that there was no foundation for the feelings to which Shakespeare gives expression in his sonnets; no young noblemanSouthampton or whoever it might be for whom Shakespeare had a real cultus-no dark lady who inspired him with passion. But it would mean that for the sake of conforming to a prescribed type (the far-off echo of the chanson courtoise in fact) Shakespeare had exaggerated and in a degree denaturalised these feelings. And here the test of the technique of the versification itself comes in very aptly. The sonnets are full of beautiful lines, images, phrases; how, being Shakespeare's, could it be otherwise? But they are also very full of technical faults. These do not always lie quite strictly within the field of prosody, but they are very recognisable and distinguishable from the content of the poems. The sonnets' most flagrant fault lies in the bathoses into which their final couplets fall. No doubt the quatorzaine lays itself open to this blemish; and, if we were to agree with Professor Saintsbury that the quatorzaine is a more truly English poem than the Petrarchan sonnet, then we should have to say that the sonnet is not adapted as a medium for English poetry. But surely 'Avenge, 'O Lord' and 'The world is too much with us' would, if they stood alone, refute such a theory. It is difficult in the quatorzaine to avoid bathos. One of the very finest achievements in this medium (by a poet in other things scarcely more than second-rate) is Daniel's Care-charmer Sleep.' The last couplet of this,

'Still let me sleep embracing clouds in vain
And never wake to face the day's disdain,'

hardly keeps the level of the other twelve lines, and so is literally a bathos; though in the case of lines of such beauty the word seems harsh. Bathos' is not too harsh a word for such final couplets of Shakespeare's as

'For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.'

'That I an accessory needs must be

To that sweet thief which sourly robs from me.'

where the weakness of the thought is very aptly echoed by the weakness of the verse and of the line-endings. The difficulty throughout Shakespeare's sonnets is rather to find one in which

* Its chief fault is redundancy in the two phrases 'Still let me sleep' and 'And never wake.'

the final couplet is not a marked bathos and in itself feeble.* The line-endings again of the final couplets ask special notice. Théodore de Banville has, in his Traité de Versification,' laid it down as a rule for French verse that the rhyme must never fall on an insignificant word. He does not give very fully his reasons for this dictum; but it would be easy to justify it on logical grounds and to show that it applies to rhyme in any language and even as a general rule to all line-endings. Now turn to Shakespeare's sonnets and see how often in the final couplets this rule is violated. (It is violated pretty frequently in the body of the sonnets likewise.) The rhyme thee,' me,' for instance, occurs eight times † in the suite; be,' 'thee' four times; be,' 'me' twice. We have besides ' fee,' me,' 'free,' ' me,' ' ye,' ' me,' (' assure ye' and 'cure me '!); altogether more than ten per cent. of the sonnet-endings contain some rhyme of the kind we have indicated. Turning to a matter more strictly of prosody we have in nearly twenty per cent. of the sonnets a spondaic ending, such as lives sweet,' prove none,' 'love sheds,' 'will shows,' 'grow sad,' 'sweet 'skill,' that time,'' fine wit,'' gives scope,'' same part,' 'your 'truth,' 'more rare,' 'your will,'' still green,'' shine bright,' bring forth,'' seem woe,'' mayst take,'' did play,' &c. ‡

96

These are of course just the kind of harshnesses which we get in the Shakespearean couplet when it appears amid the Shakespearean blank verse. And it might be thought that some fatal paralysis came over the poet's pen when he sought to avail himself of this particular metre. Without doubt some additional badness of the sonnet-couplets is due to this disability in their author. But the bodies of the quatorzaines are full of errors of versification less glaring than those we have taken from the couplets, but of a similar kind. Here, too, feeble line-endings ('thee,' 'me,' 'are,' etc.) are by no means rare, and now and again such defective rhymes as astronomy' and quality,' fleet'st' and 'sweets,'' doting,' 'nothing,' etc. The same rhymes frequently recur in different sonnets, and ('verse,'

Tired with all these, from these would I be gone

Save that to die I leave my love alone,'

is certainly of the very finest verse.

The 'lest the wise world'

couplet is another great one. But after these two, which?

† With such false rhyming as 'love thee,' ' move me' in the 26th

sonnet.

Here is one:

'Let them say more that like of hearsay well,' of which the harshness cannot easily be surpassed.

' rehearse' for example) not such everyday rhymes that their repetition can be excused. We have to compare all these faults with the matchless perfection of Shakespeare's blank verse to understand what clear evidence they afford that the poet was not highly inspired (and not, we may therefore suspect, very deeply moved) when he wrote the sonnets.

This difference, then, between the Shakespearean sonnet and the Shakespearean dramatic verse may very well symbolise for us the transition from an outworn tradition—which dates back as far as the fourteenth century or earlier still, a tradition eminently French in its origin and Franco-chivalrous in its sentiment-to the true inheritance in a world of realities in love, war, adventure, such as existed in Tudor England.

We therefore now turn to the blank verse of the dramatistsof Shakespeare, in whom it reaches its apogee. Professor Saintsbury has much that is illuminating to say on this theme. It is probable that, though this form of verse contains a number of prosodic 'points' and asks a good deal of careful study to bring its excellences to the light of day, such will not seem to be the case to the general reader, who has been wont to regard it rather as a simple matter. There is no better test of a fine ear for poetry than lies in the power to appreciate blank verse. But the blank verse of our great dramatists is a medium for so much beyond and outside itself, that it does not necessarily argue a defect of ear when we find it disconsidered. It is very easy and very natural to take it as it comes, as Jaques took his reflections, giving heaven thanks for its beauty and letting the matter rest there. The chief real advantage of prosodic and kindred studies is that they correct this tendency, and force us to pass the sweets of poetry slowly over the palate, giving us a zest which we never afterwards lose.

Let us begin by recalling the two main elements which Professor Saintsbury distinguishes as contributing to beautify the prosody of blank verse-or of all poetry for that matter. The first is equivalence' or substitution-when now and again two short syllables are substituted for a long-as in the Tanais instance which we quoted. Done constantly this would either mar the verse or change its character; done now and again it adds greatly to its charm. The second element of added beauty is enjambment,' the passing over of the sentence from one line to another, and not merely, as we shall see, the simple sensetransition, but a certain continuance of the 'phrasing'; so that a complete phrase is formed which is different from the line itself. Professor Saintsbury speaks bluntly of the non-stop'

*

at the end of the line. That is too strong a word. Actors, by some absurd and false tradition, are given to uttering Shakespeare's verse with a complete non-stop, whenever the sense can be carried on; and by so doing they make the poetry sound like prose. It is not non-stop, but a passing-on in the phrase; something like the counterpoint of music. The phrase has a beauty of its own, and a melody of its own; and within the phrase the line has still its own rhythm or melody. In order that its separate melody may be given to the phrase, it is necessary that the lines should also be divided unevenlythe pause must vary its place. This then is the third distinctly prosodical element to be looked for in the best blank verse-a variety of pause in the lines. Of course there are other (still technical) excellences to be noted-variety of vowel-sounds, for example, and (occasional) likeness of consonantal soundsotherwise alliteration; for that is a very important element of beauty in all Teutonic verse. In a treatise on ' versification' these would need likewise to be considered. But they lie outside the realm of pure prosody, so we shall not expect Professor Saintsbury to treat of them.

Between Shakespeare and the pre-Shakespeareans the enjambment or non-stoppage of the line forms the main distinction. It is at this point that, in spite of their great beauty and power, Marlowe's lines nearly always fail.

'They are moulded individually not collectively. Even in those very great passages-the locus classicus on poetry in "Tamburlaine, the death agony of Faustus, the great speech of Bathsheba, and the rest-they are literally some dozen or sixteen lines (is it one of the "points in Hamlet's soul" that he meant this)† making it is true a whole of beauty, but separable into line-parts as Shakespeare's own greatest things are not. . . . So inherent and ingrained is this characteristic that it survives and neutralises the most audacious

* Professor Saintsbury objects on different grounds to the word end-stopped lines, as it might be taken to mean end-punctuated. 'And even if this is escaped, the mere stoppage of the line at the end is not the whole of the matter. It is true that a very

large an enormous-proportion of their (the earlier dramatists) lines have (or ought to have) stops at the end; but it is also true that many which have not even in modern editions, and perhaps ought not to have on any reasonable theory of punctuation, are yet end-lopped if not-stopped.' (Vol. ii. p. 6.)

One has always to apologise for the author's style. Moreover the supposition that Hamlet could have meant this' is absurd, so that the awkward parenthesis is worse than needless,

enjambment in grammar, which does sometimes occur in these poets. As for instance in "The Jew of Malta,"

"Three hundred camels, and two hundred yoke

Of labouring oxen and five hund[e]red

She-asses,

where, do what you will, you cannot run the "five hundred she"asses" rhythmically together.

'There can be very little question that this peculiarity surviving and resisting even the immense poetical advance which these poets made is a great disadvantage. It is least felt in the Faustus speech, because that supreme agony consists with-almost invitesseparated and ejaculatory expression. . . . But turn to the only less fine

"Leicester, if gentle words would comfort me,"

of "Edward the Second." It also is wonderful; but how one longs for one minute of Shakespeare to turn it from a string of dazzling beads to a winged serpent of colour and fire!'

This last simile is exaggerated: there is not so much difference at that between Marlowe at his best and Shakespeare. At any rate the change from the end-stop to the phrase does not constitute such a change as that. But our author goes on justly enough:

'Almost every line has an actual stop at the end, and those which have not, for instance,

"And so it fares with me, whose dauntless mind
The ambitious Mortimer would seek to curb,"

are too stiffly and rigidly constructed towards the close to run on as they should.'

In the same play there are [Professor Saintsbury notes] two or three passages [from speeches of Edward II] where Marlowe almost shakes himself free' of the end-stop:

'Oh! Would I might! but heaven and earth conspire
To make me miserable

He of you all that most desires my blood,
And will be called the murderer of a king
Take it....

And Isabel, whose eyes being turned to steel
Will sooner sparkle fire than shed a tear.'

VOL. CCXIII.

NO. CCCCXXXV.