Our old metrists were
careful of elasticity, a quality which modern verse has lost in
proportion as our language has stiffened into uniformity under the
benumbing fingers of pedants.
This discussion of the value of syllables is not so trifling as it seems.
A great deal of nonsense has been written about imperfect measures in
Shakespeare, and of the admirable dramatic effect produced by filling up
the gaps of missing syllables with pauses or prolongations of the voice
in reading. In rapid, abrupt, and passionate dialogue this is possible,
but in passages of continuously level speech it is barbarously absurd. I
do not believe that any of our old dramatists has knowingly left us a
single imperfect verse. Seeing in what a haphazard way and in how
mutilated a form their plays have mostly reached us, we should attribute
such _faults_ (as a geologist would call them) to anything rather than to
the deliberate design of the poets. Marlowe and Shakespeare, the two best
metrists among them, have given us a standard by which to measure what
licenses they took in versification,--the one in his translations, the
other in his poems. The unmanageable verses in Milton are very few, and
all of them occur in works printed after his blindness had lessened the
chances of supervision and increased those of error.
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