On Quantitative Metre 331elements, stress and accent, to influence and vary the rhythm
but not allow them to interfere in the building of the metre?
Can there be in English poetry a quantitative as well as an
accentual or a stress building of verse, natural to the turn of
the language, recognised and successful? and must stress or
accentual lengths in such a metrical system be excluded from
the idea of length? For everything here depends upon what
we understand by quantity; if stress lengths are admitted, the
problem of quantitative metre loses its difficulty, otherwise it
seems insoluble.
The experimenters in pure quantitative verse have ex-
cluded stress from their theory of metrical lengths; they have
admitted only intrinsic lengths determined by the vowel of
the syllable and positional lengths determined by the num-
ber of succeeding consonants. That there is a fundamental
falsity in this theory is shown by the fact that their lines
cannot be read; or else in order to make them readable,
an unnatural weight has to be thrown on sounds that are
too slender to bear it; a weird sound-system full of false
values is artificially created. But stress is a main, if not the
main, feature of English rhythm; a metrical method ignoring
it is impracticable. A pure quantitative verse of this manu-
facture has therefore to be ruled out, both because of its
intrinsic artificiality and its unsuccessful result; it has to be
abandoned as impossible or as inherently false. Those exper-
imenters who avoid these false values and try to get rid of
the difficulty by allowing only those stresses which coincide
with intrinsic and positional longs, are on firmer ground
and have some chance of arriving at something practicable.
But their efforts too are hampered by the classical theory
that the support of more than one consonant after a short
vowel is sufficient to make short syllables metrically long,
a statement which is true of the classical languages but not
true of English. This either leads them into the introduction
of false quantities which cannot stand the test of natural
reading or drives them to oblige their longs and shorts to
coincide with accentual or stress longs and shorts. Thus we