This absorption of
the French was most fortunate for English. To the Anglo-Saxon
vocabulary--vigorous, but harsh, limited in extent, and lacking in fine
discriminations and power of abstract expression, was now added nearly the
whole wealth of French, with its fullness, flexibility, and grace. As a
direct consequence the resulting language, modern English, is the richest
and most varied instrument of expression ever developed at any time by any
race.
THE RESULT FOR POETRY. For poetry the fusion meant even more than for
prose. The metrical system, which begins to appear in the thirteenth
century and comes to perfection a century and a half later in Chaucer's
poems combined what may fairly be called the better features of both the
systems from which it was compounded. We have seen that Anglo-Saxon verse
depended on regular stress of a definite number of quantitatively long
syllables in each line and on alliteration; that it allowed much variation
in the number of unstressed syllables; and that it was without rime. French
verse, on the other hand, had rime (or assonance) and carefully preserved
identity in the total number of syllables in corresponding lines, but it
was uncertain as regarded the number of clearly stressed ones. The derived
English system adopted from the French (1) rime and (2) identical
line-length, and retained from the Anglo-Saxon (3) regularity of stress.
(4) It largely abandoned the Anglo-Saxon regard for quantity and (5) it
retained alliteration not as a basic principle but as an (extremely useful)
subordinate device.
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