the institution of meter 97
Saintsbury’s essay, titled simply “English Versification,” is quite possibly the
most succinct summary of his views on the matter. Yet it was not published as
part of his three-volume History, nor did it appear as an English Association
pamphlet. Rather, this essay was the introduction to a handbook for poets by
Andrew Loring, titled The Rhymer’s Lexicon (1905). “English Versification”
was at once an advertisement for Saintsbury’s forthcoming three volumes as
well as a clear distillation of them. Saintsbury here defines the history of En-
glish Versification not as “a struggle between native and foreign rhythm, but of
the native material of language adapting itself to the pressure of the foreign
moulds, and modifying those moulds themselves by the spring and ‘thrust’ of
its natural qualities.”^51 The result, he writes, “is one of the most interesting
things in literature. . . . By looking both ways—from earliest to latest and from
latest to earliest—we can distinguish a new form of verse, characteristically
English in its blended originality, which takes the general rhythmical form of
Low Latin and French, but which adapts them to, or adapts to them, the pri-
maeval English tendency to syllabic equivalence.”^52
The “blended originality” of English verse form is a point of pride in his
longer History; by 1905, Saintsbury was becoming the representative for stan-
dard English meter based on a subtle blending of classical (foreign, quantita-
tive) and Anglo-Saxon (native, accentual) meter. Though his own understand-
ing of these meters seemed fluid, malleable and, indeed, unstable, the more
destabilized and conceptual his opinion seemed the more ardent he became
in his assertion of their fundamental Englishness. The result of this careful
blending, he felt, was a dependable and timeless conception of English meter
and a conception of Englishness as distinct from the classics: a culmination
rather than a deviation. As a founding member of the English Association and
a professor at the University of Edinburgh, Saintsbury balanced more than
just Anglo-Saxon accents and classical quantities; he was defending a charac-
teristic Englishness that could value the classical languages as a necessary part
of English literature at a time when they were under siege. There had been a
loud and angry reaction against the reinstatement of compulsory Latin after
the 1902 Education Act,^53 and Saintsbury was performing the role of the En-
glish literary historian while at the same time trying to preserve the connec-
tion between English literature and its classical pasts. Skeat, on the one hand,
was uninterested in classical verse terms altogether and was supplanting the
classics in the academy with the rise of his own discipline, Anglo-Saxon, argu-
ing that this should be the basis and history of English literature rather than
the classical languages. Robert Bridges, on the other hand, saw both sides of
this equation, wanting students to see the benefit of the Anglo-Saxon literary
past while, at the same time, understanding the ways that classical verse forms
could be useful as one way, among many, to expand the possibilities for En-
glish prosody. That is, for Bridges, the purity, diversity, and freedom of English
meter meant understanding each distinct possibility (the accentual, the syl-