by some special action in the dance, like the clapping of hands in modern Spanish dancing. But the ballad should never be thought of as in its origin an epic or narrative poem (such as street ballads became); it only turned into that (probably) because it had absorbed into itself something from the abandoned lai or romance. By a curious custom of the Middle Ages, these amusements, dancing and the singing of 'rounds' or ballads, frequently took place in churchyards. This brought them into continual contact with and opposition to the Puritan element in Catholicism-and the essential element in medieval Catholicism was Puritan-an opposition which is for us crystallised in the medieval legend of the dancers who, keeping up their dance all Christmas Eve till mass-time on Christmas morning, were so found by the priest, and even then refused to go to church till their round was ended. For which contumacy they were cursed by the priest and had to dance on for a twelvemonth without stopping. Nearest neighbours are the keenest rivals. And this neighbourhood of the ballad to the Church service was probably not (as in the story) a physical one only. It is a reasonable conjecture that the refrain of the ballad was first suggested by the liturgical 'refrains' chanted inside the church. This popular music then was at once nearest to and furthest from the Latin hymn: nearest because it owed to that its form; whereas the prototype of the Geste,' and from it of the Romance,' is to be found in such Latin poems as the one cited above from Muratori: furthest from the hymn because it expressed most sharply the protest which the gaiety of nations' made against the Puritan severity of religion in those days. This protest spread upwards. Thus the Romance' is a less severe, less heroic type of verse than the 'Geste': and if we accept the theories of M. Bédier that will not alter the position of things. For though, according to these theories, we cannot well make a time-distinction between the Romances' and the 'Gestes,' there still remains with the latter a certain clerical influence and also a certain heroic intention, which the romances lacked. Whoso holds as we do to the organic relationship of versification and poetry, of the forme and the fond, will see already the importance of the above considerations. And presently their importance will be further emphasised. If for a moment we let our thoughts wander back to that lost poetry, the bygone alliterative verse of the Teutonic-Gothic race in its greatest splendour, and let them drop again (for in some ways it is a fall) to the smooth, melodious beauties of our English verse in the Chaucer age, we feel that something has gone which can never be recovered. We cease to wonder so much either at the obstinacy of Guest, who would try to link together these diverse products, or at the lingering taste for the old metre which made The Vision of Piers the Plowman' (which really is not fine poetry) a popular poem down to Elizabethan days: so that to-day the extant MSS. of it are only fewer than those of the Canterbury Tales.' It is perhaps no use crying over spilt milk. Our gain in the new poetry is also vast. Not rapidly but very traceably we see-through the examples which Professor Saintsbury gives and through the not inconsiderable body of poetry from which he can only give extracts, all that verse preserved in the publications of the Percy Society, the Early English Text Society, and elsewherewe see the English ear and taste refining itself until with Chaucer it bursts upon us in sudden perfection. As regards technique Gower is not so far behind. But Chaucer has the qualities of all but the very greatest of our poets, so that with him we seem to have quite entered into our inheritance. Nothing could bring home to us how truly this is so, how little in essentials there is of difference between Chaucer and the Tudor poets, than a perusal of the well-known song of Troilus in 'Troilus and Criseyde.' Let us take the first verse only: 'If no love is, O God, what fele I so? And if love is, what thing and wiche is he! If love be good, from whennes comth my wo? When every torment and adversitee That cometht of him, may to me savory thinke; wherein we see that in sentiment there lies nothing material between this and the Elizabethan lyric, and (allowing for differences in spelling and pronunciation) in prosody we have not much to advance. By the date of Chaucer, then, the essentials of English prosody have been attained. But the reason why Chaucer in this wise anticipates, not, indeed, the whole gamut of Elizabethan verse, not even the finest lyric verse, but what we may call the common form' of the lyrical and narrative verse of the later age, is that his inspiration and his sentiments are essentially those of the Elizabethans. In a book recently published, Mr. Sidney Lee has shown more clearly than was * Wicked. † Sic in ed. Skeat. But the line demands Troilus and Criseyde, Book I., lines 400. vol. i.) * before surmised, the great debt of the Elizabethans to French poetry. Of course there was also a debt to the Italians. The more accomplished of our Elizabethan or Tudor poets, such men as Surrey and Wyatt and Spenser, read Italian with ease. The debts of Spenser to Tasso are obvious. The majority of our poets did not read Italian, but they read French; and the Petrarchan sonnet and canzone floated down to them through the French poets. In prosody there are countless instances of inspiration drawn by us from beyond the Channel. The ballade, we saw, made its way here, but it was never naturalised: even the octosyllabic couplets of the lays and romances were never quite at home. They lived on, but they lived in degeneration chiefly, in doggerel. The rhyme-royal on the other hand, French in origin, became quite our own; and the rhyme-royal is father to the Spenserian stanza. These are two of the most honoured of our forms of narrative verse. The rhyming couplet had a different fate. In France the octosyllable (contracted from the decasyllable of the earlier Gestes') was lengthened again into the Alexandrine; that was the form which had most vitality over there. With us the decasyllabic couplet became stereotyped-the most important of our metres-Chaucer's chief metre; till, it in its turn, by favour of the gods and the assistance of Surrey and of Marlowe and of Shakespeare, became our blank verse; the most national of all our verse forms, and the vehicle for what is greatest in our poetry. This we take to be the second great epoch in the history of English versification; the substitution of French rhythm for Anglo-Saxon alliteration being the first. The second step is in a sense a reversal of the first. This is the moment of our final escape from French influence-it is the act of escape one may say. Mr. Lee has shown that much reminiscence of Ronsard and the Pleiad is found scattered about Shakespeare's lines. That kind of plagiarism is, however, of secondary importance. In the earlier verse the indebtedness of English prosody to French prosody is only the index of a much deeper *The French Renaissance in England' by Sidney Lee (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1910). Mr. Lee is not altogether convincing, for he is not very judicial. All items of evidence, good and bad, are assembled in his pages, as in the pleadings of a not too skilful advocate. Yet, all deductions made, enough remains to show that the influence of French literature on English in the sixteenth century was only one degree less marked than a like thing in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. 6 indebtedness during the later Middle Ages, which we have just said operated by no means wholly to our advantage. France was in those days far ahead of us in the arts of life, among the latter, not least in those arts which the Greeks specially distinguished by their word povσik-all that belonged to fineness of ear, alertness of movement, a sense of rhythm in speech or dance. The French ballads, we saw, gave the form to the ballads of all Europe. Every art finds its fixed place, its proper sphere of influence. On the side of solemnity and grandeur medieval Europe had all that it needed, more than it could well assimilate, in its magnificent architecture and in its church music. Poetry was wanted for the gayer emotions. Thus it is that the ballad-singers of the legend cursed by the priest symbolised not ineptly the poetry of that age face to face with what Carlyle called 'the eternities and the im'mensities.' Such greater emotions therefore are mostly wanting from our earlier poetry. And a certain frivolity, a certain insincerity does accompany the lyric charm of that verse. It is shown in the passage we quoted from Troilus 'and Criseyde.' Nothing could demonstrate it more clearly than the fact (noted just now) that, barring a few small details, this lover's complaint might have been written equally well in the sixteenth century. Troilus' complaint is like that of any lover in the sixteenth century, and the versification of 'Troilus and Criseyde' is in essence similar to the versification of The Faerie Queene'; because both unknowingly re-echoed the far-off tradition of the chanson courtoise of medieval chivalry. Therefore these rhymed poems were destined to give way to blank verse, because, though love was still to be, as it should be, a large part of life, it, along with light-heartedness, gaiety, and wit, made up not the whole of life, as they were almost the whole of French-English poetry in the Middle Ages or later Middle Ages. In the vast achievement of Elizabethan blank-verse drama, love of the tenderer kind-lyrical love has a secondary place. Marlowe cared little for it. Shakespeare with one exception reserved it for his comedies; and in his comedies Shakespeare is often frankly conventional and, so far, insincere. One cannot say that love and tenderness are the moving forces or inspire the best lines in The 'Duchess of Malfi' and 'The White Devil.' There is more of it in Beaumont and Fletcher, in the latter especially. Perhaps, outside Shakespeare, The Faithful Shepherdess' and Heywood's A Woman Killed by Kindness' are the tenderest and most affecting dramas of the Elizabethan cycle. Compared with the great tragedies, plays of this order are few. All this is germane to the history of prosody and the history of versification for whoever holds that the matter, the inspiration, makes the style. You may express it as you choose, either that the discovery of this new medium allowed men once more to embrace in poetry the whole gamut of human interest and emotion, or that the sense, the growing feeling that poetry belonged to all life and all life to poetry, created this new medium to fill the gap. If we take the latter, probably the juster view, then we shall reckon not insignificant the separation from national thought of those other more religious expressions of the eternities and im'mensities' which medieval Catholicism had provided. It has been accounted strange that just as, or just after, Edward VI had destroyed so many of the church bells and organs, and reformed the services of the Church almost to a Puritan fashion, the greatest era of secular music arose. But on the theory which we have laid down just now, it is not wonderful. Spenser's verse, which Professor Saintsbury we think rates too high, represents the old tradition in its finest form: that is why it was so popular in its own age; it represented the far-off chivalrous poetry of the past; in an infinitely higher rank, it yet had kinship with the prose romance of the Amadis 'de Gaul' type. The blank-verse drama, on its side, with its reality (its realism one may say) and the width of its appeal, has (from a higher plane again) a clear kinship with Don 'Quixote,' that parent of all succeeding prose fiction. Because Spenser himself belonged in nature to the retrospective order, this poetry, in contrast with the newer verse of the dramas, cannot be studied so well in Spenser as in, say, Shakespeare's sonnets. These last seem to us to give a perfect picture of a mind of the highest type working in a medium which is really foreign to it, which it has not (if one may so express it) recreated for itself. Before we examine into the perfection of technique which blank verse gives us, it is well worth while to pause a moment over the Shakespearean sonnet. Of what kind was Shakespeare's inducement to write these poems? Wordsworth and many others have supposed that he did it to unlock his heart. But we cannot overlook the evidence which Mr. Sidney Lee brought forward long ago of the imitative character of Shakespeare's sonnets, evidence which Mr. Lee's more recent researches only confirm. Thus the sonnets of Shakespeare and his dramatic blank verse would stand for what we have taken them as, the one a clear echo of foreign versification, the other the highest attainment of pure English versification. This would not of course mean |