Let us respect a genuine effort of learning, though we may not detect its immediate profit. In particular let us respect whatever Professor Saintsbury writes, who has done such splendid work upon English verse-prosody. I daresay he would retort upon my impatience grandly enough, quoting Walt Whitman:—
I am the teacher of athletes;
He that by me spreads a wider breast than my own proves the width of my own;
He most honours my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher.
His speculations may lead to much in time; though for the present they yield us small instruction in the path we seek.
It is time we harked back to our own signposts. Verse is written in metre and strict rhythm; prose, without metre and with the freest possible rhythm. That distinction seems simple enough, but it carries consequences very far from simple. Let me give you an illustration taken almost at hazard from Milton, from the Second Book of Paradise Regained:—
Up to a hill anon his steps he reared
From whose high top to ken the prospect round,
If cottage were in view, sheepcote or herd;
But cottage, herd, or sheepcote, none he saw.
These few lines are verse, are obviously verse with the accent of poetry; while as obviously they are mere narrative and tell us of the simplest possible incident—how Christ climbed a hill to learn what could be seen from the top. Yet observe, line for line and almost word for word, how strangely they differ from prose. Mark the inversions: “Up to a hill anon his steps he reared,” “But cottage, herd, or sheepcote, none he saw.” Mark next the diction—“his steps he reared.” In prose we should not rear our steps up the Gog-magog hills, or even more Alpine fastnesses; nor, arrived at the top, should we “ken” the prospect round; we might “con,” but should more probably “survey” it. Even “anon” is a tricky word in prose, though I deliberately palmed it off on you a few minutes ago. Mark thirdly the varied repetition, “if cottage were in view, sheepcote or herd—but cottage, herd, or sheepcote, none he saw.” Lastly compare the whole with such an account as you or I or Cluvienus would write in plain prose:—
Thereupon he climbed a hill on the chance that the view from its summit might disclose some sign of human habitation—a herd, a sheepcote, a cottage perhaps. But he could see nothing of the sort.
But you will ask, “Why should verse and prose employ diction so different? Why should the one invert the order of words in a fashion not permitted to the other?” and I shall endeavour to answer these questions together with a third which, I dare say, you have sometimes been minded to put when you have been told—and truthfully told—by your manuals and histories, that when a nation of men starts making literature it invariably starts on the difficult emprise of verse, and goes on to prose as by an afterthought. Why should men start upon the more difficult form and proceed to the easier? It is not their usual way. In learning to skate, for instance, they do not cut figures before practising loose and easy propulsion.
The answer is fairly simple. Literature (once more) is a record of memorable speech; it preserves in words a record of such thoughts or of such deeds as we deem worth preserving. Now if you will imagine yourself a very primitive man, lacking paper or parchment; or a slightly less primitive, but very poor, man to whom the price of parchment and ink is prohibitive; you have two ways of going to work. You can carve your words upon trees or stones (a laborious process) or you can commit them to memory and carry them about in your head; which is cheaper and handier. For an illustration, you find it useful, anticipating the tax-collector, to know how many days there are in the current month. But further you find it a nuisance and a ruinous waste of time to run off to the tribal tree or monolith whenever the calculation comes up; so you invent a formula, and you cast that formula into verse for the simple reason that verse, with its tags, alliterations, beat of syllables, jingle of rhymes (however your tribe has chosen to invent it), has a knack, not possessed by prose, of sticking in your head. You do not say, “Quick thy tablets, memory! Let me see—January has 31 days, February 28 days, March 31 days, April 30 days.” You invent a verse:—
Thirty days hath September,
April, June and November …
Nay, it has been whispered to me, Gentlemen, that in this University some such process of memorising in verse has been applied by bold bad irreverently-minded men even to the Evidences of our cherished Paley.
This, you will say, is mere verse, and not yet within measurable distance of poetry. But wait! The men who said the more memorable things, or sang them—the men who recounted deeds and genealogies of heroes, plagues and famines, assassinations, escapes from captivity, wanderings and conquests of the clan, all the “old, unhappy, far-off things and battles long ago”—the men who sang these things for their living, for a supper, a bed in the great hall, and something in their wallet to carry them on to the next lordship—these were gentlemen, scops, bards, minstrels (call them how you will), a professional class who had great need of a full repertory in a land swarming with petty chieftains, and to adapt their strains to the particular hall of entertainment. It would never do, for example, to flatter the prowess of the Billings in the house of the Hoppings, their hereditary foes, or to bore the Wokings (who lived where the crematorium now is) with the complicated genealogy of the Tootings: for this would have been to miss that appropriateness which I preached to you in my second lecture as a preliminary rule
