he defined in the strictest manner the original office of the poet,
and the object of the judicious Macbeth’s ordinance was to prevent
any one from singing the wrong arms and the rival man. Formerly the
poet held a recognized place in the body politic, and if he has been
deposed from it, it may be some consolation to think that the _Fools_,
whom the Scottish usurper included in his penal statute, have not lost
their share in the government of the world yet, nor, if we may trust
appearances, are likely to for some time to come. But the Fools here
referred to were not those who had least, but those who had most wit,
and who assumed that disguise in order to take away any dangerous
appearance of intention from their jibes and satires.
The poet was once what the political newspaper is now, and circulated
from ear to ear with satire or panegyric. He it was who first made
public opinion a power in the State by condensing it into a song.
The invention of printing, by weakening the faculty of memory, and
by transferring the address of language from the ear to the eye,
has lessened the immediate power of the poet. A newspaper may be
suppressed, an editor may be silenced, every copy of an obnoxious book
may be destroyed, but in those old days when the minstrels were a
power, a verse could wander safely from heart to heart and from hamlet
to hamlet as unassailable as the memories on which it was imprinted.
Its force was in its impersonality, for public opinion is disenchanted
the moment it is individualized, and is terrible only so long as it
is the opinion of no one in particular. Find its author, and the huge
shadow which but now darkened half the heaven shrinks like the genius
of the Arabian story into the compass of a leaden casket which one
can hold in his hand. Nowadays one knows the editor, perhaps, and so
is on friendly terms with public opinion. You may have dined with it
yesterday, rubbed shoulders with it in the omnibus to-day, nay, carried
it in your pocket embodied in the letter of the special correspondent.
Spenser, in his prose tract upon Ireland, has left perhaps the best
description possible of the primitive poet as he was everywhere when
the copies of a poem were so many living men, and all publication was
to the accompaniment of music. He says: “There is amongst the Irish
a certain kind of people called bards, which are to them instead of
poets, whose profession is to set forth the praises or dispraises of
men in their poems or rhythms; the which are held in such high regard
or esteem amongst them that none dare to displease them for fear of
running into reproach through this offense, and to be made infamous in
the mouths of all men.”
Nor was the sphere of the bards confined to the present alone. They
were also the embodied memory of the people. It was on the wings of
verse that the names of ancestral heroes could float down securely over
broad tracts of desert time and across the gulfs of oblivion. And poets
were sometimes made use of by sagacious rulers to make legends serve a
political purpose. The Persian poet Firdusi is a remarkable instance of
this. Virgil also attempted to braid together the raveled ends of Roman
and Greek tradition, and it is not impossible that the minstrels of the
Norman metrical romances were guided by a similar instinct.
But the position of the inhabitants of England was a peculiar one. The
Saxons by their conversion to Christianity, and the Normans still more
by their conversion and change of language, were almost wholly cut
off from the past. The few fragments of the Celtic race were the only
natives of Britain who had an antiquity. The English properly so called
were a people who hardly knew their own grandfathers. They no longer
spoke the language, believed in the religion, or were dominated by the
ideas of their ancestors.
English writers demand of us a national literature. But where for
thirteen centuries was their own? Our ancestors brought a past with
them to Plymouth; they claimed descent from a great race; the language
they spoke had been ennobled by recording the triumphs of ancestral
daring and genius; it had gone up to Heaven wafted on the red wings
of martyr-fires; mothers hushed their new-born babes, and priests
scattered the farewell earth upon the coffin-lid, with words made sweet
or sacred by immemorial association. But the Normans when they landed
in England were a new race of armed men almost as much cut off from
the influences of the past as those which sprang out of the ground at
the sowing of the dragon’s teeth. They found there a Saxon encampment
occupying a country strange to them also. For we must remember that
though Britain was historically old, England was not; and it was
as impossible to piece the histories of the two together to make a
national record of as it would be for us to persuade ourselves into a
feeling of continental antiquity by adopting the Mexican annals.
The ballads are the first truly national poetry in our language, and
national poetry is not either that of the drawing-room or of the
kitchen. It is the common mother-earth of the universal sentiment that
the foot of the poet must touch, through which shall steal up to heart
and brain that fine virtue which puts him in sympathy, not with his
class, but with his kind.
Fortunately for the ballad-makers, they were not encumbered with any
useless information. They had not wit enough to lose their way. It is
only the greatest brains and the most intense imagination that can fuse
learning into one substance with their own thought and feeling, and so
interpenetrate it with _themselves_ that the acquired is as much _they_
as the native. The ballad-makers had not far to seek for material. The
shipwreck, the runaway match, the unhappy marriage, the village ghost,
the achievement of the border outlaw--in short, what we read every day
under the head of _Items_ in the newspapers, were the inspiration of
their song. And they sang well, because they thought, and felt, and
believed just as their hearers did, and because they never thought
anything about it. The ballads are pathetic because the poet did not
try to make them so; and they are models of nervous and simple diction
because the business of the poet was to _tell_ his story, and not to
adorn it; and accordingly he went earnestly and straightforwardly to
work, and let the rapid thought snatch the word as it ran, feeling
quite sure of its getting the right one. The only art of expression is
to have something to express. We feel as wide a difference between what
is manufactured and what is spontaneous as between the sparkles of an
electrical machine, which a sufficiently muscular professor can grind
out by the dozen, and the wildfire of God that writes _mene, mene_, on
the crumbling palace walls of midnight cloud.
It seems to me that the ballad-maker, in respect of diction, had also
this advantage--that he had no books. Language, when it speaks to the
eye only, loses half its meaning. For the eye is an outpost of the
brain, and wears its livery oftener than that of the character. But the
temperament, the deep human nature, the aboriginal emotions, _these_
utter themselves in the voice. It is only by the ear that the true
mother-tongue that knows the short way to the heart is learned. I do
not believe that a man born deaf could understand Shakspeare, or sound
anything but the edges and shores of Lear’s tempestuous woe. I think
that the great masters of speech have hunted men and not libraries, and
have found the secret of their power in the street and not upon the
shelf.
It is the _way_ of saying things that is learned by commerce with men,
and the best writers have mixed much with the world. It is there only
that the language of feeling can be acquired.
The ballads are models of narrative poetry. They are not concerned with
the utterance of thought, but only of sentiment or passion, and it is
as illustrating poetic diction that I shall chiefly cite them. If they
moralize it is always by picture, and not by preachment. What discourse
of inconstancy has the force and biting pathos of this grim old song,
the “Twa Corbies”?
As I was walking all alone
I heard twa corbies making a moan.
The one unto the other did say:
Where shall we gang and dine to-day?
In beyond that old turf dyke
I wot there lies a new-slain knight,
And naebody kens that he lies there,
But his hawk and his hound and his lady fair.
His hound is to the hunting gone,
His hawk to fetch the wild-fowl hame,
His lady’s ta’en anither mate--
Sae we may make our dinner sweet.
You’ll sit upon his white neck-bone
And I’ll pick out his bonny blue een;
With a lock of his golden hair
We’ll thatch our nest when it grows bare.
Many a one for him makes moan,
But none sall ken where he is gone;
O’er his white bones when they grow bare
The wind shall blow forever mair.
Observe, the wind simply blows. That is enough; but a modern poet would
have sought to intensify by making the wind moan, or shriek, or sob,
or something of the kind.
Mr. Lowell here quoted a ballad which tells a story of a child-murder.
It begins:
Fair Anne sate in her bower
Down by the greenwood side,
And the flowers did spring,
And the birds did sing,
’Twas the pleasant Mayday tide.
The ballad singers had all the advantage of that spur of the moment
which the excitement of speaking gives, and they also received the
magnetism which came from the sympathy of their hearers. They knew what
_told_, for they had their hand upon the living pulse of feeling. There
was no time to palaver; they must come to the point.
The Percy came out of Northumberland,
And a vow to God made he
That he would hunt in the mountains
Of Cheviot within days three,
In the maugre of Doughty Douglas
And all that ever with him be.
They plunge into deep water at once. And there is never any filling up.
The transitions are abrupt. You can no more foretell the swift wheel
of the feeling than that of a falcon, and the phrases flash forth
sharp-edged and deadly like a sword drawn in wrath. The passions speak
out savagely and without any delicacies of circumlocution.
It is worth thinking of whether the press, which we have a habit
of calling such a fine institution, be not weakening the fibre and
damaging the sincerity of our English and our thinking, quite as fast
as it diffuses intelligence.
Consider the meaning of expression--something wrung from us by the grip
of thought or passion, whether we will or no. But the editor is quite
as often compelled to write that he may fill an empty column as that
he may relieve an overfilled brain. And in a country like ours, where
newspapers are the only reading of the mass of the people, there is a
danger of a general contentedness in commonplace. For we always become
what we habitually read. We let our newspapers think for us, argue for
us, criticize for us, remember for us, do everything for us, in short,
that will save us from the misfortune of being _ourselves_. And so,
instead of men and women, we find ourselves in a world inhabited by
incarnated leaders, or paragraphs, or items of this or that journal.
We are apt to wonder at the scholarship of the men of two centuries
ago. They were scholars because they did not read so much as we do.
We spend more time over print than they did, but instead of communing
with the choice thought of choice spirits, and insensibly acquiring the
grand manner of that supreme society, we diligently inform ourselves
of such facts as that a fine horse belonging to Mr. Smith ran away on
Wednesday and that a son of Mr. Brown fell into the canal on Thursday,
or that a gravel bank fell in and buried Patrick O’Callahan on Friday.
And it is our own fault, and not that of the editor. For _we_ make the
newspapers, and the editor would be glad to give us better stuff if we
did not _demand_ such as this.
Another evil of this state of things is the watering, or
milk-and-watering, of our English. Writing to which there is no higher
compelling destiny than the coming of the printer’s devil must end in
this at last. The paragraphist must make his paragraph, and the longer
he makes it, the better for him and the worse for us. The virtue of
words becomes wholly a matter of length. Accordingly, we have now
no longer any fires, but “disastrous conflagrations”; nobody dies,
but “deceases” or “demises”; men do not fall from houses, but are
“precipitated from mansions or edifices”; a convict is not hanged, but
“suffers the extreme penalty of the offended law,” etc.
The old ballad-makers lived in a better day. They did not hear of so
many events that none of them made any impression. They did not live,
as we do, in a world that seems a great ear of Dionysius, where if a
scandal is whispered in Pekin we hear of it in New York. The minstrels
had no metaphysical bees in their bonnets. They did not speculate about
this world or the next. They had not made the great modern discovery
that a bird in a bush is worth two in the hand. They did not analyze
and refine till nothing genuine was left of this beautiful world but an
indigestion.
The ballads neither harangue nor describe; but only state things in the
least complex way. Those old singers caught language fresh and with
a flavor of the soil in it still, and their hearers were people of
healthy sensibilities who must be hit directly and hard. Accordingly,
there is a very vigorous handling. They speak bluntly and to the
purpose. If a maiden loses her lover, she merely
Turns her face unto the wall
And there her heart it breaks.
A modern poet would have hardly thrown away the opportunity offered him
for describing the chamber and its furniture; he would put a painted
window into it--for the inkstand will supply them quite as cheaply
as plain glass. He would tell you all about the tapestry which the
eyes of the dying maiden in her extreme agony would have been likely,
of course, to have been minutely interested in. He would have given a
clinical lecture on the symptoms, and a post-mortem examination. It was
so lucky for those old ballad-mongers that they had not any ideas! And
when they give a dying speech they do not make their heroes take leave
of the universe in general as if _that_ were going into mourning for a
death more or less.
When Earl Douglas is in his death-thraw, he says to his nephew:
My wound is deep; I fain would sleep;
Take thou the vanguard of the three.
And hide me by the brakenbush
That grows on yonder lily lee.
O bury me by the brakenbush
Beneath the blooming brere.
Let never living mortal ken
That a kindly Scot lies here.
The ballads are the only true folk-songs that we have in English. There
is no other poetry in the language that addresses us so simply as mere
men and women. Learning has tempered with modern poetry, and the Muse,
like Portia, wears a doctor’s cap and gown.
The force and earnestness of style that mark the old ballad become very
striking when contrasted with later attempts in the same way. It is not
flatness and insipidity that they are remarkable for, but for a bare
rocky grandeur in whose crevices tenderness nestles its chance tufts of
ferns and harebells. One of these sincere old verses imbedded in the
insipidities of a modern imitation looks out stern and colossal as that
charcoal head which Michael Angelo drew on the wall of the Farnesina
glowers through the paling frescoes.
Mr. Lowell here read a number of passages from the old ballad entitled
“Margaret’s Ghost,” and compared them with a few stanzas from an
“improved” version of the same by Mallet. He also read from the ballad
of “Helen of Kirkconnell,” and from others.
Of the tenderness of the ballads I must give an instance or two before
I leave them. In the old ballad of “Clerk Saunders,” Margaret follows
the ghost of her lover to his grave.
So painfully she climbed the wall,
She climbed the wall up after him,
Hose nor shoon upon her feet,
She had no time to put them on.
O bonny, bonny, sang the bird
Sat on a coil o’ hay,
But mournfu’, mournfu’, was the maid
That followed the corpse o’ clay.
Is there any room at your head, Saunders?
Or any room at your feet?
Is there any room at your side, Saunders?
For fain, fain I would sleep.
She’s sat her down upon the grave
And mourned sae lang and sair
That the clochs and wanton flies at last
Came and built in her yellow hair.
In further illustration Mr. Lowell read from the “Clerk’s Two Sons of
Oxenford.” He concluded his lecture thus:
I think that the makers of the old ballads did stand face to face with
life in a way that is getting more and more impossible for us. Day by
day the art of printing isolates us more and more from our fellows and
from the healthy and inspiring touch of our fellows. We continually
learn more and more of mankind and less of man. We know more of Europe
than of our own village. We feel humanity from afar.
But I must not forget that the ballads have passed through a sieve
which no modern author has the advantage of. Only those have come down
to us which imprinted themselves on the general heart. The new editions
were struck off by mothers crooning their children to sleep, or by
wandering minstrels who went about sowing the seeds of courtesy and
valor in the cottage and on the hillside. Print, which, like the amber,
preserves all an author’s grubs, gives men the chance to try him by the
average, rather than the best, of his yield.
Moreover, the Review of the ballad-singer was in the faces of his
ring of hearers, in whose glow or chill he could read at a glance a
criticism from which there was no appeal. It was not Smith or Brown,
but the human heart that judged him.
Doubtless another advantage of these old poets was their out-of-door
life. They went from audience to audience on foot, and had no more
cramped a study than the arch of heaven, no library but clouds,
streams, mountains, woods, and men. There is something more in sunshine
than mere light and heat. I fancy that a kind of flavor we detect in
the old ballads is due to it, and that it may give color and bloom to
the brain as well as to the apple and plum. Indoor inspiration is like
the stove-heat of the forcing-house, and the fruits ripened by it are
pale, dropsical, and wanting in _tang_. There may be also a virtue in
the fireside which gives to the Northern wind a domestic and family
warmth, and makes it skilled to teach the ethics of home. But it is not
to the chimney-corner that we can trace the spiritual dynasties that
have swayed mankind. These have sunshine in their veins.
Perhaps another charm of these ballads is that nobody made them. They
seem to have come up like violets, and we have only to thank God for
them. And we imply a sort of fondness when we call them “old.” It is
an epithet we give endearingly and not as supposing any decrepitude
or senescence in them. Like all true poetry, they are not only young
themselves, but the renewers of youth in us; they do not lose, but
accumulate, strength and life. A true poem gets a part of its inspiring
force from each generation of men. The great stream of Homer rolls
down to us out of the past, swollen with the tributary delight and
admiration of the ages. The next generation will find Shakspeare fuller
of meaning and energy by the addition of our enthusiasm. Sir Philip
Sidney’s admiration is part of the breath that sounds through the
trumpet of “Chevy Chase.” That is no empty gift with which we invest a
poem when we bestow on it our own youth, and it is no small debt we owe
the true poem that it preserves for us some youth to bestow.
LECTURE V
CHAUCER
(_Tuesday Evening, January 23, 1855_)
V
It is always a piece of good fortune to be the earliest acknowledged
poet of any country. We prize the first poems as we do snowdrops, not
only for their own intrinsic beauty, but even more for that force of
heart and instinct of sunshine in them which brings them up, where
grass is brown and trees are bare, the outposts and forlorn hopes of
spring. There never comes anything again like a _first_ sensation, and
those who love Chaucer, though they may have learned late to do it,
cannot help imaginatively antedating their delight, and giving him that
place in the calendar of their personal experience which belongs to him
in the order of our poetic history.
And the feeling is a true one, for although intensity be the great
characteristic of all genius, and the power of the poet is measured
by his ability to renew the charm of freshness in what is outworn and
habitual, yet there is something in Chaucer which gives him a personal
property in the epithet “vernal,” and makes him seem always to go hand
in hand with May.
In our New England especially, where Mayday is a mere superstition
and the Maypole a poor half-hardy exotic which shivers in an east
wind almost as sharp as Endicott’s axe,--where frozen children, in
unseasonable muslin, celebrate the floral games with nosegays from
the milliner’s, and winter reels back, like shattered Lear, bringing
the dead spring in his arms, her budding breast and wan dilustered
cheeks all overblown with the drifts and frosty streaks of his white
beard,--where even Chanticleer, whose sap mounts earliest in that dawn
of the year, stands dumb beneath the dripping eaves of his harem, with
his melancholy tail at half-mast,--one has only to take down a volume
of Chaucer, and forthwith he can scarce step without crushing a daisy,
and the sunshine flickers on small new leaves that throb thick with
song of merle and mavis. A breath of spring blows out of the opening
lines of the “Canterbury Tales” that seems to lift the hair upon our
brow:
When that Aprile with his showers soote
The drought of March hath pierced to the roote,
And bathed every vein in that licour
Of whose virtue engendered is the flour;
When Zephirus eke with his sweet breath
Enspired hath in every holt and heath
The tender croppes; and the younge sun
Hath in the Ram half of his course yrun;
And little fowles maken melodie,
That slepen all the night with open eye,
So nature pricketh them in their courages.
Even Shakspeare, who comes after everybody has done his best and seems
to say, “Here, let me take hold a minute and show you how to do it,”
could not mend that. With Chaucer, the sun seems never to have run that
other half of his course in the Ram, but to have stood still there and
made one long spring-day of his life.
Chaucer was probably born in 1328, seven years after the death of
Dante, and he certainly died in 1400, having lived consequently
seventy-two years. Of his family we know nothing. He was educated
either at Oxford or Cambridge, or at neither of these famous
universities. He was, perhaps, a student at the Inner Temple, on the
books of which a certain phantasmagoric Mr. Buckley had read a record
that “Geoffrey Chaucer was fined two shillings for beating a Franciscan
friar in Fleet street.”
In the thirty-ninth year of his age he received from Edward III a
pension of twenty marks (equal to $1000 now), and afterwards a grant
of a pitcher of wine daily, and the custody of a ward which gave £104 a
year, and two places in the customs. In the last year of Edward III he
was one of three envoys sent to France to negotiate a marriage between
the Prince of Wales and a daughter of the French King. Richard II
confirmed his pension of twenty marks, and granted him another of like
amount instead of the daily wine.
Chaucer married Philippa Pycard or De la Roet, sister of Katherine
Swynford, the third wife of John of Gaunt. By this connection he is
supposed to have become a favorer of Wycliffe’s doctrines, and was in
some way concerned in the insurrection of John of Northampton, which
seems to have had for its object some religious reform. He was forced
to fly into Holland, and is said to have made his peace at last by
betraying his companions. I think one’s historical comfort is not
disturbed by refusing to credit this story, especially as it stains
the fame of a great poet, and, if character may ever be judged from
writings, a good man. We may grant that he broke the Franciscan friar’s
head in Fleet street, if it were only for the alliteration, but let
us doubt that he ever broke his faith. It is very doubtful whether he
was such stuff as martyrs are made of. Plump men, though nature would
seem to have marked them as more combustible, seldom go to the stake,
but rather your lean fellows, who can feel a fine satisfaction in not
burning well to spite the Philistines.
At this period of his life Chaucer is thought to have been in
straitened circumstances, but a new pension and a yearly pipe of wine
were granted him by Richard II, and on the accession of Henry IV these
were confirmed, with a further pension of forty marks. These he only
lived a year to enjoy, dying October 25, 1400.