Kitabı oku: «Theodore Watts-Dunton: Poet, Novelist, Critic», sayfa 13
“It is one of my misfortunes,” said he, “to be not fully worthy (to use the word of a very dear friend of mine), of Browning’s poetry. Where I am delighted, stimulated, and exhilarated by the imaginative and intellectual substance of his work, I find his metrical movements in a general way not pleasing to my ear. When a certain book of his came out – I forget which – it devolved upon me to review it. Certain eccentricities in it, for some reason or another, irritated me, and I expressed my irritation in something very like chaff. A close friend of mine, a greater admirer of Browning than I am myself – in fact, Mr. Swinburne – chided me for it, and I feel that he was right. On the afternoon following the appearance of the article I was at the Royal Academy private view, when Lowell came up to me and at once began talking about the review. Lowell, I found, was delighted with it – said it was the most original and brilliant thing that had appeared for many years. ‘But,’ said he, ‘You’re a brave man to be here where Browning always comes.’ Then, looking round the room, he said: ‘Why there he is, and his sister immediately on the side opposite to us. Surely you will slip away and avoid a meeting!’
‘Slip away!’ I said, ‘to avoid Browning! You don’t know him as well as I do, after all! Now, let me tell you exactly what will occur if we stand here for a minute or two. Miss Browning, whose eyes are looking busily over the room for people that Browning ought to speak to, in a moment will see you, and in another moment she will see me. And then you will see her turn her head to Browning’s ear and tell him something. And then Browning will come straight across to me and be more charming and cordial than he is in a general way, supposing that be possible.’
‘No, I don’t believe it.’
‘If you were not such a Boston Puritan,’ I said, ‘I would ask you what will you bet that I am wrong.’
No sooner had I uttered these words than, as I had prophesied, Miss Browning did spot, first Lowell and then me, and did turn and whisper in Browning’s ear, and Browning did come straight across the room to us; and this is what he said, speaking to me before he spoke to the illustrious American – a thing which on any other occasion he would scarcely have done:
‘Now,’ said he, ‘you’re not going to put me off with generalities any longer. You promised to write and tell me when you could come to luncheon. You have never done so – you will never do so, unless I fix you with a distinct day. Will you come to-morrow?’
‘I shall be delighted,’ I said. And he turned to Lowell and exchanged a few friendly words with him.
After these two adorable people left us, Lowell said: ‘Well, this is wonderful. You would have won the bet. How do you explain it?’
‘I explain it by Browning’s greatness of soul and heart. His position is so great, and mine is so small, that an unappreciative review of a poem of his cannot in the least degree affect him. But he knows that I am an honest man, as he has frequently told Tennyson, Jowett, and others. He wishes to make it quite apparent that he feels no anger towards a man who says what he thinks about a poem.’”
After hearing this interesting anecdote I had the curiosity to turn to the bound volume of my ‘Athenæum’ and read the article on ‘Ferishtah’s Fancies,’ which I imagine must have been the review in question. This is what I read: —
‘The poems in this volume can only be described as parable-poems – parable-poems, not in the sense that they are capable of being read as parables (as is said to be the case with the ‘Rubá’iyát’ of Omar Khayyàm), but parable-poems in the sense that they must be read as parables, or they show no artistic raison d’être at all.
Now do our English poets know what it is to write a parable poem? It is to set self-conscious philosophy singing and dancing, like the young Gretry, to the tune of a waterfall. Or rather, it is to imprison the soul of Dinah Morris in the lissome body of Esmeralda, and set the preacher strumming a gypsy’s tambourine. Though in the pure parable the intellectual or ethical motive does not dominate so absolutely as in the case of the pure fable, the form that expresses it, yet it does, nevertheless, so far govern the form as to interfere with that entire abandon – that emotional freedom – which seems necessary to the very existence of song. Indeed, if poetry must, like Wordsworth’s ideal John Bull, ‘be free or die’; if she must know no law but that of her own being (as the doctrine of ‘L’art pour l’art’ declares); if she must not even seem to know that (as the doctrine of bardic inspiration implies), but must bend to it apparently in tricksy sport alone – how can she – ‘the singing maid with pictures in her eyes’ – mount the pulpit, read the text, and deliver the sermon?
In European literature how many parable poems should we find where the ethical motive and the poetic form are not at deadly strife? But we discussed all this in speaking of prose parables, comparing the stories of the Prodigal Son and Kiságotamí with even such perfect parable poetry as that of Jami. We said then what we reiterate now: that to sing a real parable and make it a real song requires a genius of a very special and peculiar, if somewhat narrow order – a genius rare, delicate, ethereal, such as can, according to a certain Oriental fancy, compete with the Angels of the Water Pot in floriculture. Mr. Browning, being so fond of Oriental fancies, and being, moreover, on terms of the closest intimacy with a certain fancy-weaving dervish, Ferishtah, must be quite familiar with the Persian story we allude to, the famous story of ‘Poetry and Cabbages.’ Still, we will record it here for a certain learned society.
The earth, says the wise dervish Feridun, was once without flowers, and men dreamed of nothing more beautiful then than cabbages. So the Angels of the Water Pot, watering the Tûba Tree (whose fruit becomes flavoured according to the wishes of the feeder), said one to another, ‘The eyes of those poor cabbage growers down there may well be horny and dim, having none of our beautiful things to gaze upon; for as to the earthly cabbage, though useful in earthly pot, it is in colour unlovely as ungrateful in perfume; and as to the stars, they are too far off to be very clearly mirrored in the eyes of folk so very intent upon cabbages.’ So the Angels of the Water Pot, who sit on the rainbow and brew the ambrosial rains, began fashioning flowers out of the paradisal gems, while Israfel sang to them; and the words of his song were the mottoes that adorn the bowers of heaven. So bewitching, however, were the strains of the singer – for not only has Israfel a lute for viscera, but doth he not also, according to the poet —
Breathe a stream of otto and balm,
Which through a woof of living music blown
Floats, fused, a warbling rose that makes all senses one?
– so astonishing were the notes of a singer so furnished, that the angels at their jewel work could not help tracing his coloured and perfumed words upon the petals. And this was how the Angels of the Water Pot made flowers, and this is the story of ‘Poetry and Cabbages.’
But the alphabet of the angels, Feridun goes on to declare, is nothing less than the celestial charactery of heaven, and is consequently unreadable to all human eyes save a very few – that is to say, the eyes of those mortals who are ‘of the race of Israfel.’ To common eyes – the eyes of the ordinary human cabbage-grower – what, indeed, is that angelic caligraphy with which the petals of the flowers are ornamented? Nothing but a meaningless maze of beautiful veins and scents and colours.
But who are ‘of the race of Israfel’? Not the prosemen, certainly, as any Western critic may see who will refer to Kircher’s idle nonsense about the ‘Alphabet of the Angels’ in his ‘Ædipus Egyptiacus.’ Are they, then, the poets? This is indeed a solemn query. ‘If,’ says Feridun, ‘the mottoes that adorn the bowers of Heaven have been correctly read by certain Persian poets, who shall be nameless, what are those other mottoes glowing above the caves of hell in that fiery alphabet used by the fiends?’
One kind of poet only is, it seems, of the race of Israfel – the parable-poet – the poet to whom truth comes, not in any way as reasoned conclusions, not even as golden gnomes, but comes symbolized in concrete shapes of vital beauty; the poet in whose work the poetic form is so part and parcel of the ethical lesson which vitalizes it that this ethical lesson seems not to give birth to the music and the colour of the poem, but to be itself born of the sweet marriage of these, and to be as inseparable from them as the ‘morning breath’ of the Sabæan rose is inalienable from the innermost petals – ‘the subtle odour of the rose’s heart,’ which no mere chemistry of man, but only the morning breeze, can steal.”
It was such writing as this which made it quite superfluous for Mr. Watts-Dunton to sign his articles, and we have only to contrast it – or its richness and its rareness – with the naïve, simple, unadorned style of ‘Aylwin’ to realize how wide is the range of Mr. Watts-Dunton as a master of the fine shades of literary expression.
Chapter XV
THE GREAT BOOK OF WONDER
And now begins the most difficult and the most responsible part of my task – the selection of one typical essay from the vast number of essays expressing more or less fully the great heart-thought which gives life to all Mr. Watts-Dunton’s work. I can, of course, give only one, for already I see signs that this book will swell to proportions far beyond those originally intended for it. Naturally, I thought at first that I would select one of the superb articles on Victor Hugo’s works, such for instance as ‘La Legénde des Siècles,’ or that profound one on ‘La Religion des Religion.’ But, after a while, when I had got the essay typed and ready for inclusion, I changed my mind. I thought that one of those wonderful essays upon Oriental subjects which had called forth writings like those of Sir Edwin Arnold, would serve my purpose better. Finally, I decided to choose an essay, which when it appeared was so full of profound learning upon the great book of the world, the Bible, that it was attributed to almost every great specialist upon the Bible in Europe and in America. Mr. Watts-Dunton has often been urged to reprint this essay as a brief text-book for scholastic use, but he has never done so. It will be noted by readers of ‘Aylwin’ that even so far back as the publication of this article in the ‘Athenæum ‘, in 1877, Mr. Watts-Dunton – to judge from the allusion in it to ‘Nin-ki-gal, the Queen of Death’ – seems to have begun to draw upon Philip Aylwin’s ‘Veiled Queen’: —
“There is not, in the whole of modern history, a more suggestive subject than that of the persistent attempts of every Western literature to versify the Psalms in its own idiom, and the uniform failure of these attempts. At the time that Sternhold was ‘bringing’ the Psalms into ‘fine Englysh meter’ for Henry the Eighth and Edward the Sixth, continental rhymers were busy at the same kind of work for their own monarchs – notably Clement Marot for Francis the First. And it has been going on ever since, without a single protest of any importance having been entered against it. This is astonishing, for the Bible, even from the point of view of the literary critic, is a sacred book. Perhaps the time for entering such a protest is come, and a literary journal may be its proper medium.
A great living savant has characterized the Bible as ‘a collection of the rude imaginings of Syria,’ ‘the worn-out old bottle of Judaism into which the generous new wine of science is being poured.’ The great savant was angry when he said so. The ‘new wine’ of science is a generous vintage, undoubtedly, and deserves all the respect it gets from us; so do those who make it and serve it out; they have so much intelligence; they are so honest and so fearless. But whatever may become of their wine in a few years, when the wine-dealers shall have passed away, when the savant is forgotten as any star-gazer of Chaldæa, – the ‘old bottle’ is going to be older yet, – the Bible is going to be eternal. For that which decides the vitality of any book is precisely that which decides the value of any human soul – not the knowledge it contains, but simply the attitude it assumes towards the universe, unseen as well as seen. The attitude of the Bible is just that which every soul must, in its highest and truest moods, always assume – that of a wise wonder in front of such a universe as this – that of a noble humility before a God such as He ‘in whose great Hand we stand.’ This is why – like Alexander’s mirror – like that most precious ‘Cup of Jemshîd,’ imagined by the Persians – the Bible reflects to-day, and will reflect for ever, every wave of human emotion, every passing event of human life – reflect them as faithfully as it did to the great and simple people in whose great and simple tongue it was written. Coming from the Vernunft of Man, it goes straight to the Vernunft. This is the kind of literature that never does die: a fact which the world has discovered long ago. For the Bible is Europe’s one book. And with regard to Asia, as far back as the time of Chrysostom it could have been read in languages Syrian, Indian, Persian, Armenian, Ethiopic, Scythian, and Samaritan; now it can be read in every language, and in almost every dialect, under the sun.
And the very quintessence of the Bible is the Book of the Psalms. Therefore the Scottish passion for Psalm-singing is not wonderful; the wonder is that, liking so much to sing, they can find it possible to sing so badly. It is not wonderful that the court of Francis I should yearn to sing Psalms; the wonderful thing is that they should find it in their hearts to sing Marot’s Psalms when they might have sung David’s – that Her Majesty the Queen could sing to a fashionable jig, ‘O Lord, rebuke me not in Thine indignation’; and that Anthony, King of Navarre, could sing to the air of a dance of Poitou, ‘Stand up, O Lord, to revenge my quarrel.’ For, although it is given to the very frogs, says Pascal, to find music in their own croaking, the ears that can find music in such frogs as these must be of a peculiar convolution.
In Psalmody, then, Scottish taste and French are both bad, from the English point of view; but then the English, having Hopkins in various incarnations, are fastidious.
When Lord Macaulay’s tiresome New Zealander has done contemplating the ruins of London Bridge, and turned in to the deserted British Museum to study us through our books – what volume can he take as the representative one – what book, above all others, can the ghostly librarian select to give him the truest, the profoundest insight into the character of the strange people who had made such a great figure in the earth? We, for our part, should not hesitate to give him the English Book of Common Prayer, with the authorized version of the Psalms at the end, as representing the British mind in its most exalted and its most abject phases. That in the same volume can be found side by side the beauty and pathos of the English Litany, the grandeur of the English version of the Psalms and the effusions of Brady and Tate – masters of the art of sinking compared with whom Rous is an inspired bard – would be adequate evidence that the Church using it must be a British Church – that British, most British, must be the public tolerating it.
‘By thine agony and bloody Sweat; by thy Cross and Passion; by thy Precious Death and Burial; by thy glorious Resurrection and Ascension; and by the coming of the Holy Ghost, God Lord, deliver us.’
Among Western peoples there is but one that could have uttered in such language this cry, where pathos and sublimity and subtlest music are so mysteriously blended – blended so divinely that the man who can utter it, familiar as it is, without an emotion deep enough to touch close upon the fount of tears must be differently constituted from some of us. Among Western peoples there is, we say, but one that could have done this; for as M. Taine has well said: – ‘More than any race in Europe they (the British) approach by the simplicity and energy of their conceptions the old Hebraic spirit. Enthusiasm is their natural condition, and their Deity fills them with admiration as their ancient deities inspired them with fury.’ And now listen to this: —
When we, our wearied limbs to rest,
Sat down by proud Euphrates’ stream,
We wept, with doleful thoughts opprest,
And Zion was our mournful theme.
Among all the peoples of the earth there is but one that could have thus degraded the words: ‘By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept when we remembered Zion.’ For, to achieve such platitude there is necessary an element which can only be called the ‘Hopkins element,’ an element which is quite an insular birthright of ours, a characteristic which came over with the ‘White Horse,’ – that ‘dull and greasy coarseness of taste’ which distinguishes the British mind from all others; that ‘ächtbrittische Beschränktheit,’ which Heine speaks of in his tender way. The Scottish version is rough, but Brady and Tate’s inanities are worse than Rous’s roughness.
Such an anomaly as this in one and the same literature, in one and the same little book, is unnatural; it is monstrous: whence can it come? It is, indeed, singular that no one has ever dreamed of taking the story of the English Prayer-book, with Brady and Tate at the end, and using it as a key to unlock that puzzle of puzzles which has set the Continental critics writing nonsense about us for generations: – ‘What is it that makes the enormous, the fundamental, difference between English literature – and all other Western literatures – Teutonic no less than Latin or Slavonic?’ The simple truth of the matter is, that the British mind has always been bipartite as now – has always been, as now, half sublime and half homely to very coarseness; in other words, it has been half inspired by David King of Israel, and half by John Hopkins, Suffolk schoolmaster and archetype of prosaic bards, who, in 1562, took such of the Psalms as Sternhold had left unsullied and doggerellized them. For, as we have said, Hopkins, in many and various incarnations, has been singing unctuously in these islands ever since the introduction of Christianity, and before; for he is Anglo-Saxon tastelessness, he is Anglo-Saxon deafness to music and blindness to beauty. When St. Augustine landed here with David he found not only Odin, but Hopkins, a heathen then, in possession of the soil.
There is, therefore, half of a great truth in what M. Taine says. The English have, besides the Hopkins element, which is indigenous, much of the Hebraic temper, which is indigenous too; but they have by nature none of the Hebraic style. But, somehow, here is the difference between us and the Continentals; that, though style is born of taste – though le style c’est la race; and though the Anglo-Saxon started, as we have seen, with Odin and Hopkins alone; yet, just as instinct may be sown and grown by ancestral habit of many years – just as the pointer puppy, for instance, points, he knows not why, because his ancestors were taught to point before him – so may the Hebraic style be sown and grown in a foreign soil if the soil be Anglo-Saxon, and if the seed-time last for a thousand years. The result of all this is, that the English, notwithstanding their deficiency of artistic instinct and coarseness of taste, have the Great Style, not only in poetry, sometimes, but in prose sometimes when they write emotively, as we see in the English Prayer-book, in parts of Raleigh’s ‘History of the World,’ in Jeremy Taylor’s sermons, in Hall’s ‘Contemplations,’ and other such books of the seventeenth century.
The Great Style is far more easily recognized than defined. To define any kind of style, indeed, we must turn to real life. When we say of an individual in real life that he or she has style, we mean that the individual gives us an impression of unconscious power or unconscious grace, as distinguished from that conscious power or conscious grace which we call manner. The difference is fundamental. It is the same in literature; style is unconscious power or grace – manner is conscious power or grace. But the Great Style, both in literature and in life, is unconscious power and unconscious grace in one.
And, whither must we turn in quest of this, as the natural expression of a national temper? Not to the Celt, we think, as Mr. Arnold does. Not, indeed, to those whose languages, complex of syntax and alive with self-conscious inflections, bespeak the scientific knowingness of the Aryan mind – not, certainly, to those who, though producing Æschylus, turned into Aphrodite the great Astarte of the Syrians, but to the descendants of Shem, – the only gentleman among all the sons of Noah; to those who, yearning always to look straight into the face of God and live, can see not much else. The Great Style, in a word, is Semitic. It would be a mistake to call it Asiatic. For though two of its elements, unconsciousness and power, are, no doubt, plentiful enough in India, the element of grace is lacking, for the most part. The Vedic hymns are both nebulous and unemotive as compared with Semitic hymns, and, on the other hand, such a high reach of ethical writing as even that noble and well-known passage from Manu, beginning, ‘Single is each man born into the world, single he dies,’ etc., is quite logical and self-conscious when compared with the ethical parts of Scripture. The Persians have the grace always, the power often, but the unconsciousness almost never. We might perhaps say that there were those in Egypt once who came near to the great ideal. That description of the abode of ‘Nin-ki-gal,’ the Queen of Death, recently deciphered from a tablet in the British Museum, is nearly in the Great Style, yet not quite. Conscious power and conscious grace are Hellenic, of course. That there is a deal of unconsciousness in Homer is true; but, put his elaborate comparisons by the side of the fiery metaphors of the sacred writers, and how artificial he seems. And note that, afterwards, when he who approached nearest to the Great Style wrote Prometheus and the Furies, Orientalism was overflowing Greece, like the waters of the Nile. It is to the Latin races – some of them – that has filtered Hellenic manner; and whensoever, as in Dante, the Great Style has been occasionally caught, it comes not from the Hellenic fountain, but straight from the Hebrew.
What the Latin races lack, the Teutonic races have – unconsciousness; often unconscious power; mostly, however, unconscious brutalité. Sublime as is the Northern mythology, it is vulgar too. The Hopkins element, – the dull and stupid homeliness, – the coarse grotesque, mingle with and mar its finest effects. Over it all the atmosphere is that of pantomime – singing dragons, one-eyed gods, and Wagner’s libretti. Even that great final conflict between gods and men and the swarming brood of evil on the plain of Wigrid, foretold by the Völu-seeress, when from Yötunland they come and storm the very gates of Asgard; – even this fine combat ends in the grotesque and vulgar picture of the Fenrir-wolf gulping Odin down like an oyster, and digesting the universe to chaos. But, out of the twenty-three thousand and more verses into which the Bible has been divided, no one can find a vulgar verse; for the Great Style allows the stylist to touch upon any subject with no risk of defilement. This is why style in literature is virtue. Like royalty, the Great Style ‘can do no wrong.’
Of Teutonic graceless unconsciousness, the Anglo-Saxons have by far the largest endowment. They wanted another element, in short, not the Hellenic element; for there never was a greater mistake than that of supposing that Hellenism can be engrafted on Teutonism and live; as Landor and Mr. Matthew Arnold – two of the finest and most delicate minds of modern times – can testify.
But, long before the memorable Hampton Court Conference; long before the Bishops’ Bible or Coverdale’s Bible; long before even Aldhelm’s time – Hebraism had been flowing over and enriching the Anglo-Saxon mind. From the time when Cædmon, the forlorn cow-herd, fell asleep beneath the stars by the stable-door, and was bidden to sing the Biblical story, Anglo-Saxon literature grew more and more Hebraic. Yet, in a certain sense, the Hebraism in which the English mind was steeped had been Hebraism at second hand – that of the Vulgate mainly – till Tyndale’s time, or rather till the present Authorized Version of the Bible appeared in 1611. ‘There is no book,’ says Selden, ‘so translated as the Bible for the purpose. If I translate a French book into English, I turn it into English phrase, not into French-English. “Il fait froid,” I say, ’tis cold, not it makes cold; but the Bible is rather translated into English words than into English phrase, The Hebraisms are kept, and the phrase of that language is kept.’
And in great measure this is true, no doubt; yet literal accuracy – importation of Hebraisms – was not of itself enough to produce a translation in the Great Style – a translation such as this, which, as Coleridge says, makes us think that ‘the translators themselves were inspired.’ To reproduce the Great Style of the original in a Western idiom, the happiest combination of circumstances was necessary. The temper of the people receiving must, notwithstanding all differences of habitation and civilization, be elementally in harmony with that of the people giving; that is, it must be poetic rather than ratiocinative. Society must not be too complex – its tone must not be too knowing and self-glorifying. The accepted psychology of the time must not be the psychology of the scalpel – the metaphysics must not be the metaphysics of newspaper cynicism; above all, enthusiasm and vulgarity must not be considered synonymous terms. Briefly, the tone of the time must be free of the faintest suspicion of nineteenth century flavour. That this is the kind of national temper necessary to such a work might have been demonstrated by an argument a priori. It was the temper of the English nation when the Bible was translated. That noble heroism – born of faith in God and belief in the high duties of man – which we have lost for the hour – was in the very atmosphere that hung over the island. And style in real life, which now, as a consequence of our loss, does not exist at all among Englishmen, and only among a very few Englishwomen – having given place in all classes to manner – flourished then in all its charm. And in literature it was the same: not even the euphuism imported from Spain could really destroy or even seriously damage the then national sense of style.
Then, as to the form of literature adopted in the translation, what must that be? Evidently it must be some kind of form which can do all the high work that is generally left to metrical language, and yet must be free from any soupçon of that ‘artifice,’ in the ‘abandonment’ of which, says an Arabian historian, ‘true art alone lies.’ For, this is most noteworthy, that of literature as an art, the Semites show but small conception, even in Job. It was too sacred for that – drama and epic in the Aryan sense were alike unknown.
But if the translation must not be metrical in the common acceptation of that word, neither must it be prose; we will not say logical prose; for all prose, however high may be its flights, however poetic and emotive, must always be logical underneath, must always be chained by a logical chain, and earth-bound like a captive balloon; just as poetry, on the other hand, however didactic and even ratiocinative it may become, must always be steeped in emotion. It must be neither verse nor prose, it seems. It must be a new movement altogether. The musical movement of the English Bible is a new movement; let us call it ‘Bible Rhythm.’ And the movement was devised thus: Difficulty is the worker of modern miracles. Thanks to Difficulty – thanks to the conflict between what Selden calls ‘Hebrew phrase and English phrase,’ the translators fashioned, or rather, Difficulty fashioned for them, a movement which was neither one nor wholly the other – a movement which, for music, for variety, splendour, sublimity, and pathos, is above all the effects of English poetic art, above all the rhythms and all the rhymes of the modern world – a movement, indeed, which is a form of art of itself – but a form in which ‘artifice’ is really ‘abandoned’ at last. This rhythm it is to which we referred as running through the English Prayer-book, and which governs every verse of the Bible, its highest reaches perhaps being in the Psalms – this rhythm it is which the Hopkinses and Rouses have – improved! It would not be well to be too technical here, yet the matter is of the greatest literary importance just now, and it is necessary to explain clearly what we mean.
Among the many delights which we get from the mere form of what is technically called Poetry, the chief, perhaps, is expectation and the fulfilment of expectation. In rhymed verse this is obvious: having familiarized ourselves with the arrangement of the poet’s rhymes, we take pleasure in expecting a recurrence of these rhymes according to this arrangement. In blank verse the law of expectation is less apparent. Yet it is none the less operative. Having familiarized ourselves with the poet’s rhythm, having found that iambic foot succeeds iambic foot, and that whenever the iambic waves have begun to grow monotonous, variations occur – trochaic, anapæstic, dactylic – according to the law which governs the ear of this individual poet; – we, half consciously, expect at certain intervals these variations, and are delighted when our expectations are fulfilled. And our delight is augmented if also our expectations with regard to cæsuric effects are realized in the same proportions. Having, for instance, learned, half unconsciously, that the poet has an ear for a particular kind of pause; that he delights, let us say, to throw his pause after the third foot of the sequence, – we expect that, whatever may be the arrangement of the early pauses with regard to the initial foot of any sequence, – there must be, not far ahead, that climacteric third-foot pause up to which all the other pauses have been tending, and upon which the ear and the soul of the reader shall be allowed to rest to take breath for future flights. And when this expectation of cæsuric effects is thus gratified, or gratified in a more subtle way, by an arrangement of earlier semi-pauses, which obviates the necessity of the too frequent recurrence of this final third-foot pause, the full pleasure of poetic effects is the result. In other words, a large proportion of the pleasure we derive from poetry is in the recognition of law. The more obvious and formulated is the law, – nay, the more arbitrary and Draconian, – the more pleasure it gives to the uncultivated ear. This is why uneducated people may delight in rhyme, and yet have no ear at all for blank verse; this is why the savage, who has not even an ear for rhyme, takes pleasure in such unmistakable rhythm as that of his tom-tom. But, as the ear becomes more cultivated, it demands that these indications of law should be more and more subtle, till at last recognized law itself may become a tyranny and a burden. He who will read Shakespeare’s plays chronologically, as far as that is practicable, from ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ to the ‘Tempest,’ will have no difficulty in seeing precisely what we mean. In literature, as in social life, the progress is from lawless freedom, through tyranny, to freedom that is lawful. Now the great features of Bible Rhythm are a recognized music apart from a recognized law – ‘artifice’ so completely abandoned that we forget we are in the realm of art – pauses so divinely set that they seem to be ‘wood-notes wild,’ though all the while they are, and must be, governed by a mysterious law too subtly sweet to be formulated; and all kind of beauties infinitely beyond the triumphs of the metricist, but beauties that are unexpected. There is a metre, to be sure, but it is that of the ‘moving music which is life’; it is the living metre of the surging sea within the soul of him who speaks; it is the free effluence of the emotions and the passions which are passing into the words. And if this is so in other parts of the Bible, what is it in the Psalms, where ‘the flaming steeds of song,’ though really kept strongly in hand, seem to run reinless as ‘the wild horses of the wind’?”
