else to those who do not. Prose, even rhythmed prose is a flat refusal; blank verse loses half, and the most characteristic half, of the effect; couplet substitutes something foreign and very difficultly reconcilable; regular stanza something more of the same kind; while rhyme in any form alters, and in the case of the longer laisses has a terrible tendency, both in French and English, to “overdraw its account.” The very latest French version, M. Henri Clamard’s (of which a notice by the present writer appeared in the Athenæum for September 5th, 1919) tries different rhymes, some of them rather free according to orthodox standards, in the same laisse. But this not merely alters, but actually destroys, the music of the single assonance throughout.
In his directer grapple with the problem Captain Scott Moncrieff has had advantages in regard to the single line which few Frenchmen, except Agrippa d’Aubigné and Victor Hugo, have ever been able to reach. Our earlier Elizabethans gave us the single-moulded line in perfection: and the thud of the iamb (Marlowe trochaically scanned provokes a mixture of laugh and shudder) rises to the final assonance note with perfect effect. But, of course, it is in the attaining and retaining of that assonance note itself that the work, and the labour, and the crown of both lie.
I confess that, as I hinted at the beginning of this paper, I was, until very recently, under the impression that the attainment was difficult and the retainment impossible—first, owing to the peculiar obstacles to assonance in English, and secondly, because of its doubtfully agreeable effect even when obtained. If I say that Captain Scott Moncrieff has not wholly converted me, I shall only, I hope, be speaking with the frankness allowable between old professor and old student; if I add that he has brought me a long way towards conversion I am sure I use that other
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