[Footnote 77: Meyer, i. 25-59.]

The great romance is in more fortunate conditions. We have it not indeed complete (for it does not go to the death of the hero) but in ample measure: and fortunately it has for full half a century been accessible to the student. When M. Paul Meyer says that this edition "ne saurait fournir une base suffisante a une etude critique sur le roman d'Alixandre," he is of course using the word critique with the somewhat arbitrary limitations of the philological specialist. The reader who cares for literature first of all—for the book as a book to read—will find it now complete for his criticism in the Stuttgart version of the Alixandre, though he cannot be too grateful to M. Meyer for his second volume as a whole, and for the printing in the first of Alberic, and the decasyllabic poem, and for the extracts from that of Thomas of Kent, who, unlike the authors of the great Romance, admitted the Nectanabus marvels and intrigues.

[Sidenote: The great Roman d'Alixandre.]

The story is of such importance in mediaeval literature that some account of the chief English and French embodiments of it may be desirable. The French version, attributed in shares, which have as usual exercised the adventurous ingenuity of critics, to two authors, Lambert li Tors, the Crooked (the older designation "Li Cors," the Short, seems to be erroneous), and Alexander of Bernay or Paris, occupies in the standard edition of Michelant 550 pages, holding, when full and with no blanks or notes, 38 lines each. It must, therefore, though the lines are not continuously numbered, extend to over 20,000. It begins with Alexander's childhood, and though the paternity of Nectanabus is rejected here as in the decasyllabic version, which was evidently under the eyes of the authors, yet the enchanter is admitted as having a great influence on the Prince's education. This portion, filling about fifteen pages, is followed by another of double the length, describing a war with Nicolas, King of Cesarea, an unhistorical monarch, who in the Callisthenic fiction insults Alexander. He is conquered and his kingdom given to Ptolemy. Next Alexander threatens Athens, but is turned from his wrath by Aristotle; and coming home, prevents his father's marriage with Cleopatra, who is sent away in disgrace. And then, omitting the poisoning of Philip by Olympias and her paramour, which generally figures, the Romance goes straight to the war with Darius. This is introduced (in a manner which made a great impression on the Middle Ages, as appears in a famous passage of our wars with France[78]) by an insulting message and present of childish gifts from the Persian king. Alexander marches to battle, bathes in the Cydnus, crosses "Lube" and "Lutis," and passing by a miraculous knoll which made cowards brave and brave men fearful, arrives at Tarsus, which he takes. The siege of Tyre comes next, and holds a large place; but a very much larger is occupied by the Fuerres de Gadres ("Foray of Gaza"), where the story of the obstinate resistance of the Philistine city is expanded into a kind of separate chanson de geste, occupying 120 pages and some five thousand lines.

[Footnote 78: See Henry V. for the tennis-ball incident.]

In contradistinction to this prolixity, the visit to Jerusalem, and the two battles of Arbela and Issus mixed into one, are very rapidly passed over, though the murder of Darius and Alexander's vengeance for it are duly mentioned. Something like a new beginning (thought by some to coincide with a change of authors) then occurs, and the more marvellous part of the narrative opens. After passing the desert and (for no very clear object) visiting the bottom of the sea in a glass case, Alexander begins his campaign with Porus, whom Darius had summoned to his aid. The actual fighting does not take very long; but there is an elaborate description of the strange tribes and other wonders of India. Porus fights again in Bactria and is again beaten, after which Alexander pursues his allies Gog and Magog and shuts them off by his famous wall. An arrangement with Porus and a visit to the Pillars of Hercules follow. The return is begun, and marvels come thicker and thicker. Strange beasts and amphibious men attack the Greeks. The "Valley from which None Return" presents itself, and Alexander can only obtain passage for his army by devoting himself, though he manages to escape by the aid of a grateful devil whom he sets free from bondage. At the sea-shore sirens beset the host, and numbers perish; after which hairy horned old men tell them of the three magic fountains—the Fountain of Youth, the Fountain (visible only once a-year) of Immortality, and the Fountain of Resurrection. Many monstrous tribes of enemies supervene; also a Forest of Maidens, kind but of hamadryad nature—"flower-women," as they have been poetically called. It is only after this experience that they come to the Fountain of Youth—the Fontaine de Jouvence—which has left such an indelible impression on tradition. Treachery had deprived Alexander of access to that of Immortality; and that of Resurrection has done nothing but restore two cooked fish to life. But after suffering intense cold, and passing through a rain of blood, the army arrives at the Jouvence, bathes therein, and all become as men thirty years old. The fountain is a branch of the Euphrates, the river of Paradise. After this they come to the Trees of the Sun and Moon—speaking trees which foretell Alexander's death. Porus hears of this, and when the army returns to India he picks a quarrel, and the two kings fight. Bucephalus is mortally wounded; but Porus is killed. The beginnings of treason, plots against Alexander, and the episode of Queen Candace (who has, however, been mentioned before) follow. The king marches on Babylon and soars into the air in a car drawn by griffins. At Babylon there is much fighting; indeed, except the Foray of Gaza, this is the chief part of the book devoted to that subject, the Persian and Indian wars having been, as we saw, but lightly treated. The Amazons are brought in next; but fighting recommences with the siege of "Defur." An enchanted river, which whosoever drinks he becomes guilty of cowardice or treachery, follows; and then we return to Tarsus and Candace, that courteous queen. Meanwhile the traitors Antipater and "Divinuspater" continue plotting, and though Alexander is warned against them by his mother Olympias, they succeed in poisoning him. The death of the king and the regret of his Twelve Peers, to whom he has distributed his dominions, finish the poem.

[Sidenote: Form, &c.]

In form this poem resembles in all respects the chansons de geste. It is written in mono-rhymed laisses of the famous metre which owes its name and perhaps its popularity to the use of it in this romance. Part of it at least cannot be later than the twelfth century; and though in so long a poem, certainly written by more than one, and in all likelihood by more than two, there must be inequality, this inequality is by no means very great. The best parts of the poem are the marvels. The fighting is not quite so good as in the chansons de geste proper; but the marvels are excellent, the poet relating them with an admirable mixture of gravity and complaisance, in spirited style and language, and though with extremely little attention to coherence and verisimilitude, yet with no small power of what may be called fabulous attraction.

[Sidenote: Continuations.]

It is also characteristic in having been freely continued. Two authors, Guy of Cambray and Jean le Nevelois, composed a Vengeance Alexandre. The Voeux du Paon, which develop some of the episodes of the main poem, were almost as famous at the time as Alixandre itself. Here appears the popular personage of Gadiffer, and hence was in part derived the great prose romance of Perceforest. Less interesting in itself, but curious as illustrating the tendency to branch up and down to all parts of a hero's pedigree, is Florimont, a very long octosyllabic poem, perhaps as old as the twelfth century, dealing with Alexander's grandfather.[79]

[Footnote 79: In this paragraph I again speak at second-hand, for neither the Voeux nor Florimont is to my knowledge yet in print. The former seems to have supplied most of the material of the poem in fifteenth-century Scots, printed by the Bannatyne Club in 1831, and to be reprinted, in another version, by the Scottish Text Society.]

[Sidenote: King Alexander.]

The principal and earliest version of the English Alexander is accessible without much difficulty in Weber's Metrical Romances of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Centuries. Its differences from the French original are, however, very well worth noting. That it only extends to about eight thousand octosyllabic lines instead of some twenty thousand Alexandrines is enough to show that a good deal is omitted; and an indication in some little detail of its contents may therefore not be without interest. It should be observed that besides this and the Scots Alexander (see note above) an alliterative Romance of Alexander and Dindymus[80] exists, and perhaps others. But until some one supplements Mr Ward's admirable Catalogue of Romances in the British Museum with a similar catalogue for the minor libraries of the United Kingdom, it will be very difficult to give complete accounts of matters of this kind.

[Footnote 80: E.E.T.S., 1878, edited by Professor Skeat.]

Our present poem may be of the thirteenth century, and is pretty certainly not long posterior to it. It begins, after the system of English romances, with a kind of moral prologue on the various lives and states of men of "Middelerd." Those who care for good literature and good learning are invited to hear a noble geste of Alisaundre, Darye, and Pore, with wonders of worm and beast. After a geographical prologue the story of Nectanabus, "Neptanabus," is opened, and his determination to revenge himself on Philip of Macedon explained by the fact of that king having headed the combination against Egypt. The design on Olympias, and its success, are very fully expounded. Nectanabus tells the queen, in his first interview with her, "a high master in Egypt I was"; and about eight hundred lines carry us to the death of Nectanabus and the breaking of "Bursifal" (Bucephalus) by the Prince. The episodes of Nicolas (who is here King of Carthage) and of Cleopatra follow; but when the expedition against Darius is reached, the mention of "Lube" in the French text seems to have induced the English poet to carry his man by Tripoli, instead of Cilicia, and bring him to the oracle of Ammon—indeed in all the later versions of the story the crossing of the purely fantastic Callisthenic romance with more or less historical matter is noticeable. The "Bishop" of Ammon, by the way, assures him that Philip is really his father. The insulting presents follow the siege of Tyre; the fighting with Darius, though of course much mediaevalised, is brought somewhat more into accordance with the historic account, though still the Granicus does not appear; the return to Greece and the capture of Thebes have their place; and the Athens-Aristotle business is also to some extent critically treated. Then the last battle with Darius comes in: and his death concludes the first part of the piece in about five thousand lines. It is noticeable that the "Foray of Gaza" is entirely omitted; and indeed, as above remarked, it bears every sign of being a separate poem.

The second part deals with "Pore"—in other words, with the Indian expedition and its wonders. These are copied from the French, but by no means slavishly. The army is, on the whole, even worse treated by savage beasts and men on its way to India than in the original; but the handling, including the Candace episodes, follows the French more closely than in the first part. The fighting at "Defur," however, like that at Gaza, is omitted; and the wilder and more mystical and luxuriant parts of the story—the three Fountains, the Sirens, the flower-maidens, and the like—are either omitted likewise or handled more prosaically.[81]

[Footnote 81: Dr Koelbing, who in combination of philological and literary capacity is second among Continental students of romance only to M. Gaston Paris, appears to have convinced himself of the existence of a great unknown English poet who wrote not only Alisaundre, but Arthour and Merlin, Richard Coeur de Lion, and other pieces. I should much like to believe this.]

One of the most curious things about this poem is that every division—divisions of which Weber made chapters—begins by a short gnomic piece in the following style:—

"Day spryng is jolyf tide. He that can his tyme abyde, Oft he schal his wille bytyde. Loth is grater man to chyde."

[Sidenote: Characteristics.]

The treatment of the Alexander story thus well illustrates one way of the mediaeval mind with such things—the way of combining at will incongruous stories, of accepting with no, or with little, criticism any tale of wonder that it happened to find in books, of using its own language, applying its own manners, supposing its own clothing, weapons, and so forth to have prevailed at any period of history. And further, it shows how the geste theory—the theory of working out family connections and stories of ancestors and successors—could not fail to be applied to any subject that at all lent itself to such treatment. But, on the other hand, this division of the romances of antiquity does not exhibit the more fertile, the more inventive, the more poetical, and generally the nobler traits of Middle-Age literature. As will have been noted, there was little invention in the later versions, the Callisthenic fictions and the Iter ad Paradisum being, with a few Oriental accretions, almost slavishly relied upon for furnishing out the main story, though the "Foray of Gaza," the "Vows of the Peacock," and Florimont exhibit greater independence. Yet again no character, no taking and lively story, is elaborated. Nectanabus has a certain personal interest: but he was given to, not invented by, the Romance writers. Olympias has very little character in more senses than one: Candace is not worked out: and Alexander himself is entirely colourless. The fantastic story, and the wonders with which it was bespread, seem to have absorbed the attention of writers and hearers; and nobody seems to have thought of any more. Perhaps this was merely due to the fact that none of the more original genius of the time was directed on it: perhaps to the fact that the historical element in the story, small as it was, cramped the inventive powers, and prevented the romancers from doing their best.

[Sidenote: The Tale of Troy.]

In this respect the Tale of Troy presents a remarkable contrast to its great companion—a contrast pervading, and almost too remarkable to be accidental. Inasmuch as this part of mediaeval dealings with antiquity connects itself with the literary history of two of the very greatest writers of our own country, Chaucer and Shakespeare; with that of one of the greatest writers of Italy, Boccaccio; and with some of the most noteworthy work in Old French, it has been thoroughly and repeatedly investigated.[82] But it is so important, and so characteristic of the time with which we are dealing, that it cannot be passed over here, though the later developments must only be referred to in so far as they help us to understand the real originality, which was so long, and still is sometimes, denied to mediaeval writers. In this case, as in the other, the first striking point is the fact that the Middle Ages, having before them what may be called, mutatis mutandis, canonical and apocryphal, authentic and unauthentic, ancient and not ancient, accounts of a great literary matter, chose, by an instinct which was not probably so wrong as it has sometimes seemed, the apocryphal in preference to the canonical, the unauthentic in preference to the authentic, the modern in preference to the ancient.

[Footnote 82: It would be unfair not to mention, as having preceded that of M. Joly by some years, and having practically founded study on the right lines, the handling of MM. Moland and d'Hericault, Nouvelles Francaises du Quatorzieme Siecle (Bibliotheque Elzevirienne. Paris, 1856).]

[Sidenote: Dictys and Dares.]

As in the case of the Alexander-Saga, their origins were the Pseudo-Callisthenes and the Iter ad Paradisum, so in the Tale of Troy they were the works of two persons whose literary offspring has obtained for them an amount of attention transcending to a quite ludicrous extent their literary merit—Dictys Cretensis and Dares Phrygius, to whom may perhaps be added the less shadowy personage of the grammarian John Tzetzes. But, as in the other case also, they were by no means confined to such authorities. If they did not know Homer very well at first-hand, they did know him: they knew Ovid (who of course represents Homer, though not Homer only) extremely well: and they knew Virgil. But partly from the instinct above referred to, of which more presently, partly from the craze for tracing Western Europe back to the "thrice-beaten Trojans," it pleased them to regard Homer as a late and unhistorical calumniator, whose Greek prejudices made him bear false witness; and to accept the pretensions of Dictys and Dares to be contemporaries and eyewitnesses of fact. Dictys, a companion of Idomeneus, was supposed to represent the Greek side, but more fairly than Homer; and Dares, priest of Hephaestus, the Trojan.

The works of these two worthies, which are both of small compass,—Dictys occupies rather more than a hundred, Dares rather more than fifty, pages of the ordinary Teubner classics,[83]—exist at present only in Latin prose, though, as the Greeks were more expert and inventive forgers than the Romans, it is possible, if not even highly probable, that both were, and nearly certain that Dictys was, originally Greek at least in language. Dictys, the older pretty certainly, is introduced by a letter to a certain Quintus Aradius from Lucius Septimius, who informs "his Rufinus" and the world, with a great deal of authority and learning, that the book had been written by Dictys in Punic letters, which Cadmus and Agenor had then made of common use in Greece; that some shepherds found the manuscript written on linden-bark paper in a tin case at his tomb at Gnossus; that their landlord turning the Punic letters into Greek (which had always been the language), gave it to Nero the Emperor, who rewarded him richly; and that he, Septimius, having by chance got the book into his hands, thought it worth while to translate it into Latin, both for the sake of making the true history known and "ut otiosi animi desidiam discuteremus." The Dares volume is more ambitious, and purports to be introduced by no less a person than Cornelius Nepos to no less a person than Sallustius Crispus, and to have been "faithfully translated" by the former from MS. in the very hand of Dares, which he found at Athens, in order to correct the late and fabulous authority of Homer, who actually makes gods fight with men!

[Footnote 83: Ed. Meister. Leipzig, 1872-73.]

[Sidenote: The Dares story.]

It will be, of course, obvious to the merest tyro in criticism that these prefaces bear "forgery" on the very face of them. The first is only one of those innumerable variants of the genesis of a fiction which Sir Walter Scott has so pleasantly summarised in one of his introductions; and the phrase quoted about animi otiosi desidiam is a commonplace of mediaeval bookmaking. The second, more cleverly arranged, exposes itself to the question how far, putting the difficulty about writing aside, an ancient Greek MS. of the kind could possibly have escaped the literary activity of many centuries of Athenian wits and scholars, to fall into the hands of Cornelius Nepos. The actual age and origin of the two have, of course, occupied many modern scholars; and the favourite opinion seems to be that Dictys may have been originally written by some Greek about the time of Nero (the Latin translation cannot well be earlier than the fourth century and may be much later), while Dares may possibly be as late as the twelfth. Neither book is of the very slightest interest intrinsically. Dictys (the full title of whose book is Ephemeris Belli Trojani) is not only the longer but the better written of the two. It contains no direct "set" at Homer; and may possibly preserve traits of some value from the lost cyclic writers. But it was not anything like such a favourite with the Middle Ages as Dares. Dictys had contented himself with beginning at the abduction of Helen; Dares starts his De Excidio Trojae with the Golden Fleece, and excuses the act of Paris as mere reprisals for the carrying off of Hesione by Telamon. Antenor having been sent to Greece to demand reparation and rudely treated, Paris makes a regular raid in vengeance, and so the war begins with a sort of balance of cause for it on the Trojan side. Before the actual fighting, some personal descriptions of the chief heroes and heroines are given, curiously feeble and strongly tinged with mediaeval peculiarities, but thought to be possibly derived from some similar things attributed to the rhetorician Philostratus at the end of the third century. And among these a great place is given to Troilus and "Briseida."

Nearly half the book is filled with these preliminaries, with an account of the fruitless embassy of Ulysses and Diomed to Troy, and with enumerating the forces and allies of the two parties. But when Dares gets to work he proceeds with a rapidity which may be partly due to the desire to contradict Homer. The landing and death of Protesilaus, avenged to some extent by Achilles, the battle in which Hector slays Patroclus (to whom Dares adds Meriones), and that at the ships, are all lumped together; and the funerals of Protesilaus and Patroclus are simultaneously celebrated. Palamedes begins to plot against Agamemnon. The fighting generally goes much against the Greeks; and Agamemnon sues for a three years' truce, which is granted despite Hector's very natural suspicion of such an uncommonly long time. It is skipped in a line; and then, the fighting having gone against the Trojans, they beg for a six months' truce in their turn. This is followed by a twelve days' fight and a thirty days' truce asked by the Greeks. Then comes Andromache's dream, the fruitless attempt to prevent Hector fighting, and his death at the hands of Achilles. After more truces, Palamedes supplants Agamemnon, and conducts the war with pretty good success. Achilles sees Polyxena at the tomb of Hector, falls in love with her, demands her hand, and is promised it if he can bring about peace. In the next batch of fighting, Palamedes kills Deiphobus and Sarpedon, but is killed by Paris; and in consequence a fresh battle at the ships and the firing of them takes place, Achilles abstaining, but Ajax keeping up the battle till (natural) night. Troilus then becomes the hero of a seven days' battle followed by the usual truce, during which Agamemnon tries to coax Achilles out of the sulks, and on his refusal holds a great council of war. When next tempus pugnae supervenit (a stock phrase of the book) Troilus is again the hero, wounds everybody, including Agamemnon, Menelaus, and Diomed, and very reasonably opposes a six months' armistice which his father grants. At its end he again bears all before him; but, killing too many Myrmidons, he at last excites Achilles, who, though at first wounded, kills him at last by wounding his horse, which throws him. Memnon recovers the body of Troilus, but is himself killed. The death of Achilles in the temple of Apollo (by ambush, but, of course, with no mention of the unenchanted heel), and of Ajax and Paris in single fight, leads to the appearance of the Amazons, who beat the Greeks, till Penthesilea is killed by Neoptolemus. Antenor, AEneas, and others urge peace, and on failing to prevail with Priam, begin to parley with the Greeks. There is no Trojan horse, but the besiegers are treacherously introduced at a gate ubi extrinsecus portam equi sculptum caput erat. Antenor and AEneas receive their reward; but the latter is banished because he has concealed Polyxena, who is massacred when discovered by Neoptolemus. Helenus, Cassandra, and Andromache go free: and the book ends with the beautifully precise statements that the war, truces and all, lasted ten years, six months, and twelve days; that 886,000 men fell on the Greek side, and 676,000 on the Trojan; that AEneas set out in twenty-two ships ("the same with which Paris had gone to Greece," says the careful Dares), and 3400 men, while 2500 followed Antenor, and 1200 Helenus and Andromache.

[Sidenote: Its absurdity.]

This bald summary is scarcely balder than the book itself, which also, as can be seen from the summary, and would be more fully seen from the book, has no literary merit of any kind. It reads more like an excessively uninspired precis of a larger work than like anything else—a precis in which all the literary merit has, with unvarying infelicity, been omitted. Nothing can be more childish than the punctilious euhemerism by which all the miraculous elements of the Homeric story are blinked or explained away, unless it be the painstaking endeavour simply to say something different from Homer, or the absurd alternation of fighting and truces, in which each party invariably gives up its chance of finishing the war at the precise time at which that chance is most flourishing, and which reads like a humorous travesty of the warfare of some historic periods with all the humour left out.

[Sidenote: Its capabilities.]

Nevertheless it is not really disgraceful to the Romantic period that it fastened so eagerly on this sorriest of illegitimate epitomes.[84] Very few persons at that time were in case to compare the literary merit of Homer—even that of Ovid and Virgil—with the literary merit of these bald pieces of bad Latin prose. Moreover, the supernatural elements in the Homeric story, though very congenial to the temper of the Middle Age itself, were presented and ascribed in such a fashion that it was almost impossible for that age to adopt them. Putting aside a certain sentimental cult of "Venus la deesse d'amors," there was nothing of which the mediaeval mind was more tranquilly convinced than that "Jubiter," "Appollin," and the rest were not mere fond things vainly invented, but actual devils who had got themselves worshipped in the pagan times. It was impossible for a devout Christian man, whatever pranks he might play with his own religion, to represent devils as playing the part of saints and of the Virgin, helping the best heroes, and obtaining their triumph. Nor, audacious as was the faculty of "transfer" possessed by the mediaeval genius, was it easy to Christianise the story in any other way. It is perhaps almost surprising that, so far as I know or remember, no version exists representing Cassandra as a holy and injured nun, making Our Lady play the part of Venus to AEneas, and even punishing the sacrilegious Diomed for wounding her. But I do not think I have heard of such a version (though Sir Walter has gone near to representing something parallel in Ivanhoe), and it would have been a somewhat violent escapade for even a mediaeval fancy.

[Footnote 84: The British Museum alone (see Mr Ward's Catalogue of Romances, vol. i.) contains some seventeen separate MSS. of Dares.]

So, with that customary and restless ability to which we owe so much, and which has been as a rule so much slighted, it seized on the negative capacities of the story. Dares gives a wretched painting, but a tolerable canvas and frame. Each section of his meagre narrative is capable of being worked out by sufficiently busy and imaginative operators into a complete roman d'aventures: his facts, if meagre and jejune, are numerous. The raids and reprisals in the cases of Hesione and Helen suited the demands of the time; and, as has been hinted, the singular interlardings of truce and war, and the shutting up of the latter into so many days' hand-to-hand fighting,—with no strategy, no care for communications, no scientific nonsense of any kind,—were exactly to mediaeval taste.

[Sidenote: Troilus and Briseida.]

Above all, the prominence of new heroes and heroines, about whom not very much was said, and whose gestes the mediaeval writer could accordingly fill up at his own will, with the presentation of others in a light different from that of the classical accounts, was a godsend. Achilles, as the principal author of the "Excidium Trojae" (the title of the Dares book, and after it of others), must be blackened; and though Dares himself does not contain the worst accusations of the mediaeval writers against the unshorn son of the sea-goddess, it clears the way for them by taking away the excuse of the unjust deprivation of Briseis. From this to making him not merely a factious partisan, but an unfair fighter, who mobs his enemies half to death with Myrmidons before he engages them himself, is not far. On the other hand, Troilus, a mere name in the older stories, offers himself as a hero. And for a heroine, the casual mention of the charms of Briseida in Dares started the required game. Helen was too puzzling, as well as too Greek; Andromache only a faithful wife; Cassandra a scolding sorceress; Polyxena a victim. Briseida had almost a clear record, as after the confusion with Chryseis (to be altered in name afterwards) there was very little personality left in her, and she could for that very reason be dealt with as the romancers pleased.

In the subsequent and vernacular handling of the story the same difference of alternation is at first perceived as that which appears in the Alexander legend. The sobriety of Gautier of Chatillon's Alexandreis is matched and its Latinity surpassed by the Bellum Trojanum of our countryman Joseph of Exeter, who was long and justly praised as about the best mediaeval writer of classical Latin verse. But this neighbourhood of the streams of history and fiction ceases much earlier in the Trojan case, and for very obvious reasons. The temperament of mediaeval poets urged them to fill in and fill out: the structure of the Daretic epitome invited them to do so: and they very shortly did it.

[Sidenote: The Roman de Troie.]

After some controversy, the credit of first "romancing" the Tale of Troy has been, it would seem justly and finally, assigned to Benoit de Sainte-More. Benoit, whose flourishing time was about 1160, who was a contemporary and rival of Wace, and who wrote a chronicle of Normandy even longer than his Troy-book, composed the latter in more than thirty thousand octosyllabic lines, an expansion of the fifty pages of Dares, which stands perhaps almost alone even among the numerous similar feats of mediaeval bards. He has helped himself freely with matter from Dictys towards the end of his work; but, as we have seen, even this reinforcement could not be great in bulk. Expansion, however, so difficult to some writers, was never in the least a stumbling-block to the trouvere. It was rather a bottomless pit into which he fell, traversing in his fall lines and pages with endless alacrity of sinning.

Not that Benoit is by any means a person to be contemptuously spoken of. In the first place, as we shall see presently, he was for many hundred years completely and rather impudently robbed of his fame; in the second, he is the literary ancestor of far greater men than himself; and in the third, his verse, though not free from the besetting sin of its kind, and especially of the octosyllabic variety—the sin of smooth but insignificant fluency—is always pleasant, and sometimes picturesque. Still there is no doubt that at present the second claim is the strongest with us; and that if Benoit de Sainte-More had not, through his plagiarist Colonna, been the original of Boccaccio and Chaucer and Shakespeare, he would require little more than a bare mention here.

[Sidenote: The phases of Cressid.]

Dares, as we have seen, mentions Briseida, and extols her beauty and charm: she was, he says, "beautiful, not of lofty stature, fair, her hair yellow and silky, her eyebrows joined, her eyes lively, her body well proportioned, kind, affable, modest, of a simple mind, and pious." He also mightily extols Troilus; but he does not intimate any special connection between the two, or tell the story of "Cressid," which indeed his followers elaborated in terms not altogether consistent with some of the above laudatory epithets. Tzetzes, who with some others gives her the alternative name of Hippodamia, alters her considerably, and assigns to her tall stature, a white complexion, black hair, as well as specially comely breasts, cheeks, and nose, skill in dress, a pleasant smile, but a distinct tendency to "arrogance." Both these writers, however, with Joseph of Exeter and others, seem to be thinking merely of the Briseis whom we know from Homer as the mistress of Achilles, and do not connect her with Calchas, much less with Troilus. What may be said with some confidence is that the confusion of Briseida with the daughter of Calchas and the assignment of her to Troilus as his love originated with Benoit de Sainte-More. But we must perhaps hesitate a little before assigning to him quite so much credit as has sometimes been allowed him. Long before Shakespeare received the story in its full development (for though he does not carry it to the bitter end in Troilus and Cressida itself, the allusion to the "lazar kite of Cressid's kind" in Henry V. shows that he knew it) it had reached that completeness through the hands of Boccaccio, Chaucer, and Henryson, the least of whom was capable of turning a comparatively barren donnee into a rich possession, and who as a matter of fact each added much. We do not find in the Norman trouvere, and it would be rather wonderful if we did find, the gay variety of the Filostrato and its vivid picture of Cressid as merely passionate, Chaucer's admirable Pandarus and his skilfully blended heroine, or the infinite pathos of Henryson's final interview. Still, all this great and moving romance would have been impossible without the idea of Cressid's successive sojourn in Troy and the Greek camp, and of her successive courtship by Troilus and by Diomed. And this Benoit really seems to have thought of first. His motives for devising it have been rather idly inquired into. For us it shall be sufficient that he did devise it.

By an easy confusion with Chryses and Chryseis—half set right afterwards in the change from Briseida to Griseida in Boccaccio and Creseide in Chaucer—he made his heroine the daughter of Calchas. The priest, a traitor to Troy but powerful with the Greeks, has left his daughter in the city and demands her—a demand which, with the usual complacency noticed above as characterising the Trojans in Dares himself, is granted, though they are very angry with Calchas. But Troilus is already the damsel's lover; and a bitter parting takes place between them. She is sent, gorgeously equipped, to the Greeks; and it happens to be Diomed who receives her. He at once makes the fullest declarations—for in nothing did the Middle Age believe more fervently than in the sentiment,

"Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?"

But Briseida, with a rather excessive politeness, and leaving him a good deal of hope, informs him that she has already a fair friend yonder. Whereat, as is reasonable, he is not too much discouraged. It must be supposed that this is related to Troilus, for in the next fight he, after Diomed has been wounded, reproaches Briseida pretty openly. He is not wrong, for Briseida weeps at Diomed's wound, and (to the regret and reproof of her historian, and indeed against her own conscience) gives herself to the Greek, or determines to do so, on the philosophical principle that Troilus is lost to her. Achilles then kills Troilus himself, and we hear no more of the lady.

The volubility of Benoit assigns divers long speeches to Briseida, in which favourable interpreters have seen the germ of the future Cressid; and in which any fair critic may see the suggestion of her. But it is little more than a suggestion. Of the full and masterly conception of Cressid as a type of woman which was afterwards reached, Troilus, and Diomed, and Pandarus, and the wrath of the gods were essential features. Here Troilus is a shadow, Diomed not much more, Pandarus non-existent, the vengeance of Love on a false lover unthought of. Briseida, though she has changed her name, and parentage, and status, is still, as even the patriotic enthusiasm of MM. Moland and d'Hericault (the first who did Benoit justice) perceives, the Briseis of Homer, a slave-girl who changes masters, and for her own pleasure as well as her own safety is chiefly anxious to please the master that is near. The vivifying touch was brought by Boccaccio, and Boccaccio falls out of our story.

[Sidenote: The Historia Trojana.]

But between Benoit and Boccaccio there is another personage who concerns us very distinctly. Never was there such a case, even in the Middle Ages, when the absence of printing, of public libraries, and of general knowledge of literature made such things easy, of sic vos non vobis as the Historia Trojana of Guido de Columnis, otherwise Guido delle Colonne, or Guido Colonna, of Messina. This person appears to have spent some time in England rather late in the thirteenth century; and there, no doubt, he fell in with the Roman de Troie. He wrote—in Latin, and thereby appealing to a larger audience than even French could appeal to—a Troy-book which almost at once became widely popular. The MSS. of it occur by scores in the principal libraries of Europe; it was the direct source of Boccaccio, and with that writer's Filostrato of Chaucer, and it formed the foundation of almost all the known Troy-books of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Benoit being completely forgotten. Yet recent investigation has shown that Guido not merely adapted Benoit in the usual mediaeval fashion, but followed him so closely that his work might rather be called translation than adaptation. At any rate, beyond a few details he has added nothing to the story of Troilus and Cressida as Benoit left it, and as, in default of all evidence to the contrary, it is only fair to conclude that he made it.

From the date, 1287, of Guido delle Colonne's version, it follows necessarily that all the vernacular Troy-books—our own Destruction of Troy,[85] the French prose romance of Troilus,[86] &c., not to mention Lydgate and others—fall like Boccaccio and Chaucer out of the limits of this volume. Nor can it be necessary to enter into detail as to the other classical French romances, the Roman de Thebes, the Roman d'Eneas, the Roman de Jules Cesar, Athis and Profilias, and the rest;[87] while something will be said of the German AEneid of H. von Veldeke in a future chapter. The capital examples of the Alexandreid and the Iliad, as understood by the Middle Ages, not only must but actually do suffice for our purpose.

[Footnote 85: Ed. Panton and Donaldson, E.E.T.S. London, 1869-74.]

[Footnote 86: Ed. Moland and d'Hericault, op. cit.]

[Footnote 87: The section on "L'Epopee Antique" in M. Petit de Julleville's book, more than once referred to, is by M. Leopold Constans, editor of the Roman de Thebes, and will be found useful.]

[Sidenote: Meaning of the classical romance.]

And we see from them very well not merely in what light the Middle Ages regarded the classical stories, but also to what extent the classical stories affected the Middle Ages. This latter point is of the more importance in that even yet the exact bearing and meaning of the Renaissance in this respect is by no means universally comprehended. It may be hoped, if not very certainly trusted, that most educated persons have now got rid of the eighteenth-century notion of mediaeval times as being almost totally ignorant of the classics themselves, a notion which careful reading of Chaucer alone should be quite sufficient to dispel. The fact of course is, that all through the Middle Ages the Latin classics were known, unequally but very fairly in most cases, while the earlier Middle Ages at least were by no means ignorant of Greek.

But although there was by no means total ignorance, there was what is to us a scarcely comprehensible want of understanding. To the average mediaeval student, perhaps to any mediaeval student, it seems seldom or never to have occurred that the men of whom he was reading had lived under a dispensation so different from his own in law and in religion, in politics and in philosophy, in literature and in science, that an elaborate process of readjustment was necessary in order to get at anything like a real comprehension of them. Nor was he, as a rule, able—men of transcendent genius being rather rare, amid a more than respectable abundance of men of talent—to take them, as Chaucer did to a great extent, Dante more intensely though less widely, and Shakespeare (but Shakespeare had already felt the Renaissance spirit) fully and perfectly, on the broad ground of humanity, so that anachronisms, and faults of costume, matter not one jot to any one but a pedant or a fool. When he came to something in the story—something in sentiment, manners, religion, what not—which was out of the range of his own experience, he changed it into something within the range of his own experience. When the whole story did not lend itself to the treatment which he wished to apply, he changed it, added to it, left out from it, without the slightest scruple. He had no more difficulty in transforming the disciplined tactic of the Macedonian phalanx into a series of random chevauchees than in adjusting the much more congenial front-fighting of Greeks and Trojans to his own ideas; and it cost him little more to engraft a whole brand-new romantic love-story on the Tale of Troy than to change the historical siege of Gaza into a Fuerres de Gadres, of which Aimeri of Narbonne or Raoul de Cambrai would have been the appropriate hero. Sometimes, indeed, he simply confounded Persians and Saracens, just as elsewhere he confounded Saracens and Vikings; and he introduced high priests of heathen divinities as bishops, with the same sang froid with which long afterwards the translators of the Bible founded an order of "dukes" in Edom.

A study of antiquity conducted in such a fashion could hardly have coloured mediaeval thought with any real classicism, even if it had been devoted to much more genuine specimens of antiquity than the semi-Oriental medley of the Pseudo-Callisthenes and the bit of bald euhemerism which had better have been devoted to Hephaestus than ascribed to his priest. But, by another very curious fact, the two great and commanding examples of the Romance of Antiquity were executed each under the influence of the flourishing of one of the two mightiest branches of mediaeval poetry proper. When Alberic and the decasyllabist (whoever he was) wrote, the chanson de geste was in the very prime of its most vigorous manhood, and the Roman d'Alixandre accordingly took not merely the outward form, but the whole spirit of the chanson de geste itself. And when Benoit de Sainte-More gave the first shapings of the great story of Troilus and Cressida out of the lifeless rubbish-heap of Dares, it was at the precise minute when also, in hands known or unknown, the greater story of Arthur and Gawain, of Lancelot and Guinevere, was shaping itself from materials probably even scantier. Even Guido of the Columns, much more Boccaccio, had this story fully before them; and Cressida, when at last she becomes herself, has, if nothing of the majesty of Guinevere, a good deal of Iseult—an Iseult more faithless to love, but equally indifferent to anything except love. As Candace in Alexander has the crude though not unamiable naturalism of a chanson heroine, so Cressid—so even Briseida to some extent—has the characteristic of the frail angels of Arthurian legend. The cup would have spilled wofully in her husband's hand, the mantle would scarcely have covered an inch of her; but though of coarser make, she is of the same mould with the ladies of the Round Table,—she is of the first creation of the order of romantic womanhood.



CHAPTER V.

THE MAKING OF ENGLISH AND THE SETTLEMENT OF EUROPEAN PROSODY.

SPECIAL INTEREST OF EARLY MIDDLE ENGLISH. DECAY OF ANGLO-SAXON. EARLY MIDDLE ENGLISH LITERATURE. SCANTINESS OF ITS CONSTITUENTS. LAYAMON. THE FORM OF THE 'BRUT.' ITS SUBSTANCE. THE 'ORMULUM': ITS METRE, ITS SPELLING. THE 'ANCREN RIWLE.' THE 'OWL AND THE NIGHTINGALE.' PROVERBS. ROBERT OF GLOUCESTER. ROMANCES. 'HAVELOK THE DANE.' 'KING HORN.' THE PROSODY OF THE MODERN LANGUAGES. HISTORICAL RETROSPECT. ANGLO-SAXON PROSODY. ROMANCE PROSODY. ENGLISH PROSODY. THE LATER ALLITERATION. THE NEW VERSE. RHYME AND SYLLABIC EQUIVALENCE. ACCENT AND QUANTITY. THE GAIN OF FORM. THE "ACCENT" THEORY. INITIAL FALLACIES, AND FINAL PERVERSITIES THEREOF.

[Sidenote: Special interest of Early Middle English.]

The positive achievements of English literature, during the period with which this volume deals, are not at first sight great; and all the more finished literary production of the time, till the extreme end of it, was in French and Latin. But the work done during this time in getting the English language ready for its future duties, in equipping it with grammar and prosody, in preparing, so to speak, for Chaucer, is not only of the first importance intrinsically, but has a value which is almost unique in general literary history as an example. Nowhere else have we the opportunity of seeing a language and a literature in the process of gestation, or at least of a reformation so great as to be almost equal to new birth. Of the stages which turned Latin through the Romanic vulgar tongues into Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Provencal, French, we have the very scantiest remains; and though the Strasburg oaths and the Eulalia hymn are no doubt inestimable in their way, they supply exceedingly minute and precarious stepping-stones by which to cross from Ausonius to the Chanson de Roland. From the earliest literary stages of the Teutonic tongues we have, except in the case of Anglo-Saxon and Icelandic, very little wreckage of time; and Anglo-Saxon at least presents the puzzling characteristic that its earliest remains are, coeteris paribus, nearly as complete and developed as the earliest remains of Greek. In German itself, whether High or Low, the change from oldest to youngest is nothing like the change from the English of Beowulf to the English of Browning. And though the same process of primordial change as that which we have seen in English took place certainly in German, and possibly in the Romance tongues, it is nowhere traceable with anything like the same clearness or with such gradual development. By the eleventh century at latest in France, by the end of the twelfth in Germany, verse had taken, in the first case fully, in the second almost fully, a modern form. In England it was, during the two hundred years from 1150 to 1350, working itself steadily, and with ample examples, from pure accent to accentual quantity, and from alliteration to rhyme. Of this process, and those similar to it in other countries, we shall give an account which will serve for the whole in the latter part of this chapter; the actual production and gradual transformation of English language and literature generally may occupy us in the earlier part.

It is to be hoped that by this time a middle way, tolerably free from molestation, may be taken between those historians of English who would have a great gulf fixed before Chaucer, and those who insist upon absolute continuity from Caedmon to Tennyson. There must surely be something between dismissing (as did the best historian of the subject in the last generation) Anglo-Saxon as "that nocturnal portion of our literature," between calling it "impossible to pronounce with certainty whether anything in it is artistically good or bad,"[88] and thinking it proper, as it has sometimes been thought, in an examination in English literature, to give four papers to Caedmon, AElfric, and Wulfstan, and one to the combined works of Addison, Pope, Johnson, and Burke. Extravagances of the latter kind have still, their heyday of reaction not being quite past, a better chance than extravagances of the former. But both may surely be avoided.

[Footnote 88: See Craik, History of English Literature, 3d ed. (London, 1866), i. 55.]

[Sidenote: Decay of Anglo-Saxon.]

The evidence is rendered more easy in the present connection by the fact, recognised by the most competent authorities in First English or Anglo-Saxon itself, that for some time before the arbitrary line of the Conquest the productive powers of the literature had been failing, and the language itself was showing signs of change. No poetry of the first class seems to have been written in it much after the end of the ninth century, little prose of a very good class after the beginning of the eleventh; and its inflexions must in time have given way—were, it is said by some, actually giving way—before the results of the invasion and assimilation of French and Latin. The Conquest helped; but it did not wholly cause.

This, however, is no doubt open to argument, and the argument would have to be conducted mainly if not wholly on philological considerations, with which we do not here meddle. The indisputable literary facts are that the canon of pure Anglo-Saxon or Old-English literature closes with the end of the Saxon Chronicle in 1154, and that the "Semi-Saxon," the "First Middle English," which then makes its appearance, approximates, almost decade by decade, almost year by year, nearer and nearer to the modern type. And for our purpose, though not for the purpose of a history of English Literature proper, the contemporary French and Latin writing has to be taken side by side with it.

[Sidenote: Early Middle English Literature.]

It is not surprising that, although the Latin literary production of the time, especially in history, was at least equal to that of any other European country, and though it is at least probable that some of the greatest achievements of literature, French in language, are English in nationality, the vernacular should for long have been a little scanty and a little undistinguished in its yield. Periods of moulting, of putting on new skins, and the like, are never periods of extreme physical vigour. And besides, this Anglo-Saxon itself had (as has been said) been distinctly on the wane as a literary language for more than a century, while (as has not yet been said) it had never been very fertile in varieties of profane literature. This infertility is not surprising. Except at rare periods literature without literary competition and comparison is impossible; and the Anglo-Saxons had absolutely no modern literature to compare and compete with. If any existed, their own was far ahead of it. On the other hand, though the supposed ignorance of Latin and even Greek in the "dark" ages has long been known to be a figment of ignorance itself, circumstances connected with, though not confined to, the concentration of learning and teaching in the clergy brought about a disproportionate attention to theology. The result was that the completest Anglo-Saxon library of which we can form any well-based conception would have contained about ten cases of religious to one of non-religious books, and would have held in that eleventh but little poetry, and hardly any prose with an object other than information or practical use.

[Sidenote: Scantiness of its constituents.]

It could not be expected that the slowly changing language should at once change its habits in this respect. And so, as the century immediately before the Conquest had seen little but chronicles and homilies, leechdoms and laws, that which came immediately afterwards gave at first no very different products, except that the laws were wanting, for obvious reasons. Nay, the first, the largest, and almost the sole work of belles lettres during the first three-fourths of our period, the Brut of Layamon, is a work of belles lettres without knowing it, and imagines itself to be a sober history, while its most considerable contemporaries, the Ormulum and the Ancren Riwle, the former in verse, the latter in prose, are both purely religious. At the extreme end of the period the most important and most certain work, Robert of Gloucester's, is, again, a history in verse. About the same time we have, indeed, the romances of Havelok and Horn; but they are, like most of the other work of the time, translations from the French. The interesting Poema Morale, or "Moral Ode," which we have in two forms—one of the meeting-point of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, one fifty years later—is almost certainly older than its earliest extant version, and was very likely pure Saxon. Only in Nicholas of Guilford's Owl and Nightingale, about 1250, and perhaps some of the charming Specimens of Lyric Poetry, printed more than fifty years ago by Mr Wright, with a very few other things, do we find pure literature—not the literature of education or edification, but the literature of art and form.

[Sidenote: Layamon.]

Yet the whole is, for the true student of literature, full enough of interest, while the best things are not in need of praising by allowance. Of Layamon mention has already been made in the chapter on the Arthurian Legend. But his work covers very much more than the Arthurian matter, and has interests entirely separate from it. Layamon, as he tells us,[89] derived his information from Bede, Wace, and a certain Albinus who has not been clearly identified. But he must have added a great deal of his own, and if it could be decided exactly how he added it, the most difficult problem of mediaeval literature would be solved. Thus in the Arthurian part, just as we find additions in Wace to Geoffrey, so we find additions to Wace in Layamon. Where did he get these additions? Was it from the uncertain "Albinus"? Was it, as Celtic enthusiasts hold, that, living as he did on Severn bank, he was a neighbour of Wales, and gathered Welsh tradition? Or was it from deliberate invention? We cannot tell.

[Footnote 89: Ed. Madden, i. 2.]

Again, we have two distinct versions of his Brut, the later of which is fifty years or thereabouts younger than the earlier. It may be said that almost all mediaeval work is in similar case. But then the great body of mediaeval work is anonymous; and even the most scrupulous ages have not been squeamish in taking liberties with the text of Mr Anon. But the author is named in both these versions, and named differently. In the elder he is Layamon the son of Leovenath, in the younger Laweman the son of Leuca; and though Laweman is a mere variant or translation of Layamon, as much can hardly be said of Leovenath and Leuca. Further, the later version, besides the changes of language which were in the circumstances inevitable, omits many passages, besides those in which it is injured or mutilated, and alters proper names entirely at discretion.

The only explanation of this, though it is an explanation which leaves a good deal unexplained, is, of course, that the sense both of historical criticism and of the duty of one writer to another was hardly born. The curiosity of the Middle Ages was great; their literary faculty, though somewhat incult and infantine, was great likewise: and there were such enormous gaps in their positive knowledge that the sharp sense of division between the certain, the uncertain, and the demonstrably false, which has grown up later, could hardly exist. It seems to have been every man's desire to leave each tale a little richer, fuller, handsomer, than he found it: and in doing this he hesitated neither at the accumulation of separate and sometimes incongruous stories, nor at the insertion of bits and scraps from various sources, nor, it would appear, at the addition of what seemed to him possible or desirable, without troubling himself to examine whether there was any ground for considering it actual.

[Sidenote: The form of the Brut.]

Secondly, Layamon has no small interest of form. The language in which the Brut is written has an exceedingly small admixture of French words; but it has made a step, and a long one, from Anglo-Saxon towards English. The verse is still alliterative, still destitute of any fixed number of syllables or syllabic equivalents. But the alliteration is weak and sometimes not present at all, the lines are of less extreme lawlessness in point of length than their older Saxon representatives, and, above all, there is a creeping in of rhyme. It is feeble, tentative, and obvious, confined to ostentatious pairs like "brother" and "other," "might" and "right," "fare" and "care." But it is a beginning: and we know that it will spread.

[Sidenote: Its substance.]

In the last comparison, that of matter, Layamon will not come out ill even if he be tried high. The most obvious trial is with the work of Chrestien de Troyes, his earlier, though not much earlier, contemporary. Here the Frenchman has enormous advantages—the advantage of an infinitely more accomplished scheme of language and metre, that of some two centuries of finished poetical work before him, that of an evidently wider knowledge of literature generally, and perhaps that of a more distinctly poetical genius. And yet Layamon can survive the test. He is less, not more, subject to the cliche, the stereotyped and stock poetical form, than Chrestien. If he is far less smooth, he has not the monotony which accompanies and, so to speak, dogs the "skipping octosyllable"; and if he cannot, as Chrestien can, frame a set passage or show-piece, he manages to keep up a diffused interest, and in certain instances—the story of Rouwenne (Rowena), the Tintagel passage, the speech of Walwain to the Emperor of Rome—has a directness and simple appeal which cannot be slighted. We feel that he is at the beginning, while the other in respect of his own division is nearly at the end: that he has future, capabilities, opportunities of development. When one reads Chrestien or another earlier contemporary, Benoit de Sainte-More, the question is, "What can come after this?" When one reads Layamon the happier question is, "What will come after this?"

[Sidenote: 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.

[Footnote 90: Ed. White and Holt, 2 vols. Oxford, 1878.]

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Footnote 91: Ed. Morton, for the Camden Society. London, 1853. This edition is, I believe, not regarded as quite satisfactory by philology: it is amply adequate for literature.]

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 mediaeval 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.

[Footnote 92: Substantial portions of all the work mentioned in this chapter will be found in Messrs Morris and Skeat's invaluable Specimens of Early English (Oxford, Part i. ed. 2, 1887; Part ii. ed. 3, 1894). These include the whole of the Moral Ode and of King Horn. Separate complete editions of some are noted below.]

[Footnote 93: Wright, Reliquiae Antiquae, i. 208-227.]

[Footnote 94: Ed. Morris, E.E.T.S., London, 1865.]

[Sidenote: The Owl and the Nightingale.]

[Sidenote: Proverbs.]

But the Owl and the Nightingale[95] is another kind of thing. In the first place, it appears to be (though it would be rash to affirm this positively of anything in a form so popular with the French trouveres as the debat) original and not translated. It bears a name, that of Nicholas of Guildford, who seems to be the author, and assigns himself a local habitation at Portesham in Dorsetshire. Although of considerable length (nearly two thousand lines), and written in very pure English with few French words, it manages the rhymed octosyllabic couplet (which by this time had become the standing metre of France for everything but historical poems, and for some of these) with remarkable precision, lightness, and harmony. Moreover, the Owl and the Nightingale conduct their debate with plenty of mother-wit, expressed not unfrequently in proverbial form. Indeed proverbs, a favourite form of expression with Englishmen at all times, appear to have been specially in favour just then; and the "Proverbs of Alfred"[96] (supposed to date from this very time), the "Proverbs of Hendyng"[97] a little later, are not likely to have been the only collections of the kind. The Alfred Proverbs are in a rude popular metre like the old alliteration much broken down; those of Hendyng in a six-line stanza (soon to become the famous ballad stanza) syllabled, though sometimes catalectically, 8 8 6 8 8 6, and rhymed a a b c c b, the proverb and the coda "quod Hendyng" being added to each. The Owl and the Nightingale is, however, as we might expect, superior to both of these in poetical merit, as well as to the so-called Moral Ode which, printed by Hickes in 1705, was one of the first Middle English poems to gain modern recognition.

[Footnote 95: About 600 lines of this are given by Morris and Skeat. Completely edited by (among others) F.H. Stratmann. Krefeld, 1868.]

[Footnote 96: Ed. Morris, An Old English Miscellany. London, 1872.]

[Footnote 97: See Reliquiae Antiquae, i. 109-116.]

[Sidenote: Robert of Gloucester.]

As the dividing-point of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries approaches, the interest of literary work increases, and requires less and less allowance of historical and accidental value. This allowance, indeed, is still necessary with the verse chronicle of Robert of Gloucester,[98] the date of which is fixed with sufficient certainty at 1298. This book has been somewhat undervalued, in point of strict literary merit, from a cause rather ludicrous but still real. It will almost invariably be found that those mediaeval books which happen to have been made known before the formal beginning of scholarship in the modern languages, are underrated by modern scholars, who not unnaturally put a perhaps excessive price upon their own discoveries or fosterlings. Robert of Gloucester's work, with the later but companion Englishing of Peter of Langtoft by Robert Manning of Brunne, was published by Hearne in the early part of the last century. The contemporaries of that publication thought him rude, unkempt, "Gothick": the moderns have usually passed him by for more direct proteges of their own. Yet there is not a little attraction in Robert. To begin with, he is the first in English, if not the first in any modern language, to attempt in the vernacular a general history, old as well as new, new as well as old. And the opening of him is not to be despised—

"Engeland is a well good land, I ween of each land the best, Yset in the end of the world, as all in the West: The sea goeth him all about, he stands as an isle, His foes he dares the less doubt but it be through guile Of folk of the self land, as men hath y-seen while."

[Footnote 98: Edited with Langtoft, in 4 vols., by Hearne, Oxford, 1724; and reprinted, London, 1810. Also more lately in the Rolls Series.]

And in the same good swinging metre he goes on describing the land, praising its gifts, and telling its story in a downright fashion which is very agreeable to right tastes. Like almost everybody else, he drew upon Geoffrey of Monmouth for his early history: but from at least the time of the Conqueror (he is strongly prejudiced in the matter of Harold) he represents, if not what we should call solid historical knowledge, at any rate direct, and for the time tolerably fresh, historical tradition, while as he approaches his own time he becomes positively historical, and, as in the case of the Oxford town-and-gown row of 1263, the first Barons' Wars, the death of the Earl-Marshal, and such things, is a vigorous as well as a tolerably authoritative chronicler. In the history of English prosody he, too, is of great importance, being another landmark in the process of consolidating accent and quantity, alliteration and rhyme. His swinging verses still have the older tendency to a trochaic rather than the later to an anapaestic rhythm; but they are, so to speak, on the move, and approaching the later form. He is still rather prone to group his rhymes instead of keeping the couplets separate: but as he is not translating from chanson de geste form, he does not, as Robert of Brunne sometimes does, fall into complete laisses. I have counted as many as twenty continuous rhymes in Manning, and there may be more: but there is nothing of that extent in the earlier Robert.

[Sidenote: Romances.]

Verse history, however, must always be an awkward and unnatural form at the best. The end of the thirteenth century had something better to show in the appearance of romance proper and of epic. When the study of any department of old literature begins, there is a natural and almost invariable tendency to regard it as older than it really is; and when, at the end of the last century, the English verse romances began to be read, this tendency prevailed at least as much as usual. Later investigation, besides showing that, almost without exception, they are adaptations of French originals, has, partly as a consequence of this, shown that scarcely any that we have are earlier than the extreme end of the thirteenth century. Among these few that are, however, three of exceptional interest (perhaps the best three except Gawaine and the Green Knight and Sir Launfal) may probably be classed—to wit, Horn, Havelok, and the famous Sir Tristram. As to the last and best known of these, which from its inclusion among Sir Walter Scott's works has received attention denied to the rest, it may or may not be the work of Thomas the Rhymer. But whether it is or not, it can by no possibility be later than the first quarter of the fourteenth century, while the most cautious critics pronounce both Havelok the Dane and King Horn to be older than 1300.[99]

[Footnote 99: Tristram, for editions v. p. 116: Havelok, edited by Madden, 1828, and again by Prof. Skeat, E.E.T.S., 1868. King Horn has been repeatedly printed—first by Ritson, Ancient English Metrical Romances (London, 1802), ii. 91, and Appendix; last by Prof. Skeat in the Specimens above mentioned.]

[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 passages 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 kingship to Grim's wife, and as the fisherman, feigning to have performed his task, meets with very scant gratitude 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 sturdy 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, Godard the Dane being hanged, and Godric 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 ships, 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 title 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 assonance 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 fashion 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 sturdy 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 pronunciation and composition of that language; but there are certain general principles of prosody which govern all languages possessing a certain kinship. 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 classical 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 quantity of individual syllables appears to have undergone a complete change. Although metres quantitative 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 quantity, 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 quantities, 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 quantity and of syllabic identity 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 classical 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 quantity, 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 assumed regular stanza-forms, the lines also frequently fell into regular quantitative 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 fashion 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 classics 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. Quantity they observed loosely—quantity in modern languages is always loose: but it does not follow that they ignored it altogether.

[Sidenote: Accent and quantity.]

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 classical laws, allowing only much more licence of "common" syllables—common in themselves and by position—than in Latin, and rather more than in Greek.