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SOME RECENT STUDIES IN ENGLISH 
 
 PROSODY 
 
 BY GEORGE SAINTSBURY 
 
 FELLOW OF THE ACADEMY 
 
 Read May 28, 1919 
 
 It is some dozen years since the present speaker began, and some 
 eight or nine since he finished, the publication of an historical survey 
 of practical English Prosody, following it up still more recently with 
 one of Prose Rhythm. Although received with a good deal of favour, 
 these books, as treatises on one of the most controversial of all subjects 
 could not fail to be, were met with not a little disagreement : and, 
 whether by coincidence or consequence, prosodic studies, which had 
 already been somewhat numerous, have multiplied since ; most of 
 them, as was again likely, being based on principles different from, 
 not to say opposed to, mine. 
 
 The purpose of the present paper, however, is not direct contro- 
 versy with, or rebuttal of, any of these. My system may be 'mishmash', 
 as I believe one English critic has called it, or ' drivel ', as it has been 
 denominated by an American professor. But epithet-slinging of this 
 kind does not seem to me to be essentially, though it may be not 
 unhistorically, academic ; and individual controversy too often leads 
 to it. I shall even, I hope not to the disappointment of my audience, 
 mention few names in the ensuing survey. It is the theories, rather 
 than the theorists, or even the manners of theorizing, that I wish to 
 consider. As this could hardly be done without at least posing my 
 own procedure, I hope I may be excused for giving, as shortly and 
 with as little egotism as possible, an abstract of that. 
 
 My object was not to construct an a priori theory of prosody at all, 
 but to examine the prosodic substance of English poetry as a whole, 
 and to discover, if possible, in what way it was constructed. I found, 
 as it seemed to me, and to not a few others, that a system of syllabic 
 equivalence and substitution composing, and equating or contrasting, 
 different prosodic units for which I kept the old traditional name of 
 feet, pervaded the whole of it, from at least the twelfth century 
 
 IX A E 
 
• • 
 
 •»••-•• 
 
 
 « • 
 
 .«.••• • 
 
 2 ; '"¥r^EeMnGsWtHE BRITISH ACADEMY 
 
 onwards, some elements of this being far earlier. Into the origin and 
 nature, as distinguished from the contrasted value and arrangement, 
 of long and short syllables, I did not enter ; beyond pointing out that 
 neither accent, nor stress, nor, except in a purely differential sense, 
 quantity would account for it satisfactorily. By differential, I mean 
 that things of one kind were short, and those of another long, with 
 an occasional faculty of change usually called commonness. And there 
 was an end of it. This system was applied to the whole of English 
 verse, beginning from the thirteenth century, the first in which 
 English, as distinguished from Old English, can be said certainly to 
 exist, to the close of the nineteenth. It was found, by the consent of 
 at least a sufficient number of competent judges, to fit, to require no 
 straining, no omission, and no condemnation of anything that could 
 be called good poetry. 
 
 I could not, having included in my survey nearly all prosodists of 
 the past and present, expect that this would please, far less that it 
 would satisfy, all of the latter. In the first place, there were certain 
 theories of more or less age, which it either neglected or contradicted. 
 In the second, there was an absence of what is called scientific 
 appearance about it. Its mathematics were of the simplest, and its 
 physics said nothing about the glottis or about breath-units, &c. In 
 the third, it required no apparatus. In the fourth, it was not suffi- 
 ciently ' modern \ In the fifth, there was what I felt to be a probably 
 annoying combination of unpretentiousness and finality about it. It 
 gave no one, certainly not myself, any feeling of a claim to ingenious 
 discovery, or daring imagination. The secret of English poetry lay 
 at your feet ; and by merely paying a little attention to the whole of 
 that poetry itself, you found it. 
 
 It was natural that more ambitious, perhaps they may think them- 
 selves more imaginative, persons should not be content with anything 
 so humdrum, or prepared to undertake anything so laborious; and 
 they have in some cases continued, in others begun, more airy specula- 
 tions, or more elaborate laboratory work. The systems may, I think, 
 be fairly collected under the following heads : 
 
 1. A partly old, partly new system of quantification, which has, as 
 its object or objects, partly to account for and establish those intrinsic 
 or related values of ' long ' and ' short ' which have been noticed, partly 
 to make new combinations of them. 
 
 2. An endeavour to oust, or at least to supplement, regular metre 
 by irregular rhythm. 
 
 3. Very elaborate mechanical systems of phonography, in which the 
 reading of poetry by numbers of different persons, and the fashions of 
 
SOME RECENT STUDIES IN ENGLISH PROSODY 8 
 
 their utterance, were taken down, sometimes In carefully constructed 
 and machined chambers, collected, averaged, &c. 
 
 !. The old, very natural, and at first sight very plausible attempt 
 
 to identify musical with poetical harmony, and explain the latter by 
 the laws of the former. 
 
 There are, as always in such cases, varieties and combinations of 
 these : but I think the four heads comprise most, if not all, of the 
 prevalent views of prosody, other than the purely accentual one, which 
 shades from a sort of go-as- vou-please-so-long-as-you-keep-the-proper- 
 number-of-accents to something not much more than terminologically 
 different from my own ; the strict syllabic with elision, which is chiefly 
 favoured by foreigners ; and my own system. Of these latter I have 
 said enough already elsewhere and need not repeat it. 
 
 Of the first or quantitative division I prefer to say very little, for 
 more reasons than one ; the chief, and on this occasion at least all 
 sufficient, being that it cannot be called ' recent \ Its forms of theory 
 cover more than three hundred years from Stanyhurst to Stone. Its 
 practitioners have varied in quality from the lowest poetasters to 
 unquestionable poets like Campion in the earliest and the present 
 Poet Laureate (who, as I am well aware, is not a pure Quantitivist) in 
 the latest stage. The apparent temptations to it have varied likewise, 
 from innocent but puerile notions that we ought to imitate the classics 
 in everything, to imaginative, but I fear also imaginary, conceptions 
 of the necessity of conflict between ordinary pronunciation and 
 metrical value. But it is not new ; I have long ago said as much as 
 I think needful on the question of syllabic quantity in English, and 
 as I have nothing to add, so I have nothing of importance to alter, 
 and certainly nothing to withdraw. 
 
 Nor need very much be said of the Anarchists, who a^ain are a 
 rather parti-coloured bodv, but who may be said to be united in an 
 enmity, which the Quantitivists do not feel, to the principle of metre 
 itself, as it has been accepted in all ages and countries which have 
 recognized metre at all — that is to say that it is recurrent rhythm. 
 To argue with them is slightly absurd. There is no positive objection 
 to what they want and do, in itself. It may occasionally seem to us 
 very ugly, but we know that things based on something like its prin- 
 ciple in the Authorised Version of the Bible, in Ossian, in Blake, in 
 Whitman even, have been very fine indeed. Only, it is not metre ; 
 it is not a substitute for metre; and though it may seem to some, or 
 be called by the loose language of others, poetry, it is not what we 
 mean by that word. Let them do it if they like; let us take it when 
 it is good, and reject it when it is bad. Meanwhile we will stick to 
 
 a 2 
 
4 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 
 
 poetry, and to metre, which is our form of poetry. And to this, 
 unless we are to be the bourgeois of a new Bolshevism, and to be 
 exterminated with our poetry and our metre altogether, they can make 
 no objection. 
 
 With the Mechanics and Musicians, especially with the former (for 
 the latter are old friends or enemies or both), it is different. Both 
 sects have multiplied greatly of late, indeed many individual prosodists 
 hold of both ; and the reason of this is sufficiently obvious. The word 
 has long gone forth that everything is to be scientific ; and though 
 that term is equivocal to the last degree, and perhaps incapable of 
 strict logical definition, some of its properties, and still more of its 
 accidents, are commonly if confusedly apprehended by most people, 
 respected by many, and passionately affectioned by some. Among the 
 properties may be included systematic arrangement by rule involving 
 no or few exceptions, and a mainly mathematical method of procedure, 
 with abundant experiment. Among the accidents, 'apparatus' 1 , as it 
 may be succinctly termed, is important. Now prosody of the older 
 sort, with occasional exceptions, relied on observation rather than 
 experiment; and needed no apparatus whatever of a mechanical kind. 
 A library of poetry and an ear supplied the prosodist with all he 
 wanted. But of late the progress of what used to be called philo- 
 sophical instruments, and especially the invention of the phonograph, 
 have inspired the would-be scientific student of Numbers with many 
 new thoughts — whether such as would be approved by Pallas or Apollo 
 is another question. ' Collect a company of individuals and make them 
 read or recite poetry aloud 1 is the fundamental commandment, though, 
 as we shall see, the aims and processes extend far beyond this. At 
 first the results in the way of stress, division of intervals and the like, 
 were merely taken as heard. But of late, especially in America — 
 where there are many universities with much money and an eager 
 desire for something new — apparatus which outdoes Lagado, sound- 
 proof chambers, recording instruments of the utmost delicacy and the 
 like, have been constructed and consecrated, if not always exclusively, 
 to the purpose. The results, arranged in rows of figures or sets of 
 waved and straight lines, &c, &c, have been taken down, transcribed 
 and published in books and articles devoted to the subject, some of 
 these being quite voluminous. 
 
 But the results of these results ? Before considering them arsm- 
 mentatively I may mention a curious coincidence of opinion on the 
 subject. Some years ago, when that subject was fresh, a friend of 
 mine, a most excellent scholar, but somewhat more cupidus novarum 
 rerum than I am myself, took it up, but dropped it, finding, as he 
 
SOME RECENT STUDIES IN ENGLISH PROSODY 5 
 
 said, that the results 'were not definite enough 1 . Quite recently 
 a reviewer, entirely unknown to me, but evidently an honest and 
 unsophisticated person, after making generous allowance for the dili- 
 gence and curiosity shown in a book of the kind just mentioned, 
 remarked, finally and frankly, that after all ' he didn't quite see what 
 it came to '. 
 
 I have seldom read an observation which seemed to me to touch 
 the point more acutely. I could of course fill this paper, if it were 
 becoming to do so, with jokes, cheap or not so very cheap, on the 
 drums covered with rubber and mica, mounted with pointers (including 
 special pointers for ' nose-tones ') which work on smoked paper ; or 
 
 the cabinets mattressed and padded as if for the reception of : 
 
 but I should be dropping into the fault I decline if I wrote or spoke 
 the word which will suggest itself. By all means let the most com- 
 plicated apparatus that ingenuity can devise be used for any purpose 
 that it can achieve. But what purposes, in the special realm or region 
 of prosody, have these arrangements achieved ? Nay what, in the most 
 sanguine but most reasonable hopes, can they achieve ? 
 
 Of what they have achieved, in recent years and since I wrote, it is 
 possible to give some idea, though that idea may be better suited to 
 the all-observant eye than to the less receptive ear. A line of Paradise 
 Lost, to take an instance, was read by three well-educated persons into 
 the machine described above, and it recorded, in fractions of a second, 
 the time they took for each syllable and some pauses. The results 
 were as follows in decimals : 
 
 No. 1. -28 -38 -12 -18 -15 -35 -2 -2 -18 65 
 2. -4 4 -15 -3 -1 -2 -3 -3 -25 -8 
 • 3. -2 -3 -18 -25 -15 -34. -18 -2 -25 -42 
 
 2 and 3 also occupied time in pauses amounting to -4, -15. 
 
 Now this with its striking differences — A taking 65 units of time to 
 do the same thing which B takes 8 to do ; B and C taking exactly 
 the same time (25 units) to pronounce one syllable, while on another 
 their times stand in the ratio of 2 to 34 — this certainly does 'come 
 to something \ When we are told further that A, the slow man, was 
 a professional elocutionist, it comes, though not to our surprise, to 
 something more. But what do these ' somethings 1 concern? The 
 verse ? Even the actual quantity-value (or whatever word be pre- 
 ferred) of the syllables themselves ? Surely nothing of the sort. 
 What they tell us wholly and solely concerns the individuals on whom, 
 or by whose assistance, the experiment was conducted. They might 
 be useful in the construction of a signaleinent — a minute description 
 
6 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 
 
 of the persons. A speaks slowly and distinctly ; B speaks as a rule 
 much faster ; C speaks irregularly. But of the stuff and the subject 
 we learn nothing whatever. 
 
 Let us pass to a still more elaborate employment of the same or 
 again more elaborate machinery. I will read an extract : 
 
 ' With the records by sound-photography the following plan was 
 carried out ; after the observer has finished his tapping reproductions 
 [he has I should say quoting textually again ' heard a series of six 
 time intervals produced by relatively unobtrusive clicks from an electric 
 sounder, and is asked to reproduce the series as accurately as possible 
 by means of tapping his finger upon an electric key attached to a 
 kimograph which records his reproduction ']. Then after he lias finished 
 his tapping reproduction, and has heard the accelerating series twenty- 
 four times, he is told to listen to it, and accompany it each time by 
 uttering the word "tip 11 for every click. 1 There is a great deal more 
 of it, but that will do. 
 
 Now I suppose it to be very likely that some of my hearers may 
 have been thinking, ' It is all very well to hold this up to ridicule, 
 but it is one of the methods of experimental psychology, and we hold 
 that it gives valuable results. 1 
 
 I shall only request them to remember that I am not discussing 
 any such application of such methods, or giving any opinion on their 
 merits as so used. I only wish to point out, in my own division, that 
 no such process of tip-tapping, or anything of the kind, can tell us 
 anything about the rhythm of prose or poetry. It may tell us some- 
 thing about the physical-psychological characteristics of the individual 
 experimenting, or being experimented upon. It may provide fresh 
 material for that individual's dossier, to be registered and stored by 
 a new Government Department. But on no passage of Chaucer or of 
 Swinburne, of Malory or of Ruskin, can it shed the very dimmest light 
 as to its structure, arrangement, or rhythmical quality. The results 
 of the machinery remain as remote from literature as the machinery 
 itself; while, even as regards these results, the tyranny of individuality 
 retains its scornful predominance. Each intelligent observer, patient, 
 subject, or whatever he is to be termed, can whisper to himself, 'At 
 the next examination, if I choose, I can upset my record utterly. 1 
 
 So let us pass to the pure Musicians for whom, though I think they 
 are seriously wrong, and are doing much mischief in matters prosodic, 
 I have a respect quite different from that with which I regard the 
 Mechanics, albeit there are, as has been said, holy or unholy alliances 
 or leagues between the two nations. The principle of these musicians, 
 as they sometimes rather arbitrarily announce, is that 'poetic rhythm 
 
SOME RECENT STUDIES IN ENGLISH PROSODY 7 
 
 is a branch of musical rhythm'. I have abundantly shown elsewhere, 
 and may slightly touch on here later, the disastrous results of taking 
 this for granted: for the moment I wish to dwell, and to dwell a little 
 more fully, on the enormity of the question which the principle itself 
 begs. Poetic rhythm is not, in English, a branch of musical rhythm. 
 Singing is, with us, not saying. When we talk of a poet's 'singing 
 robes'' we are, as we so often are, indulging in metaphor, in analogy, 
 in figurative expression of this kind or that. If you put these pro- 
 positions to the plain man, and induce him, which is possible though 
 not frequently done, to give his mind to them, he will hardly deny 
 what I say. The two processes are produced by the same organs, no 
 doubt ; they have characteristics in common ; they are susceptible of 
 marriage ; there is no absolute gulf fixed between them. But there 
 is a clear line ; and the laws that prevail on the two sides of that line 
 are different. It may be said, l This is all very fine as an utterance 
 of Sir Positive, but where are your proofs ?' There are so many that 
 one must select from them. I do not lay any stress on the fact, though 
 it is certainly rather a curious one, that the authors of 'Proud Maisie 1 
 and of 'I arise from dreams of thee 1 not only did not know a note 
 of music, but could neither produce nor recognize a tune. That might 
 be dismissed (though I fancy the dismissal could be questioned before 
 a suitable court of appeal) as merely an instance of eccentric per- 
 sonality, and of the common disconnexion between artistic power and 
 scientific knowledge. But I have appealed to what seems to me an 
 irresistible proof in the still more common acknowledgement of the 
 difference of speech and song : others may be found in the department 
 of example. Some, I hope many, of my hearers may know Charles 
 Salaman's famous or once famous setting of Shelley's ' Lines to an 
 Indian Air 1 , already mentioned by its first verse. This setting has 
 been, I believe, regarded by many competent lovers of poetry, some 
 at least of whom were also trained musicians, as almost the ne plus 
 ultra of success in a process rather notorious for failure — which noto- 
 riety, by the way, is itself something that the musicians have got to 
 explain away. So admirably does Salaman's music appeal to the musical 
 ear of persons who possess a poetical ear likewise, that it actually 
 associates itself with Shelley's verse ; you remember it as you read ; 
 you admit the musician as no unworthy assessor and ally to the poet ; 
 and you also remember the other glorious unset lines in the Promethcm 
 as to the soul floating down the river of song itself. Yet, when you 
 examine the two side by side, you find that the musician has, quite 
 rightly judging by results, proceeded on perfectly different structural 
 lines in composing his rhythm from those which the poet has used. 
 
8 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 
 
 A precisian without an ear may even say that he has taken great 
 liberties. Shelley's scheme is of the simplest, a three-foot iambic 
 measure with free anapaestic substitution, and in two places only 
 (the last but three and the last but one of the third stanza), an 
 extension, quite common and simple again, of the three feet to four. 
 Salaman reduplicates the words, and therefore the feet, constantly — 
 * And the stars ', ' of thee ', ' a spirit ' — besides repeating whole lines in 
 a sort of reverse refrain-fashion, like that common, but less agreeable 
 to the poetical ear, in anthems. Besides this, he uses single syllables 
 as the basis on occasion, not merely of one but of two, three, or four 
 •notes, throws in frequent intervals of music without words, &c, &c. 
 The thing is in fact rather what musicians themselves used, I believe, 
 to call a ' lesson ' on the theme of the words than a mere setting of 
 them ; a lesson in the other sense too — for it no doubt helps sluggish 
 or ignorant ears to detect some suggestions of the poetry itself. It is 
 admirable and delightful ; but its actual rhythmical system has only 
 a distant connexion with that of the original. It is a translation or 
 transposition into something quite different. 
 
 But perhaps some modern musical critic may say either that this 
 is bad music, tuny, popular, even Victorian ; or that it is a professed 
 variation, a kind of fugue. This would not overthrow my argument 
 entirely, or indeed very sensibly affect it. For the difference of method 
 would remain. But let us turn to something quite different, a piece 
 of that Elizabethan music, in the wide sense of Elizabethan, to which 
 I am glad to see modern musicians paying some attention. There 
 are few more charming examples of this than 'Phillida [or Phillada] 
 flouts me\ The air is so absolutely delightful that for once k is not 
 merely adequate, but altogether superior to the words : if it were not 
 that, from the first as a general rule, we know the one as soon as we 
 know the other, I really doubt whether the words would be more than 
 moderately pleasing. I do not know whether the piece has any recorded 
 history, but I should think it very likely that, as was so common then, 
 the air came first, and the verse-writer caught some of the plaintive 
 and ineffable 'silly sooth 1 of it. 
 
 But it is only the spirit of the two that is identical. I have else- 
 where given a study, from a slightly different point of view, of the 
 prosody of 'Phillida'. Here it is chiefly important to point out that, 
 to get the musical scansion, you must to some extent wrench the most 
 obvious poetical one. In fact I do not think that any one would 
 dream, if he had never heard the music, of scanning 
 
 ' Oh what a pain is love, 
 I cannot bear it 1 
 
SOME RECENT STUDIES IN ENGLISH PROSODY 9 
 
 otherwise than iambicallv, which destroys that music at once. Here 
 there are no variations, no importations except perhaps supplementary 
 pauses ; no flummery or fuguery of any kind whatever. But the music 
 assumes (and in a way justifies the assumption) the right to scan non- 
 naturally. In this case, as in the other, I have not the slightest 
 intention of quarrelling with the marriage. I like the result immensely 
 in each case. But it is a kind of marriage by capture ; and the facts 
 show perhaps that marriage by capture may have very happy results. 
 I believe that is a fact independently admitted in other cases. But 
 certainly there are most important differences between the independent 
 actions and ways of the parties to it. 
 
 Take yet another case, far inferior in poetical value and certainly 
 an instance of what music can do to enhance good, but not supreme, 
 poetry. I forget the composer's name of the setting of Jean Ingelow's 
 ' When Sparrows Build'. The mere verse is pretty, but not much 
 more : the setting makes it beautiful. But it transposes in order to 
 do this ; and what is more, the transposition distinctly alters the 
 natural run of the verse. The actual prosody is of the simplest 
 equivalenced ' common measure \ The setting breaks it up and pads 
 it out into something quite different, much prettier if you like, but 
 with an added prettiness, as of stays and rouge. I have no objection 
 to stays and rouge, but I decline to accept them as Eve's necessary 
 wedding garment. And most of all do I decline to allow the laws, 
 perhaps the quite authentic laws, of the stays and the rouge to be 
 made those of the cheek and the bust. In the case just mentioned, 
 to take two lines only, where the original runs 
 
 ' My old sorrow wakes and cries 
 
 • • • • • 
 
 And the scarlet sun doth rise 1 , 
 
 the setting puts an immense extra stress on the syllables 'old 'and 
 'scar'. In other words the musical presentation, like the rhetorical 
 presentation of which poetry is also notoriously susceptible, requires 
 and provides decorative ornament of a distinctly separable kind. 
 There need be, though there too often is, no want of harmony between 
 decoration and structure. There may and should be no incompati- 
 bility ; but compatibility is not identity. 
 
 One and only one more, though I could give any number. But 
 perhaps this last is the strongest of all, though one of the simplest. 
 There is a very fine setting, whose I again forget— for I have not seen 
 the printed sheet for decades, though I have every note of the music 
 in my head— of Tennyson's magnificent Echo Song in The Princess. 
 The metre of this is again quite simple iambic, and the music follows 
 
10 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 
 
 it for the first three lines faithfully enough ; but at the fourth it takes 
 the bit in its teeth, turns head over heels, or executes any other 
 metaphorical manoeuvre you please. Instead of 
 
 And the | wild cat | aract leaps | in glory, 
 you have 
 
 And the wild j cataract leaps | in glory. 
 
 An anapaest and a paeon to start with ! 
 
 Now do I say that this is wrong ? Not in the least — as a setting. 
 I will even go so far as to say that the music very happily takes 
 a hint from the words and extemporizes a fresh rendering of their 
 suo-crestion. But take this rendering and the spirit of it as a metrical 
 form, and you have simple chaos. 
 
 No doubt sometimes, nay fairly often, the music adapts itself more 
 or less exactly to the proper scansion. To pick up the old metaphor, 
 the union takes place immediately along the dividing line and keeps 
 in steady contact. But that this is not always, nor perhaps in the 
 majority of cases the fact, must, I think, be admitted by any fair 
 judge. 
 
 Still, it may be said, these are, after all, mere instances. ' Why not 
 fight out the quarrel of "foot 11 and "bar", to which the whole thing 
 really comes, more in the abstract? 1 The answer is that it is pre- 
 cisely this abstract treatment of prosody which seems to me the source 
 of all the errors of the musical prosodists from Joshua Steele down- 
 wards. And Steele's name suggests to me that perhaps I may be 
 permitted to finish with another observation on him in making which 
 I shall at last break my rule of not naming living persons. As I have 
 said, it seems difficult to believe that any one can really deny this 
 simple proposition, 'The proof of the prosodic system is the actual 
 scansion of the actual poetry. 1 Now of this very Joshua Steele, who 
 is hailed by all musical prosodists as the founder of true theory on 
 the subject, my friend Mr. Omond, who agrees with him as to system, 
 said long ago that ' Steele's scansions are utterly wild '. If such are 
 the figs by the judgement of the fig-showers, what are the fig-trees ? 
 
 And this dissidence extends to other matters, where it is perhaps 
 more fatally, if less rhetorically, manifest. Nowhere perhaps is this 
 the case more than in regard to blank verse. Blank verse is, one may 
 almost say, the distinguishing glory of English poetry. No other 
 language possesses it in anything like the same perfection. In French 
 it will not do at all ; in Italian it is defeated by the intensely rhyming, 
 or at any rate assonant character of the language ; in German it can 
 flourish, but with nothing like the variety and freedom which it 
 possesses with us. But blank verse is very ill to musicalize ; and, 
 
SOME RECENT STUDIES IN ENGLISH PROSODY 11 
 
 accordingly, the musicians have had a great deal of trouble with it. 
 Some of them rule it out altogether as not poetry ; others allow it 
 a sort of privilege or uncovenanted mercy in the way of the iambic 
 scansion which they deny to other metres ; others again, perhaps the 
 majority, turn it topsy-turvy, and make it trochaic (I may observe in 
 passing that some people seem to me to be born with trochaic ears) 
 or else a jumble of various ' bars \ Such is with them the fate of the 
 wonderful metre which, unimitated and unfathered, emerges first in 
 Chaucer's prose ; dips under in the chaos of the fifteenth century, 
 comes back at first timidly and imitatively with the dawn of the 
 Elizabethan age, triumphs with Marlowe and Shakespeare and Milton, 
 withstands the misunderstanding and the partial contempt of the 
 eighteenth century, and rises again to undreamt-of splendour in the 
 nineteenth with Wordsworth and Shelley and Tennyson. 
 
 With it, as with everything else, the foot system has no difficulty. 
 Born as it is of the verse itself, the verse recognizes it at once as does 
 every other English form. Of all these forms it has taken account ; 
 it imposes no precedent theory upon them ; it derives from them ; it 
 is purely and comprehensively inductive. It turns no blind eyes ; it 
 does not add or take away ; it requires no machinery, no legerdemain, 
 no evictions, no distortion. The poetry itself, all the poetry as far as 
 possible, and an ear which can distinguish the substance and essence 
 of that poetry from its accidents and complements — these are all it 
 knows, and all it needs to know or to have. It may be possible that 
 some people are born, not merely, as I said, with trochaic instead of 
 iambic ears, but with musical instead of poetical ones. Those who 
 fortunately possess both should not be Pharisaical, and I hope they 
 are not. If anybody can adjust to musical principles poetry which is 
 already good prosodically, without making it prosodically cacophonous, 
 let him. Nay if, as in the case of Shelley and Salaman, he can build 
 on a prosodic substructure a beautiful musical superstructure, let him 
 by all means do so. What I consider inadmissible is to force on 
 poetry such distortions as those in which the musical prosodists, from 
 Steele downwards, habitually indulge ; and to discard, if not to abuse, 
 the true principles of prosody itself, because they are not those of 
 another branch of the Art of Sound. 
 
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