For his work is there, and it is incontestably—whatever its author had read or not read—the logical and biological continuation and perfecting of all that had gone before from Godric and the Paternoster. He begins with the fluent octosyllable and the melodious and usefully stringent rhyme-royal, as well as other more or less elaborate stanzas. He communicates to the couplet[67] a greater combination of order and variety than it had ever known in English; he makes of the stanza,[68] in the case of rhyme-royal, the most perfect formal arrangement of verse that English had yet seen. Later he takes up,[69] very probably because he had written so many separate examples of it in rhyme-royal itself at the close of each stanza, the decasyllabic couplet, and makes of that something greater still—a metrical instrument or vehicle escaping at once the scanty content and slightly insignificant bearing of the octosyllable, the elaborateness and rather melancholy quality of rhyme-royal. In doing this it is inevitable that, as Spenser did in parallel case afterwards, he should lean rather towards precision than towards great laxity and luxuriance of form; for things needed order. But he sets the example of that variation of pause in rhyme-royal which was fortunately taken as a rule, and which preserved for English one of the very greatest means of metrical achievement. In the octosyllable he reproduced knowingly, and with definite apology, that "failing of a syllable" which gives acephalous or trochaic alternation, and which all the greatest masters of the metre, except (following Gower) William Morris, have imitated. And he broke up the lines very largely by conversation-fragments, by putting full stops at the end of the first line of a couplet, and by making a whole paragraph end at the same place.
Details of his prosody.
But next to his provision of a perfectly finished stanza—in other words, of a complete, and pro tanto final, prosodic result—in rhyme-royal, the most important thing done by Chaucer in this department was the arranging and setting on foot of the decasyllabic couplet, which he began well in the Legend of Good Women, but carried on much better in the Canterbury Tales. Not half of his actual achievement here, and a very much smaller part of his promise and stimulus for the future, can be perceived by those who limit him to the decasyllable as such by devices of elision and syncope; still less by those who would have his varieties of line exactly to represent variations of the French decasyllable. The former proceeding is inadequate and defacing; the latter practically impossible, except as a bare and barren matter of arithmetic. You cannot imitate the prosodic effect of one language in another, even though you take the exact number of syllables and (as far as you can) divide the words, arrange the accents, etc., with the most slavish copying. The result will laugh at you prosodically; and while it is very unlikely to give you anything similar, it is nearly certain to give you something quite different.[70]
When Chaucer's verse in "heroic" or "riding rhyme" is examined, simply on its own merits and without regard to arbitrary theories of pronunciation, but with all necessary remembrance of the value of the final e, etc., it is seen to follow, in every respect, the general principles which we have seen evolving themselves in all English poetry hitherto, subject only to the general reforming or regimenting tendency which has been noticed. The normal line is beyond all question five-foot iambic, or decasyllabic with short and long syllable alternately. But there are a few instances[71] of so-called acephalous lines where the first syllable seems to have been missed—where, at any rate, there are only nine to account for, and where you consequently have to choose between a monosyllabic foot in the first place or trochaic cadence throughout. There is little doubt in the mind of the present writer that if these lines (which, after all, are very few) were deliberately written and meant to be kept, the reason of their existence was a false analogy with the octosyllable, where, as we have said, such acephalous lines, trochaic and heptasyllabic, do occur, and where they produce not only no ill, but a positively good effect. Unluckily the cutting down does not produce a good effect in the larger couplet; and if trochaic rhythm is permitted—in other words, if the missing syllable is shifted from the beginning to the end—it produces a very bad one. But they are, as has been said, in very small proportion, though there are too many of them to be simply "mended" out of existence.
Proceeding, we find, in a far larger number of instances, not a defect but an excess of syllables. As far as these syllables are found at the end of the line (in great measure caused by the final e) there is no difficulty and no dispute about them. They are allowed by everybody; and they come under that general law of almost (not quite) all prosodies which makes the final place of a line one of liberty. But it is different with those which come within the line, and with apparent extensions beyond the eleventh syllable. Many, perhaps most, prosodists would shut their eyes to the latter, regarding them as mere extra-redundances, and explain away those which occur within the line by elision before a vowel, by syncope or crasis or the like (see [Glossary]) when they come before a consonant.
To the present writer these devices and shifts appear unnecessary, discordant, the reverse of natural, and alike the consequence and the cause of prosodic error. With regard to hiatus (i.e. the actual contact of vowels) it has to be fully admitted that there is a strong tendency in MSS. to sink one of them and to write not merely "tharray" for "the array," but even "in thalyghte" for "in thee alyghte." The habit continued for a long time, and we find even in Wyatt and Surrey "tembrace" for "to embrace" and so forth. But it is important to observe first that this habit is not constant, as we should expect it to be if it represented a definite and reasoned wish always to reduce two such syllables to one; and further, that it will not affect the other cases of syllables, such as the last of "Heaven" (which, however, pretty certainly was monosyllabic at this time and later), "ever" the -eth of the third person singular and plural, y in "many a," i- in scores of words, and the like.
To the present writer, once more, it is certain, and even indisputable, that whether Chaucer deliberately used trisyllabic feet or not, there are trisyllabic feet by nature and poetic right in Chaucer, for any one who chooses them. And he is of opinion, though not so strongly, that Chaucer allowed himself an occasional Alexandrine or twelve-syllabled line,[72] just as preceding writers had allowed themselves occasional ten-syllabled lines in octosyllabics. What is once more certain, and almost indisputable, is that his lines can be so scanned with euphonious effect, and that similar phenomena manifest themselves all the way up to his time.
Of his rhymes nothing necessarily need be said here. He often avails himself for rhyme, as well as for rhythm, of the choice between Teutonic and Romance accent—the former always seeking the beginning of the word, the latter generally the end. This was hardly even a licence at his period.
One much-vexed point it is, however, impossible to omit, though far more, in every sense, has been made of it than it is worth. It occurred many years ago to a distinguished scholar, the late Mr. Bradshaw of Cambridge, to make a test out of the rhyme of y and ye, which, he thought (despite a famous example in Sir Thopas[73]), never occurs in the work unquestionably Chaucer's. To the present writer the occurrence of the rhyme in Sir Thopas closes the question, and he would have much to say against the establishment of the test, even if Sir Thopas were acknowledged as not Chaucerian. But from the strict point of view of this book the whole thing is really irrelevant. It does not matter to us who wrote certain pieces of English poetry, but what the characteristics of those and other pieces of English poetry are. The student of prosody may and should note that in some pieces of this period the rhyme of y and ye certainly does occur, that in others it apparently does not; but beyond this he need not, and, as a student of prosody, should not, go.