But Chaucer, it is argued, was not uniform in his practice. Would this be likely? Certainly not with those terminations (like courtesië) which are questioned, and in diphthongs generally. Dante took precisely the same liberties.
“Facea le stelle a noi parer più radi,”
“Nè fu per fantasia giammai compreso”
“Poi piovve dentro all ‘alta fantasia,”
“Solea valor e cortesia trovarsi,”
“Che ne ’nvogliava amor e cortesia.”
Here we have fantasì’ and fantasiä, cortesì’ and cortesiä. Even Pope has promiscuous, obsequious, as trisyllables, individual as a quadrisyllable, and words like tapestry, opera, indifferently as trochees or dactyls according to their place in the verse. Donne even goes so far as to make Cain a monosyllable and dissyllable in the same verse:—
“Sister and wife to Cain, Caïn that first did plough.”
The cæsural pause (a purely imaginary thing in accentual metres) may be made to balance a line like this of Donne’s,
“Are they not like | singers at doors for meat,”
but we defy any one by any trick of voice to make it supply a missing syllable in what is called our heroic measure, so mainly used by Chaucer.
Enough and far more than enough on a question about which it is as hard to be patient as about the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays. It is easy to find all manner of bad metres among these versifiers, and plenty of inconsistencies, many or most of them the fault of careless or ignorant transcribers, but whoever has read them thoroughly, and with enough philological knowledge of cognate languages to guide him, is sure that they at least aimed at regularity, precisely as he is convinced that Raynouard’s rule about singular and plural terminations has plenty of evidence to sustain it, despite the numerous exceptions. To show what a bad versifier could make out of the same language that Chaucer used, I copy one stanza from a contemporary poem.
“When Phebus fresh was in chare resplendent,
In the moneth of May erly in a morning,
I hard two lovers profer this argument
In the yeere of our Lord a M. by rekening,
CCCXL. and VIII. yeere following.
O potent princesse conserve true lovers all
And grant them thy region and blisse celestial.”[23]
Here is riding-rhyme, and on a very hard horse too. Can any one be insensible to the difference between such stuff as this and the measure of Chaucer? Is it possible that with him the one halting verse should be the rule, and the twenty musical ones the exception? Let us take heed to his own words:—