PROSE AND VERSE.

THE "music of the future " is at last slowly approaching its apotheosis; since "Lohengrin" has signally triumphed in Italy, and the South is opening its ears to the subtle secrets of the Teutonic Muse. The outcome of Wagner's consummate art is a war against mere melody and tintinabulation, such as have for many long years delighted the ears of both gods and groundlings. Is it too bold, then, to anticipate for future "Poetry" some such similar triumph? Freed from the fetters of pedantry on the one hand, and escaping the contagion of mere jingle on the other, may not Poetry yet arise to an intellectual dignity parallel to the dignity of the highest music and philosophy? It may seem at a first glance over-sanguine to hope so much, at the very period when countless Peter Pipers of Verse have overrun literature so thoroughly, robbing poetry of all its cunning, and "picking their pecks of pepper" to the delight of a literary Music Hall; but, in good truth, when disease has come to a crisis so enormous, we have good reason to hope for amendment. A surfeit of breakdowns and nigger-melodies, or of Offenbach and Hervé, or of "Lays" and "Rondels," and "Songs without Sense," is certain to lead to a reaction all in good time. A vulgar taste, of course, will always cling to vulgarity, preferring in all honesty the melody of Gounod to the symphony of Beethoven, and the tricksy, shallow verse of a piece like Poe's "Bells" to the subtly interwoven harmony of a poem like Matthew Arnold's "Strayed Reveller." True Art, however, must triumph in the end. Sooner or later, when the Wagner of poetry arises, he will find the world ready to understand him; and we shall witness some such effect as Coleridge predicteda crowd, previously familiar with Verse only, vibrating in wonder and delight to the charm of oratio soluta, or loosened speech.

Already, in a few words, we have sketched out a subject for some future æsthetic philosopher or philosophic historian. A sketch of the past history of poetry, in England alone, would be sufficiently startling; and surely a most tremendous indictment might be drawn thence against Rhyme. Glance back over the works of British bards, from Chaucer downwards; study the delitia Poetarum Anglicorum. What delightful scraps of melody! what glorious bursts of song! Here is Chaucer, wearing indeed with perfect grace his metrical dress; for it sits well upon him, and becomes his hoar antiquity, and we would not for the world see him clad in the freedom of prose. Here is

Spenser; and Verse becomes him well, fitly modulating the faëry tale he has to tell. Here are Gower, Lydgate, Dunbar, Surrey, Gascoigne, Daniel, Drayton, and many others: each full of dainty devices; none strong enough to stand without a rhyme-prop on each side of him. Of all sorts of poetry, except the very best, these gentlemen give us samples; and their works are delightful reading. As mere metrists, cunning masters of the trick of verse, Gascoigne and Dunbar are acknowledged masters. Take the following verses from the "Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins":

"Then Ire came in with sturt and strife,

His hand was aye upon his knife,

He brandeist like a beir;

Boasters, braggarts, and bargainers,
After him passit in pairs,

All boden in feir of weir...

Next in the dance followed Envy,
Fill'd full of feid and felony,

Hid malice and despite.

For privy hatred that traitor trembled,
Him follow'd many freik dissembled,
With fenyit wordis white;

And flatterers unto men's faces,
And back-biters in secret places,
To lie that had delight,

With rowmaris of false leasings;
Alas that courts of noble kings
Of them can ne'er be quite !"

This, allowing for the lapse of years, still reads like "Peter Piper" at his best; easy, alliterative, pleasant, if neither deep nor cunning. For this sort of thing, and for many higher sorts of things, Rhyme was admirably adapted, and is still admirably adapted. When, however, a larger music and a more loosened speech was wanted, Rhyme went overboard directly.

On the stage even, Rhyme did very well, as long as the matter was in the Ralph Royster Doyster vein; but a larger soul begot a larger form, and the blank verse of Gorboduc was an experiment in the direction of loosened speech. How free this speech became, how by turns loose and noble, how subtle and flexible it grew, in the hands of Shakspeare and the Elizabethans, all men know; and rare must have been the delight of listeners whose ears had been satiated so long with mere alliteration and jingle. The language of Shakspeare, indeed, must be accepted as the nearest existing approach to the highest and freest poetical language. Here and there rhymed dialogue was used, when the theme was rhythmic and not too profound; as in the pretty love-scenes of A Midsummer Night's Dream and the bantering, punning chat of Love's Labour's Lost. True song sparkled up in its place like a fountain. But the level dialogue for

the most part was loosened speech. Observe the following speech of Prospero, usually printed in lines, each beginning with a capital:

"This King of Naples, being an enemy to me inveterate, hearkens my brother's suit; which was,-that he, in lieu of the premises, of homage and I know not how much tribute, should presently extirpate me and mine out of the dukedom, and confer fair Milan, with all the honours, on my brother. Whereon, a treacherous army levied, one midnight fated to the purpose did Antonio open the gates of Milan; and, in the dead of darkness, the ministers for the purpose hurried thence me and thy crying self!"

Tempest, Act I., Scene 2.

Any poet since Shakspeare would doubtless have modulated this speech more exquisitely, laying special stress on the five accented syllables of each line. Shakspeare, however, was too true a musician. He knew when to use careless dialogue like the above, and when to break in with subtle modulation; and he knew, moreover, how the loose prose of the one threw out the music of the other. He knew well how to inflate his lines with the measured oratory of an offended king:

"The hope and expectation of thy time
Is ruin'd; and the soul of every man
Prophetically doth forethink thy fall.
Had I so lavish of my presence been,
So common-hackney'd in the eyes of men,
So stale and cheap to vulgar company;
Opinion, that did help me to the crown,
Had still kept loyal to possession;
And left me in reputeless banishment,
A fellow of no mark, nor likelihood.

By being seldom seen, I could not stir,

But, like a comet, I was wonder'd at;

That men would tell their children, This is he!

Others would say, Where? which is Bolingbroke?" &c.

Henry IV., Part I., Act III., Scene 2.

In the hands of our great Master, indeed, blank verse becomes almost exhaustless in its powers of expression; but nevertheless, prose is held in reserve, not merely as the fitting colloquial form of the "humorous" scenes, but as the appropriate loosened utterance of strong emotion. The very highest matter of all, indeed, is sometimes delivered in prose, as its most appropriate medium. Take the wonderful set of prose dialogues in the second act of "Hamlet," and notably that exquisitely musical speech of the Prince, beginning, “I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth." Turn, also, to Act V. of the same play, where the "mad matter between Hamlet and the Gravediggers, so full of solemn significance and sound, is prose once more. The noble tragedy of "Lear," again, owes much of its weird power to the frequent use of broken speech.

And is the following any the less powerful or passionate because it goes to its own music, instead of following any prescribed form ?—

"I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?

Merchant of Venice, Act III., Scene 1.

It would be tedious to prolong illustrations from an author with whom everybody is supposed to be familiar. Enough to say that the careful student of Shakspeare will find his most common magic to lie in the frequent use, secret or open, of the oratio soluta. And what holds of him, holds in more or less measure of his contemporaries— of Jonson, Marston, Webster, Massinger, Beaumont and Fletcher, Greene, Peele, and the rest; just as it holds of the immediate predecessor of Shakspeare, whose "mighty line" led the way for the full Elizabethan choir of voices. Then, as now, society had been surfeited with tedious jingle; and only waited for genius to set it free. It is difficult to say in what respect the following scene differs from first-class prose; although we have occasionally an orthodox blank verse line, the bulk of the passage is free and unencumbered; yet its weird imaginative melody could scarcely be surpassed.

Duch. Is he mad, too?

Servant. Pray question him; I'll leave you.
Bos. I am come to make thy tomb.

Duch. Ha! my tomb?

Thou speak'st as if I lay upon my death-bed

Gasping for breath. Dost thou perceive me such?
Bos. Yes.

Duch. Who am I? am not I thy duchess?
Bos. That makes thy sleep so broken:
Glories, like glow-worms, afar off shine bright,
But look'd to near have neither heat nor light.
Duch. Thou art very plain.

Bos. My trade is to flatter the dead, not the living;

I am a tomb-maker.

Duch. And thou hast come to make my tomb?

Bos. Yes!

Duch. Let me be a little merry :

Of what stuff wilt thou make it ?

Bos. Nay, resolve me first: of what fashion?

Duch. Why do we grow phantastical on our death-bed?

Do we affect fashion in the grave?

Bos. Most ambitiously. Princes' images on the tombs
Do not lie as they were wont, seeming to pray

Up to heaven; but with their hands under their cheeks,
As if they died of the toothache! They are not carved
With their eyes fixed upon the stars; but as
Their minds were wholly bent upon the world,
The self-same way they seem to turn their faces.

Duch. Let me know fully, therefore, the effect
Of this thy dismal preparation !—

This talk fit for a charnel.

Bos. Now I shall (a coffin, cords, and a bell).

Here is a present from your princely brothers;
And may it arrive welcome, for it brings

Last benefit, last sorrow.*

He who will carefully examine the works of our great dramatists, will find everywhere an equal freedom; rhythm depending on the emotion of the situation, and the quality of the speakers, rather than on any fixed laws of verse.

If we turn, on the other hand, to dramatists and poets of less genius, if we open the works of Waller, Cowley, Marvell, Dryden, and even of Milton, we shall find much exquisite music, but little perhaps of that wondrous cunning familiar to us in Shakspeare and the greatest of his contemporaries. Shallow matter, as in Waller ; ingenious learned matter, as in Cowley; dainty matter, as in Andrew Marvell; artificial matter, as in Dryden; and puritan matter, as in Milton, were all admirably fitted for rhymed or some other formal sort of Verse. Rhyme, indeed, may be said, while hampering the strong, to strengthen and fortify the weak. But, of the men we have just named, the only genius approaching the first-class was Milton; and so no language can be too great to celebrate the praises of his singing. Passage after passage, however, might be cited from his great work, where, like Molière's "Bourgeois Gentilhomme," he talks prose without knowing it; and, to our thinking, his sublimest feats of pure music are to be found in that dramat where he permits himself, in the ancient manner, the free use of loosened cadence. Milton, however, great as he is, is a great formalist, sitting "stately at the harpsichord." A genius of equal earnestness, and of almost equal strength-we mean Jeremy Taylor-wrote entirely in prose; and it has been well observed by a good critic that "in any one of his prose folios there is more fine fancy and original imagery -more brilliant conceptions and glowing expressions-more new figures and new applications of old figures-more, in short, of the body and soul of poetry, than in all the odes and epics that have since been produced in Europe." Nor should we have omitted to mention, in glancing at the Elizabethan drama, that the prose of Bacon is as poetical, as lofty, and in a certain sense as musical, as the more formal "poetry" of the best of his contemporaries.

Very true, exclaims the reader, but what are we driving at? Would we condemn verse altogether as a form of speech, and

*The Duchess of Malfy, Act IV. Scene 2. The above extract is much condensed. The reader who would fully feel the force of our allusion, cannot do better than study Webster's great tragedy as a whole. It utterly discards all metrical rules, and abounds in wonderful music.

† Samson Agonistes.