“He is insensibly subdued
To settled quiet; he is one by whom
All effort seems forgotten: one to whom
Long patience hath such mild composure given,
That patience now doth seem a thing of which
He hath no need.”
Wordsworth.
They say old age is cold, but this summer weather boils my blood, and
drives me to every corner where a little motion among the leaves affords
a surmise of gentle airs. Which reminds me of the comic sufferings of my
friend Pfeffers, when first he made trial of our cis-atlantic climate.
He so panted and perspired, that we feared he might go off in a paroxysm
of some tropical disease. It was many a long year ago, yet Pfeffers is
still alive; by this token, that he is my guest at this present writing.
His tongue retains a few scarcely perceptible Shibboleths of his German
original. Long ago, he threw himself heart and soul into our American
usages, and married an American wife. Age sits lightly on him. He is
brown, and square built, and he dresses young. An auburn wig surmounts
his mahogany visage with formidable dignity. Pfeffers is an
ornithologist, and—with a zeal almost furious—has traversed all our
Southern States in pursuit of the fowls of the air. That he has escaped
poisoning himself with the arsenic which he uses in his taxidermy is to
be ascribed to the volumes of tobacco-smoke which he has inhaled during
half a century.
In the odd changes of life’s wheel, some of my youthful companions have
turned up in strange places. Pfeffers has just informed me, that he met
at Memphis—not in Egypt—an old lady, who remembered having seen me in
Dublin. It was no other than Grace O’Meara, whom I left a bouncing girl
in her gallant father’s house, and who is now a hale but wrinkled
grandmamma. Through her report, I learned that Guerin—the friend of my
beloved De Mornay—lived to a very great age in the island of
Martinique, where he continued, till the last, to pursue his
philosophical and humane studies. Gentle Frenchman—how many, less
deserving, are honored with monumental marbles!
My literary reminiscences were much freshened by Pfeffers, and his
presence carried me back to the vine-clad heights of the Rhine. What
delicious fragrance comes back to one’s inner sense from the balmy
fields of juvenile experience! Surely this is one of the principal
compensations of benign Providence to men in years. Old age itself does
not always impair the faculty of living over again the innocent
pleasures of life. Garrulous we are, it cannot be denied, at our time of
life, and every octogenarian is prone to be a _laudator temporis acti_.
But if young folks were wise, they would lend willing ears, and thus
would have us in our best moments, to wit—when we are rejoicing in the
past, rather than tasking the outworn powers to receive the new
impressions of the present.
I seem to float again upon the Rhine, and again to hear the song of the
vine-dressers, suspended from the craggy and terraced slopes where the
white wines of princes are produced.
Pfeffers and I have diverged more and more as we have grown older, and
each is rigid in his cramps and oddities. Except in smoking, there is
scarcely a point on which we agree. He loves to read Rabelais; whom,
maugre all the eulogies of Coleridge and other great men, I continue to
loathe as a filthy old man. He glories in Jean-Paul, whom I never could
comprehend. He places Dante and Goethe above all poets, while I stick to
Shakspeare, Milton and Schiller. He is a red-democrat, croaks songs of
Freiligrath, and rehearses rhapsodies of Kinkel; I am a conservative, an
old federalist, and a hater of _emeutes_. He follows Blum and Heine, and
is a _Lichtfreund_, or _illuminé_, ready to guillotine priests and
proclaim a millenium of unbelief; I am a churchgoer, and almost a Quaker
in my quiet musings. He derides all such dreams as those of Guerin and
De Mornay, and votes all the Pascals, Nicoles, Fenelons and Gurneys to
be milksops and pietistic fools; I equally scorn his Bruno Bauers and
Carlyles. His old age is fiery, restless, testy and unmerciful; on the
contrary, I grow calmer, and more averse to agitation. He is a
thorough-paced abolitionist, of the _ruat cælum_ school; I am disposed
to follow Sir Robert Walpole’s _quiteta non movere_. We live in a
pleasing pain of endless controversy, which puts out his pipe a dozen
times a-day, while it only causes my clouds of smoke to roll away in
heavier volume.
My chief amusement has been in planting trees for the use of posterity,
and in decorating a little church which the ladies of our neighborhood
have been rearing out of the work of their own hands. I have inserted in
my will—after a competency for Alice—a provision looking toward the
perpetuation of a school, in the spot where my happy pedagogic days were
past. The shadows of the evening have brought with them a grateful calm.
As I contemplate the setting sun, it is soothing to consider that it
will rise to-morrow on a land which grows greater and happier every day;
a land which, in spite of occasional agitations, has settled itself with
dignity on the principles of Washington; a land in which fanatical
bonfires die out without any conflagration.
Adieu, gentlest reader! If these chapters seem to you rambling and
empty, be assured they seem not less so to me. Yet the utterance of
trifles has given me a relief; and if they add a pleasure to any who
peruse them, it will be to me a content and a recompense.
* * * * *
=SONNET.—AGE.=
=BY WM. ALEXANDER.=
Brood sombrous clouds above a midnight sea;
Rude, rifted rocks rise round the final shore
Of life’s wide world. Through the thick mist that o’er
The scene spreads sadness, lo! all silently
Glides a lone, wearied, shattered bark along;
Sun, moon and stars are darkened unto him,
Its aged voyager. His eyesight dim,
Nor joy nor pleasure can to him belong—
Ferried fast on by many drooping hours,
Nears he the leaden stream’s wide mouth, at last,
Whose waters wildly roar as run they past
Into eternity’s vast flood. All powers
Fail now to him. With numerous sorrows rife,
Enters he then the haven of immortal life.
* * * * *
=CHAUCER AND HIS TIMES.=
=BY THOMAS B. SHAW.=
We consider the age of Chaucer as the true starting-point of the English
literature properly so called. In Italy letters appear to have revived
after the long and gloomy period characterized by the somewhat false
term of “the dark ages,” with astonishing rapidity. Like germs and seeds
of plants which have lain for centuries buried deep in the unfruitful
bowels of the earth, and suddenly brought up by some convulsion of
nature to the surface, the intellect of Italy burst forth, in the
fourteenth century, into a tropical luxuriance, putting out its fairest
flowers of poetry, and its solidest and most beautiful fruits of wisdom
and of wit. Dante died seven years before, and Petrarch and Boccaccio
about fifty years after, the birth of Chaucer, who thus was exposed to
the strongest and directest influence of the genius of these great men.
How great that influence was, we shall presently see. The great causes,
then, which modified and directed the genius of Chaucer were—first, the
new Italian poetry, which then suddenly burst forth upon the world, like
Pallas from the brain of Jupiter, perfect and consummate in its virgin
strength and beauty; second, the now decaying Romanz or Provençal
poetry; and third, the doctrines of the Reformation, which were
beginning, obscurely but irresistibly, to agitate the minds of men; a
movement which took its origin, as do all great and permanent
revolutions, in the lower depths of the popular heart, heaving gradually
onward, like the tremendous ground-swell of the equator, until it burst
with resistless strength upon the Romish Church in Germany and in
England, sweeping all before it. Wickliffe, who was born in 1324, only
four years before Chaucer, had undoubtedly communicated to the poet many
of his bold doctrines: the father of our poetry and the father of our
reformed religion were both attached to the party of the celebrated John
of Gaunt, and were both honored with the friendship and protection of
that powerful prince: Chaucer, indeed, was the kinsman of the earl,
having married the sister of Catherine Swinford, first the mistress and
ultimately the wife of “time-honored Lancaster;” and the poet’s varied
and uncertain career seems to have faithfully followed all the
vicissitudes of John of Gaunt’s eventful life.
Geoffrey Chaucer was born, as he informs us himself, in London; and for
the date of an event so important to the destinies of English letters,
we must fix it, on the authority of the inscription upon his tomb, as
having happened in the year 1328; that is to say, at the commencement of
the splendid and chivalrous reign of Edward III. The honor of having
been the place of his education has been eagerly disputed by the two
great and ancient universities of Oxford and Cambridge; the former,
however, of the two learned sisters having apparently the best
established right to the maternity—or at least the fosterage—of so
illustrious a nursling. Cambridge founds her claim upon the circumstance
of Chaucer’s having subscribed one of his early works “Philogenet _of_
_Cambridge_, clerk.” He afterward returned to London, and there became a
student of the law. His detestation of the monks appears, from a very
curious document, to have begun even so early as his abode in the grave
walls of the Temple; for we find the name of Jeffrey Chaucer inscribed
in an ancient register as having been fined for the misdemeanor of
beating a friar in Fleet street.
The first efforts of a revival of letters will always be made in the
path of translation; and to this principle Chaucer forms no exception.
He was an indefatigable translator; and the whole of many—nay, a great
part of _all_—his works bears unequivocal traces of the prevailing
taste for imitation. How much he has improved upon his models, what new
lights he has placed them in, with what skill he has infused fresh life
into the dry bones of obscure authors, it will hereafter be our business
to inquire. He was the poetical pupil of Gower, and, like Raphael and
Shakspeare, he surpassed his master: Gower always speaks with respect of
his illustrious pupil in the art of poetry; and, in his work entitled
“Confessio Amantis,” places in the mouth of Venus the following elegant
compliment;—
And grate wel Chaucer, when ye mete,
As my disciple and my poéte:
For in the flowers of his youth,
In sundry wise, as he well couthe,
Of ditees and of songés glade
The which he for my sake made, etc.
These lines also prove that Chaucer began early to write; and probably
our poet continued during the whole course of his eventful life, to
labor assiduously in the fields of letters.
His earliest works were strongly tinctured with the manner, nay, even
with the mannerism, of the age. They are much fuller of allegory than
his later productions; they are distinguished by a greater parade of
scholarship, and by a deeper tinge of that amorous and metaphysical
mysticism which pervades the later Provençal poetry, and which reached
its highest pitch of fantastical absurdity in the _Arrêts d’Amour_ of
Picardy and Languedoc. As an example of this we may cite his “Dream,” an
allegorical composition written to celebrate the nuptials of his friend
and patron John of Gaunt, with Blanche, the heiress of Lancaster.
Chaucer was in every sense a man of the world: he was the ornament of
two of the most brilliant courts in the annals of England—those of
Edward III. and his successor Richard II. He also accompanied the former
king in his expedition into France, and was taken prisoner about 1359,
at the siege of Retters; and in 1367 we find him receiving from the
crown a grant of 20 marks, _i. e._ about 200_l._ of our present money.
Our poet, thus distinguished as a soldier, as a courtier, and as a
scholar, was honored with the duty of forming part of an embassy to the
splendid court of Genoa, where he was present at the nuptials of
Violante, daughter of Galeazzo, Duke of Milan, with the Duke of
Clarence. At this period he made the acquaintance of Petrarch, and
probably of Boccaccio also: to the former of these illustrious men he
certainly was personally known; for he hints, in his “Canterbury Tales,”
his having learned from him the beautiful and pathetic tale of the
patient Griselda:—
Learned at Padua of a worthy clerke
Francis Petrarke, the laureate poét:
Highte thys clerke, whose rhethorique sweet
Enlumined al Itale of poesy.
It was during his peregrinations in France and Italy that Chaucer drew
at the fountain-head those deep draughts from the Hippocrene of Tuscany
and of Provence which flow and sparkle in all his compositions. It is
certain that he introduced into the English language an immense quantity
of words absolutely and purely French, and that he succeeded with an
admirable dexterity in harmonizing the ruder sounds of his vernacular
tongue; so successfully, indeed, that it may be safely asserted that
very few poets in any modern language are more exquisitely and uniformly
musical than Chaucer. Indeed, he has been accused, and in rather severe
terms, of having naturalized in English “a wagon-load of foreign words.”
In 1380 we find Chaucer appointed to the office of Clerk of the Works at
Windsor, where he was charged with overlooking the repairs about to be
made in St. George’s Chapel, then in a ruinous condition.
In 1383 Wickliffe completed his translation into the English language of
the Bible, and his death, in the following year, seems to have been the
signal for the commencement of a new and gloomy phase in the fortunes of
the poet. Chaucer returned to England in 1386, and, the party to which
he belonged having lost its political influence, he was imprisoned in
the Tower, and deprived of the places and privileges which had been
granted to him. Two years afterward he was permitted to sell his
patents, and in 1389 he appears to have been induced to abandon, and
even to accuse, his former associates, of whose treachery toward him he
bitterly complains.
In reward for this submission to the government, we afterward find him
restored to favor, and made, in the year 1389, Clerk of the Works at
Westminster. It is at this period that he is supposed to have retired to
pass the calm evening of his active life in the green shades of
Woodstock, where he is related to have composed his admirable
“Canterbury Tales.” This production, though, according to many opinions,
neither the finest nor even the most characteristic of Chaucer’s
numerous and splendid poems, is yet the one of them all by which he is
now best known: it is the work which has handed his name down to future
generations as the earliest glory of his country’s literature; and as
such it warrants us in appealing, from the perhaps partial judgments of
isolated critics, to the sovereign tribunal of posterity. The decisions
of contemporaries may be swayed by fashion and prejudice; the criticism
of scholars may be tinged with partiality; but the unanimous voice of
four hundred and fifty years is sure to be a true index of the relative
value of a work of genius.
Beautiful as are many of his other productions, it is the “Canterbury
Tales” which have enshrined Chaucer in the penetralia of England’s Glory
Temple; it is to the wit, the pathos, the humanity, the chivalry of
those tales that our minds recur when our ear is struck with the
venerable name of Chaucer. In 1390 we find the poet receiving the
honorable charge of Clerk of the Works at Windsor; and, two years later,
a grant from the crown of 20_l._ and a tun of wine annually. Toward the
end of the century which his illustrious name had adorned, he appears to
have fallen into some distress; for another document is in existence
securing to the poet the protection of the crown (probably against
importunate creditors;) and in 1399 we find the poet’s name inserted in
the lease of a house holden from the Abbot and Chapter of Westminster,
and occupying the spot upon which was afterward erected Henry VII.’s
chapel, now forming one of the most brilliant ornaments of Westminster
Abbey. In this house, as is with great probability conjectured, Chaucer
died, on the 25th of October, 1400, and was buried in the Abbey, being
the first of that long array of mighty poets whose bones repose with
generations of kings, warriors, and statesmen, beneath the “long-drawn
aisles.”
In reading the works of this poet the qualities which cannot fail to
strike us most are—admirable truth, freshness, and _livingness_ of his
descriptions of external nature; profound knowledge of human life in the
delineation of character; and that all-embracing humanity of heart which
makes him, as it makes the reader, sympathise with all God’s creation,
taking away from his humor every taste of bitterness and sarcasm. This
humor, colored by and springing from universal sympathy, this noblest
humanity—we mean humanity in the sense of Terence’s: “homo sum; humani
nihil a me alienum puto”—is the heritage of only the greatest among
mankind; and is but an example of that deep truth which Nature herself
has taught us, when she placed in the human heart the spring of Laughter
fast by the fountain of Tears.
We shall now proceed to examine the principal poems of Chaucer, in the
hope of presenting to our readers some scale or measure of the gradual
development of those powers which appear, at least to us, to have
reached their highest apogee or exaltation in the “Canterbury Tales.”
In the first work to which we shall turn our attention, Chaucer has
given us a translation of a poem esteemed by all French critics the
noblest monument of their poetical literature anterior to the time of
Francis I. This is the “Romaunt of the Rose,” a beautiful mixture of
allegory and narrative, of which we shall presently give an outline in
the words of Warton. The “Roman de la Rose” was commenced by William de
Lorris, who died in 1260, and completed, in 1310, by Jean de Meun, a
witty and satirical versifier, who was one of the ornaments of the
brilliant court of Charles le Bel. Chaucer has translated the whole of
the portion composed by the former, together with some of Meun’s
continuation; making, as he goes on, innumerable improvements in the
text, which, where it harmonizes with his own conceptions, he renders
with singular fidelity. “The difficulties and dangers of a lover, in
pursuing and obtaining the object of his desires, are the literal
argument of the poem. This design is couched under the allegory of a
rose, which our lover, after frequent obstacles, gathers in a delicious
garden. He traverses vast ditches, scales lofty walls, and forces the
gates of adamantine castles. These enchanted holds are all inhabited by
various divinities; some of which assist, and some oppose, the lover’s
progress.” The English poem is written, like the French original, in the
short rhymed octo-syllabic couplets so universally adopted by the
Trouvères, a measure well fitted, from its ease and flowingness, for the
purpose of long narratives. We have said that the translation is in most
cases very close; Chaucer was so far from desiring to make his works
pass for original when they had no claim to this qualification, that he
even specifies, with great care and with even a kind of exultation, the
sources from whence his productions are derived. Indeed, at such early
periods in the literature of any country, writers seem to attach as
great or greater dignity to the office of translator than to the more
arduous duty of original composition; the reason of which probably is,
that in the childhood of nations as well as of men, learning is a rarer,
and therefore more admired, quality than imagination.
The allegorical personages in the “Romaunt of the Rose” are singularly
varied, rich, and beautiful. Sorrow, Envy, Avarice, Hate, Beauty,
Franchise, Richesse, are successively brought on the stage. As an
example of the remarks we have just been making, we will quote a short
passage from the latter part of Chaucer’s translation, _i. e._ from that
portion of the poem composed by John of Meun: it describes the
attendants in the palace of Old Age: we will print the original French
and also the extract:—
Travaile et douleur la hébergent,
Mais ils la lient et la chargent,
Que Mort prochaine luy présentent,
En talant de se repentir;
Tant luy sont de fléaux sentir;
Adoncq luy vient en remembrance,
En cest tardifve présence.
Quand il se voit foible et chenue.
With her, Labour and eke Travaile
Lodgid bene, with sorwe and wo.
That never out of her court go
Pain and Distress, Sekenesse and Ire,
And Melancholie that angry sire,
Ben of her palais Senatoures;
Goning ana Grutching her herbegeors.
The day and night her to tourment,
With cruel death they her present,
And tellen her erliche and late,
That Deth standith armid at her gate.
Here Chaucer’s improvements are plainly perceptible; the introduction of
Death, standing _armed_ at the gate, is a grand and sublime thought, of
which no trace is to be found in the comparatively flat original; not to
mention the terrible distinctness with which Chaucer enumerates Old
Age’s _Senators_, Pain, Distress, Sickness, Ire, and Melancholy; and her
grim chamberlains, Groaning and Grudging.
The next poem which we shall mention is the love-story entitled “Troilus
and Cresseide,” founded on one of the most favorite legends of the
Middle Ages, and which Shakspeare himself has dramatized in the tragedy
of the same name. The anachronism of placing the scene of such a history
of chivalric love in the heroic age of the Trojan War is, we think, more
than compensated by the pathos, the nature, and the variety which
characterize many of the ancient romances on this subject. Chaucer
informs us that his authority is Lollius, a mysterious personage very
often referred to by the writers of the Middle Ages, and so impossible
to discover and identify that he must be considered as the Ignis Fatuus
of antiquaries. “Of Lollius,” says one of these unhappy and baffled
investigators, “it will become every one to speak with deference.” The
whole poem is saturated with the spirit not of the Ionian rhapsodist,
but of the Provençal minstrel. It is written in the rhymed ten-syllabled
couplet, which Chaucer has used in the greater part of his works. In the
midst of a thousand anachronisms, of a thousand absurdities, this poem
contains some strokes of pathos which are invariably to be found in
every thing Chaucer wrote, and which show that his heart ever vibrated
responsive to the touch of nature.
Though we propose, in a future volume, to give such specimens and
extracts of Chaucer as may suffice to enable our readers to judge of his
manner, we cannot abstain from citing here a most exquisite passage: it
describes the bashfulness and hesitation of Cressida before she can find
courage to make the avowal of her love:—
And as the newe-abashed nightingale
That stinteth first, when she beginneth sing,
When that she heareth any herdis tale,
Or in the hedgis any wight stirring,
And after siker doth her voice outring:
Right so Cresseide, when that her drede stent,
Opened her herte and told him her entent.
We may remark here the extraordinary fondness for the song of birds
exhibited by Chaucer in all his works. There is not one of the English
poets, and certainly none of the poets of any other nation, who has
shown a more intense enjoyment for this natural music: he seems to omit
no opportunity of describing the “doulx ramaige” of these feathered
poets, whose accents seem to be echoed in all their delicacy, their
purity and fervor, in the fresh strains of “our Father Chaucer:”—
Sound of vernal showers
On the twinkling grass,
Rain-awakened flowers,
All that ever was
Joyous, and clear, and fresh, thy music doth surpass!
We have mentioned the anachronism of _plan_ in this poem; it abounds in
others no less extraordinary. Among these, he represents Cresseide as
reading the Thebaid of Statius (a very favorite book of Chaucer,) which
he calls “The Romance of Thebis;” and Pandarus endeavors to comfort
Troilus with arguments of predestination taken from Bishop Bradwardine,
a theologian nearly contemporary with the poet.
The “House of Fame,” a magnificent allegory, glowing with all the
“barbaric pearl and gold” of Gothic imagination, is the next work on
which we shall remark. Its origin was probably Provençal, but the poem
which Chaucer translated is now lost. We will condense the argument of
this poem from Warton:—“The poet, in a vision, sees a temple of glass
decorated with an unaccountable number of golden images. On the walls
are engraved stories from Virgil’s Eneid and Ovid’s Epistles. Leaving
this temple, he sees an eagle with golden wings soaring near the sun.
The bird descends, seizes the poet in its talons, and conveys him to the
Temple of Fame, which, like that of Ovid, is situated between earth and
sea. He is left by the eagle near the house, which is built of materials
bright as polished glass, and stands on a rock of ice. All the southern
side of this rock is covered with engravings of the names of famous men,
which are perpetually melting away by the heat of the sun. The northern
side of the rock was alike covered with names; but, being shaded from
the warmth of the sun, the characters here remained unmelted and
uneffaced. Within the niches formed in the pinnacles stood all round the
castle
All manera of minstrellis,
And gestours, that tellen tales
Both of weping and eke of game;
and the most renowned harpers—Orpheus, Arion, Chiron, and the Briton
Glaskeirion. In the hall he meets an infinite multitude of heralds, on
whose surcoats are embroidered the arms of the most redoubted champions.
At the upper end, on a lofty shrine of carbuncle, sits Fame. Her figure
is like those of Virgil and Ovid. Above her, as if sustained on her
shoulders, sate Alexander and Hercules. From the throne to the gates of
the hall ran a range of pillars with respective inscriptions. On the
first pillar, made of lead and iron, stood Josephus, the Jewish
historian, with seven other writers on the same subject. On the second,
made of iron, and painted with the blood of tigers, stood Statius. On
another, higher than the rest, stood Homer, Dares Phrygius, Livy,
Lollius, Guido of Colonna, and Geoffrey of Monmouth, writers on the
Trojan story. On a pillar of ‘tinnid iron clere’ stood Virgil; and next
him, on a pillar of copper, appeared Ovid. The figure of Lucan was
placed upon a pillar of iron ‘wrought full sternly,’ accompanied by many
Roman historians. On a pillar of sulphur stood Claudian. The hall is
filled by crowds of minor authors. In the meantime crowds of every
nation and condition fill the temple, each presenting his claim to the
queen. A messenger is sent to summon Eolus from his cave in Thrace, who
is ordered to bring his two clarions, Slander and Praise, and his
trumpeter Triton. The praises of each petitioner are then sounded,
according to the partial or capricious appointment of Fame! and equal
merits obtain very different success. The poet then enters the house or
labyrinth of Rumor. It was built of willow twigs, like a cage, and
therefore admitted every sound. From this house issue tidings of every
kind, like fountains and rivers from the sea. Its inhabitants, who are
eternally employed in hearing or telling news, raising reports, and
spreading lies, are then humorously described: they are chiefly sailors,
pilgrims, and pardoners. At length our author is awakened by seeing a
venerable person of great authority; and thus the vision abruptly
terminates. From the few lines we have quoted, it may be seen that this
poem, like the “Romaunt of the Rose,” is written in the octosyllabic
measure. Though full of extravagances, exaggerations of the already too
monstrous personifications of Ovid, this work extorts our admiration by
the inexhaustible richness and splendor of its ornaments; a richness as
perfectly in accordance with Middle Age art, as it is extravagant and
puerile in the tinsel pages of the Roman poet. That multiplicity of
parts and profusion of minute embellishment which forms the essential
characteristic of a Gothic cathedral is displaced and barbarous when
introduced into the severer outlines of a Grecian temple or a Roman
amphitheatre.
It now becomes our delightful duty to speak of the “Canterbury Tales;”
and we can hardly trust ourselves to confine within reasonable limits
the examination of this admirable work, containing in itself, as it
does, merits of the most various and opposite kinds. It is a finished
picture, delineating almost every variety of human character, crowded
with figures, whose lineaments no lapse of time, no change of manners,
can render faint or indistinct, and which will retain, to the latest
centuries, every stroke of outline and every tint of color, as sharp and
as vivid as when they came from the master’s hand. The Pilgrims of
Chaucer have traversed four hundred and fifty years—like the Israelites
wandering in the wilderness—arid periods of neglect and ignorance,
sandy flats of formal mannerism, unfertilized by any spring of beauty,
and yet “their garments have not decayed, neither have their shoes waxed
old.”
Besides the lively and faithful delineation—_i. e. descriptive_
delineation of these personages, nothing can be more dramatic than the
way in which they are set in motion, speaking and acting in a manner
always conformable to their supposed characters, and mutually
heightening and contrasting each other’s peculiarities. Further yet,
besides these triumphs in the _framing_ of his Tales, the Tales
themselves, distributed among the various pilgrims of his troop, are, in
almost every case, master-pieces of splendor, of pathos, or of drollery.
Chaucer, in the Prologue to the “Canterbury Tales,” relates that he was
about to pass the night at the “Tabarde” inn in Southwark, previous to
setting out on a pilgrimage to the far-famed shrine of St. Thomas of
Kent—_i. e._ Thomas à Becket—at Canterbury. On the evening preceding
the poet’s departure there arrive at the hostelry—
Wel nine and twenty in a compagnie
Of sondry folk, by aventure y-fulle
In felowship, and pilgrimes wer they alle,
That toward Canterbury wolden ride.
The poet, glad of the opportunity of traveling in such good company,
makes acquaintance with them all, and the party, after mutually
promising to start early in the morning, sup and retire to rest.
Chaucer then gives a full and minute description, yet in incredibly few
words, of the condition, appearance, manners, dress, and horses of the
pilgrims. He first depicts a Knight, “brave in battle, and wise in
council,” courteous, grave, religious, experienced; who had fought for
the faith in far lands, at Algesiras, at Alexandria, in Russia; a model
of the chivalrous virtues:
And though that he was worthy, he was wise,
And of his port _make as is a mayde_.
He was a veray parfit gentle knight.
He is mounted on a good, though not showy, horse, and clothed in a
simple _gipon_ or close tunic, of serviceable materials,
characteristically stained and discolored by the friction of his armor.
This valiant and modest gentleman is accompanied by his son, a perfect
specimen of the _damoyseau_ or “bachelor” of this, or of the graceful
and gallant youth of noble blood in any period. Chaucer seems to revel
in the painting of his curled and shining locks—“as they were laid in
presse”—of his tall and active person, of his already-shown bravery, of
his “love-longing,” of his youthful accomplishments, and of his gay and
fantastic dress. His talent for music, his short, embroidered gown with
long wide sleeves (the fashion of the day,) his perfect horsemanship,
his skill in song-making, in illuminating and writing, his hopeful and
yet somewhat melancholy love for his “lady”—
So hote he loved, that by nightertale
He slept no more than doth the nightingale—
nothing is omitted; not a stroke too few or too many.
This attractive pair are attended by a Yeman or retainer. This figure is
a perfect portrait of one of those bold and sturdy archers, the type of
the ancient national character; a type which still exists in the plain,
independent peasantry of the rural districts of the land. He is clad in
the picturesque costume of the greenwood, with his sheaf of peacock
arrows, bright and keen, stuck in his belt, and bearing in his hand “a
mighty bowe”—the far-famed “long-bow” of the English archers—the most
formidable weapon of the Middle Ages, which twanged such fatal music to
the chivalry of France at Poictiers and Agincourt. His “not-bed,” his
“brown viságe,” tanned by sun and wind, his sword and buckler, his sharp
and well-equipped dagger, the silver medal of St. Christopher on his
breast, the horn in the green baldric—how life-like does he stand
before us!
These three figures are admirably contrasted with a Prioress, a lady of
noble birth and delicate bearing, full of the pretty affectations, the
dainty tendernesses of the “grande dame religieuse.” Her name is “Madame
Eglantine;” and the mixture, in her manners and costume, of gentle
worldly vanities and of ignorance of the world; her gayety, and the
ever-visible difficulty she feels to put on an air of courtly hauteur;
the lady-like delicacy of her manners at table, and her fondness for
petting lap-dogs—
Of smale houndes had she, that she fed
With rosted flesh, and milk, and wastel-bread,
But sore she wept if on of hem were dead,
Or if men smote it with a yerde smart,
For al was conscience, and tender herte,—
this masterly outline is most appropriately _framed_ (if we may so
speak) in the external and material accompaniments—the beads of “smale
coráll” hanging on her arm, and, above all, the golden brooch with its
delicate device of a “crowned A,” and the inscription _Amor vincit_
_omnia_. She is attended by an inferior nun and three priests.
The Monk follows next, and he, like all the ecclesiastics, with the
single exception of the Personore or secular parish priest, is described
with strong touches of ridicule; but it is impossible not to perceive
the strong and ever-present _humanity_ of which we have spoken as
perhaps the most marked characteristic of Chaucer’s mind. The Monk is a
gallant, richly-dressed, and pleasure-loving sportsman, caring not a
straw for the obsolete strictness of the musty rule of his order. His
sleeves are edged with rich fur, his hood fastened under his chin with a
gold pin headed with a “love-knot,” his eyes are buried deep in his
fleshy, rosy cheeks, indicating great love of rich fare and potent
wines; and yet the impression left on the mind by this type of fat,
roystering sensuality is rather one of drollery and good-fellowship than
of contempt or abhorrence.
Chaucer exhibits rich specimens of the various _genera_ of that vast
species “Monachus monachans,” as it may be classed by some Rabelœsian
Theophrastus. The next personage who enters is the Frere, or mendicant
friar, whose easiness of confession, wonderful skill in extracting money
and gifts, and gay discourse, are most humorously and graphically
described. He is represented as always carrying store of knives, pins,
and toys, to give to his female penitents, as better acquainted with the
tavern than with the lagar-house or the hospital, daintily dressed, and
“lisping somewhat” in his speech, “to make his English swete upon the
tongue.”
This “worthy Limitour” is succeeded by a grave and formal personage, the
Merchant: solemn and wise is he, with forked beard and pompous demeanor,
speaking much of profit, and strongly in favor of the king’s right to
the subsidy “pour la saufgarde et custodie del mer,” as the old Norman
legist phrases it. He is dressed in motley, mounted on a tall and quiet
horse, and wears a “Flaundrish beaver hat.”
The learned poverty of the Clerke of Oxenforde forms a striking contrast
to the Merchant’s rather pompous “respectability.” He and his horse are
“leane as is a rake” with abstinence, his clothes are threadbare, and he
devotes to the purchase of his beloved books all the gold which he can
collect from his friends and patrons, devoutly praying, as in duty
bound, for the souls of those
Who yeve him wherewith to scolaie.
Nothing can be more true to nature than the mixture of pedantry and
bashfulness in the manners of this anchoret of learning, and the tone of
sententious morality and formal politeness which marks his language.
We now come to a “Serjeant of the Lawe,” a wise and learned magistrate,
rich and yet irreproachable, with all the statutes at his fingers’ ends,
a very busy man in reality, “but yet,” not to forget the inimitable
touch of nature in Chaucer, “As _seemed besier than he was_.” He is
plainly dressed, as one who cares not to display his importance in his
exterior.
Nor are preceding characters superior, in vividness and variety, to the
figure of the “Frankelein,” or rich country-gentleman, who is next
introduced: his splendid and hospitable profusion, and the epicurean
luxuriousness of the man himself, are inimitably set before us. “It
_snewed in his house_ of mete and drink.”
Then comes a number of burgesses, whose appearance is classed under one
general description. These are a Haberdasher, Carpenter, Webbe (or
Weaver,) Dyer, and Tapiser—
——Alle yelothed of o liverè,
Of a solempes and gret fraternitè,—
that is, they all belong to one of those societies, or _mestiers_, which
play so great a part in the municipal history of the Middle Ages. The
somewhat _cossu_ richness of their equipment, their knives hafted with
silver, their grave and citizen-like bearing—all is in harmony with the
pride and vanity, hinted at by the poet, of their wives, who think “it
is full fayre to be yeleped _Madame_.”
The skill and critical discernment of the Cook are next described: “Well
could he know a draught of London ale,” and elaborately could he season
the rich and fantastic dishes which composed the “carte” of the
fourteenth century. He joins the pilgrimage in hope that his devotion
may cure him of a disease in the leg.
A turbulent and boisterous Shipman appears next, who is described with
minute detail. His brown complexion, his rude and quarrelsome manners,
his tricks of trade, stealing wine “from Burdeux ward, while that the
chapman slepe,” all is enumerated; nor does the poet forget the seaman’s
knowledge of all the havens “from Gothland to the Cape de Finistere,”
nor his experience in his profession: “In many a tempest had his berd be
shake.”
He is followed by a Doctour of Phisike, a great astronomer and natural
magician, deeply versed in the ponderous tomes of Hippocrates, Hali,
Galen, Rhasis, Averrhoes, and the Arabian physicians. His diet is but
small in quantity, but rich and nourishing; “_his study is but little
on_ _the Bible_,” and he is humorously represented as particularly fond
of gold, “_for gold in phisiks is a cordiall_.”
Next to the grave, luxurious, and not quite orthodox doctor, enters the
“Wife of Bath,” a daguerreotyped specimen of the female _bourgeoise_ of
Chaucer’s day; and bearing so perfectly the stamp and mark of her class,
that, by changing her costume a little to the dress of the nineteenth
century, she would serve as a perfect sample of her order even in the
present day. She is equipped with a degree of solid costliness that does
not exclude a little coquetry; her character is gay, bold, and not ever
rigid; and she is endeavoring, by long and frequent pilgrimages, to
expiate some of the amorous errors of her youth. She is a substantial
manufacturer of cloth, and so jealous of her precedency in the religious
ceremonies of her parish, that, if any of her female acquaintance should
venture to go before her on these solemn occasions, “so wroth was she,
that she was out of alle charitee.”
Contrasted with this rosy dame are two of the most beautiful and
touching portraits ever delineated by the hand of genius—one “a pour
Persoune,” or secular parish priest; and his brother in simplicity,
virtue, and evangelic parity, a Plowman. It is in these characters, and
particularly in the “Tale” put into the mouth of the former, that we
most distinctly see Chaucer’s sympathy with the doctrines of the
Reformation: the humility, self-denial, and charity of these two pious
and worthy men, are opposed with an unstudied, but not the less striking
pointedness, to the cheatery and sensuality which distinguish all the
monks and friars represented by Chaucer. So beautiful and so complete is
this noble delineation of Christian piety, that we will not venture to
injure its effect by quoting it piecemeal in this place, but refer our
readers to the volume in which the whole of Chaucer’s Prologue will be
found at length.
Then we find enumerated a Reve, a Miller, a Sompnour (an officer in the
ecclesiastical courts,) a Pardoner, a Manciple, and “myself,” that is,
Chaucer.
The Miller is a brawny, short, red-headed fellow, strong, boisterous and
quarrelsome, flat-nosed, wide-mouthed, debauched; he is dressed in a
white coat and blue hood, and armed with sword and buckler.
His conversation and conduct correspond faithfully with such an
appearance; he enlivens the journey by his skill in playing on the
bagpipe.
The Manciple was an officer attached to the ancient colleges; his duty
was to purchase the provisions and other commodities for the consumption
of the students; in fact, he was a kind of steward. Chaucer describes
this pilgrim as singularly adroit in the exercise of his business,
taking good care to advantage himself the while.
Another of the most elaborately painted pictures in Chaucer’s gallery is
the “Reve,” bailiff or intendant of some great proprietor’s estates. He
stands before us as a slender, long-legged, choleric individual, with
his beard shaven as close as possible, and his hair exceedingly short.
He is a severe and watchful manager of his master’s estates, and had
grown so rich that he was able to come to his lord’s assistance, and
“lend him of his owen good.” His horse is described, and even named, and
he is described as always riding “the hindereat of the route.”
Nothing can surpass the nature and truthfulness with which Chaucer has
described the Sompnour. His face is fiery red, as cherubim were painted,
and so covered with pimples, spots, and discolorations, that neither
mercury, sulphur, borax, nor any purifying ointment, could cleanse his
complexion. He is a great lover of onions, leeks, and garlic, and fond
of “strong win as red as blood;” and when drunk he would speak nothing
but Latin, a few terms of which language he had picked up from the writs
and citations it was his profession to serve. He is a great taker of
bribes, and will allow any man to set at naught the archdeacon’s court
in the most flagrant manner “for a quart of wine.”
The last of the pilgrims is the “Pardonere,” or seller of indulgences
from Rome. He is drawn to the life, singing, to the bass of his friend
the Sompnour, the song of “Come hither, love, to me.” The Pardoner’s
hair is “yellow as wax,” smooth and thin, lying on his shoulders: he
wears no hood, “for jollité;” that is, in order to appear in the
fashion. His eyes (as is often found in persons of this complexion—note
Chaucer’s truth to nature) are wide and staring like those of a hare;
his voice is a harsh treble, like that of a goat; and he has no beard.
Chaucer then enumerates the various articles of the Pardoner’s
professional budget; and certainly there never was collected a list of
droller relics: he has Our Lady’s veil, a morsel of the sail of St.
Paul’s ship, a glass full of “pigges bones,” and a pewter cross crammed
with other objects of equal sanctity. With the aid of these and the
hypocritical unction of his address, he could manage, in one day, to
extract from poor and rustic people more money than the Parson (the
regular pastor of the parish) could collect in two months.
The number of the pilgrims now enumerated will be found by any one who
takes the trouble to count them to amount to thirty-one, including
Chaucer; and the poet describes them setting out on their journey on the
following morning. Before their departure, however, the jolly Host of
the Tabarde makes a proposition to the assembled company. He offers to
go along with them himself, on condition that they constitute him a kind
of master of the revels during their journey; showing how agreeably and
profitably they could beguile the tedium of the road with the relation
of stories. He then proposes that on their return they should all sup
together at his hostelry, and that he among them who shall have been
adjudged to have told the best story should be entertained at the
expense of the whole society. This proposal is unanimously adopted; and
nothing can be finer than the mixture of fun and good sense with which
honest Harry Bailey, the host, sways the merry sceptre of his temporary
sovereignty.
This then is the framework or scaffolding on which Chaucer has erected
his Canterbury Tales. The practice of connecting together a multitude of
distinct narrations by some general thread of incident is very natural
and extremely ancient. The Orientals, so passionately fond of
tale-telling, have universally—and not always very artificially—given
consistency and connection to their stories by putting them into the
mouth of some single narrator: the various histories which compose the
Thousand and One Nights are supposed to be successively recounted by the
untiring lips of the inexhaustible Princess Scheherezade; but the source
from whence Chaucer more immediately adopted his _framing_ was the
Decameron of Boccaccio. This work (as it may be necessary to inform our
younger readers) consists of a hundred tales divided into decades, each
decade occupying one day in the relation. They are narrated by a society
of young men and women of rank, who have shut themselves up in a most
luxurious and beautiful retreat on the banks of the Arno, in order to
escape the infection of the terrible plague then ravaging Florence.
If we compare the plan of Chaucer with that of the Florentine, we shall
not hesitate to give the palm of propriety, probability, and good taste
to the English poet. A pilgrimage was by no means an expedition of a
mournful or solemn kind, and afforded the author the widest field for
the selection of character from all classes of society, and an excellent
opportunity for the divers humors and oddities of a company fortuitously
assembled. It is impossible, too, not to feel that there is something
cruel and shocking in the notion of these young, luxurious Italians of
Boccaccio whiling away their days in tales of sensual trickery or
sentimental distress, while without the well-guarded walls of their
retreat thousands of their kinsmen and fellow-citizens were writhing in
despairing agony. Moreover, the similarity of rank and age in the
personages of Boccaccio produces an insipidity and want of variety: all
these careless voluptuaries are repetitions of Dioneo and Fiammetta: and
the period of ten days adopted by the Italian has the defect of being
purely arbitrary, there being no reason why the narratives might not be
continued indefinitely. Chaucer’s pilgrimage, on the contrary, is made
to Canterbury, and occupies a certain and necessary time; and, on the
return of the travelers, the society separates as naturally as it had
assembled; after giving the poet the opportunity of introducing two
striking and appropriate events—their procession to the shrine of St.
Thomas at their arrival in Canterbury, and the prize-supper on their
return to London.
Had Chaucer adhered to his original plan, we should have had a tale from
each of the party on the journey out, and a second tale from every
pilgrim on the way back, making in all sixty-two—or, if the Host also
contributed his share, sixty-four. But, alas! the poet has not conducted
his pilgrims even to Canterbury; and the tales which he has made them
tell only make us the more bitterly lament the nonfulfillment of his
original intention.
Before we speak of the narratives themselves, it will be proper to state
that our poet continues to describe the actions, conversation, and
deportment of his pilgrims: and nothing can be finer than the remarks
put into their mouths respecting the merits of the various tales; or
more dramatic than the affected bashfulness of some, when called upon to
contribute to the amusement of their companions, and the squabbles and
satirical jests made by others.
These passages, in which the tales themselves are, as it were,
incrusted, are called Prologues to the various narratives which they
respectively precede, and they add inexpressibly to the vivacity and
movement of the whole, as in some cases the tales spring, as it were,
spontaneously out of the conversations.
Of the tales themselves it will be impossible to attempt even a rapid
summary: we may mention, as the most remarkable among the serious and
pathetic narratives, the Knight’s Tale, the subject of which is the
beautiful story of Palamon and Arcite, taken from the Teseide of
Boccaccio, but it is unknown whether originally invented by the great
Italian, or, as is far more probable, imitated by him from some of the
innumerable versions of the “noble story” of Theseus current in the
Middle Ages. The poem is full of a strange mixture of manners and
periods: the chivalric and the heroic ages appear side by side: but such
is the splendor of imagination displayed in this immortal work, so rich
is it in magnificence, in pathos, in exquisite delineations of
character, and artfully contrived turns of fortune, that the reader
voluntarily dismisses all his chronology, and allows himself to be
carried away with the fresh and sparkling current of chivalric love and
knightly adventure. No reader ever began this poem without finishing it,
or ever read it once without returning to it a second time. The effect
upon the mind is like that of some gorgeous tissue, gold-inwoven, of
tapestry, in an old baronial hall; full of tournaments and battles,
imprisoned knights, and emblazoned banners, Gothic temples of Mars and
Venus, the lists, the dungeon and the lady’s bower, garden and fountain,
and moonlit groves. Chaucer’s peculiar skill in the delineation of
character and appearance by a few rapid and masterly strokes is as
perceptible here as in the Prologue to the Tales: the procession of the
kings to the tournament is as bright and vivid a piece of painting as
ever was produced by the “strong braine” of mediæval Art: and in point
of grace and simplicity, what can be finer than the single line
descriptive of the beauty of Emilie—so _suggestive_, and therefore so
superior to the most elaborate portrait—“Up rose the sun, and up rose
Emelie?”
The next poem of a serious character is the Squire’s Tale, which indeed
so struck the admiration of Milton—himself profoundly penetrated by the
spirit of the Romanz poetry—that it is by an allusion to the Squire’s
Tale that he characterizes Chaucer when enumerating the great men of all
ages, and when he places him beside Plato, Shakspeare, Æschylus, and his
beloved Euripides: he supposes his Cheerful Man as evoking Chaucer—
And call up him who left half told
The story of Cambuscan bold.
The imagery of the Squire’s Tale was certainly well calculated to strike
such a mind as Milton’s, so gorgeous, so stately, so heroic, and imbued
with all the splendor of Oriental literature; for the scenery and
subject of this poem bear evident marks of that Arabian influence which
colors so much of the poetry of the Middle Ages, and which probably
began to act upon the literature of Western Europe after the Crusades.
In point of deep pathos—pathos carried indeed to an extreme and perhaps
hardly natural or justifiable pitch of intensity—we will now cite,
among the graver tales of our pilgrims, the story put into the mouth of
the Clerke of Oxenforde. This is the story of the Patient Griselda—a
model of womanly and wifely obedience, who comes victoriously out of the
most cruel and repeated ordeals inflicted upon her conjugal and maternal
affections. The beautiful and angelic figure of the Patient Wife in this
heart-rending story reminds us of one of those seraphic statues of
Virgin Martyrs which stand with clasped hands and uplifted, imploring
eye, in the carved niches of a Gothic cathedral—an eternal prayer in
sculptured stone—
——Patience on a monument,
Smiling at Grief!
The subject of this tale is, as we mentioned some pages back, invented
by Boccaccio, and first seen in 1374, by Petrarch, who was so struck
with its beauty that he translated it into Latin, and it is from this
translation that Chaucer drew his materials. The English poet indeed
appears to have been ignorant of Boccaccio’s claim to the authorship,
for he makes his “Clerke” say that he had learned it from “Fraunceis
Petrarke, the laureat poéte.” Petrarch himself bears the strongest
testimony to the almost overwhelming pathos of the story, for he relates
that he gave it to a Paduan acquaintance of his to read, who fell into a
repeated agony of passionate tears. Chaucer’s poem is written in the
Italian stanza.
Of the comic tales the following will be found the most excellent—The
Nun’s Priest’s Tale, a droll apologue of the Cock and the Fox, in which
the very absurdity of some of the accompaniments confers one of the
highest qualities which a fable can possess, viz. so high a degree of
individuality that the reader forgets that the persons of the little
drama are animals, and sympathizes with them as human beings; the
Merchant’s Tale, which, like the comic stories generally, though very
indelicate, is yet replete with the richest and broadest humor; the
Reve’s Tale, and many shorter stories distributed among the less
prominent characters. But the crown and pearl of Chaucer’s drollery is
the Miller’s Tale, in which the delicate and penetrating description of
the various actors in the adventure can only be surpassed by the
perfectly natural yet outrageously ludicrous catastrophe of the intrigue
in which they move.
There is certainly nothing, in the vast treasury of ancient or modern
humorous writing, at once so real, so droll, and so exquisitely _enjoué_
in the manner of telling. It is true that the subject is not of the most
delicate nature; but, though coarse and plain-speaking, Chaucer is never
corrupt or vicious: his improprieties are rather the fruit of the ruder
age in which he lived, and the turbid ebullitions of a rich and active
imagination, than the cool, analyzing, studied profligacy—the more
dangerous and corrupting because veiled under a false and morbid
sentimentalism—which denies a great portion of the modern literature of
too many civilized countries.
It is worthy of remark that all the tales are in verse with the
exception of two, one of which, singularly enough, is given to Chaucer
himself. This requires some explanation. When the poet is first called
upon for his story, he bursts out into a long, confused, fantastical
tale of chivalry, relating the adventures of a certain errant-knight,
Sir Thopas, and his wanderings in search of the Queen of Faërie. This is
written in the peculiar versification of the Trouvères (note, that it is
the only tale in which he has adopted this measure,) and is full of all
the absurdities of those compositions. When in the full swing of
declamation, and when we are expecting to be overwhelmed with page after
page of this “sleazy stuff,”—for the poet goes on gallantly, like Don
Quixote, “in the style his books of chivalry had taught him, imitating,
as near as he can, their very phrase”—he is suddenly interrupted by
honest Harry Bailey, the Host, who plays the part of Moderator or Chorus
to Chaucer’s pleasant comedy. The Host begs him, with many strong
expressions of ridicule and disgust, to give them no more of such
“drafty rhyming,” and entreats him to let them hear something less
worn-out and tiresome. The poet then proposes to entertain the party
with “a litel thinge in prose,” and relates the allegorical story of
Melibœus and his wife Patience. It is evident that Chaucer, well aware
of the immeasurable superiority of the newly-revived classical
literature over the barbarous and now exhausted invention of the Romanz
poets, has chosen this ingenious method of ridiculing the commonplace
tales of chivalry; but so exquisitely grave is the irony in this
passage, that many critics have taken the “Rime of Sir Thopas” for a
serious composition, and have regretted it was left a fragment!
The other prose tale, (we have mentioned Melibœus,) is supposed to be
related by the Parson, who is always described as a model of Christian
humility, piety, and wisdom; which does not, however, save him from the
terrible suspicion of being a _Lollard_, _i. e._, a heretical and
seditious revolutionist.
This composition hardly can be called a “tale,” for it contains neither
persons nor events; but it is very curious as a specimen of the sermons
of the early Reformers: for a sermon it is, and nothing else—a sermon
upon the Seven Deadly Sins, divided and subdivided with all the pedantic
regularity of the day. It also gives us a very curious insight into the
domestic life, the manners, the costume, and even the cookery of the
fourteenth century. Some critics have contended that this sermon was
added to the Canterbury Tales by Chaucer at the instigation of his
confessors, as a species of penitence for the light and immoral tone of
much of his writings, and particularly as a sort of recantation, or
_amende honorable_, for his innumerable attacks on the monks. But this
supposition is in direct contradiction with every line of his admirable
portrait of the Parson; and, however natural it may have been for the
licentious Boccaccio to have done such public penance for his ridicule
of the “Frati,” and his numberless sensual and immoral scenes, his
English follower was “made of sterner stuff.” The friend of John of
Gaunt, and the disciple of Wickliffe, was not so easily to be worked
upon by monastic subtlety as the more superstitious and _sensuous_
Italian.
The language of Chaucer is a strong exemplification of the structure of
the English language. The ground of his diction will be ever found to be
the pure, vigorous, Anglo-Saxon English of the people, _inlaid_—if we
may so style it—with an immense quantity of Norman-French words. We may
compare this diction to some of those exquisite specimens of
_incrusting_ left us by the obscure but great artists of the Middle
Ages, in which the polish of metal or ivory contrasts so richly with the
lustrous ebony.
The difficulty of reading this great poet is very much exaggerated: a
very moderate acquaintance with the French and Italian of the fourteenth
century, and the observance of a few simple rules of pronunciation, will
enable any educated person to read and to enjoy. In particular it is to
be remarked that the final letter _e_, occurring in so many English
words, had not yet become an _e mute_; and must constantly be
pronounced, as well as the termination of the past tense, _ed_, in a
separate syllable. The accent also is more varied in its position than
is now common in the language. Read with these precautions, Chaucer will
be found as harmonious as he is tender, magnificent, humorous, or
sublime.
Until the reader is able and willing to appreciate the innumerable
beauties of the Canterbury Tales, it is not to be expected that he can
make acquaintance with the graceful though somewhat pedantic “Court of
Love,” an allegorical poem, bearing the strongest marks of its Provençal
origin; or with the exquisite delicacy and pure chivalry of the “Flower
and the Leaf,” of which latter poem Campbell speaks as follows,
enthusiastically but justly:
“The Flower and the Leaf is an exquisite piece of fairy fancy. With a
moral that is just sufficient to apologise for a dream, and yet which
sits so lightly on the story as not to abridge its most visionary parts,
there is, in the whole scenery and objects of the poem, an air of wonder
and sweetness, an easy and surprising transition, that is truly
magical.”
We cannot conclude this brief and imperfect notice of this great poet
without strongly recommending all those who desire to know something of
the true character of English literature to lose no time in making
acquaintance with the admirable productions of “our Father Chaucer,” as
Gascoigne affectionately calls him; the difficulties of his style have
been unreasonably exaggerated, and the labor which surmounts them will
be abundantly repaid, “it will conduct you,” to use the beautiful words
of Milton, “to a hill-side; laborious indeed at the first ascent, but
else so smooth, so green, so full of goodly prospects and melodious
sounds on every side, that the harp of Orpheus was not more charming.”
* * * * *
=THE THREE SISTERS.=
CHAPTER I.
“Gabrielle, you should not stay out so late alone.”
“It isn’t late, sister dear, for a summer’s evening. The church clock
struck eight just as I turned into the little path across the field.”
The first speaker, who was the eldest, raised her head from her work,
and, looking at Gabrielle, said:
“For you it is too late. You are not well, Gabrielle. You are quite
flushed and tired. Where have you been?”
“Nowhere but in the village,” Gabrielle said.
She paused a moment, then added, rather hurriedly:
“I was detained by a poor sick woman I went to see. You don’t know her,
Joanna, she has just come here.”
“And who is she?” Joanna asked.
“She is a widow woman, not young, and very poor. She spoke to me in the
road the other day, and I have seen her once or twice since. She had
heard our name in the village, and to-night I promised her that you or
Bertha would go and call on her. She has been very unhappy, poor thing.
You will go, sister?”
“Certainly. You should have told me before. Go, now, and take off your
bonnet. You have walked too quickly home on this hot night.”
Another lady entered the room just as Gabrielle was leaving it, and
addressed her almost as the first had done:
“You are late, Gabrielle. What has kept you out so long?”
“Joanna will tell you,” Gabrielle answered. “I have only been finding
some work for you, sister,” and with a smile she went away.
They were two stern, cold women—Joanna and Bertha Vaux. They lived
together—they two and Gabrielle—in a dark old-fashioned house, close
to a little village, in one of the southern counties of England. It was
a pretty picturesque village, as most English villages are, with little
clusters of white-washed, rose-twined cottages sprinkled through it, and
a little rough-stone country church, covered to the very top of the
spire so thickly with ivy, that it looked like a green bower. Here and
there were scattered a few pleasant houses of the better sort, standing
apart in sunny gardens, and scenting the air around with the smell of
their sweet flowers.
But the house in which Joanna and Bertha and Gabrielle lived was always
gloomy and dark and cold. It was a square brick house, with damp,
unhealthy evergreens planted in front, upon which the sun never
shone—summer or winter; the flags which paved the front of the door and
the steps of the door, were greened over with cheerless moss; and fungi
grew up in the seams of the pavement. The windows, with their thick,
black, clumsy frames, almost all faced the north, so that the cold, dark
rooms were never lighted up with sunshine; but looked even more dreary
in the summer time, with the empty fireless grates, than on winter days.
Yet the house seemed to suit well the tastes of the two elder of the
Misses Vaux.
It had stood empty for some years before they took it; for its last
occupier had committed suicide in one of the rooms—it was just the
house for such a thing to have happened in—and the superstitious horror
which the event created in neighborhood coupled with the dark and
cheerless appearance of the house, were the causes why it remained so
long unlet and so much neglected.
About six years ago, the Misses Vaux had come quite strangers to the
village; and, in a short time were settled as tenants of the lonely
house. They were young women then—not more than three and
four-and-twenty; but already grave, severe, and stern. They dressed
always in mourning, and rarely was a smile seen on their cold lips; but
they spent their time almost entirely in performing acts of charity, in
visiting the sick, and in making clothes for the poor. For miles round
they were known and looked up to with mingled reverence and awe. But
theirs was a strange, soulless charity—more like the performance of
heavy penance than of acts of love.
There was a mystery about their antecedents. No one knew whence they
came, or who they were; they had neither relations nor friends; they
lived alone in their gloomy house, and only at long intervals—sometimes
of many months—did they receive even a single letter. They were two
sad, weary women, to whom life seemed to bring no pleasure, but to be
only a burden, which it was their stern duty to bear uncomplainingly for
a certain number of years.
Gabrielle—the beautiful, sunny-natured Gabrielle—was not with them
when they first came to the village; but three years ago she had joined
them, and the three had lived together since. She was then about
fifteen;—a bright, joyous, beautiful creature, without a thought of
sadness in her, or the faintest shadow of the gloom that rested on her
sisters. Even now, although she had lived for three years in the
chilling atmosphere that surrounded them, she was still unchanged,
almost even as much a child—as gay, thoughtless, and full of joy, as
when she first came. It reminded one of a snowdrop blooming in the
winter, forcing itself through the very midst of the surrounding snow,
to see how she had grown up with this cold, wintry environment. But the
gloomy house looked less gloomy now that Gabrielle lived in it. There
was one little room with a window looking to the south (one of three
that had a sunny aspect,) which she took to be her own, and there she
would sit for many hours, working by the open window, singing joyously,
with the sunlight streaming over her, and the breath of the sweet
flowers that she had planted in a garden as close under her window as
the sun would come, stealing deliciously into the room. It was quite a
pleasant little nook, with a view far over green undulating hills and
yellow waving corn-fields, which sparkled and glittered like plains of
moving gold in the deep bright rays of the setting sun. And Gabrielle,
sitting here and gazing on them, or roaming alone amongst them, was
quite happy and light-hearted. Even her stern sisters were thawed and
softened by her presence; and, I think, felt as much love for her as it
was in their nature to feel for any one; for, indeed, it was impossible
to resist altogether her cheering influence, which spread itself over
every thing around her with the warmth of sunshine.
On this evening on which our tale begins, and for some days previous to
it, Gabrielle had been graver and quieter than she often was. She joined
her sisters now in the common sitting-room; and, with her work in her
hand, sat down beside them near the window, but she answered their few
questions about her evening ramble with only feigned gayety, as though
she was occupied with other thoughts, or was too weary to talk; and,
presently, as the twilight gathered round them, they all sank into
silence. The one window looked across the road in which the house stood,
to a dark plantation of stunted trees that grew opposite: a very gloomy
place, which, even in the hottest summer-day, had always a chill, wintry
feeling, and from which even now a damp air was rising; and, entering
the open window, was spreading itself through the room.
“How unlike a summer evening it is in this room!” Gabrielle suddenly
broke the silence by exclaiming almost impatiently. “I wish I could,
even for once, see a ray of sunshine in it. I have often wondered how
any one could build a house in this situation.”
“And do you never imagine that there are people who care less for
sunshine than you do, Gabrielle?” Bertha asked, rather sadly.
“Yes, certainly, sister; but still it seems to me almost like a sin to
shut out the beautiful heaven’s sunlight as it has been shut out in this
house. Winter and summer, it is always alike. If it was not for my own
bright little room up stairs, I think I never should be gay here at
all.”
“Well, Gabrielle, you need not complain of the gloominess of this room
just now,” Miss Vaux said. “At nine o’clock on an August evening I
suppose all rooms look pretty much alike.”
“Oh, sister, no!” Gabrielle cried. “Have you never noticed the different
kinds of twilight? Here, in this house, it is always winter twilight,
quite colorless, and cold, and cheerless, but in other places, where the
sun has shone, it is warm, and soft, and beautiful; even for an hour, or
longer, after the sun has quite set, a faint rosy tinge, like a warm
breath, seems to rest upon the air, and to shed such peace and almost
holiness over every thing. That was the kind of twilight, I think of it
so often, that there used to be at home. I remember, so very, very long
ago, how I used to sit on the ground at my mother’s feet in the summer
evenings, looking out through the open window at the dear old garden,
where every thing was so very still and quiet that it seemed to me the
very trees must have fallen asleep, and how she used to tell us fairy
stories in the twilight. Sisters, do you remember it?” Gabrielle asked,
her voice tremulous, but not altogether, so it seemed, with emotion that
the recollection had called up.
“I do,” Miss Vaux said, in a voice clear and cold, and hard as ice. From
Bertha there came no answer.
“It is one of the few things I recollect about her,” Gabrielle said
again, very softly, “the rest is almost all indistinct, like a
half-forgotten dream. I was only four years old, you say, Joanna, when
she died?”
“You know it; why do you ask?” Miss Vaux said, harshly and quickly.
There was a pause. It was so dark that none of their faces could be
seen, but one might have told, from the quick nervous way in which,
unconsciously, Gabrielle was clasping and unclasping her hand, that
there was some struggle going on within her. At last, very timidly, her
voice trembling, though she tried hard to steady it, she spoke again.
“Sisters, do not be angry with me. Often, lately I have wished so very
much to ask you some things about my mother. Oh, let me ask them now.
Dear sisters, tell me why it is that you never speak to me, or almost
allow me to speak, of her? Is it because it grieves you so much to think
of her death, or is there any other cause”—her voice sank so low that
it was almost a whisper—“why her name is never mentioned amongst us? I
have kept silence about this for so long, for I knew you did not wish to
speak of it; but, oh sisters, tell me now! Ought I not to know about my
own mother?”
“Hush!” Miss Vaux said, in a voice stern and harsh. “Gabrielle, you do
not know what you are asking. Let it be enough for you to learn that any
thing I could tell you of your mother could give you nothing but pain to
hear—pain which we would gladly spare you yet, knowing, as we so well
do, the great bitterness of it. I ask you for all our sakes, yours as
much as ours, never again be the first to mention your mother’s name!”
She had risen from her seat, and stood upright before Gabrielle, the
outline of her tall, dark figure showing clearly against the window. In
her voice there was not one trace of emotion; her whole manner was hard,
and cold, and unimpassioned; like that of one who had, long ago, subdued
all gentle feelings.
Gabrielle’s tears were falling fast, but she made no answer to Miss
Vaux’s words. She stood much in awe of both her sisters, especially of
the eldest, and knew well how hopeless all remonstrance with her would
be.
After a few moments Bertha laid her hand on Gabrielle’s shoulder,
saying, with something of gentleness in her voice:
“You distress yourself too much, my child. Trust more in us, Gabrielle.
We would try to keep sorrow from you; do not make it impossible.”
“Yes, yes; I know it is meant kindly toward me,” Gabrielle said, gently,
“but you forget that I suffer from being in ignorance. I cannot forget
that you are concealing something from me.”
“Which I would to God I could conceal from you forever,” Miss Vaux said.
“Gabrielle, foolish child, do not seek for sorrow; it will come quickly
enough of itself;” and she turned from her with some muttered words that
her sister could not hear.
Gabrielle tried to speak again; but Bertha raised her hand warningly,
and they were all silent; Gabrielle with her face bowed down upon her
hands in the thick twilight.
“We will close the window and have lights,” Bertha said, after some time
had passed; “the night air is getting cold.”
With a deep sigh Gabrielle rose, and drew down the open window, standing
there for some minutes alone, and looking out upon the dark evergreen
grove.
CHAPTER II.
“I am going into the village,” Miss Vaux said. “If you will tell me
where that poor woman lives you were speaking of last night, Gabrielle,
I will call upon her now.”
“Let me go with you,” Gabrielle said quickly. “I told her we would come
together. Wait for me one minute, and I will be ready.”
“I scarcely see the need of it. You are looking pale and ill, Gabrielle.
I would advise you to stay in the house and rest.”
“I have a headache, and the air will do it good,” Gabrielle answered.
“Let me go, sister?”
“As you will, then,” Miss Vaux said, and Gabrielle went away to dress.
She had not yet recovered her usual gay spirits; but was still grave,
quiet, and apparently occupied with her own thoughts, and the two walked
side by side, almost without speaking, along the little path over the
field which lay between their house and the village. It was a very
bright, sunny summer’s day; too hot, indeed, for walking, but beautiful
to look at. The heat seemed to weary Gabrielle, she walked so very
slowly, and was so pale.
“This is the house, sister. We go through the kitchen; she has the room
above.”
They raised the latch and went in. No one was in the lower room; so they
passed through, and ascended a low, narrow staircase, almost like a
ladder, which rose abruptly from a doorway at the farther side, until
they reached another door which stood facing them, without any landing
between it and the highest step. Gabrielle knocked, and a faint voice
from within answered—“Come in;” and she entered, followed by her
sister. It was a very small room, and very bare of furniture; for there
was little in it but a deal bedstead, an old table, and one or two odd
ricketty chairs, in one of which—that boasted of a pair of broken arms,
and something that had once been a cushion—sat the woman they had come
to visit.
Gabrielle went quickly up to her, and taking her hand said in a low
voice—
“I have brought my sister, as I promised—my eldest sister.”
The woman bowed her head without speaking then tried to rise from her
seat, but she seemed very weak, and her hand trembled as she leaned on
the arm of her chair.
“Do not rise, my good woman,” Miss Vaux said kindly; and her voice
sounded almost soft—she was so used to attune it so as to be in harmony
with a sick chamber—“do not rise; I see you are very weak,” and she
drew a chair near, and sat down by her side
“You have come quite lately to the village, my sister tells me.”
“Quite lately, less than a week ago,” was the answer; but spoken in so
low a voice that the words were scarcely audible.
“Were you ever here before? Have you any connection with the place?”
Miss Vaux asked.
“No, none.”
“But you had probably some motive in coming here? Have you no relations
or friends?”
“No, no,” the woman cried, suddenly bursting into tears, “I have no
friends, no friends in the wide world.”
A gentle hand was laid on her shoulder; a gentle voice whispered some
soft words in her ear, and the woman looked up into Gabrielle’s dark
eyes, and murmured something between her sobs. Then they were all silent
for a few moments.
“I think you are a widow,” Miss Vaux asked gently, when she had become
calmer.
“Yes,” she answered slowly, as though the word had been dragged from
her, so much it seemed to pain her to speak it.
“And have you any children?”
A moment’s pause, and then another “yes,” hardly intelligible from the
choking sob which accompanied it.
Miss Vaux was silent, looking inquiringly into the woman’s face. It was
partly turned from her, partly shaded with her thin hand; her large eyes
looking up with a strange agonized look into Gabrielle’s eyes, her pale
lips moving convulsively. Gabrielle’s face was almost as pale as hers;
her look almost as full of agony.
Miss Vaux glanced from one to the other, at first with pity; then
suddenly a quick change came over her face, a deep flush mounted to her
brow, she darted from her seat, and—calm as she ordinarily was—her
whole figure trembled as she stood before them, with her fierce gaze
turned on them.
Pale as death, neither of them speaking, they bore her passionate look;
quite motionless, too, except that Gabrielle had instinctively clasped
the widow’s hand in hers, and held it tightly.
“Speak to me, Gabrielle!” Miss Vaux cried; and her voice, harsh, loud,
and quivering with passion, echoed through the room—“tell me who this
woman is?”
From the widow’s lips there burst one word—one word like a sudden
bitter cry—“Joanna!”
She stretched out her arms imploringly, trying to grasp even her
daughter’s dress; but Miss Vaux sprung from her, and stood erect in the
center of the room; her tall figure drawn to its full height; her
burning eye still turned with unutterable anger upon the crouching woman
near her.
“You have dared to do this. You have dared to seek us out here, where we
had hoped to hide ourselves from the scoffing of the bitter, heartless
world; where we had tried by acts of charity, by suffering and penance,
to blot out the recollection of the shame that you have brought upon us!
Are we nowhere secure from you? What have we to do with you? You cast us
off years ago.”
“Sister, sister,” cried Gabrielle’s imploring voice, “oh, remember,
whatever she has done, that she is still our mother. Have mercy on her,
for she cannot bear this!”
But sternly and coldly came Miss Vaux’s answer—
“Did she remember that we were her children when she left us? Did she
remember that our father was her husband? We all loved her then—she was
very dear to us—but she turned all our warm love into bitterness. She
destroyed our happiness at one stroke, for ever; she blighted, without a
pang, all the hope of our young lives; she branded us with a mark of
shame that we can never shake off; she plunged an arrow into the heart
of each of us, which lies festering there now. Are these things to be
forgiven? I tell you it is impossible! I will never forgive her—I swore
it by my father’s deathbed—never while I live! Gabrielle, this is no
place for you. Come home with me.”
“Hear me first?” the mother cried, creeping from the seat in which she
had sunk back, and cowering, with hidden face, had listened to her
daughter’s words, “hear me before you go! I have deserved every
thing—every thing you can say; but oh, from you it is bitter to hear
it! Oh! my daughter, listen to me.” She flung herself at Miss Vaux’s
feet, on the bare floor.
“You speak of the sorrows I have brought upon you—the sorrow and the
shame; but have they equalled what I have endured? Day and night—day
and night—through months and years—fourteen long years—oh, think of
it! I have wished to kill myself, but I dared not do it; I have prayed
fervently to die. Oh, no, no, stay and listen to me! My last hope—my
last hope in heaven and earth is only with you. Oh, my daughter! you say
you loved me once—will not one spark of the old love live again? I will
try yet once more to move you to pity. I have not told you all. I have
not told you how, in my agony, I tried to find rest and peace; how I
sought it everywhere—wandering from place to place alone, in hunger and
thirst, in cold and weariness, in poverty and wretchedness; finding none
anywhere, until at last, worn out with misery, I wandered here. And here
I saw Gabrielle, my beautiful child, my love, my darling!”
The wan face lighted up with passionate love, as she looked at her who
was kneeling by her side.
“She believed me when I told her of my sorrow. She comforted me with
such sweet words, that they sank like healing balm into my soul, as
though an angel’s voice had spoken. Do not take her from me!”
“Mother, do not fear,” Gabrielle’s soothing voice whispered, “I will
stay with you—did I not promise it?”
“Gabrielle!” cried Miss Vaux, “come with me, and leave her. The tie that
once bound us to her she herself has severed for ever; we have nothing
further to do with her. Gabrielle, come!”
“I cannot come. She is my mother. I cannot leave her.”
“And we are your sisters. To whom do you owe most? We have watched over
you through your life; we have shielded you from sorrow; we have loved
you almost with the love that she ought to have given you. You have been
the single joy that we have had for years. Have you no love to give us
in return for all we have given you? Oh, Gabrielle—my sister, I pray
you!—I, who am so little used to entreat any one, I pray you for the
sake of the love we have borne you—for the sake of the honor that is
still left us—for the sake of all that you hold sacred—come, come back
with us!”
A low moan burst from the mother’s lips; for Gabrielle, weeping
bitterly, rose from her knees, and threw herself into her sister’s arms.
“Heaven bless you for this!” Miss Vaux exclaimed; but interrupting her
in a broken voice, Gabrielle cried—
“You do not understand me. I cannot return with you. No, sister. Any
thing—any thing else I will do, but I cannot forsake her in her
penitence. Can you do it yourself? Oh! sister, will you not take her
home?”
“I will not.”
There was a long pause, broken once or twice by the deep sobs that
seemed bursting the mother’s heart. Then Miss Vaux spoke again,
earnestly, even imploringly—
“Gabrielle, I ask you once more, for the last time, to return with me.
Foolish child, think what you are doing. You are bringing down your
father’s dying curse upon your head—you are piercing the hearts of
those who love you with new and bitter sorrow; you are
closing—willfully closing—against yourself the door that is still open
to receive you; you are making yourself homeless—a wanderer—perhaps a
beggar. Oh, my dear sister Gabrielle, think once more—think of all
this!”
“Sister, spare me further; your words wound me; but I have decided, and
I cannot return with you. My mother’s home is my home.”
“Then I say no more,” Miss Vaux exclaimed, while her whole figure shook.
“May God forgive you for what you do this day!”
The door closed, and Gabrielle and her mother were left alone.
Gently and lovingly Gabrielle raised her from the ground, led her to her
seat, and tried to calm and soothe her—though she wept herself the
while—with cheerful, tender words.
“Mother, are you not glad to have me with you—your own little
Gabrielle? You said it would make you happy, and yet see how you are
weeping. Hush! mother dear, hush! I will be always with you now, to
nurse you, and take care of you, and comfort you, and you will get
strong and well soon; and some day, mother, some day perhaps their
hearts will soften, and they will forgive us both, and take us home to
them, and we will all live again together, loving one another.” And
Gabrielle tried to smile through the tears that were falling still.
“My child, I am weak and selfish,” the mother said. “I should have told
you to go back to your home, and to leave me, but I could not do it. Yet
even now my heart is reproaching me for what I have done. How are we to
live? My Gabrielle, you do not know how I have struggled and labored,
sometimes, only for a crust of bread.”
“Mother, you shall labor no more. My sisters are very just: all that is
mine they will give me. We will live on very little; we will find out
some quiet little village, where no one will know who we are, or where
we came from, and there we will rest together. I will never leave you
more—never more until death parts us.”
She hung upon her mother’s neck, kissing the pale brow and sunken cheek,
and wiping away the tears that were yet falling: though more slowly and
more calmly falling now.
CHAPTER III.
“. . Of whom may we seek for succor, but of Thee, O Lord, who for our
sins are justly displeased? . .
“. . earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in sure and certain
hope of the Resurrection to eternal life. . .”
“I heard a voice from heaven, saying unto me, Write. From henceforth
blessed are the dead, which die in the Lord; even so saith the Spirit,
for they do rest from their labors.”
It was a burial in a village church-yard, and standing by an open grave
there was one mourner only, a woman—Bertha Vaux. Alone, in sadness and
silence, with few tears—for she was little used to weep—she stood and
looked upon her sister’s funeral; stood and saw the coffin lowered, and
heard the first handful of earth fall rattling on the coffin lid; then
turned away, slowly, to seek her solitary house. The few spectators
thought her cold and heartless; perhaps if they could have raised that
black veil, they would have seen such sorrow in her face as might have
moved the hearts of most of them.
The sun shone warmly over hill and vale that summer’s day, but Bertha
Vaux shivered as she stepped within the shadow of her lonely house. It
was so cold there; so cold and damp and dark, as if the shadow of that
death that had entered it was still lingering around. The stunted
evergreens, on which, since they first grew, no sunlight had ever
fallen, no single ray of golden light to brighten their dark, sad leaves
for years, looked gloomier, darker, sadder, than they had ever looked
before; the very house, with its closed shutters—all closed, except one
in the room where the dead had lain—seemed mourning for the stern
mistress it had lost. A lonely woman now, lonely and sad, was Bertha
Vaux.
She sat in the summer evening in her silent, cheerless room. It was so
very still, not even a breath of wind to stir the trees; no voice of
living thing to break upon her solitude; no sound even of a single
footstep on the dusty road; but in the solitude that was around her,
countless thoughts seemed springing into life; things long forgotten;
feelings long smothered; hopes once bright—bright as the opening of her
life had been, that had faded and been buried long ago.
She thought of the time when she and her sister, fifteen years ago, had
come first to the lonely house where now she was; of a few years
later—two or three—when another younger sister had joined them there;
and it seemed to Bertha, looking back, as if the house had sometimes
then been filled with sunlight. The dark room in which she sat had once
been lightened up—was it with the light from Gabrielle’s bright eyes?
In these long, sad fifteen years, that little time stood out so clearly,
so hopefully; it brought the tears to Bertha’s eyes, thinking of it in
her solitude. And how had it ended? For ten years nearly, now—for ten
long years—the name of Gabrielle had never been spoken in that house.
The light was gone—extinguished in a moment, suddenly; a darkness
deeper than before had ever since fallen on the lonely house.
The thought of the years that had passed since then—of their
eventlessness and weary sorrow; and then the thought of the last scene
of all—that scene which still was like a living presence to her—her
sister’s death.
Joanna Vaux had been cold, stern, and unforgiving to the last; meeting
death, unmoved; repenting of no hard thing that she had done throughout
her sad, stern life; entering the valley of the shadow of death
fearlessly. But that cold death-bed struck upon the heart of the
solitary woman who watched beside it, and wakened thoughts and doubts
there, which would not rest. She wept now as she thought of it, sadly
and quietly, and some murmured words burst from her lips, which sounded
like a prayer—not for herself only.
Then from her sister’s death-bed she went far, far back—to her own
childhood—and a scene rose up before her; one that she had closed her
eyes on many a time before, thinking vainly that so she could crush it
from her heart, but now she did not try to force it back. The dark room
where she sat, the gloomy, sunless house, seemed fading from her sight;
the long, long years, with their weary train of shame and suffering—all
were forgotten. She was in her old, lost home again—the home where she
was born; she saw a sunny lawn, embowered with trees, each tree familiar
to her and remembered well, and she herself, a happy child, was standing
there; and by her side—with soft arms twining round her, with tender
voice, and gentle, loving eyes, and bright hair glittering in the
sunlight—there was one!
Oh, Bertha! hide thy face and weep. She was so lovely and so loving, so
good and true, so patient and so tender, then. “Oh! how could’st thou
forget it all, and steel thy heart against her, and vow the cruel vow
never to forgive her sin? Thy mother—thy own mother, Bertha! think of
it.”
A shadow fell across the window beside which she sat, and through her
blinding tears Bertha looked up, and saw a woman standing there, holding
by the hand a little child. Her face was very pale and worn, with sunken
eyes and cheeks; her dress was mean and poor. She looked haggard and
weary, and weak and ill; but Bertha knew that it was Gabrielle come
back. She could not speak, for such a sudden rush of joy came to her
softened heart that all words seemed swallowed up in it; such deep
thankfulness for the forgiveness that seemed given her, that her first
thought was not a welcome, but a prayer.
Gabrielle stood without, looking at her with her sad eyes.
“We are alone,” she said, “and very poor; will you take us in?”
Sobbing with pity and with joy, Bertha rose from her seat and hurried to
the door. Trembling, she drew the wanderers in; then falling on her
sister’s neck, her whole heart melted, and she cried, with gushing
tears,
“Gabrielle, dear sister Gabrielle, I, too, am all alone!”
* * * * *
The tale that Gabrielle had to tell was full enough of sadness. They had
lived together, she and her mother, for about a year, very peacefully,
almost happily; and then the mother died, and Gabrielle soon after
married one who had little to give her but his love. And after that the
years passed on with many cares and griefs—for they were very poor, and
he not strong—but with a great love ever between them, which softened
the pain of all they had to bear. At last, after being long ill, he
died, and poor Gabrielle and her child were left to struggle on alone.
“I think I should have died,” she said, as weeping, she told her story
to her sister, “if it had not been for my boy; and _I_ could so well
have borne to die; but, Bertha, I could not leave him to starve! It
pierced my heart with a pang so bitter that I cannot speak of it, to see
his little face grow daily paler; his little feeble form become daily
feebler and thinner; to watch the sad, unchildlike look fixing itself
hourly deeper in his sweet eyes—so mournful, so uncomplaining, so full
of misery. The sight killed me day by day; and then at last, in my
despair, I said to myself that I would come again to you. I thought,
sister—I hoped—that you would take my darling home, and then I could
have gone away and died. But God bless you!—God bless you for the
greater thing that you have done, my kind sister Bertha. Yes—kiss me,
sister dear: it is so sweet. I never thought to feel a sister’s kiss
again.”
Then kneeling down by Gabrielle’s side, with a low voice Bertha said:
“I have thought of many things to-day. Before you came, Gabrielle, my
heart was very full; for in the still evening, as I sat alone, the
memories of many years came back to me as they have not done for very
long. I thought of my two sisters: how the one had ever been so good and
loving and true-hearted; the other—though she was just, or believed
herself to be so—so hard, and stern, and harsh—as, God forgive me,
Gabrielle, I too have been. I thought of this, and understood it
clearly, as I had never done before: and then my thoughts went back, and
rested on my mother—on our old home—on all the things that I had loved
so well, long ago, and that for years had been crushed down in my heart
and smothered there. Oh, Gabrielle, such things rushed back upon me;
such thoughts of her whom we have scorned so many years; such dreams of
happy by-gone days; such passionate regrets; such hope, awakening from
its long, long sleep—no, sister, let me weep—do not wipe the tears
away: let me tell you of my penitence and grief—it does me good; my
heart is so full—so full that I must speak now, or it would burst!”
“Then you shall speak to me, and tell me all, dear sister. Ah! we have
both suffered—we will weep together. Lie down beside me; see, there is
room here for both. Yes; lay your head upon me; rest it on my shoulder.
Give me your hand now—ah! how thin it is—almost as thin as mine. Poor
sister Bertha; poor, kind sister!”
So gently Gabrielle soothed her, forgetting her own grief and weariness
in Bertha’s more bitter suffering and remorse. It was very beautiful to
see how tenderly and patiently she did it, and how her gentle words
calmed down the other’s passionate sorrow. So different from one another
their grief was. Gabrielle’s was a slow, weary pain, which, day by day,
had gradually withered her, eating its way into her heart; then resting
there, fixing itself there for ever. Bertha’s was like the quick, sudden
piercing of a knife—a violent sorrow, that did its work in hours
instead of years, convulsing body and soul for a little while, purifying
them as with a sharp fire, then passing away and leaving no aching pain
behind, but a new cleansed spirit.
In the long summer twilight—the beautiful summer twilight that never
sinks into perfect night—these two women lay side by side together; she
that was oldest in suffering still comforting the other, until Bertha’s
tears were dried, and exhausted with the grief that was so new to her,
she lay silent in Gabrielle’s arms—both silent, looking into the summer
night, and thinking of the days that were forever past. And sleeping at
their feet lay Gabrielle’s child, not forgotten by her watchful love,
though the night had deepened so that she could not see him where he
lay.
CHAPTER IV.
“We will not stay here, sister,” Bertha had said. “This gloomy house
will always make us sad. It is so dark and cold here, and Willie, more
than any of us, needs the sunlight to strengthen and cheer him, poor
boy.”
“And I, too, shall be glad to leave it,” Gabrielle answered.