Chapter II: Part 2

If you need further argument (but what serves it to slay the slain?) let me remind you that you cannot use the briefest, the humblest process of thought, cannot so much as resolve to take your bath hot or cold, or decide what to order for breakfast, without forecasting it to yourself in some form of words. Words are, in fine, the only currency in which we can exchange thought even with ourselves. Does it not follow, then, that the more accurately we use words the closer definition we shall give to our thoughts? Does it not follow that by drilling ourselves to write perspicuously we train our minds to clarify their thought? Does it not follow that some practice in the deft use of words, with its correspondent defining of thought, may well be ancillary even to the study of Natural Science in a University?

But I have another word for our men of science. It was inevitable, perhaps, that Latin--so long the Universal Language--should cease in time to be that in which scientific works were written. It was impossible, perhaps, to substitute, by consent, some equally neat and austere modern language, such as French. But when it became an accepted custom for each nation to use its own language in scientific treatises, it certainly was not foreseen that men of science would soon be making discoveries at a rate which left their skill in words outstripped; that having to invent their terms as they went along, yet being careless and contemptuous of a science in which they have no training, they would bombast out our dictionaries with monstrously invented words that not only would have made Quintilian stare and gasp, but would affront the decently literate of any age.

After all, and though we must sigh and acquiesce in the building of Babel, we have some right to examine the bricks. I was waiting, the other day, in a doctor's anteroom, and picked up one of those books--it was a work on pathology--so thoughtfully left lying in such places; to persuade us, no doubt, to bear the ills we have rather than fly to others capable of being illustrated. I found myself engaged in following the manoeuvres of certain well-meaning bacilli generically described as 'Antibodies.' I do not accuse the author (who seemed to be a learned man) of having invented this abominable term: apparently it passed current among physiologists and he had accepted it for honest coin. I found it, later on, in Webster's invaluable dictionary: Etymology, 'anti' up against 'body', some noxious 'foreign body' inside your body or mine.

Now gin a body meet a body for our protection and in this gallant spirit, need a body reward him with this hybrid label? Gratitude apart, I say that for our own self-respect, whilst we retain any sense of intellectual pedigree, 'antibody' is no word to throw at a friendly bacillus. Is it consonant with the high dignity of science to make her talk like a cheap showman advertising a 'picture-drome'? The man who eats peas with his knife can at least claim a historical throwback to the days when forks had but two prongs and the spoons had been removed with the soup. But 'antibody' has no such respectable derivation. It is, in fact, a barbarism, and a mongrel at that. The man who uses it debases the currency of learning: and I suggest to you that it is one of the many functions of a great University to maintain the standard of that currency, to guard the _jus et norma loquendi_, to protect us from such hasty fellows or, rather, to suppeditate them in their haste.

Let me revert to our list of the qualities necessary to good writing, and come to the last--_Persuasiveness_; of which you may say, indeed, that it embraces the whole--not only the qualities of propriety, perspicuity, accuracy, we have been considering, but many another, such as harmony, order, sublimity, beauty of diction; all in short that--writing being an art, not a science, and therefore so personal a thing--may be summed up under the word _Charm_. Who, at any rate, does not seek after Persuasion? It is the aim of all the arts and, I suppose, of all exposition of the sciences; nay, of all useful exchange of converse in our daily life. It is what Velasquez attempts in a picture, Euclid in a proposition, the Prime Minister at the Treasury box, the journalist in a leading article, our Vicar in his sermon. Persuasion, as Matthew Arnold once said, is the only true intellectual process. The mere cult of it occupied many of the best intellects of the ancients, such as Longinus and Quintilian, whose writings have been preserved to us just because they were prized. Nor can I imagine an earthly gift more covetable by you, Gentlemen, than that of persuading your fellows to listen to your views and attend to what you have at heart.

Suppose, sir, that you wish to become a journalist? Well, and why not? Is it a small thing to desire the power of influencing day by day to better citizenship an unguessed number of men, using the best thought and applying it in the best language at your command?... Or are you, perhaps, overawed by the printed book? On that, too, I might have a good deal to say; but for the moment would keep the question as practical as I can.

Well, it is sometimes said that Oxford men make better journalists than Cambridge men, and some attribute this to the discipline of their great School of _Literae Humaniores_, which obliges them to bring up a weekly essay to their tutor, who discusses it. Cambridge men retort that all Oxford men are journalists, and throw, of course, some accent of scorn on the word. But may I urge--and remember please that my credit is pledged to _you_ now--may I urge that this is not a wholly convincing answer? For, to begin with, Oxford men have not changed their natures since leaving school, but are, by process upon lines not widely divergent from your own, much the same pleasant sensible fellows you remember. And, next, if you truly despise journalism, why then despise it, have done with it and leave it alone. But I pray you, do not despise it if you mean to practise it, though it be but as a step to something better. For while the ways of art are hard at the best, they will break you if you go unsustained by belief in what you are trying to do.

In asking you to practise the written word, I began with such low but necessary things as propriety, perspicuity, accuracy. But _persuasion_--the highest form of persuasion at any rate--cannot be achieved without a sense of beauty. And now I shoot a second rapid--_I want you to practise verse, and to practise it assiduously_.... I am quite serious. Let me remind you that, if there ever was an ancient state of which we of Great Britain have great right and should have greater ambition to claim ourselves the spiritual heirs, that state was Imperial Rome. And of the Romans (whom you will allow to have been a practical people) nothing is more certain than the value they set upon acquiring verse. To them it was not only (as Dr Johnson said of Greek) 'like old lace--you can never have too much of it.' They cultivated it with a straight eye to national improvement. Among them, as a scholar reminded us the other day, you find 'an educational system deliberately and steadily directed towards the development of poetical talent. They were not a people of whom we can say, as we can of the Greeks, that they were born to art and literature.... The characteristic Roman triumphs are the triumphs of a material civilisation.' Rome's rôle in the world was 'the absorption of outlying genius.' Themselves an unimaginative race with a language not too tractable to poetry, they made great poetry, and they made it of patient set purpose, of hard practice. I shall revert to this and maybe amplify reasons in another lecture. For the moment I content myself with stating the fact that no nation ever believed in poetry so deeply as the Romans.

Perpend this then, and do not too hastily deride my plea that you should practise verse-writing. I know most of the objections, though I may not remember all. _Mediocribus esse poetis_, etc.--that summarises most of them: yet of an infliction of much bad verse from you, if I am prepared to endure it, why should anyone else complain? I say that the youth of a University ought to practise verse-writing; and will try to bring this home to you by an argument convincing to me, though I have never seen it in print.

What are the great poetical names of the last hundred years or so? Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Landor, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Morris, Rossetti, Swinburne--we may stop there. Of these all but Keats, Browning, Rossetti were University men; and of these three Keats, who died young, cut off in his prime, was the only one not fairly well-to-do. It may seem a brutal thing to say, and it is a sad thing to say: but, as a matter of hard fact, the theory that poetical genius bloweth where it listeth, and equally in poor and rich, holds little truth. As a matter of hard fact, nine out of those twelve were University men: which means that somehow or other they procured the means to get the best education England can give. As a matter of hard fact, of the remaining three you know that Browning was well-to-do, and I challenge you that, if he had not been well-to-do, he would no more have attained to writing "Saul" or "The Ring and the Book" than Ruskin would have attained to writing "Modern Painters" if his father had not dealt prosperously in business. Rossetti had a small private income; and, moreover, he painted. There remains but Keats; whom Atropos slew young, as she slew John Clare in a madhouse, and James Thomson by the laudanum he took to drug disappointment. These are dreadful facts, but let us face them. It is--however dishonouring to us as a nation--certain that, by some fault in our commonwealth, the poor poet has not in these days, nor has had for two hundred years, a dog's chance. Believe me--and I have spent a great part of the last ten years in watching some 320 Elementary Schools--we may prate of democracy, but actually a poor child in England has little more hope than had the son of an Athenian slave to be emancipated into that intellectual freedom of which great writings are born.

What do I argue from this? I argue that until we can bring more intellectual freedom into our State, more 'joy in widest commonalty spread,' upon you, a few favoured ones, rests an obligation to see that the springs of English poetry do not fail. I put it to you that of this glory of our birth and state _you_ are the temporary stewards. I put it to the University, considered as a dispenser of intellectual light, that to treat English poetry as though it had died with Tennyson and your lecturers had but to compose the features of a corpse, is to abnegate high hope for the sake of a barren convenience. I put it to the Colleges, considered as disciplinary bodies, that the old way of letting Coleridge slip, chasing forth Shelley, is, after all, not the wisest way. Recollect that in Poesy as in every other human business, the more there are who practise it the greater will be the chance of _someone's_ reaching perfection. It is the impetus of the undistinguished host that flings forward a Diomed or a Hector. And when you point with pride to Milton's and those other mulberry trees in your Academe, bethink you 'What poets are they shading to-day? Or are their leaves but feeding worms to spin gowns to drape Doctors of Letters?'

In the life of Benvenuto Cellini you will find this passage worth your pondering.--He is telling how, while giving the last touches to his Perseus in the great square of Florence, he and his workmen inhabited a shed built around the statue. He goes on:--

The folk kept on attaching sonnets to the posts of the door....I believe
that, on the day when I opened it for a few hours to the public, more
than twenty were nailed up, all of them overflowing with the highest
panegyrics. Afterwards, when I once more shut it off from view,
everyone brought sonnets, with Latin and Greek verses: for the
University of Pisa was then in vacation, and all the doctors and
scholars kept vying with each other who could produce the best.

I may not live to see the doctors and scholars of this University thus employing the Long Vacation; as perhaps we shall wait some time for another Perseus to excite them to it. But I do ask you to consider that the Perseus was not entirely cause nor the sonnets entirely effect; that the age when men are eager about great work is the age when great work gets itself done; nor need it disturb us that most of the sonnets were, likely enough, very bad ones--in Charles Lamb's phrase, very like what Petrarch might have written if Petrarch had been born a fool. It is the impetus that I ask of you: the will to try.

Lastly, Gentlemen, do not set me down as one who girds at your preoccupation, up here, with bodily games; for, indeed, I hold 'gymnastic' to be necessary as 'music' (using both words in the Greek sense) for the training of such youths as we desire to send forth from Cambridge. But I plead that they should be balanced, as they were in the perfect young knight with whose words I will conclude to-day:--

Having this day my horse, my hand, my lance
Guided so well that I obtained the prize,
Both by the judgment of the English eyes
And of some sent by that sweet enemy France;
Horsemen my skill in horsemanship advance,
Town-folk my strength, a daintier judge applies
His praise to sleight which from good use doth rise;
Some lucky wits impute it but to chance;
Others, because of both sides I do take
My blood from them who did excel in this,
Think Nature me a man-at-arms did make.
How far they shot awry! the true cause is,
Stella looked on; and from her heavenly face
Sent forth the beams which made so fair my race.

'Untrue,' you say? Well, there is truth of emotion as well as of fact; and who is there among you but would fain be able not only to win such a guerdon but to lay it in such wise at your lady's feet?

That then was Philip Sidney, called the peerless one of his age; and perhaps no Englishman ever lived more graciously or, having used life, made a better end. But you have seen this morning's newspaper: you have read of Captain Scott and his comrades, and in particular of the death of Captain Oates; and you know that the breed of Sidney is not extinct. Gentlemen, let us keep our language noble: for we still have heroes to commemorate![1]

[Footnote 1: The date of the above lecture was Wednesday, February 12th, 1913, the date on which our morning newspapers printed the first telegrams giving particulars of the fate of Captain Scott's heroic conquest of the South Pole, and still more glorious, though defeated, return. The first brief message concerning Captain Oates, ran as follows:--

'From the records found in the tent where the bodies were discovered it appeared that Captain Oates's feet and hands were badly frost-bitten, and, although he struggled on heroically, his comrades knew on March 16 that his end was approaching. He had borne intense suffering for weeks without complaint, and he did not give up hope to the very end.

"He was a brave soul. He slept through the night hoping not to wake; but he awoke in the morning.

"It was blowing a blizzard. Oates said: 'I am just going outside, and I may be some time.' He went out into the blizzard, and we have not seen him since.

"We knew that Oates was walking to his death, but though we tried to dissuade him, we knew it was the act of a brave man and an English gentleman."']

LECTURE III.

ON THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN VERSE AND PROSE

Wednesday, February 26

You will forgive me, Gentlemen, that having in my second lecture encouraged you to the practice of verse as well as of prose, I seize the very next opportunity to warn you against confusing the two, which differ on some points essentially, and always so as to demand separate rules--or rather (since I am shy of the word 'rules') a different concept of what the writer should aim at and what avoid. But you must, pray, understand that what follows will be more useful to the tiro in prose than to the tiro in verse; for while even a lecturer may help you to avoid writing prose in the manner of Milton, only the gods--and they hardly--can cure a versifier of being prosaic.

We started upon a promise to do without scientific definitions; and in drawing some distinctions to-day between verse and prose I shall use only a few rough ones; good, as I hope, so far as they go; not to be found contrary to your scientific ones, if ever, under another teacher you attain to them; yet for the moment used only as guides to practice, and pretending to be no more.

Thus I go some way--though by no means all the way--towards defining literature when I remind you that its very name (_litterae_--letters) implies the written rather than the spoken word; that, for example, however closely they approximate one to the other as we trace them back, and even though we trace them back to identical beginnings, the Writer--the Man of Letters--does to-day differ from the Orator. There was a time, as you know, when the poet and the historian had no less than the orator, and in the most literal sense, to 'get a hearing.' Nay, he got it with more pains: for the orator had his senate-house or his law-court provided, whereas Thespis jogged to fairs in a cart, and the Muse of History, like any street acrobat, had to collect her own crowd. Herodotus in search of a public packed his history in a portmanteau, carted it to Olympia, found a favourable 'pitch,' as we should say, and wooed an audience to him much as on a racecourse nowadays do those philanthropic gentlemen who ply a dubious trade with three half-crowns and a gold chain. It would cost us an effort to imagine the late Bishop Stubbs thus trying his fortune with a bag full of select Charters at Queen's Club or at Kempton Park, and exerting his lungs to retrieve a crowd that showed some disposition to edge off towards the ring or the rails.

The historian's conditions have improved; and like any other sensible man he has advanced his claim with them, and revised his method. He writes nowadays with his eye on the printed book. He may or may not be a dull fellow: being a dull fellow, he may or may not be aware of it; but at least he knows that, if you lay him upside down on your knee, you can on awaking pick him up, resume your absorption, and even turn back some pages to discover just where or why your interest flagged: whereas a Hellene who deserted Herodotus, having a bet on the Pentathlon, not only missed what he missed but missed it for life.

The invention of print, of course, has made all, or almost all, the difference.

I do not forget that the printed book--the written word--presupposes a speaking voice, and must ever have at its back some sense in us of the speaking voice. But in writing prose nowadays, while always recollecting that prose has its origin in speech--even as it behoves us to recollect that Homer intoned the Iliad to the harp and Sappho plucked her passion from the lyre--we have to take things as they are. Except Burns, Heine, Béranger (with Moore, if you will), and you will find it hard to compile in all the lyrical poetry of the last 150 years a list of half a dozen first-class or even second-class bards who wrote primarily to be sung. It may help you to estimate how far lyrical verse has travelled from its origins if you will but remind yourselves that a _sonnet_ and a _sonata_ were once the same thing, and that a _ballad_ meant a song accompanied by dancing--the word _ballata_ having been specialised down, on the one line to the _ballet_, in which Mademoiselle Genée or the Russian performers will dance for our delight, using no words at all; on the other to "Sir Patrick Spens" or "Clerk Saunders," 'ballads' to which no one in his senses would dream of pointing a toe.

Thus with Verse the written (or printed) word has pretty thoroughly ousted the speaking voice and its auxiliaries--the pipe, the lute, the tabor, the chorus with its dance movements and swaying of the body; and in a quieter way much the same thing is happening to prose. In the Drama, to be sure, we still write (or we should) for the actors, reckon upon their intonations, their gestures, lay account with the tears in the heroine's eyes and her visible beauty: though even in the Drama to-day you may detect a tendency to substitute dialectic for action and paragraphs for the [Greek: Stichomuthia], the sharp outcries of passion in its give-and-take. Again we still--some of us--deliver sermons from pulpits and orations in Parliament or upon public platforms. Yet I am told that the vogue of the sermon is passing; and (by journalists) that the leading article has largely superseded it. On that point I can offer you no personal evidence; but of civil oratory I am very sure that the whole pitch has been sensibly lowered since the day of Chatham, Burke, Sheridan; since the day of Brougham and Canning; nay, ever since the day of Bright, Gladstone, Disraeli. Burke, as everyone knows, once brought down a Brummagem dagger and cast it on the floor of the House. Lord Chancellor Brougham in a peroration once knelt to the assembled peers, '_Here the noble lord inclined his knee to the Woolsack_' is, if I remember, the stage direction in Hansard. Gentlemen, though in the course of destiny one or another of you may be called upon to speak daggers to the Treasury Bench, I feel sure you will use none; while, as for Lord Brougham's genuflexions, we may agree that to emulate them would cost Lord Haldane an effort. These and even far less flagrant or flamboyant tricks of virtuosity have gone quite out of fashion. You could hardly revive them to-day and keep that propriety to which I exhorted you a fortnight ago. They would be out of tune; they would grate upon the nerves; they would offend against the whole style of modern oratory, which steadily tends to lower its key, to use the note of quiet business-like exposition, to adopt more and more the style of written prose.

Let me help your sense of this change, by a further illustration. Burke, as we know, was never shy of declaiming--even of declaiming in a torrent--when he stood up to speak: but almost as little was he shy of it when he sat down to write. If you turn to his "Letters on the Regicide Peace" --no raw compositions, but penned in his latter days and closing, or almost closing, upon that tenderest of farewells to his country--

In this good old House, where everything at least is well aired, I
shall be content to put up my fatigued horses and here take a bed
for the long night that begins to darken upon me--

if, I say, you turn to these "Letters on the Regicide Peace" and consult the title-page, you will find them ostensibly addressed to 'a Member of the present Parliament'; and the opening paragraphs assume that Burke and his correspondent are in general agreement. But skim the pages and your eyes will be arrested again and again by sentences like these:--

The calculation of profit in all such wars is false. On balancing
the account of such wars, ten thousand hogsheads of sugar are
purchased at ten thousand times their price--the blood of man should
never be shed but to redeem the blood of man. It is well shed for
our family, for our friends, for our God, for our country, for our
kind. The rest is vanity; the rest is crime.

Magnificent, truly! But your ear has doubtless detected the blank verse--three iambic lines:--

Are purchased at ten thousand times their price...
Be shed but to redeem the blood of man...
The rest is vanity; the rest is crime.

Again Burke catches your eye by rhetorical inversions:--

But too often different is rational conjecture from melancholy fact,

Well is it known that ambition can creep as well as soar,

by repetitions:--

Never, no never, did Nature say one thing and Wisdom say another ...
Algiers is not near; Algiers is not powerful; Algiers is not our
neighbour; Algiers is not infectious. Algiers, whatever it may be,
is an old creation; and we have good data to calculate all the
mischief to be apprehended from it. When I find Algiers transferred
to Calais, I will tell you what I think of that point--

by quick staccato utterances, such as:--

And is this example nothing? It is everything. Example is the school
of mankind, and they will learn at no other--

or

Our dignity? That is gone. I shall say no more about it. Light lie
the earth on the ashes of English pride!

I say that the eye or ear, caught by such tropes, must (if it be critical) recognise them at once as _rhetoric_, as the spoken word masquerading under guise of the written. Burke may pretend to be seated, penning a letter to a worthy man who will read it in his slippers: but actually Burke is up and pacing his library at Beaconsfield, now striding from fire-place to window with hands clasped under his coat tails, anon pausing to fling out an arm with some familiar accustomed gesture in a House of Commons that knows him no more, towards a Front Bench peopled by shades. In fine the pretence is Cicero writing to Atticus, but the style is Cicero denouncing Catiline.

As such it is not for your imitation. Burke happened to be a genius, with a swoop and range of mind, as of language to interpret it, with a gift to enchant, a power to strike and astound, which together make him, to my thinking, the man in our literature most nearly comparable with Shakespeare. Others may be more to your taste; you may love others better: but no other two leave you so hopeless of discovering _how it is done_. Yet not for this reason only would I warn you against imitating either. For like all great artists they accepted their conditions and wrought for them, and those conditions have changed. When Jacques wished to recite to an Elizabethan audience that

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players--

or Hamlet to soliloquise

To be, or not to be: that is the question--

the one did not stretch himself under a property oak, nor did the other cast himself back in a chair and dangle his legs. They both advanced boldly from the stage, down a narrow platform provided for such recitations and for that purpose built boldly forward into the auditorium, struck an attitude, declaimed the purple passage, and returned, covered with applause, to continue the action of the play. This was the theatrical convention; this the audience expected and understood; for this Shakespeare wrote. Similarly, though the device must have been wearing thin even in 1795-6, Burke cast a familiar epistle into language proper to be addressed to Mr Speaker of the House of Commons. Shakespeare wrote, as Burke wrote, for his audience; and their glory is that they have outlasted the conditions they observed. Yet it was by observing them that they gained the world's ear. Let us, who are less than they, beware of scorning to belong to our own time.

For my part I have a great hankering to see English Literature feeling back through these old modes to its origins. I think, for example, that if we studied to write verse that could really be sung, or if we were more studious to write prose that could be read aloud with pleasure to the ear, we should be opening the pores to the ancient sap; since the roots are always the roots, and we can only reinvigorate our growth through them.

Unhappily, however, I cannot preach this just yet; for we are aiming at practice, and at Cambridge (they tell me) while you speak well, you write less expertly. A contributor to "The Cambridge Review," a fortnight ago, lamented this at length: so you will not set the aspersion down to me, nor blame me if these early lectures too officiously offer a kind of 'First Aid': that, while all the time eager to descant on the _affinities_ of speech and writing, I dwell first on their _differences_; or that, in speaking of Burke, an author I adore only 'on this side idolatry,' I first present him in some aspects for your avoidance. Similarly I adore the prose of Sir Thomas Browne, yet should no more commend it to you for instant imitation than I could encourage you to walk with a feather in your cap and a sword under your gown. Let us observe proprieties.

To return to Burke.--At his most flagrant, in these "Letters on the Regicide Peace," he boldly raids Shakespeare. You are all, I doubt not, conversant with the Prologue to "Henry the Fifth":--

O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention!
A kingdom for a stage, princes to act
And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!
Then should the warlike Harry, like himself,
Assume the port of Mars: and at his heels,
Leash'd in like hounds, should Famine, Sword and Fire
Crouch for employment.

Well, this passage Burke, assuming his correspondent to be familiar with it, boldly claps into prose and inserts into a long diatribe against Pitt for having tamely submitted to the rebuffs of the French Directory. Thus it becomes:--

On that day it was thought he would have assumed the port of Mars: that
he would bid to be brought forth from their hideous Kennel (where his
scrupulous tenderness had too long immured them) those impatient dogs
of War, whose fierce regards affright even the minister of vengeance
that feeds them; that he would let them loose in Famine, Plagues and
Death, upon a guilty race to whose frame and to all whose habit, Order,
Peace, Religion and Virtue, are alien and abhorrent.

Now Shakespeare is but apologising for the shortcomings of his' play-house, whereas Burke is denouncing his country's shame and prophesying disaster to Europe. Yet do you not feel with me that while Shakespeare, using great words on the lowlier subject, contrives to make them appropriate, with Burke, writing on the loftier subject, the same or similar words have become tumid, turgid?

Why? I am sure that the difference lies not in the two men: nor is it all the secret, or even half the secret, that Burke is mixing up the spoken with the written word, using the one while pretending to use the other. That has carried us some way; but now let us take an important step farther. The root of the matter lies in certain essential differences between verse and prose. We will keep, if you please, to our rough practical definitions. Literature--the written word--is a permanent record of memorable speech; a record, at any rate, intended to be permanent. We set a thing down in ink--we print it in a book--because we feel it to be memorable, to be worth preserving. But to set this memorable speech down we must choose one of two forms, verse or prose; and I define verse to be a record in metre and rhythm, prose to be a record which, dispensing with metre (abhorring it indeed), uses rhythm laxly, preferring it to be various and unconstrained, so always that it convey a certain pleasure to the ear.

You observe that I avoid the term Poetry, over which the critics have waged, and still are waging, a war that promises to be endless. Is Walt Whitman a poet? Is the Song of Songs (which is not Solomon's)--is the Book of Job--are the Psalms--all of these as rendered in our Authorised Version of Holy Writ--are all of these poetry? Well 'yes,' if you want my opinion; and again 'yes,' I am sure. But truly on this field, though scores of great men have fought across it--Sidney, Shelley, Coleridge, Scaliger (I pour the names on you at random), Johnson, Wordsworth, the two Schlegels, Aristotle with Twining his translator, Corneille, Goethe, Warton, Whately, Hazlitt, Emerson, Hegel, Gummere--but our axles grow hot. Let us put on the brake: for in practice the dispute comes to very little: since literature is an art and treats scientific definitions as J. K. Stephen recommended. From them

It finds out what it cannot do,
And then it goes and does it.

I am journeying, say, in the West of England. I cross a bridge over a stream dividing Devon from Cornwall. These two counties, each beautiful in its way, are quite unlike in their beauty: yet nothing happened as I stepped across the brook, and for a mile or two or even ten I am aware of no change. Sooner or later that change will break upon the mind and I shall be startled, awaking suddenly to a land of altered features. But at what turn of the road this will happen, just how long the small multiplied impressions will take to break into surmise, into conviction--that nobody can tell. So it is with poetry and prose. They are different realms, but between them lies a debatable land which a De Quincey or a Whitman or a Paul Fort or a Marinetti may attempt. I advise you who are beginners to keep well one side or other of the frontier, remembering that there is plenty of room and what happened to Tupper.

If we restrict ourselves to the terms 'verse' and 'prose,' we shall find the line much easier to draw. Verse is memorable speech set down in metre with strict rhythms; prose is memorable speech set down without constraint of metre and in rhythms both lax and various--so lax, so various, that until quite recently no real attempt has been made to reduce them to rule. I doubt, for my part, if they can ever be reduced to rule; and after a perusal of Professor Saintsbury's latest work, "A History of English Prose Rhythm," I am left doubting. I commend this book to you as one that clears up large patches of forest. No one has yet so well explained what our prose writers, generation after generation, have tried to do with prose: and he has, by the way, furnished us with a capital anthology--or, as he puts it, with 'divers delectable draughts of example.' But the road still waits to be driven. Seeking practical guidance--help for our present purpose--I note first that many a passage he scans in one way may as readily be scanned in another; that when he has finished with one and can say proudly with Wordsworth:--

I've measured it from side to side,
'Tis three feet long and two feet wide,

we still have a sensation of coming out (our good master with us) by that same door wherein we went; and I cannot as yet after arduous trial discover much profit in his table of feet--Paeons, Dochmiacs, Antispasts, Proceleusmatics and the rest--an Antispast being but an iamb followed by a trochee, and Proceleusmatic but two pyrrhics, or four consecutive short syllables--when I reflect that, your possible number of syllables being as many as five to a foot, you may label them (as Aristotle would say) until you come to infinity, where desire fails, without getting nearer any rule of application.

Let us respect a genuine effort of learning, though we may not detect its immediate profit. In particular let us respect whatever Professor Saintsbury writes, who has done such splendid work upon English verse-prosody. I daresay he would retort upon my impatience grandly enough, quoting Walt Whitman:--

I am the teacher of athletes; He that by me spreads a wider breast than my own proves the width of my own; He most honours my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher.

His speculations may lead to much in time; though for the present they yield us small instruction in the path we seek.

It is time we harked back to our own sign-posts. Verse is written in metre and strict rhythm; prose, without metre and with the freest possible rhythm. That distinction seems simple enough, but it carries consequences very far from simple. Let me give you an illustration taken almost at hazard from Milton, from the Second Book of "Paradise Regained":--

Up to a hill anon his steps he reared
From whose high top to ken the prospect round,
If cottage were in view, sheep-cote or herd;
But cottage, herd, or sheep-cote, none he saw.

These few lines are verse, are obviously verse with the accent of poetry; while as obviously they are mere narrative and tell us of the simplest possible incident--how Christ climbed a hill to learn what could be seen from the top. Yet observe, line for line and almost word for word, how strangely they differ from prose. Mark the inversions: 'Up to a hill anon his steps he reared,' 'But cottage, herd, or sheep-cote, none he saw.' Mark next the diction--'his steps he reared.' In prose we should not rear our steps up the Gog-magog hills, or even more Alpine fastnesses; nor, arrived at the top, should we 'ken' the prospect round; we might 'con,' but should more probably 'survey' it. Even 'anon' is a tricky word in prose, though I deliberately palmed it off on you a few minutes ago. Mark thirdly the varied repetition, 'if cottage were in view, sheep-cote or herd--but cottage, herd, or sheep-cote, none he saw.' Lastly compare the whole with such an account as you or I or Cluvienus would write in plain prose:--

Thereupon he climbed a hill on the chance that the view from its
summit might disclose some sign of human habitation--a herd, a
sheep-cote, a cottage perhaps. But he could see nothing of the sort.

But you will ask, '_Why_ should verse and prose employ diction so different? _Why_ should the one invert the order of words in a fashion not permitted to the other?' and I shall endeavour to answer these questions together with a third which, I dare say, you have sometimes been minded to put when you have been told--and truthfully told--by your manuals and histories, that when a nation of men starts making literature it invariably starts on the difficult emprise of verse, and goes on to prose as by an afterthought. Why should men start upon the more difficult form and proceed to the easier? It is not their usual way. In learning to skate, for instance, they do not cut figures before practising loose and easy propulsion.

The answer is fairly simple. Literature (once more) is a record of memorable speech; it preserves in words a record of such thoughts or of such deeds as we deem worth preserving. Now if you will imagine yourself a very primitive man, lacking paper or parchment; or a slightly less primitive, but very poor, man to whom the price of parchment and ink is prohibitive; you have two ways of going to work. You can carve your words upon trees or stones (a laborious process) or you can commit them to memory and carry them about in your head; which is cheaper and handier. For an illustration, you find it useful, anticipating the tax-collector, to know how many days there are in the current month. But further you find it a nuisance and a ruinous waste of time to run off to the tribal tree or monolith whenever the calculation comes up; so you invent a formula, and you cast that formula into _verse_ for the simple reason that verse, with its tags, alliterations, beat of syllables, jingle of rhymes (however your tribe has chosen to invent it), has a knack, not possessed by prose, of sticking in your head. You do not say, 'Quick thy tablets, memory! Let me see--January has 31 days, February 28 days, March 31 days, April 30 days.' You invent a verse:--

Thirty days hath September,
April, June and November...

Nay, it has been whispered to me, Gentlemen, that in this University some such process of memorising in verse has been applied by bold bad irreverently-minded men even to the "Evidences" of our cherished Paley.

This, you will say, is mere verse, and not yet within measurable distance of poetry. But wait! The men who said the more memorable things, or sang them--the men who recounted deeds and genealogies of heroes, plagues and famines, assassinations, escapes from captivity, wanderings and conquests of the clan, all the 'old, unhappy, far-off things and battles long ago'--the men who sang these things for their living, for a supper, a bed in the great hall, and something in their wallet to carry them on to the next lordship--these were gentlemen, scôps, bards, minstrels (call them how you will), a professional class who had great need of a full repertory in a land swarming with petty chieftains, and to adapt their strains to the particular hall of entertainment. It would never do, for example, to flatter the prowess of the Billings in the house of the Hoppings, their hereditary foes, or to bore the Wokings (who lived where the crematorium now is) with the complicated genealogy of the Tootings: for this would have been to miss that appropriateness which I preached to you in my second lecture as a preliminary rule of good writing. Nay, when the Billings intermarried with the Tootings--when the Billings took to cooing, so to speak--a hasty blend of excerpts would be required for the "Epithalamium." So it was all a highly difficult business, needing adaptability, a quick wit, a goodly stock of songs, a retentive memory and every artifice to assist it. Take "Widsith," for example, the 'far-travelled man.' He begins:--

Widsith spake: he unlocked his word-hoard.

So he had a hoard of words, you see: and he must have needed them, for he goes on:--

Forthon ic maeg singan and secgan spell,
Maenan fore mengo in meoduhealle,
Hu me cynegode cystum dohten.
Ic waes mid Hunum and mid Hreth-gotum,
Mid Sweom and mid Geatum, and mid Suth-Denum.
Mid Wenlum ic waes and mid Waernum and mid Wicingum.
Mid Gefthum ic waes and mid Winedum....

(Therefore I can sing and tell a tale, recount in the Mead Hall, how
men of high race gave rich gifts to me. I was with Huns and with Hreth
Goths, with the Swedes, and with the Geats, and with the South Danes;
I was with the Wenlas, and with the Waernas, and with the Vikings; I
was with the Gefthas and with the Winedae....)

and so on for a full dozen lines. I say that the memory of such men must have needed every artifice to help it: and the chief artifice to their hand was one which also delighted the ears of their listeners. They sang or intoned to the harp.

There you get it, Gentlemen. I have purposely, skimming a wide subject, discarded much ballast; but you may read and scan and read again, and always you must come back to this, that the first poets sang their words to the harp or to some such instrument: and just there lies the secret why poetry differs from prose. The moment you introduce music you let in emotion with all its sway upon speech. From that moment you change everything, down to the order of the words--the _natural_ order of the words: and (remember this) though the harp be superseded, the voice never forgets it. You may take up a Barrack Room Ballad of Kipling's, and it is there, though you affect to despise it for a banjo or concertina:--

Ford--ford--ford of Kabul river...

'Bang, whang, whang goes the drum, tootle-te-tootle the fife.' From the moment men introduced music they made verse a thing essentially separate from prose, from its natural key of emotion to its natural ordering of words. Do not for one moment imagine that when Milton writes:--

But cottage, herd, or sheep-cote, none he saw.

or

Of man's first disobedience and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree...

--where you must seek down five lines before you come to the verb, and then find it in the imperative mood--do not suppose for a moment that he is here fantastically shifting words, inverting phrases out of their natural order. For, as St Paul might say, there is a natural order of prose and there is a natural order of verse. The natural order of prose is:--

I was born in the year 1632, in the City of York, of a good family,
though not of that county; my father being a foreigner of Bremen,
who settled first in Hull.--[_Defoe._]

or

Further I avow to your Highness that with these eyes I have beheld
the person of William Wooton, B.D., who has written a good sizeable
volume against a friend of your Governor (from whom, alas! he must
therefore look for little favour) in a most gentlemanly style,
adorned with the utmost politeness and civility.--[_Swift._]

The natural order of poetry is:--

Thus with the year
Seasons return, but not to me returns
Day, or the sweet approach of Ev'n or Morn,
Or sight of vernal bloom, or Summer's Rose,
Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine.

or

But cottage, herd, or sheep-cote, none he saw.

and this basal difference you must have clear in your minds before, in dealing with prose or verse, you can practise either with profit or read either with intelligent delight.

LECTURE IV.

ON THE CAPITAL DIFFICULTY OF VERSE

Thursday, April 17

In our last lecture, Gentlemen, we discussed the difference between verse, or metrical writing, and prose. We traced that difference (as you will remember) to Music--to the harp, the lyre, the dance, the chorus, all those first necessary accompaniments which verse never quite forgets; and we concluded that, as Music ever introduces emotion, which is indeed her proper and only means of persuading, so the natural language of verse will be keyed higher than the natural language of prose; will be keyed higher throughout and even for its most ordinary purposes--as for example, to tell us that So-and-so sailed to Troy with so many ships.

I grant you that our steps to this conclusion were lightly and rapidly taken: yet the stepping-stones are historically firm. Verse does precede prose in literature; verse does start with musical accompaniment; musical accompaniment does introduce emotion; and emotion does introduce an order of its own into speech. I grant you that we have travelled far from the days when a prose-writer, Herodotus, labelled the books of his history by the names of the nine Muses. I grant you that if you go to the Vatican and there study the statues of the Muses (noble, but of no early date) you may note that Calliope, Muse of the Epic--unlike her sisters Euterpe, Erato, Thalia--holds for symbol no instrument of music, but a stylus and a tablet. Yet the earlier Calliope, the Calliope of Homer, was a Muse of Song.

[Greek: Menin aeide, Thea--]

'Had I a thousand tongues, a thousand hands.'--For what purpose does the poet wish for a thousand tongues, but to sing? for what purpose a thousand hands, but to pluck the wires? not to dip a thousand pens in a thousand inkpots.

I doubt, in fine, if your most learned studies will discover much amiss with the frontier we drew between verse and prose, cursorily though we ran its line. Nor am I daunted on comparing it with Coleridge's more philosophical one, which you will find in the "Biographia Literaria" (c. XVIII)--

And first for the origin of metre. This I would trace to the balance
in the mind effected by that spontaneous effort which strives to
hold in check the workings of passion. It might be easily explained
likewise in what manner this salutary antagonism is assisted by the
very state which it counteracts, and how this balance of antagonism
becomes organised into metre (in the usual acceptation of that term)
by a supervening act of the will and judgment consciously and for
the foreseen purpose of pleasure.

I will not swear to understand precisely what Coleridge means here, though I believe that I do. But at any rate, and on the principle that of two hypotheses, each in itself adequate, we should choose the simpler, I suggest in all modesty that we shall do better with our own than with Coleridge's, which has the further disadvantage of being scarcely amenable to positive evidence. We can say with historical warrant that Sappho struck the lyre, and argue therefrom, still within close range of correction, that her singing responded to the instrument: whereas to assert that Sappho's mind 'was balanced by a spontaneous effort which strove to hold in check the workings of passion' is to say something for which positive evidence will be less handily found, whether to contradict or to support.

Yet if you choose to prefer Coleridge's explanation, no great harm will be done: since Coleridge, who may be presumed to have understood it, promptly goes on to deduce that,

as the elements of metre owe their existence to a state of increased
excitement, so the metre itself should be accompanied by the natural
language of excitement.

which is precisely where we found ourselves, save that where Coleridge uses the word 'excitement' we used the word 'emotion.'

Shall we employ an illustration before proceeding?--some sentence easily handled, some commonplace of the moralist, some copybook maxim, I care not what. 'Contentment breeds Happiness'--That is a proposition with which you can hardly quarrel; sententious, sedate, obviously true; provoking delirious advocacy as little as controversial heat; in short a very fair touchstone. Now hear how the lyric treats it, in these lines of Dekker--

Art thou poor, yet hast thou golden slumbers?
O sweet content!
Art thou rich, yet is thy mind perplex'd?
O punishment!
Dost thou laugh to see how fools are vex'd
To add to golden numbers golden numbers?
O sweet content! O sweet, O sweet content!
Work apace, apace, apace, apace;
Honest labour wears a lovely face;
Then hey, nonny nonny--hey, nonny nonny!

Canst drink the waters of the crystal spring?
O sweet content!
Swim'st thou in wealth, yet sink'st in thine own tears?
O punishment!
Then he that patiently want's burden bears
No burden bears, but is a king, a king!
O sweet content! O sweet, O sweet content!
Work apace, apace, apace, apace;
Honest labour wears a lovely face;
Then hey, nonny nonny--hey, nonny nonny!

There, in lines obviously written for music, you have our sedate sentence, 'Contentment breeds Happiness,' converted to mere emotion. Note (to use Coleridge's word) the 'excitement' of it. There are but two plain indicative sentences in the two stanzas--(1) 'Honest labour wears a lovely face' (used as a refrain), and (2) 'Then he that patiently want's burden bears no burden bears, but is a king, a king!' (heightened emotionally by inversion and double repetition). Mark throughout how broken is the utterance; antithetical question answered by exclamations: both doubled and made more antithetical in the second stanza: with cunning reduplicated inversions to follow, and each stanza wound up by an outburst of emotional nonsense--'hey, nonny nonny--hey, nonny nonny!'--as a man might skip or whistle to himself for want of thought.

Now (still keeping to our same subject of Contentment) let us _prosify_ the lyrical order of language down to the lowest pitch to which genius has been able to reduce it and still make noble verse. You have all read Wordsworth's famous Introduction to the "Lyrical Ballads," and you know that Wordsworth's was a genius working on a theory that the languages of verse and of prose are identical. You know, too, I dare say, into what banalities that theory over and over again betrayed him: banalities such as--

His widowed mother, for a second mate
Espoused the teacher of the village school:
Who on her offspring zealously bestowed
Needful instruction.

--and the rest. Nevertheless Wordsworth was a genius; and genius working persistently on a narrow theory will now and again 'bring it off' (as they say). So he, amid the flat waste of his later compositions, did undoubtedly 'bring it off' in the following sonnet:--