No More Learning



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CHAPTER XIII
PROSODY FROM CHAUCER TO SPENSER
In the short summary or survey of the progress of English
prosody which was given towards the end of the first volume
of this history, we reached the period of the alliterative revival,
in or about the early days of Chaucer. In the second and third
volumes, the actual record of poetry has been carried, approxi-
mately, to the death of Spenser; and incidental notices of the
prosody of nearly three centuries have, necessarily, been included.
But it has been judged proper to continue here the retrospect, in
connected fashion, of the general history of English versification.
The prosody of the fourteenth century, after its very earliest
periods, is a subject of very complex interest as well as of
extreme importance; and its complexity is not really difficult to
disentangle. It is from the neglect to study it as a whole, more,
perhaps, than from any other cause, that general views of English
prosody, in the not very numerous cases in which they have been
taken at all, have been both haphazard and confused. Yet the
facts, if only a little trouble be taken with them, offer their own
explanation most obligingly, and illustrate themselves in a striking
and, indeed, almost unique manner. The contemporary exist-
ence of such poets as Chaucer, Gower and whosoever may have
written the Piers Plowman poems would be remarkable in any
literature, at any time and from any point of view. In relation to
English prosody it points, formulates, illuminates the lesson which
ought to be learnt, in a manner which makes it surprising that
this lesson should ever have been mistaken. The foreign'element-
the tendency to strict syllabic uniformity of the line and to further
uniformity in its metrical subdivisions—receives special, and, for a
long time, almost final, expression in the hands of Gower. The
‘native' reaction to alliterative accentual rhythm finds its greatest
exposition-exposition which seems to disdain formally all trans-
action with metre and rime, though it cannot altogether avoid
metrical colour-in the lines of Piers Plowman. . And the middle
way—the continuation of the process which has produced Middle
18
E. L. III.
CH. XIII.


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274 Prosody from Chaucer to Spenser
English prosody out of the shaping of the Old English lump by
the pressure of the Franco-Latin mould—is trodden by the greatest
of the three, with results that show him to be the greatest. The
verse of Piers Plowoman does all that it can with the method
it makes it clear that no other knight on any other day of the
tournament is likely to do better on that side-but it also shows
the limits of the method and the weakness of the side itself. Gower
does not quite do this, partly because he is weaker, and partly
because he has a better instrument-but he shows that this instru-
ment itself needs improvement. Chaucer shows, not only that he
is best of all, not only that his instrument is better than the others,
but that this instrument, good as it is, has not done nearly all that
it can do—that there is infinite future in it. He experiments until
he achieves ; but his achievement still leaves room for further
experiment.
But, for real prosodic information, it is necessary to fall back
upon the predecessors of these famous poets, in order to perceive
how they reached their actual position. Naturally, when one comes
to think of it, the predecessors of the right and left hand representa-
tives are of less importance than those of the central protagonist.
The attempts in more or less pure alliteration before Piers Plow-
man hardly deserve study here, for Piers Plowman 'puts them all
down': the practitioners of the octosyllable, more or less precisely
written, are of even less account prosodically. But with the great
mass of verse writers, in scores of varying forms, who are the
active forerunners of Chaucer (whether he directly studied them
or not is beside the question) it is very different. In the huge
body of mostly anonymous verse which is contained in a series
of manuscripts beginning with the Harleian 2253 and ending with
the Vernon, and which includes the work of named writers like
Hampole, William of Shoreham and Laurence Minot, we find end-
less experiment, in almost every instance of which the action and
reaction of mould and mass continue to develop the main process
often referred to. It is, of course, possible, by keeping the eye
wholly to one side, to lump all or most of these things under
general categories of 'so many [generally four] stress lines,' or,
by directing it mainly to the other, to discover Latin or French
originals more or less clumsily imitated. But if the examples are
first carefully considered as individuals and the common features
which they present are then patiently extracted in connection, it will
go hard but the nisus towards new forms, familiar to us later, will
emerge. And, to some students at any rate, the presence of
6


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The Staple of English
English Poetry 275
foot-arrangement and its results—inchoate and imperfect as they
may be—will pretty certainly manifest itself.
The most important, if the most disputed, of these results is
the actual attainment, whether by deliberate intention or not, of
what was to become the great staple of English poetry, the 'deca-
syllabic' 'five-stress' or 'five-foot' line. The older statements
(not quite obsolete yet) that this line does not appear before
Chaucer—that Chaucer “introduced' it-are certainly false; while
the attempts sometimes made to assign its invention, and its first
employment in couplets, to Hampole are not very well founded.
Something, at least, very like it appears as early as the Orison
of Our Lady, and frequently reappears in later poems, especially
in The Pricke of Conscience, but also in other poems of the
Vernon and other MSS which, probably, are later than Richard
Rolle. But it is, in this particular place, less proper to establish
this point by detailed argument than to draw attention to the fact
that it is only one result of a whole multitude—the result of the
ceaseless and resistless action and reaction of mould and mass. '
If the English decasyllable or heroic and the English alexandrine
(which appears in many places, sporadically, from Mannyng to Piers
Ploroman), and combinations of them, with or without shorter lines,
were merely imitations of French, they must have been more
regular : their very irregularity shows that something was forcing
or cramping (for either metaphor may be used) the hands of the
practitioners.
The greatest of these practitioners naturally get their hands
most free, but in different ways: in Piers Plouman, by shirking
the full problem on one side, in Gower, by shirking it on the
other. How Chaucer meets it has been told in detail in the proper
place. Here, we need only consider his results in the couplet and
in rime royal—the octosyllable, for all his excellent practice in it,
must be regarded as a vehicle which he definitely relinquished;
and his stanzas, other than the septet with final couplet, are of
minor importance. But he left the two great combinations of
the decasyllabic line in such a condition that, given the existing
literary language (largely his work) and the existing pronunciation
of it, hardly anything further could be achieved or expected. The
stanza exhibited-except, perhaps, in respect of pause—a severer
standard of uniformity than the couplet; five hundred years of
subsequent practice have shown that, in all cases, this is desirable,
since too great a variety in the individual line interferes with the
concerted effect of the group. But the couplet itself exhibits an
18–2


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276 Prosody from Củaucer to Spenser
amount of freedom which has been denied rather because the
deniers think it ought not to be there than because they can
prove its absence! It certainly admits of either single (masculine)
or double (feminine) rime; it certainly admits of extension in sense
from line to line and from couplet to couplet; the pause, though
hovering somewhere about the middle, by no means always de-
finitely or necessarily alights there, or anywhere; and the lines
are certainly not of invariable syllabic length. Here, perhaps,
agreement ceases. But even those who, though they allow that
Chaucer sometimes used nine syllables only, and often (with the
double rime) eleven, would elsewhere crumple up an apparent
hendecasyllable or dodecasyllable into ten, leave an opening to
the other side. Call the means of crumpling 'slur,''elision,' 'syn-
aloepha,' or what you will, the actual fact remains that some lines
are crumpled and some not; and will permit uncrumpling to those
who choose. Those who do choose see in Chaucer, and have no
mind to alter or disguise what they see, 'feet'-monosyllabic,
dissyllabic and trisyllabic of various composition-and lines-
acephalous,' heroic or alexandrine, as the case may be. In other
words, they see what, in different degrees, has existed in English
prosody ever since. And both parties, however much they may
differ on this point, agree, each on its own system, that the prosody
and versification of Chaucer are as accomplished, as orderly, as
reducible to general rule and system, as the prosody and versifica-
tion of any poet in the world, at any time. That a different opinion
was once and long held is universally admitted to have been the
result of sheer and almost excusable ignorance of certain facts
affecting pronunciation, especially the pronunciation of the final -e.
Thus, the prosody of the fourteenth century proceeds, as has
been said above, in a manner perfectly intelligible and even sur-
prisingly logical. The processes of adjustment of mould and mass
certainly are at work in the thirteenth century; probably, if not
quite certainly, in the twelfth ; and they continue, not merely
unhindered to any important degree by the alliterative-accentual
revival, but, in a certain fashion, assisted, and, as it were, clarified,
by it, in the fourteenth. The more disorderly elements, the rougher
matters, are drawn off into this alliterative direction. No very
great poet shows himself to be a danger in the other direction
of excessive smoothness and syllabic limitation; while a very great
1 Attempts have been made at various times to argue direct and extensive copying
of contemporary French prosody by Chaucer. I have been for years pretty well
acquainted with that prosody, and can pronounce it quite different from his.


## p. 277 (#299) ############################################

Chaucer's Successors
277
poet does show himself capable of conducting prosodic develop-
ment on the combined principles of freedom and order. And,
what is more, this is not only a great poet, but one recognised
as great by his own contemporaries; and his reputation continues
at its highest for more than another century. It might seem
impossible that so favourable a state of things should turn to
anything but good ; that standards, at once so finished and so
flexible as those of the heroic couplet and the rime royal of
Chaucer, should be corrupted or lost. A stationary condition
might seem to be the worst that could reasonably be feared; and
there would not seem to be anything very terrible in a stationary
state of Chaucerian verse.
But the fifteenth century was fated to show that, in prosody,
as in everything else, something unexpected is the only safe thing
to expect. The actual versification of the successors of Chaucer
has been discussed in the chapters appertaining to it; and it has
there been pointed out that some authorities do not take so low
a view of it as seems necessary to the present writer? . But the
fact remains that, in order to get the verses of Lydgate, Occleve
and the rest into any kind of rhythmical system, satisfactory at
once to calculation and to audition, enormous liberties have to be
taken with the text; complicated arrangements of licence and
exception have to be devised; and, in some cases, even these fail-
ing, the franker vindicators have to fall back on the supposition
that mere accent, with unaccented syllables thrown in almost at
pleasure, is the basis of Lydgatian and other prosody. Now, it
may be so; but, in that case, the other fact remains that very
small liberties, if any, need be taken with the text of Chaucer ;
that necessary exceptions and licences in his case are extremely
few; and that, whether his metre be accentual or not, it is most
certainly not merely accentual, in the sense that unaccented
syllables may be peppered down at pleasure as a seasoning, still
less in the sense that the number of accents itself may be altered
at pleasure. In rime royal especially, Chaucer's line-length
and line-arrangement are almost meticulously correct. In his
followers, examples of from seven to seventeen syllables, and of
from four to seven apparent accents, are not merely occasionally,
but constantly, found. And yet we know that almost all these
writers had Chaucer constantly before them and regarded him
1 Professor Max Förster of Würzburg bas been good enough to favour me with a
communication to the effect that some MSS of Burgh, at any rate, are much less dis-
orderly than the printed editions.


## p. 278 (#300) ############################################

278 Prosody from Chaucer to Spenser
a
6
with the highest admiration; and we know, further, that his
followers in Scotland managed to imitate him with very consider-
able precision.
No real or full explanation of this singular decadence has ever
yet been given; probably none is possible. But, in two respects,
at least, something like an approach may be made to such an
explanation. The first of these is that Chaucer, assisted by Genius
but somewhat neglecting Time, standardised' the language rather
too soon. We know that, in his own day, the management of the
final -e was far less uniform and systematic in the case of others
than in his own; that it was, in fact, changing into something like
its modern value. This, of itself, would suffice, with its consequent
alternate use and disuse, forgetfulness and remembrance—nay,
its positive temptation to make a convenience and licence of
the thing—to dislocate and corrupt the metre. And there were
certainly some, probably many, other changes which would help
to produce a similar effect. Nor is it probable that many, if any,
poets had a distinct theoretic understanding of the metres that
they used—the best part of two hundred years had to pass after
1400 before we find trace of any such thing. They were ‘fingering'
at Chaucer's measures by 'rule of thumb,' and with hands furnished
with more thumbs than fingers.
But there was probably another cause which, while less certain,
is highly probable, though it needs careful study and application
to its possible result. The alliterative-accentual revival had not
only spread very far and taken great hold, but it had, as has been
shown, exhibited a singular tendency to combine itself even with
very elaborate metrical arrangements. Nor is there anything
improbable in the supposition that this tendency spread itself much
more widely than such unmistakable instances as the Awntyrs
of Arthure, or the Epistill of Swete Susane, or even Gavin
Douglas's eighth prologué would, of themselves, indicate. Nay, it
is probable that the admixture was not so much an 'adultery
of art' as an unconscious process.
Its results, however, were (except in one important respect to
be noted later) rather unfortunate, and even in not a few cases
very ugly. For exactly how much the combination counted in
the degradation of rime royal and, in a less degree, of the deca-
syllabic couplet—the octosyllabic, always an easy-going form,
escaped better-it would be rash to attempt to determine. But,
almost indisputably, it counted for a great deal—for next to every-
thing-in the rise of the curious phenomenon called 'doggerel'


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‘Doggerel
279
which we perceive during this century, and which, towards the
close of it, and at the beginning of the next, usurps a very great
position in the realm of verse.
Chaucer applies the term 'doggerel' to undistinguished and
unpoetic verse or rime, apparently of any kind; and the widest
modern use of it is not dissimilar. But, at the time of which we
are speaking the whole (probably) of the fifteenth century and
the beginning of the sixteenth-the word is wanted for a peculiar
kind of verse, rimed, indeed, all but invariably, and deriving almost
its whole poetical claim from rime, but possessing characteristics in
some respects approaching, on one side, unrimed accentual structure
of various lengths, and, on the other, the rimed 'fourteener' or its
Offspring, the common measure.
We saw, in treating of Gamelyn (which is pretty ce
older than the fifteenth century, though it is impossible to say
how much), that the metre of that remarkable piece is the four-
teener of Robert of Gloucester, 'fingered' in a peculiar way-first
by freely lengthening and shortening the iambic constituents and,
secondly, by utilising the middle pause in such a fashion as to
make of the line two counter-running halves, rather than one
uniform current with only a slight centre-halt. It is from the
neglect of fingering in this process, and from the increase of
attention to occasional accent only, that the 'doggerel' of which
we are speaking, which is dominant in the Middle Drama, very
frequent elsewhere and, perhaps, actually present in not a little
literary rime royal verse, takes its rise. It varies greatly in
length; but most writers group their doggerel, roughly, in pas-
sages, if not in whole pieces. The shortest form (except the pure
Skeltonics) vaguely represents octosyllabic or 'four-accent' verse;
the middle, decasyllables; the longest, alexandrines or fourteeners,
though, in many instances, this telescopes itself out to sixteen or
seventeen syllables, if not more, and tempts the reader or reciter
to'patter,' to take them or even four short' syllables in the stride
from one 'long' to another. The effect is sometimes suitable
1 Some examples may be desirable:
Skeltonic:
And as full of good wyll
As faire Isaphyll:
Coryaunder.
Swete pomaunder,
Goode Cassaunder.
Pseudo-octosyllabic :
Very common--a fair sample is in Heywood's Husband, Wife and Priest,
But by my soul I never go to Sir John
But I find him like a holy man,
?


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280 Prosody from Chaucer to Spenser
enough for the lower kind of comic verse; but, for the higher
kind, even of that, it is utterly unsuitable; while, for anything
passionate or serious, it is fatal. It is the prevalence of it, in
combination with the similar but even worse welter in serious
verse, which has given the fifteenth century in English poetry so
bad a name that some native historians have often said little
about it, and that some famous foreign critics have dismissed it,
almost or altogether, with a kind of contemptuous kick.
The result, however, if of doubtful beauty in itself, was
probably necessary, and can be shown to be a beneficent chapter
in the history of English verse. For, in the first place, the
Chaucerian 'standardising,' as has been shown, had been attempted
a little too early; and, in the second, there was a danger that it
might have been carried yet further into a French uniformity and
regularity which would have caused the abortion of most of the
special beauties of English verse. And, though the main literary
versification lacked music-even when, as, for instance, in Occleve,
it had a certain mechanical correctness-while the doggerel was
not so much poetry as jog-trot, or capering prose, there was a
third division of verse which, until lately, has received very little
attention, but which far exceeded the other two in poetical beauty
and also in real prosodic interest. This is the great body of mostly,
if not wholly, anonymous ballads, carols, nursery rimes, folk songs
and miscellaneous popular lyrics generally-much of our oldest
supply of which probably comes from this century—as Chevy
Chace, The Nut Brown Maid, the exquisite carol I sing of a
maiden certainly do.
The note of all these productions is that they were composed,
in many cases, for definite musical accompaniment–in all, to be
*sung or said,' in some sort of audible measure and rhythm, from
musical arrangement itself down to the reciter's drone, or the
nurse's sing-song. One general result of this is that a merely
where the very next lines slide into pseudo-heroics :
For either he is saying his devotion,
Or else he is going in procession.
Pseudo-alexandrine : Bale's Kyng Johan :
Monkes, chanons and nones in dyvers colours and shape,
Both whyte, blacke, and pyed, God send their increase yll happe.
Pseudo-fourteeners : Thersites :
To augment their joy and the commons felicity,
Fare ye well, sweet audience God grant you prosperity.
But it is important to observe that by 'pattering' or dwelling, these kinds may be
run into one another to a great extent.
6


## p. 281 (#303) ############################################

The Influence of Music
281
7
prosaic effect is almost impossible--that there must be some
sort of rhythmical division and system, and that this must be
marked. Another particular result of the greatest value is that
'triple time' will not be gainsaid-or, in other words, that tri-
syllabic feet force their way in. The influence of music has not
always been of unmitigated benefit to prosody; but, at this time,
it could hardly, by any possibility, do harm, and might do infinite
good. From the rough but still perfectly rhythmical verse of
“The Percy out of Northumberland,' through the somewhat more
regular and complicated, but equally unartificial 'For I will to the
greenwood go, alone, a banished man,' to the delicately modulated
melody of the carol above referred to, everything is equally opposed
to the heartbreaking prose of the staple rime royal and the mere
disorder of the doggerel. And what these now famous things show,
dozens, scores, hundreds of others, less famous, show likewise.
the simpler and more uniform English line of which the iambic foot
forms the staple—the line suitable for poems of length and bulk
and weight-has been hammered into shape during the thirteenth
and fourteenth centuries, so the varieties of mixed cadence, suitable
for lyric, are now being got ready; and, by a curious dispensation,
exactly while the staple line is being not so much hammered as
blunderingly knocked and bulged out of shape.
This lyric adjustment—which, in its turn, was to have important
effects later on the staple line itself—went on continuously till it
developed and refined itself, by steps which may be noticed pre-
sently, into the unsurpassed composition of 1580—1660. But,
meanwhile, however slowly and tardily, the disorder of the staple
line itself was reformed in two directions. The literary line-
which had aimed at following Chaucer or Gower, and had wandered
off into formless prose-girt itself up again (something over tightly)
into octosyllables and decasyllables, pure fourteeners or 'poulter's
measure. ' The loose forms recognised their real basis and became
anapaestic-regular, though unmusical, at first-as in Tusser. The
documents of the first change, so far as practice goes, are to be found
in the corpus of English verse during the middle of the sixteenth
century, beginning with Wyatt and Surrey. As concerns theory,
Gascoigne's Notes of Instruction, though a little late, shows us the
completed process. Earlier, less explicit, but not less really cogent
evidence of discontent and desire to reform may be found in
the craze for classical metres, the true source of which was by no
means merely an idle desire to imitate the classics, but a very
worthy, though mistaken, longing to get rid of the anarchy with


## p. 282 (#304) ############################################

282 Prosody from Chaucer to Spenser
which rimed English metres were associated, and to substitute
a well tried and approved order. But perhaps most noteworthy
of all is a piece of prose discussion in A Mirror for Magistrates,
where examples of the broken fifteenth century rhythm, which
had been prevalent from Lydgate to Hawes, are produced, 'mis-
liked' and excused on the ground of their being suitable to the
time of their subject-the reign of Richard III. This appears
in almost the oldest part of that curiously composite book; and,
in a part a little later, but still before Spenser, there is a de-
liberate description of English alexandrines as written in agree-
ment with the Roman verse called iambics. '
In the two famous writers in whom the reformation of English
verse first distinctly appears, the reforming influences—or, to speak
with stricter correctness, the models chosen in order to help the
achievement of reformare, without doubt, Italian, though French
may have had some subsidiary or go-between influence. Sonnet
and terza rima in Wyatt, and the same with the addition of blank
verse in Surrey (putting aside lyrics), tell the tale unmistakably.
And it is to be noticed that sonnet, terza rima and blank verse-
the first two by their actually strict and rigid outline and the third
through the fear and caution imposed on the writer by the absence
of his usual mentor, rime, act almost automatically. But (and it
is a precious piece of evidence in regard to their erring prede-
cessors as well as to their penitent and reformed selves) it is quite
clear that even they still have great difficulty in adjusting rhythm
to pronunciation. They wrench accent' in the fashion which
'
Gascoigne was to rebuke in the next (almost in the same) generation;
they dislocate rime; they have occasional recourse to the valued -e
which we know to have been long obsolete, and even to have turned
in some cases to the -y form in adjectives.
Whatever their shortcomings, however (and, in fact, their short-
comings were much less than might have been expected), there is
no doubt that the two poets whose names have long been and
must always be inseparable deserve, in prosody even more than
in poetry generally, the credit of a great instauration'-of show-
ing how the old patterns of Chaucer and others, adjusted to the
new pronunciation, could be got out of the disarray into which
they had fallen, by reference immediately) to Italian models.
Nor is it superfluous to point out that Italian, though apparently
a language most different in vocalisation and cadence from English,
has the very point in common with us which French lacks—the
combination, that is to say, of strict, elaborate and most various
6
6


## p. 283 (#305) ############################################

The Reformers
283
external conformation of stanza with a good deal of syllabic
liberty inside the line. These two things were exactly what
wanted encouragement in English: and Italian, gave them
together.
For the moment, however, and naturally, the stricter side of
the teaching was more attended to than the looser. The older
prosody, at an exceedingly uncertain time but, most probably, on
the bridge of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, had produced
some very lovely things : not only the three above mentioned
(of which only The Nut Brown Maid can be later than the
middle of the fifteenth century, and that may not be) but others
certainly early, such as E. 1. O. , Quia amore langueo and many
less known pieces. But doggerel had invaded lyric too, and sunk
it to merely popular uses; and it would be difficult to pick out
a really beautiful lyric that is certainly of the last generation
of the fifteenth or the first of the sixteenth century. Here, there-
fore, as elsewhere, the reform had to be rather in the precise
direction; and for at least fifty years from Wyatt (who must have
begun writing as early as 1530) to Spenser, English lyric, like
English poetry generally, is 'on its good behaviour': careful of
syllabic exactness within and correspondence without; afraid of
trisyllabic liberty; obviously nervous and ‘keeping its foot,' lest
it slip back into the quicksand of doggerel or the quagmire of
scarcely rhythmed prose.
To say this is by no means (as some seem rather uncritically
to interpret it) to speak disobligingly of the lesser contributors to
Tottel's Miscellany, of Turbervile, of Gascoigne, or even of Googe,
though in all these (especially in the first mentioned group and the
last mentioned individual) exactness is too often secured by sing-
song and jog-trot. Certainly it is not to belittle the work of Wyatt
and Surrey and Sackville, though, in the first two of these, especially
in their poulter's measure,' sing-song and jog-trot do appear. The
fact is that the business of this generation-almost of these two
generations-was to get things ready for their successors to make
a new raising of English prosody to its highest power possible in
the hands of Spenser and Shakespeare, by once more thoroughly
stamping it with rhythm. Chaucer had done this, but the material
had given way; and, in doing so, it had cast an obsolete air on the
forms themselves. Thus, even the magnificent rime royal of Sack-
ville, full of the new and truly Elizabethan spirit as it is, has a sort
of archaic and artificial air at times, the air of something that, if it
were less magnificent, might be called pastiche. And nobody until


## p. 284 (#306) ############################################

284 Prosody from Chaucer to Spenser
Spenser himself and not the earliest Spenser-writes good 'riding
rime. ' But they exercise themselves in the regular fourteener,
split and coupleted or sandwiched with alexandrines, as if this
return to almost the oldest of English metres was instinctively
felt to have some exercising and energising quality. And they
practise, sometimes, very prettily and always very carefully, divers
lyrical measures of good gymnastic power. The sonnet is too high
for most of them, after the original adventurers: it will have to
wait a little. But blank verse, handled in a stiff and gingerly
manner, is still now and then practised, especially by that great
experimenter and systematic prosodist Gascoigne. Some of them,
especially Turbervile, can get a good deal of sweetness out of
variegated rime.
In one department only, by a singular contrast, does anarchy
hold its ground almost to the last: and that is the drama. The
fact can hardly be quite unconnected with the other fact that the
pure medieval drama had been rather remarkable for prosodic
elaboration and correctness, its vehicles being, in the main, either
fair octosyllabic couplets or more or less complicated lyrical
stanzas often quite exact in construction and correspondence.
But doggerel had broken in early and was, no doubt, encouraged
by the matter of moralities and interludes, when these came to
take the place of the miracle plays. At any rate, by the end
of the fifteenth century and throughout the first two-thirds,
if not the first three-fourths, of the sixteenth, the drama was
simply overrun with doggerel-doggerel of all sorts and shapes
and sizes. Yet, even here, the tendency to get out of the welter
at last made itself felt. First, the doggerel tried to collect and
solidify itself back into the fourteener from which it had, in a
manner, 'deliquesced. ' Then it tried couplet or stanza in deca-
syllables. · And then, the stern standard of the Gorboduc blanks
at last reared itself, too stern and too stiff to draw many followers
round it at first, but destined to undergo transformation till it
became one of the most wonderful of metres past, present, or even,
perhaps, to come—the rimeless, rhythmful, Protean-Herculean
blank verse of Shakespeare.
But we are less concerned here with the fortunes of particular
metres, or particular styles, than with the general progress of
English prosody. This—at a period the signpost to which is the
publication of The Shepheards Calender but the influences and
attainments of which are not, of course, limited to a single book
or a single person—had reached one of its most important stages,


## p. 285 (#307) ############################################

The Shepheards Calender
285
a stage unparalleled in importance except by those similarly
indicated in The Canterbury Tales and Paradise Lost. During
the fifteenth century, it had been almost unmade from some points
of view; but invaluable assistances for the remaking had been
accumulated in all sorts of byeways. In the two middle quarters
of the sixteenth, it had been almost remade-in the sense that the
presence of general rhythm had been restored in accordance with
actual pronunciation; and that, as one school of prosodists would
say, stressed and unstressed, accented and unaccented syllables,
had been taught to observe more orderly and proportional arrange-
ment: as another, that metrical scansion by feet had been once
more vindicated and regimented. But, during these two genera-
tions of reforming experiment, there had been comparatively few
poets of distinguished genius : of those who possessed it, Wyatt
and Surrey came a little too early, Sackville practised on too small
a scale and in too few varieties. Nay, the very fact of reforming
and innovating experiment necessitated a period of go-cart and
then, as it were, one of marking time.
But, by 1580, or a little earlier, both these periods were over,
and the flock of singers of the great Elizabethan time found that
they had been relieved of the preliminary drill. Even the classical
metre craze-threatening as it might seem to be to English poetry
and prosody_did good, not merely by showing what is not the way,
but by emphasising the most important characteristic of what is:
that is to say, the composition of the line, not by a muddle of
promiscuous syllables, but by constituents themselves regularly
and systematically composed and constituted. Even the ‘wooden-
ness of blank verse at first forces the ear to attend to the order
and position of the stresses, to the existence and conformation of
the feet. The jog-trot of the fourteeners and the 'poulter's measure'
says the same thing heavily, as do the varied lyrical forms of
Gascoigne and Turbervile not so heavily; nay, the so-called
doggerel of Tusser (which is only doggerel in phrase and subject
and spirit, for its form is quite regular) says nothing else. Whether
it canters or trots, it may now seem to some ears to run 'mind
your feet' and, to others, 'mind your stress’; but the difference
is here merely logomachic. They heard it then-into whatever
words they translated it and they went and did it.
It may seem that the selection of Spenser to show exactly
what this stage signifies is unjust to others. Certainly, if mis-
understood, it would be so. It is as nearly certain as anything
.
can be that Sidney and others did not learn their prosody from


## p. 286 (#308) ############################################

286 Prosody from Chaucer to Spenser
Spenser, and that even Drayton and other men, who lived and
wrote far into the seventeenth century, were, in a sense, rather his
junior schoolfellows than his pupils. But his direct influence soon
became immense and all-pervading, and, as an early and masterly
representative of influences that others were feeling, there is no
one to match him. The prosodic lessons of The Shepheards Calender
are all but unmistakable. On one point only is difference of
opinion of an important kind possible—whether the famous loose
metre of February and two other months is definite Genesis and
E. codus or Christabel (to look before and after) four-stress' or
‘iambic' with trisyllabic substitution permitted-or whether it is
an attempt at Chaucerian “five-stress' or 'heroic. ' The present
writer has not the slightest doubt on the subject : but others have.
Omitting this, every metre in the Calender, and every one sub-
sequently tried by its author, though it may be differently named
by different systems, is, with the proper translations of terminology,
unmistakable. In the various forms of identical stanza, from the
sizain through the septet and octave to his own special creation;
in the sonnet; in the still larger strophes of his odes; in the more
variegated lyrical outlines of some of the Calender poems; in the
riding rime (here quite unmistakable) of Mother Hubberd's Tale-
the exact and regular accentuation or quantification of each scheme
is unerringly observed. That great bone of contention, the 'tri-
syllabic foot,' in metre not based trisyllabically, makes compara-
tively rare appearance in him; the believers in 'slur' or 'elision'
seldom have to resort to either expedient. There are a very few
possible alexandrines (outside the last line) in The Faerie Queene;
but they are probably, or certainly, oversights. He fingers this
regularly rhythmical line, whatever its length, into the widest
variety by altering the pauses and weighting or lightening special
places with chosen phrase. He runs the lines into one another, or
holds them apart within the stanza, inexhaustibly. But, on the
whole, despite his great variety of outline and combined form, he
is once more a prophet and a practitioner of regularity—of order-
of unbroken, uneccentric, music and rhythm. This is his mission
in prosody—to make, so far as his example can reach, a gallimaufry
and jumble of mixed and jolting cadences impossible or intolerable
in English. His very abandonment of the promising, and, as it
afterwards turned out, inestimable, 'Oak and Brier' measure, is,
on one theory of that measure, just as much as on another,
evidence of a final dislike to even the possibility of such jumble
and jolt.
>


## p. 287 (#309) ############################################

Spenser's Mission
287
To, and with, one great measure, Spenser (except doubtfully
and in his earliest youth) did nothing; and it was as well that he
did nothing. Nor is this yet the place in which to take any general
survey of the features and progress of blank verse; for, though
they had, by the end of the queen's reign, reached almost, or quite,
their highest, it was as part of a movement which was still moving
and which certainly could not yet be said to be moving downward.
But the reason why it was well that Spenser took no part in this
is that his mission was, as has been said, essentially a mission,
though not of cramp or fetter, of order and regularity. Now,
blank verse did not require such a missioner then. It had started,
in the first ardour of the movement against doggerel, with severe
practice and example on the part of Surrey and, later, of Sackville.
What it wanted, and what it received, was experiment and explora-
tion of the most varied and daring kind, in all its own possible
licences and transformations. Spenser, be it repeated, was not the
man to do anything of that kind for it; and the two wisely let each
other alone.
Even in regard to blank verse, however, the Spenserian lesson
must have been of inestimable service. It is hardly excessive or
fanciful to regard him, not merely as one of the greatest and one
of the very first of Elizabethan composers, but as the greatest and
the first of Elizabethan conductors, an impeccable master of rhythm,
time and tune. This was what English poetry had wanted for
nearly two hundred years and had now got. The ear was taught
and the correspondence between ear and tongue was established.
Nor—with a pretty large exception in regard to blank verse,
where Spenser's baton was quiet, in the mid-seventeenth century,
and something of one in regard to the looser form of heroic couplet
about the same time-were these great gains ever let slip. Their
exercise, indeed, was, later, confined and hampered unduly; but
its principle was not controverted. In Edward VI's time, this
general system of rhythm, time and tune had but just been
tentatively and imperfectly attained by Wyatt and Surrey; there
has not been any general change in it from Spenser's period to the
time of Edward VII. A few words have changed their usual
accent and Spenser's peculiar system of 'eye-rime' has made it
desirable to keep his spelling, lest we destroy an effect which he
wished to produce. But, whatever you do with the spelling, you
will not alter the rhythm; whereas, if you modernise Chaucer, you
must either put continual new patches and pieces into the verse
or lose the rhythm altogether. Words may fall out, and words


## p. 288 (#310) ############################################

288 Prosody from Chaucer to Spenser
may come in, but the latter find, as the former leave, a fixed
system of prosodic arrangement to which they have but to adjust
themselves. Ben Jonson may have been right or wrong in saying
that Spenser writ no language,' while he certainly was wrong in
assigning mere ‘imitation of the ancients' as the cause thereof.
But, though he did not—it is said-like the Spenserian stanza,
his own more authentic and half-casual selection of Spenser as the
antithesis to 'the Water poet' shows us that he did not go wrong on
his poetic powers. Amongst the evidences of those powers it would
be ridiculous to say to-day that Spenser discovered the rhythmical-
metrical system of English poetry; and it would be unjust to say that
he alone rediscovered and adjusted it to existing circumstances.
But he was among the rediscoverers: and the greatest of them up
to his own time. In all matters of English prosody, except blank
verse and the trisyllabically based measures, we may go back to
Spenser and to his generation for example and practical precept;
and it will always be possible so to go back until the language
undergoes some transformation of which there is not at present
even the faintest symptom.


## p. 289 (#311) ############################################

CHAPTER XIV
ELIZABETHAN CRITICISM
It is, perhaps, only after long and thorough reading of Middle
English literature that the student becomes aware how completely
absent from it is the spirit of literary criticism. Not, of course,
that, in this respect, it differs very much from its continental con-
temporaries, but that the absence is, perhaps, more complete-at
any rate longer lasting—than with any of them. Almost the first
utterance that belongs even to the precincts and outskirts of the
critical province is Robert Mannyng's statement in the prologue
of his Chronicle, c. 1330) of his reason for preferring one metre to
another, which is merely that it was more likely to be appreciated.
The unknown annotator who observed that Cursor Mundi is the
best book of all' was certainly not thinking of its literary merits.
Here, as elsewhere, the first real signs of advance are found in
Chaucer ; but Chaucer's criticism, though, probably, no one was
ever born with more of the critical spirit, is mainly implicit and
undeveloped. Yet the presence of it is unmistakable, not merely in
his remarks on his own prosody, not merely in the host's on Sir
Thopas, not merely in Sir Thopas itself and in the way in which
the company fall upon the luckless monk, but in many slighter
symptoms. Indeed, it may be said that the first definite sign of the
awakening of the critical instinct in English writers, other than
Chaucer, is in their admiration for Chaucer himself. It is true
that this admiration had singular yokefellows; but that is quite
natural. Even as you must walk before you run, and totter before
you walk, so must criticism itself, at the first, be uncritical.
The first body of critical observations in English is, probably,
to be found in the prefaces of Caxton ; and a very interesting,
though a rather infantine, body it is. His very earliest work, the
translation of the Recuyell, is dictated to him by his sense of 'the
fair language of French, which was in prose so well and com-
pendiously set and written. ' He afterwards ‘remembers himself
of his simpleness and unperfectness' in both languages. He
perceives, in reference to the Dictes of the Philosophers, that lord
19
E. L. III.
CH, XIV.


## p. 290 (#312) ############################################

290
Elizabethan Criticism
Rivers's translation is right well and cunningly made. ' He sees
that, though Boethius was 'an excellent author of divers books
craftily and curiously made in prose and metre,' yet the style of
De Consolatione is 'hard and difficult,' so that Chaucer deserved
“perpetual laud' for translating it. Benet Burgh has 'full
craftily made' Cato in 'ballad royal. ' And the praises of The
Canterbury Tales and of the Morte d'Arthur, more elaborate
than these, but also much better known, might be called the first
real 'appreciations' in English.
These elementary and half unconscious critical exercises of
Caxton, as a moment's thought will show, must have had a great
influence, exercised, no doubt, as unconsciously as it was generated,
on the new readers of these new printed books. Yet it was long
before the seed fell into a soil where it could germinate. Even
when, at the beginning of the next century, regular Rhetorics
began to be written at first hand in imitation of the ancients, or
through modern humanists like Melanchthon (the earliest instance,
apparently, is that of Leonard Coxe of Reading, in 1524), the
temptation to stray from strictly formal rhetoric into criticism was
not much felt until there arose at Cambridge, towards the middle
of the century, that remarkable school of friends who are represented
in the history of English prose by Ascham, Cheke and Wilson, and
whose share in the revival of letters is dealt with elsewhere in the
present volume? Even then, on the eve of Elizabeth's reign, and
with the new burst of Italian critical writing begun by Trissino,
Daniello and Vida, the critical utterances are scanty, quite unsys-
tematic and shot (as one of the three would have said) 'at rovers. '
The really best work of the trio in this kind is Cheke's, who, if he
was mistaken in his caution to Sir Thomas Hoby against the practice
of borrowing from ancient tongues in modern”, has left us, in the
criticism on Sallust quoted by Ascham, a really solid exercise in
the art: not, of course, absolutely right-few things are that in
criticism-but putting one side of rightness forcibly and well,
in his depreciation (as Quintilian, doubtless his inspirer, has put
it) of 'wishing to write better than you can. ' It may, however,
be noted that all the three set themselves against over-elaboration
of style in this way or that. It was this which provoked Thomas
Wilson (whom we may not now, it seems, call 'Sir' Thomas) to
diverge from the usual course of rhetorical precept, not merely
into some illustrative tales, but into a definite onslaught on ‘ink-
horn' terms—foreign, archaic, technical or what not. It is not
1 See chaps. I and XIX.
: See chap. XIX.
>


## p. 291 (#313) ############################################

Ascham
291
known exactly who first hit on this phrase, the metaphor of which
is sufficiently obvious; but it is freely used about this time. And
we can quite easily see how the 'aureate' phraseology of the
fifteenth century—the heavy bedisenment of Latinised phrase,
which we find not merely in poetry but in such books as the early
English version of Thomas à Kempis—must have challenged
opposition on the part of those who were anxious, indeed, to follow
the classics for good, but desirous, at the same time, that 'our
English’should be written ‘pure. ' And the contemporary jealousy
and contempt of the medieval appears not less clearly in Wilson's
objection to the Chaucerising which Thynne's edition, evidently, had
made fashionable.
The strengthening power of the critical sense, however, and, at
the same time, its lack of education and direction, are best shown
in Ascham. It is something, but not much, that he exhibits to the
full that curious confusion of aesthetic and ethic which, essentially
Platonic and patristic, cannot be said to have been wholly dis-
couraged by Aristotle, and which the period, uniting, for once,
the three tendencies, maintained, almost in the teeth of its own
humanism, more strenuously than ever. This confusion, or-to
—
adopt a less question-begging word—this combination, has always
had, has and, no doubt, always will have, its defenders : nor is it a
bad thing that they should exist, as protesters against the too
absolute doctrine of 'art for art only. ' But Ascham's inability to
apply the strictly critical distinguo extends far beyond the con-
demnation of romance as suggesting the violation of the sixth and
seventh commandments, or the discouragement of the importation
of foreign literature as involving that of foreign immorality, or (this
is Cheke, not Ascham, but Ascham approves it) the urging of
Sallust's laxity of conduct as an argument against his literary
competence. It is not shown in the unceasing opposition of the
whole trio to‘aureate' and `inkhorn' terms, an opposition which
may, indeed, have been excessive, but which cannot be said to have
been misplaced, when such a man as Hawes, not so many years
earlier, could be guilty of two such consecutive lines as
Degouted vapoure most aromatyke,
And made conversyon of complacence.
It appears mainly, and most dangerously, in Ascham's doctrine
of Imitation. Of this imitation, he distinguishes two kinds (liter-
ally, three, but, as he himself says, 'the third belongeth to the
second'). The first of these is the original mimesis of Aristotle :
19-2


## p. 292 (#314) ############################################

292
Elizabethan Criticism
6
'a fair lively painted picture of the life of every degree of man. '
The second is 'to follow, for learning of tongues and sciences, the
best authors. ' But he expressly limits the first kind to comedy
and tragedy, and says that ‘it doth not much belong at this time
to our purpose. ' It is the second kind, not so much the repre-
sentation of nature as the actual copying of the existing art of
man, to which he devotes his whole attention, in which he obviously
feels his whole interest. If he does not, like Vida, say, in so many
words, 'steal from’ the ancients, he has, practically, nothing more
to urge than 'follow' them, and ‘borrow from’ them. In some
respects, and to some extent, he could, of course, have said nothing
better. But, in respect of one point, and that the chief one which
gives him a position in English criticism, his following was most
corrupt. After the matter had long remained in some obscurity,
it has been shown pretty exactly how the idea came about
that English verse needed reforming on classical patterns.
Chaucerian prosody, to some extent in the hands of Chaucer's own
contemporaries like Lydgate and Occleve, but, still more, in those
of his and their successors, had fallen into such utter disarray that,
in many cases, little but the rime ("and that's not much ') remained
to distinguish verse from prose. In Ascham's own day, the very
worst of this tyranny was, indeed, past; and the apparent reor-
ganising of pronunciation on the basis of dropping the value of
the final -e, and other changes, had restored a certain order to
verse. But the favourite 'fourteener' (Ascham expressly smites
'the rash ignorant heads that can easily reckon up fourteen
syllables') was still, for the most part, a shambling, slovenly,
sing-song, with nothing of the fire which Chapman afterwards
infused into its unbroken form, or of the ineffable sweetness which
the seventeenth century lyrists extracted from the divided couplet.
On the other hand, the euphony of Greek and Latin metres was
universally recognised. Why not imitate them also ? The possibility
and propriety of this imitation (recommended, no doubt, by the fact
that, dangerous error though, on the whole, it was, it had more than
a grain of truth at the bottom of it, as regards feet, though not as
regards metres) seems to have arisen at Cambridge, likewise, and
at St John's College, but not with one of the three scholars just
mentioned. The chief begetter of it appears to have been Thomas
Watson, master of the college, afterwards bishop of Lincoln, and a
man who did not succeed in playing the difficult game between
papist and protestant with such success as Ascham and Wilson.
Ascham himself has preserved with approval the remarkably, but


## p. 293 (#315) ############################################

Ascham on Versing'
•
293
not extraordinarily, bad hexameters in which Watson puts into
English the first two lines of the Odyssey,
All travellers do gladly report great praise of Ulysses
For that he knew many mens manners and saw many cities,
and, in more places than one, he denounces rude beggarly
riming' not (as he might have done with some colour) in
favour of the new blank verse actually started by Surrey long
before he wrote, but in favour of classical 'versing. From his
time this became, with another less technical one, the main
question of Elizabethan criticism, and we may despatch it before
turning to the less technical question, and to others. We do not
know exactly at what time Watson began to recommend and attempt
English hexameters; but it must have been almost certainly before
1554, when both he and Ascham left Cambridge. And it may have
been any time earlier, as far back as 1535, which seems to have
been the first year that he, Ascham and Cheke (to whose conver-
sations on this subject, and on others connected with it, Ascham
often refers) were at the university together. It is more likely
to have been late than early. At any rate, the idea took root
in St John's and, somewhat later still (probably between 1561 and
1569), produced the celebrated and mysterious rules of Thomas
Drant, another fellow of the college. These rules are repeatedly
referred to in the correspondence beween Harvey and Spenser to be
noticed presently, though Harvey, with his usual bluster, disclaims
all knowledge of them. Ascham himself is really our earliest
authority on the subject, and seems (from Nashe’s references,
for instance) to have been practically recognised as such even then.
To do him justice, however, his affection for 'versing' appears
to have been much more lukewarm than his dislike of rime. If,
when he cites Watson's doggerel, he commits himself to the
statement that 'our English tongue may as well receive right
quantity of syllables and true order of versifying as either Greek
or Latin,' he makes exceedingly damaging admissions afterwards,
as that ‘our English tongue doth not well receive the nature of
Carmen Heroicum because the dactylus, the aptest foot for that
verse, is seldom found, and that the said carmen 'doth rather
trot and hobble than run smoothly in English. ' He makes himself
amends, however, by scolding rime with a curious pedantic pettish-
ness; and by advancing the notable argument that, whosoever is
>
6
1 Not now known to be extant, and nowhere stated with any precision by Spenser
himselt.


## p. 294 (#316) ############################################

294
Elizabethan Criticism
angry with him for misliking rime may be angry with Quintilian
for misliking it. This remark is, of course, of the highest value as
showing how far from any true critical point of view a man, always
a good scholar and, generally, a man of good sense, could find
himself at this time. Nor is there less instruction in the other
fact that, while he is aware of Surrey's blank verse, and though it
discards his bugbear rime, he is not in the least satisfied with it,
because it has not true quantity. Now, as Surrey's blank verse,
though not very free or flexible, is, as a rule, correct enough in
accent-quantity, it is clear that Ascham was woolgathering after a
system of 'quantity by position,' quantity, as opposed to accent,
and the like, which never has been, and is never likely to be,
established in English. This 'true' quantity is, in fact, the key of
the whole position, and the quest for it occupies all the acuter
minds among the earlier disputants on the subject. Ascham, while
hopeful, makes no serious effort to discover it, though his con-
fession about Watson's hexameters and those of others amounts to
a confession that it had not been discovered. Spenser and Harvey,
in their correspondence, do not so much quarrel as amicably
'wrangle,' in the technical sense, over the difficulties of quantity
by position. Can you possibly pronounce or, without pronouncing,
value for prosodic purposes 'carpenter' as 'carpenter'? May
you, while retaining the short pronunciation, but availing yourself
of the long accent of 'mother' in its first syllable, make the short
second syllable long before a consonant in the next word?
Although Spenser, in his letters, nowhere acknowledges the im-
possibility of these tricks with words, his entire abandonment of
this kind of versing in his mature work speaks more eloquently
than any formal abjuration. As for Harvey, the sort of boisterous
pedantry with which he seems to think it proper to suffuse his
writing makes it very difficult to judge how far he is serious.
But the verse (of which, apparently, he thought well enough to
repeat it three times)
O blessëd Virtue! blessëd Fame! blessed Abundance!
is sufficient to show that he did believe in quantity by position,
inasmuch as 'blessed,' in the first two cases, before consonants, be-
comes 'blessed,' and in the third, before a vowel, remains 'blessed. '
But he is simply grotesque in many of his examples; and it is
difficult not to believe them caricatures or partly so, though it is
true that Spenser himself, master of harmony as he was in the true
measures, and a very serious person, is nearly as much a doggerelist
as others in these false measures.
6


## p. 295 (#317) ############################################

6
>
Stanyhurst
295
Webbe, Puttenham and others to be mentioned presently
engage in this question-Puttenham slightly, Webbe with a
blundering eagerness--and it continues to be discussed at intervals
till it is fought out by Campion and Daniel. But the most intelli-
gent and the most illuminative of the earlier remarks on it come
from one of the wildest of the practitioners, Richard Stanyhurst.
For his wildness lies not so much in his prosody, as in his diction,
where he wilfully hampers himself by making it his principle to
use no word that had been used by his predecessor Phaer. As a
critic of prosody, he is a curious mixture of sense and crotchet.
He sees, and insists upon, the undoubted, and generally overlooked,
truth that many important monosyllables in English, 'me,' 'my,'
the,' 'and,' etc. , are common : but he wishes to indicate the
double pronunciation which, in effect, proves this, by spelling
'mee' and 'thee,' in the latter case introducing a gratuitous
confusion with the pronoun. He follows, as a rule, Latin quantity
in English, thus making 'honour' short, in spite of the accent,
and 'mother' (which he spells 'moother ') long, because of mater.
He admits quantity by position, but, apparently, not in middle
syllables; and, properly recognising the English tendency to carry
back the accent, wants to make this uniform to the extent of
'imperative' and 'orthography. Lastly, he has a most singular
system of deciding the quantity of final syllables, not by the last
vowel, but by the last consonant, whereby he is driven to make
endless exceptions, and a large number of common’ endings.
In fact, the main value of Stanyhurst is that the prevalence of the
common syllable in English is, really, at the bottom of all his
theory. But the question could never be properly cleared up on
these lines, and it remained in a state of theoretical unsettlement,
and of occasional tentative, but always unsuccessful, practice till it
was settled in the way mentioned above, and to be described below.
It is curious that Milton makes no reference to it in the after-
thought outburst against rime which he subjoined to the later
copies of Paradise Lost. It would have been extremely interest-
ing to have heard his deliberate opinion, at any rate of Campion.
The other main question, or, rather, group of questions, to which
the criticism of what we have yet to speak of was devoted, con-
cerns the general character and status of poetry at large, or, at
least, the general rules of certain important poetical kinds. These
matters had been eagerly and constantly discussed abroad during
the middle of the century, in fact during nearly the whole of its two
inner quarters, when most of the authors mentioned in the present
6
>


## p. 296 (#318) ############################################

296 Elizabethan Criticism
chapter began to write. There was even a considerable stock of
Italian and Latin critical writing on the question, which was soon
to be supplemented in French, when Ascham himself turned his
attention to the matter. These discussions turned, on one side, on
the Platonic distrust, largely altered and dosed with the puritan
dislike, of poetry, as such, and especially of dramatic poetry; and,
on another side, on the proper laws, more particularly of the drama,
but also of other poetic kinds. As for real historical criticism, for
the examination of English poetry as it was, in order to discover
what it ought to be, circumstances were not favourable; but some
attempts were made even in this line. On the whole, it will
be most profitable, having thus given the general conditions and
directions, to consider in order the actual exponents and docu-
ments of the subject. Of Ascham and his group it is probably not
necessary to say more. The direction to the subject which they
gave was invaluable, but their actual utterances on it could not
but be somewhat sporadic and haphazard. In particular, few of
them were, or could even be expected to be, devoted to English
literature as it was. General principles of a pedagogic kind,
almost always coming round to the imitation of the ancients, were
what they could give, and, perhaps, what it was best for them
to give.
The first remarks of a critical kind upon English verse may be
found, unexpectedly enough, in the dry desert of A Mirror for
Magistrates', among the intermixed conversations of the earlier
part. And, some years later, the first wholly and really critical
tractate devoted to English letters is again prosodic. This is the
somewhat famous Certayne notes of Instruction concerning the
making of verse or ryme in English, written at the request of Master
Eduardo Donati by George Gascoigne. It may have been, to some
extent, suggested by Ronsard's ten years earlier Abrégé de l'art
Poétique Français, but, if so, there is nothing in it of the awkward
and irrelevant transference to one matter of observations originally
made on matter quite different, which sometimes occurs in such cases.
Indeed, the first point of likeness—that both insist upon 'some
fine invention' (le principal point est l'invention)—is publica
materies from the ancients. And Gascoigne's genuine absorption
in his actual subject appears by his early reference to alliterative
poetry in the very words of Chaucer's parson: ‘to thunder in Rym,
Ram, Ruff, by letter (quoth my master Chaucer). ' Nor does he
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Gascoigne
297
waste much time in generalities, though those which he has are
well to the point, as in the remark 'If I should undertake to write
in praise of a gentlewoman, I would neither praise her crystal eye
nor her cherry lip, etc. For these are trita et obvia. Nay, he even
anticipates Wordsworth’s heroic petitio principii by saying that
invention being found, pleasant words will follow well enough
and fast enough. A brief caution against obscurity leads to an
advice to keep just measure, 'hold the same measure wher-
with you begin,' for the apparent obviousness of which he
apologises, observing, with only too much reason, that it was
constantly neglected. A further caution, equally obvious and
equally necessary, follows, on keeping natural emphasis or sound,
using every word as it is commonly pronounced or used-a caution
which, it is hardly necessary to say, was needed even by such a poet
as Wyatt, was not quite superfluous long after Gascoigne's time
and would, if observed, have killed the classical 'versing,' which
Gascoigne nowhere notices save by innuendo, in its cradle.
But it is immediately after, and in connection with, this, that
the most interesting and important point in the whole treatise
appears, in a statement which helps us to understand, if not to
accept, an impression which evidently held its ground in English
poetical theory for the best part of two centuries and more. It is
that 'commonly now a dayes in English rimes' (for, though he does
not recommend 'versing,' he ‘dare not call them English verses')
we use none other order but a foot of two syllables, whereof the
first is depressed or made short, and the second is elevate or made
long,' i. e. the iamb. “We have,' he says, “used in times past other
kinds of metres,' quoting an anapaestic line; and he makes the very
remarkable statement that our father Chaucer hath used the
same liberty in feet and measures that the Latinists do use. ' He,
apparently, laments the limitation, but says we must take the
ford as we find it,' and again insists that no word is to be
wrested 'from his natural and usual sound,' illustrating his posi-
tion. He deprecates the use of polysyllables as un-English and
unpleasant; of rime without reason; of unusual words, save with
discretion,' in order to draw attentive reading'; of too great
insecurity and too great facility; of unnatural inversion. But he
allows that ‘shrewd fellow . . . poetical license. These things, though
in most, but not all, cases right and sensible and quite novel
from an English pen, are almost trivial. Not so his pronounce-
ment on pauses—rests' or 'ceasures. ' He admits these to be 'at
discretion,' especially in rime royal, but again exhibits the stream
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298 Elizabethan Criticism
of tendency in the most invaluable manner, by prescribing, as best,
the middle syllable in octosyllables and alexandrines, the fourth
in decasyllables and the eighth in fourteeners. The term rime
royal reminds him that he should explain it and other techni-
calities, which he proceeds to do, including in his explanation
the somewhat famous term 'poulter's measure' for the couplet
of alexandrine and fourteener popular in the mid-sixteenth
century. And he had forgotten 'a notable kind of ryme, called
ryding ryme, such as our Mayster and Father Chaucer used in
his Canterburie tales. ' It is, he thinks, most apt for a merry tale,
rime royal for a grave discourse. And so, judiciously relegating
‘poulter's measure' by a kind of afterthought to psalms and
hymns, he ends the first, one of the shortest but, taking it
altogether, one of the most sensible and soundest, of all tractates
on prosody in English and one of our first documents in criticism
generally. Incidentally, it supplies us with some important his-
torical facts as to language, such as that 'treasure' was not
pronounced 'treasure,' that to make a dissyllable of 'Heaven'
was a licence-Mitford, two centuries later, thought the mono-
syllabic pronunciation vulgar and almost impossible--and the like.
It is very difficult to exaggerate the importance of the
appearance in this work—the first prosodic treatise in English,
and one written just on the eve of the great Elizabethan period—
of the distinct admission, all the more distinct because of its
obvious reluctance, that the iamb is the only foot in English
serious rime, and of the preference for middle caesuras. As
symptoms, these things show us the not unnatural recoil and re-
action from the prosodic disorderliness of the fifteenth century and
the earliest part of the sixteenth, just as Gascoigne's protests against
wrenching accent show the sense of dissatisfaction even with the
much improved rhythm of Wyatt and Surrey. But they also fore-
cast, in the most noteworthy fashion, the whole tendency towards
a closely restricted syllabic and rhythmical uniformity which, after
several breakings-away, resulted in the long supremacy of the
stopped, centrally divided, decasyllabic couplet as the metre of
metres, from which, or compared with which, all others were de-
clensions and licences. The reader may be reminded that, even
before Gascoigne, there are interesting, and not much noticed,
evidences of the same revulsion from irregular metres in the prose
inter-chapters of A Mirror for Magistrates.
Gascoigne, however, had been purely prosodic; the current of
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Sidney
299
after his time, took a different direction, except in so far as it
still now and then dealt with the delusion of classical 'versing. '
George Whetstone, in his dedication of Promos and Cassandra
(1578), touched, briefly, on the disorderliness of the English stage,
and its contempt alike of unity and probability. But, immediately
after this, a quarrel, half critical, half ethical, arose over the
subject of drama and poetry generally, a quarrel which is the first
thing of the kind in English literary history and which enriched
English criticism with its first work of distinct literary importance
for authorship, range and quality. The challenge of this quarrel
was Stephen Gosson's famous School of Abuse (1579) with its
appendix of pamphlets; the chief feat of arms in it was Sir Philip
Sidney's Apologie for Poetrie or Defence of Poesie (not printed
till 1595 but certainly written before 1583). Gosson had dedicated
his work to Sidney; and Sir Philip, showing a sense of literary
manners which, unfortunately, has never been too common, abstains
from replying directly to his dedicator, though his whole argument
is destructive of Gosson's. Others were less scrupulous, and, indeed,
had less reason for scruple; and Thomas Lodge, in a pamphlet the
exact title of which is lost, takes up the cudgel in all but the full
tone of Elizabethan 'flyting. This reply, however, as well as
Gosson's original attack and its sequels, has very little really
literary criticism in it. Gosson, himself a playwright for some
time, seems to have been suddenly convinced, probably by a con-
version to puritanism, of the sinfulness of poetry generally, and
the line of stricture which he takes is almost wholly moral; while,
not unnaturally, he is followed, for the most part, in this line, by
Lodge who, however, indulges in a certain amount of rather con-
fused comment and eulogium on the classics. In the time and
circumstances it was certain that Sidney would, to some exten
do the same; his strain, however, is not only of a much higher
mood but also of a wider and a more varied.
Beginning, with a touch of humour, on the tendency of every-
body to extol his own vocation, he plunges, almost at once, into
the stock defence of poetry: from its age and the wonders ascribed
to it of old; its connection with philosophy; the way in which
Plato is poetical even in his onslaughts upon it; its time-honoured
and world-spread vogue; the high and incomparable titles of
'poietes,' 'vates,' 'maker'; its command of every kind of subject,
vying with nature in something like creation; its connection
with Divinity itself. Then he sketches its kinds, and insists upon
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300
Elizabethan Criticism
both philosopher and historian. Examples of excellence for
imitation, and of misdoing for avoidance, are given. The poet
has all, 'from Dante his heven to his hell,' under the authority of
his pen. After much on this, he returns to the kinds-examining
and dismissing objections to pastoral, elegy and what not. At this
point, he makes a sweep towards his special subject of drama,
but touches it lightly and goes off to the heroic, whence, his
preamble or exposition being finished, he comes to 'poet-haters,'
the name, and even the person, of Gosson being carefully left in
obscurity. He examines and dismisses once more the stock ob-
jections—waste of time, lying, encouragement of evil desires, etc.
and, of course, sets the excellence of use against the possibility
of abuse. And so, all generalities done (the famous commendation
of Chevy Chace, ‘Percy and Duglas,' has occurred long before),
he shapes his concluding course towards English poetry, to find
out why England has 'growne so hard a stepmother' towards
poets ; why there is such a cold welcome for poetry here. And,
at this point, both the most strictly genuine criticism and the
most piquant oddity of the piece begin, though it would be very
unfair to Sidney not to remember that he is writing just after
The Shepheards Calender had appeared, in the mere overture of
the great Elizabethan concert.
"The verie true cause,' he thinks, 'of our wanting estimation,
is want of desert, taking uppon us to be poets, in despite of Pallas. '
Art, imitation and exercise, as well as mother-wit, are necessary
for poetry, and English poets use neither art nor imitation rightly.
Chaucer ‘did excellently' but had great wants,' a sentence which
surprises the reader less when he finds that A Mirror for Magistrates
is 'meetly furnished of bewtiful partes. ' The Shepheards Calender
‘hath much Poetrie in his Egloges, indeed woorthie the reading. '
But Sidney 'dare not allow' the framing of even his own familiar
friend's language to a rustic style, ‘since neither Theocritus in
Greeke, Virgill in Latine, nor Sanazara in Italian, did affect it. '
Besides these (he had duly praised Surrey), he 'remembers to
have seen few printed that had poetical sinews in them’ and,
looking back from 1580 to 1530, as he is evidently doing, one
cannot much wonder. Then he accumulates wrath on the infant
drama-again, be it remembered, before Peele, before Lyly, before
Marlowe, or just when their earliest work was appearing. But his
wrath is bestowed upon it for the very things that were to make
the greatness, not only of these three, but of Shakespeare and
all the rest. Our tragedies and comedies observe rules 'neither
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Webbe
301
6
of honest civilitie nor skilfull Poetrie,' excepting Gorboduc, which
itself is not faultless.