Excerpt from Some Recent Studies in English Prosody

With the Mechanics and Musicians, especially with the former (for the latter are old friends or enemies or both), it is different. Both sects have multiplied greatly of late, indeed many individual prosodists hold of both; and the reason of this is sufficiently obvious. The word has long gone forth that everything is to be scientific; and though that term is equivocal to the last degree, and perhaps incapable of strict logical definition, some of its properties, and still more of its accidents, are commonly if confusedly apprehended by most people, respected by many, and passionately affectioned by some. Among the properties may be included systematic arrangement by rule involving no or few exceptions, and a mainly mathematical method of procedure, with abundant experiment. Among the accidents, 'apparatus as it may be succinctly termed, is important. Now prosody of the older sort, with occasional exceptions, relied on observation rather than experiment; and needed no apparatus whatever of a mechanical kind. A library of poetry and an ear supplied the prosodist with all he wanted. But of late the progress of what used to be called philo sophical instruments, and especially the invention of the phonograph, have inspired the would-be scientific student of Numbers with many new thoughts - whether such as would be approved by Pallas or Apollo is another question. Collect a company of individuals and make them read or recite poetry aloud is the fundamental commandment, though, as we shall see, the aims and processes extend far beyond this. At first the results in the way of stress, division of intervals and the like, were merely taken as heard. But of late, especially in America where there are many universities with much money and an eager desire for something new - apparatus which outdoes Lagado, sound proof chambers, recording instruments of the utmost delicacy and the like, have been constructed and consecrated, if not always exclusively, to the purpose. The results, arranged in rows of figures or sets of waved and straight lines, &c., &c., have been taken down, transcribed and published in books and articles devoted to the subject, some of these being quite voluminous.

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