Milton-that odd person Baron, for instance-quite early, but there are no real imitators of him, early or late, in his own life. Dryden's admiration, great and genuine as it certainly was, did not lie in the least in the direction of form. He "tags" Milton's blanks while he is in love with rhyme for stage purposes; and when he has taken a new mistress, his own kind of blank verse, fine as it is in All for Love and the rest, is not Miltonic at all. Nowhere does Milton, for his own lifetime, and for long afterwards, dwell so much apart as in the sphere of prosody: it is only by a sort of cosmic alteration that the star of his soul begins to shed its influence here. On the other hand, looked at from a greater altitude and with wider range, he is one of the very greatest facts of English prosodic history; and as such we have given him room accorded to hardly any one else. Separated as he was from all the immediate or nearly immediate prosodic interests and symptoms of his own time, he supplies infallibly, though no doubt undesignedly, all or almost all that is necessary to correct the faults of that time, to confirm, while extending and vitalising, its merits. Moreover, he does something for English prosody at large which had to be done at some time, though not perhaps necessarily in this. His parergon in the sonnet, interesting and important as it is, still is a parergon. His blankverse paragraph, and his audacious and victorious attempt to combine blanks and rhymed verse with paragraphic effect in Lycidas, lay down indestructible models and patterns of English verse-rhythm, as distinguished from the narrower and more strait-laced forms of English metre which lyric and stanza had already made safe, and as against the ungirt and unstayed lubricity of the unstopped couplet, the brisk insufficiency and commonness of the stopped. That by Pause, Equivalence, and Substitutionthese three-you can secure perfect English poetic form; that, to secure it in perfection, whether you add rhyme or not, you must attend to these, that is the doctrine and the secret of Milton. It was long before it was understood -it is not universally understood or recognised even now. But it was always there; and as enjoyment and admiration of the results spread and abode, there was ever the greater chance of the principle being discovered, the greater certainty of its being put into perhaps unconscious operation by imitation. And so Milton in a sense completed, though of course he did not in the least arrest, the work which had been begun by Chaucer long before, which had been resumed by Spenser and carried on by Shakespeare, and which had fallen into his hands almost directly from Shakespeare's own. In this lease of the three lives English poetry and English prosody had been developed in a fashion still wonderful in our eyes, but certain, and fully evidenced by the results which we have been analysing from our own point of view. They were now to contract operations and reverse principle in the odd way in which, throughout literary as throughout political history, people (and the English people very particularly) have chosen to relinquish the fruits of victory, and run counter to their own previous practice and theories. But there was something to be attempted and done still, though on a smaller and less striking scale; and with this we shall be concerned in the rest of the volume. CHAPTER I DRYDEN Variety of Dryden's metres-His general prosodic standpoint-His practice - The Hastings elegy The Heroic StanzasAstræa Redux and its group-Annus Mirabilis-The couplet in the Heroic plays-Its changes-And conversion to blankDryden's blank verse-His lyrics-Other songs-The OdesThe Hymns, etc.-The couplet in the Translations—In the later poems generally-The Prologues, etc.-The Satires-The didactic and narrative pieces-Triplets and Alexandrines Note on Alexandrines in continuous verse. Dryden's metres. AMONG the numerous, and nearly always significant, Variety of differences between Dryden and the poet who continued (and in one sense finished) his work, there is hardly any more striking, though there are several which have struck more, than the fact that while Pope is practically homo unius metri, Dryden is remarkably polymetric. To some slight extent, indeed, the fact that there is hardly anything of his more widely known than the Ode on St. Cecilia's Day has kept in mind the other fact, that he was not a mere couplet-monger. But the singular fancy which has made some editors of the Poems, even while admitting Prologues and Epilogues which are almost purely dramatic, keep out the Songs in the very same plays which are not dramatic at all, has obscured the full truth from the general reader. That full truth is that, here as elsewhere, Dryden was far more above, and less of, his age than Pope. In the first place (and here Pope is not to blame for not sharing his advantage), he was nearly as 1 They are in the “Aldine” edition, but not in the "Globe." |