On Quantitative Metre 319conceived that the best way to achieve their aim was to bring in
the greatness of classical harmony and the nobility and beauty
of Greek and Latin utterance by naturalising the quantitative
metres of Virgil, Ovid, Horace. It was also natural that some of
these innovators should conceive that this could be best done by
imposing the classical laws of quantity wholesale on the English
language.
At the first attempt a difference of view on this very point
arose; there was a bifurcation of paths, but neither of these
branchings led anywhere near the goal. One led nowhere at
all, there was a laborious trudging round in a futile circle; the
other turned straight back towards accentual metre and ended in
the entire abandonment of the quantitative principle. Spenser in
his experiments used all his sovereign capacity to force English
verse into an unnatural classical mould, Sidney followed his
example. Harvey thought, rightly enough, that an adaptation to
the natural rhythm of English was indispensable, but he failed
to take more than a first step towards the right path; after him,
those who followed his line could not get any farther, — in the
end, in place of the attempt at quantitative verse, there was an
adaptation of classical metres to the accentual system. Some
who still experimented with quantity, feeling the necessity of
making their verse normally readable, did this by taking care
that their long quantities and stress or accentual pitch, wherever
these came in, coincided as far as possible. But the result was
not encouraging; it made the verse readable indeed, but stiff
beyond measure. Even Tennyson in his lines on Milton, where
he attempts this combination, seems to be walking on stilts,
— very skilfully and nobly, but still on stilts and not on his
own free God-given feet. As for other attempts which followed
the Spenserian line of approach, they can best be described in
Tennyson’s own language —
Barbarous hexameters, barbarous pentameters— and the alcaics, sapphics and galliambics were no better. A
metre which cannot be read as normal English is read, in which
light syllables are forced to carry a voice-weight which they