the institution of meter 107
grammatical forms was something forced in by the mouth. Even the “eye”
sound of “lies/flies” is stifled, “blind[s] at sunrise,” in the dark turn at the end.
The stiff figure of the professor is ironically “nurtured likewise”—withered,
unwise, dry with the old lies.
Though Bridges had a deep and abiding interest in the classics, classical
meters, and foreign verse forms in general, he saw in Milton’s prosody a way
that English verse might break free from its artificial reliance on classical scan-
sion. Along with Hopkins, Bridges was avidly engaged in thinking through
the problems that a purely “English” system of scansion presented. Why do we
scan based on the classical model, a model that must be inaccurate, since we
have no conception of how a dead language sounds? Milton’s Prosody became a
salvo for English poetry’s misunderstanding of classical meter and an attempt
to put forth new ideas for English prosody on a broad scale. Saintsbury, on
the other hand, preferred to replace the abstraction of classical meter with
the abstraction of English meter, taking for granted that enough of England
would be properly trained to hear with the kind of classical ear he imagined.
Bridges’s proposals, in a series of appendices added to and revised for each
edition of the book, attempt to clarify and purify what he saw as the gross
mis education of the English ear in accepting the inaccurate and abstract sys-
tem based on the classical model and promoted by Saintsbury. In sum, Bridges
believed that a better understanding of meter might mediate between the
classical languages and English. In his introduction to the 1901 edition, he
writes, “[i]f we consider how familiar classical poetry is to English poets and
how much it influences their practice, this definition of the English syllables
[along the lines Stone proposes] is a necessary study for those who, through
habits of English pronunciation, consciously or unconsciously misread clas-
sical verse.”^77 The publication and subsequent popularity of these pamphlets
should be read as an anticipatory protest against the 1902 Education Act, in
which compulsory Latin and Greek, modeled on what Stone and Bridges both
agreed was a false understanding of classical prosody, was again enforced by
the state. Bridges complained to Henry Bradley, editor of the OED, in 1904:
“I was disappointed in the result of voting on the compulsory Greek. We shall
have our way in all these matters in a few years, if we stick to it. It vexes me
that they are bothering my boy with Greek, he has only just got over his Latin
troubles. . . . His time is being wasted—and most boys are in the same condi-
t i o n .”^78 In this 1904 letter, we see that Bridges still has some faith that reform
is possible, though he has little faith that schoolmasters will be able to give
his son an accurate understanding of Latin and Greek. But reform was not
likely; between 1904 and the First World War, schools promoted an increas-
ingly abstract model for English meter and the modernist avant-garde arose to
protest the metronome of similar-sounding metrical poetry that they wrongly
associated with Victorian poetics. The potential for dynamism, for reformed
phonetic spelling and standardized pronunciation, and for a truly technical