There is a story, very dear for some reason to our ancestors, that
Apelles, or I forget what other Greek painter, grown desperate at the
failure of his efforts to portray realistically the foam on a dog’s
mouth, threw his sponge at the picture in a pet, and was rewarded for
his ill-temper by discovering that the resultant smudge was the living
image of the froth whose aspect he had been unable, with all his art, to
recapture. No one will ever know the history of all the happy mistakes,
the accidents and unconscious deviations into genius, that have helped
to enrich the world’s art. They are probably countless. I myself have
deviated more than once into accidental felicities. Recently, for
example, the hazards of careless typewriting caused me to invent a new
portmanteau word of the most brilliantly Laforguian quality. I had meant
to write the phrase “the Human Comedy,” but, by a happy slip, I put my
finger on the letter that stands next to “C” on the universal keyboard.
When I came to read over the completed page I found that I had written
“the Human Vomedy.” Was there ever a criticism of life more succinct and
expressive? To the more sensitive and queasy among the gods the last few
years must indeed have seemed a vomedy of the first order.
The grossest forms of mistake have played quite a distinguished part in
the history of letters. One thinks, for example, of the name Criseida or
Cressida manufactured out of a Greek accusative, of that Spenserian
misunderstanding of Chaucer which gave currency to the rather ridiculous
substantive “derring-do.” Less familiar, but more deliciously absurd, is
Chaucer’s slip in reading “naves ballatrices” for “naves
bellatrices”—ballet-ships instead of battle-ships—and his translation
“shippes hoppesteres.” But these broad, straightforward howlers are
uninteresting compared with the more subtle deviations into originality
occasionally achieved by authors who were trying their best not to be
original. Nowhere do we find more remarkable examples of accidental
brilliance than among the post-Chaucerian poets, whose very indistinct
knowledge of what precisely _was_ the metre in which they were trying to
write often caused them to produce very striking variations on the
staple English measure.
Chaucer’s variations from the decasyllable norm were deliberate. So, for
the most part, were those of his disciple Lydgate, whose favourite
“broken-backed” line, lacking the first syllable of the iambus that
follows the cæsura, is metrically of the greatest interest to
contemporary poets. Lydgate’s characteristic line follows this model:
For speechéless nothing maist thou speed.
Judiciously employed, the broken-backed line might yield very beautiful
effects. Lydgate, as has been said, was probably pretty conscious of
what he was doing. But his procrustean methods were apt to be a little
indiscriminate, and one wonders sometimes whether he was playing
variations on a known theme or whether he was rather tentatively groping
after the beautiful regularity of his master Chaucer. The later
fifteenth and sixteenth century poets seem to have worked very much in
the dark. The poems of such writers as Hawes and Skelton abound in the
vaguest parodies of the decasyllable line. Anything from seven to
fifteen syllables will serve their turn. With them the variations are
seldom interesting. Chance had not much opportunity of producing subtle
metrical effects with a man like Skelton, whose mind was naturally so
full of jigging doggerel that his variations on the decasyllable are
mostly in the nature of rough skeltonics. I have found interesting
accidental variations on the decasyllable in Heywood, the writer of
moralities. This, from the _Play of Love_, has a real metrical beauty:
Felt ye but one pang such as I feel many,
One pang of despair or one pang of desire,
One pang of one displeasant look of her eye,
One pang of one word of her mouth as in ire,
Or in restraint of her love which I desire—
One pang of all these, felt once in all your life,
Should quail your opinion and quench all our strife.
These dactylic resolutions of the third and fourth lines are extremely
interesting.
But the most remarkable example of accidental metrical invention that I
have yet come across is to be found in the Earl of Surrey’s translation
of Horace’s ode on the golden mean. Surrey was one of the pioneers of
the reaction against the vagueness and uncertain carelessness of the
post-Chaucerians. From the example of Italian poetry he had learned that
a line must have a fixed number of syllables. In all his poems his aim
is always to achieve regularity at whatever cost. To make sure of having
ten syllables in every line it is evident that Surrey made use of his
fingers as well as his ears. We see him at his worst and most laborious
in the first stanza of his translation:
Of thy life, Thomas, this compass well mark:
Ne by coward dread in shunning storms dark
Not aye with full sails the high seas to beat;
On shallow shores thy keel in peril freat.
The ten syllables are there all right, but except in the last line there
is no recognizable rhythm of any kind, whether regular or irregular. But
when Surrey comes to the second stanza—
Auream quisquis mediocritatem
Diligit, tutus caret obsoleti
Sordibus tecti, caret invidenda
Sobrius aula—
some lucky accident inspires him with the genius to translate in these
words:
Whoso gladly halseth the golden mean,
Void of dangers advisedly hath his home;
Not with loathsome muck as a den unclean,
Nor palace like, whereat disdain may gloam.
Not only is this a very good translation, but it is also a very
interesting and subtle metrical experiment. What could be more
felicitous than this stanza made up of three trochaic lines, quickened
by beautiful dactylic resolutions, and a final iambic line of regular
measure—the recognized tonic chord that brings the music to its close?
And yet the tunelessness of the first stanza is enough to prove that
Surrey’s achievement is as much a product of accident as the foam on the
jaws of Apelles’ dog. He was doing his best all the time to write
decasyllabics with the normal iambic beat of the last line. His failures
to do so were sometimes unconscious strokes of genius.