by F L Lucas
Besides, when I open my daily paper, I encounter, in the first leading article I look at, the sentence-ending ‘prévious ad | mìnistr | átions’ – a variety of cursus velox. I turn to the financial page and read: ‘Dulness renewed in N. British Loco. at 12/6 was due to competítiȯn cȯn|sìdėr | átiȯns’ (another velox!). These seem strange elegances (if they are elegant) for Fleet Street to hit upon accidentally. Now I have done it myself! ‘Hit upȯn | àccid|éntȧllẏ’ (cursus 4).
Besides, it will be noted that all these cadences end with an unaccented syllable. But the finest English sentences often end with accented syllables (thirteen sentences out of eighteen, for example, in the Landor passage quoted on p. 202). ‘Oh,’ say the cursus-worshippers, ‘but there are “native” cadences as well (such as ´ . ´ , ´ . . ´ , ´. . . ´).’ Indeed, it might be urged that the second and third of these are shortened forms of ´. . ´. (planus) or ´. . . ´. (variation of planus), just as the English decasyllable corresponds to the Italian eleven-syllable line.
But at this point my scepticism begins to suspect that all these supposed graces are not the product of some secret apostolic succession from Cicero to Stevenson, but simply the spontaneous result, first, of the nature of English speech-rhythm; secondly of the problem of writing English prose that shall be neither too rhythmical nor yet too unrhythmical.
The following factors seem to me explanation enough:
(1) In English, rhythm tends to become trochaic or iambic.
(2) Yet a too trochaic or iambic rhythm grows obvious and artificial. A natural remedy is to disguise its regularity by inserting here and there extra unaccented syllables.
(3) But it is usually difficult, in English, to have more than three unaccented syllables in succession. For then a secondary accent tends to insert itself. (E.g. we tend to say ‘intólerably’ and ‘impecúnious’; but ‘intólerably ìmpecúnious’.) Accordingly we get such variations as the following:
These variations turn out to be our old friends cursus planus, tardus, and velox.
Consider two lines of Tennyson:
Cámelot a cíty of shádowy pálaces.
Príck’d with incrédible pínnacles ìnto heáven.
Tennyon has achieved in ‘shádowy pálaces’ a perfect tardus (´ . . ´ . .); in ‘pínnacles ìnto heáven’ a perfect velox (´ . . ` . ´ .); in ‘Cámelot a cíty’ a variety of planus. Who can suppose he intended it? He was merely trying to avoid the monotony of strict iambic rhythm by playing variations. The prose-writer often does the same.
At all events in practice I think the prose-writer should snap his fingers at these medieval relics, and trust his own ear. He will merely take care to avoid too metrical rhythms; and observe variety by mingling sentences that end on a stressed syllable with others that end on an unstressed. ‘Cicero’, says Lord Chesterfield in Landor, ‘was himself a trifler in cadences, and whoever thinks much about them will become so, if indeed the very thought when it enters is not trifling.’
Landor had little to learn about prose-rhythm from any man; the more honour to him that he kept his sense of proportion about such forms of ornament. [310]
Endnotes
259 The reader who wishes to pursue it further will find a summary of recent theories on prosody and prose-rhythm in R. Wellek and A. Warren, Theory of Literature (1949), ch. XIII and bibliography. [return to text]
260 I shall not soon forget the ineffable remark of a girl undergraduate who, being asked by her supervisor if she had enjoyed some book, replied: ‘I don’t read to “enjoy”. I read to evaluate.’ Far better to be a healthy farm-wench on a milking-stool. [return to text]
261 Rhetoric, III, 8. [return to text]
262 C. Walz, Rhetores Graeci (1834), VI, pp. 165–6 (quoted in Saintsbury, English Prose Rhythm, p. 2). [return to text]
263 See p. 201. [return to text]
264 Much as I admire Saintsbury’s History of English Prosody, I can make little of his History of English Prose Rhythm. I do not believe the ordinary reader attaches the slightest importance (even if he knows what they are) to all these amphibrachs and molossi, dochmiacs and paeons. And, in practice, I am often baffled by Saintsbury’s scansions. Why ‘heārthstăne ăt Ēllăngōwăn’, but ‘Laīrd ŏf Ĕllăngōwăn’? A misprint? Why on one page ‘rĕcŏllēctiŏn’, on another ‘rēcŏllĕctiōn’ (which seems to me impossible)? Why ‘pūrplĕ | moūntaĭns | swēll | cĭrclĭng | round it?’ (Surely ‘cīrclĭng’?) Why ‘acclămătions | ăt thĕ ĭnaūg | ŭrātiŏn’? (Surely ‘ācclămātiŏns’?) Why turn the Latin dĭēs into dīĕs, but the English ‘dīŭtūrnĭty’ into ‘dĭūtūrnĭty’? And can one possibly scan the climax of Macaulay’s description of Warren Hastings’s trial – ‘shōne | roūnd Geōrgĭănă, | Dūchĕss | ŏf Dēvŏnshĭre’? ‘Geōrgĭānă’, seems essential: and, to me, the rhythm is markedly trochaic-iambic: ‘Shóne round | Geórgi|ána, || Dúchess | of Dév|onshire’ (in fact, a sort of trochaic Alexandrine). [return to text]
265 Throughout this chapter a main stress is indicated by ´; a secondary, minor stress by `. [return to text]
266 Even this is a perfectly possible Elizabethan blank verse. [return to text]
267 I do not wish to plunge into the morasses of metrical theory, buzzed over by so many fretful and stinging creatures; but, as I speak of metrical elements in prose, I should perhaps briefly explain my views of metre in verse.
Some prosodists seem to me too lawless; to find as many as seven stresses in some decasyllabic lines, and as few as three in others, brings mere anarchy. Others seem too rigid; it is clearly ridiculous to scan in mechanical sing-song –
While SMOOTH AdONis FROM his NATive ROCK
Ran PURple TO the SEA.
For ‘from’ and ‘to’ are syllables less prominent, or stressed, than the unstressed ‘While’ or ‘Ran’. But the fallacy lies in taking all the stressed syllables in a verse line to be more strongly stressed than all its unstressed syllables. Stress is only relative, not absolute – relative to the syllable before and the syllable after. (‘From’, helped by the metrical pattern, is more strongly stressed than ‘–is’ before it, or ‘his’ after it; ‘to’ than ‘–ple’ or ‘the’.)
In short, an iambic or trochaic line undulates like a telegraph-wire – not like a telegraph-wire on a dead level, but like a telegraph-wire on a rolling plain, where the crests of some undulations are actually lower than the troughs of others; but, none the less, the undulations remain. Apart from this principle of the relativity of stress, I am in general agreement with the views of Saintsbury in his History of English Prosody.
Stress itself seems partly vocal (corresponding, it is said, to increased pressure of breath in the speech-canal), partly mental. For the mind needs to keep hold of the rhythmical pattern; since, although some verse-lines will continue to scan themselves even if embedded in a prose-passage, in others the metre is murdered if they are read as prose.
I would add that when musicians apply themselves to metre, the results seem to me usually unhappy. Music and metre are farther apart than they suppose; even a metrical magician like Swinburne could be totally unmusical.
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268 The quadrisyllabic second foot would not deter some modern writers of blank verse; nor, I think, need it. [return to text]
269 Cf. Meredith’s Love in the Valley: ‘Knees and tresses folded to slip and ripple idly.’ [return to text]
270 A thick line throughout indicates the beginning or end of a verse. [return to text]
271 The Egoist, ch. VII. [return to text]
272 Two equally unrhythmical and, to me, unpleasant specimens of Meredith’s prose will be found in Saintsbury, English Prose Rhythm, pp. 438–9. [return to text]
273 Richard Feverel, ch. XIX. Cf. the metre of Love in the Valley: ‘Tying up her laces, looping up her hair.’ [return to text]
274 Dots indicate unstressed syllables. [return to text]
275 And yet even here a sort of blank verse persists in
breaking in at the end of the paragraph: ‘He detested but was haunted by the phrase.’ [return to text]
276 Isaiah XIV, 12. [return to text]
277 Saintsbury (English Prose Rhythm, p. 184) scans: ‘Nōw : sīnce : thēse : deād : bōnes’ – that is, with five heavy stresses. But surely, since ‘dead bones’ is contrasted with the ‘living ones’ of Methuselah, ‘dead’ must be more stressed than its neighbours? [return to text]
278 I must add, however, that in general Burke does not seem to me very metrical. [return to text]
279 Pater too, however, seems, as a rule one of the less scannable of poetic prose-writers. [return to text]
280 Similarly, of course, Alexandrines occur in good French prose-writers. Renan, for example, has: ‘Les dieux passent comme les hommes … il ne | serait | pas bon || qu’ils fuss|ent ét|ernels. La foi qu’on a eue ne doit jamais être une chaine. On est quitte envers elle quand on l’a soigneusement roulée dans le | linceul | de pourpre || où dorm|ent les | dieux morts.’ ‘Gods pass like men … it would not be good that they should be eternal. One’s past faith should never become a chain. One has given it its due, when one has carefully wrapped it in the winding-sheet of purple, where dead gods lie asleep.’ (See J. Marouzeau, Précis de Stylistique Français (2nd ed., 1946), p. 182.) [return to text]
281 Quoted by A. Bain, Rhetoric and Composition (1887), Part I, p. 16. It seems to me far less effective if rewritten: ‘The honourable gentleman has with much spirit and decency charged upon me the atrocious crime of being a young man: this I shall neither attempt to palliate nor deny’ (though logic might prefer ‘attempt neither to palliate nor to deny’). [return to text]
282 How typical of Pater to think so! [return to text]
283 Rev. XIV, 8. The A.V. has none of Flaubert’s fear of successive ‘ofs’s. [return to text]
284 Cf. Rev. XVIII, 2: ‘Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen’; and Tennyson, Princess: ‘Our enemies have fall’n, have fall’n’. [return to text]
285 Similarly in the Greek: ἔπεσεν, ἔπεσεν Βaβυλὼν ἡ μεγάλη. [return to text]
286 Cf. pp. 26–7. [return to text]
287 Perhaps influenced (though Tennyson hated his style ‘like poison’) by James Thomson’s: The blackbird whistles from the thorny brake,
The mellow bullfinch answers from the grove.
But if Tennyson borrowed, he bettered what he took.
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288 A precise grammarian might prefer ‘is’. [return to text]
289 Johnson ignores the use of anapaests mixed with iambics in English, as in the Christabel-metre, or in lyrics like those of Swinburne’s Atlanta. These he could not know. But the same thing can already be seen in Jacobean blank verse. [return to text]
290 Johnson, dominated by the heroic couplet, seems to me here again to underestimate the powers of English verse. [return to text]
291 Pope, Odyssey, XI. [return to text]
292 Cf. the admirable letter in which, by similar parodies, Tennyson annihilates the absurd theory of Patmore, that the six-syllabled iambic is fundamentally gloomy, the octosyllable fundamentally joyous and gay (H. Tennyson, Memoir (1897), pp. 469–70). [return to text]
293 Here, I am afraid, Johnson cheats a little. He has not really provided equivalents for the long syllables ‘weary’, ‘groan’, and ‘heaves’; ‘merry’, ‘song’, ‘wish’d’ seem to me to have much shorter vowels. On the other hand ‘impatient steps’ (in effect, four syllables) is no exact counterpart to ‘impetuous down’ (five syllables). The resulting anapaest (ᴗ ᴗ –) is important for the speed. [return to text]
294 Some texts read ‘he tried’. It seems possible that Johnson forgot that he had already a subject for his verb in ‘the poet’. It is always dangerous to embed longish quotations in the middle of sentences; the reader is apt to grow confused and lose the construction, even if the writer does not. Besides, if the quotation is a good one, the part of the sentence that follows it tends to seem anticlimax. [return to text]
295 It is interesting, and to me pleasing, to find Johnson not afraid of italics. But I doubt if ‘the exact prosodist’ is here quite exact enough. ‘Flies o’er th’ unbending corn’ does indeed provide an extra syllable or ‘time’, compared with ‘The long majestic march’; but by producing a rapid anapaest, it does make the line move faster. And it is the speed that matters, not the number of syllables. (Incidentally it is interesting that Johnson, unlike some earless persons, read ‘th’ unbending’ without wholly eliding its ‘the’ – not ‘thunbending’.)
It might also be urged that the ‘sc’ and ‘sk’ of ‘scours’ and ‘skims’ add to the sense of scurry.
[return to text]
296 Johnson, Life of Pope. Cf. Rambler 94, Idler 60. [return to text]
297 Three ‘again’s seem rather much in one line. [return to text]
298 Do frogs ‘hum’? [return to text]
299 This I doubt. [return to text]
300 Quoted in Saintsbury, English Prose Rhythm, p. 401. [return to text]
301 Cf. the not very happy title of a book of Greek travel (if it is not apocryphal): ‘Hallowed Spots of Greece.’ [return to text]
302 It has been suggested by Mr T. S. Eliot that, in Tennyon’s Mariana, ‘The blue fly sung in the pane’ is much better than ‘The blue fly sang in the pane’ would have been. ‘Sung’ is, I think, nearer to the noise of a fly (cf. ‘hum’, ‘buzz’); but even here I remain a little dubious. [return to text]
303 So with Housman’s: Though the girl he loves the best
Rouses from another’s side.
[return to text]
304 E.g. Meredith: ‘The army of unalterable law.’ [return to text]
305 The Art of Writing, ‘Elements of Style’. [return to text]
306 p. 197. [return to text]
307 Cf. the Burton passage, pp. 85–6. [return to text]
308 Yet any attentive ear can notice that B.B.C. News Bulletins, although spoken, are curiously insensitive to repetitions or jingles of words or syllables – e.g. ‘it is reported that the port is blocked’. [return to text]
309 There is a good summary in the Oxford Classical Dictionary, S.V. ‘Prose-Rhythm’. [return to text]
310 Those who wish to pursue the problem may consult the following:
John Shelley, ‘Rhythmical Prose in Latin and English’, in Church Quarterly Review, 1912.
A. C. Clark, Prose Rhythm in English, 1913.
P. Fijn van Draat, ‘Voluptas Aurium’, in Englische Studien, XLVIII, 1914.
M. W. Croll, Cadence of English Prose (University of N. Carolina Studies in Philology, XVI, 1919).
O. Elton, A Sheaf of Papers, 1922.
Of these van Draat seems to me the best (doubtless because he is as sceptical as I am); though misled by strange ideas of English stresses, such ‘áccommodátion’, ‘ímaginátion’, ‘écclesiástic’.
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CHAPTER 11: Methods of Writing
TEMPERAMENTS are so various that there may be even more than ‘nine-and-sixty ways’ of writing books. Rousseau, for example, could not compose with pen in hand: but then Chateaubriand could not compose without. Wordsworth did it while walking, riding, or in bed; but Southey, only at his desk. Shakespeare, we are told, never blotted a line; Scott could toss first drafts unread to the printer; Trollope drilled himself, watch on desk, to produce two hundred and fifty words every quarter of an hour; Hilaire Belloc, so Desmond MacCarthy once told me, claimed to have written twenty thousand of them in a day; and in ten days Balzac could turn out sixty thousand. [311] On the other hand Ronsard and Montaigne, FitzGerald and George Moore, went on sedulously repolishing even their published works. One need not believe too literally in Oscar Wilde’s account of how he spent the morning putting in a comma, and the afternoon in taking it out again; but Flaubert could really toil for three days to grind out eight lines – ‘qu’il faut pourtant raturer encore’. [312]
Clearly the main problem is, again, one of practical psychology. When a writer thinks of brilliant ideas or phrases, such that neither he nor others can think of how he thought of them, men used to call it ‘inspiration’. ‘Hé bien, Monsieur,’ King Murat of Naples would cry to Samuel Rogers (of all people), when he met him out riding, ‘êtes-vous inspiré aujourd’hui?’ [313] When Dickens was asked where he got Mr. Pickwick, he could only reply that he had thought of Mr. Pickwick. Such sudden illuminations the Hebrew prophet attributed to the spirit of the Lord; the Greek poet assigned them to the gracious hands of a Muse (etymologically akin to mania, ‘madness’, and mantis, ‘seer’); but we appear to owe them rather to that amorphous and sinister monster, the Unconscious. [314]
That things go on in our heads without our knowing is, of course, no new idea. From time immemorial men perplexed by some problem have found it wise to sleep on it. Medieval poets repeatedly pretended to fall asleep and dream their poems. The ancient Persians, according to Herodotus, gave scope to their less conscious thinking by deliberating on important matters twice – first drunk, then sober; or first sober, then drunk. Dryden speaks vividly in the dedication of The Rival Ladies of ‘a confused mass of Thoughts, tumbling over one another in the dark’, and of the Fancy (what we should call ‘Imagination’) ‘moving the sleeping images of things towards the light’. Similarly Johnson refers to ‘the lucky moments of animated imagination’; to ‘those felicities which cannot be produced at will by wit and labour, but must arise unexpectedly in some hour propitious to poetry’; to the influence exerted ‘by causes wholly out of the performer’s power, by hints of which he perceives not the origin, by sudden elevations of mind which he cannot produce in himself, and which sometimes rise when he expects them least’. Stevenson had his nocturnal Brownies. Ibsen, again, writes of putting his characters ‘out to grass’, in the hope that they will fatten. And the mathematician Henri Poincaré noted three phases in his own thinking – conscious effort; unconscious fermentation; and a final conscious analysis of the new combination thus formed. But to Freud, whatever else may be questioned in his work, belongs the great discovery, not that unconscious mental processes exist, but that they are much more extensive and important than anyone had dreamed. Men know far less than they think; but they also think far more than they know. [315]