In other words, the ear insists upon having form but no monotony, and chaos but no lawlessness. The more form. you give me, the better, says the ear; and at the same time says, The more chaos you give me, breaking the uniformity of your forms, the better. We shall find this principle of opposite functions greatly enlarging itself in the next lecture. Meantime, looking upon this enormous chasm between the limiting forms of thought and of procedure which the artist must fill, and wondering at the miracle of it, I am reminded of a story which comes to us from old Beda. It is related that upon a certain occasion a good father died, but afterwards came again to life. During his short sleep of death he had a vision of hell, which he remembered and told. He thought that he beheld a profound and terrible gulf, which was bounded on the one side by an infinite wall of flame, on the other by an infinite wall of ice. Between these two awful boundaries vibrated a prodigious swarm of souls in search of rest, now flying to the wall of flame, driven by it over towards the wall of ice, again repelled by that towards the wall of flame. When we think that the artist is placed over just such a gulf, between two like walls, driven now towards the flame of chaos which would consume all things to ashes, now toward the ice of form which would chill all things to deadness, we must needs wonder anew at the divine miracle of genius which not only in verse, but in life, thus placed, rescues itself from these awful oppositions, and converts this hell of antagonism into the heaven of art. It is by this process of converting a hell into a heaven that we find Shakspere crying, in that wonderful Sonnet CXIX: What potions have I drunk of Siren tears, What wretched errors hath my heart committed, Whilst it hath thought itself so blessed never! O benefit of ill! now I find true That better is by evil still made better; greater. CHAPTER XXI THE METRICAL TESTS — II Weak-ending, Double-ending, and Rhythmic Accent Tests; IN the last lecture we had some account of two of the five proposed Metrical Tests, namely, the Rime Test and the Run-on and End-stopped Line Test. Let us now study the three remaining ones: the Weak-ending, the Doubleending, and the Rhythmic Accent Tests. A weak-ending line is one which ends in some merely connective word, such as a conjunction or a preposition or an auxiliary verb, instead of ending, as is most natural and as a large majority of lines do end, in a noun or a verb or some such important vocable. Words like and, for, that, if, upon, be, could, or, and the like, are specimens of weak endings. For example, take these lines from The Tempest: Some food we had, and some fresh water, that . . did give us, where that is a weak ending; where upon I find my zenith doth depend upon A most auspicious star, is a weak ending; A freckled whelp hag-born - not honour'd with where with is a weak ending; Weigh'd between loathness and obedience, at where at is a weak ending. These examples will be sufficient to make you recognise the weak ending without difficulty: it is always some merely relational word which would leave the thought incomplete without the word in the next line. Weak endings have been divided into two classes, one called the Light Ending and one the Weak Ending proper, a Light Ending being a word such as am, be, could, an auxiliary verb in general, or a pronoun, I, they, etc.; while a Weak Ending proper is any one of the still less important words, such as and, if, or, but, and the like. For the For the purpose of the present account, however, we can conveniently and accurately include both these classes under the general term of Weak Endings. Now the weak-ending line as a metrical test differs in an interesting particular from the others. You observe that the weak-ending line is indeed only a species of runon line; in the lines last quoted, for example, Weigh'd between loathness and obedience, at one sees immediately that the preposition at inevitably runs the mind and the voice on to find its regimen end in the next line. Since, then, the weak-ending line is only one sort of run-on line, there would be no necessity for erecting it into a special class if it were not for the peculiarity that while Shakspere's use of the run-on line increased (as we saw) gradually on the whole from his first plays to his last ones, his use of the weak-ending line may be said to begin abruptly, far on in his career, at Macbeth. To reduce this statement to numbers, according to the table of Professor Ingram, with whose name we may specially associate the weak-ending test, in the Comedy of Errors, which is an early play, there is not a single weakending line; in The Two Gentlemen of Verona not one; in A Midsummer Night's Dream there is one; in As You Like It there are two; in Twelfth Night there are four: but when we get to Macbeth we find suddenly twenty-three, and then in Antony and Cleopatra the number jumps up to ninety-nine, while in The Tempest, with only about half the whole number of verse-lines in Antony and Cleopatra, we have sixty-seven weak endings, equivalent to about one hundred and thirty as compared with the other play. This numerical exhibit without going into more details of it, which any of you who may desire can find in Professor Ingram's Table of Weak Endings, published in Part II of the New Shakspere Society's Transactions for 1874 - this numerical exhibit would seem to give us beyond doubt a keen glimpse into the process of Shakspere's mind as regards versification. It seems clear that up to a certain point he avoided the weak-ending line in making his verse; and that at that point, about Macbeth or a little earlier, he entirely changed his opinion about it, and thereafter permitted himself to use the weak-ending line with perfect freedom. This result we might, indeed, have looked for. The weak-ending line is, as we just now saw, only one species of run-on line; and the same process |