And of this the ear is the sole
judge. It is impossible to lay down laws. Even in our
accentual and rhythmic language no analysis can find the
secret of the beauty of a verse; how much less, then, of
those phrases, such as prose is built of, which obey no law
but to be lawless and yet to please? The little that we know
of verse (and for my part I owe it all to my friend Professor
Fleeming Jenkin) is, however, particularly interesting in the
present connection. We have been accustomed to describe the
heroic line as five iambic feet, and to be filled with pain
and confusion whenever, as by the conscientious schoolboy, we
have heard our own description put in practice.
'All night | the dread | less an | gel un | pursued,' (2)
goes the schoolboy; but though we close our ears, we cling to
our definition, in spite of its proved and naked
insufficiency. Mr. Jenkin was not so easily pleased, and
readily discovered that the heroic line consists of four
groups, or, if you prefer the phrase, contains four pauses:
'All night | the dreadless | angel | unpursued.'
Four groups, each practically uttered as one word: the
first, in this case, an iamb; the second, an amphibrachys;
the third, a trochee; and the fourth, an amphimacer; and yet
our schoolboy, with no other liberty but that of inflicting
pain, had triumphantly scanned it as five iambs. Perceive,
now, this fresh richness of intricacy in the web; this fourth
orange, hitherto unremarked, but still kept flying with the
others.
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