No language can express the smallest part
Of what I feel, and suffer in my heart,
For you, whom best I love and value most:
But to your service I bequeath my ghost;
Which, from this mortal body when untied,
Unseen, unheard, shall hover at your side;
Nor fright you waking, nor your sleep offend,
But wait officious, and your steps attend.
How I have loved--excuse my faltering tongue!
My spirit's feeble and my pains are strong:
This I may say I only grieve to die,
Because I lose my charming Emily.
To die when heaven had put you in my power!
Fate could not choose a more malicious hour.
What greater curse could envious fortune give,
Than just to die when I began to live?
Vain men, how vanishing a bliss we crave,
Now warm in love, now withering in the grave!
Never, O never more to see the sun!
Still dark, in a damp vault, and still alone!
This fate is common; but I lose my breath
Near bliss, and yet not bless'd, before my death.
Farewell! but take me dying in your arms,
'Tis all I can enjoy of all your charms:
This hand I cannot but in death resign;
Ah, could I live! but while I live 'tis mine.
I feel my end approach, and thus embraced,
Am pleased to die; but hear me speak my last.
Ah, my sweet foe! for you, and you alone,
I broke my faith with injured Palamon:
But love the sense of right and wrong confounds;
Strong love and proud ambition have no bounds.
And much I doubt, should Heaven my life prolong,
I should return to justify my wrong;
For, while my former flames remain within,
Repentance is but want of power to sin.
With mortal hatred I pursued his life,
Nor he, nor you, were guilty of the strife;
Nor I, but as I loved; yet all combined,
Your beauty, and my impotence of mind;
And his concurrent flame that blew my fire;
For still our kindred souls had one desire.
He had a moment's right, in point of time;
Had I seen first, then his had been the crime.
Fate made it mine, and justified his right;
Nor holds this earth a more deserving knight,
For virtue, valour, and for noble blood,
Truth, honour, all that is comprised in good;
So help me Heaven, in all the world is none
So worthy to be loved as Palamon.
He loves you, too, with such a holy fire,
As will not, cannot, but with life expire;
Our vow'd affections both have often tried,
Nor any love but yours could ours divide.
Then, by my love's inviolable band,
By my long-suffering, and my short command,
If e'er you plight your vows when I am gone,
Have pity on the faithful Palamon.
This was his last; for Death came on amain,
And exercised below his iron reign.
Then upward to the seat of life he goes;
Sense fled before him, what he touch'd he froze:
Yet could he not his closing eyes withdraw,
Though less and less of Emily he saw;
So, speechless for a little space he lay;
Then grasp'd the hand he held, and sigh'd his soul away.
But whither went his soul, let such relate
Who search the secrets of the future state:
Divines can say but what themselves believe;
Strong proofs they have, but not demonstrative;
For, were all plain, then all sides must agree,
And faith itself be lost in certainty.
To live uprightly, then, is sure the best;
To save ourselves, and not to damn the rest.
The soul of Arcite went where heathens go,
Who better live than we, though less they know.
In Palamon a manly grief appears;
Silent he wept, ashamed to show his tears.
Emilia shriek'd but once; and then, oppress'd
With sorrow, sunk upon her lover's breast:
Till Theseus in his arms convey'd, with care,
Far from so sad a sight the swooning fair.
'Twere loss of time her sorrow to relate;
Ill bears the sex a youthful lover's fate,
When just approaching to the nuptial state:
But, like a low-hung cloud, it rains so fast,
That all at once it falls, and cannot last.
The face of things is changed, and Athens now,
That laugh'd so late, becomes the scene of woe:
Matrons and maids, both sexes, every state,
With tears lament the knight's untimely fate.
Nor greater grief in falling Troy was seen
For Hector's death, but Hector was not then.
Old men with dust deform'd their hoary hair;
The women beat their breasts, their cheeks they tear:
Why wouldst thou go, (with one consent they cry,)
When thou hadst gold enough, and Emily?
Dryden, you observe, exhibits various changes. Are they for the better
or the worse? In the first place, he introduces a new motive into the
conduct of Arcite--remorse of conscience. When fate has declared against
him, and he finds that he cannot enjoy the possession of the prize which
he has wrongfully won, his eyes open upon his own injustice, and he
acknowledges the prior right of Palamon, who first had seen Emilie.
Does this innovation make good an ethical want in the rough and
unschooled original? Or does it perplex the old heroic simplicity with a
modern and needless refinement? By right of arms, by gift of the king,
with her own gentle consent, Emelie was Arcite's. Death unsinews the
hand that held her against the world. Let a few winged moments fleet,
and she is his no more. He bows, conquered by all-conquering, alone
unconquerable necessity. His love, which had victoriously expelled his
cousin's from the field of debate, he carries with him to the melancholy
Plutonic kingdom, and leaves the field of debate still--Palamon victor,
and Emelie free. Really there seems to be something not only simpler in
art, but more pathetic, and even morally greater, in the humble
submission of the fierce and giant-like spirit to inevitable decree--in
the spontaneous return of the pristine fraternal appreciation when death
withdraws the disturbing force of rivalry--and in his voluntarily
appointing, so far as he ventures to appoint, his brother in arms and
his bride to each other's happiness--than in the inventive display of a
compunction for which, as the world goes, there appears to be positively
no use, and hardly clear room. Loftily viewing the case, a wrong has
been intended by Arcite to Palamon, but no wrong done. He has been twice
hacked and hewed a little--that is all; and it cannot be said that he
has been robbed of her who would not have been his. Indeed, the current
of destiny has so run, that the quarrel of the two noble kinsmen has
brought, as apparently it alone could bring, the survivor to wedlock
with his beloved. We suspect, then, that the attribution of the motive
is equally modern with the style of the not ill-contrived witticism
which accompanies the first mention of it--
"Conscience, that of all physick works the last,
Caused him to send for Emily in haste."
But that which, upon the general comparison of the two speeches,
principally strikes us, is the great expansion, by the multiplying of
the thoughts to which expression is given, by Dryden. With old Geoffrey,
the weight of death seems actually to lie upon the tongue that speaks in
few interrupted accents. Dryden's Moribund runs on, quite at his ease,
in eloquent disquisition. Another unsatisfactory difference is the
disappearing of that distinct, commanding purpose or plan, and the due
proportion observed upon in the original. That mere cleaving desire to
Emelie, felt through the first half in word after word gushing up from
a heart in which life, but not love, ebbs, gets bewildered in the modern
version among explications of the befallen unhappiness, and lost in a
sort of argumentative lamentation. And do but just look how that "in his
colde grave," the only word, one may say, in the whole allocution which
does not expressly appertain to Emelie, and yet half belongs to her by
contrast--is extended, in Dryden, as if upon recollection of Claudio's
complaint in "Measure for Measure," until, like that complaint, it
becomes selfish.
But there is small pleasure in picking out the poetical misses of John
Dryden. It was to be foreseen that he would be worsted in this place of
the competition; for the pathetic was not his _forte_, and was
Chaucer's. So, too, instead of the summary and concise commendation of
his happier cousin to the future regard of the bereaved bride, so
touching in Chaucer, there comes in, provoked by that unlucky
repentance, an expatiating and arguing review of the now extinct
quarrel, showing a liberty and vigour of thought that agree ill with the
threatening cloud of dissolution, and somewhat overlay and encumber the
proper business to which the dying man has now turned himself--made
imperative by the occasion--the formal and energetic eulogy on Palamon.
The praise, however, is bestowed at last, and handsomely.
Have we, think ye, gentle lovers of Chaucer, rightly understood the
possibly somewhat obscure intention of the two verses at the beginning
of our extract--
"But I bequethe the service of my gost
To you?"
We have accepted "service" in the sense which, agreeably to our
erudition, it eminently holds the old love-vocabulary--homage, devotion,
LOVE; the pure and entire dedication by the lover of his whole being to
his lady. In this meaning, the heart continually _serves_, if there
should be no opportunity of rendering any useful offices. You will see
that Dryden has taken the word in what strikes us as an inferior
sense--namely, available service; but then his verses are exquisite. And
why, gentle lovers of Chaucer, why think ye does the expiring Arcite, at
that particular juncture of his address, crave of his heart's queen
softly to take him in her arms? Is it not that he is then about pouring
out into her ear his dying design for her happiness? Received so, the
movement has great originality and an infinite beauty. His heart yearns
the more towards her as he is on the point of giving utterance to his
generous proposal. He will, by that act of love upon her part, and that
mutual attitude of love, deepen the solemnity, truth, power, impression
of his unexpected request. Will he perchance, too, approach her ear to
his voice, that grows weaker and weaker?
The two verses appear by their wording to intimate something like all
this.
"And softe take me in your armes twey,
For love of God, _and herkeneth what I sey_."
If Chaucer had any such meaning, it vanishes wholly in Dryden's version.
On re-surveying the matter at last, we feel the more that the passing
over of Emelie from the dead Arcite to the living Palamon, in Chaucer,
is by much more poetical when viewed as the voluntary concession and
gift of the now fully heroic Arcite, than as, in Dryden, the recovered
right of the fortunate survivor. However, the speech, as Dryden has it,
is vigorous, numerous, spirited, eloquent, touched with poetry, and
might please you very well, did you not compare it with the singular
truth, feeling, fitness of Chaucer's--that unparalleled picture of a
manly, sorely-wrung, lovingly-provident spirit upon its bed of untimely
death.
The process of dying has been considerately delineated by Chaucer. Death
creeps from the feet upwards to the breast--it creeps up and possesses
the arms. But the intellect which dwelled in the heart 'gan fail only
when the very heart felt death. Then dimness fell upon the eyes, and the
breath faltered. One more look--one more word--and the spirit has
forsaken its tenement. Dryden generalizes all this particularity--and
therein greatly errs. But the last four flowing verses of the
death-scene are in his more inspired manner, and must be held good for
redeeming a multitude of peccadilloes and some graver transgressions.
Read them over again--
"Yet could he not his closing eyes withdraw,
Though less and less of Emily he saw;
So, speechless for a little space he lay;
Then grasp'd the hand he held, and sigh'd his soul away."
When years rolling have in a manner exhausted the tears due to the
remembrance of the heroic Arcite, a parliament, held upon matters of
public interest, gives occasion to Theseus of requiring the attendance
of Palamon from Thebes to Athens. The benign monarch, however, is
revolving affairs of nearer and more private concern. The national
council is assembled; Palamon is in his place, and Emelie has been
called into presence. His majesty puts on a very serious countenance,
fixes his eyes, heaves a sigh, and begins unburthening his bosom of its
concealed purposes. He "begins from the beginning" in this fashion:--
"When the First Mover established the great chain of love, in which he
bound the four elements, the mighty ordering proceeded of high wisdom.
The same author, himself inaccessible to alteration, has appointed to
all natural things the law of transiency and succession. The kinds
endure; the individuals pass away. Nature examples us with decay. Trees,
rivers, mighty towns, wax and wane--much more we. All must die--the
great and the small: and the wish to live is an impiety. Better it is to
fall in the pride of strength and in the splendour of renown, than to
droop through long years into the grave; and the friend who survives
should rejoice in his friend's happy and honourable departure.
Wherefore, then, shall we longer mourn for Arcite?" This is the copious
preamble. The conclusion is more briefly dispatched. Emelie must accept
the hand of her faithful servant Palamon. He wants no persuasion; and
the knot of matrimony happily ties up at last their destinies, wishes,
and expectations, which the Tale in its progress has spun.
The royal harangue is long; and marked, doubtless, with a sort of
artificial solemnity. However, it has a deliberative stateliness and a
certain monarchal tone. _We_ do not now, in the Speeches from the
Throne, begin regularly from the Creation--but that is a refinement.
There has been eloquence of which Chaucer's deep display of philosophy
and high deduction of argument is no ill-conceived representation. There
is a grandeur in the earthly king's grounding his counsels in those of
the heavenly King; and in his blending his own particular act of exerted
kingly sway into the general system of things in the universe. The turn
from the somewhat magniloquent dissertation to the parties immediately
interested--the gentle disposing, between injunction and persuasion, of
Emelie's will, and the frank call upon Palamon to come forward and take
possession of his happiness, are natural, princely, and full of dramatic
grace. Thus,--