The Ormulum. Its metre.
The Ormulum and the Ancren Riwle appear to be—the former exactly and the latter nearly of the same date as Layamon, all being near to 1200. But though they were "good books," their interest is by no means merely one of edification. That of the Ormulum[90] is, indeed, almost entirely confined to its form and language; but it so happens that this interest is of the kind that touches literature most nearly. Orm or Ormin, who gives us his name, but of whom nothing else is known, has left in ten thousand long lines or twenty thousand short couplets a part only of a vast scheme of paraphrase and homiletic commentary on the Four Gospels (the "four-in-hand of Aminadab," as he calls them, taking up an earlier conceit), on the plan of taking a text for each day from its gospel in the calendar. As we have only thirty-two of these divisions, it is clear that the work, if completed, was much larger than this. Orm addresses it to Walter, his brother in the flesh as well as spiritually: the book seems to be written in an Anglian or East Anglian dialect, and it is at least an odd coincidence that the names Orm and Walter occur together in a Durham MS. But whoever Orm or Ormin was, he did two very remarkable things. In the first place, he broke entirely with alliteration and with any-length lines, composing his poem in a metre which is either a fifteen-syllabled iambic tetrameter catalectic, or else, as the reader pleases, a series of distichs in iambic dimeters, alternately acatalectic and catalectic. He does not rhyme, but his work, in the couplet form which shows it best, exhibits occasionally the alternation of masculine and feminine endings. This latter peculiarity was not to take hold in the language; but the quantified or mainly syllabic arrangement was. It was natural that Ormin, greatly daring, and being almost the first to dare, should neither allow himself the principle of equivalence shortly to distinguish English prosody from the French, which, with Latin, he imitated, nor should further hamper his already difficult task with rhyme. But his innovation was great enough, and his name deserves—little positive poetry as there is in his own book—high rank in the hierarchy of British poets. But for him and others like him that magnificent mixed harmony, which English almost alone of languages possesses, which distinguishes it as much from the rigid syllabic bondage of French as from the loose jangle of merely alliterative and accentual verse, would not have come in, or would have come in later. We might have had Langland, but we should not have had Chaucer: we should have had to console ourselves for the loss of Surrey and Wyatt with ingenious extravagances like Gawain Douglas's Eighth Prologue; and it is even possible that when the reaction did come, as it must have come sooner or later, we might have been bound like the French by the rigid syllable which Orm himself adopted, but which in those early days only served to guide and not to fetter.
Its spelling.
His second important peculiarity shows that he must have been an odd and crotchety creature, but one with sense in his crotchets. He seems to have been annoyed by mispronunciation of his own and other work: and accordingly he adopts (with full warning and explanation) the plan of invariably doubling the consonant after every short vowel without exception. This gives a most grotesque air to his pages, which are studded with words like "nemmnedd" (named), "forrwerrpenn" (to despise), "tunderrstanndenn" (to understand), and so forth. But, in the first place, it fixes for all time, in a most invaluable manner, the pronunciation of English at that time; and in the second, it shows that Orm had a sound understanding of that principle of English which has been set at nought by those who would spell "traveller" "traveler." He knew that the tendency, and the, if not warned, excusable tendency, of an English tongue would be to pronounce this traveeler. It is a pity that knowledge which existed in the twelfth century should apparently have become partial ignorance close to the beginning of the twentieth.
The Ancren Riwle.
The Ancren Riwle[91] has no oddities of this kind, and nothing particularly noticeable in its form, though its easy pleasant prose would have been wonderful at the time in any other European nation. Even French prose was only just beginning to take such form, and had not yet severed itself from poetic peculiarities to anything like the same extent. But then the unknown author of the Ancren Riwle had certainly four or five, and perhaps more, centuries of good sound Saxon prose before him: while St Bernard (if he wrote French prose), and even Villehardouin, had little or nothing but Latin. I have called him unknown, and he neither names himself nor is authoritatively named by any one; while of the guesses respecting him, that which identifies him with Simon of Ghent is refuted by the language of the book, while that which assigns it to Bishop Poore has no foundation. But if we do not know who wrote the book, we know for whom it was written—to wit, for the three "anchoresses" or irregular nuns of a private convent or sisterhood at Tarrant Keynes in Dorsetshire.
Later this nunnery, which lasted till the dissolution, was taken under the Cistercian rule; but at first, and at the time of the book, it was free, the author advising the inmates, if anybody asked, to say that they were under "the rule of St James"—i.e., the famous definition, by that apostle, of pure religion and undefiled. The treatise, which describes itself, or is described in one of its MSS., as "one book to-dealed into eight books," is of some length, but singularly pleasing to read, and gives evidence of a very amiable and sensible spirit in its author, as well as of a pretty talent for writing easy prose. If he never rises to the more mystical and poetical beauties of mediæval religion, so he never descends to its ferocities and its puerilities. The rule, the "lady-rule," he says, is the inward; the outward is only adopted in order to assist and help the inward: therefore it may and should vary according to the individual, while the inward cannot. The outward rule of the anchoresses of Tarrant Keynes was by no means rigorous. They were three in number; they had lay sisters (practically lady's-maids) as well as inferior servants. They are not to reduce themselves to bread-and-water fasting without special direction; they are not to be ostentatious in alms-giving; they may have a pet cat; haircloth and hedgehog-skins are not for them; and they are not to flog themselves with briars or leaded thongs. Ornaments are not to be worn; but a note says that this is not a positive command, all such things belonging merely to the external rule. Also they may wash just as often as it is necessary, or as they like!—an item which, absurd as is the popular notion of the dirt of the Middle Ages, speaks volumes for the sense and taste of this excellent anonym.
This part is the last or eighth "dole," as the sections are termed; the remaining seven deal with religious service, private devotion, the Wesen or nature of anchorites, temptation, confession, penance, penitence, and the love of God. Although some may think it out of fashion, it is astonishing how much sense, kindliness, true religion, and useful learning there is in this monitor of the anchoresses of Tarrant Keynes, which place a man might well visit in pilgrimage to do him honour. Every now and then, rough as is his vehicle of speech—a transition medium, endowed neither with the oak-and-rock strength of Anglo-Saxon nor with the varied gifts of modern English—he can rise to real and true eloquence, as where he speaks of the soul and "the heavy flesh that draweth her downwards, yet through the highship [nobleness] of her, it [the flesh] shall become full light—yea, lighter than the wind is, and brighter than the sun is, if only it follow her and draw her not too hard to its own low kind." But though such passages, good in phrase and rhythm, as well as noble in sense, are not rare, the pleasant humanity of the whole book is the best thing in it. M. Renan oddly enough pronounced Ecclesiastes, that voice of the doom of life, to be "le seul livre aimable" which Judaism had produced. The ages of St Francis and of the Imitation do not compel us to look about for a seul livre aimable, but it may safely be said that there is none more amiable in a cheerful human way than the Ancren Riwle.
It would serve no purpose here to discuss in detail most of the other vernacular productions of the first half of the thirteenth century in English.[92] They are almost without exception either religious—the constant rehandling of the time cannot be better exemplified than by the fact that at least two paraphrases, one in prose, one in verse, of one of the "doles" of the Ancren Riwle itself exist—or else moral-scientific, such as the Bestiary,[93] so often printed. One of the constantly recurring version-paraphrases of the Scriptures, however—the so-called Story of Genesis and Exodus,[94] supposed to date from about the middle—has great interest, because here we find (whether for the first time or not he would be a rash man who should say, but certainly for almost, if not quite, the first) the famous "Christabel" metre—iambic dimeter, rhymed with a wide licence of trisyllabic equivalence. This was to be twice revived by great poets, with immense consequences to English poetry—first by Spenser in the Kalendar, and then by Coleridge himself—and was to become one of the most powerful, varied, and charming of English rhythms. That this metre, the chief battle-ground of fighting between the accent-men and the quantity-men, never arose till after rhymed quantitative metre had met accentual alliteration, and had to a great extent overcome it, is a tell-tale fact, of which more hereafter. And it is to be observed also that in this same poem it is possible to discover not a few very complete and handsome decasyllables which would do no discredit to Chaucer himself.
The Owl and the Nightingale.