102 chapter 3
But if Saintsbury’s idealized and “natural” English ear is, in fact, a classically
trained organ, how does he promote the English foot soldier among the gen-
eral reading public, the majority of whom did not have access to (much less
sustained training in) classical languages and literatures? Rather than define
explicitly what he means by “feet,” Saintsbury again and again insists on an
innate sense of rhythm. What he does give us, in 1906, is a justification, along
militaristic lines, of the ascendancy of his favorite metrical foot, the iamb: “To
get the vast armies, the innumerable multitudes of [iambic verse] that exist[s]
in English, into trochaic form, or in most cases even into a suggestion of tro-
chaic rhythm, you have to play the most gratuitous, unliterary, and unnatural
tricks upon them, and you often produce positively ludicrous or nauseous
results.”^61
Saintsbury, as one might expect, prefers iambic to trochaic rhythm, but val-
ues the trochee highly as the necessary variant for the iamb. However, his abil-
ity to diagnose English verse as iambic rather than trochaic is dependent only
on his ability to hear meter; he states simply and vexingly, “my ear informs
me.” In this early appendix to the first volume he also makes his first declara-
tion of the self-evident truths of English feet. The iamb is the “ruling constitu-
ent,” the anapest “omnipresent.” Of the dactyl he has “no doubt . . . at all,” de-
spite its tendency to “tip up” into an anapest; Why does it do this? He writes,
“I do not know why; and though it would not cost me five minutes to turn the
statement of the fact into a jargonish explanation thereof on principles very
popular to-day, I decline to do anything of the kind. The English language is
made so and I accept the fact” (402–3), and thus he urges us to accept the fact
as well. Though part of Saintsbury’s inherent charm is his confidence that we
will take his word for it, his lack of technical guidance leaves us with the one
thing he has been convincing us we have—our ear. Our understanding of En-
glish prosody is at once intensely individual, therefore, but also, necessarily
collective. Rather than being taught what the iamb is (or was) and how to
mark it and memorize it, as a student in a classical classroom would have been,
Saintsbury infuses his concept of English meter with an Edwardian article of
faith in the steadfast and sturdy nature of the language, of an En gland in which
the iamb is and always has been the ruling constituent. Just like the school-
child learning about English poetry through narratives of military glory, like
the countless histories of England that justified and extolled imperial expan-
sion, Saintsbury’s English meter spoke to and fostered what he imagined was a
specifically national character.
A Prosodic Entity
Though reviewers of A History of English Prosody did not take Saintsbury’s
word for it, we, as English speakers, largely have. After being accused of not
defining the “the English foot,” he added an appendix to the third volume, in