THE MAKING OF ENGLISH AND THE SETTLEMENT OF EUROPEAN PROSODY.
SPECIAL INTEREST OF EARLY MIDDLE ENGLISH. DECAY OF
ANGLO-SAXON. EARLY MIDDLE ENGLISH LITERATURE. SCANTINESS OF
ITS CONSTITUENTS. LAYAMON. THE FORM OF THE 'BRUT.' ITS
SUBSTANCE. THE 'ORMULUM': ITS METRE, ITS SPELLING. THE
'ANCREN RIWLE.' THE 'OWL AND THE NIGHTINGALE.' PROVERBS.
ROBERT OF GLOUCESTER. ROMANCES. 'HAVELOK THE DANE.' 'KING
HORN.' THE PROSODY OF THE MODERN LANGUAGES. HISTORICAL
RETROSPECT. ANGLO-SAXON PROSODY. ROMANCE PROSODY. ENGLISH
PROSODY. THE LATER ALLITERATION. THE NEW VERSE. RHYME AND
SYLLABIC EQUIVALENCE. ACCENT AND QUANTITY. THE GAIN OF FORM.
THE "ACCENT" THEORY. INITIAL FALLACIES, AND FINAL
PERVERSITIES THEREOF.
[Sidenote: _Special interest of Early Middle English._]
The positive achievements of English literature, during the period
with which this volume deals, are not at first sight great; and all
the more finished literary production of the time, till the extreme
end of it, was in French and Latin. But the work done during this time
in getting the English language ready for its future duties, in
equipping it with grammar and prosody, in preparing, so to speak, for
Chaucer, is not only of the first importance intrinsically, but has a
value which is almost unique in general literary history as an
example. Nowhere else have we the opportunity of seeing a language and
a literature in the process of gestation, or at least of a reformation
so great as to be almost equal to new birth. Of the stages which
turned Latin through the Romanic vulgar tongues into Spanish, Italian,
Portuguese, Provençal, French, we have the very scantiest remains; and
though the Strasburg oaths and the Eulalia hymn are no doubt
inestimable in their way, they supply exceedingly minute and
precarious stepping-stones by which to cross from Ausonius to the
_Chanson de Roland_. From the earliest literary stages of the Teutonic
tongues we have, except in the case of Anglo-Saxon and Icelandic, very
little wreckage of time; and Anglo-Saxon at least presents the
puzzling characteristic that its earliest remains are, _coeteris
paribus_, nearly as complete and developed as the earliest remains of
Greek. In German itself, whether High or Low, the change from oldest
to youngest is nothing like the change from the English of _Beowulf_
to the English of Browning. And though the same process of primordial
change as that which we have seen in English took place certainly in
German, and possibly in the Romance tongues, it is nowhere traceable
with anything like the same clearness or with such gradual
development. By the eleventh century at latest in France, by the end
of the twelfth in Germany, verse had taken, in the first case fully,
in the second almost fully, a modern form. In England it was, during
the two hundred years from 1150 to 1350, working itself steadily, and
with ample examples, from pure accent to accentual quantity, and from
alliteration to rhyme. Of this process, and those similar to it in
other countries, we shall give an account which will serve for the
whole in the latter part of this chapter; the actual production and
gradual transformation of English language and literature generally
may occupy us in the earlier part.
It is to be hoped that by this time a middle way, tolerably free from
molestation, may be taken between those historians of English who
would have a great gulf fixed before Chaucer, and those who insist
upon absolute continuity from Cædmon to Tennyson. There must surely be
something between dismissing (as did the best historian of the subject
in the last generation) Anglo-Saxon as "that nocturnal portion of our
literature," between calling it "impossible to pronounce with
certainty whether anything in it is artistically good or bad,"[88] and
thinking it proper, as it has sometimes been thought, in an
examination in English literature, to give four papers to Cædmon,
Ælfric, and Wulfstan, and one to the combined works of Addison, Pope,
Johnson, and Burke. Extravagances of the latter kind have still, their
heyday of reaction not being quite past, a better chance than
extravagances of the former. But both may surely be avoided.
[Footnote 88: See Craik, _History of English Literature_, 3d ed.
(London, 1866), i. 55.]
[Sidenote: _Decay of Anglo-Saxon._]
The evidence is rendered more easy in the present connection by the
fact, recognised by the most competent authorities in First English or
Anglo-Saxon itself, that for some time before the arbitrary line of
the Conquest the productive powers of the literature had been failing,
and the language itself was showing signs of change. No poetry of the
first class seems to have been written in it much after the end of the
ninth century, little prose of a very good class after the beginning
of the eleventh; and its inflexions must in time have given way--were,
it is said by some, actually giving way--before the results of the
invasion and assimilation of French and Latin. The Conquest helped;
but it did not wholly cause.
This, however, is no doubt open to argument, and the argument would
have to be conducted mainly if not wholly on philological
considerations, with which we do not here meddle. The indisputable
literary facts are that the canon of pure Anglo-Saxon or Old-English
literature closes with the end of the Saxon Chronicle in 1154, and
that the "Semi-Saxon," the "First Middle English," which then makes
its appearance, approximates, almost decade by decade, almost year by
year, nearer and nearer to the modern type. And for our purpose,
though not for the purpose of a history of English Literature proper,
the contemporary French and Latin writing has to be taken side by side
with it.
[Sidenote: _Early Middle English Literature._]
It is not surprising that, although the Latin literary production of
the time, especially in history, was at least equal to that of any
other European country, and though it is at least probable that some
of the greatest achievements of literature, French in language, are
English in nationality, the vernacular should for long have been a
little scanty and a little undistinguished in its yield. Periods of
moulting, of putting on new skins, and the like, are never periods of
extreme physical vigour. And besides, this Anglo-Saxon itself had (as
has been said) been distinctly on the wane as a literary language for
more than a century, while (as has not yet been said) it had never
been very fertile in varieties of profane literature. This infertility
is not surprising. Except at rare periods literature without literary
competition and comparison is impossible; and the Anglo-Saxons had
absolutely no modern literature to compare and compete with. If any
existed, their own was far ahead of it. On the other hand, though the
supposed ignorance of Latin and even Greek in the "dark" ages has long
been known to be a figment of ignorance itself, circumstances
connected with, though not confined to, the concentration of learning
and teaching in the clergy brought about a disproportionate attention
to theology. The result was that the completest Anglo-Saxon library of
which we can form any well-based conception would have contained about
ten cases of religious to one of non-religious books, and would have
held in that eleventh but little poetry, and hardly any prose with an
object other than information or practical use.
[Sidenote: _Scantiness of its constituents._]
It could not be expected that the slowly changing language should at
once change its habits in this respect. And so, as the century
immediately before the Conquest had seen little but chronicles and
homilies, leechdoms and laws, that which came immediately afterwards
gave at first no very different products, except that the laws were
wanting, for obvious reasons. Nay, the first, the largest, and almost
the sole work of _belles lettres_ during the first three-fourths of
our period, the _Brut_ of Layamon, is a work of _belles lettres_
without knowing it, and imagines itself to be a sober history, while
its most considerable contemporaries, the _Ormulum_ and the _Ancren
Riwle_, the former in verse, the latter in prose, are both purely
religious. At the extreme end of the period the most important and
most certain work, Robert of Gloucester's, is, again, a history in
verse. About the same time we have, indeed, the romances of _Havelok_
and _Horn_; but they are, like most of the other work of the time,
translations from the French. The interesting _Poema Morale_, or
"Moral Ode," which we have in two forms--one of the meeting-point of
the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, one fifty years later--is almost
certainly older than its earliest extant version, and was very likely
pure Saxon. Only in Nicholas of Guilford's _Owl and Nightingale_,
about 1250, and perhaps some of the charming _Specimens of Lyric
Poetry_, printed more than fifty years ago by Mr Wright, with a very
few other things, do we find pure literature--not the literature of
education or edification, but the literature of art and form.
[Sidenote: _Layamon._]
Yet the whole is, for the true student of literature, full enough of
interest, while the best things are not in need of praising by
allowance. Of Layamon mention has already been made in the chapter on
the Arthurian Legend. But his work covers very much more than the
Arthurian matter, and has interests entirely separate from it.
Layamon, as he tells us,[89] derived his information from Bede, Wace,
and a certain Albinus who has not been clearly identified. But he must
have added a great deal of his own, and if it could be decided exactly
_how_ he added it, the most difficult problem of mediæval literature
would be solved. Thus in the Arthurian part, just as we find additions
in Wace to Geoffrey, so we find additions to Wace in Layamon. Where
did he get these additions? Was it from the uncertain "Albinus"? Was
it, as Celtic enthusiasts hold, that, living as he did on Severn bank,
he was a neighbour of Wales, and gathered Welsh tradition? Or was it
from deliberate invention? We cannot tell.
[Footnote 89: Ed. Madden, i. 2.]
Again, we have two distinct versions of his _Brut_, the later of which
is fifty years or thereabouts younger than the earlier. It may be said
that almost all mediæval work is in similar case. But then the great
body of mediæval work is anonymous; and even the most scrupulous ages
have not been squeamish in taking liberties with the text of Mr Anon.
But the author is named in both these versions, and named differently.
In the elder he is Layamon the son of Leovenath, in the younger
Laweman the son of Leuca; and though Laweman is a mere variant or
translation of Layamon, as much can hardly be said of Leovenath and
Leuca. Further, the later version, besides the changes of language
which were in the circumstances inevitable, omits many passages,
besides those in which it is injured or mutilated, and alters proper
names entirely at discretion.
The only explanation of this, though it is an explanation which leaves
a good deal unexplained, is, of course, that the sense both of
historical criticism and of the duty of one writer to another was
hardly born. The curiosity of the Middle Ages was great; their
literary faculty, though somewhat incult and infantine, was great
likewise: and there were such enormous gaps in their positive
knowledge that the sharp sense of division between the certain, the
uncertain, and the demonstrably false, which has grown up later, could
hardly exist. It seems to have been every man's desire to leave each
tale a little richer, fuller, handsomer, than he found it: and in
doing this he hesitated neither at the accumulation of separate and
sometimes incongruous stories, nor at the insertion of bits and scraps
from various sources, nor, it would appear, at the addition of what
seemed to him possible or desirable, without troubling himself to
examine whether there was any ground for considering it actual.
[Sidenote: _The form of the_ Brut.]
Secondly, Layamon has no small interest of form. The language in which
the _Brut_ is written has an exceedingly small admixture of French
words; but it has made a step, and a long one, from Anglo-Saxon
towards English. The verse is still alliterative, still destitute of
any fixed number of syllables or syllabic equivalents. But the
alliteration is weak and sometimes not present at all, the lines are
of less extreme lawlessness in point of length than their older Saxon
representatives, and, above all, there is a creeping in of rhyme. It
is feeble, tentative, and obvious, confined to ostentatious pairs like
"brother" and "other," "might" and "right," "fare" and "care." But it
is a beginning: and we know that it will spread.
[Sidenote: _Its substance._]
In the last comparison, that of matter, Layamon will not come out ill
even if he be tried high. The most obvious trial is with the work of
Chrestien de Troyes, his earlier, though not much earlier,
contemporary. Here the Frenchman has enormous advantages--the
advantage of an infinitely more accomplished scheme of language and
metre, that of some two centuries of finished poetical work before
him, that of an evidently wider knowledge of literature generally, and
perhaps that of a more distinctly poetical genius. And yet Layamon can
survive the test. He is less, not more, subject to the _cliché_, the
stereotyped and stock poetical form, than Chrestien. If he is far less
smooth, he has not the monotony which accompanies and, so to speak,
dogs the "skipping octosyllable"; and if he cannot, as Chrestien can,
frame a set passage or show-piece, he manages to keep up a diffused
interest, and in certain instances--the story of Rouwènne (Rowena),
the Tintagel passage, the speech of Walwain to the Emperor of
Rome--has a directness and simple appeal which cannot be slighted. We
feel that he is at the beginning, while the other in respect of his
own division is nearly at the end: that he has future, capabilities,
opportunities of development. When one reads Chrestien or another
earlier contemporary, Benoît de Sainte-More, the question is, "What
can come after this?" When one reads Layamon the happier question is,
"What will come after this?"
[Sidenote: _The_ Ormulum. _Its metre._]
The _Ormulum_ and the _Ancren Riwle_ appear to be--the former exactly
and the latter nearly of the same date as Layamon, all being near to
1200. But though they were "good books," their interest is by no means
merely one of edification. That of the _Ormulum_[90] is, indeed,
almost entirely confined to its form and language; but it so happens
that this interest is of the kind that touches literature most nearly.
Orm or Ormin, who gives us his name, but of whom nothing else is
known, has left in ten thousand long lines or twenty thousand short
couplets a part only of a vast scheme of paraphrase and homiletic
commentary on the Four Gospels (the "four-in-hand of Aminadab," as he
calls them, taking up an earlier conceit), on the plan of taking a
text for each day from its gospel in the calendar. As we have only
thirty-two of these divisions, it is clear that the work, if
completed, was much larger than this. Orm addresses it to Walter, his
brother in the flesh as well as spiritually: the book seems to be
written in an Anglian or East Anglian dialect, and it is at least an
odd coincidence that the names Orm and Walter occur together in a
Durham MS. But whoever Orm or Ormin was, he did two very remarkable
things. In the first place, he broke entirely with alliteration and
with any-length lines, composing his poem in a metre which is either a
fifteen-syllabled iambic tetrameter catalectic, or else, as the reader
pleases, a series of distichs in iambic dimeters, alternately
acatalectic and catalectic. He does not rhyme, but his work, in the
couplet form which shows it best, exhibits occasionally the
alternation of masculine and feminine endings. This latter peculiarity
was not to take hold in the language; but the quantified or mainly
syllabic arrangement was. It was natural that Ormin, greatly daring,
and being almost the first to dare, should neither allow himself the
principle of equivalence shortly to distinguish English prosody from
the French, which, with Latin, he imitated, nor should further hamper
his already difficult task with rhyme. But his innovation was great
enough, and his name deserves--little positive poetry as there is in
his own book--high rank in the hierarchy of British poets. But for him
and others like him that magnificent mixed harmony, which English
almost alone of languages possesses, which distinguishes it as much
from the rigid syllabic bondage of French as from the loose jangle of
merely alliterative and accentual verse, would not have come in, or
would have come in later. We might have had Langland, but we should
not have had Chaucer: we should have had to console ourselves for the
loss of Surrey and Wyatt with ingenious extravagances like Gawain
Douglas's Eighth Prologue; and it is even possible that when the
reaction did come, as it must have come sooner or later, we might have
been bound like the French by the rigid syllable which Orm himself
adopted, but which in those early days only served to guide and not to
fetter.
[Footnote 90: Ed. White and Holt, 2 vols. Oxford, 1878.]
[Sidenote: _Its spelling._]
His second important peculiarity shows that he must have been an odd
and crotchety creature, but one with sense in his crotchets. He seems
to have been annoyed by mispronunciation of his own and other work:
and accordingly he adopts (with full warning and explanation) the plan
of invariably doubling the consonant after every _short_ vowel without
exception. This gives a most grotesque air to his pages, which are
studded with words like "nemmnedd" (named), "forrwerrpenn" (to
despise), "tunderrstanndenn" (to understand), and so forth. But, in
the first place, it fixes for all time, in a most invaluable manner,
the pronunciation of English at that time; and in the second, it shows
that Orm had a sound understanding of that principle of English which
has been set at nought by those who would spell "traveller"
"traveler." He knew that the tendency, and the, if not warned,
excusable tendency, of an English tongue would be to pronounce this
trav_ee_ler. It is a pity that knowledge which existed in the twelfth
century should apparently have become partial ignorance close to the
beginning of the twentieth.
[Sidenote: _The_ Ancren Riwle.]
The _Ancren Riwle_[91] has no oddities of this kind, and nothing
particularly noticeable in its form, though its easy pleasant prose
would have been wonderful at the time in any other European nation.
Even French prose was only just beginning to take such form, and had
not yet severed itself from poetic peculiarities to anything like the
same extent. But then the unknown author of the _Ancren Riwle_ had
certainly four or five, and perhaps more, centuries of good sound
Saxon prose before him: while St Bernard (if he wrote French prose),
and even Villehardouin, had little or nothing but Latin. I have called
him unknown, and he neither names himself nor is authoritatively named
by any one; while of the guesses respecting him, that which identifies
him with Simon of Ghent is refuted by the language of the book, while
that which assigns it to Bishop Poore has no foundation. But if we do
not know who wrote the book, we know for whom it was written--to wit,
for the three "anchoresses" or irregular nuns of a private convent or
sisterhood at Tarrant Keynes in Dorsetshire.
[Footnote 91: Ed. Morton, for the Camden Society. London, 1853. This
edition is, I believe, not regarded as quite satisfactory by
philology: it is amply adequate for literature.]
Later this nunnery, which lasted till the dissolution, was taken under
the Cistercian rule; but at first, and at the time of the book, it was
free, the author advising the inmates, if anybody asked, to say that
they were under "the rule of St James"--_i.e._, the famous definition,
by that apostle, of pure religion and undefiled. The treatise, which
describes itself, or is described in one of its MSS., as "one book
to-dealed into eight books," is of some length, but singularly
pleasing to read, and gives evidence of a very amiable and sensible
spirit in its author, as well as of a pretty talent for writing easy
prose. If he never rises to the more mystical and poetical beauties of
mediæval religion, so he never descends to its ferocities and its
puerilities. The rule, the "lady-rule," he says, is the inward; the
outward is only adopted in order to assist and help the inward:
therefore it may and should vary according to the individual, while
the inward cannot. The outward rule of the anchoresses of Tarrant
Keynes was by no means rigorous. They were three in number; they had
lay sisters (practically lady's-maids) as well as inferior servants.
They are not to reduce themselves to bread-and-water fasting without
special direction; they are not to be ostentatious in alms-giving;
they may have a pet cat; haircloth and hedgehog-skins are not for
them; and they are not to flog themselves with briars or leaded
thongs. Ornaments are not to be worn; but a note says that this is not
a positive command, all such things belonging merely to the external
rule. Also they may wash just as often as it is necessary, or as they
like!--an item which, absurd as is the popular notion of the dirt of
the Middle Ages, speaks volumes for the sense and taste of this
excellent anonym.
This part is the last or eighth "dole," as the sections are termed;
the remaining seven deal with religious service, private devotion, the
_Wesen_ or nature of anchorites, temptation, confession, penance,
penitence, and the love of God. Although some may think it out of
fashion, it is astonishing how much sense, kindliness, true religion,
and useful learning there is in this monitor of the anchoresses of
Tarrant Keynes, which place a man might well visit in pilgrimage to
do him honour. Every now and then, rough as is his vehicle of
speech--a transition medium, endowed neither with the oak-and-rock
strength of Anglo-Saxon nor with the varied gifts of modern
English--he can rise to real and true eloquence, as where he speaks of
the soul and "the heavy flesh that draweth her downwards, yet through
the highship [nobleness] of her, it [the flesh] shall become full
light--yea, lighter than the wind is, and brighter than the sun is, if
only it follow her and draw her not too hard to its own low kind." But
though such passages, good in phrase and rhythm, as well as noble in
sense, are not rare, the pleasant humanity of the whole book is the
best thing in it. M. Renan oddly enough pronounced _Ecclesiastes_,
that voice of the doom of life, to be "le seul livre aimable" which
Judaism had produced. The ages of St Francis and of the _Imitation_ do
not compel us to look about for a _seul livre aimable_, but it may
safely be said that there is none more amiable in a cheerful human way
than the _Ancren Riwle_.
It would serve no purpose here to discuss in detail most of the other
vernacular productions of the first half of the thirteenth century in
English.[92] They are almost without exception either religious--the
constant rehandling of the time cannot be better exemplified than by
the fact that at least two paraphrases, one in prose, one in verse, of
one of the "doles" of the _Ancren Riwle_ itself exist--or else
moral-scientific, such as the _Bestiary_,[93] so often printed. One of
the constantly recurring version-paraphrases of the Scriptures,
however--the so-called _Story of Genesis and Exodus_,[94] supposed to
date from about the middle--has great interest, because here we find
(whether for the first time or not he would be a rash man who should
say, but certainly for almost, if not quite, the first) the famous
"Christabel" metre--iambic dimeter, rhymed with a wide licence of
trisyllabic equivalence. This was to be twice revived by great poets,
with immense consequences to English poetry--first by Spenser in the
_Kalendar_, and then by Coleridge himself--and was to become one of
the most powerful, varied, and charming of English rhythms. That this
metre, the chief battle-ground of fighting between the accent-men and
the quantity-men, never arose till after rhymed quantitative metre had
met accentual alliteration, and had to a great extent overcome it, is
a tell-tale fact, of which more hereafter. And it is to be observed
also that in this same poem it is possible to discover not a few very
complete and handsome decasyllables which would do no discredit to
Chaucer himself.
[Footnote 92: Substantial portions of all the work mentioned in this
chapter will be found in Messrs Morris and Skeat's invaluable
_Specimens of Early English_ (Oxford, Part i. ed. 2, 1887; Part ii.
ed. 3, 1894). These include the whole of the _Moral Ode_ and of _King
Horn_. Separate complete editions of some are noted below.]
[Footnote 93: Wright, _Reliquiæ Antiquæ_, i. 208-227.]
[Footnote 94: Ed. Morris, E.E.T.S., London, 1865.]
[Sidenote: _The_ Owl and the Nightingale.]
[Sidenote: _Proverbs._]
But the _Owl and the Nightingale_[95] is another kind of thing. In
the first place, it appears to be (though it would be rash to affirm
this positively of anything in a form so popular with the French
_trouvères_ as the _débat_) original and not translated. It bears a
name, that of Nicholas of Guildford, who seems to be the author, and
assigns himself a local habitation at Portesham in Dorsetshire.
Although of considerable length (nearly two thousand lines), and
written in very pure English with few French words, it manages the
rhymed octosyllabic couplet (which by this time had become the
standing metre of France for everything but historical poems, and for
some of these) with remarkable precision, lightness, and harmony.
Moreover, the Owl and the Nightingale conduct their debate with plenty
of mother-wit, expressed not unfrequently in proverbial form. Indeed
proverbs, a favourite form of expression with Englishmen at all times,
appear to have been specially in favour just then; and the "Proverbs
of Alfred"[96] (supposed to date from this very time), the "Proverbs
of Hendyng"[97] a little later, are not likely to have been the only
collections of the kind. The Alfred Proverbs are in a rude popular
metre like the old alliteration much broken down; those of Hendyng in
a six-line stanza (soon to become the famous ballad stanza) syllabled,
though sometimes catalectically, 8 8 6 8 8 6, and rhymed _a a b c c
b_, the proverb and the _coda_ "quod Hendyng" being added to each.
The _Owl and the Nightingale_ is, however, as we might expect,
superior to both of these in poetical merit, as well as to the
so-called _Moral Ode_ which, printed by Hickes in 1705, was one of the
first Middle English poems to gain modern recognition.
[Footnote 95: About 600 lines of this are given by Morris and Skeat.
Completely edited by (among others) F.H. Stratmann. Krefeld, 1868.]
[Footnote 96: Ed. Morris, _An Old English Miscellany_. London, 1872.]
[Footnote 97: See _Reliquiæ Antiquæ_, i. 109-116.]
[Sidenote: _Robert of Gloucester._]
As the dividing-point of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries
approaches, the interest of literary work increases, and requires less
and less allowance of historical and accidental value. This allowance,
indeed, is still necessary with the verse chronicle of Robert of
Gloucester,[98] the date of which is fixed with sufficient certainty
at 1298. This book has been somewhat undervalued, in point of strict
literary merit, from a cause rather ludicrous but still real. It will
almost invariably be found that those mediæval books which happen to
have been made known before the formal beginning of scholarship in the
modern languages, are underrated by modern scholars, who not
unnaturally put a perhaps excessive price upon their own discoveries
or fosterlings. Robert of Gloucester's work, with the later but
companion Englishing of Peter of Langtoft by Robert Manning of Brunne,
was published by Hearne in the early part of the last century. The
contemporaries of that publication thought him rude, unkempt,
"Gothick": the moderns have usually passed him by for more direct
_protégés_ of their own. Yet there is not a little attraction in
Robert. To begin with, he is the first in English, if not the first in
any modern language, to attempt in the vernacular a general history,
old as well as new, new as well as old. And the opening of him is not
to be despised--
"Engeland is a well good land, I ween of each land the best,
Yset in the end of the world, as all in the West:
The sea goeth him all about, he stands as an isle,
His foes he dares the less doubt but it be through guile
Of folk of the self land, as men hath y-seen while."
[Footnote 98: Edited with Langtoft, in 4 vols., by Hearne, Oxford,
1724; and reprinted, London, 1810. Also more lately in the Rolls
Series.]
And in the same good swinging metre he goes on describing the land,
praising its gifts, and telling its story in a downright fashion which
is very agreeable to right tastes. Like almost everybody else, he drew
upon Geoffrey of Monmouth for his early history: but from at least the
time of the Conqueror (he is strongly prejudiced in the matter of
Harold) he represents, if not what we should call solid historical
knowledge, at any rate direct, and for the time tolerably fresh,
historical tradition, while as he approaches his own time he becomes
positively historical, and, as in the case of the Oxford town-and-gown
row of 1263, the first Barons' Wars, the death of the Earl-Marshal,
and such things, is a vigorous as well as a tolerably authoritative
chronicler. In the history of English prosody he, too, is of great
importance, being another landmark in the process of consolidating
accent and quantity, alliteration and rhyme. His swinging verses still
have the older tendency to a trochaic rather than the later to an
anapæstic rhythm; but they are, so to speak, on the move, and
approaching the later form. He is still rather prone to group his
rhymes instead of keeping the couplets separate: but as he is not
translating from _chanson de geste_ form, he does not, as Robert of
Brunne sometimes does, fall into complete _laisses_. I have counted as
many as twenty continuous rhymes in Manning, and there may be more:
but there is nothing of that extent in the earlier Robert.
[Sidenote: _Romances._]
Verse history, however, must always be an awkward and unnatural form
at the best. The end of the thirteenth century had something better to
show in the appearance of romance proper and of epic. When the study
of any department of old literature begins, there is a natural and
almost invariable tendency to regard it as older than it really is;
and when, at the end of the last century, the English verse romances
began to be read, this tendency prevailed at least as much as usual.
Later investigation, besides showing that, almost without exception,
they are adaptations of French originals, has, partly as a consequence
of this, shown that scarcely any that we have are earlier than the
extreme end of the thirteenth century. Among these few that are,
however, three of exceptional interest (perhaps the best three except
_Gawaine and the Green Knight_ and _Sir Launfal_) may probably be
classed--to wit, _Horn_, _Havelok_, and the famous _Sir Tristram_. As
to the last and best known of these, which from its inclusion among
Sir Walter Scott's works has received attention denied to the rest, it
may or may not be the work of Thomas the Rhymer. But whether it is or
not, it can by no possibility be later than the first quarter of the
fourteenth century, while the most cautious critics pronounce both
_Havelok the Dane_ and _King Horn_ to be older than 1300.[99]
[Footnote 99: _Tristram_, for editions _v._ p. 116: _Havelok_, edited
by Madden, 1828, and again by Prof. Skeat, E.E.T.S., 1868. _King Horn_
has been repeatedly printed--first by Ritson, _Ancient English
Metrical Romances_ (London, 1802), ii. 91, and Appendix; last by Prof.
Skeat in the _Specimens_ above mentioned.]
[Sidenote: Havelok the Dane.]
It is, moreover, not a mere accident that these three, though the
authors pretty certainly had French originals before them, seem most
likely to have had yet older English or Anglo-Saxon originals of the
French in the case of _Horn_ and _Havelok_, while the Tristram story,
as is pointed out in the chapter on the Arthurian Legend, is the most
British in tone of all the divisions of that Legend. _Havelok_ and
_Horn_ have yet further interest because of the curious contrast
between their oldest forms in more ways than one. _Havelok_ is an
English equivalent, with extremely strong local connections and
identifications, of the homelier passages of the French _chansons de
geste_. The hero, born in Denmark, and orphan heir to a kingdom, is to
be put away by his treacherous guardian, who commits him to Grim the
fisherman to be drowned. Havelok's treatment is hard enough even on
his way to the drowning; but as supernatural signs show his kingship
to Grim's wife, and as the fisherman, feigning to have performed his
task, meets with very scant gratitude from his employer, he resolves
to escape from the latter's power, puts to sea, and lands in England
at the place afterwards to be called from him Grimsby. Havelok is
brought up simply as a rough fisher-boy; but he obtains employment in
Lincoln Castle as porter to the kitchen, and much rough horse-play of
the _chanson_ kind occurs. Now it so happens that the heiress of
England, Goldborough, has been treated by her guardian with as much
injustice though with less ferocity; and the traitor seeks to crown
his exclusion of her from her rights by marrying her to the sturdy
scullion. When the two rights are thus joined, they of course prevail,
and the two traitors, after a due amount of hard fighting, receive
their doom, Godard the Dane being hanged, and Godric the Englishman
burnt at the stake. This rough and vigorous story is told in rough and
vigorous verse--octosyllabic couplets, with full licence in
shortening, but with no additional syllables except an occasional
double rhyme--in very sterling English, and with some, though slight,
traces of alliteration.
[Sidenote: King Horn.]
_Horn_ (_King Horn_, _Horn-Child and Maiden Rimnilde_, &c.) is
somewhat more courtly in its general outlines, and has less of the
folk-tale about it; but it also has connections with Denmark, and it
turns upon treachery, as indeed do nearly all the romances. Horn, son
of a certain King Murray, is, in consequence of a raid of heathen in
ships, orphaned and exiled in his childhood across the sea, where he
finds an asylum in the house of King Aylmer of Westerness. His love
for Aylmer's daughter Rimenhild and hers for him (he is the most
beautiful of men), the faithfulness of his friend Athulf (who has to
undergo the very trying experience of being made violent love to by
Rimenhild under the impression that he is Horn), and the treachery of
his friend Fikenild (who nearly succeeds in making the princess his
own), defray the chief interest of the story, which is not very long.
The good steward Athelbrus also plays a great part, which is
noticeable, because the stewards of Romances are generally bad. The
rhymed couplets of this poem are composed of shorter lines than those
of _Havelok_. They allow themselves the syllabic licence of
alliterative verse proper, though there is even less alliteration than
in _Havelok_, and they vary from five to eight syllables, though five
and six are the commonest. The poem, indeed, in this respect occupies
a rather peculiar position. Yet it is all the more valuable as showing
yet another phase of the change.
The first really charming literature in English has, however, still to
be mentioned: and this is to be found in the volume--little more than
a pamphlet--edited fifty years ago for the Percy Society (March 1,
1842) by Thomas Wright, under the title of _Specimens of Lyric Poetry
composed in England in the Reign of Edward the First_, from MS. 2253
Harl. in the British Museum. The first three poems are in French, of
the well-known and by this time far from novel _trouvère_ character,
of which those of Thibaut of Champagne are the best specimens. The
fourth--
"Middel-erd for mon wes mad,"
is English, and is interesting as copying not the least intricate of
the _trouvère_ measures--an eleven-line stanza of eight sevens or
sixes, rhymed _ab, ab, ab, ab, c, b, c_; but moral-religious in tone
and much alliterated. The fifth, also English, is anapæstic tetrameter
heavily alliterated, and mono-rhymed for eight verses, with the stanza
made up to ten by a couplet on another rhyme. It is not very
interesting. But with VI. the chorus of sweet sounds begins, and
therefore, small as is the room for extract here, it must be given in
full:--
"Bytuene Mershe and Avoril
When spray beginneth to springe,
The little foul hath hire wyl
On hyre lud to synge:
Ich libbe in love-longinge
For semlokest of alle thynge,
He may me blisse bringe
Icham in hire banndoun.
An hendy hap ichabbe y-hent,
Ichot from hevine it is me sent,
From alle wymmen my love is lent
Ant lyht on Alisoun.
On hew hire her is fayr ynoh
Hire browe bronne, hire eye blake;
With lovsom chere he on me loh;
With middel small ant wel y-make;
Bott he me wille to hire take,
For to buen hire owen make,
Long to lyven ichulle forsake,
Ant feye fallen a-doun.
An hendy hap, &c.
Nihtes when I wenke ant wake,
For-thi myn wonges waxeth won;
Levedi, al for thine sake
Longinge is ylent me on.
In world is non so wytor mon
That al hire bounté telle con;
Heir swyre is whittere than the swon
Ant fayrest may in toune.
An hendy hap, &c.
Icham for wouyng al for-wake,
Wery so water in wore
Lest any reve me my make
Ychabbe y-[y]yrned [y]ore.
Betere is tholien whyle sore
Then mournen evermore.
Geynest under gore,
Herkene to my roune.
An hendy hap, &c."
The next, "With longyng y am lad," is pretty, though less so: and is
in ten-line stanzas of sixes, rhymed _a a b, a a b, b a a b_. Those of
VIII. are twelve-lined in eights, rhymed _ab, ab, ab, ab, c, d, c, d_;
but it is observable that there is some assonance here instead of pure
rhyme. IX. is in the famous romance stanza of six or rather twelve
lines, _à la_ _Sir Thopas_; X. in octaves of eights alternately rhymed
with an envoy quatrain; XI. (a very pretty one) in a new metre, rhymed
_a a a b a, b_. And this variety continues after a fashion which it
would be tedious to particularise further. But it must be said that
the charm of "Alison" is fully caught up by--
"Lenten ys come with love to toune,
With blosmen ant with bryddes roune,
That al this blisse bringeth;
Dayes-eyes in this dales,
Notes suete of nytengales,
Ilk foul song singeth;"
by a sturdy Praise of Women which charges gallantly against the usual
mediæval slanders; and by a piece which, with "Alison," is the flower
of the whole, and has the exquisite refrain--
"Blow, northerne wynd,
Send thou me my suetyng,
Blow, northerne wynd, blou, blou, blou"--
Here is Tennysonian verse five hundred years before Tennyson. The
"cry" of English lyric is on this northern wind at last; and it shall
never fail afterwards.
[Sidenote: _The prosody of the modern languages._]
[Sidenote: _Historical retrospect._]
This seems to be the best place to deal, not merely with the form of
English lyric in itself, but with the general subject of the prosody
as well of English as of the other modern literary languages. A very
great[100] deal has been written, with more and with less learning,
with ingenuity greater or smaller, on the origins of rhyme, on the
source of the decasyllabic and other staple lines and stanzas; and,
lastly, on the general system of modern as opposed to ancient
scansion. Much of this has been the result of really careful study,
and not a little of it the result of distinct acuteness; but it has
suffered on the whole from the supposed need of some new theory, and
from an unwillingness to accept plain and obvious facts. These facts,
or the most important of them, may be summarised as follows: The
prosody of a language will necessarily vary according to the
pronunciation and composition of that language; but there are certain
general principles of prosody which govern all languages possessing a
certain kinship. These general principles were, for the Western
branches of the Aryan tongues, very early discovered and formulated by
the Greeks, being later adjusted to somewhat stiffer rules--to
compensate for less force of poetic genius, or perhaps merely because
licence was not required--by the Latins. Towards the end of the
classical literary period, however, partly the increasing importance
of the Germanic and other non-Greek and non-Latin elements in the
Empire, partly those inexplicable organic changes which come from time
to time, broke up this system. Rhyme appeared, no one knows quite how,
or why, or whence, and at the same time, though the general structure
of metres was not very much altered, the quantity of individual
syllables appears to have undergone a complete change. Although metres
quantitative in scheme continued to be written, they were written, as
a rule, with more or less laxity; and though rhyme was sometimes
adapted to them in Latin, it was more frequently used with a looser
syllabic arrangement, retaining the divisional characteristics of the
older prosody, but neglecting quantity, the strict rules of elision,
and so forth.
[Footnote 100: It is sufficient to mention here Guest's famous
_English Rhythms_ (ed. Skeat, 1882), a book which at its first
appearance in 1838 was no doubt a revelation, but which carries things
too far; Dr Schipper's _Grundriss der Englischen Metrik_ (Wien, 1895),
and for foreign matters M. Gaston Paris's chapter in his _Littérature
Française au Moyen Age_. I do not agree with any of them, but I have a
profound respect for all.]
[Sidenote: _Anglo-Saxon prosody._]
On the other hand, some of the new Teutonic tongues which were thus
brought into contact with Latin, and with which Latin was brought into
contact, had systems of prosody of their own, based on entirely
different principles. The most elaborate of these probably, and the
only one from which we have distinct remains of undoubtedly old matter
in considerable quantities, is Anglo-Saxon, though Icelandic runs it
close. A detailed account of the peculiarities of this belongs to the
previous volume: it is sufficient to say here that its great
characteristic was alliteration, and that accent played a large part,
to the exclusion both of definite quantity and of syllabic identity or
equivalence.
[Sidenote: _Romance prosody._]
While these were the states of things with regard to Latin on the one
hand, and to the tongues most separated from Latin on the other, the
Romance languages, or daughters of Latin, had elaborated or were
elaborating, by stages which are almost entirely hidden from us,
middle systems, of which the earliest, and in a way the most perfect,
is that of Provençal, followed by Northern French and Italian, the
dialects of the Spanish Peninsula being a little behindhand in
elaborate verse. The three first-named tongues seem to have hit upon
the verse of ten or eleven syllables, which later crystallised itself
into ten for French and eleven for Italian, as their staple
measure.[101] Efforts have been made to father this directly on some
classical original, and some authorities have even been uncritical
enough to speak of the connection--this or that--having been "proved"
for these verses or others. No such proof has been given, and none is
possible. What is certain, and alone certain, is that whereas the
chief literary metre of the last five centuries of Latin had been
dactylic and trisyllabic, this, the chief metre of the daughter
tongues, and by-and-by almost their only one, was disyllabic--iambic,
or trochaic, as the case may be, but generally iambic. Rhyme became by
degrees an invariable or almost invariable accompaniment, and while
quantity, strictly speaking, almost disappeared (some will have it
that it quite disappeared from French), a syllabic uniformity more
rigid than any which had prevailed, except in the case of lyric
measures like the Alcaic, became the rule. Even elision was very
greatly restricted, though cæsura was pretty strictly retained, and an
additional servitude was imposed by the early adoption in French of
the fixed alternation of "masculine" and "feminine" rhymes--that is to
say, of rhymes with, and rhymes without, the mute _e_.
[Footnote 101: _Vide_ Dante, _De Vulgari Eloquio_.]
[Sidenote: _English prosody._]
[Sidenote: _The later alliteration._]
But the prosody of the Romance tongues is perfectly simple and
intelligible, except in the one crux of the question how it came into
being, and what part "popular" poetry played in it. We find it, almost
from the first, full-blown: and only minor refinements or improvements
are introduced afterwards. With English prosody it is very
different.[102] As has been said, the older prosody itself, with the
older verse, seems to have to a great extent died out even before the
Conquest, and what verse was written in the alliterative measures
afterwards was of a feeble and halting kind. Even when, as the authors
of later volumes of this series will have to show, alliterative verse
was taken up with something like a set purpose during the fourteenth
and fifteenth centuries, its character was wholly changed, and though
some very good work was written in it, it was practically all literary
exercise. It frequently assumed regular stanza-forms, the lines also
frequently fell into regular quantitative shapes, such as the heroic,
the Alexandrine, and the tetrameter. Above all, the old strict and
accurate combination of a limited amount of alliteration, jealously
adjusted to words important in sense and rhythm, was exchanged for a
profusion of alliterated syllables, often with no direct rhythmical
duty to pay, and constantly leading to mere senseless and tasteless
jingle, if not to the positive coining of fantastic or improper
locutions to get the "artful aid."
[Footnote 102: What is said here of English applies with certain
modifications to German, though the almost entire loss of Old German
poetry and the comparatively late date of Middle make the process less
striking and more obscure, and the greater talent of the individual
imitators of French interferes more with the process of insensible
shaping and growth. German prosody, despite the charm of its lyric
measures, has never acquired the perfect combination of freedom and
order which we find in English, as may be seen by comparing the best
blank verse of the two.]
[Sidenote: _The new verse._]
Meanwhile the real prosody of English had been elaborated, in the
usual blending fashion of the race, by an intricate, yet, as it
happens, an easily traceable series of compromises and naturalisations.
By the end of the twelfth century, as we have seen, rhyme was
creeping in to supersede alliteration, and a regular arrangement of
elastic syllabic equivalents or strict syllabic values was taking the
place of the irregular accented lengths. It does not appear that the
study of the classics had anything directly to do with this: it is
practically certain that the influence on the one hand of Latin hymns
and the Church services, and on the other of French poetry, had very
much.
[Sidenote: _Rhyme and syllabic equivalence._]
Rhyme is to the modern European ear so agreeable, if not so
indispensable, an ornament of verse, that, once heard, it is sure to
creep in, and can only be expelled by deliberate and unnatural
crotchet from any but narrative and dramatic poetry. On the other
hand, it is almost inevitable that when rhyme is expected, the lines
which it tips should be reduced to an equal or at any rate an
equivalent length. Otherwise the expectation of the ear--that the
final ring should be led up to by regular and equable rhythm--is
baulked. If this is not done, as in what we call doggerel rhyme, an
effect of grotesque is universally produced, to the ruin of serious
poetic effect. With these desiderata present, though unconsciously
present, before them, with the Latin hymn-writers and the French poets
for models, and with Church music perpetually starting in their
memories cadences, iambic or trochaic, dactylic or anapæstic, to which
to set their own verse, it is not surprising that English poets should
have accompanied the rapid changes of their language itself with
parallel rapidity of metrical innovation. Quantity they observed
loosely--quantity in modern languages is always loose: but it does
not follow that they ignored it altogether.
[Sidenote: _Accent and quantity._]
Those who insist that they did ignore it, and who painfully search for
verses of so many "accents," for "sections," for "pauses," and what
not, are confronted with difficulties throughout the whole course of
English poetry: there is hardly a page of that brilliant, learned,
instructive, invaluable piece of wrong-headedness, Dr Guest's _English
Rhythms_, which does not bristle with them. But at no time are these
difficulties so great as during our present period, and especially at
the close of it. Let any man who has no "prize to fight," no thesis to
defend, take any characteristic piece of Anglo-Saxon poetry and
"Alison," place them side by side, read them aloud together, scan them
carefully with the eye, compare each separately and both together with
as many other examples of poetic arrangement as he likes. He must, I
think, be hopelessly blinded by prejudice if he does not come to the
conclusion that there is a gulf between the systems of which these two
poems are examples--that if the first is "accentual," "sectional," and
what not, then these same words are exactly _not_ the words which
ought to be applied to the second.[103] And he will further see that
with "Alison" there is not the slightest difficulty whatever, but
that, on the contrary, it is the natural and all but inevitable thing
to do to scan the piece according to classical laws, allowing only
much more licence of "common" syllables--common in themselves and by
position--than in Latin, and rather more than in Greek.
[Footnote 103: Of course there is plenty of alliteration in "Alison."
That ornament is too grateful to the English ear ever to have ceased
or to be likely to cease out of English poetry. But it has ceased to
possess any _metrical_ value; it has absolutely nothing to do with the
_structure_ of the line.]
[Sidenote: _The gain of form._]
Yet another conclusion may perhaps be risked, and that is that this
change of prosody was either directly caused by, or in singular
coincidence was associated with, a great enlargement of the range and
no slight improvement of the quality of poetry. Anglo-Saxon verse at
its best has grandeur, mystery, force, a certain kind of pathos. But
it is almost entirely devoid of sweetness, of all the lighter artistic
attractions, of power to represent other than religious passion, of
adaptability to the varied uses of lyric. All these additional gifts,
and in no slight measure, have now been given; and there is surely an
almost fanatical hatred of form in the refusal to connect the gain
with those changes, in vocabulary first, in prosody secondly, which
have been noted. For there is not only the fact, but there is a more
than plausible reason for the fact. The alliterative accentual verse
of indefinite length is obviously unsuited for all the lighter, and
for some of the more serious, purposes of verse. Unless it is at
really heroic height (and at this height not even Shakespeare can keep
poetry invariably) it must necessarily be flat, awkward, prosaic,
heavy, all which qualities are the worst foes of the Muses. The new
equipments may not have been indispensable to the poet's soaring--they
may not be the greater wings of his song, the mighty pinions that take
him beyond Space and Time into Eternity and the Infinite. But they
are most admirable _talaria_, ankle-winglets enabling him to skim and
scud, to direct his flight this way and that, to hover as well as to
tower, even to run at need as well as to fly.
That a danger was at hand, the danger of too great restriction in the
syllabic direction, has been admitted. The greatest poet of the
fourteenth century in England--the greatest, for the matter of that,
from the beginning till the sixteenth--went some way in this path, and
if Chaucer's English followers had been men of genius we might have
been sorely trammelled. Fortunately Lydgate and Occleve and Hawes
showed the dangers rather than the attractions of strictness, and the
contemporary practice of alliterative irregulars kept alive the
appetite for liberty. But at this time--at our time--it was
restriction, regulation, quantification, metrical arrangement, that
English needed; and it received them.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: _The "accent" theory._]
These remarks are of course not presented as a complete account, even
in summary, of English, much less of European prosody. They are barely
more than the heads of such a summary, or than indications of the line
which the inquiry might, and in the author's view should, take.
Perhaps they may be worked out--or rather the working out of them may
be published--more fully hereafter. But for the present they may
possibly be useful as a protest against the "accent" and "stress"
theories which have been so common of late years in regard to English
poetry, and which, though not capable of being applied in quite the
same fashion to the Romance languages, have had their counterparts in
attempts to decry the application of classical prosody (which has
never been very well understood on the Continent) to modern tongues.
No one can speak otherwise than respectfully of Dr Guest, whose book
is certainly one of the most patient and ingenious studies of the kind
to be found in any literature, and whose erudition, at a time when
such erudition needed far greater efforts than now, cannot be too
highly praised. But it is a besetting sin or disease of Englishmen in
all matters, after pooh-poohing innovation, to go blindly in for it;
and I cannot but think that Dr Guest's accentual theory, after being
for years mainly neglected, has, for years again, been altogether too
greedily swallowed. It is not of course a case necessarily of want of
scholarship, or want of ear, for there are few better scholars or
poets than Mr Robert Bridges, who, though not a mere Guestite, holds
theories of prosody which seem to me even less defensible than
Guest's. But it is, I think, a case of rather misguided patriotism,
which thinks it necessary to invent an English prosody for English
poems.
[Sidenote: _Initial fallacies._]
This is surely a mistake. Allowances in degree, in shade, in local
colour, there must of course be in prosody as in other things. The
developments, typical and special, of English prosody in the
nineteenth century cannot be quite the same as those of Greek two
thousand years ago, or of French to-day. But if, as I see not the
slightest reason for doubting, prosody is not an artificially acquired
art but a natural result of the natural desires, the universal organs
of humanity, it is excessively improbable that the prosodic results of
nations so nearly allied to each other, and so constantly studying
each other's work, as Greeks, Romans, and modern Europeans, should be
in any great degree different. If quantity, if syllabic equivalence
and so forth, do not display themselves in Anglo-Saxon or in
Icelandic, it must be remembered that the poetry of these nations was
after all comparatively small, rather isolated, and in the conditions
of extremely early development--a childish thing to which there is not
the slightest rhyme or reason for straining ourselves to assimilate
the things of manhood. That accent modified English prosody nobody
need deny; there is no doubt that the very great freedom of
equivalence--which makes it, for instance, at least theoretically
possible to compose an English heroic line of five tribrachs--and the
immense predominance of common syllables in the language, are due in
some degree to a continuance of accentual influence.
[Sidenote: _And final perversities thereof._]
But to go on from this, as Dr Guest and some of his followers have
done, to the subjection of the whole invaluable vocabulary of
classical prosody to a sort of _præmunire_, to hold up the hands in
horror at the very name of a tribrach, and exhibit symptoms of
catalepsy at the word catalectic--to ransack the dictionary for
unnatural words or uses of words like "catch," and "stop," and
"pause," where a perfectly clear and perfectly flexible terminology is
ready to your hand--this does seem to me in another sense a very
childish thing indeed, and one that cannot be too soon put away. It is
no exaggeration to say that the extravagances, the unnatural
contortions of scansion, the imputations of irregularity and
impropriety on the very greatest poets with which Dr Guest's book
swarms, must force themselves on any one who studies that book
thoroughly and impartially. When theory leads to the magisterial
indorsement of "gross fault" on some of the finest passages of
Shakespeare and Milton, because they "violate" Dr Guest's privy law of
"the final pause"; when we are told that "section 9," as Dr Guest is
pleased to call that admirable form of "sixes," the anapæst followed
by two iambs,[104] one of the great sources of music in the ballad
metre, is "a verse which has very little to recommend it"; when one of
Shakespeare's secrets, the majestic full stop before the last word of
the line, is black-marked as "opposed to every principle of accentual
rhythm," then the thing becomes not so much outrageous as absurd.
Prosody respectfully and intelligently attempting to explain how the
poets produce their best things is useful and agreeable: when it makes
an arbitrary theory beforehand, and dismisses the best things as bad
because they do not agree therewith, it becomes a futile nuisance. And
I believe that there is no period of our literature which, when
studied, will do more to prevent or correct such fatuity than this
very period of Early Middle English.
[Footnote 104: His instance is Burns's--
"Like a rogue | for for | gerie."
It is a pity he did not reinforce it with many of the finest lines in
_The Ancient Mariner_.]