Robert of Gloucester.
We can give less individual attention to the first-named group of documents; but as a matter of fact they require less, and sub-group themselves. At the close of the thirteenth century we have a body of verse, the whole of it sometimes ascribed by guess-work, part of it ascribed with certainty, and yet more not without probability, to Robert of Gloucester. This work, consisting of a Chronicle and of many Saints' Lives, is entirely written in fourteener (or, when there is a final e, fifteener) couplets of the same general stamp as those which we have seen in the Moral Poem, but differentiated from those of the Ormulum by the admission of equivalence. They are, however, much more advanced than even the latest version of the Poema Morale; and the writer, or writers, can make them into a capital narrative vehicle, distinctly indicating, if not freely expressing, the further resolution into the ballad metre of eight and six.
But this craving for narrative in verse did not confine itself to a single vehicle; indeed, in probably a very great majority of instances, it preferred another, or two others, with which we are also acquainted, and further varieties still which we have not yet seen, but which show, unmistakably, the advance in prosodic aptitude. The great body of narrative verse, known as "the Romances," begins to date from the end of the thirteenth century—a few, such as Havelok and Horn, are certainly earlier than the fourteenth; by the end of the first third, if not of the first quarter, of this latter, a very large number were as certainly in existence.
The Romances.
Now probably the whole of these Romances were more or less directly imitated from French originals, nearly all of which we actually possess; but it is extremely remarkable that they by no means always followed the metre of those originals, and that when they did they took considerable liberties with it. That metre was almost invariably Alexandrine or decasyllabic, in long batches not couplets, or octosyllabic in couplet. Of the two probably oldest of ours, Havelok and Horn, the first does attempt this octosyllabic couplet, but treats it in a very rough and independent fashion, something in the Genesis and Exodus line, while King Horn seems to favour something like what we observe in part of the English Bestiary and the whole of the French one—a split Alexandrine or six-syllabled couplet. Very soon the rime couée or Romance-six (which had not been a staple romance-metre in French) appears, and occasionally more elaborate stanzas still, such as the complicated arrangement of Sir Tristrem. Those writers who prefer couplet improve upon Horn and Havelok, but they follow Genesis and Exodus much more than The Owl and the Nightingale.
Indeed, some of them develop this couplet in a manner possessing almost infinite "future." They not merely follow the writer of Genesis and Exodus in substituting trisyllabic, if not also monosyllabic, feet for dissyllabic to the number of four, but some of them develop hints, which may be found in that composition, by extending the actual foot-length of the line to five, and sometimes repeating this in an actual "heroic" pair. Whether this was in some, or even at first in all, cases accidental, does not really matter. The decasyllable or five-foot line was already existent in great masses of French poetry, though not in single couplets; it was natural that, occasionally, more room should be wanted than the octosyllable provides; and there is the undoubted fact that, in more than one other European language, ten, or according to the structure of the particular tongue, eleven syllables were suggesting themselves as the most convenient size. The fourteener was so long as to invite breaking up quite early; the Alexandrine has never naturalised itself for continuous use in English; and the octosyllable, though its early appearance, the wealth of models for it, and its ease, fostered and sustained it, had the already mentioned drawback of lack of content. It was certain that, in a language which was showing itself so fortunately free from hide-bound qualities, the decasyllable would establish itself. It has been usual to say that, in couplet at any rate, Chaucer "took it from the French." As a matter of actual practice he may have done so; but in the order of nature and thought it was not in the least necessary for him to do it. Indeed, it would be almost literally true[64] to say that English had decasyllabic couplet before French—that it was an English invention.
Lyrics.
For the time, however, the octosyllable was the staple for narrative, varied to no mean extent by the stanzas already described; while these stanzas, often of the most elaborate and complicated descriptions, were adopted from French (and perhaps Provençal) or extemporised by the taste and fancy of the writers. One famous collection[65] indicates the school of which our poets were scholars by alternating French poems with English. But this very collection shows amply that these same writers refused to undergo the syllabic constraints of French, and held to what were to be always the real, if frequently the unrecognised and sometimes the denied, principles of the New English in verse—that is to say, the constitution of the line by feet, not syllables—and the consequent possibility of obtaining equivalent lines by the substitution of feet, varying in syllabic constituence, but interchangeable in metrical value. Some examples of all these things will be found in the Scanned Conspectus; the student should search the books named in the notes for more, which he will find in the fullest abundance. What is important is that by this study he may and should discover the real and too commonly misunderstood relation of Chaucer to precedent English verse.
There is, however, another fact of the fourteenth century which it is not less important for him to recognise, and which also has been too often misunderstood, or at least not put in its proper place. This is the revival of alliterative-accentual verse.
The alliterative revival.