"This miller hath so _wisly_ bibbed ale."
And Mr Horne, with incredible ignorance of the meaning of that word,
says--
"The miller hath so _wisely_ bobbed of ale."
So wisely that he was "for-drunken"--and "as a horse he snorteth in his
sleep."
In Chaucer the description of the miller's daughter ends with this
line--
"But right faire was _hire here_, I will not lie,"
_i.e._ her hair. Mr Horne translates it "was _she here_."
But there is no end to such blunders.
In Chaucer, as in all our old poets of every degree, there occur, over
and over again, such forms of natural expression as the following,--and
when they do occur, let us have them; but what a feeble modernizer must
he be who keeps adding to the number till he gives his readers the
ear-ache. Not one of the following is in the original:--
"At Algeziras, in Granada, he,"
"At many a noble fight of ships was he."
"For certainly a prelate fair was he."
"In songs and tales the prize o'er all bore he."
"And a poor parson of a town was he."
"Such had he often proved, and loath was he."
"In youth a good trade practised well had he."
"Lordship and servitude at once hath he."
"And die he must as echo did, said he."
"Madam this is impossible, said he."
"Save wretched Aurelius none was sad but he."
"And said thus when this last request heard he."
In like manner, in Chaucer as in all our old poets of every degree,
there occur over and over again such natural forms of expression as "I
wot," "I wis"--and where they do occur let us have them too and be
thankful; but poverty-stricken in the article of rhymes must _be he_,
who is perpetually driven to resort to such expedients as the
following--all of which are Mr Horne's own:--
"Of fees and robes he many had, I ween."
"And yet this manciple made them fools, I wot."
"This Reve upon stallion sat, I wot."
"Than the poor parson in two months, I wot."
"For certainly when I was born, I trow."
"A small stalk in mine eyes he sees, I deem."
"There were two scholars young and poor, I trow."
"John lieth still and not far off, I trow."
"Eastern astrologers and clerks, I wis."
"This woful heart found some reprieve, I wis."
"Unto his brother's bed he came, I wis."
"And now Aurelius ever, as I ween."
"That she could not sustain herself, I ween."
Mr Horne, in his Introduction, unconscious of his own sins, speaks with
due contempt of the modernizations of Chaucer by Ogle and Lipscomb and
their coadjutors, and of the injury they may have done to the reputation
of the old poet. But whatever injury they may have occasioned, "there
can be doubt," he says, "of the mischief done by Mr Pope's obscene
specimen, _placed at the head_ of his list of 'Imitations of English
Poets.' It is an imitation of those passages which we should only regard
as the rank offal of a great feast in the olden time. The better taste
and feeling of Pope should have imitated the noble _poetry_ of Chaucer.
He avoided this 'for sundry weighty reasons.' But if this so-called
imitation by Pope was 'done in his youth' he should have burnt it in his
age. Its publication at the present day among his elegant works, is a
disgrace to modern times, and to his high reputation." Not so fast and
strong, good Mister Horne. The six-and-twenty octosyllabic lines thus
magisterially denounced by our stern moralist in the middle of the
nineteenth century, have had a place in Pope's works for a hundred
years, and it is too late now to seek to delete them. They were written
by Pope in his fourteenth or fifteenth year, and gross as they are, are
pardonable in a boy of precocious genius, giving way for a laughing hour
to his sense of the grotesque. Joe Warton (not Tom) pompously calls them
"a gross and _dull_ caricature of the Father of English Poetry." And Mr
Bowles says, "he might have added, it is disgusting as it is dull, and
no more like Chaucer than a _Billingsgate_ is like an Oberea." It is
_not_ dull, but exceedingly clever; and Father Geoffrey himself would
have laughed at it--patted Pope on the head--and enjoined him for the
future to be more discreet. Roscoe, like a wise man, regards it without
horror--remarking of it, and the boyish imitation of Spenser, that "why
these sportive and characteristic sketches should be brought to so
severe an ordeal, and pointed out to the reprehension of the reader as
gross and disagreeable, dull and disgusting, it is not easy to
perceive." Old Joe maunders when he says, "he that was unacquainted with
Spenser, and was to form his ideas of the turn and manner of his genius
from this piece, would undoubtedly suppose that he abounded in filthy
images, and excelled in describing the lower scenes of life." Let all
such blockheads suppose what they choose. Pope--says Roscoe--"was well
aware as any one of the superlative beauties and merits of Spenser,
whose works he assiduously studied, both in his early and riper years;
but it was not his intention in these few lines to give a _serious_
imitation of him. All that he attempted was to show how exactly he could
apply the language and manner of Spenser to low and burlesque subjects;
and in this he has completely succeeded. To compare these lines, as Dr
Warton has done, with those more extensive and highly-finished
productions, the _Castle of Indolence_ by Thomson, and the _Minstrel_ by
Beattie, is manifestly unjust"--and stupidly absurd. What Mr Horne means
by saying that Pope "avoided imitating the noble poetry of Chaucer for
sundry weighty reasons," is not apparent at first sight. It means,
however, that Pope _could_ not have done so--that the feat was beyond
his power. The author of the _Messiah_ and the _Eloïse_ wrote tolerable
poetry of his own; and he knew how to appreciate, and to emulate, too,
some of the finest of Chaucer's. Why did Mr Horne not mention his
_Temple of Fame_? A more childish sentence never was written than "its
publication at the present day among his elegant works is a disgrace to
modern times, and to his high reputation." Pope's reputation is above
reproach, enshrined in honour for evermore, and modern times are not so
Miss Mollyish as to sympathize with such sensitive censorship of an
ingeniously versified peccadillo, at which our _avi_ and _proavi_ could
not choose but smile.
But Mr Horne, thinking, that in this case "the child is father of the
man," rates Pope as roundly for what he seems to suppose were the
misdemeanours of his manhood. "Of the highly-finished paraphrase, by Mr
Pope, of the 'Wife of Bath's Prologue,' and 'The Merchant's Tale,'
suffice it to say, that the licentious humour of the original being
divested of its _quaintness and obscurity_ (!) becomes yet more
licentious in proportion to the fine touches of skill with which it is
brought into the light. Spontaneous coarseness is made revolting by
meretricious artifice. Instead of keeping in the distance that which was
objectionable, by such shades in the modernizing as should have answered
to the _hazy appearance_ (!) of the original, it receives a clear
outline, and is brought close to us. An ancient Briton, with his long
rough hair and painted body, laughing and singing half-naked under a
tree, may be coarse, yet innocent of all intention to offend; but if the
imagination (absorbing the anachronism) can conceive him shorn of this
falling hair, his paint washed off, and in this uncovered stated
introduced into a drawing-room full of ladies in rouge and diamonds,
hoops and hair-powder, no one can doubt the injury thus done to the
ancient Briton. This is no unfair illustration of what was done in the
time of Pope," &c.
It may be "no unfair illustration," and certainly is no unludicrous one.
We must all of us allow, that were an ancient Briton, habited, or rather
unhabited, as above, to bounce into a modern drawing-room full of
ladies, whether in rouge and diamonds, hoops and hair-powder, or not,
the effect of such _entrée_ would be prodigious on the fair and
fluttered Volscians. Our imagination, "absorbing the anachronism,"
ensconces us professionally behind a sofa, to witness and to record the
scene. How different in nature Christopher North and R.H. Horne! While
he would be commiserating "the injury thus done to the ancient Briton,"
we should be imploring our savage ancestor to spare the ladies.
"Innocent of all intention to offend" might be Caractacus, but to the
terrified bevy he would seem the king of the Cannibal Islands at least.
What protection against the assault of a savage, almost _in puris
naturalibus_, could be hoped for in their hoops! Yet who knows but that,
on looking round and about, he might himself be frightened out of his
senses? An ancient Briton, with his long rough hair and painted body,
may laugh and sing by himself, half-naked under a tree, and in his own
conceit be a match for any amount of women. But shorn of his falling
hair, and without a streak of paint on his cheeks, verily his heart
might be found to die within him, before furies with faces fiery with
rouge, and heads horrent with pomatum--till instinctively he strove to
roll himself up in the Persian carpet, and there prayed for deliverance
to his tutelary gods.
Our imagination having thus "absorbed the anachronism," let us now leave
Caractacus in the carpet--while our reason has recourse to the
philosophy of criticism. Mr Horne asserts, that in "Mr Pope's"
highly-finished paraphrase of the "Wife of Bath's Prologue," and the
"Merchant's Tale," "the licentious humour of the original is divested of
its quaintness and obscurity, and becomes yet more licentious in
proportion to the fine touches of skill with which it is brought into
the light." Quaintness and _obscurity_!! Why, everything in those tales
is as plain as a pike-staff, and clearer than mud. "The hazy appearance
of the original" indeed! What! of the couple in the Pear-Tree? Mr Horne
spitefully and perversely misrepresents the character of Pope's
translations. They are remarkably free from the vice he charges them
withal--and have been admitted to be so by the most captious critics.
Many of the very strong things in Chaucer, which you may call coarse and
gross if you will, are omitted by Pope, and many softened down; nor is
there a single line in which the spirit is not the spirit of satire. The
folly of senile dotage is throughout exposed as unsparingly, though with
a difference in the imitation, as in the original. Even Joseph Warton
and Bowles, affectedly fastidious over-much as both too often are, and
culpably prompt to find fault, acknowledge that Pope's versions are
blameless. "In the art of telling a story," says Bowles, "Pope is
peculiarly happy; we almost forget the grossness of the subject of this
tale, (the Merchant's,) while we are struck by the uncommon ease and
readiness of the verse, the suitableness of the expression, and the
spirit and happiness of the whole." While Dr Warton, sensibly remarking,
"that the character of a fond old dotard, betrayed into disgrace by an
unsuitable match, is supported in a lively manner," refrains from making
himself ridiculous by mealy-mouthed moralities which on such a subject
every person of sense and honesty must despise. Mr Horne keeps foolishly
carping at Pope, or "Mr Pope," as he sometimes calls him, throughout his
interminable--no, not interminable--his hundred-paged Introduction. He
abominates Pope's Homer, and groans to think how it has corrupted the
English ear by its long domination in our schools. He takes up, with
leathern lungs, the howl of the Lakers, and his imitative bray is louder
than the original, "in linked sweetness long drawn out." Such sonorous
strictures are innocent; but his false charge of licentiousness against
Pope is most reprehensible--and it is insincere. For he has the sense to
see Chaucer's broadest satire in its true light, and its fearless
expositions. Yet from his justification of pictures and all their
colouring in the ancient poet, that might well startle people by no
means timid, he turns with frowning forehead and reproving hand to
corresponding delineations in the modern, that stand less in need of it,
and spits his spite on Pope, which we wipe off that it may not corrode.
"This translation was done at sixteen or seventeen," says Pope in a
note to his January and May--and there is not, among the achievements of
early genius, to be found another such specimen of finished art and of
perfect mastery.
Mr. Horne has ventured to give in his volume the Reve's Tale. "It has
been thought," he says, "that an idea of the extraordinary versatility
of Chaucer's genius could not be adequately conveyed, unless one of his
matter-of-fact comic tales were attempted. The Reve's has accordingly
been selected, as presenting a graphic painting of character, equal to
those contained in the 'Prologue to the Canterbury Tales,' displayed in
action by means of a story, which may be designated _as a broad farce,
ending in a pantomime of absurd reality_. To those who are acquainted
with the original, an apology may not be considered inadmissible for
certain necessary variations and omissions." For our part, we do not
object to this tale, though at the commencement of such a work its
insertion was ill-judged, and will endanger greatly the volume. But we
do object to the hypocritical cant about the licentiousness of Pope's
fine touches, from the person who wrote the above words in italics.
Omissions there must have been--but they sadly shear the tale of its
vigour, and indeed leave it not very intelligible to readers who know
not the original. The variations are most unhappy--miserable indeed; and
by putting the miller's daughter to lie in a closet at the end of a
passage, this moral modernizer has killed Chaucer. In the matchless
original all the night's action goes on in one room--and that not a
large one--miller, miller's wife, miller's daughter, and the two
strenuous Cantabs, are within the same four narrow walls--their beds
nearly touch--the jeopardized cradle has just space to rock in--yet this
self-elected expositor of Chaucer is either so blind as not to see how
essential such allocation of the parties is to the wicked comedy, or
such a blunderer as to believe that he can improve on the greatest
master that ever dared, and with perfect success, to picture, without
our condemnation--so wide is the privilege of genius in sportive
fancy--what, but for the self-rectifying spirit of fiction, would have
been an outrage on nature, and in the number not only of forbidden but
unhallowed things. The passages interpolated by Mr Horne's own pen are
as bad as possible--clownish and anti-Chaucerian to the last degree.
For example, he thus takes upon himself, in the teeth of Chaucer, to
narrate Alein's night adventure--
"And up he rose, and crept along the floor,
Into the passage humming with their snore;
As narrow was it as a drum or tub,
And like a beetle doth he grope and _grub_,
Feeling his way, _with darkness in his hands_.
Till at the passage end he stooping stands."
Chaucer tells us, without circumlocution, why the Miller's Wife for
while had left her husband's side; but Mr Horne is intolerant of the
indelicate, and thus elegantly paraphrases the one original word--
"The wife her routing ceased soon after that:
And woke and left her bed; _for she was pained_
_With nightmare dreams of skies that madly rained._
_Eastern astrologers and clerks, I wis,
In time of Apis tell of storms like this_."
Such is modern refinement!
In Chaucer, the blind encounter between the Miller and one of the
Cantabs, who, mistaking him for his comrade, had whispered into his ear
what had happened during the night to his daughter, is thus comically
described--
"Ye falsè harlot, quod the miller, hast?
A falsè traitour, falsè clerk, (quod he)
Thou shalt be deaf by Goddès dignitee,
Who dorstè be so bold to disparage
My daughter, that is come of swiche lineage.
And by the throtè-bolle he caught Alein,
And he him hente despiteously again,
And on the nose he smote him with his fist;
Down ran the bloody streme upon his brest;
And on the flore with nose and mouth to-broke,
They walwe, as don two piggès in a poke.
And up they gon, and down again anon,
Till that the miller spurned at a stone,
And down he fell backward upon his wif,
That wistè nothing of this nicè strif,
For she was falle aslepe, a litel wight
with John the clerk," and ...
Here comes Mr Horne in his strength.
"Thou slanderous ribald! quoth the miller, hast!
A traitor false, false lying clerk, quoth he,
Thou shalt be slain by heaven's dignity
Who rudely dar'st disparage with foul lie
My daughter, that is come of lineage high!
And by the throat he Allan grasp'd amain,
And caught him, yet more furiously again,
And on his nose he smote him with his fist!
Down ran the bloody stream upon his breast,
And on the floor they tumble heel and crown,
And shake the house, it seem'd all coming down.
And up they rise, and down again they roll:
Till that the Miller, stumbling o'er a coal,
Went plunging headlong like a bull at bait,
And met his wife, and both fell flat as slate."
Mr Horne cannot read Chaucer. The Miller does not, as he makes him do,
accuse the Cantab of falsely slandering his daughter's virtue. He does
not doubt the truth of the unluckily blabbed secret; false harlot, false
traitor, false clerk, are all words that tell his belief; but Mr Horne,
not understanding "disparage," as it is here used by Chaucer, wholly
mistakes the cause of the father's fury. He does not even know, that it
is the Miller who gets the bloody nose, not the Cantab. "As don two
piggès in a poke," he leaves out, preferring, as more picturesque, "And
on the floor they tumble _heel and crown_!" "And shake the house--it
seemed all coming down," is not in Chaucer, nor could be; but the
crowning stupidity is that of making the Miller meet his wife, and upset
her--she being all the while in bed, and now startled out of sleep by
the weight of her fallen superincumbent husband. And this is modernizing
Chaucer!
What, then--after all we have written about him--we ask, can, at this
day, be done with Chaucer? The true answer is--READ HIM. The late
Laureate dared to think that every one might; and in his collection, or
selection, of English poets, down to Habington inclusive, he has given
the prologue, and half a dozen of the finest and most finished tales;
believing that every earnest lover of English poetry would by degrees
acquire courage and strength to devour and digest a moderately-spread
banquet. Without doubt, Southey did well. It was a challenge to poetical
Young England to gird up his loins and fall to his work. If you will
have the fruit, said the Laureate, you must climb the tree. He bowed
some heavily-laden branches down to your eye, to tempt you; but climb
you must, if you will eat. He displayed a generous trust in the growing
desire and capacity of the country for her own time-shrouded poetical
treasures. In the same full volume, he gave the "Faerie Queene" from the
first word to the last.
Let us hope boldly, as Southey hoped. But there are, in the present
world, a host of excellent, sensitive readers, whose natural taste is
perfectly susceptible of Chaucer, if he spoke their language; yet who
have not the courage, or the leisure, or the aptitude, to master his.
They must not be too hastily blamed if they do not readily reconcile
themselves to a garb of thought which disturbs and distracts all their
habitual associations. Consider, the 'ingenious feeling,' the vital
sensibility, with which they apprehend their own English, may place the
insurmountable barrier which opposes their access to the father of our
poetry. What can be done for them?
In the first place, what is it that so much removes the language from
us? It is removed by the words and grammatical forms that we have
lost--by its real antiquity; perhaps more by an accidental semblance of
antiquity--the orthography. That last may seem a small matter; but it is
not.
There are three ways in which literary craftsmen have attempted to fill
up, or bridge over, the gulf of time, and bring the poet of Edward III.
and Richard II. near to modern readers.
Dryden and Pope are the representatives, as they are the masters, of the
first method; for the others who have trodden in their footsteps are
hardly to be named or thought of. Dryden and Pope hold, in their own
school of modernizing, this undoubted distinction, that under their
treatment, that which was poetry remains poetry. Their followers have
written, for the most part, intelligible English, but never poetry. They
have told the story, and not that always; but they have distilled
lethargy on the tongue of the narrator.--This first method the most
boldly departs from the type. It was probably the only way that the
culture of Dryden's and Pope's time admitted of. We have since gradually
returned, more and more, upon our own antiquity, as all the nations of
Europe have upon theirs. Then civilization seemed to herself to escape
forwards out of barbarism. Now she finds herself safe; and she ventures
to seek light for her mature years in the recollections of her own
childhood.
But now, the altered spirit of the age has produced a new manner of
modernization. The problem has been put thus. To retain of Chaucer
whatever in him is our language, or is most nearly our language--only
making good, always, the measure; and for expression, which time has
left out of our speech, to substitute such as is in use. And several
followers of the muses, as we have seen, have lately tried their hand at
this kind of conversion.
It is hard to judge both the system and the specimens. For if the
specimens be thought to have succeeded, the system may, upon them, be
favourably judged; but if the specimens have failed, the system must not
upon them be unfavourably judged, but must in candour be looked upon as
possibly carrying in itself means and powers that have not yet been
unfolded. But unhappily a difficulty occurs which would not have
occurred with a writer in prose--the law of the verse is imperious. Ten
syllables must be kept, and rhyme must be kept; and in the experiment it
results, generally, that whilst the rehabiting of Chaucer is undertaken
under a necessity which lies wholly in the obscurity of his dialect--the
proposed ground or motive of modernization--far the greater part of the
actual changes are made for the sake of that which beforehand you might
not think of, namely, the Verse. This it is that puts the translators to
the strangest shifts and fetches, and besets the version, in spite of
their best skill, with anti-Chaucerisms as thick as blackberries.
It might, at first sight, seem as if there could be no remorse about
dispersing the atmosphere of antiquity; and you might be disposed to
say--a thought is a thought, a feeling a feeling, a fancy a fancy. Utter
the thought, the feeling, the fancy, with what words you will, provided
that they are native to the matter, and the matter will hold its own
worth. No. There is more in poetry than the definite, separable matter
of a fancy, a feeling, a thought. There is the indefinite, inseparable
spirit, out of which they all arise, which verifies them all, harmonizes
them all, interprets them all. There is the spirit of the poet himself.
But the spirit of the time in which a poet lives, flows through the
spirit of the poet. Therefore, a poet cannot be taken out of his own
time, and rightly and wholly understood. It seems to follow that
thought, feeling, fancy, which he has expressed, cannot be taken out of
his own speech, and his own style, and rightly and wholly understood.
Let us bring this home to Chaucer, and our occasion. The air of
antiquity hangs about him, cleaves to him; therefore he is the venerable
Chaucer. One word, beyond any other, expresses to us the difference
betwixt his age and ours--Simplicity. To read him after his own spirit,
we must be made simple. That temper is called up in us by the simplicity
of his speech and style. Touched by these, and under their power, we
lose our false habituations, and return to nature. But for this singular
power exerted over us, this dominion of an irresistible sympathy, the
hint of antiquity which lies in the language seems requisite. That
summons us to put off our own, and put on another mind. In a half
modernization, there lies the danger that we shall hang suspended
between two minds--between two ages--taken out of one, and not
effectually transported into that other. Might a poet, if it were worth
while, who had imbued himself with antiquity and with Chaucer, depart
more freely from him, and yet more effectually reproduce him? Imitating,
not erasing, the colours of the old time--untying the strict chain that
binds you to the fourteenth century, but impressing on you candour,
clearness, shrewdness, ingenuous susceptibility, simplicity, ANTIQUITY!
A creative translator or imitator--Chaucer born again, a century and a
half later.
Let us see how Wordsworth deals with Chaucer in the first seven stanzas
of the Cuckoo and Nightingale.
"The god of love, a benedicite!
How mighty and how gret a lord is he,
For he can make of lowè hertès highe,
Of highè lowe, and likè for to dye,
And hardè hertès he can maken fre.
"And he can make, within a litel stounde,
Of sekè folkè, holè, freshe, and sounde,
Of holè folkè he can maken seke,
And he can binden and unbinden eke
That he wol have ybounden or unbounde.
"To telle his might my wit may not suffice,
For he can make of wisè folke ful nice,
For he may don al that he wol devise,
And lither folkè to destroien vice,
And proudè hertès he can make agrise.
"And shortly al that ever he wol he may,
Ayenès him dare no wight sayè nay:
For he can glade and grevè whom he liketh:
And whoso that he wol, he lougheth or siketh,
And most his might he shedeth ever in May.
"For every truè gentle hertè fre
That with him is or thinketh for to be
Ayenès May shal have now som stering,
Other to joie or elles to som mourning;
In no seson so moch as thinketh me.
"For whan they mayè here the briddès singe,
And se the flourès and the levès springe,
That bringeth into hire rememberaunce
A maner esè, medled with grevaunce,
And lusty thoughtès fulle of gret longinge.
"And of that longinge cometh hevinesse,
And therof groweth oft gret sekenesse,
Al for lackinge of that that they desire;
And thus in May ben hertès sette on fire,
So that they brennen forth in gret distresse."