These are thy glorious works, Parent of good, Thus wondrous fair,' will make so much of a pause on the first two syllables of 'Almighty' that the word becomes in effect a bacchius, just what we have said is not admissible in English verse; while on the other hand, whoso attempts to scan the simple line, 'Almighty thine this universal frame,' cannot make it other than the normal form of blank verse which is commonly called an iambic pentameter:* so that the line becomes Ölmighty thine this universal frame.' This is a case like that of bubbling,' where the fine ear has to make distinctions which to prosody are unknown. One should perhaps rather say with Mr. Omond that 'time' as well as 'scansion' is an essential element in English prosody. But it has not a place in Professor Saintsbury's scheme. With the reserve which the above remarks imply, we may accept frankly Professor Saintsbury's nomenclature and agree with him to talk of the English line being divided into feet, and leave the word 'accent for other connexions. 'Feet 'with equivalence' is Professor Saintsbury's root-principle for English verse: equivalence being the substitution now and again of two short syllables for a long. Thus in the couplet, 'Lo, where Maeotis sleeps, and hardly flows The freezing Tanais through a waste of snows,' Tanais' is an equivalent, the two shorts Tănă being substituted for a long as the 'o' in 'Maeotis' of the foregoing line. (Here we notice once again that in scansion Maeotis,' properly a bacchius, has to become a cretic.) The effect of equivalence is nearly always pleasing when used in moderation. And though such substitutions were opposed to Pope's principles in prosody, they were (as our author notes) agreeable to his ear. For the above couplet was Pope's favourite out of all his verse. 'The reason of this preference I cannot 'discover' says Johnson. 'We can,' rightly comments Professor Saintsbury. The two verses cited above illustrate another principle or feature in versification on which Professor Saintsbury has * It is one of Professor Saintsbury's pedantries that he will not admit this the common description of the English heroic line. much to say. This is what he calls enjambment,'or the striding over of the sense or phrase from one line to the next. In the present case the change in scansion from ōtis to Tănăĭs is prepared for by the running on of the sense, hardly flows the 'freezing Tanais.' As a general rule Pope's couplet becomes soon wearying to the ear (the Popean couplet' in its wider sense yet more so), precisely on account of the rarity of this ' enjambment,' which is mostly made difficult or impossible; while the sense of monotony is increased by the antithesis. Antithesis is almost as obligatory in this type of verse as another sort of antithesis (or parallelism) is in Hebrew poetry. In Chaucer's heroic metre (in form the same as Pope's) monotony is saved partly by a less regular caesura* than we find in Pope and his imitators, partly by enjambment, which, though not common, there is nothing in Chaucer to forbid.† The best place, however, in which to study enjambment is in our blank verse, and we shall return to the subject of it there. 6 In one respect only does Guest's habit of speaking of accent' rather than of quantity-essentially misleading though it is— give him an advantage over Professor Saintsbury. It leaves Guest free to discuss what he calls quantity, viz. the different values of vowel-sounds in themselves, and the part which these sonorities individually play in verse, now serving to express slow, now rapid motion; now reproducing the soft flow of water, now the ruggedness of rocky land. There is great danger in these speculations: a poet himself may blunder heavily therein as did Pope now and again in his Essay on 'Criticism.' But these things have a place-along with subtler elements still-in any theory of versification and study of the true technique of poetry. It is a great merit in Professor Saintsbury that he continually speaks outside his brief. He * In his second volume (p. 453) by doubling back some score lines from the Rape of the Lock' Professor Saintsbury gives an amusing example of the monotony of the Popean caesura and of the regularity of antithesis in this verse. + In the first hundred lines of the Knight's Tale' there are three examples of it: 'Wher that ther kneled in his weye A companye of ladies' (lines 39, 40) (which is perhaps only semi-enjambment-in his way' being parenthetical). 'Have ye so great envye Of mine honour that thus complayn and crye' (lines 49, 50). Victorie, and as a conqueror to liven" (lines 57, 58). is constantly bringing to our notice a variety of incidental delicacies in versification, which are indefinable and certainly not within the four walls of his professed subject. So that if Professor Courthope had not, with his History of English 'Poetry' preceded our author, this work on Prosody would almost be that, would at any rate be a very fair substitute for a history of English poetry. But Mr. Courthope's book exists, and we noticed it in a recent number of this Review. Mr. Courthope's work is the larger, by six volumes against three, and as a history of poetry as a whole it is necessarily the more complete. But, as at the time we pointed out, it often wanders wide from the subject in hand, and there is in its author's literary judgements much that is conventional, a certain affection for the lieu commun (not to call it too bluntly 'the commonplace'), a certain lack of vitality: to all these things Professor Saintsbury's volumes form a corrective. Thus does one work supplement the other. In one respect, however, the author we are reviewing is at a marked disadvantage. Mr. Courthope's writing is not always very inspiriting; but it is dignified, and it can on occasion rise to the level of a fine style. Of Professor Saintsbury's prose it is a kindness to say the least possible. It must remain a wonder how one who for years has kept company with the best writers, who possesses (evidently) a nice and discriminating ear, can contrive to exclude all trace of style from his prose. But our author's faults on this head are inveterate, and criticism is vain which leads not to amendment. In plan and construction some ways suggest themselves whereby Professor Saintsbury's book might have been bettered. Here it might have been ampler, here more restricted. It would have been a difficult task, yet not beyond the reach of industry, to follow out the really traceable influences which went to the formation of our English prosody. Our author sums these up indeed, but does not deal with the matter in an historical or evolutionary way. Two formative powers alone need be taken account of in the change of our verse from the patter of the Anglo-Saxon to the rhythm of the English: (1) the Latin hymn as sung in our churches, enforced by accompanying music (that too is in some degree recoverable); and (2) French verse, which from the twelfth to the fourteenth century went through a very rapid evolution and blossomed out into a great variety of forms. That all our rhythmic' poets were familiar with French is well-nigh certain-even the author of Piers Plowman' must have been so. It is significant, as Professor Saintsbury notes, that in Wright's 'Specimens of Lyric Poetry (of the thirteenth or early fourteenth century) the authors evidently wrote, the audience listened to, indifferently, French or English. Of later writers, Chaucer of course knew French thoroughly, and Gower wrote in both languages. French poetry-all modern European poetrymay in the ultimate analysis be found derivable from the Latin hymn. The direct influence on us which came from each of the two sources we have named is probably distinguishable. To attempt the distinction would ask a more lengthy analysis than could possibly be undertaken in an article. The French influence is the only one which is easily traceable. Before it brought to bear its attractive force on ours, French literature had already gone through a course of developement. The long laisse of assonantal rhymes which characterises the Chansons de Geste' of the eleventh and twelfth centuries had been succeeded by the romantic lai, whose normal form was the octosyllabic couplet. Both these types of verse may be described as epic-though narrative' were really the better word. But side by side with these flourished the true lyric forms, the dance or ballad verses. The interesting Les Sermons du Heron' of Wright's Political Poems' is in laisses of the 'Geste' form. And that belongs to the opening of the Hundred Years' War-to Edward III's first invasion of France (c. 1340). Since M. Bédier's writings on the Chansons de Geste' it is impossible with assurance to accept these as so early or so 'epic' in character as they were once thought to be. Precisely when the lyric forms were invented we cannot say. They soon found their way to England. The beautiful ballade '-stanza, which we naturally associate with the name of François Villon, is found in English verse at the very beginning of the fifteenth century, thirty *Specimens of Lyric Poetry composed in England in the Reign of Edward I.' By Thomas Wright (Percy Soc.), 1842. + Rolls Series, No. 14. In his Antiquitates Italicae Medii Aevi' (vol. iii.) Muratori publishes a beautiful Latin poem belonging to the first quarter of the tenth century, of which the following are the opening lines: 'O tu qui servas armis ista moenia, Noli dormire, moneo, sed vigila; Dum Hector vigil exstitit in Troia, Non eam cepit fraudulenta Graecia '; and so on for eighteen successive a- endings (long and short indifferently) which can hardly be described as rhymes, but which are natural forerunners to the assonantal laisse of the vernacular Chansons de Geste.' years before Villon was born. Twenty-six political poems edited in 1904 by Dr. J. Kail for the Early English Text Society (from the Digby MS. in the Bodleian) are all in this metre. Here is a specimen of one. It is somewhat irregular, after the manner of political pieces such as these, which were written for edification not for art: 'Man synne not in overhope Thou wynnest not Goddis mercie with fight The leste [least] tryp that ever ye trede [tread]. Man, knowe thyself, love God, and drede [dread]. The last line is the refrain through a score of verses. And among the just mentioned Political Poems published by Wright, 'The Complaint of the Plowman ** (c. 1393) and the Lament of 'the Duchess of Gloucester' (c. 1441) are in the same metre. If we dwell at some length upon these beginnings of metric poetry in English it is because the question of origins' has here a special importance. Professor Saintsbury appreciates that importance, and there is throughout his work no volume and no part of a volume so interesting to the student of versification as his first, and the pages of it which he devotes to describing the naturalisation of the French forms among us and their conversion into national poetry; though (as we have said) even here something might have been added, and would have been added perhaps if our author had concerned himself with versification' in its widest sense. All ballad forms came, if originally from Italy, to us and to the whole of Northern Europe through France. The verbs baller (Fr.) and ballare (Ital.), 'to dance,' are evidence enough of this. The forms spread to Germany, to England, to Scotland, to the Scandinavian countries, to far Iceland, where the word danz meant rather a song than a dance. In England, in Scotland, in the Scandinavian lands, the French form of the ballad was preserved more purely than in Germany. The ballade which we spoke of just now, what may fairly be called the 'Villon-ballade' (as we name rhyme-royal after James I of Scotland, though it was used by Chaucer long before his day) is only a specialised type of the 'ballad,' whose generic form is marked by the refrain or chorus-the natural accompaniment to the dance-marked perhaps also * Only the first and second parts of this poem have the ballade refrain. The title of course is taken from Langland. |