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"Why, I have his works, printed at Bologna, in my room!" "I don't deny that, I am only talking about the metre used by Martelli. What you are thinking of must be verses of fourteen syllables; without alternative masculine and feminine rhymes. However, I confess that he thinks he has imitated the French Alexandrines, and his preface made me explode with laughter. Did you read it?" "Read it?
At that time my hair was archaic enough in length to grease the collar of my coat. Thus we were made to understand each other, and Louis Miraz soon took me to his attic-room in the Rue des Quatre-Vents, where he dragged two thousand alexandrines over me. For Miraz wrote no more verse.
Thus, a generation brought up on Wordsworth could hardly believe in the genuineness of Racine. Our fathers and grandfathers felt, and felt rightly, that art was something that came from and spoke to the depths of the human soul. But how, said they, should deep call to deep in Alexandrines and a pseudo-classical convention, to say nothing of full-bottomed wigs?
In his best pieces we find false rhymes, triplets, in which the third line appears to be a mere intruder, and, while it breaks the music, adds nothing to the meaning, gigantic Alexandrines of fourteen and sixteen syllables, and truncated verses for which he never troubled himself to find a termination or a partner.
My thoughts are fixed on eternity." A long lean man, with all his limbs rambling no way to reduce him to compass, unless you could double him like a pocket rule with his arms spread, he'd lie on the bed of Ware like a cross on a Good Friday bun standing still, he is a pilaster without a base he appears rolled out or run up against a wall so thin that his front face is but the moiety of a profile if he stands cross-legged, he looks like a Caduceus, and put him in a fencing attitude, you would take him for a piece of chevaux-de-frise to make any use of him, it must be as a spontoon or a fishing-rod when his wife's by, he follows like a note of admiration see them together, one's a mast and the other all hulk she's a dome, and he's built together like a glass-house when they part, you wonder to see the steeple separate from the chancel, and were they to embrace, he must hang round her neck like a skein of thread on a lace-maker's bolster to sing her praise, you should choose a rondeau; and to celebrate him, you must write all Alexandrines.
At last, when the King had gone over to the enemy, Cæsar attacked and defeated them in a battle in which many fell and the King himself disappeared. Leaving Kleopatra Queen of Egypt, who shortly after gave birth to a child that she had by Cæsar, which the Alexandrines named Cæsarion, he marched to Syria.
"They are so, Blondel," said Richard, "yet methinks the scene where there is like to be fighting will go best on in these same thundering Alexandrines, which sound like the charge of cavalry, while the other measure is but like the sidelong amble of a lady's palfrey." "It shall be as your Grace pleases," replied Blondel, and began again to prelude.
Of two noted Alexandrines, Archdeacon Farrar says: "They were philosophers in spirit; they could enforce respect by their learning and their large, rounded sympathy, where rhetorical denunciation and ecclesiastical anathemas would only have been listened to with a frown of anger, or a look of disdain.
To have brought about this amazing combination, to have erected, upon a structure of Alexandrines, of Unities, of Noble Personages, of stilted diction, of the whole intolerable paraphernalia of the Classical stage, an edifice of subtle psychology, of exquisite poetry, of overwhelming passion that is a tour de force whose achievement entitles Jean Racine to a place among the very few consummate artists of the world.
Particular attention should be paid to the transmutation of Antony's funeral oration into French alexandrines. In Voltaire's version, the climax of the speech is reached in the following passage; it is an excellent sample of the fatuity of the whole of his concocted rigmarole: ANTOINE: Brutus ... où suis-je? O ciel! O crime!
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