The Metrum.
In the very first words of the Metrum it is curious and delightful to see a man at this early period cutting right and left at the error of the older editors, who calmly shoved in, or left out, words and syllables to make what they thought correct versification for Chaucer, and at the other error committed by the majority of philologists to-day in holding that Chaucer’s syntax, accidence, and orthography were as precise as those of a writer in the school of the French Academy. Even more refreshing are, on the one hand, his knowledge and heed of Puttenham, and, on the other, his correction of Puttenham’s doctrine of the fixed Caesura, his admissions of this in the case of the Alexandrine, and his quiet demonstration that the admission of it in the decasyllable and octosyllable would make havoc of our best poetry. The contrast of this reasonable method and just conclusion, not merely with the ignorant or overbearing dogmatism of Bysshe half a century earlier, but with the perversity, in the face of light and knowledge, of Guest a century later, is as remarkable as anything in the history of English criticism.
Gray, of course, was fallible. He entangles himself rather on the subject of “Riding Rhyme”; and though he, first (I think) of all English writers, notices the equivalenced dimeter iambics of Spenser’s Oak and Bryar, and compares Milton’s octosyllables with them, he goes wrong by saying that this is the only English metre in which such a liberty of choice is allowed, and more wrong still in bringing Donne’s well-known ruggedness under this head. And he does not allow himself to do more than glance at the Classical-metre craze, his remarks on which would have been very interesting.
His subsequent analysis of “measures” with the chief books or poems in which they are used is of very great interest, but as it is a mere table it hardly lends itself to comment, though it fills nearly twenty pages. The conclusion, however, is important, and, without undue guessing, gives us fair warrant for inferring that Gray would have had much (and not a favourable much) to say on the contemporary practice he describes if the table had been expanded into a dissertation. And the table itself, with its notes, shows that though his knowledge of Middle English before Chaucer was necessarily limited, yet he knew and had drawn right conclusions from Robert of Gloucester and Robert of Brunne, The Owl and the Nightingale, the early English Life of St. Margaret, and the Poema Morale.[[108]]
His observations on “the pseudo-Rhythmus” (which odd and misleading term simply means Rhyme) present a learned and judicious summary of the facts as then known with the shorter appendices on the same subject.
The Lydgate Notes.
The observations on John Lydgate which close Gray’s critical dossier might have been devoted to a more interesting subject, but they enable us to see what the average quality of the History would have been. And they certainly go, in scheme and quality, very far beyond any previous literary history of any country with which I am acquainted. The article (as we may call it) is made up of a judicious mixture of biography, account of books (in both cases, of course, as far as known to the writer only), citation, exposition of points of interest in subject, history, manners, &c., criticisms of poetical characteristics in the individual, and now and then critical excursus of a more general kind suggested by the subject. In one place, indeed, Gray does introduce Homer in justification of Lydgate: but no one will hesitate to do this now and then; and it is quite clear that he does not do it from any delusion as to a cut-and-dried pattern, or set of patterns, to which every poem, new or old, was bound to conform.
And to this we have to add certain facts which, if not critical utterances, speak as few such utterances have done—the novelty of Gray’s original English poetry, and his selection of Welsh and Scandinavian originals for translation and imitation. These things were themselves unspoken criticism of the most important kind on the literary habits and tastes of his country, and of Europe at large. The, to us, almost unintelligible puzzlement of his contemporaries—the “hard as Greek” of the excellent Garrick, and the bewilderment of the three lords at York races, establish[[109]] the first point; as for the second, it establishes itself. To these outlying languages and literatures nobody had paid any attention whatever previously;[[110]] they were now not merely admitted to literary attention, but actually allowed and invited to exercise the most momentous influence on the costume, the manners, the standards of those literatures which had previously alone enjoyed the citizenship of Parnassus.