162 The Future Poetry
deepen or subtilise the traditional moulds, to substitute others of
a more delicate character or with a more varied and flexible prin-
ciple, to search out new packed or dissolved movements. There
have been some considerable successes, but nothing of such a
complete, sweeping and satisfying force as would quite content
a certain eagerness and impatient urge of the arriving age to find
a full rhythmic basis for its own way of self-expression. And so
we find too the attempt to initiate a violent and unprecedented
revolution in the whole fundamental method of poetic rhythm.
This tendency in some writers goes no farther than an ir-
regular use of metre which does not really carry us any farther
towards the desired result and is in no way an improvement on
the past since it has no true artistic principle to guide us to freer
and more consummate harmonies. But pushed to its logical issue
it has created the still growing form of free verse of which we
now find examples in most of the great literary languages and
coupled with it a theory that this is the one future chance for
poetry. Metre and rhyme are said to be played out, things of
the past, which can no longer be allowed to chain and hamper
the great and free movement which the enlarging spirit of poetry
demands; as rhyme was in Milton’s later view only a dainty trifle
which he flung aside for the organ harmonies of his blank verse,
so metre itself is a petty thing, half ornament, half fetter, which
has to be flung aside for some nobly self-governed democratic
anarchy that is to develop from this new type. That is a theory
of very doubtful validity. In the hands of most of its exponents
it seems to be in practice nothing but a licence for writing prose
in variously cut lengths, prose breaking off at the end of a clause
or in the middle of it to go on refreshed in the line below, —
I have seen even a line of free verse consisting of a majestic
solitary pronoun, — and that is more an eccentric method of
printing than a new rhythm. But without accepting the theory
in its intolerant entirety one can appreciate the motive which
moved the greater masters and more skilful craftsmen of this
form, if form it can be called, to make the innovation. There
is something large and many-sided and constantly mutable in
the life, thought and spirit of today which needs, to express it