96 chapter 3
‘accents’ or something of that sort.”^45 For Saintsbury, the question of English
independence was a crucial issue; he felt that verse must not rely solely on ac-
cent without some form of quantity or else it loses its link to the classical lan-
guages. This assertion comes as a result of Skeat’s reissue of Guest’s imposing
and “epoch-making” History of English Rhythms (1882) a mere five years ear-
lier. Guest believed accent to be “the sole principle”^46 that regulates English
rhythm and that English has no metrical quantity.^47 Guest’s notion of an En-
glish prosody independent of the classics epitomized one of the schisms be-
tween prosodic perspectives at the time. The competing histories of prosody in
the late nineteenth century were also competing histories of Englishness: were
the nation’s literary and national origins in the great Shakespeare and Milton,
or were they in the Anglo-Saxon and Old-English tradition? One camp valued
the continuous line of poetic thought from Shakespeare to Swinburne, and
the other prioritized preserving the narrative of steady beating Anglo-Saxon
rhythms against the foreignness of classical verse forms. The latter explained
the English literary tradition as influenced by a native beat that rebelled
against and repelled various foreign yokes (the Guest/Skeat model), whereas
the former conceived of it as a stream that had various influences that were
absorbed, colonized, and interpolated as part of an evolution (the Saintsbury
model, though a bit less neatly). Saintsbury’s mission was to guarantee that
Guest’s theories would not prove to be any more influential.^48 He would ac-
complish this not only by undermining Guest’s History and arguing vehe-
mently against the accentual system, but by replacing Guest’s looming two-
volume project with three volumes of his own.
In prosodic manuals, size does matter. In Saintsbury’s next step toward foot
domination, he published A Short History of English Literature (1898). Guest’s
History was 738 pages; Saintsbury’s “short” history was 818 pages (the later,
three-volume History of English Versification ran to a staggering 1,577 pages).
In the Short History, Saintsbury makes clear his view that, in English prosody’s
history, just as in the history of the English language and people, there was a
distinct break with Anglo-Saxon influences; therefore, there was also a break
with Guest’s solely accentual basis for English meter. In his introductory sec-
tion, “The Making of English Literature,” he claims that “the true and univer-
sal prosody of English instead of the cramped and parochial rhythm of Anglo-
Saxon”^49 came about from the influence of Latin. He titles this section “the
transition,”^50 and it is, in many ways, a blueprint for the section he titles “The
Mothers” in his larger History of English Prosody. (The Short History was in its
eighth edition by 1913.) Between 1898 and 1905, Saintsbury published re-
vised editions of A History of Nineteenth-Century Literature (1900 and 1901)
and A History of English Criticism (1900, 1901, 1902). Both of these divulged
and elaborated on his intent to disseminate his faith in the English foot to the
“general brain”; that is, how he could extend his conception of English meter
to the masses.