concentrated all their art on the effort to make both
language and metre as instantaneously intelligible as possible. They
succeeded much better in the second task than in the first: for the
truth is that the exact meaning of a verse is much more often difficult
to ascertain in the case of Pope than in the case of Milton. But no
one has ever doubted how to read aloud a line of Pope or Dryden. And
this has obvious advantages and was, of course, at first a great source
of pleasure. It made Pope's poetry the most immediately popular we
have ever had, as it still is the most effective for public quotation.
Almost everybody, as Mr. Bridges has said, "has a natural liking for
the common fundamental rhythms" and "it is only after long familiarity
with them that the ear grows dissatisfied and wishes them to be
broken." But in poetry as in music the more cultivated the ear the
sooner it gets tired of being given too little to do: and as soon as
every warbler had Pope's {223} tune by heart critical readers began to
wish for something less obvious. The ultimate result of that
dissatisfaction was the metrical experiments of Coleridge and the rich
harvest of varied rhythms and melody with which Shelley and Tennyson
and Swinburne enriched the nineteenth century. And all this movement
had also, of course, a retrospective effect. It may be true that, as
Mr. Bridges says, "there are very few persons indeed who take such a
natural delight in rhythm for its own sake that they can follow with
pleasure a learned rhythm which is very rich in variety, and the beauty
of which is its perpetual freedom to obey the sense and diction;" but
it could not fail to be the case that their number was increased by the
comparative sensitiveness to the more intricate music of words which
was inevitably produced in those who had learnt much Shelley or
Tennyson by heart. And such people at once heard things in Milton
which were absolutely inaudible to the ears of Dr. Johnson's
generation. The comparative subtlety, both in imagination and in form,
of the poetry of the nineteenth century made it impossible for poets to
compete with journalists for the attention of the big public as Pope
had done triumphantly; but as a set off against that loss it gave a far
{224} richer delight to those who were capable of that interaction of
the natural ear and the spiritual to which all great poetry makes its
appeal. This led straight back to Milton who made that do