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nationalists. By proposing a system that reverts to a conception of prosody
that existed before the earliest pollution, he wants English ears to be able to
hear again and hear clearly. We may read many of his proposed revisions as
logical, democratic, and toward the promotion of the true greatness of
English.
To do this, he has to devalue the sanctity of the mispronounced verbal sign,
relying on formal verbal unity as opposed to formal literary structure—he ab-
hors the “pedantry of scansion” and believes that true English speech, if pro-
nounced properly, will naturally vocalize English verse as it should be heard.
He asserts that the voice tone must translate words to the “plane of ideas and
emotions” in Greek as in English. “In versification,” he writes, “we know that
the manner to which every one is accustomed, even though it be pedantry, has
a far greater propriety to our ears than that which we should rightly prefer if
we were not prejudiced by custom—the ridiculous distortion of sense and
speech-rhythm in the chanting of the Psalms by the trained choirs of our Ca-
thedrals is a good example” (13). And Bridges meticulously shows where the
earliest corruption occurred: in the Latin language, when it wrongly discarded
accent and instead attempted to imitate Greek verse form based on quantity.
This mistranslation was then passed down through Chaucer to corrupt the
English ears that Saintsbury will assert are perfect and privileged. Bridges is
extremely careful, throughout Milton’s Prosody, to show how he arrived at his
conclusions by a systematic evaluation of Milton’s verses; in order to prove the
possible positions and numbers of accents and possible syllabic values, he cites
particular lines throughout Paradise Lost. Despite this critical attention to
prosodic detail, he asserts that the “rules” he is explaining are essentially “per-
missive, [Milton] indicates no rule for their use; their application is arbi-
trary. . . . Milton came to scan his verses in one way, and to read them in an-
other” (34–35). Prosody, in this way, is proved to be an interpretive exercise
for both poet and reader; rather than a guide as to how to vocally emphasize
accents in a line, the “rhythm overrides the prosody that creates it. The prosody
is only the means for the great rhythmical effects, and is not exposed but rather
disguised in the reading” (36). By teaching the reader the system in which to
scan the poem’s prosody, the text encourages the reader to appreciate the po-
em’s rhythmic effects at a higher level. Put most simply, by providing even pro-
visional prosodic rules against which the rhythm rebels, Bridges wants the
reader to begin to hear (rather than rely on wrenched pronunciation based on
visible metrical signs) the variety within the verse—to Bridges’s ear, the beauty
of verse in its variety.
Mastery for the Masses
Though the few scholars who notice the historical divisions in the study of
English prosody often cast the debate in terms of “accent” versus “quantity,” or