Part 22

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I couth_e_ tell_e_ for a gown_e_-cloth,”

or

“Than ye to me schuld brek_e_ your_e_ trouth_e_.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the stanza before this we have,--

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

and further on,--

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

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

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

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

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

But how about the elision?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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