From the grand achievements of Glorious John, one experiences a queer
revulsion of the currency in the veins in passing to the small doings of
Messrs Betterton, Ogle, and Co., in 1737 and 1741; and again, to the
still smaller of Mr Lipscomb in 1795, in the way of modernizations of
Chaucer. Who was Mr Betterton, nobody, we presume, now knows; assuredly
he was not Pope, though there is something silly to that effect in
Joseph Warton, which is repeated by Malone. "Mr Harte assured me," saith
Dr Joseph, "that he was convinced by some circumstances which Fenton had
communicated to him, that Pope wrote the characters that make the
introduction (the Prologue) to the Canterbury Tales, published under the
name of Betterton." Betterton is bitter bad; Ogle, "_wersh_ as cauld
parritch without sawte!" Lipscomb is a jewel. In a postscript to his
preface he says, "I have barely time here, the tales being already
almost all printed off, to apologize to the reader for having inserted
my own translation of The Nun's Priest's Tale, instead of that of
Dryden; but the fact is, _I did not know that Dryden's version existed_;
for having undertaken to complete those of the Canterbury Tales which
were wanting in Ogle's collection, and the tale in question _not being
in that collection_, I proceeded to supply it, having never till very
lately, strange as it may seem, _seen the volume of Dryden's Fables in
which it may be found_!!"
It is diverting to hear the worthy who, in 1795, had never seen Dryden's
Fables, offering to the public the first completed collection of the
Canterbury Tales in a modern version, "under the reasonable confidence
that the improved taste in poetry, and the extended cultivation of that,
in common with all the other elegant arts, which so strongly
characterizes the present day, will make the lovers of verse look up to
the old bard, the father of English poetry, with a veneration
proportioned to the improvements they have made in it." It grieves him
to think that the language in which Chaucer wrote "has decayed from
under him." That reason alone, he says, can justify the attempt of
exhibiting him in a modern dress; and he tells us that so faithfully has
he adhered to the great original, that they who have not given their
time to the study of the old language, "must either find a true likeness
of Chaucer exhibited in this version, or they will find it nowhere
else." With great solemnity he says, "Thence I have imposed it on myself
as a duty somewhat sacred to deviate from my original as little as
possible in the sentiment, and have often in the language adopted his
own expressions, the simplicity and effect of which have always forcibly
struck me, _wherever the terms he uses (and that happens not
unfrequently) are intelligible to modern ears_." Yes--Gulielme Lipscomb,
thou wert indeed a jewel.
Happy would he have been to accompany his version of Chaucer with notes.
"But though the version itself has been an agreeable and easy rural
occupation, yet in a remote village, near 250 miles from London, the
very books, _trifling as they may seem_, to which it would be necessary
to refer _to illustrate the manners of the 14th century_, were not to be
procured; and parochial and other engagements would not admit of absence
sufficient to consult them where they are to be found; it is not
therefore for want of deference to the opinions of those who have
recommended a body of notes that they do not accompany these Tales."
Yes--Gulielme, thou wert a jewel.
It is, however, but too manifest from his alleged versions, that not
only did Mr Lipscomb of necessity eschew the perusal of "the books,
trifling as they may seem, to which it would be necessary to refer to
illustrate the manners of the 14th century," but that he continued to
his dying day almost as ignorant of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales as of
Dryden's Fables.
In his preface he tells one very remarkable falsehood. "The Life of
Chaucer, and the Introductory Discourse to the Canterbury Tales, are
taken from the valuable edition of his original works published by Mr
Tyrwhitt." The Introductory Discourse is so taken; but it is plain that
poor, dear, fibbing Willy Lipscomb had not looked into it, for it
contradicts throughout all the statements in the life of Chaucer, which
is not from Tyrwhitt, but clumsily cribbed piecemeal by Willy himself
from that rambling and inaccurate one by a Mr Thomas in Urry's edition.
Lipscomb is lying on our table, and we had intended to quote a few
specimens of him and his predecessor Ogle; but another volume that had
fallen aside a year or two ago, has of itself mysteriously
reappeared--and a few words of it in preference to other "haverers."
Mr Horne, the author of "The False Medium," "Orion," the "Spirit of the
Age," and some other clever brochures in prose and in verse, in the
laboured rather than elaborate introduction to "The Poems of Geoffrey
Chaucer, modernized," (1841,) by Leigh Hunt, Wordsworth, Robert Bell,
Thomas Powell, Elizabeth Barrett, and Zachariah Azed, gives us some
threescore pages on Chaucer's versification; but, though they have an
imposing air at first sight, on inspection they prove stark-naught. He
seems to have a just enough general notion of the principle of the verse
in the Canterbury Tales; but with the many ways of its working--the how,
the why, and the wherefore--he is wholly unacquainted, though he
dogmatizes like a doctor. He soon makes his escape from the real
difficulties with which the subject is beset, and mouths away at immense
length and width about what he calls "the _secret_ of Chaucer's rhythm
in his heroic verse, which has been the baffling subject of so much
discussion among scholars, a trifling increase in the syllables
occasionally introduced for variety, and founded upon the same laws of
contraction by apostrophe, syncope, &c., as those followed by all modern
poets; but employed in a more free and varied manner, all the words
being fully written out, the vowels sounded, and not subjected to the
disruption of inverted commas, as used in after times." This "secret"
was patent to all the world before Mr Horne took pen in hand, and his
eternal blazon of it is too much now for ears of flesh and blood. The
modernized versions, however, are respectably executed--Leigh Hunt's
admirably; and we hope for another volume. But Mr Horne himself must be
more careful in his future modernizations. The very opening of the
Prologue is not happy.