Selected Literary Essays, page 8
We often speak carelessly as if ‘metre’ in general were bad in this period; but we are usually thinking only of the lines which we try to read as decasyllabics. The octosyllabics even of Lydgate are good enough; so are the carols and other lyrics, and so, in its way, is the loose ballad metre of Gamelyn and Beryn. Even in Wyatt the stumbling-blocks occur far more often in what seem to be decasyllabics than in his lyric metres. I say ‘what seem to be decasyllabics’ because that is precisely the point on which we must not begin by begging the question. In the following discussion I shall give the arbitrary name ‘Fifteenth-Century Heroic’ to the line which we find in The Temple of Glas, The Pastime of Pleasure, Barclay’s Eclogues, Wyatt’s Complaint upon Love to Reason, and, in general, all those poems which appear at first sight to attempt the decasyllabic line without success. The question I propose is whether the Fifteenth-Century Heroic is, in fact, an attempt at our decasyllable; and, if it is not, what else it may be.
At the outset we shall do well to remind ourselves that the modern decasyllable, as we have known it from Spenser to Bridges, is a very strange metre. In the first place it has an uneven number of beats, thus differing from the ancient hexameter, the Kalevala metre, and the old Germanic alliterative line. In the second place—and perhaps in consequence of this—it has no medial break, thus differing from the hexameter, the alliterative line, the Fourteener, and the Fourteener’s ancestor, the line of Ormulum. This second characteristic is obscured by the unfortunate practice of calling any pause in a decasyllabic line its caesura, and thus suggesting that it is, like the ancient caesura, a metrical fact. It is nothing of the sort. It can occur anywhere the poet chooses and need not occur at all, and is therefore no part of the pattern, though it may be a very important part of the poet’s handling of the pattern so as to move passion or delight. It is a rhetorical and syntactical fact, not a metrical fact. Hence Milton rightly tells us that ‘musical delight’ consists on the one hand ‘in apt numbers’ and, on the other, in ‘the sense variously drawn out from one verse into another’1—that is, on the shifting relations between the metrical pattern (the ‘numbers’) and the rhetorical or syntactical units which are fitted into it. The very fact that the latter can be varied at will proves that they are not part of the pattern. To ‘draw out variously’ the true metrical caesura of the hexameter does not lead to ‘musical delight’; it leads, or led, only to the birch—and rightly as far as metrical science is concerned.
Now the result of these two characteristics is that the decasyllabic line stands at a much farther remove than almost any other metre from the natural modes of rhythmical human behaviour, whether in song or dance or shout. One’s feet trip it instinctively to a hexameter or an octosyllabic. The Kalevala metre, if not handled with great discretion, pounds in our ear like a heart-beat. A half-line of Anglo-Saxon verse, once metrically understood, can hardly be heard, even by the inner ear, as anything but what it is. But the decasyllable is no such thing. In all good metre, no doubt, there should be some degree of discrepancy, some room for play, between the pattern (the noise the words pretend to make) and the natural pronunciation: but the decasyllabic outstrips all others in the discrepancy it allows and even demands. The octosyllabic can do wonders in this direction by a skilful use of long words, but it cannot avoid many lines of the type ‘The wynd was good, the Schip was yare’,2 in which the metrical pattern coincides exactly with the real, or with any imaginable, pronunciation. Compared with the decasyllable, which is all art and spirit, it remains mere nature. But the decasyllabic, even if it wishes, can hardly impose its rhythm in this way. Even ‘The singing masons building roofs of gold’3 hints a tiny difference between the ideal pattern and the real speech-rhythm—‘building’ counts for a shade more ideally than it does in natural reading. The ease with which our prose admits ‘blank verse lines’, and the difficulty which many find in detecting them, are further proofs of the same fact. Hence all poetry in this metre has to be read with what we may call ‘double audition’.
Most of us have been so trained to this that we are now hardly conscious of it—though it is very significant that a generation is growing up which has already begun to lose the trick. We do not usually notice that the line ‘While other animals unactive range’ (P.L., IV, 621) is pure Beowulf if we attend solely to the speech-rhythm; the first half being the C type with two disyllabic lifts, the second, type B. While other animals is, from this point of view, own brother to se þe waeter-egesan (Beow., 1260), and unactive range to be waepned-men (1284). Still less do we notice the converse—how many admirable decasyllables we could dig out of Beowulf if we started with the assumption that it was a blundering attempt at our familiar modern line: as,
Swaese gesiþas swa he selfa baed. (29)
Gewat ða neosian syþðan niht becom. (115)
In Caines cynne þone cwealm gewraec. (107)
But perhaps the truth can be put in its clearest light by an experiment. Read
I have given no man of my fruit to eat,
I trod the grapes, I have drunken the wine.
Had you eaten and drunken and found it sweet,
This wild new growth of the corn and vine;
and now read this:
I comfort few and many I torment,
Where one is spared a thousand more are spent;
I have trodden many down beneath my feet,
I have given no man of my fruit to eat.
I conjecture that you have read the last line of my second example differently from the opening line of my first: yet as mere language, separated from the ideal pattern, they are identical. And this, let us notice in passing, is a strong and beautiful example of Aristotle’s doctrine that the whole is ‘naturally prior’ to its parts.
The modern decasyllabic, then, is a metre which demands from those who are to write or read it a power of ‘double audition’ which must be the growth of long training and for which nothing in their previous poetical experience had prepared the Englishmen of Chaucer’s time. If this is so, two questions arise: (1) Is is probable that Chaucer himself had caught the music of the modern decasyllabic and intended his countrymen to hear this music in his own verse? (2) Even if Chaucer did so intend, is it at all probable that they would have understood him? The first question I leave for the present unanswered.
To the second question only one consideration prevents me from answering ‘No’ at once. It may be urged that though the line of ten syllables was new in England it was old in France, and that French examples would have prepared the ears of Chaucer’s educated audience to understand the music of the modern decasyllabic. This argument would be strong if the French ten-syllable line had, in fact, run to the same tune as our modern—that is, Spenserian—decasyllabic. But it does not. The French verse of Chaucer’s immediate predecessors had parted company with stress-accent as a metrical element and was, in that respect, the same as French verse in the nineteenth century. A single line from Deschamps—
Angleterre, d’elle ce nom s’applique—4
should be enough to convince us. Here we have no ‘drumming decasyllabon’ but a mere ten syllables. If Chaucer was in fact introducing the tune of Spenser, Milton, and Tennyson, then he was introducing a new thing for which French poetry furnished only a hint, and to which French poetry would hardly at all have opened the ears of his contemporaries. Italian poetry would have helped them a great deal more: but we have not yet evidence that many of them knew it.
It seems to me, then, that we must answer the second question in the negative. If Chaucer meant his lines to be read as the modern scholar reads them, it is extremely likely that he was disappointed. Indeed, having begun his greatest poem with
Whán that Áprille with his shóures sóte,
he was asking a good deal if he expected readers bred on the alliterative line, the octosyllabic, the Horn metre, and the metre of Gamelyn, to see at once that the poem was to go to the pattern of ‘The singing masons building roofs of gold’.
Thus far we have argued a priori. It remains to be seen what Chaucer’s successors actually did. In the interests of clarity I am going to give a purely static account of the Fifteenth-Century Heroic as I conceive it to be, neglecting for the present the history of its rise and its various modifications.
I believe that the modern reader can learn this metre most easily from William Allingham’s ‘The Fairies’ (number 769 in the Oxford Book of English Verse).5 This poem is printed in short lines which may equally well be treated as half-lines. I have never heard of any one who called it unmetrical or found a difficulty in reading it: but as soon as we attempt a metrical analysis we find ourselves in trouble. The first four lines,
Up the airy mountain,
Down the rushy glen,
We daren’t go a-hunting
For fear of little men,
can be treated as lines of three stresses, the first two in falling, the last two in rising, rhythm. But the fifth (‘Wee folk, good folk’) can equally well be treated as two stresses. Yet we do not feel that the metre has changed either here or in such lines as ‘High on the hill-top’ and ‘For seven years long’.6 We may solve our problem in two ways. We can say that all the lines have three beats and explain away the apparent dimeters, pleading that the strong pause in ‘Wee folk, good folk’ compensates for a missing stress, that years carries a stress in ‘For sév’n yeárs lóng’, and on a phantasmal or theoretical stress in ‘Hígh òn the híll-top’. On the other hand, we may say that all the lines have two full stresses and no more—the first syllable of airy being weaker than up or than the first syllable of mountain—but that they admit a third half stress, like the D and E types in Anglo-Saxon verse. If we adopt the second explanation we may notice that the rhythm of daedcene monn is very close to that of ‘Áll night awáke’ and ‘(The) Óld Kìng síts’.7 In the meantime, however, without awaiting a decision on the metrical problem, we have enjoyed the poem. We want a definition of what we have enjoyed that does not prejudge the ultimate metrical problem. I suggest the following: a long line divided by a sharp medial break into two half-lines, each half-line containing not less than two or more than three stresses, and most half-lines hovering between two and three stresses in a manner analogous to the Anglo-Saxon types D and E. When the scheme is thus stated in the abstract, we are at first tempted to say that something so vague as this cannot be called a metre at all: but against this I set the fact ‘The Fairies’ is felt to be metrical by every reader. Indeed its metre is not even an unfamiliar one. We heard something like it before we could read in ‘Péase pudding hót’ and ‘Óld Mòther Slípper-Slapper’. We read something like it not many years since in Mr de la Mare’s ‘All That’s Past’.* We find it in the famous carol—
He cám àlso stýlle
Þere his móder wás
As déw in aprýlle,
Þat fállyt òn þe grás.8
If such a metre is admitted, we may proceed to note that it must every now and then yield lines which can be read as decasyllables and which certainly will be read as such by any reader who starts with the assumption that the poem is attempting to be decasyllabic. Thus from ‘The Fairies’ we can get
Some in the reeds óf the black mountain lake
With frogs for their watch-dógs all night awake9
and from the carol
I syng of a myden þát is makëles . . .
Moder and mayden was neuer non but che.10
It will also tend to produce lines that can be read as loose ‘anapaestic’ four-beats if we start with a misunderstanding. Thus in Allingham’s poem,
They stóle little Brídget for séven years lóng.11
If so read, poems in this metre will seem to consist of some decasyllables, some ‘anapaestic’ four-beats, and some floundering lines that are neither one nor the other: but that is just what many of the ‘bad’ poems between Chaucer and Spenser sound like. Thus in the Assembly of Gods we can read as very stumbling decasyllables—
His shéte from hís bodý down hé let fáll,
And ón a rewde máner he salútyd áll the roút,
With a bóld voyse cárpyng wórdÿs stoút.
But he spáke all hólow ás hit hád be óon
Had spóke in anóther wórld þat had wóo begóon.
(437)
But the result is extremely ugly and the slurring of rewde in the second line is jaw-breaking. I think it more probable that the poet meant us to read,
His shéte from his bódy
Doẃn he let fáll,
And ón a rèwde máner
He salútyd àll the róut,
Wíth a bóld voỳse
Cárpying wórdÿs stoút.
Bút he spáke all hólow,
Ás hit hád be óon
Had spóke in anóther wórld
Þát had wóo begóon.
Even this may not seem very melodious to modern ears and With a bóld vòice still gives trouble: but I believe it can be carried off by a reader who is thinking in terms of the nursery-rhyme metre which I am suggesting and who puts a strong accent on with and bold. The last four half-lines, in their new dress, seem to me good.
Applying the same treatment to Barclay’s second Egloge (697 et seq.) we get
Then cáll for the priést
When Í refúse to drínke,
This ále bréwëd Béntly,
It máketh mè to wínke.
Thou sáyest trúe Córnix,
Beléue me, bý the róod
No hánd is so súre
That can álway make góod,
But tálke of the coúrt
If thóu haste ány móre,
Sét doẁne the bóttle,
Sàue some lícour in stóre.
Nothing will make Barclay a good poet; but I submit that such merits as this passage has will disappear if we give it back the usual lineation, and try to read it as decasyllabic verse. In the same way we can get a modicum of beauty out of Elyot’s
The blode becometh wanne, the eien firye bright,
Like Gorgon the monstre appierynge in the nyght
(Boke named the Gouernour, II, vi)
by setting it to the country dance of
The blode becómeth wánne,
The eíen fírye bríght,
Like Górgon the mónstre
Appíerynge in the nýght.
And who would wish to stretch again on the bed of Procrustes these lines from Hawes?
These daúnces trúely
Músyke hàth me toúght
To lúte or daúnce,
But it auáyled noúght;
For the fýre kyńdled
And wáxëd móre and móre,
The daúncynge bléwe it
With her beáute clére.
My hért sékened
And begán wàxe sóre;
A mýnute VI hoúres,
And VI hoúres a yére,
I thoúght it wás,
So héuy wàs my chére.
But yét fòr to cóuer
My gréte lòue arýght,
The oútwarde coúntënàuce
I máde glàdde and lýght.
(Pastime of Pleasure, 1595 et seq.)
A natural objection to my hypothesis may take the form of the question, ‘Is there any verse, however decasyllabic, which could not, if we chose, be read as you want us to read Hawes and Barclay?’ I must freely confess that there is very little decasyllabic verse which cannot be tortured into what I call the Fifteenth-Century Heroic. From the very nature of the decasyllable on the one hand and the Fifteenth-Century Heroic on the other, it must, on my view, follow that either metre will yield many lines which could occur in the other: indeed this fact is a necessary part of my case. But there remains a difference between lines which ‘can, if we choose’, be ‘tortured’ into the Fifteenth-Century Heroic and lines which can be read better and more naturally in that metre than in the decasyllabic. I think ‘His shéte fròm his bodý · doẃn he let fáll’ a true Fifteenth-Century Heroic not because it can be read thus but because this reading seems to me more natural, pleasing, and probable than ‘His shéte from hís bodý down hé let fáll’, and because the neighbouring line ‘And on a rewde maner he salutyd all the rout’ is quite intolerable as a decasyllabic. Conversely, I do not read Pope’s line as ‘A míghty máze! but nót withoùt a plán’,12 though it would be possible to do so, because the alternative ‘A míghty máze but nót withoút a plán’ seems more probable and pleasing, and also because the neighbouring line ‘Of all who blindly creep, or sightless soar’13 is clearly a very good decasyllable and would be atrocious as
Of áll who blìndly créep,
Or síghtless soár.
Once again we meet Aristotle. The metre of a poem does not result from the metre of individual lines; it is the whole which determines the parts.
The distinction between what is best read according to my hypothesis and what can only be tortured into it must, of course, be applied to the late medieval poets whom we are now considering. I do not claim that all can be read as Fifteenth-Century Heroics. I find that The Assembly of Gods is my best example and that most of Hoccleve will not fit in at all. Such a line as ‘No wight with me, in the, my sone, hath part’* would have to be ‘murdered’ if we tried to force it in.
At this point no one will forget Hoccleve’s own statement that he was the friend and pupil of Chaucer.* Have we here a real proof of this discipleship and, with it, a proof that Chaucer was writing true decasyllabics but that the tradition (for reasons I have suggested) was very soon lost?
