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Bridges' Milton's Prosody and Renaissance Metrical Theory
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
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Robert bridges published his second edition of Milton's Prosody in 1921. It was a study both highly promising and a little repulsive. Modestly, in his whimsical preface (p. iv), he referred to it as his “poor little grammar.” And in one very important sense, that is what it actually was: a grammar, or grammatical prosody, of the verse of Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes. What the poet's modesty concealed, however, was that underneath the linguistic surface, which was almost Teutonic in its precision and thoroughness, there lay, scattered but brilliant, an ore of metrical theory. For example, it is from Bridges as much as from anybody that we have derived the notion of “scansion divorced from rhythm,” of speech-accents counter-pointing metrical accents. Historically more important, I think, is the debt we owe Bridges for restoring to its original dignity the broadly European metrical system, characteristic of the Renaissance and of Milton, which Bridges called the “syllabic” system. It was he, surely, who first approached that system without a strong bias in favor of a stress prosody, or of a prosody insisting on extra-metrical liberties, and who consequently saw in it not only a rigid side—the syllable-count—but a flexible side, wherein genuine musical variation was possible—the manifold devices of “elision.”
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References
1 Milton's Prosody, with a Chapter on Accentual Verse & Notes, rev. final ed. (Oxford, 1921). The 1st ed. (1893) was originally undertaken as a corrective appendix on Milton's versification for a school text of PL. Later printed separately, if stirred so much controversy that Bridges rehandled it in a more scholarly manner. (See “Notes,” pp. 113-114.) All references in this paper will be to the 2nd ed.
2 According to his account (p. 113), Bridges began this work in 1888. No doubt ideas on “contrapuntal” metrics were germinating during this generation, but works like J. M. Schipper's English Metrics (1881-88) and J. B. Mayor's Chapters on English Metre (1886), elaborately linguistic and academic, reached a minimal audience. Of course, George Saintsbury's monumental History of English Prosody (1906-09), lively, pedantic, and “little English,” was at loggerheads with Bridges' basic assumptions. See below for some details of the quarrel.
3 Bridges, Milton's Prosody, pp. 4r-37 on elision; 37-40 on variety in the number of stresses; 40-43 on inversion of feet.
4 Ibid., pp. 35-36: “Perhaps this condition of things is expressed by saying that the rhythm overrides the prosody that creates it. The prosody is only the means for the great rhythmical effects, and is not exposed but rather disguised in the reading.”
5 See George Saintsbury, A History of English Prosody, 3 vols. (London, 1906-10), esp. Vols. i and ii, passim, on Renaissance and 17th-century prosody. See also Charlton M. Lewis, The Foreign Sources of Modern English Versification, Yale Thesis (Halle, A.S., 1898), p. 66 (note), where he refers to “the comparatively low value of mere syllabism, from an aesthetic point of view.”
6 According to Webster, metaplasm (in linguistics) is “a change in the letters or syllables of a word.” But according to the late-Empire classical grammarian Donatus (H. Keil, ed. Grammatici Latini, Lipsiae, 1857-80, iv, 395) : “Metaplasmus est transformado quaedam recti solutique sermonis in alteram speciem metri ornatusve causa.” There were 14 species in classical verse: “prothesis, epenthesis, paragoge, aphaeresis, syncope, apocape, ecstasis, systole, diaeresis, episynaliphe, synaliphe, ecthlipsis, [and] metathesis.” They were discussed in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance in works of rhetoric and grammar, both as rhetorical ornaments and as prosodic devices.
7 Certain of the metaplasmic devices—prothesis, epenthesis, paragoge, and diaeresis—could be used for the opposite purpose; that is, a word like hour, ordinarily used as a single syllable, could be used as a dissyllable, and thus a line of 9 syllables could be made to read as 10. Ideally, then, metaplasms were “stretching” as well as “squeezing” devices; but actual practice seemed to favor the latter function at the expense of the former.
8 Saintsbury was certainly one of the key objectors. His History, which an unkind critic might dub The History of the Trisyllabic Foot in English Verse, emphasized foot-scansion and the equivalence of two “shorts” for a “long”—on the analogy of classical verse—as the “Main Laws” of English verse (see I, 82-84). These “laws” he felt were operative in one degree or another in all historical periods. Thus syllabism was “an apostasy to the ‘rhythm of the foreigner’.” Wherever Bridges found an elision in Milton, Saintsbury found a trisyllabic foot. He charged his friend Bridges with over-complexity: “one master-key is a great deal better than a whole bunch of jingling picklocks. And I believe that master-key to be provided by the system of foot-scansion, with equivalence and substitution, which has been championed throughout this book” (ii, 259). I have found no support whatsoever, in Renaissance metrical theory itself, for Saintsbury's “Main Laws”: foot-scansion and substitution are found, but they are late-comers, always subordinated to the syllable-count, never found in Saintsbury's cherished trisyllabic form; and the idea of classical equivalence occurred only to the heretics who were pushing quantitative verse, never to the vernacular metrists.
9 John S. Diekhoff, “Milton's Prosody in the Poems of the Trinity Manuscript,” PMLA, liv (1939), 153-183; Arnold S. Stein, “Donne's Prosody,” PMLA, lix (1944), 373-397.
10 W. B. Hunter, “The Sources of Milton's Prosody,” PQ, xxvii (1949), 125-144. Hunter traces Milton's prosody to Sylvester and the tradition of ouritan psalmody on the basis of a number of what seem to me questionable assumptions: 1) that Bridges' book is the definitive statement of the subject; 2) that Bridges, however, is wrong in tracing Milton's prosody to Chaucer (Bridges had said that Milton was making “a learned systemization of Chaucer's practice”); 3) that only the prosody of PL, as analysed by Bridges, was pertinent to such source-tracing. Thus, Hunter calls Spenser, Daniel, and Jonson “un-syllabic” because they elide “through” certain consonants which Milton did not elide through in PL, in this manner rather absurdly making PL the exclusive model of English syllabic verse. Bridges himself was aware that if one examined Milton's use of elision, not only in PL, but in Comus, PR, and SA as well, he would find Milton differing from other writers of syllabic verse in the English Renaissance only in detail, not in kind.
11 For Jonson's interest in prosodic criticism, see his “Conversations with Drummond” in J. E. Spingarn, Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1908), i, 210 (Appendix) : “Said he had written a Discourse of Poesie both against Campion and Daniel…” Since Campion and Daniel were quarreling over prosody, it may be assumed that Jonson's “discourse” would also be prosodic. For Dryden's statement, see Ms “Dedication of the Aeneis” in W. P. Ker, ed. Essays of John Dryden (Oxford, 1909), ii, 217: “I have long had by me the materials of an English Prosodia, containing all the mechanical rules of versification …”
12 The Works of John Milton, ed. F. A. Patterson et al. (New York, 1931-38), iv, 286.
13 Works, vi, 286. It should be remembered that in both these statements Milton has in mind the uninitiated student of poetry; it would be wrong to infer that he felt that prosodie study was vain for the professional poet.
14 Li Livres dou Tresor, ed. J. Carmady (Berkeley, 1948); De Vulgari Eloquentia in Dante Alighieri, a Translation of the Latin Works (London, 1904); Dette Rime Volgari Trattato, composto nel 1332, ed. Guisto Grion (Bologna, 1869). For an example of Latini's syllabism, see Tresor, p. 327: “car qui voudra rimer, il li convient conter totes les sillabes de ses diz en tel maniere que li vers soient acordable en nombre et que li uns n'ait plus que li autres.” Here is da Tempi's metrical description of a sonnet: “Sonnettus simplex sive consuetus constare debet ex quatuordecim versibus, quarum quilibet debet esse xi syllabarum …” (Delle Rime Volgari, p. 74). Dante's discussion of Provençal-Italian stanza forms takes the same syllabic base for granted.
15 Some of the more important of these from a metrical point of view are: G. Trissino, Le Sei Divisioni della Poetica (1529); Antonio Sebastiano Minturno, L'Arle Poetica (1563); Jacopo Mazzoni, Delta Difesa delta Commedia … nelle quale si tratta pieriamente dell'Arte Poetica (1587-88); and Benedetto Varchi, Della Poetica in Lezzione, lette nell'Accademia Fiorentina sopra Diverse Materie (1590).
16 A typically syllabic statement of Minturno's is quoted below. Trissino's syllabism, complicated as we shall see by “feet” and “accent,” is nevertheless clearly implicit. Thus, he allows, as did the English metrists in English verse, only the dissyllabic foot in Italian verse: “ma perchè i piedi di tre sillabe non utile ne i Poemi Italiani, lasceremoli da canto, e diremo solamente di quelli di due sillabe …” (Le Sei Divisioni in Tutte le Opere, Verona, 1729, p. 16). The syllabic system clearly necessitated dissyllabic or monosyllabic scansion, where foot-scansion was to be attempted at all.
17 Trissino's accentualism is much too complex to discuss here. Some of its more important features are: 1) a single pitch accent for every word, monosyllabic or plurisyllabic; 2) the dissyllabic foot: all four varieties—iambic, trochaic, pyrrhic, and spondaic—are allowed, and all permutations and combinations of these in tetrasyllabic composite feet; 3) a norm for the Italian hendecasyllabic line, provided by the classical iambic trimeter (our hexameter); 4) against this norm, infinite variety arising from substitution of other dissyllabic feet for the basic iamb. I have found no earlier instance of an accentual analysis of the syllabic line, although Latini and some others mention accent in connection with the rhyming syllable. (See Trissino, op. cit., pp. 15-19.)
18 For a good account of the Seconde Rhétoriqueurs, see W. F. Patterson, Three Centuries of French Poetic Theory … (1328-1630) (Ann Arbor, 1935).
19 An important figure of the transition between the Rhétoriqueurs and the Pléiade was Thomas Sebillet, whose L'Art poétique Françoys (1548) contains a detailed statement of syllabism. See the ed. Felix Gaiffe (Paris, 1910), pp. 34-41. For Pléiade syllabism, see Ronsard's Abbrege de l'Art Poétique Françoys in Œuvres Complètes, ed. Hugues Vaganay (Paris, 1923), pp. 479-486; also DuBellay's La Defence et Illustration de la Langue Francoyse, ed. Emile Person (Paris, 1892), pp. 130 ff.: “nous avons un certain nombre de Syllabes en chacun Genre de Poë'me, par les quelles, comme par Chesnons le vers Françoys hé, et enchainé, est contraint… .” Another Pléiade affirmation of syllabism was Jacques Peletier's L'Art Poétique (1555).
20 See G. Gregory Smith, Elizabethan Critical Essays (Oxford, 1904), i, 46-57 (George Gascoigne, Certayne Notes of Instruction, 1575); i, 148-207 (Sidney, Apologie for Poesie, ca. 1583); i, 208-225 (James VI, A Schort Treatise, 1583); ii, 1-193 (George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, 1589); ii, 327-355 (Thomas Campion, Observations, 1602); ii, 356-384 (Samuel Daniel, A Defense of Ryme, ca. 1603). A typical statement of Elizabethan syllabic certainty and accentual confusion is Puttenham's: “This quantitie with them [the classical poets] consisteth in the number of their feet: & with us in the number of sillables, which are comprehended in every verse, not regarding his feete, otherwise then that we allow, in scanning our verse, two sillables to make one short portion (suppose it a foote) in every verse” (Smith, ii, 70 ff.).
21 Campion, in the wake of Tolemei in Italy and Baif et al. in France, tried to introduce quantitative criteria into English verse. He differed from the real hexametrists like Drant and Spenser (the Areopagites), however, in subordinating, although in a somewhat inconsistent fashion, quantity to accent and the syllable-count. His blasts against rhyme drew Daniel's excellent Defense.
22 Spingarn, Critical Essays, i, 206-207.
23 Smith, Eliz. Crit. Essays, ii, 327-355. The linkage between Campion and Milton, for whatever critical importance it may have, can be made. Milton is almost certain to have read his schoolmaster Alexander Gill's Logonomia Anglica (1619, 1621), the 4th part of which is a prosodia. This (in Latin) devotes an entire section (pp. 145-150) to a summary and criticism of Campion's Observations, with examples.
24 L'Arte Poetica, nelle quale si contengono i precetti Eroici, Tragici, Comici … con la Dottrina de Sonetti, Canzoni … (Napoli, 1725), pp. 356 ff.
25 Works, xa, 35.
26 Spingarn, Critical Essays, II, 264-265.
27 See his statement in Of Education (Works, IV, 286) : “… that sublime Art which in Aristotles Poetics, in Horace, and the Italian Commentaries of Castehetro, Tasso, Mazzoni, and others, teaches what the laws are of a true Epic Poem, [etc.] …”
28 Jacopo Mazzoni, Della Difesa della Commedia … (Cesena, 1688), pp. 456 ff. For Trissino's accentualism, see n. 17, above.
29 For example, both Trissino and Bridges set up an ideal (iambic) line—Trissino's, the classical iambic trimeter (hexameter); Bridges', the English iambic pentameter—and then record variations from it; both allow dissyllabic substitutions only; both recognize lines without their full complement of heavy accents. Trissino differs from Bridges in recognizing and encouraging both spondaic and pyrrhic substitutions: a point in his favor, I think.
30 The original (G. Trissino, Tutte le Opere, pp. 11-12; 20-22) reads as follows: “La soprabondanzia … overo è per divisione, cioè, dividendo un diftongo, si accresce una sillabe a la parola, com’è pietate, parola di tre sillabe, seperando quella ie, diftongo, si fa pietate di quattro sillabe… . Overo è per allongazione di tempo, com’è umile, allongando quel mi, che è breve… . Overo è per accrescimento di siliaba, com’è siringe, distringe… . Il mancamente è poi contrario a la soprabondanzia, e fassi overo per unire due vocali, che erano disguinte, o per sminuire tempo, lettera, o siliaba… . Ma quando la vocale ultima si rimuove, tal che la parola vien poi a terminare in consonante, com’è pensiero, pensier, bello, bel, questa si dimanda rimozione… . Ora per potere con pui diligenzia misurare le predette sorte di versi, sia buono vedere, che cosa e rimozione, collisione, e pronunzia congiunto, le quali tre cose fanno diversamente uno medesimo effetto; cioè ad uno, ed ad un'altro modo smmiuscono una siliaba. Rimozione adunque è, quanto ad una parola, che termini in vocale, si rimuove quella ultima vocale, e fassi terminare in consonante … e questo non si fa in ogni parola, ma solamente in quelle che hanno l, m, n, r, o sole, o geminate, avanti la ultima vocale, come è quello, quel. … La collisione si fa, quando una parola finisce in vocale, e l'altra comincia da vocale, come è
Voi che ascoltate in rime sparse il suono.
In quello, che ascoltate, quello, e, di, che, si rimuove nel misurare, e proferire, e dicessi, ch'ascoltate … et in questa collisione sempra si rimuove la vocale prima, in cui termina la parola, e non la seconda, in cui l'altra comincia … altri vogliano in tali luoghi non rimuoversi nulla; ma fare una adunazione di due vocali in una e facendo di, e, et il, e il, in una siliaba, la quale cosa sarà pronunzia congiunta… .“
31 See, e.g., the statement of the otherwise technically adventurous Ronsard (Œuvres Complètes, iv, 473): “Nous avons aussi une certaine cæsure [elision] de la voyelle e, laquelle se mange toutes les fois [italics mine] qu'elle est rencontrée d'une autre voyelle ou diftongue, pourveu que la voyelle qui suit e n'aye point la force de consonne.”
32 This was true by the 16th century at any rate. About 1405 Jacques LeGrand had written, in Des Rimes: “Tu doiz scavoir que, quant deux voyeulx s'entresuyvent, tu peulx deux sillabes tant seulement compter pour une …” This would suggest a more liberal basis of elision. But Thomas Sebillet's Art poétique Françoys, ed. F. Gaiffe (Paris, 1910), pp. 55 ff., discusses under “apostrophe et synaléphe” only the “e femenin.” This is the position that won the day in French verse, despite Ronsard's approving glance (Œuvres Complètes, iv, 480) at Greek and Italian elisional liberties: “Davantage i, et a, voyelles, se peuvent elider et manger… . Quant tu mangerois l‘o et l‘u, pour la necessité de tes vers, il ny aurait point de mal, à la mode des Italiens ou plustost des Grecs, qui se servent des voyelles, et diftongues, comme il leur plaist et selon leur necessité.” The LeGrand quotation above is to be found in E. Langlois, Recueil d'Arts de Seconde Rhétorique (Paris, 1902), pp. 2-3.
33 Discussions of metaplasm, sometimes found under “barbarism,” can be seen also in Quintilian, Servius, and other classical grammarians and rhetoricians. A few of the defined and illustrated metaplasms given by Donatus (Keil, Gram. Lat., iv, 396) are as follows: “Syncope est ablatio de media dictione contraria epenthesi, ut audacter pro audaciter …”; “Apocope est ablatio de fine dictionis paragoge contraria, ut Achilli pro Achillis …”; “Synaliphe est per interceptionem concurrentium vocalium lubrica quaedam lenisque conlisio… .”
34 Cf. Donatus (Keil, Gram. Lat., iv, 367): “vocales sunt quae se proferuntur et per se syllabam faciunt … semivocales sunt quae per se quidem proferuntur, sed per se syllabam non faciunt. sunt autem numero septem, f, l, m, n, r, s, x, ex his una duplex est, x, et liquidae quattuor, l, m, n, r… . mutae sunt quae nec per se proferuntur nec per se syllabam facit… .” This intermediate position which the early grammarians gave to the semivowels, putting them between the absolute liquidity of the vowels and the rigidity of the mutes, must have caught the eye of poets and prosodists who were looking for elidible letters. In classical verse, the semi-vowel placed after a mute made the preceding syllable “common”—i.e., either short or long as the meter required.
35 Smith, Elk. Crit. Essays, ii, 120. Puttenham fashionably devoted a chapter to quantitative metrics, although he made it clear that his precepts were to be tentative. Like Campion after him, he tried, none too successfully, to base syllable length on accent.
36 Ibid., ii, 352.
37 M. Rösier and R. Brotanek ed. (Halle, 1908), pp. 4, 16.
38 A. Eichler ed. (Halle, 1910), p. 63.
39 Gill, Logonomia, p. 142. I have used the edition published in London in 1621. A more accessible edition is that of O. L. Jiriczek (Quellen u. Forschungen z. Sprach- und Culturgeschichte, 1903).
40 On Milton's relations with Gill, see Arthur Barker, “Milton's Schoolmasters,” MLR, xxxii (1937), 526-536; and Donald [L. Clark, Milton at St. Paul's School: A Study of Ancient Rhetoric in English Renaissance Education (New York, 1948), pp. 199 ff. Barker (p. 527) writes: “The ‘mighty-mouthed inventor of Harmonies’ must have been interested, too, in Gill's discussion of prosody. …” Clark, on Milton's grammar-school initiation into prosody, writes (p. 199) : “As a boy Milton would have had to memorize the rules of prosody from the Common Grammar of Lily, which devotes twelve pages to Prosodia. In Grant's Greek Grammar he would find thirty-three pages on prosody. The rhetorics also treat prosody, Talaeus briefly in two pages and Butler in twenty. His schoolmaster, the elder Gil, had given twenty-two pages to prosody in the Fourth Part of Logonomia Anglica, and was well prepared to teach the precepts orally to his pupils… .”
41 Logonomia, pp. 135 ff. I have tried to translate Gill's English examples out of his peculiar phonetic spelling.
42 For Thomas Sebillet, see notes 19 and 32. Dryden's notions of elision were distinctly those of the French 17th century. See, for example, his Dedication to the Examen Poeticum (Ker, Essays, ii, 10-11): “… synaloepha … is the cutting off one vowel immediately before another … to shun the shock of the two vowels, immediately following each other. … I cannot say that I have everywhere observed the rule of the synaloepha in my [Ovid]; but wheresoever I have not, 'tis a fault in sound. The French and the Italians [sic] have made it an inviolable precept in their versification; therein following the severe example of the Latin poets. Our countrymen … so far … content themselves with following the licentious practice of the Greeks; who … often … sound one vowel upon another …” Dryden evidently knew his French versification better than his Italian. See also Ker, i, 255 (Preface to Sylvae), and ii, 215 (Dedication to the Aeneis).
43 Bysshe is very full on elision; in fact, his discussion (stolen in large part from Claude Lancelot, a French grammarian) would offer the closest parallel to that of Bridges if it were not for his insistence that elision is mandatory. See the 6th ed. of The Art of English Poetry, pp. 11-19. This is the French attitude.
44 Gill's discussion of accent (pp. 127, 128-130), however, shows many similarities to those of the Italians. He may have been acquainted himself with Italian metrical theory.