THE MEANING OF METRE

Did Bret Harte imitate Swinburne? Or (more pleasing thought) did Swinburne imitate Bret Harte? Did Swinburne wrestle in spirit with the admirable poem called "The Heathen Chinee", and then start up from his reading inspired and inflamed to write the great Greek tragedy of "Atalanta in Calydon"? To some academic and pedantic minds I know that this will not appear an exact literary comparison; though it covers a small point that may be called a curiosity of literature. To them it will sound as if I suggested that John Ruskin was merely a plagiarist of Josh Billings. Anyhow, it is a rather curious coincidence that there is one particular poetical metre, consisting of a quatrain and one long line at the end, which is found nowhere else in all literature, so far as I know, except in the finest and most tragic chorus of Swinburne's Atalanta and in the poem of the Heathen Chinee. It would be possible to get quite a pleasing poetical effect by interleaving the verses of the one with the verses of the other and thus producing a complete and continuous poem, all to the same beautiful tune and combining (as only the greatest masterpieces can do) the qualities of the humanist and the humorist; the elements of the grave and gay. There is no space here to weave the whole of the two narratives together; but a verse or two will show that they move with the same melody in the same metre.

0 would that with feet Unsandaled, unshod, Over-bold, over-fleet, I had swum not nor trod From Arcadia to Calydon northward a blast of the envy of God.

Which expressions are strong, Yet would feebly imply Some account of a wrong Not to call it a lie That was worked upon William my pardner, and the same being W. Nye.

It may be urged maliciously, by the unmelodious, that the identity is a mere accident of arrangement on the page; since the long line could be divided or the short lines linked up. But this is not true. That last long rolling line is really unique, like a wave sweeping away all that went before. And the moral is that metre is not artificial but elemental; it is smooth like Niagara. That long rushing line does express the sea-worship of Swinburne; that long meandering line does express the detached lucidity of Truthful James. Since then, writers have broken writing to bits to make it explosive. The other Truthful JamesI allude to Henry Jamesbegan it with a shower of commas; the more modern poets are quite capable of keeping the commas and leaving out the words. Others would make an explosion, or at least a noise, by some line like, "Burst. Blast. Burst-Blast back-blasted. Bang!" But it is not really even so noisy as a line like, "Where the thundering Bosphorus answers the thunder of Pontic seas"; because it somehow suggests, not a natural noise that cannot be stopped, but an artificial noise that actually is stopped, if only by full stops. Metre is more natural than free verse; because it has more of the movement of nature, and the curves of wind and wave.