Coventry Patmore, early in his "Essay on English Metrical Law" (1857), reaches for a telling metaphor to explain his prosodic theory: "Art ... must have a body as well as a soul," he writes, "and the higher and purer the spiritual, the more powerful and unmistakable should be the corporeal element;--in other words, the more vigorous and various the life, the more stringent and elaborate must be the law, by obedience to which life expresses itself." (1) Versification, or the poet's "peculiar mode of expression," stands in this figure as the body that gives form to the ideas, or the "matter," of verse ("Essay," p. 72). Yet in the pages that follow, Patmore's articulation of the distinction between rhythm and meter--a distinction that several critics have suggested Patmore was the first to describe--seems subtly to shift the tenor of this metaphor. (2) Meter, what Patmore calls the "ictus" or "time-beater" of verse, comes to sound very much like the immaterial soul: for Patmore, after all, it "has no material and external existence at all," but is instead a mental structure by which the corporealized rhythms of poetry may be measured. That is, meter in Patmore's essay becomes the inaudible and immaterial law that orders the rhythmically manifested life of poetry, or its actual words and sounds. But while commentators have often credited the "Essay on English Metrical Law" with giving rise to the "New Prosody," Patmore's argument wasn't necessarily new: as T. S. Omond put it in 1921, "Patmore voiced ideas that were in the air, and was sometimes less original than he fancied." (3) If anything, Patmore's essay constituted a defense of orthodoxy against the metrical experiments of those poets grouped by their critics into the Spasmodic School, as Jason R. Rudy has argued. (4) Patmore's essay has received considerable attention in recent years, but no one has yet adequately discussed the way that Patmore's prosodic conservatism is founded on another sort of orthodoxy, itself besieged in the middle of the nineteenth century: the dualist psychology that was under fire in the 1850s from new physiological theories of mind. (5) Critics have instead been most interested in the bodily effects of poetry on its readers, in the connections between poetic rhythm and the physiological rhythms of daily life; most inquiries into the links between prosody and Victorian mental science have connected midcentury "physiological poetics" with new physicalist theories of mind. (6) But such psychophysiology was not, in the 1850s, the most common way in which the Victorians conceived of mental life. On the contrary, most midcentury psychologies still figured the mind as both immaterial and immortal, insistent that our mental and spiritual beings--the two entities are largely indistinguishable in such theories--would ultimately live on past the dissolution of the body. (7) This essay attempts to unpack this forgotten side of the connection between midcentury metrics and the field of mental science in two ways: by shifting attention from psychophysiology to the soul-based psychology that remained dominant at midcentury, and by turning from the poetic rhythms that have fascinated critics to the invisible and inaudible meters that, for many Victorians, gave those rhythms meaning. I focus in particular on a poet whose work always struck his contemporaries as deeply unorthodox: Robert Browning. Browning's Men and Women (1855) was published in the same year as two key psychophysiological works that powerfully challenged psychological orthodoxy; the collection also appeared in the wake of the Spasmodic controversy that made especially pressing the connections between prosody and psychology. As had become routine for Browning by the 1850s, reviewers complained about the volumes' obscure rhythms, finding in them echoes of the excesses of the Spasmodics. But I contend that Men and Women nevertheless represents a conservative response both to materialist science and to physiological poetics, a response that in many ways anticipates (and illuminates the stakes of) the poetics articulated in Patmore's "Essay. …

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“有限中的无限”：维多利亚时代的韵律和正统的心智理论

考文垂·帕特莫尔 (Coventry Patmore) 在他的《英国公制法论文》（1857 年）的早期，用一个有说服力的比喻来解释他的韵律理论：“艺术……必须有身体和灵魂，”他写道，“而精神越高、越纯洁，物质元素就越强大和明确；换言之，生命越旺盛和多样，法律就必须越严格和精细，通过服从生命来表达自己。” (1) Versification，或诗人的“特殊表达方式”，在这个人物中，作为赋予思想或诗句“物质”形式的主体（“散文”，第72页）。然而在接下来的几页中，帕特莫尔 对节奏和节拍之间区别的阐述——一些评论家认为帕特莫尔是第一个描述的区别——似乎巧妙地改变了这个比喻的基调。(2) Meter，Patmore 所说的诗歌的“ictus”或“time-beater”，听起来很像非物质的灵魂：毕竟，对于 Patmore 来说，它“根本没有物质和外在的存在”，但是相反，它是一种心理结构，可以通过它来衡量诗歌的具体化节奏。也就是说，帕特莫尔文章中的节拍变成了不可听的和非物质的法则，它命令诗歌的有节奏地表现出来的生活，或者它的实际文字和声音。但是，虽然评论家经常将“英国公制法论文”归功于“新韵律”，但帕特莫尔的论点并不是“ 不一定是新的：正如 TS Omond 在 1921 年所说的那样，“Patmore 提出了一些悬而未决的想法，有时并没有他想象的那么新颖。” (3) 如果有的话，帕特莫尔的文章构成了对正统论的辩护，反对那些被批评者归类为痉挛学派的诗人的韵律实验，正如杰森·鲁迪 (Jason R. Rudy) 所争论的那样。(4) 帕特莫尔的论文近年来受到了相当大的关注，但还没有人充分讨论帕特莫尔的韵律保守主义是建立在另一种正统的基础上的，这种正统本身在 19 世纪中叶被围困：二元心理学。 1850 年代新的心理生理学理论引发的火灾。(5) 相反，批评家最感兴趣的是诗歌对读者的身体影响，诗的韵律与日常生活的生理韵律之间的联系；大多数对韵律学和维多利亚时代精神科学之间联系的调查都将世纪中叶的“生理诗学”与新的物理主义精神理论联系起来。(6) 但这种心理生理学在 1850 年代并不是维多利亚时代最常见的心理生活构想。相反，大多数世纪中叶心理学仍然认为心灵既是非物质又是不朽的，坚持认为我们的精神和精神存在——在这些理论中，这两个实体在很大程度上无法区分——最终会在身体解体之后继续存在。(7) 本文试图以两种方式解开世纪中叶度量与心理科学领域之间这种被遗忘的一面：通过将注意力从心理生理学转移到在本世纪中叶仍然占主导地位的基于灵魂的心理学，并从让批评家着迷的诗意节奏转向无形和听不见的韵律，对许多维多利亚时代的人来说，这些韵律赋予了这些韵律意义。我特别关注一位诗人，他的作品总是让他的同时代人感到非常非正统：罗伯特·布朗宁。布朗宁的《男人和女人》（1855 年）与两部重要的心理生理学著作同年出版，它们有力地挑战了心理正统；该系列也出现在痉挛性争议之后，该争议使得韵律和心理学之间的联系尤为紧迫。到 1850 年代，布朗宁已经成为惯例，评论家抱怨这些卷的晦涩节奏，在其中发现了痉挛过度的回声。