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to English poetry, and which, though not capable of being applied in quite the same fashion to the Romance languages, have had their counterparts in attempts to decry the application of classical prosody (which has never been very well understood on the Continent) to modern tongues. No one can speak otherwise than respectfully of Dr Guest, whose book is certainly one of the most patient and ingenious studies of the kind to be found in any literature, and whose erudition, at a time when such erudition needed far greater efforts than now, cannot be too highly praised. But it is a besetting sin or disease of Englishmen in all matters, after pooh-poohing innovation, to go blindly in for it; and I cannot but think that Dr Guest's accentual theory, after being for years mainly neglected, has, for years again, been altogether too greedily swallowed. It is not of course a case necessarily of want of scholarship, or want of ear, for there are few better scholars or poets than Mr Robert Bridges, who, though not a mere Guestite, holds theories of prosody which seem to me even less defensible than Guest's. But it is, I think, a case of rather misguided patriotism, which thinks it necessary to invent an English prosody for English

poems.

This is surely a mistake. Allowances in degree, in shade, in local colour, there must of course be in prosody as in other things. The developments, typical and special, of English prosody in the nineteenth century cannot be quite the same as those of Greek two thousand years ago,

Initial fallacies.

or of French to-day. But if, as I see not the slightest reason for doubting, prosody is not an artificially acquired art but a natural result of the natural desires, the universal organs of humanity, it is excessively improbable that the prosodic results of nations so nearly allied to each other, and so constantly studying each other's work, as Greeks, Romans, and modern Europeans, should be in any great degree different. If quantity, if syllabic equivalence and so forth, do not display themselves in Anglo-Saxon or in Icelandic, it must be remembered that the poetry of these nations was after all comparatively small, rather isolated, and in the conditions of extremely early development—a childish thing to which there is not the slightest rhyme or reason for straining ourselves to assimilate the things of manhood. That accent modified English prosody nobody need deny; there is no doubt that the very great freedom of equivalence— which makes it, for instance, at least theoretically possible to compose an English heroic line of five tribrachs-and the immense predominance of common syllables in the language, are due in some degree to a continuance of accentual influence.

And final perver

But to go on from this, as Dr Guest and some of his followers have done, to the subjection of the whole invaluable vocabulary of classical prosody sities thereof. to a sort of præmunire, to hold up the hands in horror at the very name of a tribrach, and exhibit symptoms of catalepsy at the word catalectic -to ransack the dictionary for unnatural words or

uses of words like "catch," and "stop," and "pause," where a perfectly clear and perfectly flexible terminology is ready to your hand-this does seem to me in another sense a very childish thing indeed, and one that cannot be too soon put away. It is no exaggeration to say that the extravagances, the unnatural contortions of scansion, the imputations of irregularity and impropriety on the very greatest poets with which Dr Guest's book swarms, must force themselves on any one who studies that book thoroughly and impartially. When theory leads to the magisterial indorsement of "gross fault" on some of the finest passages of Shakespeare and Milton, because they "violate" Dr Guest's privy law of “the final pause"; when we are told that "section 9," as Dr Guest is pleased to call that admirable form of "sixes," the anapast followed by two iambs,1 one of the great sources of music in the ballad metre, is " a verse which has very little to recommend it"; when one of Shakespeare's secrets, the majestic full stop before the last word of the line, is black-marked as "opposed to every principle of accentual rhythm," then the thing becomes not so much outrageous as absurd. Prosody respectfully and intelligently attempting to explain how the poets produce their best things is useful and agreeable: when it makes an arbitrary

1 His instance is Burns's

"Like a rogue | for for | gerie."

It is a pity he did not reinforce it with many of the finest lines in The Ancient Mariner.

theory beforehand, and dismisses the best things as bad because they do not agree therewith, it becomes a futile nuisance. And I believe that there is no period of our literature which, when studied, will do more to prevent or correct such fatuity than this very period of Early Middle English.

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CHAPTER VI.

MIDDLE HIGH GERMAN POETRY.

POSITION

6

OF GERMANY
FOLK-EPICS : THE
NIBELUNGENLIED -THE VOLSUNGA SAGA-THE GERMAN VERSION

-METRES

MERIT OF ITS POETRY
.

RHYME AND

LANGUAGE

6

KUDRUN

--

SHORTER
NATIONAL EPICS-LITERARY POETRY-ITS FOUR CHIEF MASTERS-
EXCELLENCE, BOTH NATURAL AND ACQUIRED, OF GERMAN VERSE—
ORIGINALITY OF ITS ADAPTATION-THE PIONEERS: HEINRICH VON
VELDEKE GOTTFRIED OF STRASBURG HARTMANN VON AUE
EREC DER WANDERERE AND 'IWEIN'-LYRICS-THE BOOKLETS
'DER ARME HEINRICH '-WOLFRAM VON ESCHENBACH-TITUREL
WILLEHALM '-'PARZIVAL -WALTHER VON DER VOGELWEIDE-

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PERSONALITY OF THE POETS-THE MINNESINGERS GENERALLY.

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Position of

It must have been already noticed that one main reason for the unsurpassed literary interest of this present period is that almost all the principal Germany. European nations contribute, in their different ways, elements to that interest. The contribution is not in all cases one of positive literary production, of so much matter of the first value actually added to the world's library. But in some cases it is; and in the instance to which we come at present it is so in a measure approached by no other country ex

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