[Sidenote: Havelok the Dane.]
It is, moreover, not a mere accident that these three, though the authors pretty certainly had French originals before them, seem most likely to have had yet older English or Anglo-Saxon originals of the French in the case of _Horn_ and _Havelok_, while the Tristram story, as is pointed out in the chapter on the Arthurian Legend, is the most British in tone of all the divisions of that Legend. _Havelok_ and _Horn_ have yet further interest because of the curious contrast between their oldest forms in more ways than one. _Havelok_ is an English equivalent, with extremely strong local connections and identifications, of the homelier pa.s.sages of the French _chansons de geste_. The hero, born in Denmark, and orphan heir to a kingdom, is to be put away by his treacherous guardian, who commits him to Grim the fisherman to be drowned. Havelok"s treatment is hard enough even on his way to the drowning; but as supernatural signs show his kings.h.i.+p to Grim"s wife, and as the fisherman, feigning to have performed his task, meets with very scant grat.i.tude from his employer, he resolves to escape from the latter"s power, puts to sea, and lands in England at the place afterwards to be called from him Grimsby. Havelok is brought up simply as a rough fisher-boy; but he obtains employment in Lincoln Castle as porter to the kitchen, and much rough horse-play of the _chanson_ kind occurs. Now it so happens that the heiress of England, Goldborough, has been treated by her guardian with as much injustice though with less ferocity; and the traitor seeks to crown his exclusion of her from her rights by marrying her to the st.u.r.dy scullion. When the two rights are thus joined, they of course prevail, and the two traitors, after a due amount of hard fighting, receive their doom, G.o.dard the Dane being hanged, and G.o.dric the Englishman burnt at the stake. This rough and vigorous story is told in rough and vigorous verse--octosyllabic couplets, with full licence in shortening, but with no additional syllables except an occasional double rhyme--in very sterling English, and with some, though slight, traces of alliteration.
[Sidenote: King Horn.]
_Horn_ (_King Horn_, _Horn-Child and Maiden Rimnilde_, &c.) is somewhat more courtly in its general outlines, and has less of the folk-tale about it; but it also has connections with Denmark, and it turns upon treachery, as indeed do nearly all the romances. Horn, son of a certain King Murray, is, in consequence of a raid of heathen in s.h.i.+ps, orphaned and exiled in his childhood across the sea, where he finds an asylum in the house of King Aylmer of Westerness. His love for Aylmer"s daughter Rimenhild and hers for him (he is the most beautiful of men), the faithfulness of his friend Athulf (who has to undergo the very trying experience of being made violent love to by Rimenhild under the impression that he is Horn), and the treachery of his friend Fikenild (who nearly succeeds in making the princess his own), defray the chief interest of the story, which is not very long.
The good steward Athelbrus also plays a great part, which is noticeable, because the stewards of Romances are generally bad. The rhymed couplets of this poem are composed of shorter lines than those of _Havelok_. They allow themselves the syllabic licence of alliterative verse proper, though there is even less alliteration than in _Havelok_, and they vary from five to eight syllables, though five and six are the commonest. The poem, indeed, in this respect occupies a rather peculiar position. Yet it is all the more valuable as showing yet another phase of the change.
The first really charming literature in English has, however, still to be mentioned: and this is to be found in the volume--little more than a pamphlet--edited fifty years ago for the Percy Society (March 1, 1842) by Thomas Wright, under the t.i.tle of _Specimens of Lyric Poetry composed in England in the Reign of Edward the First_, from MS. 2253 Harl. in the British Museum. The first three poems are in French, of the well-known and by this time far from novel _trouvere_ character, of which those of Thibaut of Champagne are the best specimens. The fourth--
"Middel-erd for mon wes mad,"
is English, and is interesting as copying not the least intricate of the _trouvere_ measures--an eleven-line stanza of eight sevens or sixes, rhymed _ab, ab, ab, ab, c, b, c_; but moral-religious in tone and much alliterated. The fifth, also English, is anapaestic tetrameter heavily alliterated, and mono-rhymed for eight verses, with the stanza made up to ten by a couplet on another rhyme. It is not very interesting. But with VI. the chorus of sweet sounds begins, and therefore, small as is the room for extract here, it must be given in full:--
"Bytuene Mershe and Avoril When spray beginneth to springe, The little foul hath hire wyl On hyre lud to synge: Ich libbe in love-longinge For semlokest of alle thynge, He may me blisse bringe Icham in hire banndoun.
An hendy hap ichabbe y-hent, Ichot from hevine it is me sent, From alle wymmen my love is lent Ant lyht on Alisoun.
On hew hire her is fayr ynoh Hire browe bronne, hire eye blake; With lovsom chere he on me loh; With middel small ant wel y-make; Bott he me wille to hire take, For to buen hire owen make, Long to lyven ichulle forsake, Ant feye fallen a-doun.
An hendy hap, &c.
Nihtes when I wenke ant wake, For-thi myn wonges waxeth won; Levedi, al for thine sake Longinge is ylent me on.
In world is non so wytor mon That al hire bounte telle con; Heir swyre is whittere than the swon Ant fayrest may in toune.
An hendy hap, &c.
Icham for wouyng al for-wake, Wery so water in wore Lest any reve me my make Ychabbe y-[y]yrned [y]ore.
Betere is tholien whyle sore Then mournen evermore.
Geynest under gore, Herkene to my roune.
An hendy hap, &c."
The next, "With longyng y am lad," is pretty, though less so: and is in ten-line stanzas of sixes, rhymed _a a b, a a b, b a a b_. Those of VIII. are twelve-lined in eights, rhymed _ab, ab, ab, ab, c, d, c, d_; but it is observable that there is some a.s.sonance here instead of pure rhyme. IX. is in the famous romance stanza of six or rather twelve lines, _a la_ _Sir Thopas_; X. in octaves of eights alternately rhymed with an envoy quatrain; XI. (a very pretty one) in a new metre, rhymed _a a a b a, b_. And this variety continues after a fas.h.i.+on which it would be tedious to particularise further. But it must be said that the charm of "Alison" is fully caught up by--
"Lenten ys come with love to toune, With blosmen ant with bryddes roune, That al this blisse bringeth; Dayes-eyes in this dales, Notes suete of nytengales, Ilk foul song singeth;"
by a st.u.r.dy Praise of Women which charges gallantly against the usual mediaeval slanders; and by a piece which, with "Alison," is the flower of the whole, and has the exquisite refrain--
"Blow, northerne wynd, Send thou me my suetyng, Blow, northerne wynd, blou, blou, blou"--
Here is Tennysonian verse five hundred years before Tennyson. The "cry" of English lyric is on this northern wind at last; and it shall never fail afterwards.
[Sidenote: _The prosody of the modern languages._]
[Sidenote: _Historical retrospect._]
This seems to be the best place to deal, not merely with the form of English lyric in itself, but with the general subject of the prosody as well of English as of the other modern literary languages. A very great[100] deal has been written, with more and with less learning, with ingenuity greater or smaller, on the origins of rhyme, on the source of the decasyllabic and other staple lines and stanzas; and, lastly, on the general system of modern as opposed to ancient scansion. Much of this has been the result of really careful study, and not a little of it the result of distinct acuteness; but it has suffered on the whole from the supposed need of some new theory, and from an unwillingness to accept plain and obvious facts. These facts, or the most important of them, may be summarised as follows: The prosody of a language will necessarily vary according to the p.r.o.nunciation and composition of that language; but there are certain general principles of prosody which govern all languages possessing a certain kins.h.i.+p. These general principles were, for the Western branches of the Aryan tongues, very early discovered and formulated by the Greeks, being later adjusted to somewhat stiffer rules--to compensate for less force of poetic genius, or perhaps merely because licence was not required--by the Latins. Towards the end of the cla.s.sical literary period, however, partly the increasing importance of the Germanic and other non-Greek and non-Latin elements in the Empire, partly those inexplicable organic changes which come from time to time, broke up this system. Rhyme appeared, no one knows quite how, or why, or whence, and at the same time, though the general structure of metres was not very much altered, the quant.i.ty of individual syllables appears to have undergone a complete change. Although metres quant.i.tative in scheme continued to be written, they were written, as a rule, with more or less laxity; and though rhyme was sometimes adapted to them in Latin, it was more frequently used with a looser syllabic arrangement, retaining the divisional characteristics of the older prosody, but neglecting quant.i.ty, the strict rules of elision, and so forth.
[Footnote 100: It is sufficient to mention here Guest"s famous _English Rhythms_ (ed. Skeat, 1882), a book which at its first appearance in 1838 was no doubt a revelation, but which carries things too far; Dr Schipper"s _Grundriss der Englischen Metrik_ (Wien, 1895), and for foreign matters M. Gaston Paris"s chapter in his _Litterature Francaise au Moyen Age_. I do not agree with any of them, but I have a profound respect for all.]
[Sidenote: _Anglo-Saxon prosody._]
On the other hand, some of the new Teutonic tongues which were thus brought into contact with Latin, and with which Latin was brought into contact, had systems of prosody of their own, based on entirely different principles. The most elaborate of these probably, and the only one from which we have distinct remains of undoubtedly old matter in considerable quant.i.ties, is Anglo-Saxon, though Icelandic runs it close. A detailed account of the peculiarities of this belongs to the previous volume: it is sufficient to say here that its great characteristic was alliteration, and that accent played a large part, to the exclusion both of definite quant.i.ty and of syllabic ident.i.ty or equivalence.
[Sidenote: _Romance prosody._]
While these were the states of things with regard to Latin on the one hand, and to the tongues most separated from Latin on the other, the Romance languages, or daughters of Latin, had elaborated or were elaborating, by stages which are almost entirely hidden from us, middle systems, of which the earliest, and in a way the most perfect, is that of Provencal, followed by Northern French and Italian, the dialects of the Spanish Peninsula being a little behindhand in elaborate verse. The three first-named tongues seem to have hit upon the verse of ten or eleven syllables, which later crystallised itself into ten for French and eleven for Italian, as their staple measure.[101] Efforts have been made to father this directly on some cla.s.sical original, and some authorities have even been uncritical enough to speak of the connection--this or that--having been "proved"
for these verses or others. No such proof has been given, and none is possible. What is certain, and alone certain, is that whereas the chief literary metre of the last five centuries of Latin had been dactylic and trisyllabic, this, the chief metre of the daughter tongues, and by-and-by almost their only one, was disyllabic--iambic, or trochaic, as the case may be, but generally iambic. Rhyme became by degrees an invariable or almost invariable accompaniment, and while quant.i.ty, strictly speaking, almost disappeared (some will have it that it quite disappeared from French), a syllabic uniformity more rigid than any which had prevailed, except in the case of lyric measures like the Alcaic, became the rule. Even elision was very greatly restricted, though caesura was pretty strictly retained, and an additional servitude was imposed by the early adoption in French of the fixed alternation of "masculine" and "feminine" rhymes--that is to say, of rhymes with, and rhymes without, the mute _e_.
[Footnote 101: _Vide_ Dante, _De Vulgari Eloquio_.]
[Sidenote: _English prosody._]
[Sidenote: _The later alliteration._]
But the prosody of the Romance tongues is perfectly simple and intelligible, except in the one crux of the question how it came into being, and what part "popular" poetry played in it. We find it, almost from the first, full-blown: and only minor refinements or improvements are introduced afterwards. With English prosody it is very different.[102] As has been said, the older prosody itself, with the older verse, seems to have to a great extent died out even before the Conquest, and what verse was written in the alliterative measures afterwards was of a feeble and halting kind. Even when, as the authors of later volumes of this series will have to show, alliterative verse was taken up with something like a set purpose during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, its character was wholly changed, and though some very good work was written in it, it was practically all literary exercise. It frequently a.s.sumed regular stanza-forms, the lines also frequently fell into regular quant.i.tative shapes, such as the heroic, the Alexandrine, and the tetrameter. Above all, the old strict and accurate combination of a limited amount of alliteration, jealously adjusted to words important in sense and rhythm, was exchanged for a profusion of alliterated syllables, often with no direct rhythmical duty to pay, and constantly leading to mere senseless and tasteless jingle, if not to the positive coining of fantastic or improper locutions to get the "artful aid."
[Footnote 102: What is said here of English applies with certain modifications to German, though the almost entire loss of Old German poetry and the comparatively late date of Middle make the process less striking and more obscure, and the greater talent of the individual imitators of French interferes more with the process of insensible shaping and growth. German prosody, despite the charm of its lyric measures, has never acquired the perfect combination of freedom and order which we find in English, as may be seen by comparing the best blank verse of the two.]
[Sidenote: _The new verse._]
Meanwhile the real prosody of English had been elaborated, in the usual blending fas.h.i.+on of the race, by an intricate, yet, as it happens, an easily traceable series of compromises and naturalisations.
By the end of the twelfth century, as we have seen, rhyme was creeping in to supersede alliteration, and a regular arrangement of elastic syllabic equivalents or strict syllabic values was taking the place of the irregular accented lengths. It does not appear that the study of the cla.s.sics had anything directly to do with this: it is practically certain that the influence on the one hand of Latin hymns and the Church services, and on the other of French poetry, had very much.
[Sidenote: _Rhyme and syllabic equivalence._]
Rhyme is to the modern European ear so agreeable, if not so indispensable, an ornament of verse, that, once heard, it is sure to creep in, and can only be expelled by deliberate and unnatural crotchet from any but narrative and dramatic poetry. On the other hand, it is almost inevitable that when rhyme is expected, the lines which it tips should be reduced to an equal or at any rate an equivalent length. Otherwise the expectation of the ear--that the final ring should be led up to by regular and equable rhythm--is baulked. If this is not done, as in what we call doggerel rhyme, an effect of grotesque is universally produced, to the ruin of serious poetic effect. With these desiderata present, though unconsciously present, before them, with the Latin hymn-writers and the French poets for models, and with Church music perpetually starting in their memories cadences, iambic or trochaic, dactylic or anapaestic, to which to set their own verse, it is not surprising that English poets should have accompanied the rapid changes of their language itself with parallel rapidity of metrical innovation. Quant.i.ty they observed loosely--quant.i.ty in modern languages is always loose: but it does not follow that they ignored it altogether.
[Sidenote: _Accent and quant.i.ty._]
Those who insist that they did ignore it, and who painfully search for verses of so many "accents," for "sections," for "pauses," and what not, are confronted with difficulties throughout the whole course of English poetry: there is hardly a page of that brilliant, learned, instructive, invaluable piece of wrong-headedness, Dr Guest"s _English Rhythms_, which does not bristle with them. But at no time are these difficulties so great as during our present period, and especially at the close of it. Let any man who has no "prize to fight," no thesis to defend, take any characteristic piece of Anglo-Saxon poetry and "Alison," place them side by side, read them aloud together, scan them carefully with the eye, compare each separately and both together with as many other examples of poetic arrangement as he likes. He must, I think, be hopelessly blinded by prejudice if he does not come to the conclusion that there is a gulf between the systems of which these two poems are examples--that if the first is "accentual," "sectional," and what not, then these same words are exactly _not_ the words which ought to be applied to the second.[103] And he will further see that with "Alison" there is not the slightest difficulty whatever, but that, on the contrary, it is the natural and all but inevitable thing to do to scan the piece according to cla.s.sical laws, allowing only much more licence of "common" syllables--common in themselves and by position--than in Latin, and rather more than in Greek.
[Footnote 103: Of course there is plenty of alliteration in "Alison."
That ornament is too grateful to the English ear ever to have ceased or to be likely to cease out of English poetry. But it has ceased to possess any _metrical_ value; it has absolutely nothing to do with the _structure_ of the line.]
[Sidenote: _The gain of form._]
Yet another conclusion may perhaps be risked, and that is that this change of prosody was either directly caused by, or in singular coincidence was a.s.sociated with, a great enlargement of the range and no slight improvement of the quality of poetry. Anglo-Saxon verse at its best has grandeur, mystery, force, a certain kind of pathos. But it is almost entirely devoid of sweetness, of all the lighter artistic attractions, of power to represent other than religious pa.s.sion, of adaptability to the varied uses of lyric. All these additional gifts, and in no slight measure, have now been given; and there is surely an almost fanatical hatred of form in the refusal to connect the gain with those changes, in vocabulary first, in prosody secondly, which have been noted. For there is not only the fact, but there is a more than plausible reason for the fact. The alliterative accentual verse of indefinite length is obviously unsuited for all the lighter, and for some of the more serious, purposes of verse. Unless it is at really heroic height (and at this height not even Shakespeare can keep poetry invariably) it must necessarily be flat, awkward, prosaic, heavy, all which qualities are the worst foes of the Muses. The new equipments may not have been indispensable to the poet"s soaring--they may not be the greater wings of his song, the mighty pinions that take him beyond s.p.a.ce and Time into Eternity and the Infinite. But they are most admirable _talaria_, ankle-winglets enabling him to skim and scud, to direct his flight this way and that, to hover as well as to tower, even to run at need as well as to fly.
That a danger was at hand, the danger of too great restriction in the syllabic direction, has been admitted. The greatest poet of the fourteenth century in England--the greatest, for the matter of that, from the beginning till the sixteenth--went some way in this path, and if Chaucer"s English followers had been men of genius we might have been sorely trammelled. Fortunately Lydgate and Occleve and Hawes showed the dangers rather than the attractions of strictness, and the contemporary practice of alliterative irregulars kept alive the appet.i.te for liberty. But at this time--at our time--it was restriction, regulation, quantification, metrical arrangement, that English needed; and it received them.
[Sidenote: _The "accent" theory._]
These remarks are of course not presented as a complete account, even in summary, of English, much less of European prosody. They are barely more than the heads of such a summary, or than indications of the line which the inquiry might, and in the author"s view should, take.
Perhaps they may be worked out--or rather the working out of them may be published--more fully hereafter. But for the present they may possibly be useful as a protest against the "accent" and "stress"
theories which have been so common of late years in regard to English poetry, and which, though not capable of being applied in quite the same fas.h.i.+on to the Romance languages, have had their counterparts in attempts to decry the application of cla.s.sical prosody (which has never been very well understood on the Continent) to modern tongues.
No one can speak otherwise than respectfully of Dr Guest, whose book is certainly one of the most patient and ingenious studies of the kind to be found in any literature, and whose erudition, at a time when such erudition needed far greater efforts than now, cannot be too highly praised. But it is a besetting sin or disease of Englishmen in all matters, after pooh-poohing innovation, to go blindly in for it; and I cannot but think that Dr Guest"s accentual theory, after being for years mainly neglected, has, for years again, been altogether too greedily swallowed. It is not of course a case necessarily of want of scholars.h.i.+p, or want of ear, for there are few better scholars or poets than Mr Robert Bridges, who, though not a mere Guest.i.te, holds theories of prosody which seem to me even less defensible than Guest"s. But it is, I think, a case of rather misguided patriotism, which thinks it necessary to invent an English prosody for English poems.
[Sidenote: _Initial fallacies._]