sible to arrive at any easy generalisation about the culture of the Dark Ages.1 Rodulphus was one of the unfortunate children of whom Rabelais speaks, put into a monastery at twelve years old, not having then, nor ever acquiring, any fitness for the religious life, beyond frequent visions of the Devil. He was expelled, after he had made himself a nuisance to every one, and became a vagrant from one monastery to another, picking up odd jobs. But he had some liking for books, and settled down towards the end of his life, and wrote his history. He had few historical sources, besides tradition; and his book is one of the most authentic renderings anywhere to be found of the average mind of the time-both in the contents of the mind, visions, portents, stories, and in its artless movement from any point to any circumference. He has sometimes been treated too heavily, as if the whole Middle Age were summed up in Rodulphus Glaber. That is not so, but he is nevertheless a true son of his time, and has some claim to speak the epilogue at the close of the Dark Ages. No literary work in the Dark Ages can be compared for the extent and far-reaching results of its The new forms influence with the development of popular of Latin verse. Latin verse. The hymns went further and affected a larger number of people's minds than 1 Raoul Glaber; les cinq livres de ses histoires (900-1044) publiés par Maurice Prou, 1886. Cf. Gebhart, l'état d'âme d'un moine de l'an 1000-le chroniqueur Raoul Glaber: in Revue des deux Mondes, Oct. 1, 1891. 7 anything else in literature. They gave the impulse to fresh experiment which was so much needed by scholarly persons; provided new rules and a new ideal of expression for the unscholarly. Those who had no mind to sit down and compose an epithalamium in hexameters or a birthday epistle in elegiacs, might still write poetry in Latin,-unclassical Latin, indeed, but not dull, not ungentle-a language capable of melody in verse and impressiveness in diction. As Bede says, the ear in rhythmic verse will observe a measure of its own, and scholarly poets will use in a scholarly way the forms that the common makers use rudely: "quem (sc. rhythmum) vulgares poetæ necesse est rustice, docti faciant docte." The most beautiful things in Latin rhyme belong to a later period, it is true, and will be appraised by the Editor of this series in the following volume; but the Dark Ages began it. Also the free Latin verse is the origin of all the rhythms and measures of modern poetry in the Romance languages, and in English and German too, where they are content, as Shakespeare and Milton generally were, with the Romance types of versification. There seem to be two different ways in which Latin was made available for popular poetry. Irregular Latin verse might be either (1) in the classical forms used irregularly, or (2) in forms not classical at all. But in both cases, whether, for example, an iambic trimeter is written without respect for quantity, or whether on the other hand the irregular poet takes a line of his own, not imitating any classical pattern of verse, there is the common feature that quantity is neglected, or at any rate not treated under the old rules. In both cases there is a rebellion against the Greek tradition of prosody, introduced at Rome by the founders of Latin poetry under the Republic. This emancipation from the Greek rule of good verse sometimes but not always went along with a strong metrical emphasis on the accent, like that which in Greece itself was replacing the old verse-measures with the new political " line, the verse of the Greek ballads.1 In Latin there was more excuse for it than in Greek, because it was a return to the natural genius of the language. This of course does not make things any better from the classical point of view; but it increases the dignity of accentual Latin among the modern forms of verse, if it can in any way be traced back to the Saturnian age. A pedigree of this sort has been attempted by some scholars.2 Whatever may be the true history of the Saturnian verse, whether it died out after the beginning of classical Latin poetry, or survived in country places and came back in a new form in French and Provençal, it is certain that the old Latin rhythms, before the Greek forms were introduced, had more likeness to modern verse in their accent than Greek verse has. It is known also that the common people when they adopted classical measures used them accentually: "the popular poetry of the Republic as well as of the Empire was markedly ac1 See below, p. 343. 2 See Stengel, Romanische Verslehre, in Gröber's Grundriss, ii. i. 1 centual." Just as in English poetry there is a continual dissension between the naturalised French measures, decasyllabic, octosyllabic, &c., and the licentious spirit of the language, which will not count the syllables exactly, so in Latin the tunes of common speech interfered with the strict use of prosody. The analogies between English and Latin poetry are striking, when their histories are compared. The Latin Saturnian, it has often been thought, had the same fortune as the English alliterative verse; Chaucer is "our English Ennius," and his contemptuous allusion to the older fashion of poetry "I cannot geste ROM RAM RUF by lettre," is in the same spirit as the slighting reference to Nævius in the younger poet's Annals: "Scripsere alii rem Vorsubu' quos olim Fauni vatesque canebant." Ennius is all for the Greek prosody in Latin, as Chaucer is for the French metres in English. But there is a closer resemblance than this analogy of Saturnian and alliterative English, in the practice of the English and Latin poets who adopted the foreign models and did their best to be regular. Chaucer's verse is not the same as his French masters wrote; it does not keep the French rules exactly, and its graces and beauties are not those of the French. The Latin poets wrote like Homer, as near as they could, but they could not 1 W. M. Lindsay, The Accentual Element in Early Latin Verse: Transactions of the Philological Society, March 2, 1894. escape from their language: in Virgil and Ovid there are traces of the Italian Faun-vestiges of the old poetical diction, an emphasis which is not Greek, but comes down from the ancient days, before the vates and the Camenæ had made way for the Greek Muses. Greek metres were brought into agreement with the accent of Latin speech. One of the marvellous things in Latin at the end of the classical age is the effect of the accent in the Pervigilium Veneris “Cras amet qui numquam amavit, quique amavit cras amet," and in the poem of Tiberianus "Amnis ibat inter arva valle fusus frigida, From this "Qu'una domna s'es clamada de sos gardadors a mei” in which the accentual effect is the same, and the regard for quantity equally distinct, though not quite so thorough-going. In the interval there were many poets who kept the same sort of measure-Prudentius, Fortunatus, and others. In this particular kind of trochaic verse it proved to be fairly easy to adapt the Greek form to popular use without spoiling its original 1 Baehrens, P. L. Min., iii. 264; cf. Mackail, Latin Literature. |