the institution of meter 103
1910, titled coyly, “What Is a Foot?” Here he summarizes his position along
military lines once again: “[F]rom almost the first ‘syllable of recorded time,’
when English became fully English, its verse arranges itself—haltingly at first,
then in a more and more orderly and soldierly fashion—in certain equivalent
groups of syllables themselves, which, in turn, are grouped further into lines.”^62
This definition does not appear in the main text, however; Saintsbury hides it
in an appendix, one of the many additions he includes in the 1910 volume
three. Again, “it is the result to the ear which decides”^63 whether it hears some-
thing long, or short, or loud, or soft, or accented by degrees. But Saintsbury is
just as reticent, four years after the start of his project, to provide an answer or
definition. He admits, “sometimes you may be unable to go positively right,
because there are two or more available interpretations of the riddle” (522).
We might think, then, that feet, for Saintsbury, are abstract equivalent spaces,
like Coventry Patmore’s isochronous intervals, or T. S. Omond’s “time-
spaces.”^64 But this is not the case. Despite the interpretive freedom he grants,
for Saintsbury, English feet are no abstraction, even though they are some-
times equivalent and interchangeable. He writes, “I take them as something
real.” They have personalities; the foot “is a member of a line-body,” “a prosodic
entity”:
But . . . there abide these three—iamb, trochee, and anapaest—in the
English aristocracy of poetry. The iamb is with us the staple of poetic
life: it will do any work, take on any colour, prove itself at need the equal
of the other two, which it often summons to reinforce it. The trochee is
the passion of life; not easily adaptable by itself, except for special mo-
ments, comic or tragic, frivolous or plaintive, as it chooses, but season-
ing and inspiriting the iamb constantly and yet strangely. And the ana-
paest is the glory of life, though its uses differ in glory.^65Here, Saintsbury uses patriotic and Biblical rhetoric and admits what he has
been subtly insisting all along, or subtly hoping to convince us that we already
knew: English meter is (just like Latin or Greek) something “aristocratic,” and
it also requires faith. (The allusion to St. Paul particularly aligns the iamb with
“faith.”)^66 Not only are these three feet singled out as equivalent to the glories
of classical meter, but they are imbued with the nationalistic characteristics
of a military regiment: they will do their duty, they will support one another,
they will do any work. His particularly Edwardian emphasis on the English-
ness of English meter—to the level of the dutiful iamb—plays into the ex-
pectations of poetry’s nationally educated audience in the years leading up to
the First World War. By refusing to engage with the complexity of English
meter, we can read Saintsbury’s History as an attempt at stabilization for the
healthy, collective, patriotic view of English meter and, by extension, English
poetry’s role as a stabilizing, patriotic force in national culture. Saintsbury’s