[Footnote 25: This couplet is an exaggeration of the original:
I followed ay my dames lore,
As well of that as of other thinges more.]
[Footnote 26: Tearing garments, and throwing dust upon the head was a
custom with some ancient nations, but was not an English habit, and
there is no allusion to it in the text of Chaucer:
When that my fourthe husband was on bier,
I wept algate, and made a sorry cheer,
As wives musten for it is usage;
And with my kerchief covered my visage;
But, for that I was purveyed of a mate,
I wept but small, and that I undertake.
The hard-hearted selfishness which does not bestow a thought upon the
dead, being solely intent upon enjoying existence with the living, comes
out in a yet more odious light when she narrates her feelings at the
funeral. Her mind is entirely taken up with the young clerk, and mainly
with admiration of his figure:
When that I saw him go
After the bier, methought he had a pair
Of legges and of feet so clean and fair
That all my heart I gave unto his hold.]
[Footnote 27: She does not in the original profess "to repent it still,"
and for the excellent reason that, after a period of rebellion on the
part of the clerk, he had become a puppet in her hands, and had rendered
up both himself and his chattels to her undisputed management.]
[Footnote 28: The wife of Bath says she insisted upon going from house
to house, according to her former custom, and the clerk set his face
against the practice. His instances from Roman story were directed
against this special failing, and were not general declamations on the
virtue of Roman matrons and Gracchus' mother. The clerk told the
gossiping, intriguing dame that Simplicius Gallus left his wife for
ever, merely because he caught her looking out of the door with her head
uncovered. He told her of another Roman that in the same manner deserted
his wife because she one day went to see a game without his knowledge.
His quotation from Holy Writ is not "some grave sentence," but the
particular sentence of Ecclesiasticus which says, "Give the water no
passage; neither a wicked woman liberty to gad abroad." When the context
has been generalised the lines which follow have not the accumulative
sting of the original, where they are an additional example of the evil
consequences of suffering women to rove about. Pope has further weakened
their force by supposing them to have no higher authority than the
opinion of the clerk. In Chaucer they are given as a proverb, and the
husband urges them with triumph because they convey the general
experience of mankind. The language is stronger than in Pope. Instead of
mildly pronouncing that the man who suffers his wife to visit "halwes"
or the shrines of saints "deserves a fool's cap," the proverb declares
that he "is worthy to be hanged on the galwes."]
[Footnote 29: The clerk in the original reads with greater assiduity
than "oft at evening."
He had a book that gladly night and day,
For his desport he woulde read alway.
After describing the contents of the book the wife of Bath adds,
And alle these were bound in one volume;
And every night and day was his custume,
When he had leisure and vacatioun
From other worldes occupation,
To reden in this book of wicked wives.
This portion of the narrative in Chaucer is exceedingly pleasant and
natural. The wife says that she paid no regard to the clerk's Roman
precedents, his quotations from Scripture, his old saws and proverbs.
Ne I would not of him corrected be;
I hate him that my vices telleth me.
The contempt with which she treated his exhortations drove him utterly
mad, and it was then that he betook himself to reading all the
literature he could find that bore upon the vices and frailties of
women. The evidence of their general perversity with which his studies
supplied him consoled him for the ungovernable disposition of his own
wife, and he used "to laugh away full fast" over the record of their
obstinacy and evil doings. He had the sweeter satisfaction of revenge.
His mirth galled his imperious, froward wife, and when he read aloud the
endless detail of female iniquities, backed up by the authority of great
names, she could restrain her rage no longer, and the storm burst forth
under which the wretched clerk succumbed.]
[Footnote 30: Pope has omitted a stroke of humour; for in the original,
she naturally mistakes the rank and age of St. Jerome.
And eke there was a clerk sometime in Rome
A _cardinal,_ that highten St. Jerome.--WARTON.]
[Footnote 31: This passage acquaints us with the writers who were
popular in the days of Chaucer.--WARTON.
Warton takes no account of the fact that Chaucer was only enumerating
the authors which furnished arguments against women. Valerius is a tract
by Walter Mapes, which bears the title "Epistola Valerii ad Rufinum."
St. Jerome's denunciations of matrimony are in his treatise "Contra
Jovinianum." Tertullian wrote strongly against second marriages; and
severe animadversions upon female vices or weaknesses have a large place
in his works. "Who is meant by Chrysippus," says Tyrwhitt, "I cannot
guess." Ovid's Art of Love, and the Letters of Eloisa and Abelard are
known by name to all the world.]
[Footnote 32: This line is not in Chaucer.]
[Footnote 33: If Pope intended to follow the original, "good" means
"good legends."]
[Footnote 34: The wife of Bath, having laid down the maxim that it is
impossible for any clerk to speak well of women, except it be of the
saints, indignantly inquires,
Who painted the lion, tell me, who?
and with an oath she adds,
If women hadde written stories,
As clerkes have within their oratories,
They would have writ of men more wickedness,
Than all the mark of Adam may redress.
"Than all the mark" is than all that bear the mark or image of Adam.
Pope's version, in which the wife asks the question and tamely answers
it, is flat in comparison with the scornful repetition of the emphatic
"who?" Yet he has employed this reduplication of a predominant word at
ver. 397, where it has much less effect. Judiciously used, there is
force and beauty in the turn, as in the couplet from Addison's
translation of Ovid:
Her sisters often, as 'tis said, would cry
Fie, Salmacis, what always idle, fie:]
[Footnote 35: Pope, misapplying the original, has adopted an image which
is astronomically false. Chaucer spoke the language of astrology, and
said that each of these planets fell in the exaltation of the other; for
a planet was in its exaltation when it was in the sign of the zodiac,
where it was supposed to exercise its greatest influence, and fell, or
was in its dejection, in the sign where it exercised the least. Mercury,
the god of science, was in his exaltation in Virgo, where Venus, the
goddess of love, had no sway. Venus was in her exaltation in Pisces, and
there Mercury was in his dejection. A man could not be under the
government of incompatible planetary powers, and since scholars served
Mercury,