The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory Part 10

As in the case of the Alexander-Saga, their origins were the Pseudo-Callisthenes and the _Iter ad Paradisum_, so in the Tale of Troy they were the works of two persons whose literary offspring has obtained for them an amount of attention transcending to a quite ludicrous extent their literary merit--Dictys Cretensis and Dares Phrygius, to whom may perhaps be added the less shadowy personage of the grammarian John Tzetzes. But, as in the other case also, they were by no means confined to such authorities. If they did not know Homer very well at first-hand, they did know him: they knew Ovid (who of course represents Homer, though not Homer only) extremely well: and they knew Virgil. But partly from the instinct above referred to, of which more presently, partly from the craze for tracing Western Europe back to the "thrice-beaten Trojans," it pleased them to regard Homer as a late and unhistorical calumniator, whose Greek prejudices made him bear false witness; and to accept the pretensions of Dictys and Dares to be contemporaries and eyewitnesses of fact. Dictys, a companion of Idomeneus, was supposed to represent the Greek side, but more fairly than Homer; and Dares, priest of Hephaestus, the Trojan.

The works of these two worthies, which are both of small compa.s.s,--Dictys occupies rather more than a hundred, Dares rather more than fifty, pages of the ordinary Teubner cla.s.sics,[83]--exist at present only in Latin prose, though, as the Greeks were more expert and inventive forgers than the Romans, it is possible, if not even highly probable, that both were, and nearly certain that Dictys was, originally Greek at least in language. Dictys, the older pretty certainly, is introduced by a letter to a certain Quintus Aradius from Lucius Septimius, who informs "his Rufinus" and the world, with a great deal of authority and learning, that the book had been written by Dictys in Punic letters, which Cadmus and Agenor had then made of common use in Greece; that some shepherds found the ma.n.u.script written on linden-bark paper in a tin case at his tomb at Gnossus; that their landlord turning the Punic letters into Greek (which had always been the language), gave it to Nero the Emperor, who rewarded him richly; and that he, Septimius, having by chance got the book into his hands, thought it worth while to translate it into Latin, both for the sake of making the true history known and "ut otiosi animi desidiam discuteremus." The Dares volume is more ambitious, and purports to be introduced by no less a person than Cornelius Nepos to no less a person than Sall.u.s.tius Crispus, and to have been "faithfully translated" by the former from MS. in the very hand of Dares, which he found at Athens, in order to correct the late and fabulous authority of Homer, who actually makes G.o.ds fight with men!

[Footnote 83: Ed. Meister. Leipzig, 1872-73.]

[Sidenote: _The Dares story._]

It will be, of course, obvious to the merest tyro in criticism that these prefaces bear "forgery" on the very face of them. The first is only one of those innumerable variants of the genesis of a fiction which Sir Walter Scott has so pleasantly summarised in one of his introductions; and the phrase quoted about _animi otiosi desidiam_ is a commonplace of mediaeval bookmaking. The second, more cleverly arranged, exposes itself to the question how far, putting the difficulty about writing aside, an ancient Greek MS. of the kind could possibly have escaped the literary activity of many centuries of Athenian wits and scholars, to fall into the hands of Cornelius Nepos.

The actual age and origin of the two have, of course, occupied many modern scholars; and the favourite opinion seems to be that Dictys may have been originally written by some Greek about the time of Nero (the Latin translation cannot well be earlier than the fourth century and may be much later), while Dares may possibly be as late as the twelfth. Neither book is of the very slightest interest intrinsically.

Dictys (the full t.i.tle of whose book is _Ephemeris Belli Trojani_) is not only the longer but the better written of the two. It contains no direct "set" at Homer; and may possibly preserve traits of some value from the lost cyclic writers. But it was not anything like such a favourite with the Middle Ages as Dares. Dictys had contented himself with beginning at the abduction of Helen; Dares starts his _De Excidio Trojae_ with the Golden Fleece, and excuses the act of Paris as mere reprisals for the carrying off of Hesione by Telamon. Antenor having been sent to Greece to demand reparation and rudely treated, Paris makes a regular raid in vengeance, and so the war begins with a sort of balance of cause for it on the Trojan side. Before the actual fighting, some personal descriptions of the chief heroes and heroines are given, curiously feeble and strongly tinged with mediaeval peculiarities, but thought to be possibly derived from some similar things attributed to the rhetorician Philostratus at the end of the third century. And among these a great place is given to Troilus and "Briseida."

Nearly half the book is filled with these preliminaries, with an account of the fruitless emba.s.sy of Ulysses and Diomed to Troy, and with enumerating the forces and allies of the two parties. But when Dares gets to work he proceeds with a rapidity which may be partly due to the desire to contradict Homer. The landing and death of Protesilaus, avenged to some extent by Achilles, the battle in which Hector slays Patroclus (to whom Dares adds Meriones), and that at the s.h.i.+ps, are all lumped together; and the funerals of Protesilaus and Patroclus are simultaneously celebrated. Palamedes begins to plot against Agamemnon. The fighting generally goes much against the Greeks; and Agamemnon sues for a three years' truce, which is granted despite Hector's very natural suspicion of such an uncommonly long time. It is skipped in a line; and then, the fighting having gone against the Trojans, they beg for a six months' truce in their turn.

This is followed by a twelve days' fight and a thirty days' truce asked by the Greeks. Then comes Andromache's dream, the fruitless attempt to prevent Hector fighting, and his death at the hands of Achilles. After more truces, Palamedes supplants Agamemnon, and conducts the war with pretty good success. Achilles sees Polyxena at the tomb of Hector, falls in love with her, demands her hand, and is promised it if he can bring about peace. In the next batch of fighting, Palamedes kills Deiphobus and Sarpedon, but is killed by Paris; and in consequence a fresh battle at the s.h.i.+ps and the firing of them takes place, Achilles abstaining, but Ajax keeping up the battle till (natural) night. Troilus then becomes the hero of a seven days' battle followed by the usual truce, during which Agamemnon tries to coax Achilles out of the sulks, and on his refusal holds a great council of war. When next _tempus pugnae supervenit_ (a stock phrase of the book) Troilus is again the hero, wounds everybody, including Agamemnon, Menelaus, and Diomed, and very reasonably opposes a six months' armistice which his father grants. At its end he again bears all before him; but, killing too many Myrmidons, he at last excites Achilles, who, though at first wounded, kills him at last by wounding his horse, which throws him. Memnon recovers the body of Troilus, but is himself killed. The death of Achilles in the temple of Apollo (by ambush, but, of course, with no mention of the unenchanted heel), and of Ajax and Paris in single fight, leads to the appearance of the Amazons, who beat the Greeks, till Penthesilea is killed by Neoptolemus. Antenor, aeneas, and others urge peace, and on failing to prevail with Priam, begin to parley with the Greeks. There is no Trojan horse, but the besiegers are treacherously introduced at a gate _ubi extrinsecus portam equi sculptum caput erat_. Antenor and aeneas receive their reward; but the latter is banished because he has concealed Polyxena, who is ma.s.sacred when discovered by Neoptolemus.

Helenus, Ca.s.sandra, and Andromache go free: and the book ends with the beautifully precise statements that the war, truces and all, lasted ten years, six months, and twelve days; that 886,000 men fell on the Greek side, and 676,000 on the Trojan; that aeneas set out in twenty-two s.h.i.+ps ("the same with which Paris had gone to Greece," says the careful Dares), and 3400 men, while 2500 followed Antenor, and 1200 Helenus and Andromache.

[Sidenote: _Its absurdity._]

This bald summary is scarcely balder than the book itself, which also, as can be seen from the summary, and would be more fully seen from the book, has no literary merit of any kind. It reads more like an excessively uninspired _precis_ of a larger work than like anything else--a _precis_ in which all the literary merit has, with unvarying infelicity, been omitted. Nothing can be more childish than the punctilious euhemerism by which all the miraculous elements of the Homeric story are blinked or explained away, unless it be the painstaking endeavour simply to say something different from Homer, or the absurd alternation of fighting and truces, in which each party invariably gives up its chance of finis.h.i.+ng the war at the precise time at which that chance is most flouris.h.i.+ng, and which reads like a humorous travesty of the warfare of some historic periods with all the humour left out.

[Sidenote: _Its capabilities._]

Nevertheless it is not really disgraceful to the Romantic period that it fastened so eagerly on this sorriest of illegitimate epitomes.[84]

Very few persons at that time were in case to compare the literary merit of Homer--even that of Ovid and Virgil--with the literary merit of these bald pieces of bad Latin prose. Moreover, the supernatural elements in the Homeric story, though very congenial to the temper of the Middle Age itself, were presented and ascribed in such a fas.h.i.+on that it was almost impossible for that age to adopt them. Putting aside a certain sentimental cult of "Venus la deesse d'amors," there was nothing of which the mediaeval mind was more tranquilly convinced than that "Jubiter," "Appollin," and the rest were not mere fond things vainly invented, but actual devils who had got themselves wors.h.i.+pped in the pagan times. It was impossible for a devout Christian man, whatever pranks he might play with his own religion, to represent devils as playing the part of saints and of the Virgin, helping the best heroes, and obtaining their triumph. Nor, audacious as was the faculty of "transfer" possessed by the mediaeval genius, was it easy to Christianise the story in any other way. It is perhaps almost surprising that, so far as I know or remember, no version exists representing Ca.s.sandra as a holy and injured nun, making Our Lady play the part of Venus to aeneas, and even punis.h.i.+ng the sacrilegious Diomed for wounding her. But I do not think I have heard of such a version (though Sir Walter has gone near to representing something parallel in _Ivanhoe_), and it would have been a somewhat violent escapade for even a mediaeval fancy.

[Footnote 84: The British Museum alone (see Mr Ward's _Catalogue of Romances_, vol. i.) contains some seventeen separate MSS. of Dares.]

So, with that customary and restless ability to which we owe so much, and which has been as a rule so much slighted, it seized on the negative capacities of the story. Dares gives a wretched painting, but a tolerable canvas and frame. Each section of his meagre narrative is capable of being worked out by sufficiently busy and imaginative operators into a complete _roman d'aventures_: his facts, if meagre and jejune, are numerous. The raids and reprisals in the cases of Hesione and Helen suited the demands of the time; and, as has been hinted, the singular interlardings of truce and war, and the shutting up of the latter into so many days' hand-to-hand fighting,--with no strategy, no care for communications, no scientific nonsense of any kind,--were exactly to mediaeval taste.

[Sidenote: _Troilus and Briseida._]

Above all, the prominence of new heroes and heroines, about whom not very much was said, and whose _gestes_ the mediaeval writer could accordingly fill up at his own will, with the presentation of others in a light different from that of the cla.s.sical accounts, was a G.o.dsend. Achilles, as the princ.i.p.al author of the "Excidium Trojae"

(the t.i.tle of the Dares book, and after it of others), must be blackened; and though Dares himself does not contain the worst accusations of the mediaeval writers against the unshorn son of the sea-G.o.ddess, it clears the way for them by taking away the excuse of the unjust deprivation of Briseis. From this to making him not merely a factious partisan, but an unfair fighter, who mobs his enemies half to death with Myrmidons before he engages them himself, is not far. On the other hand, Troilus, a mere name in the older stories, offers himself as a hero. And for a heroine, the casual mention of the charms of Briseida in Dares started the required game. Helen was too puzzling, as well as too Greek; Andromache only a faithful wife; Ca.s.sandra a scolding sorceress; Polyxena a victim. Briseida had almost a clear record, as after the confusion with Chryseis (to be altered in name afterwards) there was very little personality left in her, and she could for that very reason be dealt with as the romancers pleased.

In the subsequent and vernacular handling of the story the same difference of alternation is at first perceived as that which appears in the Alexander legend. The sobriety of Gautier of Chatillon's _Alexandreis_ is matched and its Latinity surpa.s.sed by the _Bellum Trojanum_ of our countryman Joseph of Exeter, who was long and justly praised as about the best mediaeval writer of cla.s.sical Latin verse.

But this neighbourhood of the streams of history and fiction ceases much earlier in the Trojan case, and for very obvious reasons. The temperament of mediaeval poets urged them to fill in and fill out: the structure of the Daretic epitome invited them to do so: and they very shortly did it.

[Sidenote: _The_ Roman de Troie.]

After some controversy, the credit of first "romancing" the Tale of Troy has been, it would seem justly and finally, a.s.signed to Benoit de Sainte-More. Benoit, whose flouris.h.i.+ng time was about 1160, who was a contemporary and rival of Wace, and who wrote a chronicle of Normandy even longer than his Troy-book, composed the latter in more than thirty thousand octosyllabic lines, an expansion of the fifty pages of Dares, which stands perhaps almost alone even among the numerous similar feats of mediaeval bards. He has helped himself freely with matter from Dictys towards the end of his work; but, as we have seen, even this reinforcement could not be great in bulk. Expansion, however, so difficult to some writers, was never in the least a stumbling-block to the _trouvere_. It was rather a bottomless pit into which he fell, traversing in his fall lines and pages with endless alacrity of sinning.

Not that Benoit is by any means a person to be contemptuously spoken of. In the first place, as we shall see presently, he was for many hundred years completely and rather impudently robbed of his fame; in the second, he is the literary ancestor of far greater men than himself; and in the third, his verse, though not free from the besetting sin of its kind, and especially of the octosyllabic variety--the sin of smooth but insignificant fluency--is always pleasant, and sometimes picturesque. Still there is no doubt that at present the second claim is the strongest with us; and that if Benoit de Sainte-More had not, through his plagiarist Colonna, been the original of Boccaccio and Chaucer and Shakespeare, he would require little more than a bare mention here.

[Sidenote: _The phases of Cressid._]

Dares, as we have seen, mentions Briseida, and extols her beauty and charm: she was, he says, "beautiful, not of lofty stature, fair, her hair yellow and silky, her eyebrows joined, her eyes lively, her body well proportioned, kind, affable, modest, of a simple mind, and pious." He also mightily extols Troilus; but he does not intimate any special connection between the two, or tell the story of "Cressid,"

which indeed his followers elaborated in terms not altogether consistent with some of the above laudatory epithets. Tzetzes, who with some others gives her the alternative name of Hippodamia, alters her considerably, and a.s.signs to her tall stature, a white complexion, black hair, as well as specially comely b.r.e.a.s.t.s, cheeks, and nose, skill in dress, a pleasant smile, but a distinct tendency to "arrogance." Both these writers, however, with Joseph of Exeter and others, seem to be thinking merely of the Briseis whom we know from Homer as the mistress of Achilles, and do not connect her with Calchas, much less with Troilus. What may be said with some confidence is that the confusion of Briseida with the daughter of Calchas and the a.s.signment of her to Troilus as his love originated with Benoit de Sainte-More. But we must perhaps hesitate a little before a.s.signing to him quite so much credit as has sometimes been allowed him. Long before Shakespeare received the story in its full development (for though he does not carry it to the bitter end in _Troilus and Cressida_ itself, the allusion to the "lazar kite of Cressid's kind"

in _Henry V._ shows that he knew it) it had reached that completeness through the hands of Boccaccio, Chaucer, and Henryson, the least of whom was capable of turning a comparatively barren _donnee_ into a rich possession, and who as a matter of fact each added much. We do not find in the Norman _trouvere_, and it would be rather wonderful if we did find, the gay variety of the _Filostrato_ and its vivid picture of Cressid as merely pa.s.sionate, Chaucer's admirable Pandarus and his skilfully blended heroine, or the infinite pathos of Henryson's final interview. Still, all this great and moving romance would have been impossible without the idea of Cressid's successive sojourn in Troy and the Greek camp, and of her successive courts.h.i.+p by Troilus and by Diomed. And this Benoit really seems to have thought of first. His motives for devising it have been rather idly inquired into. For us it shall be sufficient that he did devise it.

By an easy confusion with Chryses and Chryseis--half set right afterwards in the change from Briseida to Griseida in Boccaccio and Creseide in Chaucer--he made his heroine the daughter of Calchas. The priest, a traitor to Troy but powerful with the Greeks, has left his daughter in the city and demands her--a demand which, with the usual complacency noticed above as characterising the Trojans in Dares himself, is granted, though they are very angry with Calchas. But Troilus is already the damsel's lover; and a bitter parting takes place between them. She is sent, gorgeously equipped, to the Greeks; and it happens to be Diomed who receives her. He at once makes the fullest declarations--for in nothing did the Middle Age believe more fervently than in the sentiment,

"Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?"

But Briseida, with a rather excessive politeness, and leaving him a good deal of hope, informs him that she has already a fair friend yonder. Whereat, as is reasonable, he is not too much discouraged. It must be supposed that this is related to Troilus, for in the next fight he, after Diomed has been wounded, reproaches Briseida pretty openly. He is not wrong, for Briseida weeps at Diomed's wound, and (to the regret and reproof of her historian, and indeed against her own conscience) gives herself to the Greek, or determines to do so, on the philosophical principle that Troilus is lost to her. Achilles then kills Troilus himself, and we hear no more of the lady.

The volubility of Benoit a.s.signs divers long speeches to Briseida, in which favourable interpreters have seen the germ of the future Cressid; and in which any fair critic may see the suggestion of her.

But it is little more than a suggestion. Of the full and masterly conception of Cressid as a type of woman which was afterwards reached, Troilus, and Diomed, and Pandarus, and the wrath of the G.o.ds were essential features. Here Troilus is a shadow, Diomed not much more, Pandarus non-existent, the vengeance of Love on a false lover unthought of. Briseida, though she has changed her name, and parentage, and status, is still, as even the patriotic enthusiasm of MM. Moland and d'Hericault (the first who did Benoit justice) perceives, the Briseis of Homer, a slave-girl who changes masters, and for her own pleasure as well as her own safety is chiefly anxious to please the master that is near. The vivifying touch was brought by Boccaccio, and Boccaccio falls out of our story.

[Sidenote: _The_ Historia Trojana.]

But between Benoit and Boccaccio there is another personage who concerns us very distinctly. Never was there such a case, even in the Middle Ages, when the absence of printing, of public libraries, and of general knowledge of literature made such things easy, of _sic vos non vobis_ as the _Historia Trojana_ of Guido de Columnis, otherwise Guido delle Colonne, or Guido Colonna, of Messina. This person appears to have spent some time in England rather late in the thirteenth century; and there, no doubt, he fell in with the _Roman de Troie_. He wrote--in Latin, and thereby appealing to a larger audience than even French could appeal to--a Troy-book which almost at once became widely popular. The MSS. of it occur by scores in the princ.i.p.al libraries of Europe; it was the direct source of Boccaccio, and with that writer's _Filostrato_ of Chaucer, and it formed the foundation of almost all the known Troy-books of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Benoit being completely forgotten. Yet recent investigation has shown that Guido not merely adapted Benoit in the usual mediaeval fas.h.i.+on, but followed him so closely that his work might rather be called translation than adaptation. At any rate, beyond a few details he has added nothing to the story of Troilus and Cressida as Benoit left it, and as, in default of all evidence to the contrary, it is only fair to conclude that he made it.

From the date, 1287, of Guido delle Colonne's version, it follows necessarily that all the vernacular Troy-books--our own _Destruction of Troy_,[85] the French prose romance of _Troilus_,[86] &c., not to mention Lydgate and others--fall like Boccaccio and Chaucer out of the limits of this volume. Nor can it be necessary to enter into detail as to the other cla.s.sical French romances, the _Roman de Thebes_, the _Roman d'Eneas_, the _Roman de Jules Cesar_, _Athis and Profilias_, and the rest;[87] while something will be said of the German aeneid of H. von Veldeke in a future chapter. The capital examples of the Alexandreid and the Iliad, as understood by the Middle Ages, not only must but actually do suffice for our purpose.

[Footnote 85: Ed. Panton and Donaldson, E.E.T.S. London, 1869-74.]

[Footnote 86: Ed. Moland and d'Hericault, _op. cit._]

[Footnote 87: The section on "L'Epopee Antique" in M. Pet.i.t de Julleville's book, more than once referred to, is by M. Leopold Constans, editor of the _Roman de Thebes_, and will be found useful.]

[Sidenote: _Meaning of the cla.s.sical romance._]

And we see from them very well not merely in what light the Middle Ages regarded the cla.s.sical stories, but also to what extent the cla.s.sical stories affected the Middle Ages. This latter point is of the more importance in that even yet the exact bearing and meaning of the Renaissance in this respect is by no means universally comprehended. It may be hoped, if not very certainly trusted, that most educated persons have now got rid of the eighteenth-century notion of mediaeval times as being almost totally ignorant of the cla.s.sics themselves, a notion which careful reading of Chaucer alone should be quite sufficient to dispel. The fact of course is, that all through the Middle Ages the Latin cla.s.sics were known, unequally but very fairly in most cases, while the earlier Middle Ages at least were by no means ignorant of Greek.

But although there was by no means total ignorance, there was what is to us a scarcely comprehensible want of understanding. To the average mediaeval student, perhaps to any mediaeval student, it seems seldom or never to have occurred that the men of whom he was reading had lived under a dispensation so different from his own in law and in religion, in politics and in philosophy, in literature and in science, that an elaborate process of readjustment was necessary in order to get at anything like a real comprehension of them. Nor was he, as a rule, able--men of transcendent genius being rather rare, amid a more than respectable abundance of men of talent--to take them, as Chaucer did to a great extent, Dante more intensely though less widely, and Shakespeare (but Shakespeare had already felt the Renaissance spirit) fully and perfectly, on the broad ground of humanity, so that anachronisms, and faults of costume, matter not one jot to any one but a pedant or a fool. When he came to something in the story--something in sentiment, manners, religion, what not--which was out of the range of his own experience, he changed it into something within the range of his own experience. When the whole story did not lend itself to the treatment which he wished to apply, he changed it, added to it, left out from it, without the slightest scruple. He had no more difficulty in transforming the disciplined tactic of the Macedonian phalanx into a series of random _chevauchees_ than in adjusting the much more congenial front-fighting of Greeks and Trojans to his own ideas; and it cost him little more to engraft a whole brand-new romantic love-story on the Tale of Troy than to change the historical siege of Gaza into a _Fuerres de Gadres_, of which Aimeri of Narbonne or Raoul de Cambrai would have been the appropriate hero. Sometimes, indeed, he simply confounded Persians and Saracens, just as elsewhere he confounded Saracens and Vikings; and he introduced high priests of heathen divinities as bishops, with the same _sang froid_ with which long afterwards the translators of the Bible founded an order of "dukes" in Edom.

A study of antiquity conducted in such a fas.h.i.+on could hardly have coloured mediaeval thought with any real cla.s.sicism, even if it had been devoted to much more genuine specimens of antiquity than the semi-Oriental medley of the Pseudo-Callisthenes and the bit of bald euhemerism which had better have been devoted to Hephaestus than ascribed to his priest. But, by another very curious fact, the two great and commanding examples of the Romance of Antiquity were executed each under the influence of the flouris.h.i.+ng of one of the two mightiest branches of mediaeval poetry proper. When Alberic and the decasyllabist (whoever he was) wrote, the _chanson de geste_ was in the very prime of its most vigorous manhood, and the _Roman d'Alixandre_ accordingly took not merely the outward form, but the whole spirit of the _chanson de geste_ itself. And when Benoit de Sainte-More gave the first shapings of the great story of Troilus and Cressida out of the lifeless rubbish-heap of Dares, it was at the precise minute when also, in hands known or unknown, the greater story of Arthur and Gawain, of Lancelot and Guinevere, was shaping itself from materials probably even scantier. Even Guido of the Columns, much more Boccaccio, had this story fully before them; and Cressida, when at last she becomes herself, has, if nothing of the majesty of Guinevere, a good deal of Iseult--an Iseult more faithless to love, but equally indifferent to anything except love. As Candace in _Alexander_ has the crude though not unamiable naturalism of a _chanson_ heroine, so Cressid--so even Briseida to some extent--has the characteristic of the frail angels of Arthurian legend. The cup would have spilled wofully in her husband's hand, the mantle would scarcely have covered an inch of her; but though of coa.r.s.er make, she is of the same mould with the ladies of the Round Table,--she is of the first creation of the order of romantic womanhood.

CHAPTER V.

THE MAKING OF ENGLISH AND THE SETTLEMENT OF EUROPEAN PROSODY.

SPECIAL INTEREST OF EARLY MIDDLE ENGLISH. DECAY OF ANGLO-SAXON. EARLY MIDDLE ENGLISH LITERATURE. SCANTINESS OF ITS CONSt.i.tUENTS. LAYAMON. THE FORM OF THE 'BRUT.' ITS SUBSTANCE. THE 'ORMULUM': ITS METRE, ITS SPELLING. THE 'ANCREN RIWLE.' THE 'OWL AND THE NIGHTINGALE.' PROVERBS.

ROBERT OF GLOUCESTER. ROMANCES. 'HAVELOK THE DANE.' 'KING HORN.' THE PROSODY OF THE MODERN LANGUAGES. HISTORICAL RETROSPECT. ANGLO-SAXON PROSODY. ROMANCE PROSODY. ENGLISH PROSODY. THE LATER ALLITERATION. THE NEW VERSE. RHYME AND SYLLABIC EQUIVALENCE. ACCENT AND QUANt.i.tY. THE GAIN OF FORM.

THE "ACCENT" THEORY. INITIAL FALLACIES, AND FINAL PERVERSITIES THEREOF.

[Sidenote: _Special interest of Early Middle English._]

The positive achievements of English literature, during the period with which this volume deals, are not at first sight great; and all the more finished literary production of the time, till the extreme end of it, was in French and Latin. But the work done during this time in getting the English language ready for its future duties, in equipping it with grammar and prosody, in preparing, so to speak, for Chaucer, is not only of the first importance intrinsically, but has a value which is almost unique in general literary history as an example. Nowhere else have we the opportunity of seeing a language and a literature in the process of gestation, or at least of a reformation so great as to be almost equal to new birth. Of the stages which turned Latin through the Romanic vulgar tongues into Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Provencal, French, we have the very scantiest remains; and though the Strasburg oaths and the Eulalia hymn are no doubt inestimable in their way, they supply exceedingly minute and precarious stepping-stones by which to cross from Ausonius to the _Chanson de Roland_. From the earliest literary stages of the Teutonic tongues we have, except in the case of Anglo-Saxon and Icelandic, very little wreckage of time; and Anglo-Saxon at least presents the puzzling characteristic that its earliest remains are, _coeteris paribus_, nearly as complete and developed as the earliest remains of Greek. In German itself, whether High or Low, the change from oldest to youngest is nothing like the change from the English of _Beowulf_ to the English of Browning. And though the same process of primordial change as that which we have seen in English took place certainly in German, and possibly in the Romance tongues, it is nowhere traceable with anything like the same clearness or with such gradual development. By the eleventh century at latest in France, by the end of the twelfth in Germany, verse had taken, in the first case fully, in the second almost fully, a modern form. In England it was, during the two hundred years from 1150 to 1350, working itself steadily, and with ample examples, from pure accent to accentual quant.i.ty, and from alliteration to rhyme. Of this process, and those similar to it in other countries, we shall give an account which will serve for the whole in the latter part of this chapter; the actual production and gradual transformation of English language and literature generally may occupy us in the earlier part.

It is to be hoped that by this time a middle way, tolerably free from molestation, may be taken between those historians of English who would have a great gulf fixed before Chaucer, and those who insist upon absolute continuity from Caedmon to Tennyson. There must surely be something between dismissing (as did the best historian of the subject in the last generation) Anglo-Saxon as "that nocturnal portion of our literature," between calling it "impossible to p.r.o.nounce with certainty whether anything in it is artistically good or bad,"[88] and thinking it proper, as it has sometimes been thought, in an examination in English literature, to give four papers to Caedmon, aelfric, and Wulfstan, and one to the combined works of Addison, Pope, Johnson, and Burke. Extravagances of the latter kind have still, their heyday of reaction not being quite past, a better chance than extravagances of the former. But both may surely be avoided.

[Footnote 88: See Craik, _History of English Literature_, 3d ed.

(London, 1866), i. 55.]

[Sidenote: _Decay of Anglo-Saxon._]