For statutes one, and one for aphorisms

Was hunting; this the priesthood followed; that
By force or sophistry aspired to rule;

To rob another; and another sought,

By civil business, wealth; one moiling lay
Tangled in net of sensual delight;

And one to listless indolence resign'd;

What time from all these empty things escaped,
With Beatrice I thus gloriously

Was borne aloft, and made the guest of heaven.

ROBERT BROWNING (1812-1889)

A poet's surest title to coming fame is probably to be found, not in his acceptance by the public, which is generally wrong, or right too late, but by the poets of the generation immediately following his own. Jeffrey might declare on reading the Excursion,This will never do,' but Wordsworth was already shaping the poetry of Byron and Shelley and Keats; and in like manner, while he was still caviare to the multitude, Browning, in some respects more than Tennyson, was inspiring Rossetti and Morris and Swinburne. And the poets were captivated by the poetry-not by the philosophy of Paracelsus, the religion of Rabbi ben Ezra, the apologetics of Cleon and A Death in the Desert; not, in short, by Browning's teaching, about which so much was to be heard later, when Browning was at last discovered, but by the poetic and dramatic art of his studies in mood and character.

The thought of Browning does not differ profoundly from that of Tennyson. It represents the same conflict between a religious, idealist temperament and the Lucretian trend of thought in an age of physical science and historical criticism: but Browning delights more than Tennyson in nimble dialectics, and his spirit is one of a more buoyant, at times facile, optimism. The general scope of Browning's art, too, is not so distinct from Tennyson's as it appeared to contemporaries. The dramatic lyric or idyll, the dramatic expression in a poem more or less lyrical in form of some mood, some phase of character, is the forte of both rather than the personal lyric of Wordsworth and Shelley or the dramatic presentation of character in action. The mood is often more intensely realized by Tennyson, and his expression of it more equably finished and musical. But Browning's range is wider, his insight subtler, his presentation more instinct with life and movement and humour.

One of the most felicitous appreciations of Browning's genius came from a poet of the generation preceding his own, the veteran Landor :--

There is delight in praising though none hear
Beside the singer; and there is delight
In praising though the praiser sit alone
And see the praised far off him, far above.
Shakespeare is not our poet but the world's;
Therefore of him no speech! and brief for thee,
Browning! Since Chaucer was alive and hale
No man hath walkt along our roads with step
So active, so inquiring eye, or tongue
So varied in discourse. But warmer climes

Give brighter plumage, stronger wing; the breeze
Of Alpine heights thou playest with, borne on
Beyond Sorrento to Amalfi, where

The Sirens wait thee singing song for song.

This comparison with Chaucer probably touches what is essential in Browning's genius more closely than any dissertation on his philosophy of life. The same genial dramatic curiosity and sympathy with which Chaucer portrays his Canterbury pilgrims, or humanizes the weakness of Criseyde and the knavery of Pandarus, inspires Browning's studies of problematical characters like Sordello and Paracelsus; his brilliant miniatures of conscienceless Renaissance rascals like the duke in My Last Duchess or the bishop anxious to outshine his rival even after death; his parleyings with and apologiae for all sorts and conditions of men. Of his artists, Fra Lippo Lippi is a type that suggests Chaucer himself. Pictor Ignotus would have been quite comprehensible to the poets of Hugh of Lincoln and other tender and edifying saints' legends. Andrea del Sarto would certainly have had his monologue cut short by the Host as too heavy and depressing. Browning's range is wider; his analysis deeper; his method more philosophic, less simply poetic and concrete; his lyrical impulse stronger. He has the historic sense of which the Middle Ages knew nothing. Not only men of all ranks and professions but of all climes and times interested him, from David or St. John in the desert to an Italian patriot or a Cardinal Wiseman of to-day. But in both poets we find the same amused and sympathetic interest in all that smacks of human nature. The dominant note of Browning's sometimes fantastic music is the C major of this life'. He has not Donne's complexity of soul, though his love-poetry recalls that of the metaphysicals by its passionate yet intellectual evolution, and its realistic contempt for conventional imagery.

·

The most interesting difference between Chaucer and Browning emerges when one considers the serious intention which runs through the work of the latter. For Browning is a teacher, as Chaucer is in the main a satirist. In the work of both an intention can generally be divined. Neither the one nor the other has the almost superhuman creative indifference of Shakespeare. But in Chaucer the secular and the religious are separated from one another with the sharp dualism of the Middle Ages; in Browning they constantly interpenetrate. Bold as Browning's art and humour sometimes are he could never have written in the detached, naughty vein of Chaucer in the Wife of Bath's prologue and some of his tales. For all his wide sympathies Browning remains at heart a Camberwell dissenter, moral in a definite, English sense of the word, very much hand in glove with them above' (to borrow a phrase of Mr. Hardy's rustics), terribly sure that he knows why God did this or that, and 'what all the blessed Evil's for'. Chaucer has a certain sympathy with the common sense and Epicurean worldliness of the Monk (And I seyde, his opinioun was good'), but he sets him in sharp opposition to his true Christian, the poor parson. It interests Browning to show us in Bishop Blougram a certain blend of the two, a man of the world who is at bottom a good man of religioun'; an intellectual sceptic whose will believes. His apology is one of the most brilliant of Browning's longer studies, because in Blougram there is so much of Browning himself, the man of the world, the Epicurean lover of all the good things of experience, the intellectual athlete, the 'hell-deep' religious instincts which no love of this world or play of

sceptical dialectics could invalidate. Among the seers of poetry Browning is not likely to take a place, despite his high aims and his philosophy. But English poetry would be vastly poorer without his tireless dramatic curiosity, his buoyant vitality, his deep and reverend sense of the worth of life and love.

Of the faults and obscurity of Browning's style much was said in his life-time. His earliest poems were frequently obscure, his later frequently diffuse. But the art of a poem like My Last Duchess is as faultless and inevitable as that of the most jewelled idyll Tennyson ever wrote. It can never be said of Browning's poems, as of Southey's, that they should have been written in prose. His work is rhythmical and poetic to the core; and nowhere is the poet more obvious than in the similes. Swinburne declared that the finest lines in English literature are these from Sordello:

As the King-bird with ages in his plumes
Travels to die in his ancestral glooms.

MATTHEW ARNOLD (1822-1888)

In the poetry of Matthew Arnold the elegiac note prevails. Of a spirit less buoyant than Browning, more critical than Tennyson, he found a certain bitterness, amari aliquid, in the wells of their inspiration. The meaning of life was less obvious to him, human ambitions less worthy, the sources of happiness less abundant, the grounds of hope less secure than to the poets of the previous generation. The tide of belief in revelation was ebbing fast from a desolate shore :

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

'What gain', as wrote one of his contemporaries, to watch for an hour the inscrutable pageant, to be summoned out of nothingness into illusion, and evolved but to aspire and to decay?' Arnold was not sure of the values by which men were content to walk, and accepted life, it would scem, as a doubtful gift, in the spirit of passionless Stoic acquiescence rather than with eagerness and joyful desire of it. He knew himself to belong to an age of questions and hesitations rather than of answers and actions. For consolation amid moral and intellectual perplexities he turned to nature and to art, which supplied in some measure and degree the support more generally sought and obtained in religion, to nature and art, where the spirit of man can forget itself and the discords that vex it, and escape into wider regions of passionless and unbroken harmony. In Thyrsis, where he laments a poet who, like himself, was burdened by the uncertainty of human issues, and in The Scholar Gipsy, he touches the scenes and subjects,-English landscape, classical art and literature,— which were for him the best spiritual simples. In Sohrab and Rustum he attempts heroic narrative in the restrained, disinterested classical manner he never tired of praising, but it is difficult not to believe that at least in the concluding passage which describes Oxus as 'a foiled circuitous wanderer' the poet touches as in an allegory the history of his own disturbed and divided spirit.

EDWARD FITZGERALD (1809-1883)

The Bodleian MS. of the Rubaiyát of Omar Khayyám, a Persian astronomer and poet who lived in the eleventh century, was brought to Fitzgerald's notice by his friend Prof. Cowell. He found something of himself in the old poet, and his imagination was fired. But Fitzgerald's version is rather a new poem inspired by Omar's stanzas than an actual rendering. Poetry is untranslatable, but it has sometimes happened that the music of an earlier poet so charmed a later of another race and language that he re-wrote the score for a different instrument, it may be of finer quality and tone. It was so with Fitzgerald. The first edition, containing seventy-five stanzas, was printed by Quaritch, in 1859, as a shilling pamphlet, but in default of purchasers was relegated to a bookstall, where it was sold for a penny. There it was discovered by some friends of Rossetti's, and quickly attained celebrity in a narrow literary circle. The second edition, containing 110 stanzas, was published in 1868; the third in 1872, and the fourth in 1879, each containing 101 stanzas, were the last in the author's lifetime.

Omar's theme, the unconquered mystery of life and death, the flux, beyond arrest, of human things, the sorrowful and swift flight of beauty and joy, was a theme old as the world itself. But his philosophy, touched with all the sadness of an unwilling surrender to human destiny, enriched with Eastern imagery, and set to new and stately harmonies, ministered to the temper of a generation later than that which found rest in the philosophy of In Memoriam or Christmas Eve and Easter Day, a generation to which intellectual despair was very near, and Epicurean counsels seemed the only wisdom. Nor is it likely to lose its power, so subtly does it render the bitter-sweet of reflective existence, the thought of beauty that must be loved and yet must be relinquished, the uneasy fear, never wholly to be banished from the hearts of men, that their exile from the joys of conscious being will be without return, that the only affections they have known can again be known. It may well remain, while the language lasts, its most finished expression of the spirit's darker broodings, its most searching music in the minor key.

never

GLOSSARY

THIS glossary, primarily of Chaucer's words, is intended for the general reader. The student will use his English and Middle English dictionaries and historical grammar. It makes no pretence to exhaust either the words which might be glossed or the meanings which those glossed might bear, but merely to explain such words as might trouble a general reader, and to give as accurately as possible the meanings which they bear in these texts. In the case of Burns's words we have made careful use of the glossary which he attached to the Edinburgh edition of his works.

Middle English (i.e. in this volume, Chaucer's) spelling is phonetic, and many words which appear strange to the eye will be found familiar when pronounced. Later English spelling became chaotic owing to changes of sound, the silencing of letters which are still printed, the influence of analogies and etymologies real or mistaken.

To give a full account of the changes in English pronunciation is impossible, but the following notes on a few sounds may be of service in reading Chaucer and Burns, and in appreciating some Elizabethan and later rimes :

(1) a. Chaucer's long a (e. g. in 'name') had the broad sound heard in the modern interjection 'ah!' This sound was later what phonologists call fronted' (a), getting the sound of the a in 'can', but long, which is probably its Elizabethan sound. This passed through the long sound of e in 'ken' (which is its general value in Scotch, in e. g. 'name 'face') to its modern sound-' eh' in Northern, e-i in Southern English. (2) e. Long e had in Chaucer's English two sounds, the close sound heard in the modern 'they' (e.g. 'he', 'see'); the open sound heard in the modern there' (e.g. sea). These are difficult to distinguish in Chaucer without some knowledge of their origin, but roughly, those which had the close sound are in later English spelt with ee, those with the open sound with ea (e.g. 'beech' and 'sheath'). The close sound soon after the Middle English period changed to the ee sound it now has, and words such as 'be', 'me', 'decree', were pronounced in Shakespeare's time as now. But the open e retained its sound for a considerable time, which explains such rimes as, e. g. p. 113 (Ben Jonson), sweat''heat', were appeare', 'Hemisphere''there'. Later this open e became close e (eh !), and Pope rimes (p. 189), ' obey'' tea'. Ultimately its pronunciation became that of ee, so that tea'- see is now a correct rime.

(3) i. Long i has in Chaucer the continental sound of long i-our ee in 'see'. This early became a diphthong a-i, and was identical with the then pronunciation of the old French diphthong oi. Dryden and Pope (e.g. p. 206, ll. 346–7) rime 'join-line' (ja-in-la-in). Later the influence of the spelling gave 'join' its present sound (jo-in), but in dialectal English and in Scotch the older sound remains-see Burns, p. 261, 11. 37-42,' while-style-isle-boil'.

(4) ō. Long o in Chaucer had two sounds-close as heard in modern so', open as in the Italian open o, somewhat as in 'soar'. These two are not as a rule rimed together. The former passed into oo-e. g. 'rote' (p. 1) is our 'root'. The open o ('soar') was the only