duce more real spondees into his hexameters than Longfellow and others had done. Compare such a line as Longfellow's

"Man is unjust, but God is just; and finally justice".

with Kingsley's —

"Then as a pine upon Ida when south-west winds blow landward."

In the former the dissyllabic feet are in no sense spondees; in the latter there is an effort to fill them with genuinely long syllables.

Lover whose vehement kisses on lips irresponsive are squandered,

Lover that wooest in vain Earth's imperturbable heart; Athlete mightily frustrate, who pittest thy thews against legions,

Locked with fantastical hosts, bodiless arms of the sky; Sea that breakest for ever, that breakest and never art

broken,

Like unto thine, from of old, springeth the spirit of man,Nature's wooer and fighter, whose years are a suit and a

wrestling,

All their hours, from his birth, hot with desire and with. fray.

(WILLIAM WATSON: Hymn to the Sea, ii.)

"trocheism one atom. My ear always demands the equivalent of the 'lost short syllable.' And again: "Every argument you bring convinces me more and more that the theory of our prosody depending on accent is false, and that it really is very nearly identical with the Greek. ... I am glad to hear (being a lazy man) that I have more license than I wish for; but I do think that, with proper care, you may have as many spondees, without hurting the rhythm, in English as you have in Greek, and my ear is tortured by a trochęę instead. . . . I must try for Homer's average of a spondee a line."

Here the alternate lines represent the "pentameter" of the Latin elegiac verse, where the light syllables were omitted at the cesura and the end of the line.

When they came to the fair-flowing river and to the places Where stood pools in plenty prepared, and water abundant Gushed up, a cure for things manifold uncleanly, the mules

were

Unyoked from the waggons, driven off to the bindweed pastures

By the rushing swirling river, and the women set about it Unloading the waggons, carrying clothes down to the water, One with other striving, stepping hastily into the wash

troughs.

When washing and rinsing were done, they brought the linen down

On to the sea-shore, and set it all out thereupon in rows Where the pebbles thrown up by the waves most thickly abounded.

(WILLIAM JOHNSON STONE: Translation of Odyssey, vi. 85 ff., in The Use of Classical Measures in English. 1899.)

Mr. Stone, like the Elizabethan classical versifiers, seeks to write purely quantitative verse in English, and, so far from aiming at the same time to preserve the rhythm of the usual English hexameter, he regards the clash between accent and quantity as a beauty rather than a defect. The verses he intends to be read "with the natural accent unimpaired," the reader listening for the regular quantities at the same time.

The views of Mr. Stone on the nature of English accent and quantity are perhaps unique among modern writers on the subject. "The ordinary unemphatic English accent is exactly a raising of pitch, and nothing more," as in Greek. "The accent of emphasis is something quite different in character from the ordinary accent." To those who

insist that to them the second syllable of carpenter is distinctly short, Mr. Stone replies: "You are associating yourselves by such an admission with the vulgar actors of Plautus rather than the educated readers of Virgil;". -a truly terrible charge! Mr. Stone gives an interesting critical history of earlier efforts to introduce classical measures into English. His monograph is reprinted, but without the specimen translation, as the second part of the 1901 edition of Robert Bridges's Milton's Prosody.

66

For further discussion of the relations of classical and English prosody, and of accent and quantity in English, see Schipper, vol. i. pp. 21–27; A. J. Ellis: article in the Transactions of the Philological Society, 1875-1876; T. D. Goodell: article on Quantity in English Verse," in the Proceedings of the American Philological Society, 1885; Edmund Gurney: The Power of Sound, pp. 429-439; J. M. Robertson: Appendix to New Essays towards a Critical Method, 1897; and the discussion in Part Three of the present volume.

VII. IMITATIONS OF ARTIFICIAL FRENCH

LYRICAL FORMS

A number of artificial lyrical forms, originating in the ingenuity of the mediæval Provençal poets, were adopted by the Middle English imitators of the Romance lyrists, and were revived with no little vigor in the Victorian period. Chief among the influential models for these forms, in early times, were the poems of Machault (1284-1377), Deschamps (1328-1415), Froissart (1337-1410), and Villon (1431-1485). Again in the seventeenth century such forms as the rondeau were revived in France by Voiture (1598-1648), but with little effect in England. Finally, in the nineteenth century, the forms were reintroduced by M. Théodore de Banville, and later into England by Mr. Lang, Mr. Austin Dobson, Mr. Gosse, and others. For the history of these fashions in outline, see the admirable introduction to Mr. Gleeson White's Ballades and Rondeaus (1893); also Mr. Andrew Lang's Lays and Lyrics of Old France (1872); Mr. Austin Dobson's "Note on some Foreign Forms of Verse," in the collection of Latter Day Lyrics (1878); and an article by Mr. Edmund Gosse in the Cornhill Magazine, July, 1877.

Says Mr. Dobson: "It may be conceded that the majority of the forms now in question are not at present suited for . . . the treatment of grave or elevated themes. What is modestly advanced for some of them . . . is that they may add a new charm of buoyancy, a lyric freshness, to amatory and familiar verse, already too much condemned to faded measures and out-worn cadences. Further, . . . that they are admirable vehicles for the expression of trifles or jeux d'esprit. They have also a

humbler and obscurer use. If, to quote the once-hackneyed, but now too-much-forgotten maxim of Pope

'Those move easiest that have learned to dance,'

what better discipline, among others, could possibly be devised for those about to versify' than a course of Rondeaux, Triolets, and Ballades?" Mr. Dobson refers to the article by Mr. Gosse already cited, and "to the Odes Funambulesques, the Petit Traité de Poésie Française, and other works of M. Théodore de Banville. To M. de Banville in particular and to the second French Romantic School in general, the happy modernization in France of the old measures of Marot, Villon, and Charles of Orleans is mainly to be ascribed." (Latter Day Lyrics, ed. W. D. Adams, pp. 334 ff.)*

Says Mr. Gleeson White: "The taste for these tours de force in the art of verse-making is no doubt an acquired one; yet to quote the first attempt to produce a lyric with a repeated burden would take one back to the earliest civilization. . . . Whether the first refrains were used for decorative effect only, or to give the singer time to recollect or improvise the next verse, it matters little, since the once mere adjunct was made in later French use an integral and vital part of the verse. The charm of these strictly written verses is undoubtedly increased by some knowledge of their technical rules. . . . To approach ideal perfection, nothing less than implicit obedience to all the rules is the first element of success; but the task is by no means finished there. Every quality that poetry demands, whether clearness of thought, elegance of expression, harmonious sound, or faultless rhythm, is needed as much in these shapes as in unfettered verse. . . . It may be said, without fear of exaggeration, that all the qualities required to form a perfect lyric in poetry are equally needful here, plus a great many special ones the forms themselves demand.

* On the early history of these forms in France, see Stengel's article in Gröber's Grundriss der Romanischen Philologie, vol. ii. pp. 87-96.