are we to be brought to believe and feel that the unreal language before us is the discourse "really used by men?" We answer; only by the most rigid adherence, on the part of the author, to the common forms and dramatic usages of his living spoken tongue in every other respect. He must not sacrifice one jot or one tittle of the common structure and natural conversational flow of language: otherwise the bar we have spoken of falls at once down between him and his readers, and it is vain for him and them to attempt to shake hands across it. The illusion is at an end; we feel that we are no longer reading or listening to the language which men really speak. Now, when composing in prose, an author need not, as we have said, be so particular; because there is no such preliminary obstacle cleaving to the character of his style, and rising up between him and those whom he addresses. In the second place, the writer in rhyme has an object of his own to gain by perverting language from its natural spoken course; to wit, he obtains his rhymes more easily by doing so. But the reader's object is quite different from this. It is no object of his that the author should obtain his rhymes easily. On the contrary, his object is to derive enjoyment from feeling consciously or unconsciously that the rhymes are obtained by a fair encounter with all the difficulties of the case, and by a triumph over them; the difficulty of preserving the common construction and all the usual proprieties of oral speech being here the chief or rather the only obstacle to be surmounted. When, therefore, he finds the author evading this difficulty by sacrificing these proprieties; that is, by transposing words out of their natural order, or interpolating unnecessary ones for the sake of his rhymes, he immediately concludes, that he is merely anxious about working out his own ends and not about promoting his, (the reader's,) and he is accordingly very properly revolted and repelled by his work. Now, in prose even, though an author should wander considerably from ordinary syntax, we feel that he has no personal and private end to gain by this—that he is not led to do so by a preference of his own object to that of his readers—and therefore his deviations are much less offensive, and much more easily forgiven. And in the third place, what we desire to be made to feel to a great extent in every work of art, is the power of the artist. We behold nothing worth looking at, unless we behold him exercising a triumphant mastery over untractable and refractory materials. Like Van Amburgh with his tigers he must make language lie down at his feet, kiss his hands, and follow him whither soever he will. But when we find him permitting his verse to interfere with the natural idiom and arrangement of his speech, we behold this exhibition reversed; the language has then gotten the upper hand of the artist, and we are made sensible of nothing but his weakness—an unpleasing object of contemplation at all times. In prose, again, this helplessness never becomes so palpably conspicuous even though the writer should be unable to direct his language perfectly straight in the paths of correct conversational idiom.
This conclusion will, no doubt, be unpalatable to many of our English versifiers; and cannot but be peculiarly nauseous to the translators whose merits we are canvassing. These, and many other people besides them, we believe, have got a silly crotchet into their heads that rhyme is in itself a beauty or merit in composition—and that for the sake of this extra charm the critic will, and ought in some degree, to forego the usual strictness with which he sits in judgment upon the style of authors whose works are without the "accomplishment of verse." We have already stated how diametrically we dissent from this doctrine; and now we beg to add further, for the benefit of all versifiers, past, present, and to come, that rhyme in itself; that is, taken independently of other considerations, is one of the greatest blemishes with which language can be afflicted. When we repeat what we have already said, that it is an unnatural appendage to speech—that the tongues of men in real life are not hung with the bells of rhyme, we have said quite enough to vindicate and establish the truth of this assertion. Therefore any appeal made to our critical clemency in behalf of inverted constructions, or other imperfections of language, not usually met with in prose or conversation—made, we say, on the score that they are to a certain extent compensated by the extra pleasure, forsooth, communicated
