340 The Future Poetry
are lengthened by stress — or else by a sufficient weight of con-
sonants or some other lengthening sound-element; but the mere
fact of more than one consonant coming after a short vowel,
whether within the word or after it, or both in combination,
is not sufficient to confer length upon the syllable. Heaviness
caused by a crowding of consonants affects the rhythm of a line
or part of a line but does not alter its metrical values.
Each word has its own metrical value which cannot be
radically influenced or altered by the word that follows.
(2) The English language has many sounds which are
doubtful or variable in quantity; these may be sometimes used
as short and sometimes as long according to circumstance. Here
the ear must be the judge.
(3) Quantity within the syllable itself is not so rigidly fixed
as in the ancient languages; often position or other circumstances
may alter the metrical value of a syllable. A certain latitude has
to be conceded in such cases, and there again the ear must be
the judge.
(4) Quantity metres cannot be as rigid and unalterable in
English as in the old classical tongues; for the movement of
the language is pliant and flexible and averse to rigidity and
monotone. English poetry has always a fundamental metrical
basis, a fixed normality of the feet constituting a line; but it
relieves the fixity by the use of modulations substituting, with
sometimes a less, sometimes a greater freedom, other feet for the
normal. This rule of variation, very occasionally admitted in the
classical tongues but natural in English poetry, must be applied
or at least permitted in quantitative metres also; otherwise, in
poems of some length, their rhythms may become stereotyped
in a too rigid sameness and fatigue the ear.
No other rules than these four need be laid down, for the
rest must be left to individual choice and skill in technique.
In the basic structure of quantitative verse so arranged the
three elements of English rhythm, accent, stress and intrinsic
quantity are none of them excluded; all are united or even fused
together. Accentual high pitch is taken up into stress; low pitch,
not amounting to stress, as also slighter accentual inflexions