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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Although Nicholas Grimald has been mentioned as a forerunner of English classicism, his use of the closed and balanced decasyllabic couplet has not been emphasized sufficiently to challenge the position commonly assigned to Beaumont, Sandys, Waller, or Jonson. I shall attempt to point out his neoclassic qualities, and to account for them in terms of his sources. In so doing I hope to throw light upon the early history of the heroic couplet, Grimald's position as a pioneer, and the relation of the Latin elegiac distich to English classical verse.
1 See Camb. Hist. Eng. Lit., III, 180; and cf. Warton, Hist of Eng. Poetry (1875 reprint), 670; Courthope, Hist. of Eng. Poetry, II, 150. Saintsbury, strangely enough, does not even notice that Grimald wrote couplets.
2 Other nominees have been Drummond, Drayton, Heywood, Marlowe, and Hall. Chaucer's couplet (sometimes closed and balanced) was lost in the metrical and linguistic confusion of fifteenth century England, or circled to futile stagnation in the backwater of Scottish verse.
3 This relationship has been thrice proposed—by Professor J. S. P. Tatlock (Nation, XCVIII, Apr. 9, 1914, 390), with Drayton and Heywood as illustrations; Mr. E. C. Knowlton (Nation, XCIX, July 30, 1914, 134), with Marlowe and Hall; and Mr. A. M. Clark (The Library, 4th Ser., Vol. III, No. 3, Dec., 1922, 210-222), again with Heywood.
4 References are to the numbers in L. B. Merrill's Life and Poems of Nicholas Grimald (New Haven, 1925). These I use throughout. In the first table I also add in parentheses the corresponding pages in Arber's reprint of Tottel's Miscellany.
5 I attach no significance to medial pause as a criterion, believing it to be not a deliberately cultivated mannerism, but partly accidental, and partly the inevitable result of the balanced structure.
6 Hist. of Eng. Prosody, II, 274.
7 Saintsbury persistently assumes that Waller got the idea of the heroic couplet from the final couplet of Fairfax's ottava rima stanza; e.g., Hist. Eng. Pros., I, 358-359 (and cf. II, 275-277): “We know that as a matter of fact the couplet writers of the earlier seventeenth century took this from Fairfax.” The basis of this dictum is a single sentence (italicized below) detached from its context; the complete statement (Dryden, Preface to the Fables) follows: “Spenser more than once insinuates, that the soul of Chaucer was transfused into his body, and that he was begotten by him two hundred years after his decease. Milton has acknowledged to me, that Spenser was his original; and many besides myself have heard our famous Waller own, that he derived the harmony of his numbers from Godfrey of Bulloign, which was turned into English by Mr. Fairfax.” This statement no more means that Waller learned to close and balance his couplets from Fairfax's stanza than that Milton learned to “paragraph” his blank verse from Spenser's stanza. There is nothing here to indicate that Dryden was thinking of closure and balance in the phrase “harmony of numbers.”
8 Definition: A couplet is run-on if an element of sense or structure logically belonging to it is carried over into the following couplet in such a way as to mar the latter's unity of sense or structure. Any couplet not so run-on is closed.
9 Here an exact test is difficult, and the figures of critics differ widely. I use balance as the more general term, including antithesis. There is balance when corresponding ideas or constructions are so arranged as to emphasize the correspondence. If such balanced expressions show opposition or contrast, they are antithetical.
10 The same passages are used as for closure. I have counted all cases in which the intent is clear, even though the execution may not be perfect.
11 See also below, p. 541, foot-note. See also the following cases (Merrill's numbers): 2:19, 25-28; 3:3-4, 6, 7-8, 23-24, 28, 30; 4: 12, 18; 5: 3-4, 6, 14, 17-18; 7: 11-12; 8:6, 15-16; 9:3-4; 16:1-2, 7, 10-13, 20; 22: 1-8 (questions-answers); 23: 5-6, 14-19, 23-24; 30: 7-8; 33: 1-2, 5, 29-30, 32, 35-36, 37-40, 45-50; 34: 7-8; 35: 7-10, 15-18, 31-32, 35-36, 39-40, 45-46, 55-58, 63-64, 81-82, 85-86, 92.
12 E.g. (30: 7-8)—
So greeted floods: that, wher ther rode before
A ship, a car may go safe on the shore.
But Waller and Dryden sometimes missed it, too.
13 Life—ryte (16: 1-2).
14 I find 8 (2%): alway (3 times), therefore, baytree, nightyde, deathday, fireflame. Even these are doubtfully weak; the accent is “hovering.”
15 There are a few in his non-couplet verse. Of the couplets in Marlowe's Hero and Leander 8% are feminine; in Chapman's continuation 9%; in Spenser's Mother Hubberd's Tale 10%; in Waller, Dryden, and Pope, almost none.
16 The other 2½% comprise the weak endings noted above, and the words indifferent and Phaeton. Pope's Rape, I. & II, has 99% primary accents or monosyllables; Hero and Leander, 82%; Mother Hubberd's Tale, 78½%. It is worth noting, too, that Grimald avoids long terminal words; 99% are of one or two syllables. Cf. Pope, with 97%, and contrast Spenser and Marlowe, with 87½% and 85%. Recall also that Sir John Beaumont's neoclassic pronouncement (Chalmers, Eng. Poets, VI, 30-31) praises “our Saxon shortness . . . . . In choice of words fit for the ending-place.”
17 There is one final preposition. Of pronouns there are 3.75%; cf. Pope's 1.7% and Marlowe's 7.5%.
18 In 3: 15 Merrill's ed. inserts a superfluous you; it does not occur in Arber's reprint.
19 Concerning the originals, see Table, p. 539. In translations from elegiacs, the smaller compass of the English couplet forbids superfluous insertions.
20 The similarity of thought and form suggests that in this unique triplet Grimald may have had in mind the three-line (aaa) stanzas of Thomas of Celano's hymn, Dies Irae.
21 There is no apparent connection between Grimald's verse and the sporadic couplets mentioned above (p. 534); certainly the explanation now to be offered is the easier.
22 Merrill's edition gives the supposed Latin or Greek originals of 18 of Grimald's poems.
23 (1) Prof. T. K. Whipple (Martial and the English Epigram, Berkeley, 1925, p. 318) notes resemblances between Nos. 21 and 34, and Martial V. 59 and IX, 51, but adds that “the resemblance is so general that it is more probable that Grimald was following Renaissance originals than Martial.” (Also cf. No. 34 with Greek Anthology VII, 551—Vol. II of the Loeb ed.) (2) As the model of Nos. 24 and 25 Professor Whipple (op. cit., p. 314) cites Erasmus, Adagia, Chil. II, Centur. iii, Prov. 49; this I have not seen. Certainly I do not agree with Mr. Merrill (p. 432) that Grimald “worked directly from the Greek”; for elsewhere he regularly translates couplet-for-couplet—almost line-for-line; whereas in 24 and 25 he is never with the Greek, lagging behind (in each poem) until the last two lines, into which he compresses three and one-half Greek lines.
24 For 7, 8, and 9 Merrill gives Latin prose versions. Of No. 9 there is also a Greek version (Anthol. XIV, 110—Vol. V of the Loeb ed.). Grimald's version is twice as long as the Latin or the Greek, and lacks a phrase present in each of them (forma dispare and ). Perhaps No. 9 is a translation of a Renaissance Latin version.
25 Gnomic epigrams, 7, 8; elegies and epitaphs, 33, 34, 35, 40; greetings, 16.
26 Martial's epigrams are 75% elegiac; Ausonius's, more than 80%; in the Greek Anthology the percentage is certainly much higher, as also in Buchanan, Campion, John Owen, and Charles Fitzgeffrey. I have not seen Beza's Latin works.
27 See above, pp. 533-4.
28 The only figures I can offer are by G. H. Bubendey (Die Symmetrie der romischen Elegie, Hamburg, 1876; Table on p. 10), showing coincidence of distich with independent clause (or complete sentence) in Ovid, 94%; Tibullus, 93%; Propertius, 83%; Catullus, 54%. Since a dependent clause, or even a phrase, may constitute a closed couplet, the percentage of closure would undoubtedly be higher than these figures show.
29 For good examples of such reproduction, see Nos. 2, 3, 4, 22, 23, 30, 37. I submit the following specimen—Beza's Elegia V, followed by Grimald's 3: 13-24:
Hic videor Cereris fugientem cernere natam,
Hic videor furvi cemere Ditis equos;
Littora si specto, vitreas tunc cognito Nymphas,
Fervidaque in medio nu'mina saepe mari.
Quo magis evado montes sublimis in altos,
Hoc proprior Veneris fit puer ille mihi;
Si placeant urbes: vis semel omnia dicam?
Illic quum videam plurima, nulla placent.
Illius nunc carpo oculos, nunc illius ora,
Haec capite, haec pedibus displicit, illa genis;
Denique materies si desit, crimina fingo:
Et quaecunque aliis candida, nigra mihi est.
Here I behold dame Ceres ymp in flight:
Here bee, methynk, black Plutoes steeds in sight.
Stronds if I look upon, the Nymphs I mynde:
And, in mid sea, oft fervent powrs I fynde,
The hyer that I clyme, in mountanes wylde,
The nearer mee approcheth Venus chylde.
Towns yf I haunt: in short, shall I all say?
There soondry fourmes I view, none to my pay.
Her favour now I note, and now her yies:
Her head, amisse: her foot, her cheeks, her guyse.
In fyne, where mater wants, defauts I fayn:
Whom other, fayr: I deem, she hath soom stayn.
Grimald carried over into English most of the Latin balance; and in his Latin translations most of the balance is reproduced from the Latin. Naturally, so good a classicist as Grimald knew other models of balance and antithesis; but here we find him in the act of using this model.
30 To be sure, the hexameter is invariably feminine; but the resounding bang of the pentameter is the more impressive.
31 Having waived the medial cesura as an essential neoclassic quality (see above, p. 533, foot-note), I am deprived of utilizing the corresponding feature of the Latin pentameter.
32 Notably Ovid; I find 26 in the 56 lines of Amores II, xi (funestas aguas, turgida vela, etc.). Ovid was almost as fond as Pope of balance and antithesis, and the other qualities mentioned above appear frequently in his work. The same thing is true, in varying degrees, in the other elegists, in Martial, and in the Renaissance Latinists. Thus it is evident that the influence I am emphasizing here continued to operate throughout the formative period of the heroic couplet. It merely happens that Grimald is a good laboratory specimen, and is particularly interesting because of his early date.
33 This implies no denial of possible influence by the French couplet—say after the first decade of the seventeenth century. But by that time dozens of versifiers knew the trick.
