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The Quarterly reviewer quotes, as admirable of its kind, the description in The Borough of the card-club, with the bickerings and ill-nature of the old ladies and gentlemen who frequented it. It is in truth very graphic, and no doubt absolutely faithful to life; but it is rather metrical fiction than poetry.
On the other hand, Tennyson, though already the most remarkable among the younger poets, was still but exercising himself in the studies in language and metrical music by which his consummate art was developed; Browning had published only 'Pauline, 'Paracelsus, and 'Strafford; the other poets who have given distinction to the Victorian age had not begun to write.
Meantime the reason for resisting the example and practice of Hazlitt lies in this that essentially it is at war with sincerity, the foundation of all good writing, to express one's own thoughts by another man's words. This dilemma arises. The thought is, or it is not, worthy of that emphasis which belongs to a metrical expression of it.
Now all the great romancers have been born to it, as Robinson Crusoe was born to the sea, or as Turner was born to paint. Though Scott published novels late, he had begun Waverley at thirty-four; his earlier works are romantic ballads and metrical romances; and from boyhood, at home and abroad, he was ever filled with some tale of adventure and character.
Nevertheless, this fact is not fatal to expression; for, in the first place, there is much variety of rhythm within a given metrical form, so that what superficially may seem to be the same rhythm is really a different one; and, in the second place, as we have already observed in the case of music, there is much in form and energy of movement which contrasting emotions have in common, and this may be expressed in the rhythmic type.
Though the poets of the 15th century were not overburdened with genius, they had, at least, a definite model to follow. As in the 14th century, metrical romances continued to be translated from the French, homilies and saints' legends and rhyming chronicles were still manufactured.
Of their numerous productions enough survives to indicate that a certain technical skill was not wholly lost. The metrical treatises of Terentianus Maurus, a scholar of the later years of the second century, show that the science of metre was studied with great care, not only in its common forms, but in the less familiar lyric measures.
That is true, and indeed as a parodist Sir George Trevelyan belongs to the metrical miocene. His Horace, when serving as a volunteer in the Republican Army, bursts into a pretty snatch of song which has a flavour of Moore:
For me, a quiet room a quiet room and a book, a volume in the hand, held lightly between the fingers. A volume of poems, lines metrical and cadenced; something by a sound Victorian. We have no later poets." "Swinburne?" suggested Miss Beam, an eager spinster. "Swinburne, Mr. Kinosling? Ah, SWINBURNE!" "Not Swinburne," said Mr. Kinosling chastely. "No."
He speaks of his own works under the name of Sermones, "talks" a name which was retained by his great successor, Horace; but the peculiar combination of metrical form with wide range of subject and the pedestrian style of ordinary prose, received in popular usage the name Satura, or "mixture."
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