R,CHARD MONCKTON MILNES was born in the year - OUDL Home

Tennyson, Swinburne, Meredith 169Now she is excusing herself to Philip:Alas, the Council will not hear of war.They say your wars are not the wars of England.They will not lay more taxes on a landSo hunger-nipt and wretched; and you knowThe crown is poor. We have given the church-lands back;The nobles would not; nay, they clapt their handsUpon their swords when ask'd; and therefore GodIs hard upon the people. What's to be done?Sir, I will move them in your cause again,And we will raise us loans and subsidiesAmong the merchants; and Sir Thomas GreshamWill aid us. There is Antwerp and the Jews.And so on and so forth.Why blank verse, or any sort of verse at all for thestage? Dry den raised the question; but, after that, it wasgenerally assumed to be the right sort of thing. Itsaesthetic merits apart, the Elizabethan dramatists hadsound practical reasons for clinging to it. It is easy stuffto write, as we have said; and they had no time to waste.It is easy to learn too; and the actors had less. Besides,as what is too stupid to be said can be sung, so willsounding blank verse cover a mighty lot of nonsense.But the grand dramatic merit of verse, of course, is thatit is in itself an emotional thing; and the appeal of dramawill be first or last—first and last, very often—to theemotions. Verse is hypnotic; the mere rhythm of it canfascinate and hold the hearer. It can often be toohypnotic so spoken; one has seen audiences saved fromsleep only by the extreme discomfort of the stalls theywere wedged in—not always saved, moreover. Thescientific side of the matter may be found broached ina most interesting pamphlet written for the EnglishAssociation by Sir Philip Hartog, On the Relation ofPoetry to Verse. He quotes the psychologists, speaks ofthe central attention which we consciously offer to asubject, and of the uncontrolled 'marginal' attention