Palamon and Arcite | Page 8

Palamon and Arcite may seem to us superfluous, for a well-educated man in the nineteenth century is familiar with his Chaucer in the original; but in the sixteenth century our early poets were regarded as little better than barbarians, and their language was quite unintelligible. It was, therefore, a distinct addition to the literature of his age when he rescued from oblivion the Knight's Tale, the first of the Canterbury Tales, and gave it to his world as Palamon and Arcite.
Here, as in his translations, Dryden catches the spirit of his original and follows it; but he does not track slavishly in its footprints. In this particular poem he follows his leader more closely than in some of his other paraphrases, and the three books in which he divides his Palamon and Arcite_ scarcely exceed in length the original Knight's Tale_. The tendency toward diffuse expansion, an excess of diluting epithets, which became a feature of eighteenth-century poetry, Dryden has sensibly shunned, and has stuck close to the brisk narrative and pithy descriptions of Chaucer. If the subject in hand be concrete description, as in the Temple of Mars, Dryden is at his best, and surpasses his original; but if the abstract enters, as in the portraiture on the walls, he expands, and when he expands he weakens. To illustrate:
"The smiler with the knif under the cloke"
has lost force when Dryden stretches it into five verses:
"Next stood Hypocrisy, with holy leer; Soft smiling, and demurely looking down, But hid the dagger underneath the gown: The assassinating wife, the household fiend, And far the blackest there, the traitorfriend."
The anachronisms in the poem are Chaucer's. When he put this story of Greek love and jealousy and strife into the mouth of his Knight, he was living in the golden age of chivalry; and he simply transferred its setting to this chivalrous story of ancient Greece. The arms, the lists, the combat, the whole environment are those of the England of Edward III, not the Athens of Theseus. Dryden has left this unchanged, realizing the charm of its mediaeval simplicity. As Dryden gives it to us the poem is an example of narrative verse, brisk in its movement, dramatic in its action, and interspersed with descriptive passages that stimulate the imagination and satisfy the sense.
Coming as it did in the last years of his life, the poem found him with his vocabulary fully developed and his versification perfected; and these are points eminently essential in narrative verse. When Dryden began his literary career, he had but just left the university, and his speech smacked somewhat of the pedantry of the classical scholar of the times. Then came the Restoration with its worship of French phrase and its liberal importation. His easy-going life as a Bohemian in the early sixties strengthened his vernacular, and his association with the wits at Will's Coffee House developed his literary English. A happy blending of all these elements, governed by his strong common sense, gave him at maturity a vocabulary not only of great scope, but of tremendous energy and vitality.
At the time of the production of Palamon and Arcite Dryden had, by long practice, become an absolute master of the verse he used. As we have seen, his early work was impregnated with the peculiarities of the Marinists; and even after the ascendency of French taste at the Restoration he still dallied with the stanza, and was not free from conceits. But his work in the heroic drama and in satire had determined his verse form and developed his ability in its use. In this poem, as in the bulk of his work, he employs the unenjambed pentameter distich; that is, a couplet with five accented syllables in each verse and with the sense terminating with the couplet. Dryden's mastery of this couplet was marvelous. He did not attain to the perfect polish of Pope a score of years later, but he possessed more vitality; and to this strength must be added a fluent grace and a ready sequence which increased the beauty of the measure and gave to it a nervous energy of movement. The great danger that attends the use of the distich is monotony; but Dryden avoided this. By a constant variation of cadence, he threw the natural pause now near the start, now near the close, and now in the midst of his verse, and in this way developed a rhythm that never wearies the ear with monotonous recurrence. He employed for this same purpose the hemistich or half-verse, the triplet or three consecutive verses with the same rhyme, and the Alexandrine with its six accents and its consequent well-rounded fullness.
So much for Palamon and Arcite. First put into English by the best story-teller in our literature, it was retold at the close