Chapter X: Part 10

An imperturbable perception of the _real_ relations of things is the Saxon’s leading quality,--no sense whatever, or at best small, of the ideal in him. He has no notion that two and two ever make five, which is the problem the poet often has to solve. Understanding, that is, equilibrium of mind, intellectual good digestion, this, with unclogged biliary ducts, makes him mentally and physically what we call a very fixed fact; but you shall not find a poet in a hundred thousand square miles,--in many prosperous centuries of such. But one element of incalculable importance we have not mentioned. In this homely nature, the idea of God, and of a simple and direct relation between the All-Father and his children, is deeply rooted. There, above all, will he have honesty and simplicity; less than anything else will he have the sacramental wafer,--that beautiful emblem of our dependence on Him who giveth the daily bread; less than anything will he have this smeared with that Barmecide butter of fair words. This is the lovely and noble side of his character. Indignation at this will make him forget crops and cattle; and this, after so many centuries, will give him at last a poet in the monk of Eisleben, who shall cut deep on the memory of mankind that brief creed of conscience,--“Here am I. God help me: I cannot otherwise.” This, it seems to me, with dogged sense of justice,--both results of that equilibrium of thought which springs from clear-sighted understanding,--makes the beauty of the Saxon nature.

He believes in another world, and conceives of it without metaphysical subtleties as something very much after the pattern of this, but infinitely more desirable. Witness the vision of John Bunyan. Once beat it into him that his eternal _well-being_, as he calls it, depends on certain conditions, that only so will the balance in the ledger of eternity be in his favor, and the man who seemed wholly of _this_ world will give all that he has, even his life, with a superb simplicity and scorn of the theatric, for a chance in the next. Hard to move, his very solidity of nature makes him terrible when once fairly set agoing. He is the man of all others slow to admit the thought of revolution; but let him once admit it, he will carry it through and make it _stick_,--a secret hitherto undiscoverable by other races.

But poetry is not made out of the understanding; that is not the sort of block out of which you can carve wing-footed Mercuries. The question of common-sense is always, “What is it good for?”--a question which would abolish the rose and be answered triumphantly by the cabbage. The danger of the prosaic type of mind lies in the stolid sense of superiority which blinds it to everything ideal, to the use of anything that does not serve the practical purposes of life. Do we not remember how the all-observing and all-fathoming Shakespeare has typified this in Bottom the weaver? Surrounded by all the fairy creations of fancy, he sends one to fetch him the bag of a humble-bee, and can find no better employment for Mustard-seed than to help Cavalero Cobweb scratch his ass’s head between the ears. When Titania, queen of that fair ideal world, offers him a feast of beauty, he says he has a good stomach to a pottle of hay!

The Anglo-Saxons never had any real literature of their own. They produced monkish chronicles in bad Latin, and legends of saints in worse metre. Their earlier poetry is essentially Scandinavian. It was that _gens inclytissima Northmannorum_ that imported the divine power of imagination,--that power which, mingled with the solid Saxon understanding, produced at last the miracle of Stratford. It was to this adventurous race, which found America before Columbus, which, for the sake of freedom of thought, could colonize inhospitable Iceland, which, as it were, typifying the very action of the imaginative faculty itself, identified itself always with what it conquered, that we owe whatever aquiline features there are in the national physiognomy of the English race. It was through the Normans that the English mind and fancy, hitherto provincial and uncouth, were first infused with the lightness, grace, and self-confidence of Romance literature. They seem to have opened a window to the southward in that solid and somewhat sombre insular character, and it was a painted window all aglow with the figures of tradition and poetry. The old Gothic volume, grim with legends of devilish temptation and satanic lore, they illuminated with the gay and brilliant inventions of a softer climate and more genial moods. Even the stories of Arthur and his knights, toward which the stern Dante himself relented so far as to call them _gratissimas ambages_, most delightful circumlocutions, though of British original, were first set free from the dungeon of a barbarous dialect by the French poets, and so brought back to England, and made popular there by the Normans.

Chaucer, to whom French must have been almost as truly a mother tongue as English, was familiar with all that had been done by Troubadour or Trouvère. In him we see the first result of the Norman yeast upon the home-baked Saxon loaf. The flour had been honest, the paste well kneaded, but the inspiring leaven was wanting till the Norman brought it over. Chaucer works still in the solid material of his race, but with what airy lightness has he not infused it? Without ceasing to be English, he has escaped from being insular. But he was something more than this; he was a scholar, a thinker, and a critic. He had studied the _Divina Commedia_ of Dante, he had read Petrarca and Boccaccio, and some of the Latin poets. He calls Dante the great poet of Italy, and Petrarch a learned clerk. It is plain that he knew very well the truer purpose of poetry, and had even arrived at the higher wisdom of comprehending the aptitudes and limitations of his own genius. He saw clearly and felt keenly what were the faults and what the wants of the prevailing literature of his country. In the “Monk’s Tale” he slyly satirizes the long-winded morality of Gower, as his prose antitype, Fielding, was to satirize the prolix sentimentality of Richardson. In the rhyme of Sir Thopas he gives the _coup de grace_ to the romances of Chivalry, and in his own choice of a subject he heralds that new world in which the actual and the popular were to supplant the fantastic and the heroic.

Before Chaucer, modern Europe had given birth to one great poet, Dante; and contemporary with him was one supremely elegant one, Petrarch. Dante died only seven years before Chaucer was born, and, so far as culture is derived from books, the moral and intellectual influences they had been subjected to, the speculative stimulus that may have given an impulse to their minds,--there could have been no essential difference between them. Yet there are certain points of resemblance and of contrast, and those not entirely fanciful, which seem to me of considerable interest. Both were of mixed race, Dante certainly, Chaucer presumably so. Dante seems to have inherited on the Teutonic side the strong moral sense, the almost nervous irritability of conscience, and the tendency to mysticism which made him the first of Christian poets,--first in point of time and first in point of greatness. From the other side he seems to have received almost in overplus a feeling of order and proportion, sometimes wellnigh hardening into mathematical precision and formalism,--a tendency which at last brought the poetry of the Romanic races to a dead-lock of artifice and decorum. Chaucer, on the other hand, drew from the South a certain airiness of sentiment and expression, a felicity of phrase, and an elegance of turn hitherto unprecedented and hardly yet matched in our literature, but all the while kept firm hold of his native soundness of understanding, and that genial humor which seems to be the proper element of worldly wisdom. With Dante, life represented the passage of the soul from a state of nature to a state of grace; and there would have been almost an even chance whether (as Burns says) the _Divina Commedia_ had turned out a song or a sermon, but for the wonderful genius of its author, which has compelled the sermon to sing and the song to preach, whether they would or no. With Chaucer, life is a pilgrimage, but only that his eye may be delighted with the varieties of costume and character. There are good morals to be found in Chaucer, but they are always incidental. With Dante the main question is the saving of the soul, with Chaucer it is the conduct of life. The distance between them is almost that between holiness and prudence. Dante applies himself to the realities and Chaucer to the scenery of life, and the former is consequently the more universal poet, as the latter is the more truly national one. Dante represents the justice of God, and Chaucer his loving-kindness. If there is anything that may properly be called satire in the one, it is like a blast of the divine wrath, before which the wretches cower and tremble, which rends away their cloaks of hypocrisy and their masks of worldly propriety, and leaves them shivering in the cruel nakedness of their shame. The satire of the other is genial with the broad sunshine of humor, into which the victims walk forth with a delightful unconcern, laying aside of themselves the disguises that seem to make them uncomfortably warm, till they have made a thorough betrayal of themselves so unconsciously that we almost pity while we laugh. Dante shows us the punishment of sins against God and one’s neighbor, in order that we may shun them, and so escape the doom that awaits them in the other world. Chaucer exposes the cheats of the transmitter of metals, of the begging friars, and of the pedlers of indulgences, in order that we may be on our guard against them in this world. If we are to judge of what is national only by the highest and most characteristic types, surely we cannot fail to see in Chaucer the true forerunner and prototype of Shakespeare, who, with an imagination of far deeper grasp, a far wider reach of thought, yet took the same delight in the pageantry of the actual world, and whose moral is the moral of worldly wisdom only heightened to the level of his wide-viewing mind, and made typical by the dramatic energy of his plastic nature.

Yet if Chaucer had little of that organic force of life which so inspires the poem of Dante that, as he himself says of the heavens, part answers to part with mutual interchange of light, he had a structural faculty which distinguishes him from all other English poets, his contemporaries, and which indeed is the primary distinction of poets properly so called. There is, to be sure, only one other English writer coeval with himself who deserves in any way to be compared with him, and that rather for contrast than for likeness.

With the single exception of Langland, the English poets, his contemporaries, were little else than bad versifiers of legends classic or mediæval, as happened, without selection and without art. Chaucer is the first who broke away from the dreary traditional style, and gave not merely stories, but lively _pictures_ of real life as the ever-renewed substance of poetry. He was a reformer, too, not only in literature, but in morals. But as in the former his exquisite tact saved him from all eccentricity, so in the latter the pervading sweetness of his nature could never be betrayed into harshness and invective. He seems incapable of indignation. He mused good-naturedly over the vices and follies of men, and, never forgetting that he was fashioned of the same clay, is rather apt to pity than condemn. There is no touch of cynicism in all he wrote. Dante’s brush seems sometimes to have been smeared with the burning pitch of his own fiery lake. Chaucer’s pencil is dipped in the cheerful color-box of the old illuminators, and he has their patient delicacy of touch, with a freedom far beyond their somewhat mechanic brilliancy.

English narrative poetry, as Chaucer found it, though it had not altogether escaped from the primal curse of long-windedness so painfully characteristic of its prototype, the French Romance of Chivalry, had certainly shown a feeling for the picturesque, a sense of color, a directness of phrase, and a simplicity of treatment which give it graces of its own and a turn peculiar to itself. In the easy knack of story-telling, the popular minstrels cannot compare with Marie de France. The lightsomeness of fancy, that leaves a touch of sunshine and is gone, is painfully missed in them all. Their incidents enter dispersedly, as the old stage directions used to say, and they have not learned the art of concentrating their force on the key-point of their hearers’ interest. They neither get fairly hold of their subject, nor, what is more important, does it get hold of them. But they sometimes yield to an instinctive hint of leaving-off at the right moment, and in their happy negligence achieve an effect only to be matched by the highest successes of art.

“That lady heard his mourning all
Right under her chamber wall,
In her oriel where she was,
Closëd well with royal glass;
Fulfilled it was with imagery
Every window, by and by;
On each side had there a gin
Sperred with many a divers pin;
Anon that lady fair and free
Undid a pin of ivory
And wide the window she open set,
The sun shone in at her closet.”

It is true the old rhymer relapses a little into the habitual drone of his class, and shows half a mind to bolt into their common inventory style when he comes to his _gins_ and _pins_, but he withstands the temptation manfully, and his sunshine fills our hearts with a gush as sudden as that which illumines the lady’s oriel. Coleridge and Keats have each in his way felt the charm of this winsome picture, but have hardly equalled its hearty honesty, its economy of material, the supreme test of artistic skill. I admit that the phrase “_had_ there a gin” is suspicious, and suggests a French original, but I remember nothing altogether so good in the romances from the other side of the Channel. One more passage occurs to me, almost incomparable in its simple straightforward force and choice of the right word.

“Sir Graysteel to his death thus thraws,
He welters [wallows] and the grass updraws;

* * * * *

A little while then lay he still,
(Friends that saw him liked full ill,)
And bled into his armor bright.”

The last line, for suggestive reticence, almost deserves to be put beside the famous

“Quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante”

of the great master of laconic narration. In the same poem[14] the growing love of the lady, in its maidenliness of unconscious betrayal, is touched with a delicacy and tact as surprising as they are delightful. But such passages, which are the despair of poets who have to work in a language that has faded into diction, are exceptional. They are to be set down rather to good luck than to art. Even the stereotyped similes of these fortunate illiterates, like “weary as water in a weir,” or “glad as grass is of the rain,” are new, like nature, at the thousandth repetition. Perhaps our palled taste overvalues the wild flavor of these wayside treasure-troves. They are wood-strawberries, prized in proportion as we must turn over more leaves ere we find one. This popular literature is of value in helping its toward a juster estimate of Chaucer by showing what the mere language was capable of, and that all it wanted was a poet to put it through its paces. For though the poems I have quoted be, in their present form, later than he, they are, after all, but modernized versions of older copies, which they doubtless reproduce with substantial fidelity.

It is commonly assumed that Chaucer did for English what Dante is supposed to have done for Italian and Luther for German, that he, in short, in some hitherto inexplicable way, created it. But this is to speak loosely and without book. Languages are never made in any such fashion, still less are they the achievement of any single man, however great his genius, however powerful his individuality. They shape themselves by laws as definite as those which guide and limit the growth of other living organisms. Dante, indeed, has told us that he chose to write in the tongue that might be learned of nurses and chafferers in the market. His practice shows that he knew perfectly well that poetry has needs which cannot be answered by the vehicle of vulgar commerce between man and man. What he instinctively felt was, that there was the living heart of all speech, without whose help the brain were powerless to send will, motion, meaning, to the limbs and extremities. But it is true that a language, as respects the uses of literature, is liable to a kind of syncope. No matter how complete its vocabulary may be, how thorough an outfit of inflections and case-endings it may have, it is a mere dead body without a soul till some man of genius set its arrested pulses once more athrob, and show what wealth of sweetness, scorn, persuasion, and passion lay there awaiting its liberator. In this sense it is hardly too much to say that Chaucer, like Dante, found his native tongue a dialect and left it a language. But it was not what he did with deliberate purpose of reform, it was his kindly and plastic genius that wrought this magic of renewal and inspiration. It was not the new words he introduced,[15] but his way of using the old ones, that surprised them into grace, ease, and dignity in their own despite. In order to feel fully how much he achieved, let any one subject himself to a penitential course of reading in his contemporary, Gower, who worked in a material to all intents and purposes the same, or listen for a moment to the barbarous jangle which Lydgate and Occleve contrive to draw from the instrument their master had tuned so deftly. Gower has positively raised tediousness to the precision of science, he has made dulness an heirloom for the students of our literary history. As you slip to and fro on the frozen levels of his verse, which give no foothold to the mind, as your nervous ear awaits the inevitable recurrence of his rhyme, regularly pertinacious as the tick of an eight-day clock and reminding you of Wordsworth’s

“Once more the ass did lengthen out
The hard, dry, seesaw of his horrible bray,”

you learn to dread, almost to respect, the powers of this indefatigable man. He is the undertaker of the fair mediæval legend, and his style has the hateful gloss, the seemingly unnatural length, of a coffin. Love, beauty, passion, nature, art, life, the natural and theological virtues,--there is nothing beyond his power to disenchant, nothing out of which the tremendous hydraulic press of his allegory (or whatever it is, for I am not sure if it be not something even worse) will not squeeze all feeling and freshness and leave it a juiceless pulp. It matters not where you try him, whether his story be Christian or pagan, borrowed from history or fable, you cannot escape him. Dip in at the middle or the end, dodge back to the beginning, the patient old man is there to take you by the button and go on with his imperturbable narrative. You may have left off with Clytemnestra, and you begin again with Samson; it makes no odds, for you cannot tell one from tother. His tediousness is omnipresent, and like Dogberry he could find in his heart to bestow it all (and more if he had it) on your worship. The word _lengthy_ has been charged to our American account, but it must have been invented by the first reader of Gower’s works, the only inspiration of which they were ever capable. Our literature had to lie by and recruit for more than four centuries ere it could give us an equal vacuity in Tupper, so persistent a uniformity of commonplace in the “Recreations of a Country Parson.” Let us be thankful that the industrious Gower never found time for recreation!

But a fairer as well as more instructive comparison lies between Chaucer and the author of “Piers Ploughman.” Langland has as much tenderness, as much interest in the varied picture of life, as hearty a contempt for hypocrisy, and almost an equal sense of fun. He has the same easy abundance of matter. But what a difference! It is the difference between the poet and the man of poetic temperament. The abundance of the one is a continual fulness within the fixed limits of good taste; that of the other is squandered in overflow. The one can be profuse on occasion; the other is diffuse whether he will or no. The one is full of talk; the other is garrulous. What in one is the refined _bonhomie_ of a man of the world, is a rustic shrewdness in the other. Both are kindly in their satire, and have not (like too many reformers) that vindictive love of virtue which spreads the stool of repentance with thistle-burrs before they invite the erring to seat themselves therein. But what in “Piers Ploughman” is sly fun, has the breadth and depth of humor in Chaucer; and it is plain that while the former was taken up by his moral purpose, the main interest of the latter turned to perfecting the form of his work. In short, Chaucer had that fine literary sense which is as rare as genius, and, united with it, as it was in him, assures an immortality of fame. It is not merely what he has to say, but even more the agreeable way he has of saying it, that captivates our attention and gives him an assured place in literature. Above all, it is not in detached passages that his charm lies, but in the entirety of expression and the cumulative effect of many particulars working toward a common end. Now though _ex ungue leonem_ be a good rule in comparative anatomy, its application, except in a very limited way, in criticism is sure to mislead; for we should always bear in mind that the really great writer is great in the mass, and is to be tested less by his cleverness in the elaboration of parts than by that _reach_ of mind which is incapable of random effort, which selects, arranges, combines, rejects, denies itself the cheap triumph of immediate effects, because it is absorbed by the controlling charm of proportion and unity. A careless good-luck of phrase is delightful; but criticism cleaves to the teleological argument, and distinguishes the creative intellect, not so much by any happiness of natural endowment as by the marks of design. It is true that one may sometimes discover by a single verse whether an author have imagination, or may make a shrewd guess whether he have style or no, just as by a few spoken words you may judge of a man’s accent; but the true artist in language is never spotty, and needs no guide-boards of admiring italics, a critical method introduced by Leigh Hunt, whose feminine temperament gave him acute perceptions at the expense of judgment. This is the Bœotian method, which offers us a brick as a sample of the house, forgetting that it is not the goodness of the separate bricks, but the way in which they are put together, that brings them within the province of art, and makes the difference between a heap and a house. A great writer does not reveal himself here and there, but everywhere. Langland’s verse runs mostly like a brook, with a beguiling and wellnigh slumberous prattle, but he, more often than any writer of his class, flashes into salient lines, gets inside our guard with the home-thrust of a forthright word, and he gains if taken piecemeal. His imagery is naturally and vividly picturesque, as where he says of Old Age,--

“Eld the hoar
That was in the vauntward,
And bare the banner before death,”--

and he softens to a sweetness of sympathy beyond Chaucer when he speaks of the poor or tells us that Mercy is “sib of all sinful”; but to compare “Piers Ploughman” with the “Canterbury Tales” is to compare sermon with song.

Let us put a bit of Langland’s satire beside one of Chaucer’s. Some people in search of Truth meet a pilgrim and ask him whence he comes. He gives a long list of holy places, appealing for proof to the relics on his hat:--

“‘I have walked full wide in wet and in dry
And sought saints for my soul’s health.’
‘Know’st thou ever a relic that is called Truth?
Couldst thou show us the way where that wight dwelleth?’
‘Nay, so God help me,’ said the man then,
‘I saw never palmer with staff nor with scrip
Ask after him ever till now in this place.’”

This is a good hit, and the poet is satisfied; but, in what I am going to quote from Chaucer, everything becomes picture, over which lies broad and warm the sunshine of humorous fancy.

“In oldë dayës of the King Artour
Of which that Britouns speken gret honour,
All was this lond fulfilled of fayerie:
The elf-queen with her joly compaignie
Dancëd ful oft in many a grenë mede:
This was the old opinion as I rede;
I speke of many hundrid yer ago:
But now can no man see none elvës mo,
For now the gretë charite and prayëres
Of lymytours and other holy freres
That sechen every lond and every streem,
As thick as motis in the sonnëbeam,
Blessyng halles, chambres, kichenës, and boures,
Citees and burghës, castels hihe and toures,
Thorpës and bernes, shepnes and dayeries,
This makith that ther ben no fayeries.
For ther as wont to walken was an elf
There walkith none but the lymytour himself,
In undermelës and in morwenynges.
And sayth his matyns and his holy thinges,
As he goth in his lymytatioun.
Wommen may now go saufly up and doun;
In every bush or under every tre
There is none other incubus but he,
And he ne wol doon hem no dishonóur.”

How cunningly the contrast is suggested here between the Elf-queen’s jolly company and the unsocial limiters, thick as motes in the sunbeam, yet each walking by himself! And with what an air of innocent unconsciousness is the deadly thrust of the last verse given, with its contemptuous emphasis on the _he_ that seems so well-meaning! Even Shakespeare, who seems to come in after everybody has done his best with a “Let me take hold a minute and show you how to do it,” could not have bettered this.

“Piers Ploughman” is the best example I know of what is called popular poetry,--of compositions, that is, which contain all the simpler elements of poetry, but still in solution, not crystallized around any thread of artistic purpose. In it appears at her best the Anglo-Saxon Muse, a first cousin of Poor Richard, full of proverbial wisdom, who always brings her knitting in her pocket, and seems most at home in the chimney-corner. It is genial; it plants itself firmly on human nature with its rights and wrongs; it has a surly honesty, prefers the downright to the gracious, and conceives of speech as a tool rather than a musical instrument. If we should seek for a single word that would define it most precisely, we should not choose simplicity, but homeliness. There is more or less of this in all early poetry, to be sure; but I think it especially proper to English poets, and to the most English among them, like Cowper, Crabbe, and one is tempted to add Wordsworth,--where he forgets Coleridge’s private lectures. In reading such poets as Langland, also, we are not to forget a certain charm of distance in the very language they use, making it unhackneyed without being alien. As it is the chief function of the poet to make the familiar novel, these fortunate early risers of literature, who gather phrases with the dew still on them, have their poetry done for them, as it were, by their vocabulary. But in Chaucer, as in all great poets, the language gets its charm from him. The force and sweetness of his genius kneaded more kindly together the Latin and Teutonic elements of our mother tongue, and made something better than either. The necessity of writing poetry, and not mere verse, made him a reformer whether he would or no; and the instinct of his finer ear was a guide such as none before him or contemporary with him, nor indeed any that came after him, till Spenser, could command. Gower had no notion of the uses of rhyme except as a kind of crease at the end of every eighth syllable, where the verse was to be folded over again into another layer. He says, for example,

“This maiden Canacee was hight,
Both in the day and eke by night,”

as if people commonly changed their names at dark. And he could not even contrive to say this without the clumsy pleonasm of _both_ and _eke_. Chaucer was put to no such shifts of piecing out his metre with loose-woven bits of baser stuff. He himself says, in the “Man of Law’s Tale,”--

“Me lists not of the chaff nor of the straw
To make so long a tale as of the corn.”

One of the world’s three or four great story-tellers, he was also one of the best versifiers that ever made English trip and sing with a gayety that seems careless, but where every foot beats time to the tune of the thought. By the skilful arrangement of his pauses he evaded the monotony of the couplet, and gave to the rhymed pentameter, which he made our heroic measure, something of the architectural repose of blank verse. He found our language lumpish, stiff, unwilling, too apt to speak Saxonly in grouty monosyllables; he left it enriched with the longer measure of the Italian and Provençal poets. He reconciled, in the harmony of his verse, the English bluntness with the dignity and elegance of the less homely Southern speech. Though he did not and could not create our language (for he who writes to be read does not write for linguisters), yet it is true that he first made it easy, and to that extent modern, so that Spenser, two hundred years later, studied his method and called him master. He first wrote _English_; and it was a feeling of this, I suspect, that made it fashionable in Elizabeth’s day to “talk pure Chaucer.” Already we find in his works verses that might pass without question in Milton or even Wordsworth, so mainly unchanged have the language of poetry and the movement of verse remained from his day to our own.

“Thou Polymnia
On Pérnaso, that, with[16] thy sisters glade,
By Helicon, not far from Cirrea,
Singest with voice memorial in the shade,
Under the laurel which that may not fade.”

“And downward from a hill under a bent
There stood the temple of Mars omnipotent
Wrought all of burned steel, of which th’ entrée
Was long and strait and ghastly for to see:
The northern light in at the doorës shone
For window in the wall ne was there none
Through which men mighten any light discerne;
The dore was all of adamant eterne.”

And here are some lines that would not seem out of place in the “Paradise of Dainty Devises”:--

“Hide, Absolom, thy giltë [gilded] tresses clear,
Esther lay thou thy meekness all adown.

* * * * *

Make of your wifehood no comparison;
Hide ye your beauties Ysoude and Elaine,
My lady cometh, that all this may distain.”

When I remember Chaucer’s malediction upon his scrivener, and consider that by far the larger proportion of his verses (allowing always for change of pronunciation) are perfectly accordant with our present accentual system, I cannot believe that he ever wrote an imperfect line. His ear would never have tolerated the verses of nine syllables, with a strong accent on the first, attributed to him by Mr. Skeate and Mr. Morris. Such verses seem to me simply impossible in the pentameter iambic as Chaucer wrote it. A great deal of misapprehension would be avoided in discussing English metres, if it were only understood that quantity in Latin and quantity in English mean very different things. Perhaps the best quantitative verses in our language (better even than Coleridge’s) are to be found in Mother Goose, composed by nurses wholly by ear and beating time as they danced the baby on their knee. I suspect Chaucer and Shakespeare would be surprised into a smile by the learned arguments which supply their halting verses with every kind of excuse except that of being readable. When verses were written to be chanted, more license could be allowed, for the ear tolerates the widest deviations from habitual accent in words that are sung. _Segnius irritant demissa per aurem._ To some extent the same thing is true of anapæstic and other tripping measures, but we cannot admit it in marching tunes like those of Chaucer. He wrote for the eye more than for the voice, as poets had begun to do long before.[17] Some loose talk of Coleridge, loose in spite of its affectation of scientific precision, about “retardations” and the like, has misled many honest persons into believing that they can make good verse out of bad prose. Coleridge himself, from natural fineness of ear, was the best metrist among modern English poets, and, read with proper allowances, his remarks upon versification are always instructive to whoever is not rhythm-deaf. But one has no patience with the dyspondæuses, the pæon primuses, and what not, with which he darkens verses that are to be explained only by the contemporary habits of pronunciation. Till after the time of Shakespeare we must always bear in mind that it is not a language of books but of living speech that we have to deal with. Of this language Coleridge had little knowledge, except what could be acquired through the ends of his fingers as they lazily turned the leaves of his haphazard reading. If his eye was caught by a single passage that gave him a chance to theorize he did not look farther. Speaking of Massinger, for example, he says, “When a speech is interrupted, or one of the characters speaks aside, the last syllable of the former speech and first of the succeeding Massinger counts for one, because both are supposed to be spoken at the same moment.

‘And felt the sweetness _of’t_
‘_How_ her mouth runs over.’”

Now fifty instances may be cited from Massinger which tell against this fanciful notion, for one that seems, and only seems, in its favor. Any one tolerably familiar with the dramatists knows that in the passage quoted by Coleridge, the _how_ being emphatic, “_how her_” was pronounced _how’r_. He tells us that “Massinger is fond of the anapæst in the first and third foot, as:--

‘Tŏ yoŭr mōre | thăn mās|cŭlinĕ rēa|sŏn thāt | cŏmmānds ’ĕm ||.’

Likewise of the second pæon (⌣--⌣⌣) in the first foot, followed by four trochees (--⌣), as:--

‘Sŏ grēēdĭly̆ | lōng fōr, | knōw theĭr | tītĭll|ātiŏns.’”

In truth, he was no fonder of them than his brother dramatists who, like him, wrote for the voice by the ear. “To your” is still one syllable in ordinary speech, and “masculine” and “greedily” were and are dissyllables or trisyllables according to their place in the verse. Coleridge was making pedantry of a very simple matter. Yet he has said with perfect truth of Chaucer’s verse, “Let a few plain rules be given for sounding the final è of syllables, and for expressing the terminations of such words as _ocëan_ and _natiön_, &c., as dissyllables,--or let the syllables to be sounded in such cases be marked by a competent metrist. This simple expedient would, with a very few trifling exceptions, where the errors are inveterate, enable any one to feel the perfect smoothness and harmony of Chaucer’s verse.” But let us keep widely clear of Latin and Greek terms of prosody! It is also more important here than even with the dramatists of Shakespeare’s time to remember that we have to do with a language caught more from the ear than from books. The best school for learning to understand Chaucer’s elisions, compressions, slurrings-over and runnings-together of syllables is to listen to the habitual speech of rustics with whom language is still plastic to meaning, and hurries or prolongs itself accordingly. Here is a contraction frequent in Chaucer, and still common in New England:--

“But me were lever than [lever ’n] all this town, quod he.”

Let one example suffice for many. To Coleridge’s rules another should be added by a wise editor; and that is to restore the final _n_ in the infinitive and third person plural of verbs, and in such other cases as can be justified by the authority of Chaucer himself. Surely his ear could never have endured the sing-song of such verses as

“I couth_e_ tell_e_ for a gown_e_-cloth,”

or

“Than ye to me schuld brek_e_ your_e_ trouth_e_.”

Chaucer’s measure is so uniform (making due allowances) that words should be transposed or even omitted where the verse manifestly demands it,--and with copyists so long and dull of ear this is often the case. Sometimes they leave out a needful word:--

“But er [the] thunder stynte, there cometh rain,”
“When [that] we ben yflattered and ypraised,”
“Tak [ye] him for the greatest gentleman.”

Sometimes they thrust in a word or words that hobble the verse:--

“She trowed he were yfel in [some] maladie,”
“Ye faren like a man [that] had lost his wit,”
“Then have I got of you the maystrie, quod she,”
(Then have I got the maystery, quod she,)
“And quod the jugë [also] thou must lose thy head.”

Sometimes they give a wrong word identical in meaning:--

“And therwithal he knew [couthë] mo proverbes.”

Sometimes they change the true order of the words:--

“Therefore no woman of clerkës is [is of clerkës] praised”
“His felaw lo, here he stont [stont he] hool on live.”
“He that covèteth is a porë wight
For he wold have that is not in his might;
But he that nought hath ne coveteth nought to have.”

Here the “but” of the third verse belongs at the head of the first, and we get rid of the anomaly of “coveteth” differently accented within two lines. Nearly all the seemingly unmetrical verses may be righted in this way. I find a good example of this in the last stanza of “Troilus and Creseide.” As it stands, we read,--

“Thou one, two, and three, eterne on live
That raignast aie in three, two and one.”

It is plain that we should read “one _and_ two” in the first verse, and “three _and_ two” in the second. Remembering, then, that Chaucer was here translating Dante, I turned (after making the correction) to the original, and found as I expected

“Quell’ uno _e_ due e tre che sempre vive
E regna sempre in tre _e_ due ed uno.” (Par. xiv. 28, 29.)

In the stanza before this we have,--

“To thee and to the philosophic_all_ strode,
To vouchsafe [vouchësafe] there need is, to correct”;

and further on,--

“With all mine herte’ of mercy ever I pray
And to the Lord aright thus I speake and say,”

where we must either strike out the second “I” or put it after “speake.”

One often finds such changes made by ear justified by the readings in other texts, and we cannot but hope that the Chaucer Society will give us the means of at last settling upon a version which shall make the poems of one of the most fluent of metrists at least readable. Let anyone compare the “Franklin’s Tale” in the Aldine edition[18] with the text given by Wright, and he will find both sense and metre clear themselves up in a surprising way. A careful collation of texts, by the way, confirms one’s confidence in Tyrwhitt’s good taste and thoroughness.

A writer in the “Proceedings of the Philological Society” has lately undertaken to prove that Chaucer did not sound the final or medial _e_, and throws us back on the old theory that he wrote “riding-rime,” that is, verse to the eye and not the ear. This he attempts to do by showing that the Anglo-Norman poets themselves did not sound the _e_, or, at any rate, were not uniform in so doing. It should seem a sufficient answer to this merely to ask whence modern French poetry derived its rules of pronunciation so like those of Chaucer, so different from those of prose. But it is not enough to prove that some of the Anglo-Norman rhymers were bad versifiers. Let us look for examples in the works of the best poet among them all, Marie de France, with whose works Chaucer was certainly familiar. What was _her_ practice? I open at random and find enough to overthrow the whole theory:--

“Od sa fill_ë_[19] ke le cela--
Tut li curag_ë_s li fremi--
Di mei, fet-el_ë_ par ta fei--
La Dameisel_ë_ l’aporta--
Kar ne li sembla mi_ë_ boens--
La dam_ë_ l’aveit apelée--
Et la mer_ë_ l’areisuna.”

But how about the elision?

“Le pal_i_’ _e_sgard_ë_ sur le lit--
Et el_e_’ _e_st devant li alée--
Bel_e_’ amië [cf. mi_ë_, above] n_e’i_l me celez.
La dam_e_’ ad sa fill_e_’ amenée.”

These are all on a single page[20], and there are some to spare. How about the _hiatus_? On the same page I find,--

“Kar l’Ercëveskë _i_ _e_stoit--
Pur eus beneistr_e_’ _e_ _e_nseiner.”

What was the practice of Wace? Again I open at random.

“N’osa remaindr_e_’ en Normandië,
Maiz, quant la guerr_ë_ fu finië,
Od sou herneiz en Puill_e_’ _a_la--
Cil de Baienës lung_ë_ment--
N_e_ _i_l nes pout par forc_ë_ prendre--
Dunc la vil_ë_ mult amendout,
Prisons e preiës amenout.”[21]

Again we have the sounded final _e_, the elision, and the _hiatus_. But what possible reason is there for supposing that Chaucer would go to obscure minstrels to learn the rules of French versification? Nay, why are we to suppose that he followed them at all? In his case as in theirs, as in that of the Italians, with the works of whose two greater poets he was familiar, it was the language itself and the usages of pronunciation that guided the poet, and not arbitrary laws laid down by a synod of versemakers. Chaucer’s verse differs from that of Gower and Lydgate precisely as the verse of Spenser differs from that of Gascoigne, and for the same reason,--that he was a great poet, to whom measure was a natural vehicle. But admitting that he must have formed his style on the French poets, would he not have gone for lessons to the most famous and popular among them,--the authors of the “Roman de la Rose”? Wherever you open that poem, you find Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meung following precisely the same method,--a method not in the least arbitrary, but inherent in the material which they wrought. The _e_ sounded or absorbed under the same conditions, the same slurring of diphthongs, the same occasional _hiatus_, the same compression of several vowels into one sound where they immediately follow each other. Shakespeare and Milton would supply examples enough of all these practices that seem so incredible to those who write about versification without sufficient fineness of sense to feel the difference between Ben Jonson’s blank verse and Marlow’s. Some men are verse-deaf as others are color-blind,--Messrs. Malone and Guest, for example.

I try Rutebeuf in the same haphazard way, and chance brings me upon his “Pharisian.” This poem is in stanzas, the verses of the first of which have all of them masculine rhymes, those of the second feminine ones, and so on in such continual alternation to the end, as to show that it was done with intention to avoid monotony. Of feminine rhymes we find ypocrisi_ë_, fam_ë_, justic_ë_, mesur_ë_, yglis_ë_. But did Rutebeuf mean so to pronounce them? I open again at the poem of the _Secrestain_, which is written in regular octosyllabics, and read,--

“Envi_ë_ fet hom_ë_ tuer,
Et si fait bonn_ë_ remuer--
Envië grev_e_’, envië blec_ë_,
Envi_ë_ confont charit_ë_
Envi_e_’ ocist humilit_ë_,--
Estoit en ce païs en vi_ë_
Sanz orgueil er_e_’ _e_t sanz envi_ë_--
La glorieus_ë_, dam_ë_, chier_ë_.”[22]

Froissart was Chaucer’s contemporary. What was his usage?

“J’avoi_ë_ fait en ce voiaig_ë_
Et je li di, ‘Ma dam_ë_ s’ai-je
Pour vous ëu maint souvenir’;
Mais je ne sui pas bien hardis
De vous remonstrer, dam_ë_ chier_ë_,
Par quel art ne par quel manier_ë_,
J’ai ëu ce comenc_ë_ment
De l’amourous atouch_ë_ment.’”

If we try Philippe Mouskes, a mechanical rhymer, if ever there was one, and therefore the surer not to let go the leading-strings of rule, the result is the same.

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.

“Fac_ea_ le stelle a n_oi_ parer più radi,”
“Nè fu per fantas_ia_ giamm_ai_ compreso”
“P_oi_ p_io_vve dentro all ‘alta fantas_ia_,”
“Sol_ea_ valor e cortes_ia_ trovarsi,”
“Che ne ’nvogliava amor e cortes_ia_.”

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:--

“And, for there is so great diversitë
In English, and in writing of our tong,
So pray I God[24] that none miswritë the
Ne the mismetre for defaut of tong,
And redde whereso thou be or ellës song
That thou be understood God I beseech.”

Yet more. Boccaccio’s _ottava rima_ is almost as regular as that of Tasso. Was Chaucer unconscious of this? It will be worth while to compare a stanza of the original with one of the translation.

“Era cortese Ettore di natura
Però vedendo di costei il gran pianto,
Ch’era più bella ch’altra creatura,
Con pio parlare confortolla alquanto,
Dicendo, lascia con la ria ventura
Tuo padre andar che tulti ha offeso tanto,
E tu, sicura e lieta, senza noia,
Mentre t’aggrada, con noi resta in Troia.”[25]

“Now was this Hector pitous of naturë,
And saw that she was sorrowful begon
And that she was so faire a creaturë,
Of his goodnesse he gladed her anon
And said [saidë] let your father’s treason gon
Forth with mischance, and ye yourself in joy
Dwelleth with us while [that] you list in Troy.”

If the Italian were read with the same ignorance that has wreaked itself on Chaucer, the riding-rhyme would be on its high horse in almost every line of Boccaccio’s stanza. The same might be said of many a verse in Donne’s satires. Spenser in his eclogues for February, May, and September evidently took it for granted that he had caught the measure of Chaucer, and it would be rather amusing, as well as instructive, to hear the maintainers of the hop-skip-and-jump theory of versification attempt to make the elder poet’s verses dance to the tune for which one of our greatest metrists (in his philological deafness) supposed their feet to be trained.

I will give one more example of Chaucer’s verse, again making my selection from one of his less mature works. He is speaking of Tarquin:--

“And ay the morë he was in despair
The more he coveted and thought her fair;
His blinde lust was all his coveting.
On morrow when the bird began to sing
Unto the siege he cometh full privily
And by himself he walketh soberly
The imáge of her recording alway new:
Thus lay her hair, and thus fresh was her hue,
Thus sate, thus spake, thus span, this was her cheer,
Thus fair she was, and this was her manére.
All this conceit his heart hath new ytake,
And as the sea, with tempest all toshake,
That after, when the storm is all ago,
Yet will the water quap a day or two,
Right so, though that her forme were absént,
The pleasance of her forme was presént.”

And this passage leads me to say a few words of Chaucer as a descriptive poet; for I think it a great mistake to attribute to him any properly dramatic power, as some have done. Even Herr Hertzberg, in his remarkably intelligent essay, is led a little astray on this point by his enthusiasm. Chaucer is a great narrative poet; and, in this species of poetry, though the author’s personality should never be obtruded, it yet unconsciously pervades the whole, and communicates an individual quality,--a kind of flavor of its own. This very quality, and it is one of the highest in its way and place, would be fatal to all dramatic force. The narrative poet is occupied with his characters as picture, with their grouping, even their costume, it may be, and he feels for and with them instead of being they for the moment, as the dramatist must always be. The story-teller must possess the situation perfectly in all its details, while the imagination of the dramatist must be possessed and mastered by it. The latter puts before us the very passion or emotion itself in its utmost intensity; the former gives them, not in their primary form, but in that derivative one which they have acquired by passing through his own mind and being modified by his reflection. The deepest pathos of the drama, like the quiet “no more but so?” with which Shakespeare tells us that Ophelia’s heart is bursting, is sudden as a stab, while in narrative it is more or less suffused with pity,--a feeling capable of prolonged sustention. This presence of the author’s own sympathy is noticeable in all Chaucer’s pathetic passages, as, for instance, in the lamentation of Constance over her child in the “Man of Law’s Tale.” When he comes to the sorrow of his story, he seems to croon over his thoughts, to soothe them and dwell upon them with a kind of pleased compassion, as a child treats a wounded bird which he fears to grasp too tightly, and yet cannot make up his heart wholly to let go. It is true also of his humor that it pervades his comic tales like sunshine, and never dazzles the attention by a sudden flash. Sometimes he brings it in parenthetically, and insinuates a sarcasm so slyly as almost to slip by without our notice, as where he satirizes provincialism by the cock

“Who knew by nature each ascensiön
Of the equinoctial in his native town.”

Sometimes he turns round upon himself and smiles at a trip he has made into fine writing:--

“Till that the brightë sun had lost his hue,
For th’ orisont had reft the sun his light,
(This is as much to sayen as ‘it was night.’)”

Nay, sometimes it twinkles roguishly through his very tears, as in the

“‘Why wouldest thou be dead,’ these women cry,
‘Thou haddest gold enough--and Emily?’”