better. And moreover rhyme did not kill no-rhyme. On the contrary, were this demand suddenly and dreadfully sprung upon you, 'Of rhyme and no-rhyme in English Poetry you must today surrender one or the other-which shall it be?' You would find it a desperate choice. Could you abandon Paradise Lost with Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear-all the great Elizabethan drama? Well, as everybody knows, Daniel had the better in the dialectic, and, we have to own, the better cause. At all events we have plenty of reason to congratulate ourselves that Campion's arguments were not convincing. But as a poet Campion none the less was a better man than Daniel and as it were casually, by an experiment, just by 'taking and doing the thing' as we say, he had really proved this much of his case-that, though we cannot afford to lose rhyme, there is plenty of room for the unrhymed lyric too. Listen to this: Rose cheek'd Laura, come; Sing thou smoothly with thy beauty's Sweetly gracing. Lovely forms do flow From concent divinely framèd: Heaven is music, and thy beauty's Birth is heavenly. These dull notes we sing Discords need for helps to grace them; Only beauty purely loving Knows no discord; But still moves delight, Like clear springs renew'd by flowing, Ever perfect, ever in them -selves eternal. Campion never pretended that classical metres could be exactly transferred to our English use: nay he expressly denied it and was at pains to lay down lines on which they can be adapted. In this he was undoubtedly right. Attempts have been made e.g. to write pure Sapphics in English, the most successful being one by Doctor Watts who (though some of you may remember him as the author of 'Let dogs delight To bark and bite') was a considerable poet, and wrote excellent Sapphics on the unpromising subject (by which I mean, unpromising for Sapphics) of the Day of Judgment: When the fierce North-wind with his airy forces And the red lightning with a storm of hail comes Such shall the noise be, and the wild disorder Tears the strong pillars of the vault of Heaven, He ends: Flames all about them. O may I sit there when He comes triumphant, Shout the Redeemer. This, in the polite language of its own generation, is monstrous fine: but I once spent time and pains on studying the English Sapphic and convinced myself that our language cannot be constrained to it naturally or without a necessary loss beyond all likely gain. Nevertheless I sometimes wonder that Milton-no lover of rhyme, as his preface to Paradise Lost tells you-having gone some way to efface the impression of rhyme in his Horatian sonnets, did not experiment farther and try working on the Horatian model without it. That is my heresy. If any one in this room feels that he has at all the Horatian genius (I use the word in its Latin sense, not its modern) I would commend to him the experiment of rendering it in delicate metres divorced from rhyme, being convinced that Horace's secret, though it may never be captured in that way, will be captured in no other. Then if he ask 'But have you any one concrete example to encourage me?' I answer "Yes, one: and it is Collins's Ode to Evening. There, if anywhere in English poetry, if he seek, he will find the secret of Horace's 'falling close': Then lead, calm votaress, where some sheety lake Reflect its last cool gleam. Or if chill blustering winds, or driving rain, Views wilds and swelling floods, And hamlets brown, and dim-discover'd spires, Thy dewy fingers draw The gradual dusky veil. You will not accept the suggestion, but I commend it to your thoughts; and so, for today, conclude. ON THE TERMS 'CLASSICAL' AND 'ROMANTIC' I to a few words two terhand 'Classical' and 'Romantic'-with which your books to English Literature have doubtless by this time made you familiar, though you will not find them frequently mentioned in the masterpieces of which those handbooks are supposed to treat. They are adjectives, epithets, assigning to this and that work of art either this or that of two qualities which (I shall not be wrong in saying) these handbooks suggest to you as opposed to one another, if not mutually exclusive. Further, I shall not be much amiss, perhaps, in suggesting that you have no very sharply defined idea of how exactly, or exactly why, or exactly how far, these qualities 'classical' and 'romantic' stand opposed one to another, or of how far exactly they exclude one another. You can say of this paper that it is white, of the print typed upon it that it is black: your sense accurately distinguishes and you can indicate with finger or pencil precisely where black impinges on white. But we cannot draw any such line between 'classical' and 'romantic' work; since, to begin with, the difference between them is notional and vague (even if we admit a true difference, which at this point I do not). You have probably not defined the difference, even to yourselves. You have (I dare to assert) a positive opinion that Pope is 'classical' and Blake ‘romantic,' as you have (I dare to suggest) a notion that it means something like the difference between St Paul's Cathedral and Westminster Abbey. We may get to something a little more definite than that before we have done, this morning. But for the moment maybe I do few of you a grave injustice in assuming that you are more confident of 'knowing what you mean' by the epithets 'classical' and 'romantic' than of your ability to determinate their difference in words: and that if suddenly presented with some line or passage of literature, admittedly beautiful, and halted with the demand 'Is this classical? or is it romantic?' you might conceivably find yourself yet more diffident. Say, for example, you were thus held up to stand and deliver yourself upon Hamlet's dying speech to Horatio: If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart, Absent thee from felicity awhile And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain or upon this from Lycidas: or upon Together both, ere the high lawns appeared Under the opening eyelids of the Morn, the last words of Beatrice Cenci: Give yourself no unnecessary pain, My dear Lord Cardinal. Here, Mother, tie |