The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory | Page 6

poems which cluster in Germany round the
name of the "Arch-Poet,"[7] in England round that of Map, without
seeing how much freer of hand is the Latin rhymer in comparison with
him who finds it "hard only not to stumble" in the vernacular. We feel
what a gusto there is in this graceless catachresis of solemn phrase and
traditionally serious literature; we perceive how the language,
colloquially familiar, taught from infancy in the schools, provided with
plentiful literary examples, and having already received perfect licence
of accommodation to vernacular rhythms and the poetical ornaments of
the hour, puts its stammering rivals, fated though they were to oust it,
out of court for the time by its audacious compound of experience and
experiment.
[Footnote 7: On this Arch-Poet see Scherer, History of German
Literature (Engl. ed., Oxford, 1886), i. 68.]
[Sidenote: Examples of its verbal influence.]
The first impression of any one who reads that exceedingly delightful
volume the Camden Society's Poems attributed to Walter Mapes may
be one of mere amusement, of which there are few books fuller. The
agreeable effrontery with which the question "whether to kiss Rose or
Agnes" is put side by side with that "whether it is better to eat flesh
cooked in the cauldron or little fishes driven into the net;" the intense
solemnity and sorrow for self with which Golias discourses in trochaic
mono-rhymed laisses of irregular length, De suo Infortunio; the
galloping dactylics of the "Apocalypse"; the concentrated scandal
against a venerated sex of the De Conjuge non Ducenda, are jocund
enough in themselves, if not invariably edifying. But the
good-for-nothing who wrote
"Fumus et mulier et stillicidia Expellunt hominem a domo propria,"
was not merely cracking jokes, he was exercising himself, or his
countrymen, or at farthest his successors, in the use of the vernacular
tongues with the same lightness and brightness. When he insinuated
that

"Dulcis erit mihi status Si prebenda muneratus, Reditu vel alio, Vivam,
licet non habunde, Saltem mihi detur unde Studeam de proprio,"--
he was showing how things could be put slyly, how the stiffness and
awkwardness of native speech could be suppled and decorated, how the
innuendo, the turn of words, the nuance, could be imparted to
dog-Latin. And if to dog-Latin, why not to genuine French, or English,
or German?
[Sidenote: The value of burlesque.]
And he was showing at the same time how to make verse flexible, how
to suit rhythm to meaning, how to give freedom, elasticity, swing. No
doubt this had in part been done by the great serious poetry to which
we shall come presently, and which he and his kind often directly
burlesqued. But in the very nature of things comic verse must supple
language to a degree impossible, or very seldom possible, to serious
poetry: and in any case the mere tricks with language which the
parodist has to play, familiarise him with the use of it. Even in these
days of multifarious writing, it is not absolutely uncommon to find men
of education and not devoid of talent who confess that they have no
notion how to put things, that they cannot express themselves. We can
see this tying of the tongue, this inability to use words, far more
reasonably prevalent in the infancy of the vernacular tongues; as, for
instance, in the constant presence of what the French call chevilles,
expletive phrases such as the "sikerly," and the "I will not lie," the
"verament," and the "everidel," which brought a whole class of not
undeserving work, the English verse romances of a later time, into
discredit. Latin, with its wide range of already consecrated expressions,
and with the practice in it which every scholar had, made recourse to
constantly repeated stock phrases at least less necessary, if necessary at
all; and the writer's set purpose to amuse made it incumbent on him not
to be tedious. A good deal of this comic writing may be graceless:
some of it may, to delicate tastes, be shocking or disgusting. But it was
at any rate an obvious and excellent school of word-fence, a
gymnasium and exercising-ground for style.
[Sidenote: Hymns.]

And if the beneficial effect in the literary sense of these light songs is
not to be overlooked, how much greater in every way is that of the
magnificent compositions of which they were in some cases the parody!
It will be more convenient to postpone to a later chapter of this volume
a consideration of the exact way in which Latin sacred poetry affected
the prosody of the vernacular; but it is well here to point out that almost
all the finest and most famous examples of the mediæval hymn, with
perhaps the sole exception of Veni, Sancte Spiritus, date from the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries.[8] Ours are the stately rhythms