This is a clipping and incisive style. Even the largo (to borrow a term from music) of Calantha's address to her nobles, though it assumes hendecasyllabic stateliness, maintains the somewhat jerky motion of the lines that had preceded it. While speaking of Ben Jonson or of Marston would have been the proper time to mention the blank verse of George Chapman, a very manly and scholarlike author. He expressed philosophical ideas in elevated language. This eulogy of honourable love is vigorous in thought as well as metre: 'Tis nature's second sun, Causing a spring of virtues where he shines; For love informs them as the sun doth colours; Of valour, wit, virtue, and haughty thoughts, There is nothing in this passage which can be termed highly poetical. It is chiefly interesting as showing the plasticity of language and of metre in the hands of our Elizabethan authors. They fixed their mind upon their thoughts, as we should do in writing prose, and turned out terse and pregnant lines not unadorned with melody. I have hitherto purposely abstained from speaking about Webster, a poet of no ordinary power, whose treatment of blank verse is specially illustrative of all the licences which were permitted by the playwrights of that time. His language is remarkably condensed, elliptical, and even crabbed. His verse is broken up into strange blocks and masses, often reading like rhythmical prose. It is hard, for instance, to make a five-footed line out of the following: To be executed again; who must despatch me? Yet close analysis will always prove that there was method in the aberra tions of Webster, and that he used his metre as the most delicate and responsive instrument for all varieties of dramatic expression. Avoiding the sing-song of Greene and Peele, the lyrical sweetness of Fletcher, the prosaic gravity of Jonson, the mere fluency of Heywood and Decker, the tumid magniloquence of Marlowe, and the glittering regularity of Ford, he perfected a style which depends for its effect upon the emphases and pauses of the reciter. One of the most striking lines in his tragedy of the Duchess of Malfi proves how wholly and how successfully Webster sacrificed metre to expression. A brother is looking for the first time after death on the form of a sister whom he has caused to be murdered : Cover her face mine eyes dazzle: she died young. There is no cæsura, no regular flow of verse, in this line, though in point of syllables it is not more redundant than half of Fletcher's. Each sentence has to be said separately, with long intervals and sighs, that indicate the working of remorseful thought. The powerful collocation of his words may be illustrated by such a line as,— Other sins only speak; murder shrieks out! where the logical meaning can hardly fail to be emphasized by the reader. Quantity in the verse of Webster is sympathetic with the purpose of the speaker in writing it he no doubt imagined his actors declaiming with great variety of intonation, with frequent and lengthy pauses, and with considerable differences in the rapidity of their utterances. The dialogue of the duchess with her waiting-maid on the subject of the other world and death is among the finest for its thoughts and language. As far as rhythm contributes to its excellences, they depend entirely upon the pauses, emphases, and irregularities of all sorts which are used. The duchess begins, Up to this point the verses have run smoothly for Webster. But the duchess has exhausted one vein of meditation. Her voice sinks, and ske falls into a profound reverie. When she rouses herself again to address Cariola, she starts with a new thought, and the line is made redundant:I'll tell thee a miracle; I am not mad yet to my cause of sorrow: The heaven o'er my head seems made of molten brass, To eke out the second line the voice is made to dwell with emphasis upon the word "mad," while the third and fourth have each twelve syllables, which must be pronounced with desperate energy and distinctness,-as it were rapidly beneath the breath. But again her passion changes. It relents, and becomes more tender. And for a space we have verses that flow more evenly : I am acquainted with sad misery; As the tanned galley-slave is with his oar; And custom makes it easy. At this point she sinks into meditation, and on rousing herself again with a fresh thought, the verse is broken and redundant : What do I look like now? : Cariola answers plainly, and her lines have a smooth rhythm:— Like to your picture in the gallery, A deal of life in show, but none in practice; Or rather like some reverend monument, Whose ruins are even pitied. The duchess takes up this thought : Very proper; And fortune seems only to have her eyesight Here her contemplation is broken by the approach of a messenger, and she exclaims, without completing the line,— How now! What noise is that? It might seem almost hypercritical to remark, that when the train of thought is broken from without, the verse is deficient; when broken by the natural course of the speaker's reflection, it is redundant. Yet this may be observed in the instances which I have quoted, and there is a real reason for it. The redundant line indicates the incubation of long-continued reverie; the deficient very well expresses that short and sudden cessation of thought which is produced by an interruption from without. The remarks which I have made on Webster's style apply with almost equal force to that of his contemporaries. We read in Hamlet, for instance :— This bodily creation ecstasy Is very cunning in. Ecstasy! The second line is defective in one syllable. That syllable, to Shakspeare's delicate sense of the value of sounds and pauses, was supplied by Hamlet's manner. The prince was meant, no doubt, to startle his andience by the sudden repetition of the word "ecstasy," after a quick gesture of astonishment. To those who read the pages of our dramatists with this conception of their metre, its irregularities furnish an unerring index to the inflections which the actors must have used, to the characters which the poets designed, and to the situations which they calculated. The want of action is thus insome measure compensated, and it becomes apparent that the true secret of blank verse consists in the proper adaptation of words and rhythms to the sense contained in them. On this point I have already more than once insisted. I repeat it because it seems to me that in this respect blank verse differs from every other metre in kind, and that it cannot be properly appreciated, far less properly written, unless it be remembered that thought must always run before expression, and mould language to its own particular uses. Blank verse is indeed a sort of divinized prose. Having traced the origin and development of blank verse upon the stage, and seen the congruence of liberty and law, the harmony of thought and form, which constitute its beauty, we can understand how Milton came to use it as he did. Milton was deeply read in the Elizabethan authors; he profited by all of them and wore their mantle with a double portion of their power. Nor did he fail to observe the analogy between blank verse and the Virgilian hexameter; so that he added structures of more complex melody than had been used upon the stage, periods more fitted to reading or to recitation than to the rapid utterance of acted character. Yet, while he dignified the metre by epical additions, he never forgot that he was handling the verse of tragedy; and every one of the "remarkably unharmonious lines which Johnson has collected in his essay on the versification of Milton, was not fashioned, as the critic hints, in slovenly haste, or in despair of making modern language musical, but was deliberately written in obedience to the highest laws of the metre which Marlowe, Shakspeare, Fletcher, Webster, and the other dramatists had used. In suiting blank verse to epic poetry, Milton preserved the elasticity and force with which his predecessors had wielded it; his so-called harshness resulted from a deliberate or instinctive obedience to the genius of the English tragic metre. It seems hardly necessary to insist upon this view of Milton's versification. Yet the pernicious canons of the eighteenth century, when taste had become habituated to the mechanical regularity and meaningless monotony of the couplet, still prevail, and there are people who cannot read Milton by the sense and by their ear, but who cling blindly to the laws of rigorous scansion. A dispute arose not long ago in one of our leading papers, as to the proper reading of two lines in Samson Agonistes; where, by the way, dramatic licence was, to say the least, allowable. The lines ran thus: Yet God hath wrought things as incredible It was suggested that they might be reduced to order by this transposition: Yet God of old hath for his people wrought Things as incredible: what hinders now? It is clear that the versification according to the second reading is far smoother. But is it more Miltonic, and would it not be very easy by a similar process of transposition to emasculate some of the most vigorous periods in Milton's poetry, and to reduce his music to the five-footed monotony of incompetent versifiers? The truth is, that the chorus,—or Milton, who speaks in the chorus,-does not think about iambic regularity, but is intent on arguing with Manoah. Its words of faith and confidence rush forth :--- Yet God hath wrought things as incredible then stop; and the question follows after a pause:— What hinders now? Energy of meaning is thus communicated to the double purpose of their argument. The action of the speech is weakened by the suggested emendation. Take again line 175 of Samson Agonistes,— and write it, Universally crowned with highest praises. Crowned universally with highest praises. The first form is anomalous; the second makes a very decent hendecasyllabic. Johnson, Bentley, and the like, would rejoice in so manipulating a hundred characteristic passages; but true criticism looks backward and deduces its grounds of judgment from the predecessors rather than the successors of a poet. Adopting this standard, we should try Milton by Elizabethan models and not by the versifiers of the eighteenth century. But these examples are taken from a tragedy. In Paradise Lost we find that Milton has varied the dramatic rhythm by abstaining from hendecasyllables and by introducing far more involved and artificial cadences. In fact the flow of epical language is naturally more sedate and complex than that of the drama: for it has to follow the thoughts of one mind through all its reasonings. Yet the dramatic genius of the metre is for ever asserting itself, as in the following lines: Rejoicing but with awe, In adoration at his feet I fell Submiss; he reared me, and, "Whom thou soughtest I am," Said mildly, "Author of all this thou seest Above, or round about thee, or beneath." Here, if we fix our attention upon the lines and try to scan them, we find the third most dissonant. But if we read them by the sense, and follow the grouping of the thoughts, we terminate one cadence at "submiss," and after a moment of parenthetical description begin another period, which extends itself through the concluding lines. To analyse Miltonic blank verse in all its details would be the work of much study and prolonged labour. It is enough to indicate the fact that the most sonorous passages commence and terminate with interrupted lines, including in one organic structure, periods, parentheses, and paragraphs of fluent melody, that the harmonies are wrought by subtle and most complex alliterative systems, by delicate changes in the length and volume of syllables, and by the choice of names magnificent for their mere gorgeousness of sound. In these structures there are many pauses which enable the ear and voice to rest themselves, but none are perfect, none satisfy the want created by the opening hemistich, until the final and deliberate close is reached. Then the sense of harmony is gratified and we proceed with pleasure to a new and different sequence. If the truth of this remark is not confirmed by the following celebrated and essentially Miltonic passage, it must fall without further justification : And now his heart Distends with pride, and hardening in his strength, Met such embodied force as named with these |