Historical Manual of English Prosody. Saintsbury George

Historical Manual of English Prosody

or it is converted into something individual, separated from its neighbours, and possessing no kinship to them.

Yet the line, though not "a wonder and a wild desire," is a good one; and (therein differing from their eighteenth-century ancestors) the syllabists and accentualists would mostly nowadays allow this, though their principles have to submit it to privilegia and allowances to make it out.

The foot arrangement makes no difficulty, needs no privilegium, and necessarily applies none. The line is at once recognised by the ear as a good line and correspondent to its neighbours, which, as a body, and also at once when a few have been read, informed that ear that they were five-foot lines of iambic basis. Therefore it will lend itself to foot-arrangement on that norm. The five feet may be iambs, trochees, anapæsts, spondees, tribrachs, and perhaps (this is a question of ear) dactyls and pyrrhics. These may be substituted for each other as the ear shall dictate, provided that the general iambic base is not overthrown or unduly obscured.

Further, these feet are composed of long and short syllables, the length and shortness of which is determined to some extent by ordinary pronunciation, but subject to various modifying influences of position and juxtaposition. Under those laws to which all its companions are equally and inevitably subject, mutatis mutandis, it makes itself out as above:

Twīnklĕd | thĕ ĭnnū|mĕrā|blĕ ēar | ănd tāil—

trochee, anapæst, iamb, iamb, iamb. The justification of ā in "āble" has already been partly given; it may be added that in the actual pronunciation of the word by good speakers there is a "secondary accent" (as they call it) on the syllable.

Here there is no straining, no "private bill" legislation, no separating of the line from its fellows, only a reasonable Reign of Law with reasonable easements.

Application further to his "Hollyhock" song.

Let us now take a more complicated instance, also from Tennyson. In that poet's first volume there was a "Song" which, unlike most of its fellows, remained practically unaltered amid the great changes which he introduced later. It has, I believe, always been a special favourite with those who have been most in sympathy with his poetry. But, nearly twenty years after its first appearance, it was described by no ill-qualified judge (an admirer of Tennyson on the whole) in the words given in the note:[22] and I believe it had been similarly objected to earlier. Now what were the lines that excited this cry of agonised indignation? They are as follows:—

A spirit haunts the year's last hours

Dwelling amid these yellowing bowers:

To himself he talks;

For at eventide, listening earnestly,

At his work you may hear him sob and sigh

In the walks;

Earthward he boweth the heavy stalks

Of the mouldering flowers:

Heavily hangs the broad sunflower

Over its grave in the earth so chilly;

Heavily hangs the hollyhock,

Heavily hangs the tiger-lily.

Now it is not very difficult to perceive the defects of this extremely beautiful thing in the eyes of a syllabic-accentualist, as this critic (whether knowing it or not) probably was.

The syllabists have always, by a perhaps natural though perhaps also irrational extension of their arithmetical prepossession, disliked lines of irregular length on the page. Bysshe would have barred stanzas; a very few years before Tennyson's book, Crowe, then Public Orator at Oxford, had protested against the exquisite line-adjustments of the seventeenth century. To the pure accentualists the thing might seem an unholy jumble, accented irregularly, irregularly arranged in number, seemingly observing different rhythms in different parts.

Now see how it looks under the foot system:

A spi|rit haunts | the year's | last hours

Dwelling | amid | these yel|lowing bowers:

To himself | he talks;

the feet being sometimes, at the beginning of the lines, monosyllabic, and of course of one long syllable only (Ēarth-|, Hēa-|, Ō-|); sometimes dissyllabic, iambic mainly, but occasionally at least semi-spondaic—

Ă spīr|ĭt hāunts | thĕ yēar's | lā̆st hōurs;

often trisyllabic, and then always anapæstic—

Fŏr ăt ē|vĕntĭde līst|ĕnĭng ēarn|ĕstlȳ̆.

Even so early in the present book this should need little comment; but it may be the better for some. It is an instance of substitution carried out boldly, but unerringly; so that, iamb and anapæst being the coin of interchange and equivalence, the rhythm is now iambic, now anapæstic chiefly, the two being not muddled, but fluctuant—a prosodic part-song. And the foot system brings this out straightforwardly and on its general principles, with no beggings or assumptions whatever for the particular instance. Moreover, the structure of the piece may be paralleled freely from the songs in Shakespeare's plays.[23]

Such application possible always and everywhere.

It is indeed sometimes said that such methods of scansion as these may apply very well to nineteenth-century poets, but that they are out of place in regard to older ones. This is demonstrably false. The method applies alike, and in like measure obviates all difficulties, in examples of the thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. It is as applicable to the early and mostly anonymous romancers and song-writers as to Tennyson, it accommodates Shakespeare as well as Browning. To Milton as to Shelley, to Dryden and Pope as to the most celebrated of our modern experimenters, say to Miss Christina Rossetti or Mr. Swinburne, it "fits like a glove." The rules in the next chapter, and the subjoined examples fully scanned in Chapter VI., will show its application as a beginning; the whole contents of this volume must give the fuller illustration and confirmation.[24]

FOOTNOTES:

Table of Contents

[15] The most recent, perhaps, and the most unfortunate competitor is "stress-unit"—for there are most certainly feet (i.e. constitutive divisions of lines) which include no stress at all.

[16] A full account of these would occupy a book bigger than the larger History. Among the latest and most curious attempts on the subject is one to mark off certain metrical rhythms as "accentual," certain others as "quantitative." This (which partly results from the superfluous anxiety to discover and isolate the sources of length and shortness) makes something very like a chimera or a hotch-potch of English verse.

[17] In metrical quantity, not in vowel sound.

[18] Of Anglo-Saxon and very early Middle English poetry. See Scanned Conspectus

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