Page:EB1911 - Volume 27.djvu/1074

Rh Teutonic metrical composition. In Icelandic poetry there was a highly artificial verse-system known as court-verse (drdUkvaeU), which consisted of alliterative groups of two lines each, arranged in staves of eight lines. When we consider primitive Teutonic verse closely, we see that it did no,t begin with any conscious art, but, as Vigfussen has said, "was simply excited and emphatic prose" uttered with the repetition of catchwords and letters. The use of these was presently regulated. Alliteration of stressed ropt-syllables formed the basis of Teutonic verse, as quantity had formed the basis of Greek verse. A study of the "Heliand" and the "Lay of Hildebrand" in Old German, of the "Atli" and "Harbard" lays in Icelandic, and of the writings attributed to Beowulf, Caedmon and Cynewulf in Anglo-Saxon, will show the general unity and the local divergences of this class of verse.

English Metre.—The first writer in whom there has been discovered a distinct rebellion against the methods of Anglo- Saxon versification is St Godric, who died in 1170. Only three brief fragments of his poetry have been preserved, but there is no doubt that they show, for the first time, a regular composition in feet. A quotation will show the value of St Godric 's invention:—

From this difficult stanza down to the metres of modern English the transition seems gradual and direct, while the tradition of Anglo-Saxon alliterative prosody is abruptly broken. The fragments of St Godric appear to be independent of one another, and therefore indicate that the division of lines into feet is not accidental. They are much less dubious, and more firm as the basis of an hypothesis, than the famous quatrain 1 about the singing of the monks of Ely, which is perhaps a little earlier in date than the fragments of St Godric. This has much picturesque beauty, but if it is carefully examined the actual scheme of it as metre seems to evade detection. The Ely singer warbled, not knowing what he sang, but St Godric knew perfectly well, and must have been a deliberate innovator. There is still more definition of feet in the Poema Morale, printed by Dr Morris, which is supposed to date from about 1200. In longer pieces, and particularly in the Ormulum, and in the Brut of Layamon, which belong to the early part of the 13th century, we find, on the whole, less definite abandonment of the Anglo-Saxon system of prosody, but nevertheless a prominence given both to rhyme and to rhythm. In Layamon, particularly, the recognition of a recurrent verse of four accents is unquestionable. The place of this poet in the history of prosody is very carefully noted by Guest, who remarks that in Anglo-Saxon verse, the syllables which take the alliteration are always accented, while in the later metres, where alliteration was combined with rhyme, the former is often thrown upon ian unaccented syllable. " Layamon appears to take a middle course. It would seem he gave accents both to his rhyming and his alliterative syllables; but the former were often obliged to content themselves with a false accent." An advance was made about fifty years later in Genesis and Exodus, a poem published by Professor Skeat, which has such great value in the proof it gives of the extension of verbal melody, that Saintsbury lias said that " it contains more of the kernel of English prosody, properly sq called, than any [other] single poem before Spenser." The phenomenon which we meet with in all these earliest attempts at purely English verse is the unconscious deter- mination of writers, who had no views about prosody, to follow their national instinct in the direction of grouped feet and rhymes. This is further emphasized in Horn and Havelok, and' in the smoother octosyllabics of the 14th-century metrical romances, where the rhymes become very frequent, with an

occasional short line or bob, to prevent monotony of effect. Few of these romances have much literary value, but their prosodical value is very great, for we see in them the normal movement of English verse becoming fixed to certain principles beyond any possibility of escape:—

This, from Sir Percevale, is, it must be allowed, an unusually correct example; the uncouth 14th-century writers did not commonly arrive at their effect without much more irregularity and wavering than this, but the design is evident even in their worst examples. Between 1210 and 1340 not a single English poem of importance is known to have been written in the old alliterative measure of the Anglo-Saxons. But at the latter date there set in a singular reaction in favour of alliteration, a movement which culminated, after producing some beautiful romances, in the satires of Langland. Those writers, and they were many, who preserved foot-scansion and rhyme, during this alliterative repetion, became ever closer students of contemporary French verse, and in the favourite octosyllabic metre " the uncompromising adoption of the French, or syllabically uniform, system is the first thing noticeable" (Saintsbury). This tendency of Middle English metre culminates in the work of John Gower, which is singularly polished in its rhyming octosyllabics, although unquestionably nerveless still, and inelastic.

It is, however, to Chaucer that we turn for far greater con- tributions to English verse. He it was who first, with full consciousness of power as an artist, adopted the use of elaborate stanzas, always in following of the French; he it was who first gained freedom of sound by a variation of pause, and by an alternation of trochaic and iambic movement. It is the lack of these arts which keeps Gower and his predecessors so stiff. In particular Chaucer, in his first period, invented rime-royal, a stanzaic form (in seven decasyllabic lines, rhymed a b a b b C c), peculiarly English in character, which was dominant in our literature for more than two hundred years; it was used in the long romance of Troilus and Creseide, where English metre for the first time displays its beauty to the full. The importance of rime-royal is displayed in the fact that its sixth and seventh lines actually form the decasyllabic couplet, which is commonly held to be a later discovery of Chaucer's, in The Legend of Good Women. This is the heroic verse, in which The Canterbury Tales are mainly composed, and this metre of five accents, with couplet-rhyme, became so powerful in the future history of English poetry that it may almost be taken as the central and most characteristic of our verse-forms, as the alexandrine couplet is in French and Dutch prosody. It seems to have been originally called riding-rhyme, the name by which Gascoigne describes it (1575).

It is impossible here to do more than indicate very briefly those fluctuations which English prosody underwent when the learned and vivid example of Chaucer was withdrawn. The metres of Lydgate and his successors were discordant and feeble; their ears had learned but very incorrectly the lesson of the master. Lydgate, in particular, went back to an earlier type, and showed himself more skilful in the old eight-syllable measure than in the new decasyllable. More interesting to the prosodical student than the work of these or later Chaucerians is the influence exercised throughout the 15th and early 16th centuries by the popular ballads, of which "Chevy Chase" is believed to be the oldest surviving example, while "The Tale of Gamelyn" is the longest. The introduction of the loose, elastic ballad-quatrain, with its melodious tendency to refrain, was a matter of great importance in the metamorphosis of British verse. The degenerate forms employed by the English 1 5th-century poets in attempting more regular prosody were in some measure connected by the greater exactitude of the Scotch writers, particularly of Dunbar, who was by far the most accomplished metrist between Chaucer and Spenser.