CHAUCER. 197 



our language (better even than Coleridge s) are to be found in 

 Mother Goose, composed by nurses wholly by ear and beating 

 time as they danced the baby on their knee. I suspect Chaucer 

 and Shakespeare would be surprised into a smile by the learned 

 arguments which supply their halting verses with every kind of 

 excuse except that of being readable. When verses were written 

 to be chanted, more licence could be allowed, for the ear 

 tolerates the widest deviations from habitual accent in words 

 that are sung. Segnius irritant demissa per aure?n. To some 

 extent the same thing is true of anapaestic and other tripping 

 measures, but we cannot admit it in marching tunes like those 

 of Chaucer. He wrote for the eye more than for the voice, as 

 poets had begun to do long before.* Some loose talk of Cole 

 ridge, loose in spite of its affectation of scientific precision, about 

 retardations and the like, has misled many honest persons 

 into believing that they can make good verse out of bad prose. 

 Coleridge himself, from natural fineness of ear, was the best 

 metrist among modern English poets, and, read with proper 

 allowances, his remarks upon versification are always instructive 

 to whoever is not rhythm-deaf. But one has no patience with 

 the dyspondseuses, the paeon primuses, and what not, with 

 which he darkens verses that are to be explained only by the 

 contemporary habits of pronunciation. Till after the time of 

 Shakespeare we must always bear in mind that it is not a 

 language of books but of living speech that we have to deal 

 with. Of this language Coleridge had little knowledge, except 

 what could be acquired through the ends of his fingers as they 

 lazily turned the leaves of his haphazard reading. If his eye 

 was caught by a single passage that gave him a chance to 

 theorise he did not look farther. Speaking of Massinger, for 

 example, he says, When a speech is interrupted, or one of the 

 characters speaks aside, the last syllable of the former speech 



* Froissart s description of the book of traites amoureux et de moralite, which he 

 had had engrossed for presentation to Richard II. in 1394, is enough to bring tears to 

 the eyes of a modern author. Et lui plut tres grandement; et plaire bien lui devoit, 

 car il etoit enlumine, ecrit et historic et couvert de vermeil velours a dis cloux d argent 



poems were also read aloud. 



Pur remembrer des ancessours 

 Les fails et les dits et les mours, 

 Deit Ten les livres et les gestes 

 Et les estoires lire afestes. Roman dit Rcu. 

 But Chaucer wrote for the private reading of the closet. 



