92 chapter 3
in writing and revising his account was to correct the tendency to read Milton
(and, implicitly, any poet’s meter) improperly. This modest history of the vol-
ume rapidly expands into a technique for protecting the whole of English
verse and language from sinking more deeply into ignorance, which he finds
society reluctant or too frightened to remedy. He writes defensively, insisting
that his original intention was to contribute “such an account of the versifica-
tion as should knock out the prevalent usage of misreading the rhythm; for it
was generally thought necessary and correct to mispronounce words so as to
make them scan with regular alternate accent.” He continues: “[T]hen, after
the book was printed as a separate treatise, young poets started using Miltonic
inversions so freely in their blank verse that champions of the prevailing or-
thodoxy raised an indignant protest in the newspapers, wherein the discussion
grew so incredibly hot that a London evening journal advertised ‘prosody’ as
an attractive item in its daily papers.”^33 Though he gestures to the debates in
which he participated, it is only in his private letters that he accuses metrists
like Saintsbury, Skeat, and T. S. Omond of wrongly determining the direction
of scholarship about English versification; in his public writing he makes every
attempt to be conciliatory and unifying in the presentation of his scholarship.
Ever since the public interest in prosody was fueled by the debates, Bridges
laments, “this book has been on false footing.” Here, in the 1921 edition, he
attempts once again to “set the facts on their proper phonetic basis, but I am
well aware that good intentions cannot make up for lack of early training in
phonetics; it is a subject that needs a young ear, and my late adventures in the
field can only modestly claim to be of use . . . ” (113–14). The direction, then,
of the 1921 edition, is toward criticizing England’s failures to correct the issues
he brought up in each edition in the thirty-three years that the book was in
print, and to include his revised and mature thinking about the state of pro-
nunciation and the general misuse of the language (a topic that became more
and more important to him after the war). Bridges emerges in the early twen-
tieth century as a crusader against “the tyranny of schoolmasters and gram-
marians,”^34 whose attempts to preserve the purity of English result in bemoan-
ing the state of non-phonetic spelling and publishing versions of his poems in
his own invented system of phonetic speech.
Most prosodic scholars, however, did not accept Bridges’s prosodic mas-
tery. Joseph Mayor, of Cambridge, attacked both Bridges and Skeat^35 in the
1901 (second) edition of Chapters on English Metre, taking issue in particular
with Bridges’s attempt to define the elision of extrametrical syllables in Mil-
ton’s lines. Mayor’s tone is high-handed: “I feel some doubt as to what would
be Mr. Bridges’s explanation of a line such as the following : “That cruel ser-
pent. On me / Exercise most.”^36 In an unpublished letter to Mayor as Bridges
is revising the 1921 edition, Bridges asks Mayor how he himself would scan
the line: “I remember that in controverting my contention that Milton in P.L.
consciously excluded what I called ‘extrametrical syllables’ from any [---] of the