If they did
not, there is no reason whatever why any of us who do should adopt
their metre: if they did and failed, there is every reason why we should
select a different one.
Professor Conington has adduced one cogent argument against blank verse:
that is, that hardly any of us can write it.[D] But if this is so--if
the 'blank verse' which we write is virtually prose in disguise--the
addition of rhyme would only make it rhymed prose, and we should be as
far as ever from "verse really deserving the name."[E] Unless (which I
can hardly imagine) the mere incident of 'terminal consonance' can
constitute that verse which would not be verse independently, this
argument is equally good against attempting verse of any kind: we should
still be writing disguised, and had better write undisguised, prose.
Prose translations are of course tenable, and are (I am told) advocated
by another very eminent critic. These considerations against them occur
to one: that, among the characteristics of his original which the
translator is bound to preserve, one is that he wrote metrically; and
that the prattle which passes muster, and sounds perhaps rather pretty
than otherwise, in metre, would in plain prose be insufferable. Very
likely some exceptional sort of prose may be meant, which would dispose
of all such difficulties: but this would be harder for an ordinary
writer to evolve out of his own brain, than to construct any species of
verse for which he has at least a model and a precedent.
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