear's attention to particular sounds in a series. Their special functions are : To call the ear's attention to par- ticular sounds in a series of verse- sounds or music-sounds, for the purpose of marking the intervals of time allotted to each bar, such interval being always that which elapses between any two sounds thus distinguished by the . To call the ear's attention to particu- lar sounds in a series of syllabic sounds constituting an English word, for the purpose of empha- sizing the special dignity, above other sounds in that word, of the root-sound (generally) thus distin- guished by the .... To call the ear's attention to par- ticular words in a series of English words constituting a sentence, for the purpose of emphasizing the Rhythmic Accent; Pronunciation Accent ; Physics of Accent. 121 logical importance, above other words in that sentence, of the word whose main sound is thus distinguished by the . . . Logical Accent. These discriminations are based upon varieties of functional purpose. If we now consider the three sorts of accent as phenomena of sound, we can further dis- criminate them by their respective physical explana- tions. The rhythmic accent in universal use for marking- off the bars of music and of English verse is a slight increase of intensity. The physical explanation of in- tensity refers it (see Chapter I.) to the excursion of the vibrating-body, which is wider according to the force of the vibratory impulse. The width of the excursion thus becomes the measure of the force : and such measure, when perceived by the ear, is what we call intensity. This process — of signalizing each bar by a slightly more forcible production of one of its sounds -*- is in- variable in music and in English verse. The whole system of secondary rhythm in both arts turns upon the timed recurrence of the slight increase in intensity, or rhythmic accent. But the pronunciation accent often differs physically from the rhythmic accent in consisting not only of this slightly wider excursion which produces the increase of intensity, but also of a slightly faster rate of vibration which gives rise to the perception of a heightened pitch in the sound. This heightening of pitch is easily veri- fied by experiment. If the conduct of a reader's voice who is not aware of the experiment be narrowly watched, it will be observed that in general the emphatic syllable — as for example the first in "rhythmic," the second in 122 Science of English Verse. "compare," the third in "referee" — is given with a slightly increased intensity and with a slightly sharp- ened pitch. But the sharpening is not inevitable, often yielding to those more important variations of pitch which constitute the tunes of speech and which may frequently require a lowering of voice in the accented syllable. The experiment for testing the sharpened pitch in the pronunciation accent is conditioned upon the reader's not being aware of it, because the thou- sand-fold habit of speech has made its processes so unconscious that when they become conscious they are almost sure to become unnatural. Such being the physical constitution of the rhythmic accent and the pronunciation accent : when "we come to investigate the logical accent it is found not to coincide precisely with either in its nature. Although the logi- cal accent is, in general, an exaggeration of the pronun- ciation accent as just described — that is, although the logical "^accent in the majority of cases is a greater increase of intensity and a higher sharpening of pitch than the pronunciation accent — sometimes it is a low- ering or flattening of pitch combined with the increase in intensity. Its general nature — as a combination of increased intensity and heightened pitch greater than that of the pronunciation accent — may be well illus- trated by an example in which a logical antithesis is set up between two pronunciation accents. For example, let the reader utter the following sentence aloud : " In English, we do not say ' xhy^mic^ we say ' rhythraic.^ " Here a logical antithesis is set up between the first pronunciation and the second : and consequently the logical accent, which is used to call the attention of Logical Accent. - 123 the ear to antithetic words, here falls upon the same sounds with the pronunciation accent. The result is a very clear and pronounced combination of increased intensity and sharpened pitch. But, particularly where the expression is of wonder or contempt, the logical accent often yields its heightening of pitch in favor of a tune of speech which requires a lowering of pitch. For example, in the following question the sound "wom-" is lower in pitch than the others: " Would you strike an unprotected woman ? " as may be more clearly perceived by noticing the rela- tively sharp pitch of the antithetic " woman " in utter- ing aloud the merely interrogative question, " Was it a woman, or a man ? " In point of fact, the pronunciation accent is simply the logical accent on a smaller scale, — having its origin in the logical pre-eminence of the root-syllable over the other syllables in a word. Hence the description of the logical accent as a physical exaggeration of the pro- nunciation accent agrees with its nature ; and it is also easily seen that the logical accent in practice partly falls on the same sound with the pronunciation accent, embracing in its scope the whole word instead of a single syllable. In fine : let the reader always think of The rhythmic accent as concerning the bar, or secondary rhythm ; The pronunciation accent as concerning, primarily, at least, the root-syllable of a word; The logical accent as concerning the prominent words bf a sen- tence. These accents have been dwelt upon with care for the reason that grave errors have arisen in modern 124 Science of English Vers6. criticism through the confusion of their natures and functions. Such errors will be pointed out in the dis- cussion of those types of rhythm, particularly that of blank verse, which they have specially concerned. It is worth while observing finally that the variations of pitch which distinguish two of these accents are really primordial forms of the tunes of speech discussed in Part III. ; and when it was remarked that their pitch- variations sometimes yield to those of the more highly- developed tunes, this was only another method of say- ing that the tune of speech changed from a higher tone to a lower one for some special meaning. Having thus discriminated the rhythmic accent : we are now to trace its function in marking-off bars of secondary rhythm for the ear. It was above explained that the musician begins his notation of ideas by placing at the head certain figures which establish the normal time-value of each bar: as " V," which advertises the reader that each bar is to contain a time-value equivalent to 3 quarter-notes : or as " o," which advertises the reader that each bar will contain a time-value equivalent to 3 eighth-notes. It was then explained that the poet accomplishes the same purpose of advertising the reader of the time-value intended for each of his bars by initiating the rhythm with words which unequivocally suggest the bar. As, for example, a poem beginning with Wistfully I wandering | substantially informs the reader that each bar is to have the time-value and rhythmic accent of "wistfully"' or of "wandering" — that is, a time-value of 3 eighth- Initiation of Rhythm. 125 notes and a rhythmic accent on the first sound of each bar. Pursuing the subject from this point: it is not always, nor even usually, necessary that the rhythm should be initiated by a single word, as "wistfully" in the example. The same bar — which, as consisting of three equal units of time, we may call hereafter "3-rhythm" as contradistinguished from the "4-rhythm" presently developed — the same bar of . 3-rhythm may be hinted by beginning with a two-sound word whose accent is on the first sound, following that with one unaccented sound, and then placing another accented sound : as, for example, instead of the words Wistfully I wandering | over the | waters, | the words Wistful she | wandered a- | way o'er the | waters | would unequivocally initiate the same 3-rhythm. Indeed, numerous collocations of single words are pronounced in familiar conversation with such an ac- cent and primary rhythm that the poet may confidently initiate a rhythm with them. Thus Tennyson has not hesitated to put forth Half a league, | half a league | half a league, | onward relying upon the ordinary swing of the words "half a league " in current utterance to suggest to the reader the 3-rhythm i • c r I c c c I c c n ^ M These three methods of initiating a 3-rhythm may now be placed under each other for better comparison, with numbered sounds and a typic scheme : 126 Science of English Verse. Wist - ful ly Wist - ful she Half a league, I 2 3 t c : wand-er - ing wand - ered a - half a league, I 2 3 : I : ver the o'er the a league, I 2 3 way half r c wa wa on - [12] ters. ters. ward. 3 But suppose it should be desired to initiate a type of secondary rhythm in which the bar consists of four equal units of time — that is, a type of 4-rhythm, of the form i' : t :\: t rc\: t : c\^ r | Here, the rhythmic accent must recur on every fourth sound, instead of on every third sound as in 3-rhythm. The typic bar may therefore be conveyed to the reader as follows : Wistfully she wandered o'er the desert of the waters, where the rhythm is clearly seen to be tc ' : t t c c t C I t * r r Wist-ful - ly she wandered o'er the des - ert of the wa - ters. 1234 1234 I 2 3 4 [I 2] [3 4] To these examples of the method of initiating given rhythms it is perhaps necessary to add nothing more than the caution that opening bars consisting of single words are often capable of more than one rhythmic interpretation, and that such equivocal bars should rarely occur at the beginning of a piece. When occur- ring in the body of it, after the type of rhythm has been clearly given to the reader, they occasion no trouble of course because the type gives the clue by which the reader's mind even unconsciously rhythmizes them. For example : in the old English ballad " Proud were the Spencerg" (see Hale's and Furnivall's edition of Equivocal Bars at Beginning. 127 Bishop Percy's Manuscript) the first two bars might be either 3-rhythm, I I I I Proud were the Spen - cers, t and • or 4-rhythm of the form Proud were thf • Spen cers, I and and the reader is unable to decide which of these is intended until the last two bars of the line are reached, which admit of no rhythmic arrangement except that of 4-rhythm, 1 I I c I r of con di tions mild I 2 3 4 All such equivocal beginnings are bad. The resources of our language as to rhythm are so copious that not the laziest ballad-maker need ever be at a loss for means of indicating the intended movement of verse with unmistakable clearness. The two great classes of secondary rhythm which have been named "3-rhythm" and "4-rhythm" com- prise, as types, all the rhythmic combinations made with English words. When the rhythmic accent recurs at that interval of time represented by three units of any sort — no matter among how many sounds this amount of time may be distributed — we have the effect upon the ear of 3-rhythm : when the rhythmic accent recurs at that interval of time represented by four units of any sort — no matter among how many sounds this amount of time is distributed — then the effect on the ear is that of 4-rhy,thm. 128 Science of English Verse. But the expression above, "no matter among how many sounds this amount of time is distributed," refers only to the general effect upon the ear as 3-rhythm or 4-rhythm ; and, in practice, certain favorite methods of distributing the given time of each bar have specialized three very strongly-marked forms of 3-rhythm, and two very strongly-marked forms of 4-rhythm, in English poetry. These forms are as follows. 3-rhythm occurs under the typic form (i) of which Tennyson's Charge of the Light Brigade is a modern example (though, as we shall presently find, this is the earliest type of rhythm in our language) 3 8 I Half c c I t : t l t • 1 c a league, half a league, half a league, on ward or under the form (2) i r t \ [ r I r r | r t \ in which the time-value of the 3 eighth-notes t t t is distributed among two sounds by making the first sound in the bar a quarter-note, equivalent in value to the 2 first eighth-notes of the bar : this form finding a modern illustration in Poe's Raven, I r c r c r C r c Once up - on a mid - night drear y ; or under the form (3) '^ %i r. In mai - i A : r n med - i A f 1 ta - A c r tion, fa \ - A ^ f^ cy free r hill. Typic Forms of 4.- Rhythm. 129 where the form (2) is exactly reversed, the two last eighth-notes in each bar coalescing into one sound of a quarter-note's length, and th^ rhythmic accent recur- ring on the second time-unit in each bar instead of on the first. In the separate discussion of these forms which is presently to follow, another method of noting the present one will be presented and their respective merits set forth. 4-rhythm occurs under the typic form (i) % t c : t : : : : t : : : ^ (The) rose was new in bios- som and the sun was on the or under the form (2) if c c r c c r r r Hame came my gude - man and hame came he. These five forms, or sub-types, of the two main types afford us five natural and convenient divisions for the special study of secondary rhythm as it appears in Eng- lish verse. This special discussion is begun in the next chapter, with the consideration of the remarkable cir- cumstance that every long poem, and nearly every short one, in the English language since the beginning of our poetic history in the seventh century has been written in 3-rhythm. But before advancing to that division it seems proper to end this general view of 3-rhythm and 4-rhythm by answering the very natural question which will arise, in the student's mind as to why there should not be other classes of secondary rhythm besides the 3-class and the 4-class — why, for instance, we should not have 2- rhythm and 5 -rhythm, and so on. Considering first the question as to 2-rhythm : its 130 Science of English Verse. answer is that 4-rhythra (which we have) is substantially 2-rhythm in the only form in which it would be tolerable to the ear. This may easily be seen if we consider what 2-rhythm would be in its typic form if rigidly maintained. The scheme of such a type is — and so forth. But the quick recurrence of the same ac- cent on every alternate sound, without any relief through the variation in time-distribution among the sounds — which variation the shortness of the bar renders neces- sarily limited — would be a monotonous iteration not pleasant to the modern English ear. It would seem that such a rhythmus existed among the Greeks. The grammarians describe a foot of theirs called the Pyrrhic which was "two short," or "^^;" and such a foot would be precisely one bar, J J, of the 2-rhythm now in hand. It might be an interesting point — how the Greek declaimer of such a series of sounds could mark-off the feet to the ear of his audi- ence without a rhythmic accent. In a succession of Pyrrhics there would be no recurrent difference of dura- tion to mark off groups ; a recurrent change of pitch in the voice, at such short intervals, would be intolerable ; and a recurrent tone-color, at the same intervals, would be not only intolerable, but well-nigh impossible. If, therefore, all the resources of duration, of pitch, and of tone-color be thus out of his power : if, as many assert, the signs ^ and ' and ^ called " accents " in Greek were intensity-accents ; and if, as is evident on the least inspection, these accents do not coincide with the rhythmic accent but fall at such intervals as would utterly destroy all possible groupings by means of the 2- Rhythm. 131 rhythmic accent : it would seem that we must be driven to one of two conclusions, either that the Greeks did use the rhythmic accent just as we do for secondary o rhythm, or that the Pyrrhic was in Greek — as the g bar I* f is in English — a merely theoretical measure. Among several acute remarks which peer through the mass of error in Poe's Rationale of Verse is one which ridicules the idea that any such measure as the Pyrrhic exists in English poetry. The remark as to the monotony of the recurrence of a similar rhythmic accent at an interval so short as P f will have prepared the reader to see that the form of 4-rhythm herein adopted substantially saves to us all the swing of 2-rhythm without this disadvantage. In 4-rhythm, in fact, many bars occur in the form If M (equivalent of course to I f f f f |) which is 2-rhythm founded upon the longer unit f instead of the unit f; while in 4-rhythm bars of the form I r r I* r I there is, in practice, a slight accent placed on the third note — an accent well known in music as the " secondary " or subsidiary accent, occur- ring always on the third time-unit of bars which involve four time-units. In accordance with these considerations we find in 9 music the very common rhythmus ^ — which is the same as our , or 4-rhythm, in verse, — but so far as I am aware no piece of music has been written in the rhythmus g, or | ^ * |. Accepting these as sufficient grounds for the absence of 2-rhythm from our list of secondary types ; when we 132 Science of English Verse. come to consider the absence of s-rhythm entirely dif- ferent reasons present themselves. These are founded on the difficulty which the ear finds in co-ordinating recurrences of the rhythmic accent at the interval of 5 units. It is not the length of the interval, but the odd- ness of it, which seems to trouble the ear. 5-rhythm has been occasionally attempted, as an experiment, in music, and Robert Franz has even written a song in 7-rhythm.' Without here considering the latter, which " It is interesting to remark in this connection that the form of the Japanese ode is framed upon the numbers five and seven, the entire ode consisting of thirty-one syllables which are always distributed among five lines, giving five syllables to the first line, seven to • the next, five to the next, and seven each to the two last. This arrangement is not theoreti- cally rhythmical among them, and it is commonly supposed that the Jap- anese have no rhythm in their verse. On hearing several poems recited, however, by Mr. Mitsukuri and Mr. Kuhara — two highly-intelligent Jap- anese gentlemen who are now Fellows of Johns Hopkins University, and who have obligingly favored me with several readings for this purpose — I am strongly inclined to think the Japanese verse not only rhythmical, but rhythmical according to the forms and limitations just set forth as to English verse. Thus although the five-syllabled and seven-syllabled lines of the Japanese ode seem to contravene the principles of 2-rhythm and 3-rhythm just now asserted, on investigation they strike my ear as being so pronounced in actual utterance as to become genuine 3-rhythm. For example, the following poem — in which I have divided each syllable of a word from its neighbor by a hyphen, for clearness' sake : — 1=345 Yo-no-na-ka-wa 1234567 Yu-me-ka u-tsu-tsu-ka U-tsu-tsu-to-mo Yu-me-to-mo shi-ra-Klsu A-ri-te il^-lce-re-ba (the a sounded as our ah and the i as our «) might be noted crudely Yo no na - ka wa f t I I c : c V Yu - me - ka tsu tsu ka 5-Rhythni. 133 is a unique tours de force of this charming writer : it will help the student's conception of the precise diffi- culties of S-rhythm if I briefly describe what is, so far as I know, the most successful conquest of them thus far achieved in music. This is the " Hailing Dans," or c c c c r - U - tsu - tsu - to mo r r t I I shi ra dsu I I I I III U me to - mo te na ■ ke re ba. But it is more than possible that my own strong expectation of finding this rhythm, based upon the universality of the form in all European rhythmic effort, may have prejudiced my ear to hear it ; and added to this is the extreme uncertainty which must attend all nicer judgments upon rhythm in a foreign tongue. Of the general fact of rhythm, however, my ear brought a quite conclusive verdict. I think it safe to say that if the rhythm of the poem was not as above noted, it was a genuine, and very interesting, case of pure 5-rhythm and 7-rhythm alternating. It sometimes sounded quite plainly so. In this event the notation of the thirty-one syllabled ode would be : ^ I I t t t 8 Yo ka - wa I I I : I : t t Yu - me - ka u tsu - tsu ka I I I t t I U - tsu - tsu - to - mo I t : : I I I I U - me - to mo shi - ra - dsu t t : t t t t A - ri te na - ke - re ba. in which each line consists of a single bar, and, further, in which each seven-group seemed to be pronounced in the same time with the five-group. It may interest the curious to add that the poem given is very striking in 134 Science of English Verse. Fling, movement in a Norse Suite by Mr. Asger Hame- rik, of Baltimore. The theme is as follows : With the utmost adroitness the author has caused the very difficulties of this 5 -rhythm to aid the spirit of the movement. He is picturing a dance, *not of carpet- knights or Mabille debauchees, but of men making merry between warlike deeds, — Vikings between voyages; and the rhythmic turmoil and hilarious riot of their Norse fling, or Halling-dance, could not be better conveyed to the hearer's ear than through the trouble which the ear finds in keeping up with this rhythm — a trouble so great that even the trained musicians of the orchestra must pay the strictest attention in order to keep the time, while to most hearers there seems to be a peculiar mirth- ful jerk of time in each bar manifesting itself through all the complex beauty of the melody and of its instru- mentation in the orchestra. If, now, we investigate this "jerk" for a moment, and ascertain exactly by what means the orchestral players keep up with the 5-rhythm of this movement, we shall find that the question as to S-rhythm in our enumeration of types is answered by the fact that 5-rhythm, in its practical form, is really a combination of 3-rhythm and 2-rhythm (the 2-rhythm just now described as used in music and as the same with our 4-rhythm, a being same as g) and is thus in- its significance, and sounds as if it came out of Hamlet, though it dates from before the tenth century. It may be translated : This life — Is it a dream or a reality ? Whether a reality Or a dream we cannot know. For it is, and it is not. 6- Rhythm, 8- Rhythm, &c. 135 eluded in our list. For the musical phrase of the Hail- ing Dance just now given is played with the rhythmic accents placed as indicated by the mark a in the follow- ing, where to prevent perplexing the student I have re- duced every note in each bar to the primary unit of the bar, thus presenting an outline of the melody : n ^ t -r- "^ A A , ^ , J € y^ 1 — *j -F \ — J— ^- 3 4 5 12345 That is, the rhythmic accent recurs the first time at the ' interval of 3 notes, the next time at the interval of 2 notes, then at 3 notes, then at 2, and so on ; in other words we have practically a bar of 3-rhythm, then a bar of 2-rhythm (our 4-rhythm), then a bar of 3-rhythm, then one of 2-rhythm, and so on : in short, a succes- sion of bars in which 3-rhythm regularly alternates with 4-rhythm. Thus 5-rhythm, so far as it is practicable, is included in our two types 3-rhythm and 4-rhythm. It is hardly necessary to add that all rhythms above 5-rhythm are either even rhythms, and mere doubles of 3-rhythm and 4-rhythm, — as 6-rhythm which is mere- ly 3-rhythm repeated, and 8-rhythm which is merely 4-rhythm repeated, — or are odd rhythms and are con- trolled by the considerations advanced in regard to 5- rhythm. It is proper here for the sake of completeness to re- view all the possible forms of these two great types of rhythm according as the rhythmic accent is placed on the first, the second, the third, &c., units of the bar. Of course either method is sufficient to mark the time, bar by bar ; in 3-rhythm, for instance, the grouping into 136 Science of English Verse. threes is suf5ficiently indicated to the ear whether the rhythmic accent falls on the first, the second, or the third unit of the bar, so long as the accent recurs on every third unit after the first unit on which it was heard. In 3-rhythm, different positions of the accent would give us the following possible forms of bars : I : I : \ — accent on first unit, understood always without being expressed, as heretofore explained ; 3, ^ , I 8 • ^ M — accent on second unit ; and if f M — accent on third unit. Similarly, in 4-rhythm, we would have four possible forms of bars, according to accentuation : ^i I I I \-' t: I I I V U t t t h-4 1 c c t \- The general view of the two types, 3-rhythm and 4-rhythm, will now be complete if the possible forms of their bars according to the number of separate sounds in each be discussed. No more fruitful source of error has vitiated the theories of verse than the confusion of the actual num- ber of sounds in a bar with the typical number of time- units in the bar. For example, we may have a bar of 3-rhythm in which there is but one sound while there Possible Forms of Bars. 137 are three time-units, g f . ; another bar of 3-rhythm in which there are two sounds, yet still three time-units, Q [ pi; another bar of 3-rhythm in which there are three sounds and three time-units; another bar of 3-rhythm in which there are four sounds and still three time-units, g ^ ^ * ' , and this might appear, according as we divide the first, the second, or the third, I 2 eighth-note into two, as | ^^ ^ ^ o"* ^ ^ u; ^ ^, '^'^ « C C S ? ' another bar in which there are five sounds, yet still the normal three time-units, %ll II C, or ^ ^ C ll.orlll ll\ 12345 12345 12345 another bar in which there are six sounds and yet only the three normal time-units, g p ^ B 1^ k 5 ! and so on. But again, instead of distributing the normal time- value of the bar among sounds entirely, we may dis- tribute them among sounds and silences : as, for ex- ample, in either one of the above forms of 3-rhythm bars, we may substitute for any one of the sounds a rest of the same time-value, in which case the one-sound bar 3 I • • I I 1 • I g r might appear either as [ L or ^ , or t' ' t"6 two-sound bar g r P as ^ * , or as | ' P as p * 1: the three-sound bar as ^ t| * |^ or ,as ^ ^ f I, or as p 1^ ^ , or in man- other forms ; and so on, or 138 Science of English Verse. In the same way, any bar of 4-rhythm may be greatly varied by variously distributing the four time-units among different numbers of sounds. It is of prime importance for the reader to remem- ber in this connection : (i) That the bar takes its name, as 3-bar (i.e., bar of 3-rhythm) or 4-bar (i.e., bar of 4-rhythm), not from the number of sounds in it but from the typic number of time-units in it : (2) That the verse-maker or the musician may put one sound or one silence, or any number of sounds or of silences or of both, into any bar of any form of any rhythm in English poetry, so long as the time-values of these sounds and silences, when added, exactly make up the normal time-value of the bar ; (3) That it is not necessary to have all the bars, in any given piece of verse, of the same form as to their number of sounds or as to the distribution of time-value among those sounds : as is well illustrated in the scheme of Tennyson's Break, break, brea,k. r Break, r break, I I r On thy cold A c r c r r break, A III i\: } \: M ■ And I would that my tongue could ut - ter C I The thoughts that a rise in me. Y^here a great diversity of bars is presented , \ This different method of writing the scheme from th^t before Reference to Simplest Form-. 139 (4) That even a change in the place of the rhythmic accent sometimes affords an agreeable variation, if it be for only one bar at a time, and made after some rest, or silence, in the verse which prepares the ear for a ne-v accentuation, as at the beginning of a line, for example, which is the usual place for such a change ; (5) That in determining the typic form to which a given piece of verse may be referred, therefore, we do not consider a single bar, nor two bars, but look along the body of the piece at the sum of appearances and as- certain what is the simplest form of bar predominating in the piece, — to which form we then refer it ; as, for example, in the scheme of Break, break, break just given, we look along through the stanza, and, finding we refer I r several bars of the simple form the poem to that form, as the typic bar, of which all the others are varieties ; (6) That, in pursuance of this course, we may often write schemes of poems which present only the main typic forms of the bars, and which are absolutely accurate for all purposes except where there is special occasion to represent the actual movement of the reader's voice in each bar of a poem ; so that hereafter, in presenting schemes of verse, unless qualifying words appear at the beginning, it is to be understood that the scheme is not intended to represent the minuter variations in the bars dependent upon this or that distribution of time- values among this or that number of sounds, but only the simplest form of such distribution which predomi- nates in the poem ; given is better because it preserves the line-arrangement of the wotds in the notation. I40 Science of English Verse. {fj That, in point of fact, the practice of English verse in persistently repeating certain selected forms of bar for many centuries has resulted in the emergence of five great forms — three forms of 3-rhythm and two forms of 4-rhythm — out of the large number of possible forms already hinted-at, to which all the varieties of rhythm in English verse may be referred. The student should now be exercised with the utmost thoroughness upon the matters discussed in the present chapter. For this purpose : (i) The scheme of Break, break, break, should be re- quired to be written from memory on the blackboard ; (2) Each bar should be taken-up in succession and the student caused to add the time-values of its sepa- rate sounds and silences so as to demonstrate their o agreement with the typic time-value H ; (3) The various possible forms of bars given above should be repeated, and extended through other distri- butions in 3-rhythm and 4-rhythm, with the exactest detail, at least until the student has thoroughly mas- tered the relations of notes and the distinction between the number of sounds and the number of typic time- units in a bar. Prevalence of j- Rhythm. 141 CHAPTER V. OF 3-RHYTHM, GENERALLY ; AND SPECIALLY OF ITS THREE FORMS. The following chapter will deal : (i) With the remarkable fact of the almost exclusive prevalence of 3-rhythm in English poetry from its be- ginning to the present time, illustrating this prevalence with citations from the Anglo-Saxon poem of The Battle of Maldon (lOth century), and the later English poems of The Ormulum (13th century), The Cuckoo-Song (13th century), Tke Vision concerning Piers Plowman (14th century), The Canterbury Tales (14th century). The Song of Ever and Never (early i6th century), Shak- spere's Plays, Endymion, The Raven, The Idylls of the King, The Psalm of Life, Brahma, and Atalanta in Caly- don; (2) Specially with blank verse. I think no circumstance in the history of aesthetics is so curious as the overpowering passion of the English ear for 3-rhythm as opposed to 4-rhythm. From the beginning of English poetry with the Song of the Trav- eller, which we may perhaps refer to the 6th century : or, speaking within the more certain bounds of poetic history, from our father Caedmon : through all the won- derful list down to the present day, every long poem and nearly every important short poem in the English language has been written in some form of 3-rhythm. This being so, I have thought that a brief outline of 142 Science of English Verse. the course of English rhythm — a contour, drawn in musically-noted schemes of the rhythms which have distinguished our greatest poems — might form a meth- od of presenting the three forms of 3-rhythm not only more agreeable than a stricter order of treatment, but more effective for the student's clear conception, since such an outline will necessarily be composed of one after another illustration of the three forms in question as they have been applied by the greatest artists in our tongue. Beginning with Anglo-Saxon poetry, we find that a single form of 3-rhythm prevails in it exclusively for the first five hundred years of our poetic history. Below will be given a scheme in which one hundred bars of a very noble and manful Anglo-Saxon poem have been carefully reduced to notation ; the number of simplest forms in the scheme will then be counted, and a typic scheme constructed upon the percentage which these numbers bear to the whole number of bars. This procedure will be found to reveal quite clearly that the typic form of Anglo-Saxon secondary rhythm is an alternation of bars of the form g [• * * I with bars of the form g f u • An inquiry thus conducted offers a means of testing Anglo-Saxon rhythms with mathematical precision, which any reader may adopt for the purpose of verifying the conclusions herein given. Before presenting this scheme it is worth while men- tioning that the fundamental misconception, already discussed, of the nature of rhythm as based upon ac- cent and not on quantity, has resulted in vitiating, to a greater or less extent, pretty nearly all the estimates of Anglo-Saxon rhythm heretofore given. A couple of Errors as to Anglo-Saxon Rhythm. 143 hundred years ago the learned Hickes declared his be- lief that the "feet" of Anglo-Saxon poetry should be measured by the laws of classic quantity. This opinion, while not quite correct, seems to be more nearly so than any subsequent one, except Conybeare's. Dr. Guest, in his History of English Rhythms, pp. 174-5, has not hesitated to affirm that "in none" of the Anglo-Saxon poems "is found the slightest trace of a temporal rhythm," — that is of a rhythm based upon time, or quantity. Tyrwhitt — though his ignorance of Anglo-Saxon perhaps deprives of all authority a judg- ment which was often so penetrating in more familiar departments of scholarship — could see no rhythm at all in Anglo-Saxon poetry, nor even its alliteration. In the otherwise admirable grammatical introduction of Sweet's Anglo-Saxon Reader — in many respects the most worthy work of this nature known to the present author — the statement occurs : "the essential elements of O. E." (Old English, or Anglo-Saxon) "versification are accent and alliteration. . . . The number of unac- cented syllables is indifferent." The italicized portion of the last sentence is thus marked for the purpose of calling attention to another form in which the original error as to "the essential element of rhythm " (supposed to be accent) appears in several modern treatises. The necessary dependence of rhythm upon time, or quantity, and that alone, has already been set forth ; and " the number of unaccented syllables" was therefore so far from being "indifferent" that the ear of the old Anglo-Saxon audience before whom the gleeman stood forth with his harp and chanted the poem could not have kept the mighty rhythm which beats through all these songs without a 144 Science of English Verse. strict co-ordination of all the verse-sounds, unaccented as well as acc^ted. A similar statement as to the syllables is found in that wonderful little treasury, the Rev. Stopford 'Qrodke's Pfimer of English Literature: "It" (that is. Old English or Anglo-Saxon poetry) " was not written in rime • nor were its syllables counted." Mr. Morley, in his First Sketch, makes a similar affir- mation as to the syllables. Even Conybeare, whose appreciation of Anglo-Saxon rhythm was warm and enthusiastic, nevertheless writes, with a certain timidity, "The general rhythm and cadence of their" — the Anglo-Saxons' — "verse is not altogether undiscoverable." But, accepting, if only provisionally, the doctrine hereinbefore presented that all rhythm is necessarily based upon quantity, and that this quantity is only per- ceived through the exact co-ordination by the ear of all the individual time-values of the sounds, or syllables, both accented and unaccented : if we shall find, upon reducing a considerable portion of Anglo-Saxon verse to notation according to this hyyothesis and actually "counting" all the "syllables," that a definite rhythmi- cal purpose appears, revealed in quite determinate types of rhythm which vary from bar to bar only in details for the sake of avoiding monotony, — perhaps it may be fairly considered that the case in favor of Anglo-Saxon rhythm has been made out. With this view, the following scheme is presented. In order to give it an interest beyond the merely tech- nical, I have chosen for notation a passage from a poem ' But see the Rhyming Poem quoted in Part III., on the colors of English verse, and the rhymes in The Phainix. Anglo-Saxon Rhythm. 145 written in 993 called The Battle of Maldon — otherwise sometimes The Death of Byrhtnoth — which, in the j udg- ment of my ear, sets the grace of great loyalty and the grimness of wild battle to glorious music. Perhaps no man could hear this strain read aloud without a notable stirring of the blood. The rhythm of this poem — let it be observed as the reader goes through the scheme — is striki^ngly varied in time-distribution from bar to bar. The poem in fact counts with perfect confidence upon the sense of rhythm which is well-nigh universal in our race, often boldly opposing a single syllable in one bar to three or four in the next. I should not call this " bold," except for the timidity of English poetry during the last two hundred years, when it has scarcely ever dared to ven- ture out of the round of its strictly defined iambics, for- getting how freely our folk-songs and nursery-rhymes employ rhythms and rhythmic breaks — as " Peas por- ridge hot," for example, or almost any verse out of Mother Goose — which, though "complex" from the stand-point of our customary rhythmic limitations, are instantly seized and co-ordinated by children and child- minded nurses. A peculiarity of the Old English poetry must be now mentioned which enabled the craftsman in words to venture upon these variations with certainty that the hearer's ear would recognize their rhythmic significance at once. This was its well-defined system of allitera- tion. In most lines the three first bars or feet begin with the same consonant ; in others the three first bars begin with a vowel, though not necessarily the same vowel ; in others the two middle bars begin with the same consonant ; and in others the first and third bars 146 Science of English Verse. begin with the same consonant. These four alliterative types are rarely departed from : and thus it will be seen that in most cases three, and in nearly all other cases two, distinct rallying-points of rhythm were unequivo- cally indicated to the ear. For example, in the fourth line of The Battle of Maldon : I 2 34 1* ^ 1* • ^ ' r 1* f * r r r r -U V i — 1 - *■ V V V - — V * hyc - gan to han - dum, to hy ge go dum ' the alliterative h's of hycgan, handum, and hyge deter- mine the two first bars for the ear as H ^ * ^ , and 3 • P the two last as equivalent g | ^ , with absolute cer- tainty. I wish now to arrange twenty-five lines from The Battle of Maldon so that the general reader though wholly unacquainted with Anglo-Saxon may represent to himself with tolerable accuracy the swing and lilt of the original sounds. For this purpose, the following simple directions will sufiSce to indicate the pronuncia- tion, letters not given being sounded as in modern English. a as a in "father." ae " " " "m«n." e " prolonged e in " ra^ry." e " e in " m^t." i " i " " machme." y " i " " iV ea nearly as ea in " reax." eo " " eo " "Leoville." Pronounce all the c's like k ; and always make a syl- lable of e at the end of a word, as " staethe " = stath-eh, "stithlice" = stith-lik-eh, "clipode" = clip-o-deh. " To combat hand to hand, with good heart. Scheme from The Battle of Maldon. 147 The passage given is from line forty-two to line sixty- seven, which contains the manful defiance of Byhrtnoth to the vikings. We are in the year 993 : scene, the coast of England : a party of vikings — ninety -three ship-loads of them — have landed, bent upon plunder: Byrhtnoth, a stout thane of ^thelred's, leads a party of English warriors to oppose the pirates and forms his men along one bank of the river Panta which here runs into the sea, the enemy being arrayed on the other bank: a messenger of the vikings then "stands forth," and " strongly calls " over the water to Byrhtnoth that if he will pay liberal tribute — "rings for ransom" — the vikings will agree to leave him unmolested and take to their ships again and sail away. Whereupon : ' iii =e =6 Byrht noth math-el o - de, bord haf-en de wand wac ne assc, word mael de. ^E y ¥f--w — re and an - raed s I - geaf him a — p p w~ nd - swar - e : " ge - » » 3 0-- ^-r — tazj -M »< ^Zl 1 — -^ U 1^—1 1= P-*^- eth? hi wil - lath eow ' It is hardly necessary to say that the E of the bass-clef upon which the following notation is arranged has no other significance than that of a convenient tone which the reader can strike, if he chooses, on the piano, according to the rhythm here indicated. It will be noticed too that — as often happens in modern verse — syllables really belonging to the last bar of a line often begin the first of the next line. These for the sake of con- venience I have put always where they belong rhythmically, that is, at the ends of their rhythmic phrases. 148 Science of English Verse. tu th'eow set hild ne deah. %^m f- =P ^ =t= Brim - man - na bod - a, a beod eft on gean ; w pi:=^r=^— =P-=P m — —w=^ =»E se - ge thin - um leod-um micl - e lath re spell, thset her stent un for cuth eorl mid his we ro de folc and fold an: feal Ian sceol on ^•=:g:i3t==p3z=:p=j— * M-g-flrd— » » a= : — m ^= m- - hseth-en e aet hild e. To hean - lie me thync - eth thset mid lir - um sceatt - 1 im to scip e gang ~"F P ? oh ^-P- _U— 1 ^ ? >- i_^_ -=W- >— L;. — -<; — =( — f- 1- un - be foht - en e, nu ge thus feor hid er on sceal ord and ecg sr ge se - man, Translation of Passage N'oted. 149 Het tha bord ber an, beom as gang an, thaet on thasm east £e the eal le stod-on. Ne i^i mih - te thaer for wae - ter e wer - od to tham oth rum : luc on lag - u - stream - as ; to lang hit him thuht e," " Byrhtnoth cried to him, brandished the buckler, shook the slim ash,' with words made utterance, wrathful and resolute, gave him his answer: 'Hearest thou, sea-rover, that which my folk sayeth? Yes, we will render you tribute ... in javelins — poisonous point and old-time blade — good weapons, yet forward you not in the fight. Herald of pirates, be herald once more : bear to thy people a bitterer message, — that here stands dauntless an earl Byrhtnoth mathelode, bord hafenode, wand wacne a!sc, wordum maelde, yrre and anrxd, ageaf him andsware; ' Gehyrst thu, sselida, hwxt this folc segeth? Hi willath eow to gafole garas syllan, aettrene ord and ealde swurd, tha heregeatu the eow aet hilde ne deah. Brimmana boda, abeod eft ongean ; sege thinum leodum micle lathre spell, with his warriors, will keep us this country, land of my lord Prince yEthelrsed, folk and field : the heathen shall perish in battle. Too base, methinketh, that ye with your gold should get you to ship all unfoughten with, now that so far ye have come to be in our land: never so soft shall ye slink with your treasure away : us shall ^ The translation following is nearly literal, and for convenience is accompanied with the text. ' Ash : i.e. ashen shaft of his javelin, for which " sesc " is a common expression. 1 50 Science of English Verse. persuade both point and blade — grim game of war — ere we pay you for peace.' Bade he then bear forward bucklers, and warriors go, till they thset her stent unibrcuth eorl mid his werode, the wile geealgian ethel thysne, .^thelraedes card, ealdres mines, folc and foldan: feallan sceolon haethene set hilde. To heanlic me thynceth thxt ge mid urum sceattum to scipe gangon unbefohtene, nu ge thus feor hider on urne eard inn becomon ; ne sceole ge swa softe sine gegangan : OS sceal ord and ecg ser geseman, grimm guthplega, ser we gafol syllan.' Het tha bord beran, beornas gangan, all Stood ranged on the bank that was east. Now there, for the water, might never a foeman come to the other: there came flow- ing the flood after ebb-tide, mingled the streams : too long, it seemed to them, ere that together the spears would come." thaet hi on tham eastsethe ealle stodon. Ne mihte thger for wsetere werod to tham othrum: thser com flowende flod aefter ebban, lucon lagustreamas : to lang hit him thuhte, hwaenne hi togaedere garas bxron. An inspection of this musical map reveals a rhythmic scheme which admirably secures power, variety, and a certain hurrying rush and ordered riot of sounds. Each line consists of four bars,' and each bar of a number of syllables which mark off determinate periods of time for the ear. The reader will easily catch the essential swing of the poem by fixing in his mind, for ' The importation of this term into the nomenclature of poetic science clears away at a single stroke such an accumulation of errors and confu- sions as no one would be prepared to believe who had not made special study of English criticism during the last three hundred years. The " foot " of classic metres was . . whatever fancy might choose to make it : but as soon as it is identified with the " bar " of music, whose nature and functions are as well understood as the simplest mathematical for- mula, it becomes a thing which can be discussed with profit, as bein^ matter of scientific precision. Sum of Appearances. 1 5 1 example, the movement of the beautiful line (next to the last in the extract just given) i Thaer com flow - end e flod aef ter ebb an (There came flow - ing (the) flood af ter ebb tide) which may be considered the type of all the lines. The method of varying this type so as to prevent the move- ment from growing monotonous may be accurately ascertained by the following calculation. Out of the one hundred bars given above (twenty-five lines with four bars each) there are forty-three bars of the form (i) r f\ thirty -four bars of the form (2) f f f; sixteen bars of the form (3) U \i ', ' — which I have written also as Lg ^ t, or ^ ^J p , or ' ^ C—T . considering that in the absence of more minute data than we possess as to Old English pronun- ciation these forms of (3) may be used interchangeably, or at least according to the feeling of the reader ; and seven bars of the form f ', — which might be written f "^ , or sometimes T S where the syllable is evidently not meant to be prolonged. Now, classifying these four varieties with reference to their effect on the ear, the forms (2) and (3) may be considered as one, both conveying a sense of rush and hurry ; (i) constitutes a class by itself representing still ' In the last line of the extract the second bar consists of five syllables and has the form ^ C y . I have classed this — with sufficient accu- racy for the purposes of this paper — in number (3) ; its separate consid- eration would involve some details too technical to be presented here, and its proportion to the others — one out of a hundred — is not sufiicient to give it importance as a mode of variation of the typical bar. 152 Science of English Verse. rapid movement but more ordered and governed than (2) and (3) ; while (4) is an arrest of movement for an instant ; as if the torrent of metre flowed now into a broad pool, now into an eddy. From this point of view, grouping (3) with (2), and considering, as is actually the case, that (3) ^J ^ ^ (for which there is no name in prosody) is so slightly differentiated from (2) f f f as to be substantially the same bar ; we have, in our hun- dred bars, of the form T T T fifty bars ; of the form I* f forty-three bars ; and of the form f ' seven bars. This then is a fair idea of the rhythm of Tke Death of Byrhtnoth ; for the hundred bars given are thorough- ly representative of the whole piece and the number seems large enough to render deductions reliable. The speech of Byrhtnoth which they include cannot fail to delight every ear : in truth I do not know where to look in English poetry, old or new, for a succession of words which make more manly music as mere sounds. The form of bar f p f f which occurs so often in math -el - o - a£ the foregoing scheine is by no means given as the only manner of noting those sounds, and perhaps may not suit the actual movement of many voices. It offers an interesting point of comparison with exactly similar modern forms, where in a 3-rhythm poem we often find a bar consisting of four sounds. For example : in Ten- nyson's Oiarge of the Light Brigade, the four sounds " val-ley of death " are placed in a bar of o time, thus : I 8 ^ I c All I I I fc : : I I •*c the val - ley of death rode the six hund - red 3 1234 I 2 3 t 2 Typic Anglo-Saxon Scheme. 153 Instead, however, of delivering this second bar as 8 ^ ^ I' V y niany voices would make a distribution val-ley of death of time-values among the four sounds which would be represented by the following formula of notation well- known in music : § J J * J where the straight val - ley of death line drawn over the four notes indicates that they are to be played, or uttered, in the time of three of the same notes : a rhythmic device depending upon a pro- cess exactly opposite to that of the triole already ex- plained, where • i • (for example) indicates that the three notes J T T are to be played in the time of two ^ J. The method illustrated in S^ttC'^CCtt' s^^'^s generally Math -el - o - de val - ley of death preferable to the form %l I I t > %l I t ^ Math-el - o - de val -ley of death, and would have been adopted in the foregoing scheme except for the desire to concentrate the student's atten- tion upon the special purpose of the scheme and there- fore to avoid all preliminary explanations that could be dispensed-with. It will be hereafter used, except when other forms specially commend themselves. The rhythm revealed by the scheme given for Byrht- noth's speech is the typic rhythm of Anglo-Saxon poetry, and its typic scheme g T t b I b (representing the two typic simple forms of bar which. 154 Science of English Verse. alternating with each other, largely predominate in every poem) never varies from the beginning to the end of what we may call Anglo-Saxon poetry, though the number of bars to the line is occasionally differ- ent. This may appear in illustrative passages from the Song of the Traveller, probably 6th century ; Csedmon's Paraphrase, .7th ; Beowulf, 8th ; The Wanderer (unknown date ; possibly), 9th ; the scheme already given from the Battle of Maldon, loth. From Csedmon (as preserved in King Alfred's Anglo- Saxon translation of Beda's Ecclesiastical History) : I : I c her i an 6 3 4 r " Weard, 8 • -1 thonc' Nu we sceol-o S • / n hec : t t ) - f on - ric - es 7 r c mod ge r I t Met od es i ih te and tiis Though belonging more strictly to a monograph on Anglo-Saxon rhythm, it is worth while interrupting this series for a moment in order to call attention to a prin- ciple, illustrated in the bars marked i and 3 of this Csedmon scheme, which is of application in the proper delivery and notation of almost every line of Anglo- Saxon poetry. Considering first the bar number 3, t c c t heo - f on - ric - es, the word is a compound one, of "heo-fon" — which is heaven — and "ric-es," which is the genitive case of 1 Nu we sceolon herian heofonrices Weard, Notu we shall praise (ike) heaven-kingdonCs Ward (i.e. guardian) Metodes mihte and his modgethonc {the) Creator's might and his mood-thinking (i.e. the thoughts of his heart). Anglo-Saxon Contractions. 155 "rice," kingdom. This genitive in es is the origin of our modern English possessive case, formed by the apos- trophe and s. There can be no doubt — but the reasons cannot here be given — that this contraction of the pos- sessive case prevailed in common speech a long time before it was indicated in writing," — as indeed always 1234 happens: and hence a four-sound word like "heofonrices" was, in the gleeman's oral reproduction, practically a three-sound word " heofonric's " — or, as it would be if "rice" had survived in this connexion, heavenric's — and -should therefore have the notation g ^ ' ^ , , heo - f on - ric's in which it presents us with the simple typic bar of 3-rhythm, instead of the rarer form o J ^ J * heo - f on - ric - es A process exactly similar converts bar number i of the Caedmon scheme ^ C C t C Nu we sceol - on 1234 into the same simple typic bar g p f' * ; for the word sceolon Nu we sceol'n I 2 3 (sc here representing our modern sh) is the first person plural of the modern form s/iall, agreeing with "we" — " Nu we sceolon " = JVow we shall — and just as in modern English we contract such a two-sound word as ' We begin to find similar ones indicated early in the 13th century, as for example in the Cuckoo-Song presently quoted where immediately after " bleteth " (bleateth) comes " louth " which is a one-sound contraction of the two-sound " lou-eth " or loweth (sc. the cow loweth after the calf, &c.). All through the Cuckoo-Song the liberty of making or not making such contractions, according as the rhythm may suggest, is apparent, 156 Science of English VerSe. "swollen" into a one-sound word "swol'n," — or as in German verse schullen appears as schull'n, siehen as sieh'n, gliihen as gluh'n, and the like — so there can be no doubt that in the excited utterance of the Anglo- Saxon gleeman- " sceolon " would cease to be a two- sound word "sceol-on" and become a one-sound word " sceol'n," • thus giving us the simple typic bar 3 ,• 8 ^ Nu instead of K we sceol'n Nu I I I I ■ we sceol - on A further application of the principle which underlies both these processes — the principle of connected utter- ance, which drops out or slurs over so many unaccented sounds in every sentence of modern speech — would reduce bar number 6 in the Csedmon scheme, from to g ^ * J — the typic simple miht' end his miht - e ond his form — by the well-known custom of eliding or slurring- out the last vowel of a word (here the e in " miht-e ") before the first vowel of the next (here the o in " ond "). Proceeding, in the light of these developments, to note the later Anglo-Saxon rhythms : the following, from the great Anglo-Saxon epic of Beowulf, continues the same forms of 8 bar which we find in Csedmon's 'Paraphrase, %l t I r I • • r • Tha was on heal - le heard ecg to gen Sweord o • • fer r I setl - um, r I sid rand • man • Cb aucer gives it as sch uUn : one syllable. Schemes from Beowulf and The Wanderer. 157 r I I I I haf - en hand - a fsest, helm ne mund : Where we perceive always the typic forms T T H and f f prevaiUng. Scheme of the opening lines of The Wanderer: r C 1:1 III Oft him an - ha - ga c c c r • Met - od es milts - e, r c r r I ^ ^ I geond lag u - lad e long e I I I '\ I I I I r I hre - ran mid bond a - re ge- bid eth, III III theah the he mod-cea- rig r I sceold - e P 1 1 sae." hrim - cald - e It is impossible to quote these opening thoughts of The Wanderer without calling attention to a profound mournfulness and gentle dignity which breathe subtly out of the melodious movement of the verse. Nothing could be more beautiful than the rhythmic play of this poeni. Even those who understand no word of Anglo- Saxon must be deeply impressed with the tender sing which goes all along through the poem, when it is prop- erly read aloud. As the reader easily observes, it carries on the rhythmus of f P P and f f, so striking in the other poems. It will afford some striking suggestions if we now ^ There was in hall (the) falchion brandished. Swords over benches, many a buckler (was) high-hoven, fast in hand, helmet not minded. " Often the Solitary prayeth for mercy, — (for) God's compassion, — though he, mood-careful, over the water-ways long-time should Stir with (his) hands the rime-cold sea. 158 Science of English Verse. compare these very earliest rhythms of our language with the very latest : and for this purpose let the schemes of modern rhythm be next given, instead of at the last, leaving the intermediate schemes to be after- wards presented in their historical order. For this purpose compare the following schemes, (i) from Swinburne's Atalanta in Calydon, and (2) William Morris's Love Is Enough. From Atalanta in Calydon: t : : I : t c t c : : how shall we Where shall we find her, r J r ^ c r 5 r Fold our hands round her knees, and cling? sing to " her 1 From Love Is Enough : Love is : t t : c t i I t woods have no t t t t e - nough : tho' the world be a - wan - ing,And the • • *1 t I t voice but the r t I voice of com- plain -ing. Nothing can be more suggestive than the evident tendency of these latest rhythms to return to the precise rhythmic forms of the fathers. Resuming the historic order : after the purer Anglo- Saxon, of which specimens have been given from Casd- mon, Beowulf, &c., up to the loth century (the Battle of Maldon probably dates 993), take the following scheme from the Ormulum, a poem probably of the early part of the 13th century. Orm, or Ormin, the author, is addressing his brother in the beginning of the poem and recounting how his brother had thought that if he (Orm) would put "inntill Ennglissh" (into English) Scheme from The Ormulum. 159 the Gospel's holy lore (Goddspelless hallghe lare) it might well turn to mickle profit (frame) &c. The metre of this poem is most artfully arranged to carry out its 3-rhythm, and the flow of it is wonderfully fine. The final /s must all be pronounced, as in Anglo- Saxon : for instance " woUd-e yern-e lern-en," where each final e makes a separate syllable, in sound much like the exclamation eh, or somewhat more open than the French mute e as read in poetry ; except where, as in "forr lufe off Crist" (for love of Christ) the e of "lufe'' is plainly slurred into the o of "off" making practically one sound. %t r Thu thohht - A t r Till mik - c r Yiff Enngl - t r Itt wolld - c" r And foUgh - t r Withth thoht, est tatt itt mihht J r r r ell fram - e turm p r c r issh follk, forr luf-e c r p r e yem - e lem p r c r enn itt, and fill p r ^r r withth word, withth ded t f e wel : « en, : r of Crist c « enn, : r enn itt It will be profitable, with the insertion of only a few occasional sounds of ek and en to replace the termina- tional e and en, to reproduce this rhythm by giving the modern equivalents, word for word, of the text, which should be read aloud, pronouncing the eh and en wher- ever they occur : i6o Science of English Verse. Thou thoughtest that it might (-eh) well To mickle profit turn (-en) If English folk, for love of Christ, It would (-eh) gladly ' learn (en), And follow it and fill (-en) ^ it With thought, with word, with deed (-eh) : a process exactly parallel .with the modern French habit of reading their poetry in which the old custom of pro- nouncing the (now) mute-^ is retained though it has long vanished from current speech. Take next a rhythmic scheme of the Cuckoo-Song, which may be a few years later in date. This bright spring-song is of special interest in the present connex- ion because the music to which its words are found set has a rhythm so exactly reproducing the typical rhyth- mic scheme of the poem that it is hardly necessary to do more than transcribe the notes of the music, disre- garding the changes of pitch, in order to obtain the following scheme, — with the exception of a minute variation in one bar where the sound " in " is prolonged, in singing, during the time of the rest which would pre- vent its drawl in utterance. On this account, as well as because the poem has pre-eminence as not only one of the first English songs but as the first found with the music to which it was sung,3 the first four lines of the typic scheme are here given and then the music of the whole is added, with the accompanying words. ' The word in the text is yerne, i.e., yearningly. ■^ Fillenn itt, i.e.,/uim\ (-en) it. ' It was recovered from Harleian Ms. 978 in the British Museum, which seems to have been a monk's commonplace-book or omnium gatherum. Sir Frederic Madden dates it about 1240. The Cuckoo- Song. i6i 3 * m r • r -1 Sum er is i - cum en in, r Lhud e r sing • cue - r cu, 1 S 1 r Grow r eth r sed and r blow - eth r med And r springth ' the r w c de - r nu". 1 S T CUCKOO-SONG.' Allegretto. Sum er is i - cum - en in . . . Lhud - e sing cue- Grow eth sed, and blow - eth med, And springth the uu de nu. Sing cue cu I i L-^ \ \ f\l is=p ^ I - we ■ blet - eth aft er lomb, Ihouth aft er calv e ^ For springs M / see the preceding remarks on contractions, ^ Summer is (y-) come (-n) in, Loudly sing, cuckoo ! Groweth seed and bloweth mead And spring (c) th the wood (e) now. ' In the two bars marked with a cross near the end the words are assigned to the notes differently from the original, the monkish transcriber having been careless, as is apparent from his wholly gratuitous and un- , necessary disregard of the ordinary custom, at this point. As for the pronunciation it may be sufficiently imitated, for all present purposes, by giving all the vowels long — except the « short as in modern in, and c much like long o, and pronouncing all the final e's as separate syllables, like eh. l62 Science of English Verse. ^ .1 b I I cu. Bui loc stert eth, buck e vert eth =i»=F^ ^^ Mur ie sing cue - cu, cue eu, cue cu, wel -:t lidV sing - es thu cuc-cu, ne . . . swik thu nav er nu. Sumer is icomen- in, Summer is come in Lhude sing, cuccu I Loudly sing, cuckoo ! Groweth sed, and bloweth mad, Groweth seed and bloweth mead And springth' the uude nu. And spring {/) th the wood now. Sing, cuceu I Sing, cuckoo. Awe bleteth after lomb, Ewe bleateth after lamb, Lhouth after calve cu. Loweth after calf {the) cow (i.e., the cow loweth after the calf). BuUoe sterteth, bucke verteth, Bullock starteth, buck verteth, (i.e. seeketh the green ; French, vert : — but the word is not certainly this) Murie sing, cuccu 1 Merrily sing, cuccu ! Cuccu, cuccu ! Cuckoo, cuckoo 1 Wel singes thu, cuccu. Well singest thou, cuckoo Ne swik thu naver nu. Cease not thou never now. Scheme from The Vision of Piers Plowman. 1 63 Here ' the typic bar is the g ' ' which we found to be one of the two predominant forms in Anglo-Saxon poetry. Coming down from the 1 3th to the 14th century, next is a scheme of the four opening lines of The Vision con- cerning Piers Plowman. Probably no rhythm was ever so thoroughly misunderstood as the gentle and inces- sant sing which winds along through these alliterative fixed-points as a running brook among its pebbles. The reader will observe that we have here still the typic bar g ^ ^ ^ overwhelmingly predominant in the poem, but with the rhythmic accent at the second time-unit of the bar instead of the first. In a som er A t se • 1 son whan soft was C I I the son ne I shop - e me in A shroud •J •J es as I a shep - I I c e wer e ' This was sung as a part-song for four or six voices. As such it pro- duces a delightfully outdoor and breezy effect. The method of singing it was as follows. The melody is of such a character that any four bars of it will harmonize with any other four. Therefore, taking three sopranos and either contralto or bass voice, the procedure is : first soprano sings first four bars alone : second strikes-in at fifth bar, singing from the be- ginning, and goes on with the first voice which is always four bars ahead of the second : third voice strikes-in on the ninth bar, singing from the beginning, and then goes on with the other two, in the manner of a catch or round. Meantime the contralto, or bass, sings all the time, over and over, the following /«, or burden, until the song is finished: M K ^ing Sing cue - cu. 1 64 Science of English Verse. A A A A In hab - i-te as an her- e - mit - e un - ho - ly : t t of werk-es A A A A Went wyd - e in I r this world, wond -res t I : to her - e. This is the rhythmus of the third movement in Bee- thoven's Seventh Symphony which succeeds the awful Heart-beat March of the second movement. It is con- ventionally written with an arsis or unaccented note at the beginning, thus ^ r r r f 1 ^ ^ ^ i f ^ f * but the more accurate method would be M -^ i: :b=:l il I I | l I F if the music were, like the poem, in lines each of which begins with an unaccented sound. An expression occurs in the Palladis Tamia, Wit's Treasury,^ of Francis Meres, printed in 1598, concern- ing this rhythm of Piers Plowman which is very remark- able as betraying an appreciation of its true nature for which one would not look in the i6th century. Says Maister Meres (p. 156, line 24, of the New Shakspere Society's Series IV, Part I, 1874): "As Homer was the first that adorned the Greek tongue with true quan- tity: so Piers Plowman was the first that observed the 'The book so dear to all Shakspere students from its mentioning -. ^nd thus limiting the date of — several of Shakspere's plays. Langland's and Chaucer s Rhythms. 165 true quantity of our verse without the curiositie of rime." This utterance of Meres becomes all the more curious if we compare it with Puttenham's remark in The Arte of English Poesie upon "that nameles who wrote the Satyre called Piers Plowman " — as he terms Langland ' in another place. ..." His verse " (says Puttenham) "is but loose metre, and his termes hard and obscure, so as in them is litle pleasure to be taken." This outline of our rhythmic history has now reached a most notable point as we advance from Langland to Chaucer. Although Langland and Chaucer were con- temporaries and were writing their books at the same moment, yet Langland differs from Chaucer in such a way that he must be considered to terminate the ancient period, as clearly as Chaucer begins the modern period, of English poetry. Langland belongs with Aldhelm, Csedmon and Cynewulf ; Chaucer with Shakspere, Keats and Tennyson. A cunning enough confirmation of this view crops-out in the citation just made from Puttenham. In the same chapter ^ in which he finds Langland such as in him " is litle pleasure to be taken " he finds Chaucer thoroughly delightful : a curious in- stance where, of two contemporary poets, the one is so archaic in rhythm and speech that neither is under- stood by a critic of his own tongue only two centuries off, while the other is so modern in both that he is not only understood but freely enjoyed by the same critic. Not that we get out of 3-rhythm, at all, when we leave Langland and the ancients for Chaucer and the ' Or Langley: see Professor C. H. Pearson's paper in The North British Review for April, 1870. " Chapter XXXI ; v. pp. 75-6; of The Arte of English Poesie. Arber reprint, Murray & Son. London, 1869. 1 66 Science of English Vers&. moderns : that maintains its hold undisturbed. But In Chaucer we come for the first time upon a special form of 3-rhythm which thereafter prevails with almost un- broken uniformity throughout English poetry. It has been customary to refer the origin of English blank verse to Surrey's translation of part of the .(Eneid in the earlier half of the i6th century, in which that noble poet used lines consisting of five bars, the . typic bar A having the form * . But this is Chaucer's rhyth- mus : all the Canterbury Tales in verse — except the comical Sir Thopas and the surely spurious Coke's Tale of Gamely n — are written in a rhythm whose description merely repeats that given above for Surrey's rhythm, — narnely, lines of five bars each, the typic bar A having the form • • . It is true that Chaucer used rhyme, while Surrey did not : and in this respect Sur- rey's verse was " blank," as opposed to Chaucer's : but it was not blank as opposed to Casdmon's and Cynewulf's ; in fact English poetry for its first five hundred years was without rhyme ' — that is, was blank verse. Surrey therefore was neither the first, by nearly a thousand years, to discard rhyme in English verse ; nor was he the first, by more than a hundred and fifty years, to use the line of five I r Inasmuch as this form A I r — to which we now come in the Chaucer scheme — corresponds to the classic iambus, which is described as a short (^ before ' Except as heretofore noted. Observe, further, the error of Meres in affirming that Piers Plowman is the first English poem which observes the true quantity of our verse " without the curiositie of rime." Chaucer^ s and Surrey^ s Rhythms. 167 a long (f), let us, for the sake of a convenient and suf- ficiently precise term, always- hereafter designate this as the iambus : the reader always understanding that when the word "iambus" is used, it is equivalent to And, to acquire beforehand another convenient term which belongs to the consideration of the fourth order of rhythm — the line-group, or metre — let us designate a line which consists of five bars as a line of 5. In this terminology, therefore, the lines both of Chaucer and of Surrey may be conveniently called iambic 5's so far as the rhythm is concerned : though the term "blank verse" has come to be exclusively limited to that rhythm when it is used without rhyme. The reader is therefore to understand that when Surrey is said to be the father of blank verse, nothing more can be meant than that he first used without rhyme a rhythm which was at least as old as Chaucer. The typic scheme of the first four lines in Chaucer's Knyghtes Tale (the first of the Canterbury Tales) is this : li r Whil-om A I r There was A c r Of Atth - c r And m A ^ ^a as old A ^ d^ a due en-es he I- ^ his tym ^A e * sto - A that hight - A was r lord e swich c r nes tell - A z r e The - A and gov - I r I r en us A I r se us A \l I er - nour ^ r. que - rour.' a con • Text taken from EUesmcre Manuscript, six-text edition, Chaucer Society. 1 68 Science of English Verse. Two points in connection with this scheme are of interest. (i) Let the student observe the process of transition from the pure Anglo-Saxon rhythm, through Lang- land's, to Chaucer's. The Anglo-Saxon presented us with the typic g ^ \i v \, Langland presents us the same, only the accent has been transferred to the • • • L/ [/ 1; ; while Chaucer presents the same as Langland, only the last two of the three eighth-notes have joined together into a quarter-note — as if in music we should write f f where the slur ' " binds together the two sounds f f into one sound precisely equivalent to f — so that in Chaucer we have instead of « f • f 8 1 r The second point is connected with this same transi- tion, and concerns the very interesting link of it which we find in the resemblance of the last bar in most of Chaucer's lines to the last bar in nearly all of Lang- land's lines, in Chaucer, the last sound of almost every line is an e (the lines quoted from the Knight's Tale happen not to be such lines), whose rhythmic value is expressed in the fifth bar of each line of the following scheme noting the first two lines of The Canterbury Prologue: , the form. Whan that c r The droghte 2 A 3a ^ c r A -prill - • • e with hise shour - I r of March • r hath perc - ed to k I C es swoot the root Chaucer^ s Final E. 169 The reader may catch very nearly the exact sound of this e which terminates so many of Chaucer's lines by getting any intelligent Frenchman to read aloud a ' French poem and observing a certain sound of the final ^'s which, though mute in prose, the French retain as a syllable in poetry. It will be observed that this sound is often scarcely more than that remission of breath with which one relieves the lung when, in speaking, the words end before the breath is expended which has been accumulated in the lung for the purposes^ of utterance. When an American, in impatiently trying to remember a word in the midst of discourse says, for example, " I was walking down the -eh — the -eh — the Hofsstrasse when I met &c.," the e}i% have almost the sound of the French e and are often indeed a mere remission of breath to relieve the lung. It would seem that such a necessity in some way suggests that shape of the buccal cavity which results in the tone-color of the French mute e as given when rather slurred in reading French poetry : a tone-color perhaps better represented by the sound of our short u in "but," somewhat finically pro- nounced, than any other in our language. Now, that this final e at the end of Chaucer's lines was mainly a sort of audible remission of the breath having the rhythmical effect noted in the last scheme from Chaucer seems to be clearly the result of the following considerations : (i) that Chaucer evidently did not intend this final e at the end of each line to have the full force of a sylla- ble, else he would have used more of other terminations than e in the same place : or in other words his ten- dency to confine the sound to that of the final e, which was already becoming a sound that could be slurred at 1 70 Science of English Verse. pleasure,' shows a peculiarity in that sound which must have suited his rhythmic purpose ; (2) that this rhythmic purpose did not demand a full syllable at the end of the bar, as shown by the large .numbers of such lines as the four quoted from the Knight's Tale which have no final e ; (3) that the pronunciation and rhythmical effect herein given harmonize all these kinds of lines, for the lines not terminating in a final e would admit a similar audible remission of the breath, — as we hear it used by many readers of the present day ; (4) that thus the original rhythmic intent would be consistently carried out in every line, and would reveal itself as merely a sort of reminiscence of the final bar in each line of Anglo-Saxon poetry and particularly in each line of Piers Plowman. Coming down from Chaucer, and skipping the 15 th century during which, if one excepts a few passages of Lydgate and Gower, no English poetry was made except among the Scotch makers — who however carry out the 3-rhythm modus without exception — the following very striking ballad, which belongs to the early part of the 1 6th century and which I find among the Bright Ms. published by the Shakspere Society in 1848, gives us the genuine old Anglo-Saxon rhythmus of the two forms g ^ L/ U i U with almost a typic regularity of alternation. I give the scheme of the first two lines and then the poem nearly entire. ' As seems to be the net conclusion resulting from the careful and scholarly labors of Mr. Ellis and Professor Child with regard to the gen- eral use of the final e in Chaucer. See Part II, Early English Pronun- ciation, by Mr. A. J. Ellis (published by both the Chaucer and New Shakspere Societies), which contains an admirable summary of Professor Child's paper on this subject. Scheme of Ever and Never. 171 Ev er in Ev - er in grai- fyng and plow-ing and I I I nev er in I I nev - er in grow-ing, La' ^ sow- ing. SONG OF EVER AND NEVER. Ever in graffyng and never in growing, Ever in plowing and never in sowing, Ever in repyng and never in mowinge, Ever in trowing and never in knowinge.. Ever full gorged, and never from ' tappjrnge, Ever at sylence and never from clappynge. Ever a-cold and never from wrappynge Ever in hoping and never in happyng. Ever in travell ' and never at byrth, Ever in smylyng and never in myrth. Ever in swellyng and never slack gyrth, Ever in purchace and never ought worth. Ever at hand and never at wyll,' Ever styk fast and never stand styll. Ever cum toward and never cum tyll,< Ever a clarke and never can skyll. Syns ever and never shall never have end, Good is it ever never to offend ; For ever shall never kepe fawtes in safe mend But ever shall scourge fawtes that never amend. 1 " From," in the sense of away from; " never ftom tappynge " = never free from the necessity of tapping, that is', always at it. ^ Travail. 8 Pleasure (for example) ever near by (at hand) but never quite reachable (at will) . * Tyi\ = to = up ia. 172 Science of English Versi. Coming from the early part of the i6th century to the early part of the 17th : if we take the following four lines from Hamlet we will be presented not only with a further illustration of 3-rhythm but with an interesting illustration of the survival through our blank verse of the end-bar form in final e- .3 8 -just now discussed in Chaucer. Such lines occur with great fre- quency in Shakspere, and with the greatest frequency in Fletcher.' On comparing the final bars in each line of the following scheme of the opening lines in the Hamlet soliloquy with that just given of the opening lines in the Canterbury Tales Prologue, we may see the historic connection and rhythmic reason of the so-called "double-ending" or "feminine-ending" lines in Shakspere which have in modern times acquired so much interest, not only as affording another rhythmic test of his growth as an artist but as offering means for nice discrimination between Shakspere's and Fletcher's parts (for instance) in the play of Henry VHL, or that of the Two Noble Kinsmen.'^ SCHEME FROM HAMLET'S SOLILOQUY. 8 1 r To be r I Wheth-er A A A A I r or not to be I r that s the question A A A A 'tis no - I r bier in • • the mind to su£ - fer ' But Fletcher uses them very differently from Shakspere. See spe- cial treatment of blank verse, end of this chapter. ^ For interesting discussions of both plays from this and similar point? of view, see Transactions of the New Shakspere Society for 1874, series I. Scheme of Hamlet's Soliloquy. 173 A A A I r The slings and ar - rows of A A r I Or to take arms I r a - gainst out - r ra A C r A geous f or-tune ; E troub-les. In connection with this scheme it may be remarked once for all that in reading-o£f every such notation of lines from an acting-play, it must always be remembered that the long pauses and stage-silences which occur in stage-delivery — especially in the stage-delivery of such a soliloquy as this of Hamlet's — will necessarily inter- rupt the continuity ■ of the movement, and that the scheme can therefore only claim to be a scheme of that rhythmic intention upon which the writer projected his work and which in its general type only is carried in the hearer's mind throughout the progress of the play. For example: after the word "question "at the end of the first line in the foregoing soliloquy the actor would doubtless be silent for some time, in the meditative blank of thought which suits Hamlet's unquiet leaping from one idea to another here ; but in the rhythmic intention this line is run-on to the next, and artfully run-on, the unaccented syllable "-tion" of "question" allowing an effective change of the accent to the first sound of " whether " in the next line. The four lines just given present an unusual example of the occurrence of double-endings four times in suc- cession. Passing Milton with the single remark that Paradise Lost is written in the same typic form of 3-rhythm with Shakspere's plays ; and giving a scheme of only the first line of Endymion because it presents us with an- 174 Science of English Verse. other instance of the double-ending in blank verse just discussed. A A • • A thing of beau A I r A c .r A ty IS a joy for - ev - er we may come to Poe's Raven which offers a new treat- ment of 3-rhythm so far as metre (or the line-group) is concerned, but consists entirely of the form so familiar in Anglo-Saxon poetry, H f ^ . if c r r r i ^ i ^ i ^ i r r r c Once up O-ver -on a man-y a mid-night drear-y while I pon-der'd weak and wear-y quaint and LiT r c r r r c r -^ cu-ri-ous vol-ume of for- got-ten lore. The Idylls of the King is in the typic form of 3-rhythm which is specially named blank verse ; though the special treatment of it is such as to make a wholly different music from Shakspere's. Longfellow's Psalm of Life is in the same form of 3-rhythm as Poe's Raven up to the management of the line-group, which is quite different : er c r I r I Tell me not in mourn ful num - bers Life is but an r I emp - ty r ^ dream. Emerson's Brahma is in a c lifferent form of 3-rhythm : 8 1 r When me A A A they (, I am • • the wings. Schemes from Swinburne's Atalanta in Calydon, and Morris's Love Is Enough, all illustrating the unbroken Five Battle -Songs in 3- Rhythm. 175 employment of some form of 3-rhythm, have been already given. So that we find the English love for 3-rhythm not only unabating after more than twelve hundred years' use of it, but the most modern English verse tending into the very specific forms of 3-rhythm used by our earliest ancestral poets. As exhibiting not only the strength of our passion for 3-rhythm but the subtle tenacity with which even specific forms of it have associated themselves with certain classes of poetic ideas, perhaps the following five poems may fitly terminate this brief review of our rhythmic history. I have selected out of the body of English poetry five battle-songs, written at intervals of three centuries apart, namely : a scene from The Fight at Finnesburg, dating before the 7th century ; a battle- scene from the Death of Byrhtnoth, loth century ; a battle-scene from Layamon's Brut, 13th century; a battle-ballad of Agincourt, i6th century; and. Tenny- son's Charge of the Light Brigade, 19th century. Surely no one can regard without interest this succession of manful songs, all moving in- exactly the same verse-beat and carrying us on their rhythmic movement, by three- century leaps, through twelve centuries of English verse. SONG OF THE FIGHT AT FINNESBURG. Typic scheme. ir I Ban ■ helm « r I bers tan C I I burh - thel - u * P P \) I \f dyn - ed e. Hleothrode tha heathogeong cyning : " Ne this ne dagath eastan, ne her draca ne fleogeth, 176 Science of English Verse. ne her thisse healle horn naes ne byrnath ; fugelas singath, gylleth graeg-hama, guth-wudu hlynneth, scyld scefte oncwyth ; nu scyneth thes mona Wathol under wolcnum, nu ariseth wae-daeda the thisse folces nith fremman willeth ; Ac onwacingath nu, wigend mine, habbath eowre land, hicgeath on ellen, Winnath on orde, wesath anmode. Tha araes manig gold-hroden thegn, gyrde him his swurde. Tha waes on healle wael-slihta gehlyn, sceolde nalaes bord genumen handa, ban-helm berstan, burh-thelu dynede, oth set thaere guthe Garulf gecrang, ealra asrest eorth-buendra, Guthlafes sunu ; ymb hyne godra fela hwearf lathra hrjew ; hrsefen wandrede, sweart and sealo-brun ; swurd-leoma stod swylce eal Finns burh fyrene wasre. Hig fuhton fif dagas, swa hyra nan ne feci driht-gesitha ; ac hig tha duru heoldon.' ' Cried aloud, then, war-young king : " this dawneth not from east, nor here dragon flieth, nor here of this hall light burneth j birds sing, chirpeth cricket, war-wood soundeth, shield answereth shaft ; now shineth the moon wandering under skies, now arise woe-deeds that this folk's quarrel will perform. But wake ye now, warriors mine ! hold your lands, think upon valor, strive in battle-line, be one-minded." . . Then arose many a gold- adorned thane, girded hira with his sword. . . . Then was in the hall slaughter's din, might not shield be taken in hand, bone-helm burst, house- floor dinned, until in the fight Garulf fell soonest of all earth-dwellers, Guthlaf's son; about him a crowd of many good foes' corpses; raven wandered, swart and sallow-brown ; sword-light stood, as if all Finn's burgh were a-fire. . . . They fought five days, so none of the coinpailions fell ; but they held the door. ... Scheme from The Death of Byrhtnoth. 177 BATTLE-SCENE FROM THE DEATH OF BYRHT- NOTH. Typic scheme. (Hi)let - on tha of - fol mum | feol - heard - e spear - u '1 ^ c r •■ c re re ge - grund - en e gar - as fleo - gan ; cj* n c e p I I. I r -^ bo-gan wser-on by sig - e, bord ord on - feng, u II I ' I r I I I II bead - u - raes, beor - nas feol - Ion, on ge r r r r hys sas la - gon. bit - er waes se hwaeth-er e hand r c r ^ (tha)Byrht - noth braed r c r r bill of sceath e • C I t £ r t r • rad and brun - ecg and on tha byrn an sloh: to c c r fed* r c r ^ ^ r 1 hrath - e hi ne ge - let te lid marm-a sum, r p r r e r c r r tha he thaes eorl - es earm a - myrd e ; I I i\^ t t : t : r t feoll tha to | fold an feal - o - hilt - e swurd : ne t t h^ J t J t ^ I miht - e he ge - heald - an heard ne • mec - e, ' Probably a word omitted in the MS. 178 Science of English Verse. r r waep nes r I weald an. r r r c \i : t t : : (tha)hiti - e heow on | haeth - en - e scealc - as, and : : t beg - en tha t t ill beorn - as the hi - ne r big r c stod - on, t t t r nemn hyr a frean r c r c feorh ge - seald - on." t t : t : t f t t t ^ ^l£-noth and Wulf-maer be - weg en lag- on thao- BATTLE-SCENE FROM LAYAMON'S BRUT. Typic scheme. 3 r 8 ^ Hard - lich t I r hew en, helm e ther r gull Togadere heo tuhten and lothlice fuhten ; hardliche hewen, helme ther gullen, starcliche to-stopen mid steles ^^,%'i.. Alle daei ther ilseste fasht mid tham maeste, 1 " They let fly from their hands the file-hard spears, the sharp-ground javelins; bows were busy, brand met buckler, bitter was the battle-rush, warriors fell, on every hand men lay." <'The battle goes on : after a while Byrhtnoth, now in bad condition, is striking at a pirate who has run over to rob a fallen chieftain of his gold rings and bracelets.) " Then Byrhtnoth drew from sheath his sword, broad and brown-bladed, and smote on his (the pirate's) corselet: but one of the pirates too quickly hindered him, and maimed the chieftain's arm; fell then to earth (his) yellow-hilted sword, he might no longer hold the brand, (he might no longer) wield weapon." . (Byrhtnoth is surrounded: he calls over to his men from the midst of his enemies, speaks a few cheerful words, offers up a short manful prayer to heaven; and then) " The heathen hewed him to pieces and both the warriors that stood by him. iElfhod and Wulfmeer lay together: by the side of their prince they gave up their life," Schemes from The Brut, and Agincourt. 1 79 a thet thustere niht to-daelde heore muchele fiht. Lasien a ba halve cnihtes to-hewen. Ther was muchel blod gute ; balu ther wes rive ; brustlede scaeftes, beornes ther veoUen.' THE BALLAD OF AGINCOURT, OR THE ENGLISH BOWMAN'S GLORY.^ Typical scheme. ^c c c c c r III t t c 8 A - gin - court, A - gin-court I Know ye not A - gin and end-stopped L line j 1- " " «> > 1 86 Science of English Verse. c the double-ending -\ Shakspere's use of -< or feminine-ending > in blank verse ; ( line ) « " 5 the weak-ending > " « « \ line ) " " the rhythmic accent " " « SHAKSPERE'S USE OF THE REST. Nothing can be more remarkable than the confidence with which English nursery-songs and proverbial expres- sions count upon the rhythmic perceptions of the people, as contrasted with the timidity of minor poets and the forgetful ness of commentators in this particular. The most complex rhythms of our language — the rhythms which rely most on the hearer's or reader's ear to replace lacking sounds with rests of the right time-value, to make one sound very long and others very short, to run-on or end-stop the lines, and the like — are to be found in Mother Goose and in the works of our greatest poets. It is in the verse of those who must be classed between these limits that we find those rigid and inex- orable successions of iambus to iambus, of end-stopped line to end-stopped line, and the like, which betray either the writer's fear that his rhythmic intention might not be understood or the limitations of his rhythmic intention itself. It is only an extension of the same remark to say that music is almost entirely fearless in this respect, and the rudest music almost as much so as the finest. I have heard a Southern plantation "hand," in "patting Juba" for a comrade to dance by, venture upon quite complex successions of rhythm, not hesitating to syncopate, to change the rhythmic accent for a moment, or to indulge in other highly-specialized variations of the current Rests, in Mother Goose. 187 rhythmus. Here music, let it be carefully observed, is in its rudest form, consisting of rhythm alone : for the patting is done with hands and feet, and of course no change of pitch or of tone-color is possible. In considering Shakspere's use of the rest we shall find these facts of the iitmost importance. Approached from the direction of music and of the folk-song or nursery-rhyme, the problems which have been explained sometimes as licenses, sometimes as irregularities, some- times as faults of stupid printers in wrongly arranging the lines, sometimes even as corruptions of the text, will mostly be seen to resolve themselves simply into a great artist's use of his rhythmic materials with a free- dom founded upon the rhythmic practices of the fathers and the rhythmic perceptions of children and common people. A single illustration from Mother Goose, with one from the negro's patting, will supply us with a precisely- noted formulation of the facts just stated which we can then apply in the analysis of Shakspere's supposed peculiarities in this particular. Let any one listen to a child reciting this passage out of Mother Goose : Is John Smith within ? Ay, that he is. Can he set a shoe ? Ay, marry, two. One a penny, two a penny. Tick, tack, two. The rhythmic movement of th§ child's utterance is as follows ; i88 Science of English Verse. % t r * * J r X Is John Smith with - in? r Ay, that he T IS. s Can t I : he set a r shoe? s I mar ry. r two. s One a pen - ny. two a pen - ny. • Tick, -1^1 tack. r two. S An examination of this scheme will show that the child's rhythmic sense has here arranged a series of time-values, both for sounds and silences (rests), which presents considerable complexity. I^et the student ob- serve particularly the rests which have been supplied by the child between the words, and upon which the whole rhythm depends. Here we see a rhythmic intention based upon the occurrence of rests within the body of the line. These rests happen to occur on unaccented sounds in the bar : but it is important to notice that rests may occur at the place where the accent belongs, and that this is fre- quently resorted-to in music to produce striking rhyth- mic effects. To take an example from the most culti- vated music and enforce it with one from the rudest form of that art : in Haydn's " Queen of France " sym- phony the slow movement has a flute obligato at one point, of which the first strain commences ; ^H^- SB ^ &c. Rests, in the Integra's Patting. 1S9 while the second strain has a rest at every accented point of the bar throughout, each bar being of the form ^-»— ^ On the other hand, every one who has noticed a South- ern negro's " patting " will have been apt to hear an effect of the same nature as in Haydn's movement, produced by omitting the stroke, of foot or of hand, which the hearer expects to fall on the accented note at the first of the bar, thus : Allegro vivace, U c c cl'' c c tl"" r I f * and similar forms. These instances might be indefinitely multiplied ; but they will surely suffice here to authorize us in formulating the assertion that : In popular poetry, and in the crudest as well as the most refined music, a rest may supply a sound not only in the body of the line or phrase but even on the accented place of the bar. Now, just as Haydn uses the rhythmic device of the negro, so Shakspere uses the rhythmic device of the nursery-rhyme. Let us then apply the principle just formulated to the interpretation of certain lines in Shakspere's plays which have been accounted for very variously by various commentators. The following line, for example — 117, in Measure for Measure, Act H. Scene 2 — has occasioned much per- plexity : Than the soft myrtle ; but man, proud man.' ' Delius text ; same in the first fotio. 1 90 Science of Bnglish Verse. Regarded from the stand-point of well-known pro- cedures in music, this line offers no difficulty. If we now analyze the means by which the rhythmic intention is here discovered and verified, the student will have a mode of procedure set before him for application in all future cases of doubt ; and if we find not only that this rhythmic intention is for the reader to supply a rest in the body of the line, but that many of Shakspere's lines exhibit a similar intention for the purpose of producing a clearly-defined correspondence between rhythm and idea, it may surely be claimed — in view of the principle just now developed — that Shakspere is simply employ- ing the common rhythmic devices of ruder poetry just as Haydn and Beethoven employ those of ruder music, and that it is as incorrect to call the one an "irregu- larity" or a "license" as it would be to call the other so. Our analysis may be comprehended in the following four propositions. (i) The accentual construction of the line Than the soft myrtle ; but man, proud man SO limits its possibilities that the reader is forced to supply a quarter-rest immediately after the syllable " -tie " in " myrtle," as by the following scheme : eA A A A r c r r r ^ ,c r r r Than the soft myr - tie ; but man, _ proud man. (2) This suggestion to the reader is instantly con- ' The familiar Shaksperean beginning of a line with _ ^ instead of A ' ^ the typic _ _ : presently treated in full under the head of Shakspere's fc r Use of the Rhythmic Accent. Rests, in Measure for Measure. 191 firmed by the fact that the semicolon — which is a logi- cal rest — appears at the very point where the rhyth- mical rest falls, namely just after the " -tie " in " myrtle." (3) The reader's assurance becomes doubly sure when he finds that the context shows a movement of idea which is strikingly embodied in this special movement of rhythm, as is always the case in Shakspere. (4) And finally investigation reveals that it is really a habit with Shakspere to intensify just such antitheses as occur here in the ideas with just such a rest to be supplied at the place of an accented note, — wherein, indeed, he only carries out the unconscious habit of every ordinary reader or speaker of English. To examine these propositions separately : (i) If we construct the scheme of a typic line of blank verse : c r J r ^ r ^ r c r 3 8 and apply the line in question to this typic scheme as far as it will go, being guided by the place of the pro- nunciation accent, or of the logical accent, for the place of the rhythrijic accent, we find that the only note left without a corresponding word is the note occupying the place suggested for the rest, namely that after " -tie " in "myrtle," thus : A z r proud man. The student observes that in thus measuring the given line by the type, we are guided by the accentual con- struction, as follows : the first two bars and a third fit exactly : A A Than the I r I • I r proud myr -tie; but man, 102 Science of English Verse. 8 I r Than the A I r • A r A r proud myr tie; p r but, if we - should go on with the sounds, the next two accents would fall upon " but " and " proud " thus 8 I r Than the A A A c r I r I r proud myr -tie J but man, proud c r in which the " but man proud man " is of course in- tolerable : for though the accent can occasionally be reversed, as at the beginning of this very line, or occa- sionally placed upon unimportant words (as presently explained), this is always done with a light hand, and under a certain artistic guidance of the ear which does not allow it except for pleasing variations of rhythm. Finding therefore that the accentual construction does not allow "but" on the note immediately after "-tie," we try the next note, of course, and finding that here the " but " and all that follows it fit perfectly to the type: I r proud man we conclude straightway that the author's rhythmic intention was for a rest to occupy the place and time of the typic quarter-note after "-tie." This rest makes the line perfectly musical : as may be strikingly illustrated by inserting an actual sound in its place. For example, suppose the line read " myrtle- tree " instead of "myrtle : " if we apply this to the type, , we find that it fits exactly, and on reading it aloud it forms a perfect line of blank verse : • » c r I r I r- 'har the proud myr - tie;. — but man. Expression helped by Rests. 193 A A A A A Than the soft myr - tie - tree ; but r man, proud man. The rest, however, is here far more effective than any sound could be : as we shall presently see when we consider the idea Shakspere is dealing with. (2) This position of the rest is immediately confirmed when the reader observes that it is the same position with that of the semicolon. The semicolon has the same relation to the logic of the sentence that the rest has to the rhythm of it. (3) Along with these two considerations straightway comes a third which supports them both, namely : that the expression of the idea involved in the context is heightened, according to English habits of utterance, by just such a rest. The speaker is drawing a sharp and passionate contrast between the use of authority made by Jove, or Heaven, and that made of it by man ; Merciful heaven ! Thou rather with thy sharp and sulphurous bolt Splitt'st the unwedgeable and gnarled oak. Than the soft myrtle ; but man, proud man ! Dressed in a little brief authority. Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven As make the angels weep. . . . It is Isabella, in the extremity of love and terror, pleading with Angelo for her brother's life : what more natural, or more striking, than the momentary pause, after the word "myrtle" which ends the description of Heaven's course, before showing, like as not with a great sob at the very place of the rest, and in a changed voice which the accented rest well introduces, the meaner wavs of man .' 1 94 Science of English Verse. (4) These considerations seem to reach certainty when we find that in the same act of the same play Shakspere has used the same rhythmical effect — name- ly, that of accentuating a silence by suggesting a rest in the place of an accented sound — for a similar pur- pose, namely, to heighten the current idea. This is line 173, already commented upon in another connec- tion : A I r ous mouths I r r c r r ^ r e c Who would be - lieve me ? O per - il - These instances could easily be supplemented with similar ones, all showing that Shakspere, just like the nursery-rhymer, does not hesitate at a rhythmic inten- tion which requires a rest to be supplied in the body of the line, while, far in advance of the nursery-rhymer, he uses this device with special purpose, where he desires that the rhythmic dress of his idea should not flap about its body but clothe it with absolute fitness. It is instructive to note that this line, and similar ones, which thus readily resolve themselves into rhyth- mic proportion when approached from the direction of familiar practices in popular poetry and in music, have presented such insuperable difficulty to those who have considered them with other preconceptions that a cor- ruption of the text has been deliberately posited as the only refuge from the supposition of an unconquerable defect in the rhythm. The method just shown of deal- ing with disputed rhythms — by first constructing a typic line, and then placing all the certain sounds under their proper notes, in a process analogous to the "ex- clusive diagnosis" of the physician — will become all Argument against Rests. I95 the more valuable to the student if we consider for a moment the fundamental error underlying the argument of those who have abandoned these lines as irreducible to any rhythm. The following citation from Professor Craik's Eng- lish of Shakspere,^ concerning the line just now dis- cussed, may perhaps fairly be taken as representative of this argument. " So much cannot be said " — that is, that such lines are not "irregular" or strained by "license" — " for another form of verse (if it is to be so called) which has also been supposed to be found in Shakspere " such as for instance " the well-known line in Measure for Measure . . . ' Than the soft myrtle ; but man, proud man.' This, it will be observed, is different from a merely truncated line of nine syllables ,..;... the syllable that is wanting is in the middle. . . . The existing text of the plays presents us with a con- siderable number of verses of this description. Is the text in all such cases to be accounted corrupt } I con- fess myself strongly inclined to think that it probably is. The only other solution of the difficulty that has been offered is, that we have a substitute for the omitted syllable in a pause by which the reading of the line is to be broken. This notion appears to have received the sanction of Coleridge. But I cannot think that he had fully considered the matter. It is certaiti that in no verse of Coleridge s own does any mere pause ever per- form the function which would thus be assigned to it. Nor is any such principle recognized in any other English ' Prolegomena, pp. 36-7, here and there ; edition, Chapman and Hall, London, 1857. 196 Science of English Verse. verse, modem or ancient, of which we have a text that can be absolutely relied upon.^ . . . How is it possible by any length of pause to bring any thing like rhythm out of the above quoted words, — ' Than the soft myrtle. But man, proud man.' If this be verse, there is nothing that may not be so designated." The logic of this passage may be thus compressed, for the purpose of examination : (i) That the laws of English verse, as deduced from the practices of English poets, do not admit the substi- tution of a rest ("pause") for a sound, in the body of a line ; (2) That Coleridge, who interpreted the given line upon the principle that such laws did allow such substi- tution, never applied the principle in his own verse ; (3) That even if the laws of English verse did allow such substitution, the allowance would not avail for the given line, since no length of rest can possibly make it rhythmical. Perhaps the argument (i) may be considered suffi- ciently met by the considerations just now advanced under the head of Shakspere's use of the rest, showing that even our popular poetry is built upon the necessity of such substitutions and upon perfect confidence in the rhythmic perceptions of the ordinary ear as to where to place them. In point of fact Mother Goose would not be rhythmical without them. As to the prac- tices of poets, see the scheme of Tennyson's Break, break, break, which involves such rests ; and a thousand similar songs could be cited. ' The itahcs here are the present writer's. Rests, in Christabel. 197 (2) But the assertion that " in no verse of Coleridge's own does any mere pause ever perform the function which would be thus assigned to it '' is so far from being correct that the entire poem of Christabel, in which Coleridge explicitly supposed that he had made a new departure in verse, depends for its rhythm upon the constant substitution of rests (" pauses ") for sounds, by the reader, in the body of the line. This was the true innovation made by Coleridge in this poem — an innovation, let it be carefully noted, not at all upon the practices of English verse in general but upon that par- ticular phase of them represented by the inexorable stiffness of the " elegant " period which bred Pope and other like monsters of refinement. Nothing is more common than such rests in the body of the line in Anglo-Saxon verse, and, as shown, in popular verse and in music, and — to return to our point — in Coleridge's own Christabel. For example : 'Tis And A the mid the owls 1 A Tu -whit 1 c I : die of night have a wa - A a - gam, How drow si ly by the cas ken'd the crow t I I tie clock, ing cock. -1 s ^ I c And hark, 1 A Tu-whoo 1 the crow - mg cock it crew 1 1 presents us with a scheme of the first stanza in Chris- tabel, which reveals that the entire rhythmus depends on the occurren9e of definite rests in the body of the 198 Science of English Verse. line as well as at the end of the line. No one indeed was more familiar with such rhythmic devices than Coleridge, and many instances of such rests could be given from his work. (3) Finally, as to the assertion that no length of pause could bring any thing like rhythm out of the given line : if the words be uttered according to the scheme offered above, they must certainly sound per- fectly rhythmical to every ear. SHAKSPERE'S USE OF END-STOPPED AND RUN- ON LINES. The explanation of end-stopped and run-on lines already given need not be repeated here, and perhaps it will be sufficient to give the briefest outline of the manner in which these varieties of the line-group in blank verse have become tests of genuineness — as in determining the respective shares of Shakspere and Fletcher in the play of Henry VIII. for example, or tests of chronology — as in determining, or at least helping to determine, the comparative dates of Shak- spere' s plays. In order to place vivid examples before the reader's mind at the outset : here are four end-stopped lines from near the opening of Love's Labor's Lost: Our late edict shall strongly stand in force : Navarre shall be the wonder of the world ; Our court shall be a little academe, Still and contemplative in living art. Let it be observed how each of these lines is so "stopped" at the "end" (hence "end-stopped" lines), by comma or other mark of punctuation or sometimes Shakspere's Run-on Lines. 199 by a stop only logical and without mark, as to necessi- tate a rest or pause of the voice. Here, on the other hand, are four run-on lines from The Tempest, which I have chosen because it is one of Shakspere's latest plays while Love's Labor's Lost is one of the earliest, and, although the end-stopped test is not to be relied on alone nor pushed too far, there seems no doubt that the timid use of run-on lines is in general characteristic of Shakspere's earlier period and the free use of them characteristic of his maturity in art. These lines are from Act I. Scene 2 : . . . and by my prescience I find my Zenith doth depend upon A most auspicious star, whose influence If now I court not, but omit, my fortunes Will ever after droop. Here it is perceived that neither of these lines logi- cally admits of a rest at the end but that "iihe close connection between the last word of each line and the first word of the next inevitably "runs'^ the voice "on" (hence "run-on" lines) past the end of the line, usually to some point in the body of the next line. Now the proportion of run-on lines to end-stopped lines \t\ Love's Labor's Lost is only a little more than one in eighteen while that in The Tempest is a little more than one in three. It will thus be readily seen that here is a very precise method of estimating the changes in Shak- spere's habits of versification, and that this precise method must be far more reliable as tracing the true course of his artistic growth than those vague judg- ments which embody so much of the personal equation and which were for so many years the bane and dis- grace of Shakspere criticism. In fact it may be said 200 Science of English Verse. that the spirit of precise inquiry has had the same stim- ulating effect in Shakspere scholarship as in physical science, and that under its influence the world is begin- ning for the first time to get insight into the true life and artistic growth of our master. The student should now familiarize himself with this branch of Shakspere criticism by choosing some play of Shakspere, counting first all its blank-verse lines, then its end-stopped and run-on lines respectively, and finally deducing the proportion of each variety of line to the whole number of lines. Treated in this manner the plays after a while begin to assume a distinctive physi- ognomy even to the eye : as one reads one sees, in a delightful half-consciousness, the face of the young Shakspere glowing through the lines, or the more reverend countenance of the grave and mature artist who has embodied the whole of his life in his art and is become a great and forgiving and patient Prospero, ready to lay down his mantle and depart. Yet — it is worth while repeating the warning, for ideas of this sort are apt to run-away with one — the end-stopped and run-on line test is not to be relied on, alone, for determining the relative priority of plays neaf together. While, as between the early extreme of Shakspere's growth represented by Love's Labor s Lost and the late extreme represented by The Tempest, the difference in versification with regard to these varieties of lines is perfectly plain ; while, indeed, every one but moderately acquainted with the secrets and necessities of dramatic blank verse must see that the progress of an artist like Shakspere could not be otherwise than from the hardness and four-square-ness of the end- stopped line to the rounded grace and freedom of the Shakspere's Double-ending Lines. 201 run-on line; nevertheless many other considerations arise before the grave and careful Shakspere scholar which must be held steadily in view along with this, or any other single one of the "metrical tests." The method of end-stopped and run-on lines was first discussed by C. Bathurst in his work, Changes in Shakspere' s Versification at Different %Periods of his Life. Those desirous of pursuing the subject may consult that ; Dowden's admirable Shakspere Primer, Macmillan & Co., London and New York (but I believe more lately published by Messrs. Appleton & Co., New York) ; Mr. Furnivall's Introduction to the Delius Text embodied in The Leopold Shakspere, Cassell, Fetter, & Galpin, London, Paris and New York ; and, here and there, the papers and discussions set forth in the Trans- actions of the New Shakspere Society for 1 874. The method of using this test for the determination of the genuineness of Shakspere's plays can be better explained when we consider the next branch of our present subject, namely : SHAKSPERE'S USE OF THE DOUBLE-ENDING, OR FEMININE-ENDING, LINE. The following is a specimen of the double-ending line, from The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Act \, Scene i : A I r And built A I r so shelv I r ing that I r one can A not climb it Here the final bar has the form J C^T not climb it the typic form J f not climb instead of In the treatment of Chau- 202 Science of English Verse. cer's verse we became familiar with the special rhyth- mic effect of this breaking-up of the typic ? which ter- minates the line into f ^ , its equivalent ; and the "it" in "climb it " here is much like the final e in Chaucer, as to rhythmic value. The feminine ending is a species of double ending : where the two sounds at the end of the line constitute separate words, as in "climb it," the ending is called double ; where these , two sounds belong to the same word, as the terminal word " slander " in 8 I r The leaf the ending is called feminine. Not infrequently the terminal f is broken into three sounds, as in "mira- cles " at the end of the following line : A A A A i r eg - Ian - tine, I r whom not to slan-der A p r Must be A A A I r I r I r a faith that rea - son with ■out mir - ac - les A A A A I r I r I » r r And built so shelv - ing that we can - Let it be carefully observed that in the above three lines the first, if typic, would end with the sound " climb," thus A I r not climb the second line, if typic, would end with "slan-," thus: 8 I r The leaf and the third, if typic, would end with "mir-," thus ; O A A A A A 8 c r c r c r c r c r Must be a faith that rea - son with - out mir ■ A A A A I r r r I ,r • • of eg - Ian - tine, whom not to slan- Double Ending as Metrical Test. 203 From this circumstance such syllables as the "it" in "climb it," "der" in "slander," and "acles" in "mira- cles," are often called " extra syllables." The reader in hearing this term must of course understand that the extra syllable is simply another sound which takes off part of the time-value of the typical l* at the end of blank verse lines, and that there is no such thing in rhythm as a really "extra" syllable, whatever time- value is in the bar being distributed among all the sounds in that bar, whether these be one, or five, or none — that is, rests. Care must be had against mistaking lines as double- ending which are not so. For example the following italicized lines look like double-ending ones at first : Thou shalt not lack The flower that's like thy face, pale primrose, nor The azured harebell like thy veins, no, nor The leaf of eglantine, &c. Neither of them however is a double-ending line : both have the typic termination T, as shown by the scheme : I r : r c r c r I r The flower that's like thy face, pale prim- rose, nor A A A A A I r I r I r The a- zured hare - bell like c r thy veins c r Two very interesting applications of the double-end- ing as a metrical test have been made by modern schol- arship. * This is only a typic scheme, sufficient for the purpose in hand. The actual movement of the voice does not accent the two "nor"s at the end of these lines, but disposes of them in a very interesting way which will presently be explained under Shakspere's 1155 of the rhythmic accent. 204 Science of English Verse. (i) For example, it has been applied, in conjunction with the end-stopped line test, to determine the relative shares of Shakspere and Fletcher in the play of Henry VIII. The very palpable unlikeness in the style of different passages in this play had attracted the atten- tion of critics as early as the time of Dr. Johnson ; but it was in 1850 that the subject was taken hold of in earnest. The Gentleman 's Magazine for that year contained a notable paper by Mr. James Spedding,' in which, after having assigned certain parts of the play to Fletcher and certain parts to Shakspere upon general considera- tions of their respective styles, the writer proceeded to announce at least the possibility of a metrical . test, and partly to shape the method of applying it. The stu- dent will derive such a valuable lesson as to the manner in which reverent scholarship avails itself of apparently trivial facts and applies them in the precise determina- tion of what seem to be insoluble problems, that I think it well worth while to trace the progress of this metri- cal test from the beginning made by Mr. Spedding to the development of it afterwards made by Mr. Fleay and Mr. Furnivall. " It has been observed " (said Mr. Spedding, in the latter part of his paper) . . . that lines with a redundant syllable at the end " — by which he means double-ending and feminine-ending lines — "occur in Henry VIII. twice as often as in any of Shak- spere's other plays. Now, it will be found on examina- tion that this observation does not apply to all parts of the play alike, but only to those which I have noticed as, in their general character, un-Shaksperian." He ' Entitled " Who wrote Shakspere's Henry VIII. ? " It may be found reprinted in the Transactions of the New Shakspere Society for 1874, Mr. Spedding's Test with Double Endings. 205. then arranges a table in which he gives the proportion of double-ending lines to the whole number of lines, for each scene of the play. Having next ascertained what is the ordinary proportion of such lines in two of Shak- spere's plays which were written about the same period with Henry VIII. — namely, Cymbeline and Winter's Tale — he goes through the table, and wherever he finds this proportion substantially carried out in any scene, he assigns that scene to Shakspere ; wherever he finds a greatly larger proportion of double-ending lines in a scene, he assigns that scene to Fletcher. Having com- pared these assignments with those which he had pre- viously made, based upon broader grounds of style, he finds them substantially agreeing. Before showing the further development of this pro- cess, it is impossible to forbear an acknowledgment of gratitude to the author of the paper just quoted as a genuine discoverer in criticism. While, as has been before remarked, the double-ending test should not be pushed into minuter offices than it or any other such test can discharge; yet, as a precise and numerically- verifiable check to critical estimates which have been formed upon other considerations often liable to bias from personal temperament and always more or less vague, it is of very great value ; and, as importing into criticism the methods of exact science and to that ex- tent relieving it from its long-time opprobrium of uncer- tainty, the service of Mr. Spedding to modern culture must be regarded very great. In course of time a clew which made the process of reasoning just detailed still more precise, was found. Mr. Fleay, in examining several Elizabethan dramatists besides Shakspere with reference to the use of rhymes, 206 Science of English Verse. double-endings, &c., in their verse, had observed amongst other things that Fletcher's verse is distinguished, " (i) By number of double or female endings ; these are more numerous in Fletcher than in any other writer in the language, and are sufficient of themselves to dis- tinguish his works ; " " (2) By frequent pauses at the end of lines ; this union of ' the stopped line ' with the double ending is peculiar to Fletcher." ' Without going farther into Mr. Fleay's skilful and laborious researches : if we examine, by the musical method of schemes, a double-ending line of Fletcher's with reference to the peculiarity marked (2) above, we shall find Fletcher's combination of "double-ending" with "end-stopped" line to be a rhythmic idiosyncrasy so individual as to form a very well-marked test be- tween Fletcher and Shakspere, especially when we add the characteristic circumstance that Fletcher's double endings very often consist of two important words, as "a friend's part" (which is the final bar of the first Fletcher line given below), instead of " to climb it," a heavy word and a light one (" it ") as in Shakspere's double-ending line before cited. Here then is a scheme of five consecutive lines from Fletcher, in the Little French Lawyer: r r Col - our'd A c r A gen - A A : r I r with smooth ex- cu A A I r I r tie - man's, a man's A c r ses. Was't A c r that wears a friend's part, A t r a sword, ' p. 53, Rev. F. G. Fleay's paper number 2, On Metrical Tests as ap- plied to Dramatic Poetry, printed in The Transactions of the New Shak- spere Society, for 1 874. Scheme of Fletcher's Double Endings. 207 A 1 I r And stands A 1 c r To hide I r up on A I r his head A A z r t r the point of rep- A A I r c 9 that when his hon- u ta - tion, A our call'd him, r r Call'd him C r loud A A c r I r and led him to his for - tune ? If the final bars in the first, third, fourth, and fifth of these lines be examined, it will be found that each ends not only in two sounds, but that these two sounds have a comma after them, indicating a rest of the voice be- tween their last sound and the first of the next line, and thus distinguishing them from run-on lines which have no such rest. Now it must be remembered that in the ordinary end-stopped line this rest is supplied out of the time-value of the last f in the final bar,* thus : A A A c r : r r r But, as I think, (for tru - I r ly would I speak, — where the silence indicated by the dash in the text is indicated by the 1 in the scheme, and the time-value of " speak," which would otherwise be f, has been reduced to P to make room for the rest. But if the first line of Fletcher's above-cited be read aloud one easily feels that this procedure will not do : after the words " a friend's part," a longer and more pronounced rest is needed before the intercalary clauses, " a gentleman's, a man's that wears a sword," &c. Whence is this rest to come? We cannot slice off a cantle of the time- value of "part" for it, — for " part " itself has had to share some of the time-value of "friend's" — thus 208 Science of English Verse. f T"^ — and its time-value p is not enough for a friend's part the rest here needed. In point of fact the voice makes another bar to the line here : and — relying upon the rhythmic sense which will never tolerate any thing like an " extra " or "redundant" sound, but which inexorably fills out with rests any bar partly occupied by sound — the actual conduct of the reader's voice in such a line is as follows : « r r c r Col-our'd with smooth I r c A A A r : r I ^ Was't a friend's part Here the requisite rest is obtained at the end ; but obtained by making the line-group consist of six bars instead of the five bars which constitute a typic line of blank verse. Thus the precision of the musical system of noting rhythm acquaints us with the important fact that many of Fletcher's end-stopped double-ending lines are really Alexandrines,' and that this is the secret of the characteristic effect which Fletcher's rhythm ^ pro- duces upon every ear, — an effect smooth, yet heavy and ' Lines consisting of six bars of the form § ^ * are called " Alexandrines " from their use in the French poem ne Alexandriad. ' Mr. Emerson, in Representative Men, gives a perfect description of it, though apparently not suspecting Fletcher here. He describes the verse of Fletcher's part of Henry VIII. as "written by a superior, thoughtful man, with a vicious ear," adding: "I can mark his lines, and know well their cadence. . . . The lines are constructed on a given tune, and the verse has even a trace of pulpit eloquence." Mr. Spedding in a letter to The Gentleman's Magazine, October, 1850, (reprinted in the Shaks.,Soc. Trans, for 1874, Appendix, p. 21) mentions: " The resemblance of the style, in some parts of the play, to Fletcher's, Fletcher's Double Endings, Alexandrines. 209 crawling withal. If now we compare this fact with the curiously-differing practice of Shakspere, we obtain a very striking mark of distinction. While Shakspere used the double-ending line far more freely in his late period than in his early one — the early Love's Labor's Lost has but nine ' double-ending lines in a total of 2,789 while the late Winter's Tale has six hundred and thirty-nine double-endings in a total of 2,758 — he also used the run-on line with a similarly-increased frequen- cy : so that while by virtue of the more frequent double- endings his verse grew more like Fletcher's, it grew more unlike Fletcher's by virtue of the enormous musical dif- ference between Shakspere's run-on lines, which are merely rendered more elastic and varied by the double- ending, and Fletcher's end-stopped lines, which are really impressed with the sluggishness of the Alexandrine by the double-ending. In other words, Shakspere's run-on double-ending line preserves the metrical type of the five-barred blank verse line, and agreeably varies the rhythmical type ; while Fletcher's end-stopped double- ending line frequently destroys the metrical type of blank verse, giving it six bars instead of five to the line, and does not vary the rhythm at all. But, to return from this digression. The procedure described by Mr. Spedding in his paper on Henry VIII. was carried out by Mr. Fleay on a larger scale, with the was pointed out to me several years ago by Alfred Tennyson . . . ; and long before that the general distinctions between Shakspere's manner and Fletcher's had been admirably explained by Charles Lamb in his note on the Two Noble Kinsmen, and by Mr. Spalding in his Essay." ' Perhaps it is worth while noting a probable lapsus of the pen which gives this number as " seven " in Mr. Fleay's paper number I On Metrical Tests applied to Shakspere, p. 7, while the figure in the annexed table is " 9." ■ ' 2IO Science of English Verse. additional clew of Fletcher's habitual combination of the double-ending with the end-stop ; and the result was a substantial confirmation of Mr. Spedding's original distribution. It is worth the student's while to remem- ber the general proportions of double-endings as be- tween Fletcher and Shakspere at the period when Henry VIII. was written — probably about 1613. This proportion appears, from the table in Mr. Fleay's note printed on page 23 of the Appendix to the New Shak- spere Society's Transactions for 1874, to have been as follows. Out of the 1,146 blank verse lines in Henry VIII. assigned to Shakspere, 380 were double endings : while, out of 1,467 blank verse lines assigned to Fletch- er, 863 were double endings. Again : Mr. Spedding's distribution was independent- ly confirmed, upon an examination of the play with reference to the end-stopped line only, by Mr. Furnivall. When it is stated that Mr. Samuel Hickson, before 1850, had made an independent distribution of the parts between Shakspere and Fletcher on general grounds of style, which, after the publication of Mr. Spedding's paper, was found to agree with its conclusions in a surprising manner, the student will be able to perceive the valuable aid which minute criticism — as we may perhaps call the verse-tests — can render in affording checks to large criticism. The mention of Mr. Fleay's name in connection with the double-ending researches above makes it necessary to add that he has associated his name most completely with the rhyme-test — which ascertains chronology &c. from Shakspere's growing disuse of rhymes as he be- came older — while Mr. Spedding places more reliance upon the pause-test, that is, the relative occurrence of Shakspere 's Weak Endings. 211 rests in the body of the line and at the end of the line, at different periods of Shakspere's work. SHAKSPERE'S USE OF WEAK-ENDING AND LIGHT- ENDING LINES. A line of blank verse ending in a merely conjunctive word such as and, as, if, in, nor, than, with, is called a weak-ending line : while one ending in an auxiliary verb such as am, have, is, would, and the like, or in a relative pronoun who, which, that, and the like, or in since, while, through, till, and such words, is called a light-ending line. In the following lines from The Winter's Tale, the first is a light-ending, and. the second is a weak-end- ing line : Since what I am to say, must be but that Which contradicts my accusation, and The testimony on my part no other But what comes from myself, it scarce shall boot me. It is readily seen that weak and light endings really make a species of run-on lines, for they have in common the incident that the voice does not pause after their last sound but runs-on its rhythmic grouping into the next line. The use of these endings therefore forms an important part of phrasing ; and nothing is more notice- able than the parallelism between the advance which Shakspere made in the breadth and freedom of his phrasing and the advance which every growing musi- cian makes in precisely the same particulars. Observe for instance how grand and sweeping are the phrases in the lines quoted : the real metrical grouping is Since what I am to say, Must be but that which contradicts my accusation, And the testimony on my part no other but what comes from myself ; 2 1 2 Science of English, Verse. and the words are so arranged that the rhythm is of incessant variety while the type is never lost sight of. The weak and light-ending lines, like the run-on lines of which they are a species, are highly character- istic of Shakspere's later periods as contradistinguished from his earlier ones : but they differ from the double- ending and run-on lines in the circumstance that they do not show a gradual increase in frequency but seem to appear almost suddenly in Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra, after which they are freely used. For example, in the 1,146 lines constituting Shak- spere's part of Henry VIII. there are 82 weak and light endings ; and Cymbeline, another very late play, shows 130 weak and light endings; while some earlier plays, such as Comedy of Errors and Two Gentlemen of Verona., have none at at all. Midsummer Night's Dream one, and Henry IV. one in each part. The subject of weak and light endings in its relation to Shakspere's art has been developed by Professor Ingram, of Trinity College, Dublin, who has formulated his researches in a most useful table showing the per- centages of such endings in the plays. SHAKSPERE'S USE OF THE RHYTHMIC ACCENT. In his peculiar management of the rhythmic accent, also, Shakspere's supreme mastery of the technic of blank verse shows itself with great clearness. We can see him learning to think in verse. Indeed, growing always, in the way of the artist, — always profiting by the practice of his earlier comedy, of his middle-period tragedy, — always converting acquisition into second nature, — he finally made his whole technic a constitu- Shakspere^s use of the Rhythmic Accent. 213 tional grace, so that his passion flowed with a hereditary pre-adaptation to rhythm. The great underlying principle, however, of all Shak- spere's applications of his technic in practice was a superb confidence in the common rhythmic perception of men and a clear insight into the rhythmic habit of familiar English utterance. This method of working with a constant inward reference to the great average and sum of men, and with an absolute reliance upon their final perception, is the secret of that infinitely- varied rhythm which we find plashing through all the later blank verse of Shakspere ; and one of the most frequent means by which he effected these variations without either impairing the type of the verse or strain- ing the habit of utterance out of its familiar course was the artful transferrence into verse of the actual use which English-speaking people make of the rhythmic accent in their current discourse. Perhaps every one has observed that particularly in Shakspere's later plays he seems absolutely careless as to what kind of word the rhythmic accent may fall on. Sometimes it is on the article the, sometimes the prepo- sition of, sometimes the conjunction and, sometimes the unaccented syllable of a two-sound word as quickens instead of quickens, and so on. This apparent carelessness is really perfect art. It is the consummate management of dramatic dialogue in blank verse, by which the wilder rhythmic patterns of ordinary current discourse are woven along through the regular strands of the orderly typic lines. The following illustrative schemes aim to show the student precisely how this is done. Every one knows what is called an " air with variations," in music, and has ^i4 Science of English Vers6. observed how in each "variation" the "air" is to be heard, maintaining its comparatively simple melody, as a sort of type, through all the complexities of the varia- tion-forms. If, then, the typic form of blank verse — which is, a line of five bars, each bar of the form 8 t r be considered the air, and the actual rhythmic movement of the voice in uttering each line be considered the variation, we shall have a tolerably precise conception of the relation between type and variety. And such a conception suggests the course pursued in arranging the following schemes for the pur- pose of showing Shakspere's peculiar freedom in using the rhythmic accent. A given passage being taken, we first apply each line of the words to a line of the musi- cally-noted type of blank verse : such application will show the rhythmic accent falling upon sounds which do not receive any accent in familiar discourse ; but if we then read the words for the sense, note down the actual conduct of the voice in so reading them, and compare the resulting notation with that of the type, we will always find that the type is carefully preserved in all its essential features but only varied by different distribu- tions of time-values in each bar to accommodate the proper position of the accent. This proposition sounds obscure in the abstract, but becomes quite clear in the concrete illustration. In studying these schemes, the student should have always in mind the following principles : (i) That in Shakspere's verse the only way to get the exact rhythm is to read for the sense ; (2) That Shakspere never mangles the type of his blank verse ; Rhythmic Accent in The Tempest. 215 (3) That consequently, in every line,' five rhythmic accents are always present or accounted-for : and that it is in his method of " accounting-for " them that Shakspere's mastery is so apparent, for it is the method of common speech, and his verse thus forever crowds the firm fabric of the type, as a canvas, with all the multitudinous and floating rhythmical figures of every- day utterance. Only the most frequent forms of this accentual varia- tion are here given. An exhaustive presentation of them all would be impossible in this space. But it is hoped that every student with an ordinary musical ear will be able to perceive, and to note down, the philoso- phy of all Shakspere's music, from the illustrations given. Let us apply the process detailed in a previous sec- tion, for example, to the following passage from Ferdi- nand's soliloquy in The Tempest, Act III. Scene i. This my mean task Would be as heavy to me as odious ; but The mistress which I serve quickens what's dead And makes my labors pleasures. Applying the first three lines to their types, we have the scheme : % ■ ■ • A t r' This my A c r mean task A A A A A t r Would be I u as heav - y c r to me as - di - t r ous, but ' Of course those lines excepted which are evidently meant to contain three, or less, bars, or four, or six, bars : some of which are written to vary the metrical type, some due to corrupt texts, some to lapsus of hurry, and the like causes. 2l6 Science of English Vers6. t r The mist ress which t r I serve t r quick -ens t r what's dead On observing the position of the stress-mark '^ in this scheme we find the accentuation in three places to be such as would sound very absurd in usual speech. In the first line an accent falls on " my ; " in the second on "but ; " in the third on the syllable "-ens " of quick- ens. Of course no one would read : .This my mean task would be as heavy to me as odious but the mistress which I serve quick/;2J what's dead. But, when read for the sense as if it were prose, this is the rhythmic movement as heard in the ordinary reader's utterance : r t This my A . .-^ but A r r what's dead r r mean task would be I as heav-y A : r The mist ress which r r c c c I serve . . quick-ens If now we take this prose utterance and divide it off into line-groups of five bars each, we will be able to compare it bar for bar with the typic scheme. For this purpose let us write the typic scheme, then under it bar for bar the actual scheme, and finally the corresponding words. Typic Scheme : . Actual Scheme : Words : . t r A This my t r A r r mean task Discussion of Scheme from The Tempest. 2 1 7 A.S. ^ p Words: Would be \ I u as heav-y C f to me 6 A T.S. I r JKoraJr .- The mist - ^ 10 A ^ c t [. r r c r ress which I serve ^ a5-^ r c f c as o - di - ous II • A ; .r c.r •1 1 but ^ r c r what's dead. . . quick-ens Let us compare such bars of this actual scheme as differ from their corresponding bars in the typic scheme. This particular passage was selected because it reveals the three methods most habitual with Shakspere of vary- ing the rhythmic accent and still preserving the type. (i) On comparing bar i of the actual scheme with its corresponding bar of the typic scheme above, we find that the typic accent has been shifted to the first in- stead of the second word in the bar; the typic form A A * I , with the accent on " my " becomes ^J This my This my with the accent on " this." We have here a form of varying the typic bar « • which was in great favor with Shakspere, and indeed with Chaucer two hundred years before him, though not nearly so freely used by Chaucer as by Shakspere. The substituted form i Ld* might be better written — to suit the more flowing and less snapped-o£f utterance of some readers — thus 1 r c in which f C is 2 1 8 Science of English Verse. given in the same time as f, being indeed only another form of the familiar triole f f P- Now the occurrence of the rest at the beginning of this form connects it- self in an interesting manner with the circumstance that Shakspere's favorite places for using this form are : (i) at the beginning of a line ; and (2) at the beginning of a phrase, just after the rest which marks off the pre- ceding phrase. The fitness of such places for this sort of bar may be thus explained. The form -1 • ^ • . or 1 •• • > (which we may hereafter use quite interchangeably) presents a curiously plastic bar to come at the beginning of a line because it can be made by the ear to fit-on to the end of either a double-ending run-on line or an end-stopped line with great facility by means of the vacant place represented by the "i . For example, here is a double- ending line out of Cymbeline, running-on to a line which begins with this form, that is, with the first sound accented : Perfumes the chamber thus : the flame o' the taper Bows toward her. Now in practice the last sound " -er " of " taper " would here be put in the place of the *i which begins the usual form of such a bar as \ v ' ^^i^ instead Bows to- of being what is usually called the "redundant syllable" of the double-ending line "Perfumes the &c. ta.per" it would be the unaccented first syllable of the next line, as in this scheme : Chaucer's Lines beginning with Rests. 219 8 1 r Per-fumes A I r the chamb- A t r er thus : the flame o' A I r the ta I r I per Bows to ■ Thus after a run-on line with a double-ending, the next line may begin upon an accented syllable — instead of upon the unaccented syllable always beginning a typic line of blank verse — with peculiarly dove-tailing effect. Shakspere is evidently fond of it, and we find many pairs of lines for which the scheme just given would serve. On the other hand, in beginning the line after an end-stopped line, the T in the form "i r c fur- nishes the proper pause which the voice must make in ending an end-stopped line, — without the necessity of slicing-off a part of the time-value of the last sound in the final bar of the end-stopped-line for that rest. Here it is evident that the 1 in the form 1 r r discharges two functions: (i) of marking-off the hne- group or phrase-group which precedes i-t, and (2) of accounting to the ear for the customary unaccented syl- lable which precedes every accented syllable in typic blank verse. Chaucer evidently likes to set-off with this form, in beginning a tale, or a stanza, or a line. The prologue 3 -1 to the Canterbury Tales opens with it, g ~ the first tale, The Knight's opens with it. I Whan that I &c; 220 Science of English Verse. 3 8 A A : r A r r Whil - om as old - e sto - A I r ries tell I r A A A A I r I r I r I LJ quod he, in chirch- es whan I prech - e the Pardoner's prologue opens with it, Lord-ynges, many lines begin with it, such as, in the Wife of Bath's tale, Kisse me, Continuing our comparison of corresponding bars in the typic and actual schemes, and passing-over bars 2, 3, 4, and 5 which are alike in both : we come to bars 6 and 7 which reveal one of Shakspere's characteristic methods of disposing of the rhythmic accent. Here the accent in the typic line would fall on " but : " 7 but the rhythmus of common A A A ^ 1 I r I r : r CCJf quod sche we be no leng - er wroth - e 6 A as o - di I r ous but utterance, such as any on? would unconsciously use in speaking these words, makes a different distribution of the time-values in each of these bars (as Shakspere well knew) and not only throws the whole of the word "-odi- ous " into the 6th bar, but fills up the place of "-ous" in the 7th bar with the rest 1, at the samd time slicing A off part of the • in the typic bar for another rest *i, thus leaving "but," as it should be, unaccented and easily running on to the next line, — so easily, in fact, that many voices — perhaps most — would put it in the next line entirely, and make the 7th bar all rest, thus : The Rest both Rhythmic and Logical. 221 I I r but the mist c r ress which &c This rest in bar 7 is here of great importance and inter- est. We had occasion in discussing the line "Than the soft myrtle &c.," above, to observe how cunningly Shakspere interposes a rest in the body of the line at a point where there is to be a great change or antithe- sis in the idea — where indeed many writers would punctuate with a dash, or a semicolon. The rest here is of exactly similar logical function : Ferdinand, a prince, set by Prospero to carrying logs, says : "This, my mean task, would be as heavy to me as odious " — here how- ever the image of Miranda comes to him ; his frown of disgust changes to the rapturous smile of love ; a wholly antithetical idea is to be expressed, and before express- ing it, Shakspere inserts the rest after the unaccented syllable "-ous" of "odious" just as for the same pur- pose he inserted the rest after the unaccented syllable "-tie'' of "myrtle," — " but the mistress which I serve quickens what's dead &c." The rest, therefore, of the 7th bar discharges both the logical office of separating the antithetic clauses, and the rhythmical office of re- lieving " but " from the rhythmic accent. Passing-over bars 8 and 9 which are alike in both schemes, we come to bars 10 and 11 which show us a third method of Shakspere's for relieving sounds from the rhythmic accent which would not take the pronun- ciation-accent, herein also remembering how this relief 22 2 Science of English Verse. is given in ordinary speech and applying the principle in verse. In the typic bar 1 1 the rhythmic accent would 10 3 -^ 11 A : r quick-ens &c.: fall on "-ens" of "quickens," g • P I serve but in uttering these words, the reader would make a different distribution of the time-values : the sound "serve" — which is a good sound for prolonging with- out the drawl which English ears hate — is held-over into the next bar until it occupies the f time-value pre- viously occupied by "quick-;" and the sound "quick-," being thus relieved, is assigned to the next note forward, which is tiie accented note, while its other sound "-ens " A is given to the third eighth-note, the p of the typic bar being broken into two T T for "quick" and "ens" re- spectively. There are many voices, of decisive or jerky utterance, which will not prolong a note : such voices, instead of relieving the sound " quick " as above by a prolonga- tion of " serve " through the time of the first T in the " quickens " bar, would give " serve " only its own time and simply substitute a rest *" for that ^ , thus : lO 8 1 r I serve II A quick-ens &c. The student who will patiently master the three methods now detailed in connection with (i) bar i, (2) bars 6 and 7, and (3) bars 10 and 11, will be at no loss in interpreting Shakspere's subtlest dispositions of the rhythmic accent. Although these methods may appear Type and Variety in Verse. 223 abstruse at first to those unfamiliar with the logic of rhythmical processes, they will presently become en- tirely plain : they are indeed the most familiar phe- nomena in music, in popular poetry, and in the utter- ance used for ordinary English conversation, nor ought they to be regarded as any thing more than the mere A B C of English verse. They would not be so re- garded if it were not for certain wide-spread misconcep- tions which have resulted in blinding many persons to the vitally-important distinction between type and vari- ety in verse. When the classic prosodies inform us that the hexameter consists of dactyls and spondees alternating at pleasure except that the last foot in a line must always be a spondee and the next-last always a dactyl, they give us but the type of the hexameter. The actual movement of a Greek or Latin reader's voice in delivering Homer or Virgil would without question exhibit variations of the type analogous to those which have just been discussed in Shakspere's verse. It is likely that if the knowledge of classic prosody was not so often confined to the knowledge of the classic hex- ameter only, these misconceptions as to the type might be dissipated by facts which must attract the attention of all thorough students of forms of classic verse other than the hexameter. For example, the interposition of the rest in the body of the line, and the relief of sylla- bles not admitting the rhythmic accent by the various methods just detailed, might — if we understood familiar Greek utterance as well as we do our own — easily solve many of the Greek choruses which are at present but rhythmic confusion ; and I think there can be no doubt that these choruses are, like Shakspere's verse, an escape out of the rigidities of the type into tie infinity 224 Science of English Verse. fields of those subtle rhythms which pervade familiar utterance. Thus, approached from the direction of classic prosody — and often from that of only so much classic prosody as is involved in the narrow type of the hexameter — Shakspere's verse has often seemed a mass of "license," of "irregularity," and of lawless anomaly to commentators ; while, approached from the direction of that great rhythmic sense of humanity dis- played in music, in all manner of folk-songs, and in common talk, it is perfect music. In closing this necessarily meagre account of blank verse it is interesting to note that the prevalence in English poetry of the iambus — which is the basis of blank verse — had already attracted attention as early as the third quarter of the i6th century. I find Webbe speaking of it, in his Discourse : " The naturall course of most English verses seemeth to run uppon the old Iambic stroake," he says. Gascoigne, in his Certayne Notes of Instruction, also refers to it : " Commonly now a dayes in english rimes we use none other order but a foote of two sillables, whereof the first is depressed or made short, and the second is elevate or made long," i.e. J I* I, or the iambus : "and surely I can lament" — he adds — "that wee are fallen into such a playne and simple manner of wryting, that there is none other foote used but one." A still more cunning testimonial to the exclusive prevalence of the iambus occurs in King James's Reulis &c. for verse : for he gives no " Reulis " for any other kind ! as if he were unconscious that English verse admitted any rhythm besides the iambic. His pithy injunction is that "your first syllable in the lyne be short, the second lang." Schemes of ^-Rhythm. 225 CHAPTER VI. . OF 4-RHYTHM, GENERALLY ; AND SPECIALLY, OF ITS TWO FORMS. The type of 4-rhythm is g ^ ^ ^ ' . In Eng- lish verse it usually occurs under the form (i) of u r r I , or the less common form (2) a V w Vi V \ ] ' ^^^ '■^^ varieties of bar in each form alternating with each other subject to no restriction except that usually the variety If Si in form (2) terminates the line. (i) The form (i) g T C C | f I* I is the classic dactyl and spondee. The dactyl is "one long before two short," which corresponds with f T T J and the spondee is two long, which corresponds with f f. The movement of this rhythmus in English is well illustrated by the following old Scotch poem : V c t r : t r r r -^ c Hame came my gude - man, an' hasie came he ; and ^ r r J r r r c J r « There he saw a horse where nae horse should be. It is of great importance to distinguish this T T T. the true classic dactyl, from the bar which is usually called a dactyl in English verse, g ^ ' [/ \. The 226 Science of English Verse. two lie at opposite poles of rhythm, the former — g r V V , the classic dactyl — being in 4-rhythm, studied, formal, ponderous, and the latter « b k T none of these, b"Ut capable of infinite variety. This confusion has arisen from what was called the logacedic dactyl. If we should utter the first f in g I * * (the classic dactyl) short, as might well happen in rapid speech or prose (Greek logos), rather than long as required in the type of the poem or song (Greek aoide), we should have f instead of ?, and r P r I instead of T C C I • ^^'^ '® ^ ^'^^^ °^ prose-song {logos-aoide, "logaoedic") dactyl, or loga- cedic dactyl. But the logaoedic dactyl is our old friend, the type of 3-rhythm, familiar in English verse from its beginning to the present time : while the 4-rhythm classic dactyl is exceedingly scarce in English verse. The " hexam- eters " which were made by Harvey and Webbe in the i6th century, and those in which Mr. Longfellow's poem Evangeline is written, agree with the classic hexameter only in metre, that is, in having 6 bars to the line : their rhythm is totally different and no Eng- lish ear could tolerate them if accurately uttered accord- ing to the classic form g P C C ■ This form of 4-rhythm called the classic dactyl, g f C C — dominating old epic verse almost as 3 completely as the form of 3-rhythm, g • • the iambus, dominates English verse — reveals to us a called 4- Rhythm, Greek: 3- Rhythm, English. 227 remarkable difference in the rhythmic bent or genius of English people as compared with Greek and Latin people. The classic dactyl has the ponderous pulse of march-time : the iambus has the swing of a waltz. The awful second movement in Beethoven's Seventh Symphony — a movement in which he seems to have had in his mind the inexorable march of the human race from the mystery of birth to the mystery of death, the march from the tomb to the tomb, tx tvji^oio ini tvii^ov — has its important subject in exactly this rhythm of the classic dactyls and spondees : E: * eSe ^1 i=st fi=3= ^E^^ it^ ^^E^ S M ij^rzS* in which grim regularity presides like the changeless fate in a Greek tragedy. The next movement of this symphony has its opening subject, on the contrary, in the rapid swing of a very light form of 3-rhythm, nearly akin to the iambus. This subject has been already given. Perhaps the reader will sufficiently understand the possibilities of this form of 4-rhythm in English verse upon analyzing the following fervent ballad of Jean Ingelow's. I give the scheme for the first stanza : the student should then make a scheme for the other three stanzas according to this general type, — for which pur- pose the entire poem is subjoined. 228 Science of English Verse. SCHEME OF FIRST STANZA OF LIKE A LAVEROCK IN THE LIFT. It's we two, it's we two, it's we two for aye, I I I I r i: ttt: ^ ^ All the world and we two,and Hea-venbeour stay. : I LLS Like e Natura Rerum. ^ An anacrusis of two notes instead of one. The anacrusis is only the remainder of a broken bar, and may be as many sounds as the bar will contain, lacking one. ^ The mark ^ denotes that the bar is broken, its remainder being found at the begin- ning of the next line, as anacrusis. Phrase - Groups. 233 CHAPTER VII. OF THE THIRD AND FOURTH ORDERS OF RHYTHMIC GROUPING. The subject of secondary rhythm, or that species of sound-groups called the bar, has now been presented-, in the discussion of the two great types of such group- ing, 3-rhythm and 4-rhythm, with their respective subor- dinate forms. We therefore come to the next order of rhythmic groups which was called tertiary rhythm. This, as explained in the general outline which preceded the more special discussions, is a grouping together not of individual verse-sounds, but of bars, which are already groups of such sounds. It is, in other words, a grouping of groups. And inasmuch as these phrase-groups are mostly not so large as those which we call the line, they may be termed of the third order, while the line-group of bars may be termed of the fourth order. It is not necessary to repeat here the explanation given of the manner in which the phrase-groups, the alliterative groups and the logical-accent groups are marked off for the ear. And the illustrations which have been incidentally given in the various schemes already presented will perhaps sufficiently acquaint the student with the manner in which these minor groups are made to relieve the possible monotony which might result from the invariable equality of bar with bar, and from the usual equality of line with line, in point of their time-valu?. In the manner of using this third 234 Science of English Verse. order of groups I do not think it well for the student to pay any attention to models beyond such as is necessary to understand the philosophy of the technical processes involved. The phrase-group, the logical group, the alliterative group, — these are matters of the subtlest individuality ; it is in these that each writer must show the stuff of his own ego: in other matters of rhythm — the bar, the line — Shakspere and the anonymous newspaper versifier are alike confined by certain fixities ; but these irregular groupings of the third order let down the bars and turn Pegasus out into the universe. Considering the nature and function of these irregular groups therefore to have been sufficiently explained, and leaving students to work their own wills therein, without meddling with models, we may now pass to the FOURTH ORDER OF SOUND-GROUPS — THE LINE. The ear may co-ordinate one bar with more than one ; two bars with two or more than two ; three with three or more ; and so on : and to this extent it may be said that a line may consist of any number of bars. But the practice of English verse is to use (very rarely) two, (less rarely) three, (very commonly) four, (most commonly) five, sometimes six, seven, or eight, bars to the line. In other words the line, in English verse, usually ranges between the limits of two and eight bars, with a very great majority of four-bar and five-bar lines. It has been before explained that the term metre has come to be. associated, in a connection very familiar to all English-speaking persons, with the number of bars in a line, the hymn-book usually describing a given hymn or psalm as common metre, long metre, &c. This Rhythm without Line -Groups. 235 term seems therefore well enough established to war- rant its use as the peculiar designation of the line-group. "3-rhythm, iambic, 5 metre" for example would fully connote all the rhythmic phenomena of blank verse ; and so on, the first term in such combinations always referring to the rhythm (trochee f T I iambus A I r ,) and the latter figure to the metre. It has been already explained how, in Shakspere's later dramatic dialogues especially, the line-group is often obliterated for the ear, either by run-on lines which carry over the separating pause into the body of the next line, or by phrase-groups which insert pauses within the body of the line. A great prevalence of run-on lines renders this obliteration so complete that, as remarked in the general outline, verse so treated is practically without metre, or line-grouping. I am strongly inclined to believe that English poetry might be a great gainer if we would at once frankly recognize this rhythmic but unmetric verse as a strictly-rhythm- ized prose, and print it as such without the decep- tive line-division. Particularly in using the rhythm g U ^ M ' b ill English verse a certain fini- calness attaches to a regularity of line-grouping : while if it be employed without lines, but merely in great masses of unlined prose, the effect is noble in the high- est degree. A development of English rhythm lies, I feel sure, in this direction. The habit of placing the rhyme — when rhyme is used — most commonly at the end of the line has made the rhyme a distinctive feature of the line-group for the ear, in English verse, Of course the rhyme could be placed 236 Science of English Verse. — and sometimes is, as in Foe's Raven — at other points in the line : and there is no reason for placing it at the end except the rhythmic function which it then dis- charges — of marking-ofE for the ear each rhythmic group of bars comprehended in each line. This purely rhythmic office of rhyme does not seem to have occurred to Puttenham and several of his fellow- critics in the i6th century, who were in the habit of using the term " rhyme " as the very antithesis of " rhythm." A strong party had grown up in Putten- ham's time who were for doing away with "rhyme," in favor of "rhythm," the latter being treated as a term referring to blank verse or to English hexameters. Of course the contempt which some of them felt for " rhyme" was due as much to the abuse of it which had been made by finical poetasters as to their unconscious- ness of the rhythmic powers of rhyme. If a line-group is to be marked-o£f for the ear — and such a group is marked-off by every end-stopped line — there is certainly no reason in the nature of things why it should not be marked-off with rhymes, as well as with mere rests : the rhyme marks it off quite as clearly and more agreeably, by being itself an independent source of pleasure to the ear; just as one might mark-off the miles of a road with marble statues instead of ordinary mile-stones, the statues at once discharging the function of mile-markers (that is, the rhythmic function) and of pleasure-givers on their own account to the eye. In this connection it is interesting to find the word "rhyme" used for " rhythm " before Puttenham. Ormin (also called "Orm"), writing probably early in the 13th century, says, in dedicating The Ormulum to his brother Walter, Poulter's Measure. i^)! Ic hafe sett her o thiss boc T have set here in this book Amang Godspelless wordess, Among GospeVs words All thurrh me sellfenn, manig word All through my self, many {a) word The rime swa to fiUenn. The rime so to fill : and inasmuch as rhymes occur only here and there while the rhythm of the poem is skilfully carried out every- where, he must mean that he has set here in this book many a word to fill the rhythm. The subject of rhyme as rhyme — that is, as a pleas- ure of the ear dependent on tone-color and unconnected with rhythm — is treated in Part III. under the title "Colors of English Verse." Since the i6th century the favorite lines of English verse have been almost entirely 4's and s's. During that century, however, a great deal of poetry was writ- ten in the long 12's and 14's, as they were called from the number of syllables in alternate lines, like the fol- lowing lines of Queen Elizabeth's poem (notice the pause in the middle of the first line and of every alter- nate line thereafter, which Puttenham comically calls a " Cesure ") : The fear of future foes, exiles my present joy, And wit me warnes to shun such snares as threaten mine annoy. This was called "poulter's measure," as Gascoigne quaintly informs us, because the "poulters," in selling, were in the habit of giving twelve for the first dozen and fourteen for the next, and so on. 238 Science of English Vers6. Other sorts of lines had acquired special designations at this time. Puttenham calls the metre in which the Canterbury Tales are written " Riding Rime," and that of Chaucer's Troylus and Cryseyde " meetre Heroicall." Gascoigne and others term " Rithme Royall " the stanza in which each verse — their "verse" here meaning our "line" — has "tenne sillables, and seven such verses make a staffe" (stanza), "whereof the first and thirde lines do awnswer (acrosse) in like terminations and rime, the second, fourth, and fifth do likewise answere eche other . . . and the two last do combine and shut up the sentence." It is the stanza of Chaucer's Troylus and Cryseyde, and of King James's The King's Quhair. Various Stanza - Groups. 239 CHAPTER VIII. OF THE FIFTH ORDER OF RHYTHMIC GROUPS. THE STANZA. As the line is a group of smaller groups (or bars), so the stanza is a group of the line-groups. A stanza — often called a "verse" in the common speech of the present day — may be a group of two, three, or any number of lines, in English verse. Per- haps I should say in English verse since the i6th cen- tury : for it is evident that Puttenham had never seen stanzas of two or of three lines. He says : " The shortest staffe " — by staffe he means stanza — "con- teineth not under foure verses," ' — using "verses" in its classic sense as lines. But we have poems in stanzas of two lines, as Tenny- son's Locksley Hall, of which the first stanza is. Comrades, leave me here a little, while as yet 'tis early morn ; Leave me here, and when you want me, sound upon the bugle horn. And we have poems in stanzas of three lines, as Tenny- son's The Two Voices, of which the first stanza is, A still small voice spake unto me, " Thou art so full of misery. Were it not better not to be ? " or as Miss A. C. Thompson's perfect little Song of the Night at Dawn, of which the first stanza is, ' Arte of English Foesie, p. 79, Arber Reprint. 240 Science of English Verse. Whither shall I run Till the set of sun, Till the day be done ? Besides these we have poems in stanzas of four lines, too common to need illustration ; of five lines, as Ten- nyson's On a Mourner ; of six lines as Shakspere's Venus and Adonis ; of seven lines, as Chaucer's Troylus and Cryseyde, or Shakspere's Lucrece ; of eight lines, as T&nnyso-a's Charge of the Light Brigade ; of nine lines, as Spenser's Faery Queen ; and so on. The Faery Queen by the way was not known to Put- tenham, whose quaint argument against five lines to the stanza would apply equally well to the nine-lined stanzas of that poem : " A staffe of five verses," he says, meaning a stanza of five lines, " is not much used be- cause he that carl not comprehend his periode in foure verses, will rather drive it into six then " (than) "leave it in five, for that the even number is more agreable to the eare then the odde is." We are therefore practically without limitation as to the number of lines in any stanza of English verse. There is however one form of stanza which has re- mained a strictly-specialized form ever since its intro- duction into English by Surrey and Wyatt in the earlier part of the i6th century, and which, as such a strictly- specialized form, as well as by virtue of its remarkable fitness for particular purposes, must claim separate mention under the present head. This is the form known as THE SONNET. The sonnet is always one stanza of fourteen lines. These lines are iambic 5's, rhymed according to fixed rules. Of these rules there are two sets, governing Italian, or Legitimate^ Sonnet. 241 respectively (i) the Italian, or Legitimate, sonnet, and (2) the English, or Illegitimate, sonnet. (i) The Italian sonnet is so called from the fact that this form of stanza was imported into our language from the Italian; and the synonymous term "legitimate" is applied to it because soon after its introduction another form of fourteen-lined stanza began to be used in which the succession of rhymes was different in order from that authorized by the Italian laws for this sort of verse ; and to distinguish the two one was called the Italian, or Legitimate, the other the English or Illegiti- mate, sonnet. The Italian is often called, also, the " Strict " form of the sonnet. The order of rhymes in the Italian, legitimate, or strict, sonnet may be gathered from the following beau- tiful example of this species of poem by Sir Thomas Wyatt. The order as to the first eight lines is always that presented in this poem : but the last six lines may be varied in the order of their rhymes so far as to rhyme either in couplets or triplets, and so far as to allow the rhymes to be either successive, alternate, or three apart. The first eight lines of this Italian sonnet are often called the " major portion," and the last six lines the "minor portion;" we find the major portion often separated, in printing, from the minor portion, by a space ; and some have even gone so far as to hold that there should be a certain change of sentiment on pass- ing from the major portion to the minor portion. This seems, however, to be a somewhat finical regulation, and without any particular authority. It may be re- marked, however, that every sonnet, whether legitimate or illegitimate, ought to be really a little drama, with every idea in every line converging directly upon some 242 Science of English Verse. special idea in the last two lines, like rays of light into a focus. A good sonnet should always therefore be read with a certain suspension of the reader's thought until the end is reached, and the end should always throw back a new and comprehensive interest upon all that precedes it. SIR THOMAS WYATT'S "NOLI ME TANGERE"' SONNET. MAJOR PORTION. First Qttatrain. Who list to hunt ? I know where is an hind But as for me, alas, I may no more. The vain travail hath wearied me so sore ; I am of them that furthest come behind. Second Quatrain. Yet may I by no means my wearied mind Draw from the deer ; but, as she fleeth afore, Fainting I follow. I leave off, therefore. Since in a net I seek to hold the wind. MINOR PORTION. Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt, As well as I, may spend his time in vain ; And, graven with diamonds in letters plain. There is written her fair neck round about : " Noli me tangere ; for Caesar's I am, And wildfe for to hold, though I' seem tame." Here it is seen that in the major portion the ist, 4th, Sth, and 8th lines rhyme together, and the 2nd, 3rd, 6th and 7th lines rhyme together ; while in the minor por- tion the first four lines present alternate rhymes, and the last two make a couplet. ' ' It has been thought that Wyatt loved Anne Boleyn, and wrote this sonnet with cunning hints as to his dangerous rival Henry VIII. English, or Illegitimate, Sonnet. 243 (2) The English, illegitimate, or free, sonnet pre- serves all the strictness of the Italian so far as concerns the law of fourteen iambic s's; but has its rhymes in the order displayed by the following sonnet of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, the co-worker of Wyatt in introducing this species of verse into English. This sonnet is a translation from one of Petrarch's. Love, that liveth and reigneth in my thought, That built his seat within my captive breast, Clad in the arms wherein with me he fought, Oft in my face he doth his banner rest : She that me taught to love and suffer pain, My doubtful hope and eke my hot desire With shamefaced cloak to shadow and restrain, Her smiling grace converteth straight to ire : And coward Love then to the heart apace Taketh his flight, whereas he lurks and plains His purpose lost, and dare not show his face. For my lord's guilt, thus faultless, bide 1 pains. Yet from my lord shall not my foot remove : Sweet is his death that takes his end by love \ This form of the sonnet has become sacred to all seri- ous people since the heavenly series of private prayers and confessions which Shakspere whispered in it. THE SONNET IN ENGLISH POETRY. For this purpose, the sonnet has come to be an acknowledged and set method in English. During the last three hundred years, whenever an English poet has had any personal and holy matters which he could not refrain from putting into form, he has mostly adopted the sonnet — one or other species of it — for that form. Each sonnet is like a letter from the poet to you, marked "confidential" at the top. Of this personal 244 Science of English Verse. nature are many beautiful series of sonnets in English : those of Wyatt and Surrey; Constable's To Diana; Griffin's To Fidessa ; Drayton's, called / or of the form _^__„_, or many other such possible combinations not specified by prosody, were included under the gen- eral term syzygies, or yokings-together of quantities. As in thfe other cases, it is not deemed proper to give specific directions for phonetic syzygy in verse. The habit of noting such sequences will presently breed in the mind that unconscious care of them which will guide the thought, in its working, towards the proper combinations. It is impossible not to cite in this connection the two perfect lines of Tennyson whose physical beauty depends on their suave syzygy of M-colors, aided by a delicious distribution of vowel-colors : Or moan of doves in immemorial elms And murmur of innumerable bees. , Sounds, not Letters, alliterate. 309 CHAPTER XIV. OF ALLITERATION. Alliteration occurs where the initial vowel-sounds or consonant-sounds of two or more consecutive, or near, accented syllables are the same. In the rhyme these initial sounds are necessarily different : and to this extent alliteration is the counterpart of rhyme. For" example, in Fullyathom/ive thy-yather lies, the italicized /'s are alliterative, for they begin accented sounds : while the first F, in " Full," is not strictly alliterative since it comes on an unaccented syllable. Observe that it is the sound, and not the letter, which is alliterative ; and hence, as in the case of rhyme, we may have alliteration when the letters are different, as The sea that doth exceed his banks, where the " s" in "sea" and the "c" in "exceed" alliterate, being the same color, though different letters ; and so we may not have alliteration where the letters are the same, as in The harp not honor'd with a song, where the h in " harp " does not alliterate with the h in " honor'd," the one being pronounced and the other not. I have already detailed the irhythmic function of alliteration and have called the student's attention to 3IO Science of English Verse. the wholly different part played, as to this function, by alliteration in Anglo-Saxon poetry from that in more modern English verse. We found that while allitera- tion was used among the Anglo-Saxon poets to establish and fortify the main rhythm of the verse, its effect in modern verse is to vary the main rhythm by irregtilar and unlooked-for groups which break the monotony of the set rhythmic movement. The law of alliteration was strikingly specialized in Anglo-Saxon verse, as already detailed. Many lines ' were found to present one of the two following types : either the first three accented verse-sounds begin with the same consonant-color, or with some vowel-color ; or the second and third accented sounds begin with the same consonant-color, or with some vowel-color. Thus a passage from The Phcenix, already partly quoted, has every line of the first type (3 alliterative letters) except the third, which presents the .second type (2 alliterative letters). To show these alliterative letters clearly to the eye, they are printed in Italic capitals. Ne .Forstes iTiasst, ne i^yres blaest, ne haggles Hryrt, ne ATrimes dryre, ne Yunnan hsetu, ne .S'incald, ne IVaxm Jf'eder, ne Jfinter scur, W"i\\i& ge Wirdan, ac se Wong seomath .E^dig and Onsund; is thaat .<^thele lond .Slostmum ge^lowen. Inasmuch as this alliterative letter is, except in very rare cases, the initial letter of an important word, — and moreover of the important sound of an important word — it is easy to see that such alliteration must have ' I speak of the double section as a " line : " it corresponds precisely with the line-group as herein detailed. Line -Groups broken by Alliteration. 311 made the beat of the rhythmic movement very strong and commanding to the ear; for the first verse-sound in every alliterated bar is thus signalized to the ear by a pronunciation-accent, a logical accent, a rhythmic ac- cent, and a tone-color. The fondness for alliteration thus displayed in our early poetry remains palpable to this day in a thousand alliterative proverbs, saws, and sayings which have come down from old times, such as " Many Men, Many J:/inds," " Time and Tide wait for no man," " When 5ale is highest ^oon is nighest " which is equivalent to " The ZJarkest hour's before the Dawn ; " and many such which every reader will recall. But, as was said, the rhythmic office of alliteration in modern English verse is to break the monotony of regular groups by interjecting irregular groups. In the following lines, for example, which are the last six of a charming sonnet by Thomas Watson, (a i6th century sonnet-maker whose Hekatompatheia, or Hundred Pas- sions, contains some good sonnet-work), the letters which I have printed in capitals to attract the eye really attract the ear in the same way. Observe that two alliterative sounds are found, often, one near the end of one line, the other near the beginning of the next Hne : thus the line-group, which is apt to grow monoto- nous, is relieved by other groups which are bound together and forced upon the ear by the alliterative letters. In the first lines the sonnetteer has been expressing his rapture on hearing his mistress sing. 3 1 2 Science of English Verse. And who so mad that fFouId not Wi'Ca his WiW. Zeese Zibertie and Zife to heare her sing Whose voice exceeds those harmonies that i^ill Elisian ^ieldes where growes eternall Spring? If mightie Jove should Zfeare what I have /fard, She (sure) were ^is, and all my Market Msx^^ ! Alliteration, like rhyme, had come to excite a party against it in the i6th century, though there was an opposite party who ran it fearfully beyond its province. Even Chaucer, with his " Rim, ram, ruf," had made fun of the dismal long alliterative poems written in the two centuries preceding him, whose dull iterations were indeed enough to drive the ear mad. King James and the Scottish poets of the 15 th century held it in high regard : the king even says, in his Reulis &c., " Let all your verse be Literall " — meaning by " literall " alliter- ative. Gascoigne, on the other hand, is more guarded : "many writers" he says, indulge "in repeticion of sun- drie wordes all beginning with one letter, the whiche, (beyng modestly used) lendeth good grace to a verse : but they do so hunt a letter to death, that they make it Crambe, and cramb'e bis positum mors est : therefore, Ne quid nimis." And in another connection he declares that "it is not inough to roll inpleasant woordes, nor yet to thunder in Rym, Ram, Ruff, by letter. ..." I find Robert Greene, too, burlesquing Stanihurst's alliteration, later than Gascoigne's utterances above : Then did he make heaven's vault to rebound With rounce robble bobble Of ruffe raffe roaring With thwick thwack thurlerie bouncing. And, still later, we all know Shakspere's jokes on the alliterators, in "Raging rocks with shivering shocks," Error of Turner and Tyrwhitt. 313 and "The preyful princess pierced &c." of Love's Labor's Lost. It is one of those curiosities of opinion which make us pinch ourselves and ask if we are all in a dream, that Sharon Turner, a laborious historian of the Anglo- Saxons, only partly believed in the alliteration of their verse, and that Tyrwhitt flatly denied the presence of any alliteration in it. Says Turner : " I am willing to concur with Mr. J. Conybeare that alliteration was used in Saxon poetry. . . . But I think it was as an occasional beauty, not as in Pierce Ploughman the fundamental principle " (Hist, of England, Vol. III., Ang. Sax. Period, pp. 357-8, note 4). Tyrwhitt, however, is more sweeping : as if one should stand forth and offer to maintain against all comers, Paynim or Christian, that there was never such a building as the Tower of London. " That the Saxons had a species of writing which differed from their com- mon prose, and was considered by themselves as poetry is very certain ; but it seems equally certain, that their compositions of that kind were neither divided into verses of a determinate number of syllables, nor embel- lished with what we call rhyme." To which he adds in a note : " We do not see any marks of studied allitera- tion in the old Saxon poetry." These citations are given as instructive examples to the student of the quaint absurdities into which criti- cism may be led when working on the vague estimates prevalent until quite recent times, and as testimonials to the value of the exacter methods which are indicated by the metrical tests heretofore described. While, as often before remarked, these metrical tests are not to 314 Science of English Verse. be made the excuse for swinging into the opposite error of over-minuteness, they represent, when properly- estimated, a tendency to precise, well-founded and truth- ful judgments which must be regarded as bound to initiate a literary scholarship of more character than the world has yet seen. The brief account given of alliteration has been de- vised to replace for the student any formal rules or cautions for its use. None could be given, indeed, which would be more definite than the inference which the student must necessarily draw from the preceding outline, namely, that all alliteration for the sake of alliteration is trifling, and that in modern English verse it is to be used with such delicate art that the ear will unconsciously feel its indefinite presence, varying the verse as brief irregular bird-calls, heard in the wood here and there, seem to add a delight to the mass of green. There was never a more consummate artist in the use of this delicate effect than Shakspere. I do not recollect one instance in his works where an alliter- ation occurs that makes any claim on its own account. Such alliteration is felt, through the infinite decorum and gentility which broods at the bottom of art, to be always tawdry, vulgar, and intrusive. Scarcely any word so well expresses the feeling produced by it as that which is often applied in America to certain styles of dress — "loud." And perhaps no more definite caution can be given the student than that all allitera- tion which attracts any attention as alliteration is loud. The Artist's Law. 315 CHAPTER XV. OF THE EDUCATED LOVE OF BEAUTY, AS THE ARTIST's ONLY LAW. And this sketch of the colors of English verse may now be closed with the statement, already partly anti- cipated in several other connections, that the matters herein treated are only in the nature of hints leading to the widest possible views of poetic form, and by no means laws. For the artist in verse there is no law : the perception and love of beauty constitute the whole outfit ; and what is herein set forth is to be taken merely as enlarging that perception and exalting that love. In all cases, the appeal is to the ear ; but the ear should, for that purpose, be educated up to the highest possible plane of culture. With this sort of ear under- stood, one may say that King James has summed up the whole matter in his homely Scotch words : " Zour eare maun be the onely iudge, as of all the other parts Qi Flowing," (that is, of rythmic movement) "the verie twichestane quhairof is musique." The Boy's Froissart. EDITED WITH AN BTTEODUOTION By SIDNEY LANIER. WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY ALFRED KAPPES. One Volume, crown 8vo, extra cloth, - $3.00. ** As you read of the fair knights and the foul knights— for Froissart tells of both — it cannot but occur to you that sofnehoiu it seems harder to be a good knight now-a-days than it ivas then , . . Nevertheless the same qualities ivhich made a matiful fighter tke?t^ make ofte jwiv. To speak the very truths to perform a promise to the utmost^ to reveretice all ivomen^ to maintain right and honesty, to help the weak ; to treat high a*id loiu ivith courtesy, to be constant to one love, to be fair to a bitter foe, to despise luxury, to pursue simplicity ^ modesty and gentleness in heart and bearings this was in the oath of the young knight ivho took the stroke -upon him in the fourteenth century, and this is still the ivay to luin love and glory in the nineteenth^'' — Extract from the Preface. CRITICAIi NOTICES. *i There is no reason why Sir John Froissart should not become as well known to young readers as Robinson Crusoe himself." — Literary World, "Though Mr, Lanier calls his edition of Froissart a book for boys, it is a book for men as well, and many there be of the latter who will enjoy its pages." — N. Y. Eve. Mail. "We greet this book with positive enthusiasm, feeling that the presentation of Froissart in a shape so tempting to youth is a particularly worthy task, particularly well done."-iV: Y. live. Post. "The book is romantic, poetical, and full of the real adventure which is so much more wholesome, than the sham which fills so much of the stimulating juvenile literature of the day." — Detroit Free Press. "That boy will be lucky who gets Mr. Sidney Lanier's 'Boy's Froissart' for a Christmas present this year. There is no better and healthier reading for boys than ' Fine Sir John ; ' and this volume is so handsome, so well printed, and so well illustrated tliat it is a pleasure to look it over." — Nation. " Mr. Sidney Lanier, in editing a boy's version of Froissart, has not only opened to them a world of romantic and poetic legend of the chivalric and heroic sort, but he has given them something which ennobles and does not poison the mind. Old Froissart was a gentleman every inch ; he hated the base, the cowardly, the paltry ; he loved the knightly, the heroic, the Ecntle, and this spirit breathes through all his chronicles. There is a genuineness, too, about his writings that gives them a literary value." — Baltimore Gazette. " In his work of editing the famous knightly chronicle that Sir Walter Scott declared mspired him with more enthusiasm than even poetry itself, Mr. Lanier has shown, naturally, a warm appreciativeness and also a nice power of discrimination. He has culled the choicest of the chronicles, the most romantic, and at the same time most com- plete, and has digested them into an orderly compact volume, upon which the publishers have lavished fin.e paper, presswork and binding, and that is illustrated by a number of c\x\&.^*— Philadelphia Times. *** For sale by all booksellers, or 7ttill be sent, post-paid^ upon receipt of price CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS, Nos. 743 AND 745 Broadway, New York. ^long the tVay. A VOLUME OF SHORT POEMS. BY MARY MAPES DODGE, Editor of St. Nicholas. One volume, square 12mo, $1; extra cloth, - - $l.BO, The most ardent admirer of Mrs. Dodge's previous works can hardly be prepared for the new wealth of the present volume. These poems are beautiful in thought and w^orkmanship, and evince a w^onderful power and range of poetic faculty. As a collection of short poems, it is unlike any- thing that has preceded it, and deserves to be classed in the small list of those books of song that belong to the daily life of the people, and go straight to the popular heart. CRITICAIi NOTICES. " A handsome little volume of over loo pages of bright, clear print, fairly rippling widi laughing carols and glad songs. There is a breeze-like freshness in the poetry of thi? writer that stimulates without palling on the taste, and is buoyant without being light in worth. There is the breath of spring in every poem, and the sparkle and purity of dew in every thought expressed." — Indianapolis Journal. '*Mrs. Mapes Dodge sings as naturally as the bobolink or nightingale, and enjoys an equal delight with them in the flowery meadow and the blossoming orchard. She has listented to the voice of the grass and the trees, the airy tongues of the mountain stream, and writes down the artless melodies which she has heard from the stars and the sea. Her poetry betrays a deep sympathy with human life as well as with external nature." —N. Y. Tribune. " Reading the poems one discovers in their construction and in the dexterous play of fancy which inspires them, the same winning cleverness that marks the author's appeals to child nature ; but with it he finds also a depth of poetic feeling, the manifesta- Uon of which is rarely possible in juvenile literature." — N, Y. Mvening Post. " It need scarcely be added that they are full of charm, tender in feeling, graceful in versification, and genuinely poetic in fency and imagination. Those verses dealing essentially with child life and child aspirations have a delicacy of sentiment peculiar to Mrs. Dodge alone among all who sing on similar subjects."— ^(7j^(7« Saturday Evening Gazette. "These poems show all the delightful brightness and cleverness which her stories for young folks so fully possess, and they are animated by the same straightforward, com- mon-sense spirit, and more than that, they display a depth of poetic feeling which she has, of course, had little opportunity to display in her writings for youth." — Boston Post. " The poems are full of grace and melody, imaginative and refined in expression.'* — 'Baltimore Gazette. *#* For sale hy all booksellers^ or sent post-paid upon receipt of price^ by CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS, Nos. 743 AND 745 Broadway. New YpRK, Friar Anselmo and Other Poems. By JULIA C. R. DORR. 1 vol., square 12mo., - - $1.25. A rare grace and tenderness of feeling, characteristics of whatever Mrs. Dorr writes, mark this book everywhere. It will make its author more definitely known among those in whose memories many of her verses have lingered ; and with those who have already given her high critical recognition, it will place her position beyond a doubt. CRITICAL ISOTICES. "Mrs. Ji'LiA Dorr has won an enviable place among the friendly household poets of the land by her exqiiibite purity of sentiment her genuine poetical feeling, the beauty of her fandes. and the sweetness of her diction, combined with a profound love of nature and the tender sympathies of domestic life." — Keiv York 'Iribune. " Mrs. Dorr has a firm and confident touch, and she pos.sesses that mastery of metrical expression, the lack of which leads so many writers whose poetic gifts are unquestionable into invo.ved constructions and other hterarj' limping*?. The directness and simplicity o her utterance are charms not to be despised, and her grace of expression would go far to secure the success of work poetieally less excellent than hers is." — Etieniiig Post. "Refinement of taste, delicacy of thought, fluent diction, harmoTiious versification, and a true poetic ring are the invariable attractions of Mrs. D' iRr's verse. It is not ambitious in character, but within its ranee it is wholly icood, always pure in tone and sweet in sentiment. The book is published by Messrs. Charles Scribner's Sons in a style thorouglily in keeping with the dainty nature of its conx^wth.'* — Boston Sat. Eve. Gazette, " In Mrs. Dorr's verse purity of thought and a quiet but intense affection are beautifully blended "—Literafy World. "Often her strains have a sp'rit and ring which is exhilarating, and thenobihtyof their sentiment rises at times into true christian devotion." — Congregationalisi. * if* For sale by all booksellers, or ivill be sent, posi-^aid, upon receipt of price CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS, Nos. 743 AND 745 Broapway, New York. ^|f lOfin Bag. A POEM IN SONGS AND SONNETS. By RICHARD WATSON GILDER. WITH UNIQUE ILLUSTRATIONS. One volume, i6mo, cloth, . . . $1.50. CRITICAL NOTICES. "The strength of the poems is in their spiritual perception, their music, their passion »t= dramatic and imaginative power."— iV. V. Evening Post. "Their rare vein of poetry and consummate artistic finish can only be met by a smile of welcome." — N. Y. Tribune. " Amid so much that invites to charm, it is difficult to draw a hard line between whal Is good and what we think is best." — Philadelphia Inquirer. "They are at once strong and graceful, and evince a degree of culture and restraini altogether unusual in a first poem, and full of promise for the future." — Boston Daily yournal. *' This is a work that may be put alongside the work of great poets and not suffer ; ii has the flavor of immortality." — R. R. Boivkerin N. Y. Eveni7ig MaiL '*The advent of a new poet is an event in the literature of any language, and in The ITeiu Day Richard Watson GUder proves himself a true poet, essentially an original one, too." — Harper's Monthly. " There is sincerity of emotion, delicacy of expression, seriousness of intention, and artistic capacity enough in Mr. Gilder's verses to give ground for hope that with large* experience and faithful culture, he will write such poetry as will add preciousness to even th-Lse first works of his muse." — The Nation, "Tbey have absolute merit when compared with the books of the poets we prize."— N Y. Herald. NOW READY : The Poet and His Master, AND OTHER FOEMS. By RICHARD WATSON GILDER. Author of "The New Day." One vol., i6mo, cloth, gilt side and back, $1.25, •»• The above books for sale by all booksellers^ or will be sent^ ^ost or express kAr^es faidy upon receipt of the price by the publishers, CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS, 743 AND 745 Broadway, Npw York A VALUABLE LITTLE BOOK. IS, (Jonrisp j^isforg of P^usir, FROM THE COMMENCEMENT OF THE CHRISTIAN ERA TO THE PRESENT TIME. By H. G. B. HUNT, B. Mus., Christ Churchy Oxford, One volume neat 12mo, with numerous Tablesj eto. Olotli, $1.00. Mr. Hunt has produced a well-arranged and really concise history of the subject with which he deals. The book is divided into three sections, the first of which is a general review of musical epochs and events, while the second presents a series of clironometrical tables, and the third sum- marizes a history of the art. The student "is warned" in the preface " that he is not to expect what is called a readable book," but we feel bound to say that Mr. Hunt's work is, in the proper sense of the word, far more readable than boolcs which attempt to combine valuable informa- tion with attractiveness by tricks to which Mr. Hunt has not condescended. Those who care to follow the fortunes of opera and music in general cannot do better than to turn to Mr. Himt's little book. GRITICAIi NOTICES. "As the book now stands, it is the most concise and correct history of music that we have ever seen compiled as a text-book No musician, and in fact, no con- noisseur or person making any pretension to musical taste, should be without this little work as a ready reference." — Chicago Tribune, *' The book is not only a remarkable example of skillful condensation, but, for the vast amount of valuable information that is crowded within its narrow limits, is without com- parison. We recommend it warmly to the attention of musical students." — Boston Saturday Eve. Gazette. "The entire book, admirably made, is the best specimen oitnultum in parvo that We have seen in a long time." — N. Y, Mail. "The subject is one of the most appropriate for study in schools, and we know no other book to be compared with this one for such use. There are bulky books full of informa- tion, but this one is concise and methodical." — N'e7v York Observer. ** As a text-book for school study or private reference, we have seen nothing so com- pact and useful It is a comprehensive survey of the whole field, from the earliest Greek and Egyptian art down to the performance of Wagner's Trilogy at Hayreuth, in 1876." — Springfield Union, ** Altogether, this is an admirable compend, worth more than many pretentious works, and quite indispensable to the student of music. As a text-book, it seems to be one of the best possible." — Boston Globe, •#• The above book for sale by all booksellers^ or will be sent^ post or express iharges^idy upon receipt of the price by the publishers, CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS, 743 AND 74S Broadway, New York The Complete Poetical Writings OF Dr. J. G. HOLLAND, Editor of Scribner's Monthly Magazine. Wzt/i Illustrations by Reinhart^ Griswoltt, and Mary Hallock Foote^ and Portrait by Wyatt Eato7i. PRIFTED FROM KE¥ STEREOTYPED PL4TES, PREPARED EXPRESSLY fOfi THIS EDITION. Ot\e Volume, 8vo, Extra Cloth, - - $5.00> CRITICAL NOTICES, '* Dr. Holland will always find a congenial audience in the homes of culture and refinement. He does not affect the play of the darker and fiercer paasions, but delights in the sweet images that cluster around the domestic hearth. He therishes a strong fellow- feeling with the pure and tranquil life in the modest social circles of the American people, and has thus won his way to the companionship of many friendly hearts " — N V. Triburie. " It is the rare truthfulness of his pictures of still life, the poetry with which he has the art of investing homely things and every-day experiences, and the strong moral motive with which his writings are charged which especially commend them to the great army of his readers." — Springfield Daily Union. *" Dr. Holland's pen moves so easily and gracefully that we do not always appre- ciate fully the real poetic merit, the subtle meaning, the delicate imagery and all the mingled truth and beauty that link in his smooth-flowing lines." — N. Y. Ez>a?igeii&t. DR. HOLLAND'S WORKS. Bitter Sweet , a Poem, . $1.50 Eathina; a Poem, . 1,50 The MisiiesB of tlie Manse ; a Poem, 1,5 J 111. Ed. 5.00 Tlie Marble Proplieoy and other Poems, . . 1,60 Miss Oilheit's Careei, ■ 2.00 Bay Path, . . . 2 00 Every Day Topics, 1.7B Nicholas Mrntom. ■ ■ $1.75 The Story of Sevenoaks- lUus. 1,75 Arthur Bmnicastle. Illustrated. 1,75 Letters to YcTuig People, • 1.50 Gold Foil hammered from Popular Proverbs, . . I.75 Lessens in Lifj, - . 175 Plain Talis on Familiar Subjects, 1.75 Letters to the Joneses, . ■ 1,75 BRIGHTWOOD EDITION. In six vols., i6mo, cabinet size, printed upon tinted wove paper, including Timothy Titcombs* Letters to Young Bitter Sweet $ i-50 Kathrina 1.50 Lessuns in Life 1.75 Gold Foil 1.75 .People 81.50 Plain Talks (Dr. Holland's Popular Lectures) 1.75 The volumes of this edition may be purchased separately, or they will be furnished in a handsome box for $g.oo. *#* For sale by all booksellers, or sent post-paid upon receitt of price, by ^ ^ ^ j CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS, Nos. 743 AND 745 Broadway, New York.