Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845

"The verse of Chaucer, I confess, is not harmonious to us, but it is like the eloquence of one whom Tacitus commends, it was auribus istius temporis accommodata. They who lived with him, and some time after him, thought it musical; and it continues so, even in our judgment, if compared with the numbers of Lidgate and Gower, his contemporaries:—there is the rude sweetness of a Scotch tune in it, which is natural and pleasing, though not perfect. It is true, I cannot go so far as he who published the last edition of him; for he would make us believe the fault is in our ears, and that there were really ten syllables in a verse where we find but nine; but this opinion is not worth confuting; it is so gross and obvious an error, that common sense (which is a rule in every thing but matters of faith and revelation) must convince the reader that equality of numbers, in every verse which we call heroic, was either not known, or not always practised in Chaucer's age. It were an easy matter to produce some thousands of his verses which are lame for want of half a foot, and sometimes a whole one, and which no pronunciation can make otherwise. We can only say, that he lived in the infancy of our poetry, and that nothing is brought to perfection at first. We must be children before we grow men. There was an Ennius, and in process of time a Lucilius and a Lucretius, before Virgil and Horace; even after Chaucer there was a Spenser, a Harrington, a Fairfax, before Waller and Denham were in being; and our numbers were in their nonage till these last appeared."

Strange to say, by the changing pronunciation of the language, there grew with time upon the minds of men a doubt, whether or no the Father of our Poetry wrote verse! The tone of Dryden, in the above passage, when animadverting upon Speght, shows that that editor, in standing up for ten syllables, put forth an unusual opinion; whilst the poet, in alleging the deficiency, manifestly agrees with the opinion of the antique versification that had become current in the world. He taxes Chaucer, it will be observed, with going wrong on the side of deficiency, not of excess; nor does he blame the interchange even of deficiency and excess, as if the syllables were often nine and often eleven. His words leave no room for misconception of their meaning. They are as definite as language can supply. "Thousands of the verses are lame for want of half a foot, or of a whole one." In this sense, then, he intends: "That equality of numbers, in every verse which we call heroic, was either not known, or not always practised in Chaucer's age."

But as Dryden has been severely taken to task by some insignificant writers of our day for the above passage, let us, not for his vindication, but excuse, take a moment's glance at Speght's edition (1602,) which, in Dryden's day, was in high esteem, and had been at first published on the recommendation of Speght's "assured and ever-loving friend," the illustrious Francis Beaumout. In his preface, Speght says—"and his verses, although in divers places they may seem to us to stand of unequal measures, yet a skilful reader that can scan them in their nature, shall find it otherwise. And if a verse here and there fal out a sillable shorter or longer than another, I rather aret it to the negligence and rape of Adam Scrivener, that I may speak as Chaucer doth, than to any unconning or oversight in the Author. For how fearful he was to have his works miswritten, or his verse mismeasured, may appear in the end of his fifth book of Troilus and Cresside, where he writeth thus:—

'And for there is so great diversitie,In English and in writing of our tongue,So pray I God, that none miswrite thee,Ne thee mismetre for defaut of tongue'" &c.

How Speght made up the measure to his own satisfaction does not appear; nor what those methods of pronunciation may have been which Dryden tried, and which left some thousand verses deficient by half a foot, or a foot.

But believing Speght's text to be accurate, Dryden could not but believe in the artlessness and irregularity of Chaucer's versification. Speght's text is most inaccurate, and altogether undeserving of his own very high opinion, thus expressed in the Dedication to Sir Robert Cecil—"Now, therefore, that both by old written copies, and by Master William Thynn's praiseworthy labours, I have reformed the whole worke, whereby Chaucer for the most part is restored to his owne antiquitie." In his Chaucer, Dryden met every where such lines as these—

"When that April with his shours sote.""And small foules maken melodieThat slepen all night with open eie.""It befell that season on a day.""Ready to wend in my pilgrimage.""That toward Canterbury would ride—The chambres and stables weren wide.""To tell you all the condition.""Full worthy was he in his lords warre.""Aboven all nations in Pruce.""For to tell you of his array."

We suspect that there was all along a lingering tradition amongst the learned about the virtue of the Mute E's. Vestiges of the use occur in the poets of Elizabeth's time. Wallis, the celebrated grammarian, says, that "with our early poets it is found that that (final) E did or did not constitute an additional syllable, just as the stricture of the verse required it." Urry, whose edition of Chaucer was published, not long after his death, in 1721, knows for vocal the termination in ES, of genitive singular and of the plural—also the past tense and participle in ED, which, however, can hardly be thought much of, as it is a power over one mute E that we retain in use to this day. The final E, too, he marks for a syllable where he finds one wanted, but evidently without any grammatical reason. Urry was an unfortunate editor. Truly does Tyrwhitt say of him, that "his design of restoring the metre of Chaucer by a collation of MSS., was as laudable as his execution of it has certainly been unsuccessful." The natural causes of this ill success are thus severely and distinctly stated, "The strange license in which he appears to have indulged himself, of lengthening and shortening Chaucer's words according to his own fancy, and of even adding words of his own, without giving his readers the least notice, has made the text of Chaucer in his edition by far the worst that was ever published." One is not surprised when Tyrwhitt, the model of gentlemanly and scholarly editor, a very pattern of temperate, equitable, and merciful criticism, cannot refrain from closing his preface with this extinguishing censure of his wilful predecessor—"Mr Urry's edition should never be opened by any one for the purpose of reading Chaucer."

Morell, a scholar, published in 1737 the Prologue and the Knight's Tale—and he, too, marked at need the Mute E's in his text, but by what rule Tyrwhitt does not intimate, nor do we now distinctly recollect. He courageously holds that the numbers of Chaucer "are always musical, whether they want or exceed the complement." But that cannot well be; for except in very peculiar cases—such, for example, as the happy line, "Gingling in the whistling wind full clear"—if the MS. have it so—a line of nine syllables only must be a lame one—and their frequent recurrence would be the destruction of all music.

Tyrwhitt urges the reason of pronouncing the final E; namely, that it remains to us from a language in which it formed a syllable. So from the Norman French we have fac-E, host-E, chang-E, &c. This is basing the matter on its true ground. It must, however, be acknowledged with some sorrow, that this well-schooled, clear-minded, and most laborious editor did not feel himself bound, for the behoof of his author, to master, as far as the philology of the day might have enabled him, the Saxon tongue itself, and learn from the fountain what might, and what could not be—the language of Chaucer. Imperfect as the study of the Anglo-Saxon then was, he would thus have possessed a needful mastery over the manuscripts, upon which, as it was, he wholly depended; and he would have been saved from some unguarded philological assertions and whimsical speculations. Wanting this guidance, the work, so well executed as it is, is a monument only the more to be wondered at of his indefatigable industry and extraordinary good sense.

Upon any where opening Chaucer, of the many seemingly defective verses, (Dryden in saying thousands may have exaggerated the number even in Speght,) by far the greater part will be found recoverable to measure by that restitution of the Mute E which we since, too exclusively perhaps, connect with the name of Tyrwhitt. The confidence felt in his text, however—the only one upon which a metrical scholar dares work—in some sort justifies the honour. Meanwhile, this metrical theory, from his time, has been generally received; and the renown of the founder of our poetry settled on all the wider and firmer basis, when he appears as the earliest skilled artificer of the verse itself—the ten-syllabled or now national verse, of Shakspeare, Spenser, Milton, Dryden, and Pope.

One starts, therefore, to find a name of such distinction as the late Laureate's formally opposed to Tyrwhitt, and committed to the opinion which may seem to have been Dryden's, that the verse of Chaucer is "rhythmical, not metrical." This hardly self-explicating distinction of Dr Geo. Fred. Nott's, Southey in his Life of Cowper has explained in set terms—a verse for which the number of beats or accents is ruled is rhythmical—for example, the verse of Coleridge's Christabel. In that beautiful poem, the verse is fixed at four beats or accents, but is free syllabled, having six, seven, ten, twelve, or fourteen. Southey cannot believe that the prudent and practical Chaucer would have placed his verse, intended for general reception, in the jeopardy of a reader's discretion for determining when the verse required the sounding, and when the silence, of a vowel, by its nature free to be sounded or left silent, as exigency might require. But he misapprehends the proposed remedy; and the discretion which he supposes is not given. In the two languages from which ours is immediately derived, the Anglo-Saxon and the Norman-French, there are found many final syllables, entirely dropped in our pronunciation, and many of them in our writing, but which in the time of Chaucer were all still written, and all with the same vowel E. The metrical hypothesis, to which Tyrwhitt's labours gave a lustre, much heightened by the Anglo-Saxon studies abroad and at home of the present century, bears—first, that in the language of Chaucer's day these syllables were still audible; and secondly, that Chaucer consequently employed them in his verse, like any other syllables, with the due metrical value:—herein not, as the Laureate thought, overruling, but conforming himself to the use of his mother tongue. To this more than plausible view, which, if the late studies that have been taken in the intelligence of Alfred's speech had been made in Tyrwhitt's day, would not have waited till now for its full establishment, no objection has yet been raised that seems to deserve the slightest attention. The Laureate's vanish upon the mere statement. For Dr Nott, on whom he triumphantly builds, and whose proofs he seems to adopt—he is the weakest and most wrongheaded of all possible prosers; and, what is more, his opinions, if they deserve the name, differ toto cœlo from Southey's. For we have seen that Southey's ground of distinction is the number of syllables unrestrained or varying, as in Christabel. But Nott says repeatedly, that the number of syllables is fixed, namely, to ten; and of the five beats he says not a word.

To extricate Nott's argument (in his edition of Surrey) from entanglement would not repay a tithe of the trouble; suffice it to say that he holds that as English verse, before Chaucer, was rhythmical, it is not likely that Chaucer all at once made it metrical. We answer first—the question is of a fact offering its own evidence, not of an anterior likelihood. Secondly—Tyrwhitt's theory that Chaucer, from his intimacy with the more advanced French and Italian poetry, adopted their measure, and stamped art upon a poetry till then rude and helpless, has high natural probability, and agrees to the vehement early extollings of Chaucer as sovereign master of art. Thirdly—we desire a better proof and explanation of the difference between rhythmical and metrical verse than Dr Nott has given, who has placed some extracts from these anterior poets at the side of some from Chaucer, which prove just nothing. Fourthly, there was metrical verse in England before Chaucer, eight-syllabled and fifteen-syllabled—if no others. Mr Hallam (Introduction to the Literature of Europe) writes with more commendation of Dr Nott's accomplishments than they merit; but in the following excellent passage he shows his usual knowledge of his subject, and his usual judgment.

"It had been supposed to be proved by Tyrwhitt, that Chaucer's lines are to be read metrically, in ten or eleven syllables, like the Italian, and, as I apprehend, the French of his time. For this purpose, it is necessary to presume that many terminations, now mute, were syllabically pronounced; and where verses prove refractory after all our endeavours, Tyrwhitt has no scruple in declaring them corrupt. It may be added, that Gray, before the appearance of Tyrwhitt's essay on the versification of Chaucer, had adopted without hesitation the same hypothesis. But, according to Dr Nott, the verses of Chaucer, and of all his successors down to Surrey, are merely rhythmical, to be read by cadence, and admitting of considerable variety in the number of syllables, though ten may be the more frequent. In the manuscripts of Chaucer, the line is always broken by a cæsura in the middle, which is pointed out by a virgule; and this is preserved in the early editions down to that of 1532. They come near, therefore, to the short Saxon line, differing chiefly by the alternate rhyme, which converts two verses into one. He maintains that a great many lines of Chaucer cannot be read metrically, though harmonious as verses of cadence. This rhythmical measure he proceeds to show in Hoccleve, Lydgate, Hawes, Barclay, Skelton, and even Wyatt; and thus concludes, that, it was first abandoned by Surrey, in whom it very rarely occurs. This hypothesis, it should be observed, derives some additional plausibility from a passage in Gascoyne's 'Notes of instruction concerning the making of verse or rhyme in English,' printed in 1575. 'Whosoever do peruse and well consider his (Chaucer's) works, he shall find that, although his lines are not always of one selfsame number of syllables, yet being read by one that hath understanding, the longest verse, and that which hath most syllables in it, will fall (to the ear) correspondent unto that which hath fewest syllables; and likewise that which hath fewest syllables shall be found yet to consist of words that have such natural sound, as may seem equal in length to a verse which hath many more syllables of lighter accents.'

"A theory so ingeniously maintained, and with so much induction of examples, has naturally gained a good deal of credit. I cannot, however, by any means concur in the extension given to it. Pages may be read in Chaucer, and still more in Dunbar, where every line is regularly and harmoniously decasyllabic; and though the cæsura may perhaps fall rather more uniformly than it does in modern verse, it would be very easy to find exceptions, which could not acquire a rhythmical cadence by any artifice of the reader. The deviations from the normal type, or decasyllable line, were they more numerous than, after allowance for the license of pronunciation, as well as the probable corruption of the text, they appear to be, would not, I conceive, justify us in concluding that it was disregarded. These aberrant lines are much more common in the dramatic blank verse of the seventeenth century. They are, doubtless, vestiges of the old rhythmical forms; and we may readily allow that English versification had not, in the fifteenth or even sixteenth centuries, the numerical regularity of classical or Italian metre. In the ancient ballads, Scots and English, the substitution of the anapaest for the iambic foot, is of perpetual recurrence, and gives them a remarkable elasticity and animation; but we never fail to recognize a uniformity of measure, which the use of nearly equipollent feet cannot, on the strictest metrical principles, be thought to impair."

Mr. Guest, in his work, of which we hope erelong to give an account, brings to the story of English verse far more extensive research than had hitherto been bestowed upon it; and that special scholarship which was needed—the Anglo-Saxon language, learned in the new continental school of Rask and Grimm. His examination of our subject merges in a general history of the Language, viewed as a metrical element or material; and hence his exposition, which we rapidly collect seriatim, is plainly different in respect of both order and fulness from what it would have been, had the illustration of Chaucer been his main purpose. He follows down the gradual Extinction of Syllables; and in this respect, our anciently syllabled, now mute E, takes high place, and falls first under his consideration.

This now silent or vanished Vowel occurred heretofore, with metrical power, in adopted French Substantives, as—eloquenc-e, maladi-e; and in their plurals, as—maladi-es. And in Adjectives of the same origin, as—larg-e.

It remained from several parts of the Anglo-Saxon grammar.—From A, E, U, endings of Anglo-Saxon substantives—as nam-a, nam-e; tim-a, tim-e; mon-a, (the moon,) mon-e; sunn-e, (the sun,) sonn-e; heort-e, (the heart,) hert-e; ear-e, (the ear,) er-e; scol-u, (school,) scol-e; luf-u, lov-e; sceam-u, sham-e; lag-a, law-e; sun-u, (a son,) son-e; wud-u, (a wood,) wod-e.—(To Mr Guest's three vowels, add O:—as bræd-o (breadth) bred-e.)—From the termination THE; as—streng-the; yow-the.—From a few adjectives ending in e; as—getrew-e, trew-e; new-e, new-e.—From adverbs, formed by the same vowel from adjectives; as from beorht, (bright,) is made, in Anglo-Saxon, beorht-e, (brightly,) remaining with Chaucer, as bright-e.—Inflexion produces the final E. In substantives, the prevalent singular dative of the mother speech was in E. Chaucer, now and then, seems to present us with a dative; as in the second verse of the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, from rot, (root,) rot-e. And Mr Guest thinks that he has found one instance of a genitive plural E from A; namely, from the earlier ath, (an oath,) genitive plural, ath-a; with Chaucer—oth, oth-e.

The German family of languages exhibits a fine and bold peculiarity—a double declension of its Adjectives, depending on a condition of syntax. The Anglo-Saxon adjective, in its ordinary (or, as grammarians have called it, Indefinite) declension, makes the nominative plural for all the genders in E; and this remains as the regular plural termination of the adjective to Chaucer. Thus we have, in the more ancient language—eald; plural, eald-e; with Chaucer—old; plural, old-e, &c.

The rule of the extraordinary (or Definite) declension, is thus generally given by Mr Guest for Chaucer. "When the adjective follows the definite article, or the definite pronoun, this, that, or any one of the possessive pronouns—his, her, &c.—it takes what is called its definite form."—(Vol. i. p. 32.) From the Anglo-Saxon definite declension (running through three genders, five cases, and two numbers,) remains, to the language that arose after the Conquest, one final E. E.g. Indefinite—strong; definite, strong-e;—indefinite—high; definite—high-e.

The Verb ends the first person singular, and the three persons plural, of the present tense, and makes imperative and infinitive, in E. The past tense generally ends in DE or EDE; (Mr Guest has forgotten TE;) sometimes in ED.

As for those two principal endings, the genitive singular in ES, which is the Anglo-Saxon termination retained, and the plural in ES, which is the Anglo-Saxon ending obscured—they happen hardly to fall under Mr Guest's particular regard; but it is easily understood that the Anglo-Saxon hlaford, (lord,) gen. sing. hlaford-es, had, in Chaucer's day, become lord, lord-es;—and that scur, (shower,) plural scur-as, of our distant progenitors had bequeathed to his verse—shour, shour-es.

Legitimate scepticism surely ceases when it thus appears that ignorance alone has hastily understood that this vowel, extant in this or that word, with a quite alien meaning and use, (—e.g. for lengthening a foregoing vowel—softening an antecedent consonant,)—or with none, and through the pure casualty of negligence or of error, might at any time be pressed irregularly into metrical service. Assuredly Chaucer never used such blind and wild license of straightening his measure; but an instructed eye sees in the Canterbury Tales—and in all his poetry of which the text is incorrupt—the uniform application of an intricate and thoroughly critical rule, which fills up by scores, by hundreds, or by thousands, the time-wronged verses of "the Great Founder" to true measure and true music.

To sum up in a few words our own views—First, if you take no account of the mute E, the great majority of Chaucer's verses in the only justifiable text—Tyrwhitt's Canterbury Tales—are in what we commonly call the ten-syllabled Iambic metre.

Secondly, if you take account of the metrical E, the great majority of them appear, if you choose so to call them, as eleven-syllabled Iambic verses, or as the common heroic measure with a supernumerary terminal syllable.

Thirdly, if you take no account of the disputed E, a very large number of the verses, but less apparently than the majority, appear as wanting internally one or two syllables.

Fourthly, if you take account of the said troublesome E, almost universally these deficient measures become filled up to the due complement—become decasyllabic or hendecasyllabic, as the case may be.

Fifthly, if you consent to take account of this grammatical metrical E, no inconsiderable number of the verses—ten-syllabled or eleven-syllabled, by technical computation—acquire one or two supernumerary syllables distributed, if one may so speak, within the verse—and to be viewed as enriching the harmony without distorting or extending the measure, after the manner of the Paradise Lost.

Finally, (for the present,) whether the verses in general fall under our usual English scheme of the one-syllabled ending, or end, as the Italian for the most part do, dissyllabically, has been disputed by those who agree in the recognition of the metrical E. To wit—shall the final E of Mr Guest's rule, ending the verse, and where it would, consequently, make a hypercatalectic eleventh syllable, still be pronounced—as Tyrwhitt, although not anxiously, contends? If the grammatical rule is imperative within the verse, as much, one would think, must it be so at its termination. That Chaucer admits the doubled ending we see by numerous unequivocal instances from all moods of the verse, mirthful and solemn; these show a versification friendly to the doubled ending; and must go far to remove any scruple of admitting Tyrwhitt's conception of it as generally hendecasyllabic.

Let the position of Chaucer in the history of his art be considered, and it will be seen that those who maintain a systematic art in him have a relief from objections greater than those who should enquire concerning perhaps any other poet. In the formation of his verse, and the lifting up of a rude language, more than Dante himself, a creator! What wonder, then, if he should sometimes make mistakes, and that some inconsistencies remain at last irreducible? If the method undertaken draws the irreducible cases into a narrower and a narrower compass, that sufficiently justifies the theory of the method against all gainsayers.

This copious, and, possibly, tedious grammatical display of this once active metrical element, was forced from us as the only proper answer to the doubt revived in our own day on the versification of Chaucer. We are too prone to believe that our forefathers were as rude as their speech, and their speech as they; but this multitude of grammatical delicacies, retained for centuries after the subjection of the native language by conquest, and systematically applied in the versification of the great old poet, shows a feeling of language, and an authentic stamp of art, that claim the most genial and sympathizing respect of a refined posterity, to their not wholly unrefined, more heroic ancestors.