_The Pilgrimage to Canterbury._
"Whanne that April with his shoures sote
The droughte of March hath perced to the rote,
And bathed every veine in swiche licour
Of which vertue engendred is the flour;
When Zephyrus eke with his sote brethe
Enspired hath in every holt and hethe
The tendre croppes--and the yonge Sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours yronne;
* * * *
Than longen folk to gon on pilgrimages--
* * * *
* * * *
Befelle, that in that seson, on a day."--_Prologue._
I quote these lines because I wish to show that Tyrwhitt, in taking them as
indicative of the very day on which the journey to Canterbury was
performed, committed a great mistake.
The whole of the opening of the prologue, down to the line last quoted, is
descriptive, not of any particular day, but of the usual season of
pilgrimages; and Chaucer himself plainly declares, by the words "in _that_
seson, on _a_ day"--that the day is _as yet_ indefinite. {316}
But because Tyrwhitt, who, although an excellent literary critic, was by no
means an acute reader of his author's meaning, was incapable of
appreciating the admirable combination of physical facts by which Chaucer
has not only identified the real day of the pilgrimage, but has placed it,
as it were, beyond the danger of alteration by any possible corruption in
the text, he set aside these physical facts altogether, and took in lieu of
them the seventh and eighth lines of the prologue quoted above, which, I
contend, Chaucer did not intend to bear any reference to the day of the
journey itself, but only to the general season in which it was undertaken.
But Tyrwhitt, having seized upon a favourite idea, seems to have been
determined to carry it through, at any cost, even at that of altering the
text from "_the Ram_" into "_the Bull_:" and I fear that he can scarcely be
acquitted of unfair and intentional misquotation of Chaucer's words, by
transposing "his halfe cours" into "half his course," which is by no means
an equivalent expression. Here are his own words:
"When he (Chaucer) tells us that 'the shoures of April had _perced to
the rote_ the drought of March' (ver. 1, 2.), we must suppose, in order
to allow due time for such an operation, that April was far advanced;
while, on the other hand, the place of the sun, 'having just run _half
his course in the Ram_' (ver. 7, 8.), restrains us to some day in the
very latter end of March. This difficulty may, and, I think, should, be
removed by reading in ver. 8. the BULL, instead of the RAM. All the
parts of the description will then be consistent with themselves, and
with another passage (ver. 4425.), where, in the best MSS., the _eighte
and twenty_ day of April is named as the day of the journey to
Canterbury."--_Introductory Discourse._
Accordingly, Mr. Tyrwhitt did not hesitate to adopt in his text the
twenty-eighth of April as the true date, without stopping to examine
whether that day would, or would not, be consistent with the subsequent
phenomena related by Chaucer.
Notwithstanding Tyrwhitt's assertion of a difficulty only removable by
changing the Ram into the Bull, there are no less than two ways of
understanding the seventh and eighth lines of the prologue so as to be
perfectly in accordance with the rest of the description. One of these
would be to suppose the sign Aries divided into two portions (not
necessarily _equal_ in the phraseology of the time), one of which would
appertain to March, anal the other to April--and that Chaucer, by the
"halfe cours yronne," meant the _last_, or _the April_, half of the sign
Aries. But I think a more probable supposition still would be to imagine
the month of April, of which Chaucer was speaking, to be divided into two
"halfe cours," in one of which the sun would be in Aries, and in the other
in Taurus; and that when Chaucer says that "the yonge Sonne had in the Ram
his halfe cours yronne," he meant that the _Aries half of the month of
April_ had been run through, thereby indicating _in general terms_ some
time approaching to the middle of April.
Both methods of explaining the phrase lead eventually to the same result,
which is also identical with the interpretation of Chaucer's own
contemporaries, as appears in its imitation by Lydgate in the opening of
his "Story of Thebes:"
"Whan bright Phebus passed was the Ram,
Midde of Aprill, and into the Bull came."
And it is by no means the least remarkable instance of want of perception
in Tyrwhitt, that he actually cites these two lines of Lydgate's _as
corroborative of his own interpretation_, which places the sun _in the
middle of Taurus_.
I enter into this explanation, not that I think it necessary to examine too
curiously into the consistency of an expression which evidently was
intended only in a general sense, but that the groundlessness of Tyrwhitt's
alleged necessity for the alteration of "the Ram" into "the Bull" might
more clearly appear.
I have said that Tyrwhitt was not a competent critic of Chaucer's practical
science, and I may perhaps be expected to point out some other instance of
his failure in that respect than is afforded by the subject itself. This I
may do by reference to a passage in "The Marchante's Tale," which evinces a
remarkable want of perception not only in Tyrwhitt, but in all the editors
of Chaucer that I have had an opportunity of consulting.
The morning of the garden scene is said in the text to be "er that dayes
eight were passed of the month of _Juil_"--but, a little further on, the
same day is thus described:
"Bright was the day and blew the firmament,
Phebus of gold his stremes doun hath sent
To gladen every flour with his warmnesse;
He was that time in Geminis, I gesse,
But litel fro his declination
In Cancer."
How is it possible that any person could read these lines and not be struck
at once with the fact that they refer to the 8th of _June_ and not to the
8th of _July_? The sun would leave Gemini and enter Cancer on the 12th of
June; Chaucer was describing the 8th, and with his usual accuracy he places
the sun "but litel fro" _the summer solstice_!
Since "Juil" is an error common perhaps to all previous editions, Tyrwhitt
might have been excused for repeating it, if he had been satisfied with
only that: but he must signalise _his edition_ by inserting in the Glossary
attached to it--"JUIL, _the month of July_," referring, as the sole {317}
authority for the word, to this very line in question of "The Marchante's
Tale!"
Nor does the proof, against him in particular, end even there; he further
shows that his attention must have been especially drawn to this garden
scene by his assertion that Pluto and Proserpine were the prototypes of
Oberon and Titania; and yet he failed to notice a circumstance that would
have added some degree of plausibility to the comparison, namely, that
Chaucer's, as well as Shakspeare's, was a _Midsummer Dream_.
It is, perhaps, only justice to Urry to state that _he_ appears to have
been aware of the error that would arise from attributing such a situation
of the sun to the month of July. The manner in which the lines are printed
in _his_ edition is this:--
"ere the dayis eight
Were passid, er' the month July befill."
It is just possible to twist the meaning of this into _the eighth of the
Kalends of July_, by which the blunder would be in some degree lessened;
but such a reading would be as foreign to Chaucer's astronomy as the lines
themselves are to his poetry.