or with Milton's

Seasons return, but not to me returns

Day, nor the sweet approach ... Par. Lost, III: 40 ff. Different as often is the swifter, simpler flow of the purely narrative verse of Chaucer, solidly English though the movement may be of such a monosyllabic line as

A knight ther was, and that a worthy man,

there can be little question but that he learned from the great Italians the essentials of his art. Could he fail to perceive, at the opening of the Inferno, the effect of the double reversal of stress in Questa selva selvaggia ed aspra e forte ?

Could it escape him that his translation

!

The day gan failen, and the derke night PoFoules 85

followed with fidelity the movement of Dante's

Lo giorno andava, e l'aer bruno ?

It must of course be recognized that in Chaucer's hands any Romance original will become more strongly accentual. Indeed, it is a question if, with all his knowledge of Italian poetry, Chaucer did not grasp it more by eye than by ear; if he did not impose upon it, as any purely bookish English student to-day imposes upon his Dante, the Germanic rhythm. Consider the shortness of Chaucer's first visit to Italy, January to May, and his mature age at the time; also that, although his second visit extended over double the time of the first, it was made after six years, and when Chaucer was more than forty years old. But even with such limitations, I would suggest that Chaucer probably took from Italy his idea of the decasyllabic line, and took also, it may well be, his idea of the freedom possible in the number and position of its accented syllables.

To this last attention may be called. Our prosodic theories provide for the existence in English of "iambic pentameter" lines; it is incumbent upon the individual student to realize that this theoretical type is the rarest of all forms in the actual rhythm; that what we term the ten-syllabled line ranges from nine to twelve syllables; that what we term the five-beat line has more frequently four grammatical stresses, or three and a secondary; and that what we call "iambic" requires the constant presence of "trochees”, "spondees", and "anapests" to satisfy our ear. It is the distinction of Chaucer, and a distinction probably arising under Italian influence, to have planted these standards of variation at the very opening of the course of English heroic verse; to have established once and for all the fact that

Or breke it at a renning with his heed

has as much right in "five-beat iambic" context as

But thou wys, thou wost, thou mayst, thou art al.

Retaining as we do in our prosody the nomenclature of a poetry whose prime characteristic is its regularity, we find it hard to express the quality of a poet who took from Continental prosodies their liberties, and united them in the earliest modern English poetry. But because this freedom of flow is Chaucer's great contribution to English verse, it is before all things necessary that we study his variations from the theoretical verse-scheme.

The extreme refinement of vocalic and rhythmic effects we do not expect to find in a poet of Chaucer's early date; we do not seek in his verse for the artful opening and shutting of sound in imitation of air-effects, as in Milton's

Swinging slow with sullen roar

nor the dragging sweetness of Keats'

And no birds sing.

For when we speak of Chaucer's freshness and simplicity, it is his freedom from just such beautiful sophistications that we mean,—a freedom which befits the man who was first, last, and always the storyteller, and but incidentally the singer. We mean such contrasts as this:

For Cristes lore and his apostles twelve
He taughte, and first he folwed it himselve.

Prologue 527-8 (of the Parson)

Do not, as some ungracious pastors do,
Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven,
Whiles, like a puffed and reckless libertine,
Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads
And recks not his own rede.

Hamlet I, 3.

Or this:

As doon thise loveres in hir queynte geres,
Now in the croppe, now doun in the breres,
Now up, now doun, as boket in a welle.
Right as the Friday, sothly for to telle,
Now it shyneth, now it reyneth faste.
Right so can gery Venus overcaste
The hertes of hir folk.

Knight's Tale, 673 ff.

O how this spring of love resembleth
The uncertain glory of an April day:

Which now shows all the beauty of the sun,
And by and by a cloud takes all away.

Two Gent. Verona I, 3.

But there is in Chaucer, notwithstanding his characteristically simple diction, ample evidence of conscious artistic intent. Not often do we find the device for attracting the ear to important words, such as Milton uses when he makes an expected light syllable heavy,

Shoots far into the bosom of dim Night

Par. Lost I: 1036,

a device whose emphasis is still more clearly seen when misused as by Cowper,

To adjust the fragrant charge of a short tube

That fumes beneath his nose

Task, V: 55-56.

Yet similar cases do occur in Chaucer. Compare for instance the line describing the Parson and his conception of duty,

That if gold ruste what shal iren do

with the unexpected weight on gold. Other and more striking examples of artistic intent are easily found; Mather, in his edition of the Prologue, etc., p. xxxvi, points out several; note the rapid and hardbreathing movement of the preparations for the tournament, Knight's Tale 1636 ff., or the still more forcible and powerfully alliterative descriptions of the tournament itself and of the seafight in the Cleopatra story of the Legend of Good Women. Mather also cites single expressive lines like

He was shortsholdred, brood, a thikke knarre

in the portrait of the Miller. To this, it seems to me, we may well add the two lines following in the Prologue,

Ther nas no dore that he nolde heve of harre
Or breke it at a renning with his heed.

The former of these is not so obvious as Pope's

Up the high hill he heaved a huge round stone,

nor is the latter so marked as Tennyson's

And flashing round and round and whirled in an arch,

but the two first of Chaucer's three lines are as certainly overweighted with intent as is the last line underweighted to an almost imitative swiftness of motion.

To turn to another artistic possibility, that of vocalic tone-coloring, we may see, with Mather, conscious art in the line

Ginglen in a whistling wind as clere

Prol. 170,

and recognize the "harsh and angular" adjectives of Knight's Tale 1117; or we may agree with Saintsbury as to the melodic effect of Troilus' song,

If no love is, O God, what fele I so,

And if love is, what thing and which is he?

But we shall not expect to find the oppressive richness of lines such as Tennyson's "Lit by a low large moon", or the intellectual melancholy of Arnold's "unplumb'd, salt, estranging sea." There, again, is the modern refinement of sensation developed since Chaucer's day. Even the farewell cry of Arcite, "Allone withouten any companye", we hesitate to accept at the full pathetic value accorded it by Mather when we see it used of the clerk Nicholas at the opening of the Miller's Tale, closely following the description of Arcite's death.

The collection of such observations upon the rhythmical and melodic effects of Chaucer has however formed no part of the work of prosodists. Schipper, upon whose methods are based the verse-analyses of subsequent Middle English students, has treated Chaucer as one treats the line-by-line workmen of earlier ages, and has erected (working with the uncritical text of Morris) a set of line-types and variants which are still accepted. It may however be questioned if a discussion of Chaucer's melody which proceeds on such methods alone can make that melody apparent. For it is based, in the first place, upon a text uncertain in those very matters of detail to which Schipper limits his analysis; in the second place, it ignores the general esthetic considerations which we can reach with even our present text, and which will at least give us a better conception of Chaucer's artistic power than will Schipper's classification of his cesuras. We can, for instance, note that the presence of the inflexional -e in Chaucer's language adds to his line a larger amount of open vocalic sound than our choked consonantal utterance permits, although the monotony of this recurring vowel sound makes the Englishman's line less intrinsically melodious than that of the Italian. The existence of this vowel sound, moreover, enabled Chaucer to manage the transitional parts of his narrative with a smaller proportion of the partially stressed pronouns and connectives than is possible to us when we try to modernize him. We must in rendering him either increase the amount of such words,-words rarely in themselves musical,-or increase his emphasis by using adjectives and adverbs not in his swift fluid narrative. Look, for example, at the opening of the Knight's Tale:

Whilom, as olde stories tellen us,
Ther was a duk that highte Theseus.

Chaucer.

In days of old there liv'd, of mighty fame,
A valiant Prince, and Theseus was his name.

Dryden.

Whilom, as olden tales record for us,

There lived a duke whose name was Theseus.

Skeat.

Chaucer, working up to his principal idea, Theseus, the final rimeword of his couplet, reaches it with but four words on which

emphatic utterance is necessary to our comprehension,-whilom, olde, stories, duke; the rest of his words are subsidiary, and three of his unaccented syllables are inflexional, making no tax upon enunciation or mind. Dryden not only loses the rise of the couplet to Theseus, and makes three pauses where Chaucer made two, but he adds two adjectival ideas, mighty and valiant, which are not expressed by Chaucer; his verse paces where Chaucer's springs. Comparisons between Chaucer and Dryden, at all moments when Dryden does not deliberately expand his original, reveal interesting divergences of this same sort. Dryden is almost invariably heavier than Chaucer, besides failing constantly to reproduce the reserve, the sparing use of epithet, so characteristic of the older poet.

A comparison of the two poets in this aspect of their work alone expresses the personalities of their geniuses as clearly as does a comparison of their lives and their entire literary production. In a poet, the verse is the man.

D. Chaucer's Line- and Strophe-Forms

Chaucer's line- and strophe-forms have been discussed, in general by Tyrwhitt, by Schipper, by ten Brink, and by Skeat, as above referred to. Tyrwhitt and Skeat based their conclusions upon their own editions; ten Brink used the Chaucer Society's Six-Text and the prints of Harley 7334 and Dd by Morris and by Wright. Schipper used the eds. of Morris.

The Four-beat Line.

None of these students gives much attention to the four-beat line; see ten Brink, Sprache und Versk. §§ 297-303, Schipper, Engl. Metrik I: 280, Skeat VI: xcvii. See also: Zur Geschichte des kurzen Reimpaars im Mittelenglischen. C. L. Crow. diss. Göttingen, 1892, pp. 63, reviewed Anglia Beibl. 3: 303 (Dieter), Engl. Stud. 18:225 (Kaluza). See also the eds. of the Book of the Duchesse and of the House of Fame by Lange and by Willert.

The study of this line is for Chaucer subject to peculiar limitations, which perhaps have not been sufficiently recognized by editors. The translation of the Roman de la Rose is not with certainty to be termed Chaucer's; the BoDuchesse is preserved in but three texts, and those all of one family, so that a critical text is not possible; while of the HoFame also but three copies remain, two of them sisters (and the same MSS which preserve the BoDuchesse), the third a very corrupt and untrustworthy codex. Our dicta regarding Chaucer's four-beat line are thus exceedingly tentative.

Any student devoting himself to an analysis of Chaucer's short couplet has first to reconstruct the Fairfax-Bodley text of the two