Amenities of Literature Part 15

---------What causeth Suevenes[3]

On the morrow or on evens?

he playfully concludes, and modern philosophy could no better a.s.sist the inquiry--

---------Whoso of these Miracles The causes know bet[4] than I Define he, for I certainly Ne can them not, ne never thinke To busie my witte for to swinke To know why this is more than that is, Well worthe of this thing Clerkes, That treaten of this and of other werkes, For I, of none opinion Nil.

It is with the same pleasantry he avoids all commonplace descriptions, by playfully suggesting his pretended unskilfulness for the detail, or his want of learning--

Me list not of the chaf, ne of the stre, Maken so long a tale, as of the corn.

"Man of Lawe's Ta'e."

Yet humour and irony are not his only excellences, for those who study Chaucer know that this great poet has thoughts that dissolve in tenderness; no one has more skilfully touched the more hidden springs of the heart.

The Herculean labour of CHAUCER was the creation of a new style. In this he was as fortunate as he was likewise unhappy. He mingled with the native rudeness of our English words of Provencal fancy, and some of French and of Latin growth. He banished the superannuated and the uncouth, and softened the churlish nature of our hard Anglo-Saxon; but the poet had nearly endangered the novel diction when his artificial pedantry a.s.sumed what he called "the ornate style" in "the Romaunt of the Rose," and in his "Troilus and Cressida." This "ornate style"

introduced sesquipedalian Latinisms, words of immense dimensions, that could not hide their vacuity of thought. Chaucer seems deserted by his genius when "the ornate style" betrays his pangs and his anxiety. As the error of a fine genius becomes the error of many, because monstrous protuberances may be copied, while the softened lines of beauty remain inimitable, this "ornate style" corrupted inferior writers, who, losing all relish of the natural feeling and graceful simplicity of their master, filled their verse with noise and nonsense. This vicious style, a century afterwards, was resumed by STEPHEN HAWES. We have, however, a glorious evidence, amid this struggle both with a new and with a false style, of Chaucer's native good taste; he finally wholly abandoned this artificial diction; and his later productions, no longer disfigured by such tortured phrases and such remote words, awaken our sympathy in the familiar language of life and pa.s.sion.

TYRWHIT has ingeniously constructed a metrical system to arrange the versification to the ear of a modern reader; by this contrivance he would have removed all obstructions in the p.r.o.nunciation and in the syllabic quant.i.ties. He maintained that the lines were regular decasyllabics. But who can read this poet for any length, even the "Canterbury Tales" in the elaborated text of Tyrwhit, without being reminded of its fallacy? Even the E final, on which our critic has laid such stress, though often sounded, a.s.suredly is sometimes mute. Dan Chaucer makes at his pleasure words long or short, and dyssyllabic or trisyllabic; and this he has himself told us--

But for the rime is light and lewde, Yet make it somewhat agreable, Though some verse fail in a syllable.

Our critic was often puzzled by his own ingenuity, for in some inveterate cases he has thrown out in despair an observation, that "a reader who cannot perform such operations for himself (that is, helping out the metre) had better not trouble his head about the versification of our ancient authors." The verse of Chaucer seems more carefully regulated in his later work, "the Tales;" but it is evident that Chaucer trusted his cadences to his ear, and his verse is therefore usually rhythmical, and accidentally metrical.

On a particular occasion the poet submitted to the restraint of equal syllables, as we discover in "The Court of Love," elaborately metrical, and addressed to "his princely lady," with the hope that she might not refuse it "for lack of ornate speech." It is evident, therefore, that Chaucer had a distinct conception of the heroic or decasyllabic verse, but he did not consider that the mechanical construction of his verse was essential to the free spirit of his fancy. "I am no metrician," he once exclaimed; he wrote

Books, songs, ditees In RIME, or else in CADENCE.

"The House of Fame."

This circ.u.mstance arose from the custom of the age, when poems were _recited_, and not _read_; readers there were none among the people, though auditors were never wanting; it was much the same among the higher orders. Poems were usually performed in plain chant, and a verse was musical by the modulation of the harp. There was no typographical metre placed under the eye of the reciter; the melody of the poet too often depended on the adroitness of the performer; and the only publishers of the popular poems of Chaucer were the harpers, who, in stately halls on festal days, entranced their audience with Chaucer's Tale, or his "Ballade." His poem of "Troilus and Cressida," although almost as long as the aeneid, was intended to be _sung_ to the harp as well as _read_, as the poet himself tells us, in addressing his poem---

And _redde_ where so thou be, or elles _sung_.

In the most ancient ma.n.u.scripts of Chaucer's works the caesura in every line is carefully noted, to preserve the rhythmical cadence with precision; without this precaution the harmony of such loose versification would be lost. In the later editions, when the race of roaming minstrels had departed, and our verse had become solely metrical, the printers omitted this guide to the ancient recitation. We perceive this want in the uncertain measures of Chaucer's versification; and a dexterous modulation is still required to catch the recitative of Chaucer's poems.

Are the works of our great poet to be consigned to the literary dungeon of the antiquary's closet? I fear that there is more than one obstruction which intervenes between the poet's name, which will never die, and the poet's works, which will never be read. A ma.s.sive tome, dark with the Gothic type, whose obsolete words and difficult phrases, and, for us, uncadenced metre, are to be conned by a glossary as obsolete as the text, to be perpetually referred to, to the interruption of all poetry and all patience, appalled even the thorough-paced antiquary, Samuel Pegge, as appears by his honest confession. Already a practised bibliosopher proclaims, alluding to the edition by Tyrwhit of Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales," "And who reads any other portion of the poet?" Yet the "Canterbury Tales" are but the smallest portion of Chaucer's works! But some skilful critics have perpended and decided differently: even among the projected labours of Johnson was an edition of Chaucer's works; and G.o.dwin, when diligently occupied on this great poet, with just severity observed that "a vulgar judgment had been propagated by slothful and indolent persons, that the 'Canterbury Tales'

are the only part of the works of Chaucer worthy the attention of a modern reader, and this has contributed to the wretched state in which his works are permitted to exist."

Are we then no longer to linger over the visionary emotions of the great poet in the fine portraitures of his genius from his youthful days, when the fever of his soul, not knowing where to seek for its true aliment, careless of life, fed on its own sad musings, in Chaucer's "DREME," or, onwards in life, in the "TESTAMENT OF LOVE," that chronicle of the heart in a prison solitude? And are we no longer interested in those personal traits Chaucer has so frequently dropped of his own tastes and humours, so that we are in fact better acquainted with Chaucer than we are with Shakspeare? Even during his official occupations, this poet loved his studious solitary nights, and frequently alludes to his pa.s.sion. Must we close that "HOUSE OF FAME," with whose fragments Pope reared "The Temple?" Has all the enchantment of the moonlight-land of chivalry and fairyism in "THE FLOURE AND THE LEAFE" vanished? Are we no longer to listen to "THE COMPLAINT OF THE BLACK KNIGHT," which touched a d.u.c.h.ess or a queen? or the stanzas of "THE CUCKOO AND THE NIGHTINGALE," which musically resound that musical encounter? Is the legend of pathetic tenderness in the impa.s.sioned "TROILUS," and "the sillie woman who falsed Troilus," ever to be closed? there may we pursue the vicissitudes of love, in what the poet calls "a little tragedy;" and we find Ovidian graces amid its utter simplicity. There are, indeed, vicissitudes of taste as well as of love. "Troilus and Cressida" was the favourite in the days of Henry VIII. over the "Canterbury Tales" and "The Floure and the Leafe;" it was, too, the model of Sidney in the court of Elizabeth; Love triumphed at court over Humour and Fancy.

It is true that the language of Chaucer has failed, but not the writer.

The marble which Chaucer sculptured has betrayed the n.o.ble hand of the artist; the statue was finished; but the grey and spotty veins came forth, clouding the lucid whiteness.

For the poet or the poetical, the difficulty of the language may be surmounted with a reasonable portion of every-day patience. I know, from several of my literary contemporaries, that this, however, has not been conceded. The more familiar I became with Chaucer, the more I delighted in the significance of the Chaucerian words. From some modern critics, occasionally the name of Chaucer startles the ear. One, indeed, has recently complained that "Chaucer's divine qualities are languidly acknowledged by his unjust countrymen;"[5] and Coleridge emphatically said, "I take unceasing delight in Chaucer. His manly cheerfulness is especially delicious in my old age. How exquisitely tender he is!"[6]

But the popularity of this gifted child of nature, and this shrewd observer of mankind, is doomed to another obstruction than that of his curious diction. The playfulness of his comic invention, and the freedom of his simplicity, will no longer be allowed to atone for the levity of some of his incidents. When Warton, to display the genuine vein of the Chaucerian humour, imprudently a.n.a.lysed the "Miller's Tale," having reached the middle, the critic, recollecting himself, suddenly breaks off with a curt remark--"The sequel cannot be repeated here!" In a recklessness of all knowledge, and in an unhappy hour, the poet of "Don Juan" decided, while he probably would have started from Chaucer's black-letter tome, that "Chaucer, notwithstanding the praises bestowed on him, I think obscene and contemptible. He owed his celebrity merely to his antiquity." As if the greatest of our poets had only been celebrated in the day when Byron wrote! Yet in all the unfettered invention and nudity of style, there was no grossness in the temper, and less in the habits, of the poet. He addressed his own age as his contemporaries were doing in France and in Italy, and from whom he had borrowed the very two tales on which this censure has fallen. In telling "a merrie tale," Chaucer could not have antic.i.p.ated this charge; and, in truth, for subjects which are obscene and disgustful he had no taste, as he showed in his reproof of Gower for having selected two repulsive ones--the unnatural pa.s.sions of Canace and Apollonius Tyrius. Of these our Chaucer cries,--

Of all swiche cursed stories I say, Fy!

Our poet has himself pleaded that having fixed on his personage, he had no choice to tell any other tale than what that individual would himself have told. Before we immolate Chaucer on the altar of the Graces, we should not only listen to his plea, but to his own easy remedy for this disorder produced by his too faithful copy after nature.

--------Whoso list not to hear, Turn over the leaf, and chese another tale!

Our notions and our customs of delicacy are the result of a change in our manners of no distant period; and, compared with our neighbours, many are still but conventional. They are so even in respect to ourselves, for, not to go back to the golden days of Elizabeth, the language and the manners of the court of Anne would have startled modern decorum. The "polite conversation" of Swift has fortunately preserved for us specimens which we could not have imagined. Our poems, our comedies, and our tales, so late as the days of Swift and Pope, have allusions, and even incidents and descriptions, which we no longer tolerate. How far our fastidiousness lies on the surface of our lesser morals, I will not decide; but men of genius have complained that this fastidiousness has become too restrictive, by contracting the sphere of inventive humour, which flashes often in such small matters as ludicrous tales and playful levities, which must not lie on our tables.

Chaucer long remained a favourite in the most polite circles; Aubrey, at the close of the seventeenth century, in his "Idea," recommends the study of Chaucer, as the poet in full reputation. At a later period, the days of Dryden and Pope, our versifiers were continually renovating his humour and his more elegant fictions. OGLE, with others, attempted to modernize Chaucer; but it is as impossible to give such a version of Chaucer as to translate the Odes of Horace. They corrupted by their interpolations, and weakened by their diffusion; Chaucer was not discernible in the dimness of their paraphrase. The great beauties of Chaucer spring up from the soil in which they lie embedded; and the most skilful hand will discover that in gathering the flower it must cease to live without its root.

We never possessed a tolerably correct edition of this master-poet; and the very circ.u.mstance of the continued popularity of the poems with the many has occasioned their present wretched condition. When works circulated in their ma.n.u.script state, before the era of printing, the popularity of a poet made his text the more liable to corruption.

Multiplied transcripts were produced by heedless or licentious scribes, whose careless omissions, and whose perpetuated blunders and even interpolations can only be credited by the collators of the ma.n.u.scripts of Chaucer. This happened with the very first printed edition by Caxton.

Our patriarchal publisher discovered that he had printed from a very faulty ma.n.u.script, and, in that primitive age of simplicity and printing, n.o.bly suppressed the edition which dishonoured the author, and subst.i.tuted an improved one. Doubtless GOWER, a grave and learned poet, whose copies are remarkably elegant, has descended to us in a purer condition than CHAUCER, for he was rarely transcribed. Speght was the first editor who gave a more complete edition of Chaucer, with the useful appendage of a glossary, the first of its kind, and which has been a fortunate acquisition for later glossographers. But Speght, with the aid of Stowe, who was equally industrious, was so deficient in critical ac.u.men, as to have impounded any stray on the common stamped with the initials of Chaucer. Thus our poet has suffered all the mischances of faithless scribes, unintelligent printers, and uncritical editors. To make the bad worse, the last modern edition of Chaucer, by URRY, though recommended by the white letter, offering this bland relief to a modern reader, is a showy volume, of which we are forbidden to read a line! The history of this edition is an evidence how ill our scholars, at no remote period, were qualified to decide on the fate of a great vernacular author. Urry, the pupil of Dean Aldrich, and the friend of Bishop Atterbury, appears to have been one of that galaxy or confederacy of wits called "the Wits of Christ Church." The "Student of Christ Church, Oxon," offered a t.i.tle and a place which would sanction an edition of Chaucer; one object of which was to contribute five hundred pounds to finish Peckwater Quadrangle. The pompous folio appeared heralded by the queen's licence for the exclusive sale for fourteen years. Our editor at first seems to have been reluctant and modest, till instigated by his great patrons to divest himself of all fear of the author. In his innocence conceiving that the strokes of his own pen would silently improve an obsolete genius, this merciless interpolator, changing words and syllables at pleasure, has furnished a text which Chaucer never wrote![7] If the worst edition that was ever published contributed to finish Peckwater Quadrangle, it is amusing to be reminded that causes are often strangely disproportionate to their effects.

The famous portion of Chaucer's Miscellaneous Volume has been fortunate in the editorial cares of TYRWHIT. Tyrwhit, a scholar as well as an antiquary, was an expert philologer; his extensive reading in the lore of our vernacular literature and our national antiquities promptly supplied what could not have entered into his more cla.s.sical studies; and his sagacity seems to have decided on the various readings of all the ma.n.u.scripts, by piercing into the core of the poet's thoughts.[8]

It is remarkable that some of the most lively productions of several great writers have been the work of their maturest age. Johnson surpa.s.sed all his preceding labours in his last work, the popular Lives of the Poets. The "Canterbury Tales" of Chaucer were the effusions of his advanced age, and the congenial verses of Dryden were thrown out in the luxuriance of his later days. Milton might have been cla.s.sed among the minor poets had he not lived to be old enough to become the most sublime. Let it be a source of consolation, if not of triumph, in a long studious life of true genius, to know that the imagination may not decline with the vigour of the frame which holds it; there has been no old age for many men of genius.

We must lament that at such an early period in our vernacular literature, we have to record that the two fathers of our poetry, congenial spirits as they were, too closely resembled most of their sons--in one of the most painful infirmities of genius. I have said elsewhere that jealousy, long supposed to be the offspring of little minds, is not, however, confined to them. We do not possess the secret history of the two great poets, Chaucer and Gower; but we are told by Berthelet in his edition of Gower's "Confessio Amantis," when he quotes the commendatory lines on Gower by Chaucer, that the poets "were both excellently learned, _both great friendes together_." Ancient biographers usually fall into this vague style of eulogy, which served their purpose rather than a more critical research. True it is that "they were both great friends," but, what Berthelet has not told, they became also "both great enemies." We know that Chaucer has commemorated the dignified merits of "the moral Gower," and that Gower has poured forth an effusion not less fervid than elegant from the lips of Venus, who calls Chaucer "her own clerk, who in the flower of his youth had made ditees and songes glad which have filled the land." Did this little pa.s.sion of poetic jealousy creep into their great souls? Else how did it happen that Chaucer, who had once solicited the correcting hand of his friend, in his latest work, reprehended the sage and the poet, and that Gower, who had not stinted the rich meed of his eulogy which appeared in the first copies of his "Confessio Amantis," erased the immortality which he had bestowed. The justice of their reciprocal praise neither of these rivals could efface, for that outlives their little jealousies.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] After G.o.dwin had sent to press his biography of Chaucer, a deposition on the poet's age in the Herald's College detected the whole erroneous arrangement: as the edifice so ingeniously constructed had fallen on the aerial architect, he alleged truly that the deposition "contradicted the received accounts of all the biographers;" in fact, they had repeated original misstatements. The appendix, therefore, to the history of this modern biographer stands as a perpetual witness against its authenticity;--there are some histories to which an appendix might prove to be as fatal. In this dilemma, our bold sophist was "absurd and uncharitable enough" to add one more conjecture to his "Life of Chaucer,"--that "the poet, from a motive of vanity, had been induced _to state on oath_ that he was about forty when, in truth, he was fifty-eight!"--Hippisley's "Chapters on Early English Literature," 85.

[2] It has been alleged by more than one writer, that this mysterious affair relates to the election for the mayoralty of John of Northampton, a Wickliffite and a Lancastrian. But Mr. Turner, whose researches are on a more extended scale than any of his predecessors, truly observes that--"There are other periods besides the one usually selected to which the personal evils which Chaucer complains of are applicable."--"Hist. of England," v. 296. It is as likely to have occurred when Nicholas Brambre, a confidential partisan of government in the City, appointed to the mayoralty by his party, caught "the Freemen" by ambushes of armed men, and turned the Guildhall into a fortress. At such a time "Free Elections" might have been considered by Chaucer as something "n.o.ble and glorious for all the people."

[3] Dreams.

[4] Better.

[5] Autobiography of an Opium-Eater.--"Tait's Mag." August, 1835.

[6] Coleridge's "Table-Talk."

[7] So unskilful or so incurious was Warburton in the language of our ancient poets, that in his notes on Pope he quotes the following lines of Chaucer--

"Love wol not be _constreined_ by maistrie.

Whan maistrie cometh, the _G.o.d_ of love anon _Beteth_ his wings, and _farewel_, he is gon"--

from Urry's edition, in which they appear thus transformed and corrupted:

Love will not be _confined_ by maisterie.

When maisterie comes, the _Lord_ of love anon _Flutters_ his wings, and _forthwith_ is he gone.

[An excellent example of the superior vigour of Chaucer may be seen in an original pa.s.sage of his "Palamon and Arcite," contrasted with Dryden's tamer modernization of the same, in "Curiosities of Literature," vol. ii. p. 107.--ED.]

[8] This "sagacity" has been much and justly questioned by the more advanced students of medieval literature. Sir Harris Nicolas has produced an excellent edition of the poet; but the best text of the "Canterbury Tales" has been published by Mr. Thos. Wright, from a careful collation of the oldest ma.n.u.script.--ED.

GOWER.