100 chapter 3
might not admit that we do. Despite the metaphors of stepping-stones, fence
posts, and walking to which the word “foot” lends itself, Saintsbury detracts
attention from his obvious and innocent allusion to earlier usages of the term:
“call them feet, spaces, isochronous intervals, or abracadabras, every English
verse can be divided up . . . into so many groups of ‘long’ and ‘short’ syllables
which have metrical correspondence with each other in the line and in other
lines . . . call the name iamb or abracadabra, trochee or tomfool, the thing is
there from the Brut to the Barrack-Room Ballads” (xix). From the earliest
rhymed history of England to patriotic tales of soldiers, Saintsbury asserts that
the history of meter and of England is unified, indivisibly, by these groups of
syllables that preexist and predate even our ability to name them—name them
whatever you like, but Saintsbury likes to call them feet. The English ear, as he
construes it, is particularly adapted to detect and judge them.
But even if Saintsbury gives plenty of examples of the best poetry in English
with his descriptions and praise, the book itself cannot provide the “ear train-
ing” of the native Englishman who is classically trained, though Saintsbury
does not say this directly. That is, implicit everywhere in the three volumes is
the fact that the classical methods through which Saintsbury was trained pre-
pared him for what he then translates into an innate sense of rhythmic sound
that haunted his thinking about rhythm and meter. This “innate sense” also
played extremely well on the way that the national education system was
teaching English poetry. For Saintsbury, an “English ear” that could naturally
hear metrical feet based loosely on a classical measure of scansion was the true
English ear—the true, classically trained, public school educated, elite English
ear. History, as far as metrical training was concerned, was transformed into
nature, but only for those with access to a classical education. Saintsbury ar-
gues, in a direct attack on Guest and Skeat, that although there is a natural
English ability to both see and hear the beauty of English verses, some artificial
training is beneficial:
I hope it is not impertinent or pedantic once more to recommend
strongly this joint eye- and-ear reading. It does not at all interfere with
the understanding of the sense or enjoyment of the poetry, and it puts
the mind in a condition to understand the virtue and the meaning of
the prosody as nothing else can. One of the innumerable privileges of
those who have received the older classical education is that they have
been taught (in at least some cases) to read scanningly.^58The eye and an ear are a “combined instrument,” “properly tuned,” that will
reveal English meter to be “a real and living rhythmical organism” (184). But
if it is between a theory of scansion, which is intended for the eye, and pronun-
ciation, intended for the ear, the remaining two volumes lean toward the ear.