The Art of Writing | Page 5

to be lawless and yet to please? The
little that we know of verse (and for my part I owe it all to my friend
Professor Fleeming Jenkin) is, however, particularly interesting in the
present connection. We have been accustomed to describe the heroic
line as five iambic feet, and to be filled with pain and confusion
whenever, as by the conscientious schoolboy, we have heard our own
description put in practice.
'All night | the dread | less an | gel un | pursued,' {2}
goes the schoolboy; but though we close our ears, we cling to our
definition, in spite of its proved and naked insufficiency. Mr. Jenkin

was not so easily pleased, and readily discovered that the heroic line
consists of four groups, or, if you prefer the phrase, contains four
pauses:
'All night | the dreadless | angel | unpursued.'
Four groups, each practically uttered as one word: the first, in this case,
an iamb; the second, an amphibrachys; the third, a trochee; and the
fourth, an amphimacer; and yet our schoolboy, with no other liberty but
that of inflicting pain, had triumphantly scanned it as five iambs.
Perceive, now, this fresh richness of intricacy in the web; this fourth
orange, hitherto unremarked, but still kept flying with the others. What
had seemed to be one thing it now appears is two; and, like some
puzzle in arithmetic, the verse is made at the same time to read in fives
and to read in fours.
But again, four is not necessary. We do not, indeed, find verses in six
groups, because there is not room for six in the ten syllables; and we do
not find verses of two, because one of the main distinctions of verse
from prose resides in the comparative shortness of the group; but it is
even common to find verses of three. Five is the one forbidden number;
because five is the number of the feet; and if five were chosen, the two
patterns would coincide, and that opposition which is the life of verse
would instantly be lost. We have here a clue to the effect of
polysyllables, above all in Latin, where they are so common and make
so brave an architecture in the verse; for the polysyllable is a group of
Nature's making. If but some Roman would return from Hades (Martial,
for choice), and tell me by what conduct of the voice these thundering
verses should be uttered--'Aut Lacedoe- monium Tarentum,' for a case
in point--I feel as if I should enter at last into the full enjoyment of the
best of human verses.
But, again, the five feet are all iambic, or supposed to be; by the mere
count of syllables the four groups cannot be all iambic; as a question of
elegance, I doubt if any one of them requires to be so; and I am certain
that for choice no two of them should scan the same. The singular
beauty of the verse analysed above is due, so far as analysis can carry
us, part, indeed, to the clever repetition of L, D, and N, but part to this

variety of scansion in the groups. The groups which, like the bar in
music, break up the verse for utterance, fall uniambically; and in
declaiming a so- called iambic verse, it may so happen that we never
utter one iambic foot. And yet to this neglect of the original beat there
is a limit.
'Athens, the eye of Greece, mother of arts,' {3}
is, with all its eccentricities, a good heroic line; for though it scarcely
can be said to indicate the beat of the iamb, it certainly suggests no
other measure to the ear. But begin
'Mother Athens, eye of Greece,'
or merely 'Mother Athens,' and the game is up, for the trochaic beat has
been suggested. The eccentric scansion of the groups is an adornment;
but as soon as the original beat has been forgotten, they cease implicitly
to be eccentric. Variety is what is sought; but if we destroy the original
mould, one of the terms of this variety is lost, and we fall back on
sameness. Thus, both as to the arithmetical measure of the verse, and
the degree of regularity in scansion, we see the laws of prosody to have
one common purpose: to keep alive the opposition of two schemes
simultaneously followed; to keep them notably apart, though still
coincident; and to balance them with such judicial nicety before the
reader, that neither shall be unperceived and neither signally prevail.
The rule of rhythm in prose is not so intricate. Here, too, we write in
groups, or phrases, as I prefer to call them, for the prose phrase is
greatly longer and is much more nonchalantly uttered than the group in