he grudgingly and almost tacitly admitted it) and verse of double, as such—were not adopted by others, his doctrine was always (save in a very few instances to be duly noticed later) implicitly, and often explicitly, the doctrine of the eighteenth century. Nor has this ever lost a certain measure of support; while it is very curious that the few foreign students of English prosody who have arisen in late years are usually inclined to it.
One difficulty in it, however, could never escape its most peremptory devotees; and a shift for meeting it must have been devised at the same time as the doctrine. It was all very well to lay down that English verse must consist of a certain number of syllables; but it could escape no one who had ever read a volume or even a few pages of English poetry, that it did consist of a very uncertain number of them. The problem was, therefore, how to get rid of the surplus where it existed. It was met by recourse to that very classical prosody which was in other respects being denied, and by the adoption of ruthless "elision" or "crushing out" of the supposed superfluities. This involved not merely elision proper—the vanishing or metrical ignoring of a vowel at the end of a word before a vowel (or an h) at the beginning of another, "th('/e) Almighty," "t('/o) admire." Application of a similar process to the interior of words like "vi('/o)let," "di('/a)mond," was inculcated, and in fact insisted on; and even where consonants preceded and followed a vowel of the easily slurrable kind, as in "watery," the suppression of the e and sometimes even of other vowels—"del('/i)cate"—was prescribed.
Its results.
There may possibly be two opinions (though it seems strange that there should be) on the æsthetic results of this proceeding. To the present writer they seem utterly hideous; while the admission of the full syllables seems melodious and satisfying. It may also be pointed out that there is a very tell-tale character about the fact that not a few prosodists who defend "elision" in principle defend it only as a metrical fiction, and even lay down positively that the elided syllables are always to be pronounced.[13] But it is far less matter of opinion—if it is even matter of opinion at all—first, that this process of mangling and monotonising English poetry is unnecessary; and, secondly, that it is inconsistent with the historic development of the language and the literature. That it is unnecessary will, it is hoped, be demonstrated in the next of these Introductory Chapters; and that it is unhistorical the whole body of the historical survey to follow will show. And another objection of great importance can be made good at once and here. The rigid observance of the syllabic system produces, and cannot but produce, an intolerable monotony—a monotony which has made the favourite verse of the eighteenth century positively (if perhaps excessively and unreasonably) loathsome to succeeding generations. It would be condemned by this, if it had no other fault; while it has, as a matter of fact, hardly a virtue. It was tried once for all by Orm, and failed once for all, in the beginning of modern English, and it has never been tried in practice or maintained in theory since without validating inferior poetry and discouraging good.[14]
FOOTNOTES:
[11] For the almost necessary precedence, owing to the inflexional e, of the fourteener by this, and for expansion and explanation of other historic facts mentioned in this chapter, see Scanned Conspectus and Books II. and III.
[12] See Bibliography and Book III.
[13] This, it may be pointed out, is in flat contradiction to the older doctrine of, for instance, Dryden, that no vowel can be cut out before another in scansion which is not so in pronunciation.
[14] Examples here can hardly be needed. At any rate, one (Shenstone's, v. inf., own) may suffice:
The loose wall tottering o'er the trembling shade,
Cautions.
Here syllabic prosody would pronounce, and in strictness spell, "tott'ring."—This is perhaps as good a place as any to make some remarks on the connection of syllables with English prosody. In that prosody there are no extrametrical syllables, except at the end of lines, and (much more doubtfully) at the cæsura, which is a sort of end. Every syllable that occurs elsewhere must be part of, or constitute, a foot; and it is for this reason that the "Rules" following begin with feet, not syllables. It is practically impossible, in many, if not in most cases, to tell the prosodic value of an English syllable, or an English word, till you see it in actual verse.—Again, although there are, of course, innumerable instances where a foot coincides with a word, the composition of the foot out of syllables belonging to different words, as in
The thun|der of | the trum|pets of | the night,
or
To set|tle the | success|ion of | the state,
is usually more effective.—And, lastly, although there have, at different times, been strange prejudices against the use of monosyllables and of polysyllables, these prejudices are, in both cases, wholly unreasonable.
CHAPTER IV
SYSTEMS OF ENGLISH PROSODY—THE FOOT
General if not always consistent use of the term "foot."
Although the accentual and the syllabic systems—sometimes separate, but oftener combined—have, on the whole, dominated English preceptist prosody almost from the time when it first began to be formally studied, there has, until very recently, been a constant tendency to blend with these, if not the full acceptance, at any rate a certain borrowing, of the terminology of a third system—the foot-and-quantity one, so well known in the classical prosodies. Not before Bysshe (c. 1700) do you find any positive denial of "feet." Gascoigne (c. 1570) talks of them; Milton speaks of "committing short and long"; Dr. Johnson, though using a strict accent-and-syllable scheme, admits (whether with absolute accuracy or not does not matter) that "our heroic verse is derived from the iambic." And in more modern times, from Mitford downwards, arguments against the applicability of the terms in English have not unfrequently been found consistent with an occasional, if not a regular, employment of them.
In fact, nothing but a curious suspicion, as of something cabalistical in them, can prevent their use, or the use of some much more clumsy and inconvenient equivalents—bars, beats, sections, what not;[15] for that use is based on the most unalterable of all things, except the laws of thought, the laws of mathematics. Everybody, whatsoever his prosodic sect, admits that verse consists of alternations of two values—some would say of more than two, but that only complicates the application of an unchanged argument. Now the possible combinations of two different things, in successive numerical units of two, three, four, etc., are not arbitrary, but naturally fixed; and the names of feet—iambic,
