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Updated: May 1, 2025
The French and Italians know nothing of the two first at least, their best poets have not practised them. As for the pauses, Malherbe first brought them into France within this last century, and we see how they adorn their Alexandrines. But as Virgil propounds a riddle which he leaves unsolved "Dic quibus in terris, inscripti nomina regum Nascantur flores, et Phyllida solus habeto"
But more often the poet either uses his subject as a means for exhibiting his learning or style, as Statius, Cinna, and the Alexandrines; or loses sight of the deeper meaning altogether, and merely reproduces the beauty of the ancient myths without reference to their ideal truth, as was done by Ovid, and recently by Mr. Morris, with brilliant success, in his Earthly Paradise.
Her ears were buzzing; it seemed that everything was turning round. Monjardin, the center of all eyes, made pompous preparation; he pulled down his vest, arranged his sleeves and, in sonorous, cadenced voice began to recite his alexandrines, scanning the lines impeccably.
Was she beginning to be tired of her companionless liberty? Had the long stanzas, bound by so many interwoven links of rhyme, ending in long Alexandrines, the long cantos, the lingering sweetness long drawn out through so many unended books, begun to weary her at last? Had even a quarrel with a fisher lad been a little pastime to her? and did she now wish she had detained him a little longer?
Not to name our old Comedies before SHAKESPEARE, which are all writ in verse of six feet or Alexandrines, such as the French now use: I can show in SHAKESPEARE, many Scenes of Rhyme together; and the like in BEN. JOHNSON's tragedies. In CATILINE and SEJANUS, sometimes, thirty or forty lines.
How many, many potentates, great and small, during all the intervening centuries, had bowed their heads and spoken words of reverence in the presence of the only sepulchre remaining in situ and intact of the world-conquerors of antiquity! Of all these reputed soliloquies, that of Don Carlos, in the spacious Alexandrines of Victor Hugo in "Hernani," Gard remembered as being the most famous.
If we were entitled to say what, in our opinion, the style of dramatic poetry should be, we would declare for a free, outspoken, sincere verse, which dares say everything without prudery, express its meaning without seeking for words; which passes naturally from comedy to tragedy, from the sublime to the grotesque; by turns practical and poetical, both artistic and inspired, profound and impulsive, of wide range and true; verse which is apt opportunely to displace the caesura, in order to disguise the monotony of Alexandrines; more inclined to the enjambement that lengthens the line, than to the inversion of phrases that confuses the sense; faithful to rhyme, that enslaved queen, that supreme charm of our poetry, that creator of our metre; verse that is inexhaustible in the verity of its turns of thought, unfathomable in its secrets of composition and of grace; assuming, like Proteus, a thousand forms without changing its type and character; avoiding long speeches; taking delight in dialogue; always hiding behind the characters of the drama; intent, before everything, on being in its place, and when it falls to its lot to be beautiful, being so only by chance, as it were, in spite of itself and unconsciously; lyric, epic, dramatic, at need; capable of running through the whole gamut of poetry, of skipping from high notes to low, from the most exalted to the most trivial ideas, from the most extravagant to the most solemn, from the most superficial to the most abstract, without ever passing beyond the limits of a spoken scene; in a word, such verse as a man would write whom a fairy had endowed with Corneille's mind and Molière's brain.
At first, he clung to the measures most approved in French poetry, especially to Alexandrines and Iambic tetrameters, and to their irregular association in a sort of ballad metre, which in England has been best handled by Robert Browning in his fine ballad of 'Harve; Riel. Jasmin's first rhymes were written upon curl papers, and then used on the heads of his lady customers.
Through the flowing regularity of his Alexandrines his personages stand out distinct and palpable, in all the vigour of life. The presentment, it is true, is not a detailed one; the accidents of character are not shown us only its essentials; the human spirit comes before us shorn of its particulars, naked and intense.
"I'll master De Marsay some of these days!" thought the crushed poet; "after all, Canning and Chateaubriand are both in politics." Canalis would gladly have brought forth some great political poem, but he was afraid of the French press, whose criticisms are savage upon any writer who takes four alexandrines to express one idea.
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