HKB
generally, where the translator has not to intimate stanzas--where he has on the contrary to intimate that there are none--rhyme seems at first sight an intrusion and a suggestio falsi.
No doubt (as has been observed) what 'Pastorals' we have are mostly written in what is called the heroic measure. But the reason is, I suppose, not far to seek. Dryden and Pope wrote 'heroics,' not from any sense of their fitness for bucolic poetry, but from a sense of their universal fitness: and their followers copied them. But probably no scholar would affirm that any poem, original or translated, by Pope or Dryden or any of their school, really resembles in any degree the bucolic poetry of the Greeks. Mr. Morris, whose poems appear to me to resemble it more almost than anything I have ever seen, of course writes what is technically Pope's metre, and equally of course is not of Pope's school. Whether or no Pope and Dryden intended to resemble the old bucolic poets in style is, to say the least, immaterial. 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.