FOOTNOTES:
[49] Running illustrations of the following chapters will be found in the preceding Scanned Conspectus, but additional ones will be supplied in notes when necessary. It may not be superfluous to call the student's special attention to this chapter. All correct appreciation of English prosody depends upon the facts contained in it; and while the ignoring or mistaking of these facts is fatal, it has unfortunately been too common.
Werig winneth: widsith onginneth
Sar ne sinneth: sorgum cinnith
Blæd his blumith: blisse linnath
Listum linneth: lastum ne linneth.
[51] V. sup. Scanned Survey II.
[52] V. sup. Scanned Survey III.
Merie sungen the muneches binnen Ely
Tha Cnut ching rew therby.
Roweth cnihtes neer the land
And here we thes muneches sang.
Vre feder thet in heouene is,
That is al soothful iwis.
Wee moten to theos weordes iseon
Thet to liue and to saule gode beon.
Thet weo beon swa his sunes iborene
Thet he beo feder and we him icorene
Thet we don alle his ibeden
And his wille for to reden.
[55] In doubling the consonant after a short vowel-sound.
[56] Examples of all this will be found in the Scanned Survey and in the Glossaries and Form-lists of Book IV.
[57] For more on all this see Scanned Conspectus and [next Book].
Thus queth Alured.
Wis childe is fader blisse.
If hit so bi-tideth
that thu bern ibidest,
the hwile hit is lutel
ler him mon-thewes
than hit is wexynde;
hit schal wende thar to.
the betere hit schal iwurthe
euer buuen eorthe,
ac if thu him lest welde
werende on worlde
lude and stille
his owene wille.
Mon that wol of wysdam heren,
At wyse Hendyng he may lernen,
That wes Marcolues sone;
Gode thonkes and monie thewes
Forte teche fele shrewes;
For that wes ever is wone.
. . . . . . .
Wis mon halt is wordes ynne,
For he nul no gle begynne
Er he have tempted is pype.
Sot is sot, and that is sene,
For he wol speke wordes grene
Er then hue buen rype,
"Sottes bolt is sone shote,"
Quoth Hendyng.
[59] Latin.
Nam leo stans fortis super alta cacumina montis,
Qualicunque via vallis descendit ad ima,
Si venatorem per notum sentit odorem,
Cauda cuncta linit quae pes vestigia figit.
French.
Uncore dit Escripture
Leuns ad tele nature,
Quant l'om le vait chazant,
De sa cue en fuiant
Desfait sa trace en terre,
Que hom ne l' sace querre;
Ceo est grant signefiance,
Aiez en remembrance.
English.
The leun stant on hille,
And he man hunten here,
Other thurg his nese smel
Smake that he negge,
Bi wile weie so he wile
To dele nither wenden,
Alle hise fet-steppes
After him he filleth,
Drageth dust with his stert
Ther he [dun] steppeth,
Other dust other deu,
That he ne cunne is finden,
Driueth dun to his den
Thar he him bergen wille.
All is man so is this erne [eagle],
Would[è] ye now listen,
Old in his[è] sinn[e]s derne [dark],
Or he becometh Christen.
The spelling is designedly modernised, but very slightly.
Maid[è] here thou mightst behold
This world[è]s love is but o res And is beset so fele-vold [manifoldly],
Fick|le and frack|le [frail] and wok | and les [weak and false].
Und|er mould | they li|eth [plural] cold
And fal|loweth [groweth yellow] as | doth mead|ow grass.
[63] It is sometimes asked by persons who should know better, "What has English prosody to do with these mostly un-English things?" The answer is simple—that these un-English things went largely, and essentially, to the making of English prosody.
[64] The poem commonly reputed as the oldest in French, St. Eulalia, is in something very like it, but was not followed up.
[65] MS. Harl. 2253. Published by Thomas Wright for the Percy Society (London, 1847) as Specimens of Lyric Poetry.
[66] The rhyme-royal decasyllables of the "Supplication," or "Letter to Venus and Cupid," at the close of the Confessio, and of the poem "In Praise of Peace."
[67] In the disputed Romance of the Rose, and the undisputed Death of Blanche, and the somewhat later House of Fame.
[68] The Parliament of Fowls, Troilus and Criseyde, etc.
[69] First in the Legend of Good Women and then in the Canterbury Tales.
[70] These words are written, not merely on general principles, but from long and extensive knowledge of French fourteenth-century poetry.
[71] Such as the well-known
Twen|ty ¦ bok|ès ¦ clad | in ¦ black | or ¦ red
of the Oxford clerk.
Westward | right swich, | ano|ther in | the op|posite.
(Knight's Tale, 1036.)
And said, | O deer|e housbond|e, be|nedi|citee!
(Wife of Bath's Tale, 231.)
Doth so | his ce|rimo|nies and | obei|saunces,
And ke|peth in | semblant | all his | obser|vaunces.
(Squire's Tale, 515, 516.)
[73] "Sir Guy," which cannot have an e, and "chivalrye," which must have one.
[CHAPTER II]
FROM CHAUCER TO SPENSER—DISORGANISATION AND RECONSTRUCTION
Causes of decay in Southern English prosody.
It might be supposed, especially in face of the unquestionable reputation which Chaucer had attained before his death—and which he maintained undisturbed, and hardly approached, for the entire period until Spenser's birth,—that his prosodic work, once done, would have been done once for all; that in points of form, though individual inferiority of poetic gift might show itself, there could be no great technical falling off. To think this, however, would be to ignore—as, in fact, men too usually do ignore, and have ignored—the necessary and intricate connection between language and prosody. Chaucer had raised the state of English versification to the highest point possible in his time; in fact, there are reasons for saying that he had screwed it up beyond the level possible to ordinary men. To mention nothing else, the exactness, and at the same time the rhythmical variety of his verse, depend on two special points—the valuing of the final e and the optional but carefully selected shift from French to English accentuation.[74] We know that, even in the mouths and on the pens of his own contemporaries, the e was breaking down, and that it "went" more and more during the fifteenth century; and we know likewise, though less certainly, that though, even at the close of the period with which we are dealing, French accentuation was still permissible to poets, an English standard was gradually establishing itself, violation of which was disapproved.[75] Moreover, the fact remains undeniable that the poetic quality of the followers of Chaucer, in Southern English of the literary kind, was low to a point unprecedented, and never yet again reached since.
The progress of prosody between Chaucer and Spenser divides itself, sharply but unequally in point of time, between a longer space (about a century and a quarter) from Chaucer to poets like Hawes, Skelton, and Barclay; a shorter (of about half a century or less) from Wyatt to Spenser. In the first division a subdivision—of matter, not time—has to be made between the literary poets in Southern English, the Scottish Chaucerians from James the First to Douglas or Lyndsay (if not even to Montgomerie, who died later than Spenser himself), and the ballad, carol, and other folk-song writers of the fifteenth century.
Lydgate, Occleve, etc.
The history of the first division is the history of the breakdown just referred to. Except in the so-called Chauceriana—pieces such as "The Cuckoo and the Nightingale," "The Flower and the Leaf," "The Court of Love," etc., once attributed to Chaucer himself, but cast out on various kinds of evidence ranging from practically conclusive to very doubtful—and sometimes even in such poets as Lydgate and Occleve, who for no very small portion of their lives were Chaucer's own contemporaries, downwards, seem to be struck with metrical palsy or metrical blindness. Examples, given in the Scanned Conspectus above, will show the way in which they confuse different metres, vary the lengths of their lines not by intentional substitution but by sheer muddlement, violate rhythm and cadence—turn, in fact, the perfect harmony of their master into a cacophony which is not even prosaic. Sometimes, especially in Occleve, by rigid counting of syllables, they escape worse blunders, though they seldom make real music. Generally, even this resource fails them, and there is no worse chaos than in Hawes, one of the latest and not one of the least of them; while Skelton, perhaps the acutest intelligence of all, takes refuge in frank, not clumsy, and intentional doggerel.
The Scottish poets.
To this spectacle of disorganisation and decay the Scottish followers of Chaucer (who, generally with acknowledgment as eager and hearty as that of their English comrades, take him for their master) present what may at first sight seem an astonishing and almost unintelligible contrast. With final e's allowed for (or in case of necessity touched in), the Kingis Quair, traditionally ascribed, and never with solid reason denied, to James the First, is a piece of rhyme-royal as soundly constructed, and as well fitted and polished, as if it were Chaucer's own. Henryson, in his following of Chaucer's Troilus, and in his other poems, never breaks down in metre, but handles every form that he touches with equal precision and charm. Even more may be said of Dunbar, whose lyrics possess the peculiar grace only given by metrical accomplishment, who can manage alliterative metre more smoothly than Langland and with not less vigour, and who, if he wrote the "Friars of Berwick," is, next to Chaucer himself, the greatest master of the early (Middle English) heroic couplet. Of the verse-chroniclers, Wyntoun, though not very poetical, uses octosyllabic couplet, with not infrequent equivalence, effectively enough, and Blind Harry writes very strict decasyllabic couplet with cæsura at the fourth syllable, after the French model. The earlier sixteenth-century writers, Douglas and Lyndsay, if not perhaps quite impeccable, appear so beside Hawes and his fellows; while the two latest strictly Scots poets, Scott and Montgomerie, manage most complicated measures—reminding us of early French and Provençal, or of those of the English fourteenth century in lyric and drama—with unerring accuracy and finished grace. Of this strange contrast the simple fact of writing in a different dialect, requiring more care in imitation, may supply some explanation; the other fact, that this dialect was rather a literary convention than a vernacular speech, some more; and the higher quality of individual genius, more still; but a margin of surprise remains.
Ballad, etc.
It is difficult to say whether that margin is reduced or widened by the fact that a contrast, almost as striking, is found between the English literary poetry of the period and the "folk-song," sacred and profane. It is probable that the bulk of our older ballads date from the earliest fifteenth century or the very close of the fourteenth. The latter would seem to be true of the "Robin Hood" ballads; the former is pretty certainly true of "Chevy Chase." We have also from the fifteenth century a large body of carols, or sacred poems for singing.
Now in these, though they naturally vary much in poetic merit and in prosodic accomplishment, it is remarkable that this latter scarcely ever falls to the level of the worst literary poetry, and never falls in exactly the same way. The ballad-writers invariably, and the carol- and hymn-writers very commonly, preserve the English licence of equivalence in the fullest fashion; and this seems to relieve their motion of the staggering and fatal cramp which rests on their superiors in formal literary rank. They sing naturally: they do not aim at, and break down in, a falsetto. Although it would be impossible to have anything in a worse condition, as far as copying goes, than our oldest version of "Chevy Chase," its natural ballad motion carries it safe through all the corruptions and defacements; the sacred song of "E.I.O." is admirable metre; the Carol of the Virgin, "I sing of a maiden," is matchless in quiet metrical movement; and the famous "Nut-brown Maid," which is certainly not later than this century, deserves the same praise in more rapid melody.
These compositions, however, though they did a precious office in preserving the true principles of English prosody, could not exercise immediate influence; and the disorganising of literary versification was no doubt partly cause and partly consequence of the continuance of the alliterative revolt which did not die till after Flodden—indeed, not till after Musselburgh (Pinkie). But, indirectly, this revolt encouraged fresh developments of English metre itself. The old fourteener had taken new and lively form in such pieces as Gamelyn[76] (late fourteenth century) and Beryn (middle fifteenth), and through it and other things—the musical adaptations of songs and hymns and the like—there was arising, in dramatic literature especially, a disorderly, imperfect, but very important notion of wholly "triple-timed" or anapæstic metre. In fact, it is not excessive to regard the English fifteenth century as a period when all elements of prosody were thrown into a sort of cauldron, sack, sieve, or lucky-bag, in which, as according to the different metaphors suiting these objects, they were to be boiled down, shaken together, sifted out, and taken as fortune would have it, to supply the stock of a new venture in more orderly and polished verse-manufacture when actual speech had settled itself once more.
Dissatisfaction and reform.
At what period, in what manner, and by what persons exactly, conscious discontent with this confusion and dilapidation was made manifest, is not known. That it was felt consciously about the middle of the sixteenth century we do know positively from a passage in the Mirror for Magistrates; and later still we find the precepts of Gascoigne virtually, if not always expressly, directed against it. But, as has been hinted, even Skeltonic evinces an earlier attempt to escape from it in practice as far back as the first quarter of the century; while, at an uncertain time for first efforts, during the second, and then ever increasingly during the third, till the death of Gascoigne himself, poetical practice proclaims the fact, even more emphatically than any preceptist rules of criticism could do. Indeed, there has hardly ever been any mistake, and it is difficult to think that by persons possessed of ears and eyes any could be made, about the surprising revolution manifest in the verse of Sir Thomas Wyatt, and of his younger disciple, Henry Howard, known by his courtesy title as the Earl of Surrey. Instead of the weltering and staggering discords of the poets from Lydgate onward, we come back to verse almost as clear, regular, and harmonious as Chaucer's, though with a much more modern pronunciation and accent, to which it occasionally seems to have some difficulty in reconciling itself. The final e has in most cases disappeared, though it is probably there in a few cases, and in a few others has settled itself into y.[77] The inordinate variety of syllables in the line, not explicable by any trisyllabic foot, is reformed. Indeed, the need of the reform is so strongly felt that the poets run into the opposite error—salutary for the time—of excessive syllabic uniformity.
Wyatt and Surrey.
There can be no question that Wyatt, and, through or after him, Surrey, were enormously helped, if not originally stimulated to reform, by the existence of new, exact, and attractive foreign models derived, at any rate originally, from a new language. French had hitherto been almost the only source of such models, and it had lost its virtue—not least perhaps because ballades and other formal devices, though excellent in themselves, had been practised all through the period of disorganisation. Italian supplied, in the sonnet, terza rima, and blank verse, fresh models, in the attempt to imitate which precision of syllabic and rhythmical arrangement almost inevitably enjoined itself. To write either sonnet or terza in shuffling doggerel would destroy the particular form; to write blank verse in such a way (as was actually shown a hundred years afterward by the later "Elizabethan" dramatists) is to lose all form; so that the instinct of preservation kept the new experimenters right. Precisely why they adopted another form which is not Italian at all—the poulter's measure of alternate Alexandrine and fourteener—is not so easy to decide; but it may very reasonably be taken to be an attempt to regularise two of the shapes to which the doggerel of the time and its predecessor most nearly approximated. It is not a very good form (though when it splits up into "short measure" it has some merits), and even in the hands of two such poets as Wyatt and Surrey it is terribly sing-song. But this very sing-song carried regularity with it. Of the imported measures terza has never suited English very well, though numerous attempts have been made at it by poets sometimes of supreme quality. On the other hand, the sonnet—not the commonest Italian form at first, but that also later—has made itself thoroughly at home; and blank verse—not much more of a success in Italian itself than terza in English—has, in English, grown to be one of the greatest metres in the world's prosodic history.
It should be at once seen that these processes of reform involved an almost inevitable—a certainly very natural—"drawing-in of the horns" of verse, which was positively beneficial in practice, but which led to rather disastrous mistakes in theory. On the one hand, so far as Italian admits of foot-distribution, it is distributable only into dissyllabic feet in the metres affected.[78] On the other, the utter disorganisation of English verse which had prevailed might well seem to have been caused by the neglect to observe accurate division into such feet—a division which, in our language, will always chiefly favour the iamb, or foot with the first syllable short and the second long. Accordingly we find that in Wyatt and Surrey themselves; in their companions when (long after the death of the first, and nearly a decade after that of the second) their work came to be published in Tottel's Miscellany; in the huge rubbish-heap of the Mirror for Magistrates with its one pearl of price in Sackville's contributions; and in the poets of the third quarter of the sixteenth century—George Turberville and Gascoigne himself—this iambic rhythm is omnipresent, though the line-length and other combinations may be largely variable. There is, it is true, one remarkable exception in the Georgic poet Tusser, who uses frequent and accurate anapæst; but the nature of his subject, the homeliness of his diction, and the character of his intended readers, may have been thought to put him out of strictly poetical consideration. When Gascoigne—merely as narrating and regretting a fact, not announcing, as some have erroneously thought, a principle—stated the limitation, his fact was for the most part a fact, and had been so for more than a generation.
Their followers.
It would, however, be a gross mistake in criticism, as well as a piece of unpardonable ingratitude, to find fault with these poets for their prosodic limitation. It was their business to limit and be limited—to substitute, at whatever cost of temporary restriction of freedom, order for the abominable disorder of the preceding century, rhythm for its limping or staggering movement, harmonious and well-concerted metrical arrangement for its hubbub of halting verse or scarcely more than even half-doggerelised prose. And they did this. When, as in the cases of Wyatt, Surrey, and Sackville, they were men of real and genuine poetic gift they did much more; though the two first were still hampered by the uncertainty of pronunciation. From this Sackville is comparatively free; though the deliberate archaism in him no doubt assists this freedom, and may have suggested something similar to Spenser. Even Turberville and Gascoigne, though their strictly poetic powers are less, manage to produce, by no means seldom, sweet and harmonious measures. And all do the inestimable work of drilling, regimenting, and preparing the raw and demoralised state of English prosody so that it may be ready to the hands of a real master and commander.
Spenser.
Such a master and commander duly presented himself in Spenser. Naturally enough—and even commendably enough on the principle of proving all things and holding fast that which is good—he spent a little time on classical "versing"; only to give it up so completely that (as is not the case with his friend Sidney) no single example of it, or of any approach to it, occurs in his actual poetical works. He must have spent much more on experiments in English verse proper, before the ever-famous and admirable Shepherd's Calendar appeared in the winter of 1579-80.
The Shepherd's Calendar.
For poetical excellence, combined with prosodic regularity, there had been nothing like this since Chaucer; for poetical excellence combined with prosodic variety it may be questioned whether Chaucer himself—his whole work being set against this novice's essay—can show anything equal. Spenser had not yet ventured to publish (though it is more than probable that he had sketched it out[79]) his immortal stanza, and he did not issue till later any exact and complete followings of Chaucer's riding rhyme. But he uses (the exact order is for special reasons not followed) a very fine six-line stanza (decasyllables rhymed ababcc); slightly altered Romance-six with fresh substitution and redundance in the short lines; various stanzas much "cuttit and broken" (i.e. of very varied line-length and rhyme-order); the Chaucerian octave; common ballad measure; and another metre, much discussed and not universally agreed upon, but, on the more probable interpretation of it, one of the most interesting in the whole history of English poetry.
This arrangement, which is found in the "February," "May," and "September" pieces, but most characteristically in the part of "February" devoted to the tale of "The Oak and the Brere" (Briar), has been thought by some to be evidence that Spenser misunderstood Chaucer's "riding rhyme" owing to the disuse of the final valued e and other changes, these pieces presenting the result of the misconception. Unfortunately for this notion, the pieces themselves contain large numbers of consecutive decasyllabics perfectly well filled and rhythmed; while Spenser later wrote another piece, Mother Hubberd's Tale, which is in impeccable "riding rhyme" from first to last. He is also, not merely in his later work, but in the other nine-twelfths of the Calendar itself, an equally impeccable master of every rhythm and metre that he tries, so that it is practically inconceivable that he should here have been stumbling blindfold, or wandering aimlessly, between perfect decasyllabic couplets, perfect octosyllabic couplets, and doggerel anapæstic lines inconsistent with both. On the other hand, there had been in English, as we have seen, from Genesis and Exodus downwards, a variety of octosyllabic couplet which had admitted anapæstic equivalence freely, which reappeared in the Romances, and which, though not favoured by Chaucer or Gower or their immediate followers, had persevered in various places down to Spenser's own time. It seems to the present writer, as it did to Gray a hundred and fifty years ago, and has to many others since Christabel, though Coleridge himself strangely did not notice it, that Spenser here followed his elders, and anticipated Coleridge himself, in choosing equivalenced octosyllable to vary his non-equivalenced decasyllable. And on this theory we have in Genesis and Exodus, the Shepherd's Calendar, and Christabel, the three main piers of a great bridge which unites the earliest and the latest ages of English prosody, and which carries that prosody's most vital and differential principle.
The Faerie Queene.
The result, however, of Spenser's experiments was that, for his chief poem the Faerie Queene, he chose none of the metres in which he had thus experimented, nor any which had been previously employed by poets, English or other, but invented (the possible stages of the invention being given elsewhere) the magnificent Spenserian stanza of eight decasyllables and an Alexandrine. With this he got more room than in either rhyme-royal or the octave—an unsurpassed medium for the individual descriptive effects in which he delighted, and yet one which could combine itself (for the purpose of larger description or of narrative) into most attractive sequence. He did not, however, confine himself to this in his later poems, but showed himself a master, not merely of the octave in both its forms and of the couplet, but also of two extensive verse combinations more elaborate than the Spenserian itself, but less original, and both really suggested, as the Spenserian was not, by Italian. The first was the sonnet, which, after the successors of Wyatt and Surrey had been apparently afraid to venture on it, had been taken up by Sidney and Watson probably about the same time that he was himself at work upon his Calendar, and in which he did very beautiful things. The other was the still more extensive and complicated arrangement, suggested no doubt by the Italian canzone, which he employed in the Epithalamion and Prothalamion—stanzas of unequal line-length and intertwisted rhyme-order which sometimes extend to a score of lines or thereabouts.
Spenser did not, after the Shepherd's Calendar, attempt the lighter kind of lyric, nor anything in trisyllabic measures; while he seems distinctly to eschew trisyllabic substitution in others, though it appears sometimes. But this was, in fact, a condition of his completing, and informing with full poetic spirit, the prosodic reform of the second and third quarters of the century. He left English poetry once more provided—and indeed had furnished it long before his too early death—with a perfect form of verse, and with a nearly perfect form of poetic diction. This diction, which was almost as much his own work as his stanza, was at the time, and has been since, much misunderstood. Ben Jonson called it "no language"—an insidious proposition which, under the truth that it is no language that was at the time, had been before, or has since been the living speech of any person or group, conveys the falsehood that it is therefore unfit for poetry. It is probable that Chaucer's was, though slightly mixed, much nearer the actual language of his own time, and for that very reason it grew obsolete, and, until it was studied from the antiquarian point of view, carried the verse with it. Spenser's blend of actuality, archaism, dialect, borrowings from French and Italian, and the like, provided a literary medium which, though parts of it too have become antiquated, has as a whole provided patterns for all subsequent poets. The most disputable of his devices, though it has a certain quaint charm of its own, is what is called his "eye-rhyme"—a system of altering the spelling of some words so that they may not only sound alike on the voice but look alike on the page.