Read Ebook: The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory (Periods of European Literature vol. II) by Saintsbury George

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On hew hire her is fayr ynoh Hire browe bronne, hire eye blake; With lovsom chere he on me loh; With middel small ant wel y-make; Bott he me wille to hire take, For to buen hire owen make, Long to lyven ichulle forsake, Ant feye fallen a-doun. An hendy hap, &c.

Nihtes when I wenke ant wake, For-thi myn wonges waxeth won; Levedi, al for thine sake Longinge is ylent me on. In world is non so wytor mon That al hire bount? telle con; Heir swyre is whittere than the swon Ant fayrest may in toune. An hendy hap, &c.

Icham for wouyng al for-wake, Wery so water in wore Lest any reve me my make Ychabbe y-yrned ore. Betere is tholien whyle sore Then mournen evermore. Geynest under gore, Herkene to my roune. An hendy hap, &c."

"Lenten ys come with love to toune, With blosmen ant with bryddes roune, That al this blisse bringeth; Dayes-eyes in this dales, Notes suete of nytengales, Ilk foul song singeth;"

by a sturdy Praise of Women which charges gallantly against the usual mediaeval slanders; and by a piece which, with "Alison," is the flower of the whole, and has the exquisite refrain--

"Blow, northerne wynd, Send thou me my suetyng, Blow, northerne wynd, blou, blou, blou"--

Here is Tennysonian verse five hundred years before Tennyson. The "cry" of English lyric is on this northern wind at last; and it shall never fail afterwards.

This seems to be the best place to deal, not merely with the form of English lyric in itself, but with the general subject of the prosody as well of English as of the other modern literary languages. A very great deal has been written, with more and with less learning, with ingenuity greater or smaller, on the origins of rhyme, on the source of the decasyllabic and other staple lines and stanzas; and, lastly, on the general system of modern as opposed to ancient scansion. Much of this has been the result of really careful study, and not a little of it the result of distinct acuteness; but it has suffered on the whole from the supposed need of some new theory, and from an unwillingness to accept plain and obvious facts. These facts, or the most important of them, may be summarised as follows: The prosody of a language will necessarily vary according to the pronunciation and composition of that language; but there are certain general principles of prosody which govern all languages possessing a certain kinship. These general principles were, for the Western branches of the Aryan tongues, very early discovered and formulated by the Greeks, being later adjusted to somewhat stiffer rules--to compensate for less force of poetic genius, or perhaps merely because licence was not required--by the Latins. Towards the end of the classical literary period, however, partly the increasing importance of the Germanic and other non-Greek and non-Latin elements in the Empire, partly those inexplicable organic changes which come from time to time, broke up this system. Rhyme appeared, no one knows quite how, or why, or whence, and at the same time, though the general structure of metres was not very much altered, the quantity of individual syllables appears to have undergone a complete change. Although metres quantitative in scheme continued to be written, they were written, as a rule, with more or less laxity; and though rhyme was sometimes adapted to them in Latin, it was more frequently used with a looser syllabic arrangement, retaining the divisional characteristics of the older prosody, but neglecting quantity, the strict rules of elision, and so forth.

On the other hand, some of the new Teutonic tongues which were thus brought into contact with Latin, and with which Latin was brought into contact, had systems of prosody of their own, based on entirely different principles. The most elaborate of these probably, and the only one from which we have distinct remains of undoubtedly old matter in considerable quantities, is Anglo-Saxon, though Icelandic runs it close. A detailed account of the peculiarities of this belongs to the previous volume: it is sufficient to say here that its great characteristic was alliteration, and that accent played a large part, to the exclusion both of definite quantity and of syllabic identity or equivalence.

But the prosody of the Romance tongues is perfectly simple and intelligible, except in the one crux of the question how it came into being, and what part "popular" poetry played in it. We find it, almost from the first, full-blown: and only minor refinements or improvements are introduced afterwards. With English prosody it is very different. As has been said, the older prosody itself, with the older verse, seems to have to a great extent died out even before the Conquest, and what verse was written in the alliterative measures afterwards was of a feeble and halting kind. Even when, as the authors of later volumes of this series will have to show, alliterative verse was taken up with something like a set purpose during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, its character was wholly changed, and though some very good work was written in it, it was practically all literary exercise. It frequently assumed regular stanza-forms, the lines also frequently fell into regular quantitative shapes, such as the heroic, the Alexandrine, and the tetrameter. Above all, the old strict and accurate combination of a limited amount of alliteration, jealously adjusted to words important in sense and rhythm, was exchanged for a profusion of alliterated syllables, often with no direct rhythmical duty to pay, and constantly leading to mere senseless and tasteless jingle, if not to the positive coining of fantastic or improper locutions to get the "artful aid."

Rhyme is to the modern European ear so agreeable, if not so indispensable, an ornament of verse, that, once heard, it is sure to creep in, and can only be expelled by deliberate and unnatural crotchet from any but narrative and dramatic poetry. On the other hand, it is almost inevitable that when rhyme is expected, the lines which it tips should be reduced to an equal or at any rate an equivalent length. Otherwise the expectation of the ear--that the final ring should be led up to by regular and equable rhythm--is baulked. If this is not done, as in what we call doggerel rhyme, an effect of grotesque is universally produced, to the ruin of serious poetic effect. With these desiderata present, though unconsciously present, before them, with the Latin hymn-writers and the French poets for models, and with Church music perpetually starting in their memories cadences, iambic or trochaic, dactylic or anapaestic, to which to set their own verse, it is not surprising that English poets should have accompanied the rapid changes of their language itself with parallel rapidity of metrical innovation. Quantity they observed loosely--quantity in modern languages is always loose: but it does not follow that they ignored it altogether.

That a danger was at hand, the danger of too great restriction in the syllabic direction, has been admitted. The greatest poet of the fourteenth century in England--the greatest, for the matter of that, from the beginning till the sixteenth--went some way in this path, and if Chaucer's English followers had been men of genius we might have been sorely trammelled. Fortunately Lydgate and Occleve and Hawes showed the dangers rather than the attractions of strictness, and the contemporary practice of alliterative irregulars kept alive the appetite for liberty. But at this time--at our time--it was restriction, regulation, quantification, metrical arrangement, that English needed; and it received them.

These remarks are of course not presented as a complete account, even in summary, of English, much less of European prosody. They are barely more than the heads of such a summary, or than indications of the line which the inquiry might, and in the author's view should, take. Perhaps they may be worked out--or rather the working out of them may be published--more fully hereafter. But for the present they may possibly be useful as a protest against the "accent" and "stress" theories which have been so common of late years in regard to English poetry, and which, though not capable of being applied in quite the same fashion to the Romance languages, have had their counterparts in attempts to decry the application of classical prosody to modern tongues. No one can speak otherwise than respectfully of Dr Guest, whose book is certainly one of the most patient and ingenious studies of the kind to be found in any literature, and whose erudition, at a time when such erudition needed far greater efforts than now, cannot be too highly praised. But it is a besetting sin or disease of Englishmen in all matters, after pooh-poohing innovation, to go blindly in for it; and I cannot but think that Dr Guest's accentual theory, after being for years mainly neglected, has, for years again, been altogether too greedily swallowed. It is not of course a case necessarily of want of scholarship, or want of ear, for there are few better scholars or poets than Mr Robert Bridges, who, though not a mere Guestite, holds theories of prosody which seem to me even less defensible than Guest's. But it is, I think, a case of rather misguided patriotism, which thinks it necessary to invent an English prosody for English poems.

This is surely a mistake. Allowances in degree, in shade, in local colour, there must of course be in prosody as in other things. The developments, typical and special, of English prosody in the nineteenth century cannot be quite the same as those of Greek two thousand years ago, or of French to-day. But if, as I see not the slightest reason for doubting, prosody is not an artificially acquired art but a natural result of the natural desires, the universal organs of humanity, it is excessively improbable that the prosodic results of nations so nearly allied to each other, and so constantly studying each other's work, as Greeks, Romans, and modern Europeans, should be in any great degree different. If quantity, if syllabic equivalence and so forth, do not display themselves in Anglo-Saxon or in Icelandic, it must be remembered that the poetry of these nations was after all comparatively small, rather isolated, and in the conditions of extremely early development--a childish thing to which there is not the slightest rhyme or reason for straining ourselves to assimilate the things of manhood. That accent modified English prosody nobody need deny; there is no doubt that the very great freedom of equivalence--which makes it, for instance, at least theoretically possible to compose an English heroic line of five tribrachs--and the immense predominance of common syllables in the language, are due in some degree to a continuance of accentual influence.

MIDDLE HIGH GERMAN POETRY.

POSITION OF GERMANY. MERIT OF ITS POETRY. FOLK-EPICS: THE 'NIBELUNGENLIED.' THE 'VOLSUNGA SAGA.' THE GERMAN VERSION. METRES. RHYME AND LANGUAGE. 'KUDRUN.' SHORTER NATIONAL EPICS. LITERARY POETRY. ITS FOUR CHIEF MASTERS. EXCELLENCE, BOTH NATURAL AND ACQUIRED, OF GERMAN VERSE. ORIGINALITY OF ITS ADAPTATION. THE PIONEERS: HEINRICH VON VELDEKE. GOTTFRIED OF STRASBURG. HARTMANN VON AUE. 'EREC DER WANDERAERE' AND 'IWEIN.' LYRICS. THE "BOOKLETS." 'DER ARME HEINRICH.' WOLFRAM VON ESCHENBACH. 'TITUREL.' 'WILLEHALM.' 'PARZIVAL.' WALTHER VON DER VOGELWEIDE. PERSONALITY OF THE POETS. THE MINNESINGERS GENERALLY.

It must have been already noticed that one main reason for the unsurpassed literary interest of this present period is that almost all the principal European nations contribute, in their different ways, elements to that interest. The contribution is not in all cases one of positive literary production, of so much matter of the first value actually added to the world's library. But in some cases it is; and in the instance to which we come at present it is so in a measure approached by no other country except France and perhaps Iceland. Nor is Germany, as every other country except Iceland may be said to be, wholly a debtor or vassal to France herself. Partly she is so; of the three chief divisions of Middle High German poetry , the folk-epic, the "art-epic," as the Germans themselves not very happily call it, and the lyric--the second is always, and the third to no small extent, what might punningly be called in copyhold of France. But even the borrowed material is treated with such intense individuality of spirit that it almost acquires independence; and part of the matter, as has been said, is not borrowed at all.

The form, though not finished with the perfection of the French decasyllabic, is by no means of a very uncouth description. The poem is written in quatrains, rhymed couplet and couplet, not alternately, but evidently intended for quatrains, inasmuch as the sense frequently runs on at the second line, but regularly stops at the fourth. The normal line of which these quatrains are composed is a thirteen-syllabled one divided by a central pause, so that the first half is an iambic dimeter catalectic, and the second an iambic dimeter hypercatalectic.

"Von einer isenstangen: des gie dem helde not."

The first half sometimes varies from this norm, though not very often, the alteration usually taking the form of the loss of the first syllable, so that the half-line consists of three trochees. The second half is much more variable. Sometimes, in the same way as with the first, a syllable is dropped at the opening, and the half-line becomes similarly trochaic. Sometimes there is a double rhyme instead of a single, making seven syllables, though not altering the rhythm; and sometimes this is extended to a full octosyllable. But this variety by no means results in cacophony or confusion; the general swing of the metre is well maintained, and maintains itself in turn on the ear.

It will depend on individual taste whether the reader prefers the so-called "art-poetry" which broke out in Germany, almost wholly on a French impulse, but with astonishing individuality and colour of national and personal character, towards the end of the twelfth century, to the folk-poetry, of which the greater examples have been mentioned hitherto, whether he reverses the preference, or whether, in the mood of the literary student proper, he declines to regard either with preference, but admires and delights in both. On either side there are compensations for whatever loss may be urged by the partisans of the other. It may or may not be an accident that the sons of adoption are more numerous than the sons of the house: it is not so certain that the one group is to be on any true reckoning preferred to the other.

One thing may be said with great certainty of the division of literature to which we have come, that none shows more clearly the natural aptitude of the people who produced it for poetry. It is a familiar observation from beginners in German who have any literary taste, that German poetry reads naturally, German prose does not. In verse the German disencumbers himself of that gruesome clumsiness which almost always besets him in the art he learnt so late, and never learnt to any perfection. To "say" is a trouble to him, a trouble too often unconquerable; to sing is easy enough. And this truth, true of all centuries of German literature, is never truer than here. Translated or adapted verse is not usually the most cheerful department of poetry. The English romances, translated or adapted from the French, at times on the whole later than these, have been unduly abused; but they are certainly not the portion of the literature of his country on which an Englishman would most pride himself. Even the home-grown and, as I would fain believe, home-made legend of Arthur, had to wait till the fifteenth century before it met, and then in prose, a worthy master in English.

"Under der linden An der heide, da unser zweier bette was, da muget ir vinden schone beide gebrochen bluomen unde gras. Vor dem walde in einem tal, tandaradei! schone sanc diu nahtegal."

At last we are free from the tyranny of the iambic, and have variety beyond the comparative freedom of the trochee. The blessed liberty of trisyllabic feet not merely comes like music, but is for the first time complete music, to the ear.

"Diu wise Is?t, diu schoene Is?t, Diu liuhtet alse der morgenrot,"

is the very thing the want of which mars the pleasantly flowing but somewhat featureless octosyllables of his French models. In the famous passage where he has been thought to reflect on Wolfram, he certainly praises other poets without stint, and shows himself a generous as well as a judicious critic. How Hartmann von Aue hits the meaning of a story! how loud and clear rings the crystal of his words! Did not Heinrich von Veldeke "imp the first shoot on Teutish tongues" ? With what a lofty voice does the nightingale of the Bird-Meadow warble across the heath! Nor is it unpleasant to come shortly afterwards to our old friends Apollo and the Camoenae, the nine "Sirens of the ears"--a slightly mixed reminiscence, but characteristic of the union of classical and romantic material which communicates to the Middle Ages so much of their charm. Indeed nowhere in this Pisgah sight of literature would it be pleasanter to come down and expatiate on the particular subject than in the case of these Middle High German poets.

The next or lyrical division shows Hartmann more favourably, though still not exactly as a great poet. The "Frauenminne," or profane division, of these has something of the artificial character which used very unjustly to be charged against the whole love-poetry of the Middle Ages, and which certainly does affect some of it. There is nowhere the "cry" that we find in the best of Gottfried's "nightingales"--the lyric poets as opposed to the epic. He does not seem to have much command of trisyllabic measures, and is perhaps happiest in the above-mentioned mono-rhymed quatrain, apparently a favourite measure then, which he uses sometimes in octosyllables, but often also in decasyllables. I do not know, and it would probably be difficult to say, what was the first appearance of the decasyllable, which in German, as in English, was to become on the whole the staple measure of non-lyrical poetry and the not infrequent medium of lyrical. But this must be fairly early, and certainly is a good example. The "Gottesminne," or, as our own old word has it, the "Divine" Poems, are very much better. Hartmann himself was a crusader, and there is nothing merely conventional in his few lays from the crusading and pilgrim standpoint. Indeed the very first words, expressing his determination after his lord's death to leave the world to itself, have a better ring than anything in his love-poetry; and the echo is kept up in such simple but true sayings as this about "Christ's flowers" :--

"Min froude wart nie sorgelos Unz an die tage Daz ich mir Krystes bluomon kos Die ich hie trage."

"Minne waltet grozer kraft"--

"Ow?, Ow?, unde ow?!"--

"Cundrie la Sorziere Diu unsueze und doch diu fiere"

is a much more weird personage than Morgane or Nimue, though she may also be more "unsweet." Part of this unfamiliar effect is no doubt due to Wolfram's singular fancy for mutilating and torturing his French names, to his admixture of new characters and adventures, and especially to the almost entirely new genealogy which he introduces. In the pedigree, containing nearly seventy names, which will be found at the end of Bartsch's edition, not a tithe will be familiar to the reader of the English and French romances; and that reader will generally find those whom he does know provided with new fathers and mothers, daughters and wives.

"Diu werlt was gelf, r?t unde bl?,"

one only prays for more such childishness. Is there a better song of May and maidens than

"So diu bluomen uz dem grase dringent"?

where the very phrase is romance and nature itself, and could never be indulged in by a "classical" poet, who would say , "flowers grow in beds, not grass; and if in the latter, they ought to be promptly mown and rolled down." How intoxicating, after deserts of iambs, is the dactylic swell of

"Wol mich der stunde, daz ich sie erkande"!

how endearing the drooping cadence of

"Bin ich dir unmaere Des enweiz ich niht; ich minne dich"!

how small the change which makes a jewel out of a commonplace in

THE 'FOX,' THE 'ROSE,' AND THE MINOR CONTRIBUTIONS OF FRANCE.

"Gaite de la tor, Gardez entor Les murs, si Deus vos voie;"

"Hu! et hu! et hu! et hu!"

"Por coi me bast mes maris? laysette!"

"Tant mar i fustes, cuens Do, frans de nature, por vostre aor vestrai je la haire ne sur mon cors n'arai pelice vaire."

This conduct differs sufficiently from that of the unnamed heroine of another song, who in the sweetest and smoothest of verse bids her husband never to mind if she stays with her lover that night, for the night is very short, and he, the husband, shall have her back to-morrow!

And besides the morality, perverse or touching, the quaint manners, the charming unusual names or forms of names, Oriour, Oriolanz, Ysabiaus, Aigline,--there are delightful fancies, borrowed often since:--

"Li rossignox est mon p?re, Qui chante sur la ram?e el plus haut boscage; La seraine ele est ma m?re, qui chante en la mer sal?e el plus haut rivage."

Every now and then, too, we find, in the half-random and wholly scurrile slander of womankind, a touch of real humour, of the humour that has feeling behind it, as here, where a sufficiently ribald variation on the theme of the "Ephesian matron" ends--

"Por ce teng-je celui ? fol Qui trop met en fame sa cure; Fame est de trop foible nature, De noient rit, de noient pleure, Fame aime et het en trop poi d'eure: Tost est ses talenz remuez, Qui fame croit, si est desv?s."

So too, again, in "La Housse Partie," a piece which perhaps ranks next to the "Vair Palefroi" in general estimation, there is neither purely romantic interest, as in the Palfrey, nor the interest of "the pity of it," as in the piece just quoted; but an ethical purpose, showing out of the mouth of babes and sucklings the danger of filial ingratitude.

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