V

But let us come to more learned imitation-learned, that is to say in the matter of technique. It has been pointed out -first I believe by our present Poet Laureate that Milton in his sonnets was deliberately adapting the sonnet-form to the Horatian ode; and the suggestion had only to be made, to convince.

Lawrence, of vertuous Father vertuous Son,

Now that the Fields are dank, and ways are mire,
Where shall we sometimes meet, and by the fire
Help waste a sullen day; what may be won
From the hard season gaining? Time will run
On smoother till Favonius re-inspire

The frozen earth; and clothe in fresh attire
The Lily and Rose, that neither sow'd nor spun.
What neat repast shall feast us, light and choice,

Of Attick taste, with Wine, whence we may rise
To hear the Lute well toucht, or artful voice

Warble immortal Notes and Tuscan Ayre?
He who of those delights can judge, and spare
To interpose them oft, is not unwise.

Consider that, or the sonnet to Cromwell, or that to Cyriack
Skinner:

To day deep thoughts resolve with me to drench
In mirth, that after no repenting draws;

Let Euclid rest and Archimedes pause,

And what the Swede intend, and what the French.
To measure life, learn thou betimes, and know
Toward solid good what leads the nearest way;
For other things mild Heav'n a time ordains,
And disapproves that care, though wise in show,
That with superfluous burden loads the day,
And when God sends a cheerful hour, refrains.

I shall discuss the technique later: but who can read that
without exclaiming Aut Flaccus aut nullus? Now I pro-
ceed to point out that just when Milton was endeavouring
to break up the old Petrarcan sonnet, and refit it to the
Horatian ode, he was Cromwell's Latin Secretary and, for
comrade in the Secretaryship, he had another poet, Andrew
Marvell, who was at the same time working upon the
Horatian model though in a different way: and I have
sometimes wondered what Cromwell would have said had
he happened in and caught his two secretaries at it, one at
either end of the table. Now Andrew Marvell's Garden
and Coy Mistress are Horatian enough, as are his later
satires written under Charles II. But his Horatian Ode
upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland has been praised as
the most Horatian thing not written by Horace. Therefore
I pause upon it, and will quote its two best-known stanzas,
those upon
Charles I at his execution:

He nothing common did, or mean,
Upon that memorable scene,

But with his keener eye

The axe's edge did try;

Nor called the gods with vulgar spite
To vindicate his helpless right;

But bowed his comely head
Down, as upon a bed.

What falls short, here, of Horace's

scilicet invidens

privata deduci superbo

non humilis mulier triumpho,

or of the conclusion of the great Regulus ode, where the noble Roman, simply obedient to his honour, parts the anguished crowd that would have stayed him at any price,

and goes back to certain death by torture, cheerful as though bound on a week-end release from business?

Tendens Venafranos in agros

Aut Lacedaemonium Tarentum.

I should consent-and no two words about it—with the general opinion that this 'falling close' is one of the noblest on which ever poem concluded, were it not that a critic whose judgment as a rule I respect-Dr Tyrrell of Dublin1

-has twice at least and recently derided it for sheer bathos. I hardly know where to begin with such a pronouncement. Yet if Dr Tyrrell be somehow mixing up Venafrum or Tarentum with some reminiscences of cheap week-end tickets, I would remind him that Venafrum was a home of Samnite warriors (who were among the best), while the verse itself reminds him of Tarentum's origin; and the noble associations of both may not improbably have crossed Horace's mind as it usually crosses his reader's. A great deal depends in poetry on the dignity thus associated with a name: the 'busman's call 'Penny all the way-Shepherd's Bush to Marble Arch!' would (as Dr Tyrrell will allow) be enhanced in allurement if beneath that Arch sat Jove, father of gods and men, if that bush sheltered pastoral Apollo with the flock of Admetus. But take the verse alone, in its own beauty. Is it possible that Dr Tyrrell's ear has missed to hear the lovely tolling vowels of 'Venafranos in agros' or missed to note the even more lovely cadences of vowels on which it chimes a close-'Aut Lacedaemonium Tarentum'?

Gentlemen, listen to this-though you listen to nothing else this morning. You would write strongly and melodiously, so that out of the strong should come forth sweetness.

1 Now valde deflendus.

Well, as the strength of style rests on the verb-verbum, the word; as your noun is but a name and your adjective but an adjunct to a name, while along your verb runs the nerve of life; so, if you would write melodiously, through your vowels must the melody run. What are the consonants, all of them? Why, as their name implies, they are assistant sounds, naught by themselves. Some of them are mute, and known as 'mutes.' With others you can make queer abortive noises. But take any phrase, of verse or prose, renowned for beauty:

Tuba mirum spargens sonum...
In la sua volontade è nostra pace...

Open the temple gates unto my love,

finem...

Open them wide that she may enter in!...

Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang...

Where the bright Seraphim in burning row

Their loud-uplifted Angel trumpets blow...

Give unto the Lord the glory due unto his name: worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness.

The voice of the Lord is upon the waters; the God of glory thundereth: the Lord is upon many waters...

I say that after allowing all you can for the beautiful assistance of consonants you must recognise that the vowels carry the main music.

It amazes me therefore to find Stevenson-himself a melodious writer-in an Essay On Some Technical Elements of Style playing about with these secondary letters P, V, H, and the rest, while almost totally neglecting the great vowels, and that though he had this very Regulus ode in his thoughts at the time, for he quotes it with special

approval. Yet what is approval worth when he talks of 'these thundering verses'? What?-thundering'?

Aut Lacedaemonium Tarentum.

No: I will swear, not thundering; or if thundering, but as a storm rolling away southward beyond distant hills and muted into calm.

Now in Marvell's stanza

Nor called the gods with vulgar spite

To vindicate his helpless right;

But bowed his comely head
Down, as upon a bed...

with its shrill, spitting, 'spite'-the sharp i and s concentrating on the labial p-lowered at once and duplicated as by echo in the thinner i and softer sibilant vind)-followed by the quiet

But bowed his comely head
Down...

(mark the full o's)

Down, as upon a bed...

(spite-to

in Marvell's stanza we do in sense and sound get the Horatian falling close almost perfectly suggested. Yes: but not quite perfectly, I think. For why? Because the ear is all the while attending for the rhyme-head,' 'bed.' That is the nuisance with rhyme: it can hardly help suggesting the epigram, the clinch, the verse 'brought off' with a little note of triumph. In rhyme you cannot quite 'cease upon the midnight with no pain.' Your ear expects the correspondent, and 'you are not quite happy until you get it.' Bearing this in mind, will you turn to a sonnet of Milton, whose sonnets (as everyone knows) are peculiarly constructed? Bearing this in mind, and that Milton was