By the interplay of these varieties of accent the strophic song, with the same tune to several stanzas, condemned as lazy and low by our prose critics of music, becomes, as Brahms always maintained, the highest achievement of a song-writer. The inter play does not annihilate right and wrong in declamation, nor does it prove that the classics are infallible; but it forms a musical technique as disciplined as prosody and as unlike prose. In such ways artistic factors reconcile their conflicts, and without such conflicts there is neither art nor life. Wagner and Wolf are per fect masters of a musical declamation that follows the rules of prose; but when we are told that there are no other rules, and that the classics from Bach to Brahms merely blundered insensi tively, it is time to point out that musical rhythm cannot be learnt from a bell-metronome nor poetry from a pronouncing dictionary.
Let us now try a few experiments in setting blank verse to music. The first step will be to find a constant musical rhythm to represent the average line. This average rhythm will horrify the poetic ear if it is put forward as a 'specimen of blank verse, and probably if a line could be found that fitted it exactly that line would be a very ugly one. Still, the fact remains that the musician's average idea of blank verse is accurately represented by the following scheme, which represents two lines: Now read the first paragraph of Paradise Lost rigidly to this scheme at the rate of two syllables to a metronome-beat of 8o to the minute. You will not satisfy the poet's ear ; but you will find that the lines accommodate themselves better to this than to any other uniformity that extra syllables can be managed by grace notes, and that the interval of two quavers between each line is a natural part of the scheme. We can proceed thus for eight lines, with rheumatic pains but not complete disaster. The im perative "Sing" is a heavy word to put into anacrusis, even of double length, and our three main beats must override many ac cents in lines that so often have four. Also the interlinear pause of two beats is irksome when the sense runs on. In the ninth line we must alter the scheme, for no anacrusis can digest any part of "In the beginning." So we must "invert" the first foot thus:— But before we condemn the scheme let us see how far the tor ture is mitigated by merely adding musical rise and fall:— Blank verse has been worse recited than this. The rigid musical timing proves unexpectedly flexible already ; and the rubato of a good singer can go far to improve it without becoming vulgar.
Now let us legalize the singer's rubato, and, without altering the two-quaver intervals between the lines, help the enjambement by a pianoforte accompaniment that makes the ear expect the reso lution of a discord. Sensitive harmonies will further aid the rhyth mic sense. The notation is now becoming troublesome; so that
bars are divided into three and the lengths of the notes doubled. But the original scheme is nowhere violated. (See Ex. 5.) After this point any attempt to continue this literal interpreta tion of the metre would make the music drag hopelessly. Already the first two lines would be the better for running over the pause and doubling the pace of "that forbidden tree:" But this would mean using two time-scales and would take us into free corn position. The object of this illustration is not to show how these words ought to be set, nor to prove the very doubtful proposition that they are singable to any kind of music ; but simply to bring out the most elementary relations between music and verse.
5. Phrasing.—The higher art of phrasing is chiefly observable in groups of very much simpler bars than those of our illustra tions so far. Two facts, often ignored, must be realized before we can understand phrasing at all. First, music, being in time and not in space, is never apprehended in a coup d'oeil, but always in a momentary present connecting a remembered past with an im perfectly anticipated future. Consequently we miss half the aesthetic values of rhythm if we insist on knowing all about it from the first note. Rhythms have as much right to change their meaning while we listen to them as the cats of Wonderland have to grin; and "they all can and most of them do." The second point is that the bar represents no fundamental rhythmic fact. It did not come into existence so long as music was printed only in parts. When music began to be printed with all the parts ranged legibly on one page, it was necessary to score the pile of parts with vertical strokes to range them in partitions and guide the eye. Hence the word score, and the French partition and German Partitur. The nascent body-rhythm grew stronger and gradually made it convenient that the bars should coincide with the groups indicated by the time-signature, and this gave rise (but only in recent times) to the delusion that the bar was the permanent unit. It is often obviously not so. When Mozart writes in moderate common time his phrasing is sure to make an odd number of half-bars somewhere so that a theme that originally lay on 1, 2, 3, 4 now lies on 3, 4, 1, 2. In such a case it is pedantic to say that the accent has changed and still more pedantic to blame Mozart for not either taking shorter bars throughout or changing to them according to the rhythm. If the half-bar dis placement is really awkward Mozart will put it right, as when he rebarred the duet "Bei Mannern welche Liebe fiihlen" in Die Zauberflote. But long bars imply delicate accents and these ac cents become no harder when the phrasing contracts.