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of verse are the first conditions which the words must submit to, the rhythm is the esthetic result of the senses, values and relations of the words thus conditioned. The beauty of verse consisted as much in the concealment as in the revelation of construction but it certainly could not proceed from only one of these. For this reason he found Father Butt's reading of verse and a schoolgirl's accurate reading of verse intolerable. Verse to be read according to its rhythm should be read according to the stresses; that is, neither strictly according to the feet nor yet with complete disregard of them. All this theory he set himself to explain to Maurice and Maurice, when he had understood the meanings of the terms and had put these meanings carefully together, agreed that Stephen's theory was the right one. There was only one possible way of rendering the first quatrain of Byron's poem:



My days are in the yellow leaf
The flowers and fruits of love are gone
The worm, the canker and the grief
Are mine alone.

Stannie

The two brothers tried this theory on all the verse they could remember and it yielded wonderful results. Soon Stephen began to explore the language for himself and to choose, and thereby rescue once for all, the words and phrases most amenable to his theory. He became a poet with malice aforethought.



He was at once captivated by the seeming eccentricities of the prose of Freeman and William Morris. He read them as one would read a thesaurus and made a garner of words. He read Skeat's Etymological Dictionary by the hour and his mind, which had from the first been only too submissive to the infant sense of wonder, was often hypnotised by the most commonplace conversation. People seemed to him strangely ignorant of the value of the words they used so glibly. And pace by pace as this indignity of life forced itself upon him he became enamoured of an idealising, a more veritably human tradition. The phenomenon seemed to him a grave one and he began to see that people had leagued themselves together in a conspiracy of ignobility and that Destiny had scornfully reduced her prices for them. He desired no such reduction for himself and preferred to serve her on the ancient terms.










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