BLANK VERSE.

- THE use of unrhymed verse is the special characteristic of En lish poetry. It is this more than anything else

• which separates ur poetic literature from that of France and the literatures which France has influenced. Our two greatest , poets, Shakespeare and Milton, wrote far more in blank verse than in rhyme, and there is not a single great poet between Marlowe and Dryden, and between Cowper and Tennyson, except Byron, who does not owe some of his most signal triumphs to the use of blank verse. The English people— 'outside the eighteenth century—have been as fond of reading blank verse as the poets of writing it, and on the whole they have always liked what is good and condemned what is bad in the developments of that measure. They con- demned the curious attempt to introduce a stilted and pedantic use of alternate decasyllabic and hendecasyllabic lines after the model of the French Alexandrines which was made in the eighteenth century, and they appreciated the return to the Elizabethan freedom introduced by Keats, Shelley, and Wordsworth. Again, the genius of our people and of our literature prevented the abandonment of blank verse, which was in effect desired by Pope and his followers. Dr. Johnson, it will be remembered, had a positive hatred of blank verse. He quarrelled savagely with Bishop Percy, but when he was told that Percy preferred rhyme and condemned blank verse, be exclaimed : "If I had known that, I would have hugged him." But though the greater public has been appreciative of blank verse, the critics, or rather the half - critics, have been, and are even at the present day, curiously ignorant of the true nature of blank verse, and have never failed to assault and decry any and every attempt to use blank verse freely and with a true regard to its higher harmonies. They have always, as it were, tried to put blank verse into an iambic strait - waistcoat, and so to spoil its -charm and make it dull, dead, and monotonous.

Blank verse means essentially merely unrhymed verse, but it has come in common speech to mean that unrhymed ten- syllable iambic line in which Shakespeare wrote his plays and Milton his epic. It is of this blank verse that we shall treat first, saying afterwards something of the attempts that have been made by our poets to write in other unrhymed metres. Our blank-verse line of ten syllables began by being purely and simply iambic. Every line began with an unaccented syllable and ended with an accented, and the feet moved with absolute regularity. (We speak of "accented" and "unaccented" as these are the words generally used, but the correct expression is, of course, "emphatic" and "unemphatic.") But blank verse had not been invented ten years before people noticed the monotony and dullness of these regular beats. An early Elizabethan critic spoke of the blank - verse line as a "drumming decasyllabon." That is an excellent phrase.

The correct iambic line is intolerable if the drumming "a dam, a dam, a diim, a dam, di dam," is maintained with- out break. The dramatists, whether consciously or uncon-

sciously, soon realised this, and broke away from the regular iambic tread. Peele and Green were monotonously iambic, but

Marlowe quickly emancipated himself, while Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, and all the greater Elizabethans gave themselves an absolute freedom. What may have been their theory we do not know, but their practice was to distribute the accents almost at will in a ten- syllable line. As long as the last word in a ten- syllable line was accented, and as long as they got in five accents in all, they were satisfied. In addition, they often added—influenced, no doubt, by the example of the double rhyme in rhymed verse—an unaccented syllable at the end of their ten-syllable line, and this made it eleven syllables long. Fletcher is, of course, the greatest devotee of this weak or female ending, as it is called. He often wrote whole passages without any ten-syllable lines. Take the great passage in which Ordella describes death :—

" Children begin it to us, strong men seek it, And Kings from height of all their painted glories Fall, like spent exhalations, to this centre ; And those are fools that fear it, or imagine A few unhandsome pleasures or life's profits Can recompense this place ; and mad that stay it. Till age blow out their lights, or rotten humours Bring them dispersed to the earth."

As we have said, within the ten-syllable or eleven-syllable line of five accents, the Elizabethan poets used complete freedom in their arrangement of the feet. Sometimes they gave the verse a special character by starting with a trochee instead of an iamb—this is indeed the commonest variation— and sometimes, though more rarely, they so arranged the accents in an eleven-syllable line as to give the effect of an English accentual Sapphic of the "Story, God bless yon! I have none to tell, Sir," kind. Shakespeare has several such

lines-

" Cromwell, I charge thee, fling away ambition," and Fletcher was always dropping into this Sapphic rhythm,

as in—

"Sister, I reap the harvest of my labours,"

or- "We are too base and dirty to deserve thee."

Webster was what one of his contemporaries called exceed- ingly "licentious" in his blank verse. Such lines as-

" Cover her face ; mine eyes dazzle; she died young;" will not for a moment scan as plain iambics, for the good

reason that plain iambics they are not, and no tapping of fingers or feet on table or floor will make them so. But though the Elizabethans gave themselves so great a license within the limit of their ten or eleven syllable line, they were always restrained by the essential control of harmony. Though they recognised that a line was not good merely because it was correctly iambic, they recognised also that if it was not iambic it must be melodious. Hence they never broke through the iambic cadence without satisfying the ear. They were not so foolish as to think that a line was good merely because it was irregular. Milton in his blank verse adopted all the metrical devices of the Elizabethans, and added fresh perfections of his own. "Paradise Lost" and "Paradise Regained" are full of lines which would drive absolutely crazy those modern critics who think that every line of blank verse which cannot be broken on the Procrustean bed of iambic cadence is bad verse. Fortunately most modern critics leave Milton unread, if not unwritten of, and hence they are not called upon to essay the dangerous, nay desperate, task of getting an iambic scansion out of such lines as-

" Burnt after them to the bottomless pit." "Shook the arsenal and fulmined over Greece." "Suffering, abstaining, quietly expecting." "Fairer than feigned of old or fabled since."

It must not for a moment be supposed that these lines are instances of Milton's carelessness. On the contrary, whether right or wrong, they are the deliberate results of a highly con- beiOUS art. Milton wrote the lines because they specially pleased

'his ear, not because he bad forgotten for the moment the tune "d dim, de dim." When, then, our critics fall foul of our modern poets because their lines will not scan—by which they mean scan iambically—they are making an error in criticism, and attacking Milton and the Elizabethans also. What they should attack is want of melody, not want of the iambic fall. The question is—Is the ear pleased ? not—Does the line go by a rule ?—which after all is not really the rule. No doubt many modern poets in their struggle to get away from conventionality, use blank-verse forms which are licen- tious without being harmonious, and they are, of course, to be corrected for such faults. Let us, however, never condemn a poet merely because his verse is not as strictly iambic in structure as Doctor Johnson's "Irene." It is part of a poet's business to be perpetually trying to increase the scope and power of the measures he uses. It is better to fail every now and again in such an attempt than to keep always the beaten track of a conventional and well-worn prosody.

A few words as to the attempts to write other forms of blank verse than the ten-syllable iambic. How comes it that we have not unrhymed eight or six syllable iambica or un- rhymed dactyls, trochees, and anapests? The inquiry is a very curious one. Except for the various attempts to write English hexameters and pentameters — attempts usually spoiled by the desire to imitate a Latin Laeasure instead of making a new English one on somewhat similar lines—and a few experiments like those of Shelley and Southey in what is really rhythmic prose, there is extremely little English poetry written in unrhymed metres which have not an iambic decasyllabic basis. Practically, we have no un- rhymed lyrical measures. (The choruses in "Samson Agonistes " are not lyrics.) One might have expected to find a good many attempts to discard rhyme in those eight-syllable and six-syllable iambics which have been so dear to our rhyming poets. Curiously enough, however, the only attempt we can recall was made by Shakespeare,—an attempt, which, as far as we know, has escaped the critics. In the dialogue between Richard III. and Anne, Shakespeare deliberately uses a six-syllable blank-verse line. There is no doubt of the fact. The lines read like a sort of duet in a blank-verse madrigal :—

"Anne. I would I knew thy heart.

Glo. 'Tis figured in my tongue. Anne. I fear me both are false. Gin. Then man was never true. Anne. Well, well, put up your sword. Glo. Say then my peace is made. Anne. That shall you know hereafter. Glo. But shall I live in hope P Anne. All men I hope live so. Glo. Vouchsafe to wear this ring. Anne. To take is not to give."

Zt is curious that no poet has ever taken this hint, and tried to develop the strange lilt of these verses into a fixed measure. But this is by no means Shakespeare's only attempt at lyrical blank verse. Tennyson obtained an excellent lyrical melody out of iambic, blank verse in "Tears, Idle Tears," and in the experiments that preceded it, by grouping three lines together. But Shakespeare had done the same in the blank verse lyric which has for its refrain "Thou hast not loved." If we turn from the iambic to the trochaic metre, we shall see that this measure has been almost entirely neglected by the poets who have used blank verse. Longfellow used it in "Hiawatha," but his

n ee was tame and mannered and has not been followed. Yet here is the seed out of which we are sure that the most exquisite metrical effects might be produced. Browning, though few people seem to have noticed it, has written one superlatively beautiful and melodious poem in trochaic blank ✓ erse. But then Browning concealed his trochees in a ten- syllable line with a weak or female ending, which to those who only count syllables, and do not allow the verse to ring in the ear, looks like an ordinary blank-verse line. In reality its only likeness consists in the fact that it covers as much space in the page :—

"Raphael wrote a century of sonnets. Wrote them with a silver-pointed pencils, Else he only used to draw Madonnas."

It is strange, again, that this metrical hint has never been taken up and developed.. Equally strange is the fact that though Matthew Arnold made a very marked success with his dactylic unrhymed verse, he has had so few imitators. Consider his :—

"Yes, we arraign her ; but she, The weary Titan, with deaf Ears, and labour-dimmed eyes, Regarding neither to right Nor left, goes passively by, Staggering on to her goal ; Bearing onshouldcrs immense, Atlantean, the load,

Well nigh not to be borne, Of the too vast orb of her fate."

Those lines have as much " go " and vigour and melody as if they were rhymed, but, unless it be Mr. Henley, who has

tried to develop this measure ? We have called it dactylic because the dactyl is the dominant foot, —the foot that is heard and controls the measure. We should be in- clined to say, however, that the metre is in blank verse what the couplets of " Christabel" are in rhyme.

There are in the "weary Titan" measure three accents in

each line, but the poet is free to fit each accent with one or with two unaccented syllables at pleasure. That is, he may use two dactyls and an iamb, or three trochees, or one anapmst one iamb and one trochee, as he can best serve the needs of his verse. In our opinion, however, Matthew

Arnold's structure is too loose for the metre. If the measure

is to be written at its beet the dactylic movement should predominate. It certainly does in all the passages in which

Matthew Arnold was most successful.

We have only touched the fringe of a vast subject—we have said nothing of Collins and nothing of Clough—and yet we have probably said more than those of our readers who are not metrical enthusiasts will care to read. We shall conclude with an appeal to the poets of the present genera- tion to take up unrhymed lyrical and elegiac measures, and develop them. Mr. Watson has written some hexameters and.

pentameters, and some short-lined dactylics of super-excellent melody. Why should he not attempt to give us something in octosyllabic iambics ? or again, why should he not bring to perfection our existing blank-verse trochaic, or the metre of "the weary Titan "? It is in the use of new measures—not merely new forms of stanza—that the younger poets will find an escape from their chief difficulty,—the liability to echo the

mighty dead. Poets, it is true, always are saying and always must say the same things, for they deal with the unchangeable,

—human emotion. Still, they mast say them in a new way and with a new edge. If they can develop a new march of words they will find it far easier to be original. Of course we do

not suggest that they should all instantly forswear the existing metres. We merely desire that they should not

allow themselves to be kept prisoners in the old domains, but should sometimes use their art to discover as well as to elaborate.