So far, so good; but it is to be hoped that intelligent minds will perceive an occurring difficulty. If this selection of metre is an elaborate attempt to imitate French or Latin, or both, why are its results so extraordinarily sporadic? One could understand the presence of many imperfect lines and couplets; it might even be surprising that in a first attempt there should be such good ones as that above quoted. But how could the man, in an actual majority of cases, produce stuff like the other distich quoted, and many more unrhythmical still, which are not even attempts at the iambic couplet—which have no connection whatever with it?
Sufficient.
No; an explanation at once more subtle and more natural is wanted; for it is a great mistake to think that the subtler is necessarily the less natural. Does not this immense mass of apparently confused experiment suggest that the language itself has passed into a new rhythmical atmosphere?—that two different metrical systems, one dropping and dying off ever fainter to the ear, the other becoming clearer and clearer to it, were sounding in Layamon's brain? Sometimes he writes under one influence; sometimes under the other; more frequently under confused echoes of both. Such a set of causes would produce exactly such a set of results.
Nor is it of the slightest relevance, as an objection, to say that the total number of new Romance words in Layamon is very small—a couple of hundred perhaps in both forms of the poem taken together. You do not necessarily require one Romance word to fashion the most complicated metres of Tennyson and Mr. Swinburne. The point is, "What was the general rhythm, and what were the means of obtaining it, which sounded most gratefully in English ears at the opening of the thirteenth century and onwards?"
The facts, if they, as they too seldom have been, are carefully arranged and impartially considered, answer this further question as clearly as any reasonable person can desire.
We possess a relatively considerable number of poems composed probably between 1200 and 1250. The most important of these are, besides Layamon's Brut itself, the Ormulum, the Poema Morale or Moral Ode, the Orison of Our Lady, a Bestiary, the Proverbs of Alfred and of Hendyng, the Love-Rune and other minor pieces, the Middle English Genesis and Exodus, and The Owl and the Nightingale.
Other documents.
Hardly two of these are in the same metre, at least in the same form of the same metre, and none of them exhibits exactly the same curious blend of old and new as that which appears in the Brut. But, for that very reason, they enforce the same general lesson—for they do enforce it—in the most striking and conclusive way possible. That lesson is, as we saw, that the new language of English was seeking in every possible way for a new prosody of English, and was finding it under several and special forms of experiment, but in the same general spirit.
The Ormulum.