Andersen. — Metre. 475 



best used by Chaucer. With him it runs freely ; the lines, 

 though stopped by means of the rime, are yet not stopped 

 abruptly ; the mid-pause of the line, or caesura, is varied, and 

 it has some of the charm of blank verse with the primitive charm 

 of rime added. With Pope the place of the csesura became 

 more definite, and the lines, too, were more definitely stopped ; 

 in fact, the rime broke his verses up into couplets ; they became 

 a string of epigrams : so that it has been said of Pope that under 

 the curb of pause and rime his Pegasus became a rocking-horse. 

 Such monotony must cause a revulsion. That revulsion took 

 shape, not in discarding the metre, but in discarding the rime 

 and in varying the place of the mid-pause. Dryden, among 

 others, wrote against this innovation, maintaining that the 

 rimed heroic was the suitable measure for tragedy, as it gave 

 such opportunity for epigram — a state of things quite out of 

 harmony in tragedy, where, of course, epigram has no place. 



2. (a.) In Pope's couplets the two lines generally serve to 

 convey a complete sentence, in the same way that the two fines 

 of ballad-metre did. On reading Pope aloud, too, it will be 

 found that a breath is taken invariably after the tenth or twen- 

 tieth syllable — much more often after the tenth. Here, then, 

 it would seem that the average length of a sentence is ten 

 syllables : Pope by his artificiality has made the average the 

 actual. Why should ten syllables be adopted here in the place 

 of fourteen % Reading aloud gives one reply : it will be noticed 

 that Pope's lines are read more slowly, more deliberately, than 

 lines in ballad-metre. The reason will be at once seen on ex- 

 amining the nature of the subject conveyed by the words. The 

 ballads are active, Pope is reflective : one relates an incident, 

 intense and almost without detail ; the other contemplates 

 the incident, and elaborates the detail : one is active, one is 

 sedentary. The very deliberate nature of his subject enabled 

 Pope to measure his lines as if by scale. 



(b.) In this light it will be interesting to compare two trans* 

 lations of Homer — one by Chapman, the other by Pope. Chap- 

 man employed the only metre really suitable — the equivalent, 

 in English, of Homer's metre — when he employed the ballad- 

 metre. One cannot but indorse Keats' s sonnet in the main, 

 but, whilst admiring the skill, the fault is also evident. Chapman 

 made this mistake : he did not sufficiently stop the lines ; he 

 used the ballad-metre, the metre of action, but tried also to give 

 it the flexibility belonging to blank verse in allowing his lines 

 constantly to overflow ; and it is these overflowing parts prin- 

 cipally that cause his metre to halt. Rimes, when used, should 

 generally coincide with pauses, not make them ; with Chapman, 

 they do not point his metre, but break it. Pope failed more 



