E410206A. The Poems of Geoffrey Chaucer, Modernized.
The Athenæum, 6 February 1841, p. 107–108.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 5, 389–391.
Chaucer is the morning star of our verse:—
His light those clouds and mists dissolv’d
Which our dark nation long involv’d.
But Chaucer dead, there was no revivification of his spirit till Spenser wrote, who more than once insinuates (and there are genealogies in song as well as in heraldry) that the soul of Chaucer was transferred into his body. The father of our verse had all the qualities of a great poet; imagination, fancy, pathos, humour peculiarly English, and descriptive power. The English language which, to use Addison’s expressive phrase, sunk under Milton, rose with Chaucer; his works, indeed, are essential to a perfect understanding of the history of our language: though not one jot more so than to a history of the manners and morals of the nation—to the history of our civilization. Chaucer made our language a written and a poetical one;—
And as much as then
The English language could express to men,
He made it do.
There were rhymers, it is true, before him, but the line of the English poets begins with Chaucer; nor is this unfelt, for he has had the homage of genius in every age, with but two exceptions, Cowley and Byron.
In “the file of our heroic poets” Chaucer was the first in time, nor is he much behind in rank; in popularity he is low, from the too-much talked of antiquity of his language, and the bugbear difficulty of his rhythm. But the heavy “Gothic cloud of night” that hangs over the learning of his age and obscures the lesser lights, is a fog or mist that time and language have thrown over his thought, to haze rather than eclipse his genius, for “the lost glories of his numbers,” that Waller laments, exist more in fancy than in truth. A taste for Chaucer is thought an antiquarian relish; and the multitude are frightened at the rough shell that incloses the sweet kernel.
To extend a taste for this great poet has been the task of the several writers who have united to produce the work before us, which we venture to predict, without much pretension to prophecy, will do no more to make Chaucer read, than Ogle, or Lipscombe, Pope, Dryden, or Wordsworth, have done already. To our thinking, the greatest help ever given to Chaucer has been in the cheap reprint of his “Canterbury Tales,” in Dove’s Classics and Bell’s Poets; the low price of the volumes induced purchasers; and if men will only attempt to read, they will soon relish and appreciate, for Chaucer is as much a poet for the many as Shakspeare himself. He is the most enlivened of our tale-tellers, the most dramatic by far of all our undramatic poets, the most vivid of our painters in words, and the most characteristic and discriminatory, now humorous, now pathetic, and now both.
If a mob of gentlemen, etchers and engravers, anxious to make Vandyke or Velasquez popular, were to trick out their glorious pictures in the costume of to-day, the attempt would not be more idle than this to give Chaucer a modern dress, and make him write as these gentlemen believe he would have written, had he lived, not in the time of the Plantagenets and Edwards, but of the Guelphs. To hold consistently to their argument, Occleve’s drawing of Chaucer should have stood before the volume, not in the gipon or garb he wore, but after the fashion of Stultz or Nugee. Chaucer, in this modern version, is as much like old Geoffrey as Sprat and Flatman are like Pindar. The father of our poetry stands like a time-worn tower, overgrown with ivy, which these Malone-like modernizers have stripped fearlessly off, that they may cover it with a coat of whitewash. If you cannot restore the tower to its pristine splendour, it is a sort of sacrilege to rob it of those beauties which nature, to atone for the injuries of time, has bestowed upon it. It is impossible to change the spelling of Chaucer without injustice to his metre, and yet the spelling is but a small impediment. Despoil him of his words, and you strip him of that beauty, that Doric dialect which lends, as Ben Jonson said, “a kind of majesty to style,” for words in writing are what colours are in painting. You rob him too of the characteristic peculiarities that reflect his age. You rob him of those touches which, like the lisp in Lord Douglas’s speech that Barbour speaks of, is a beauty that becomes him “wonder well;” that, in his own words—
—make his Englishe swete upon his tonge.
To modernize an author is, in other words, to translate him: and what is translation but an endeavour to make an author write as he would have written in our time and in our language? What Dryden and Pope attempted was to work in the spirit rather than the letter of their author, and they wrote pretty poems of their own, which are as much like Chaucer as the “Iliad” of the one, and the “Æneid” of the other, are like Homer and Virgil. They interpolated largely, forgetting a rule of one of their own favourites:—
Excursions are inexpiably bad,
And ’tis much safer to leave out than add.
They mis-metred Chaucer, and mis-wrote lines, the very things he prayed to escape from. Their ornaments, too, are as incongruous as the modern monuments in Westminster Abbey with the surrounding architecture—as Sir Cloudesley Shovel’s full-bottomed wig with his Roman sandals and naked body. They made him write after the fashion of their day, syllabically, not as he really wrote, as Gascoigne assures us, rhythmically, that is, upon the same principle on which Coleridge composed his “Christobel,” a kind of versification to which the public ear is not yet attuned, but, thanks to Coleridge, Shelley, Wordsworth, and others, it must and will learn, and, when it has acquired the taste,—
Then, such as Dryden is shall Chaucer be;
his rhythm will be mastered, and the public will know more than the clock-work note of the heroic couplet, which in a long poem lulls to mellifluous drowsiness. He will then no longer be thought “to fayle in a syllable,” to be lame “for want of half a foot,” but will have a music of his own, as every true poet has.
Shakspeare is supposed to have met his commentators in another world, and was found to have no previous acquaintance with them or they with him. When these “mere moderns” meet Chaucer, a recognition there will be, a friendly shake of the hands, perhaps, for intentional kindness, but nothing to infer intimacy or to encourage it. Kindred spirits live together, and where Chaucer is, his modernizers cannot be. Do they know more of Chaucer, let us ask, than they know of Wordsworth? We hope they do; for Wordsworth never supplied them with the motto to their volume, which is the work of one Michael Drayton, who addressed a delightful epistle, in verse, “To his dearly loved Friend, Henry Reynolds, Esq., of Poets and Poesy,” where the very lines occur which these modernizers attribute to Wordsworth. They blunder at the threshold, and print their ignorance on the title-page of their work.
“Everything has been done for Chaucer’s poems,” says Mr. Horne, in his Introduction, “but to make them intelligible to the general reader,”—that is, to dilute them down to the level of cockney comprehensions. This, therefore, is the object of the present volume; and accordingly the nerve, vigour, and manliness of Father Chaucer is reduced to sickly weakness and effeminacy, and his sons (but are they of his sealed tribe?) have gone, to use Sir Philip Sydney’s phrase, “but stumblingly after him.” Chaucer’s native manners-painting verse would defy even a kindred genius to modernize it; and the same may be said of the freshness of his descriptive scenes, for description in Chaucer is something for both ear and eye. Heighten his nature you cannot, or enliven his humour, or deepen his pathos. He is as graphic as description has ever been, or as words will allow. “I see the pilgrims in the Canterbury Tales,” says Dryden, “their humours, their features, and their very dress, as distinctly as if I had supped with them at the Tabard in Southwark.” They are, indeed, all but visible; their characters are distinct and individual as human nature itself; their wit, their humour, their wisdom, their manners, even when they are only varieties of the same class, are all obviously distinct: he brings the scene and the actors before us as in life; we laugh, talk, eat, drink, sport with them; they can no more pass into the dark backward and abysm of time than nature herself; they yet live glowing from the hand of their creator, as fresh to the understanding eye, though five hundred years old, as if the work of yesterday. Words with Chaucer, too, are things—they are pure gold, with the mint stamp sharp and clear on them, not counters of arbitrary value, to be changed at pleasure; they are never vague, characterless, inappropriate, like our modern language; in their use there is often manifest the refined delicacy of genius, which must be lost by the slightest change. They are essential, too, to the melody of his verse, of which no poet in our language has left finer examples. Chaucer was master of all and every variety of linked sweetness. Can this be preserved in a modern paraphrase? To us, indeed, it is strange how men could be found to embark in so hopeless and thankless a task, for if they succeed in directing but one poetic spirit to Chaucer, he will despise the copy, in proportion as he prizes the original. After all, one half the difficulties are local, for the people north of the Humber and south of the Tay, would understand Chaucer without much labour, for they speak a language still rich in Saxon words, and they use to this day many of his expressions, for the meaning of which a cockney turns to a glossary.
But it was idle to waste more words on the subject. Let us give a specimen or two. Here is the first half-dozen lines of the true poet, and for the convenience of readers not familiar with Chaucer we have here and there marked the accent:—
Whanne that April with his shourés sote,
The droughte of March hath percéd to the rote,
And bathed every veine in swiche licoúr,
Of whiche vertue engendred is the flour;
When Zephirus eke with his soté brethe
Enspiréd hath in every holt and hethe
The tendre croppés, and the yongé sonne
Hath, &c.
Here is the counterfeit presentment:—
When that sweet April showers with downward shoot
The drought of March have pierc’d unto the root,
And bathéd every vein with liquid power,
Whose virtue rare engendereth the flower;
When Zephyrus also with his fragrant breath
Inspiréd hath in every grove and heath
The tender shoots of green, and the young sun
Hath, &c.
Now, the downward shoot, and liquid power, and virtue rare of the April showers, the reader will observe are so many gratuitous flourishes of the modern versifier. This is a pretty dilatation and dilution of four lines and one idea. Then again, in the second line, there are wanton changes, which affect both the sense and rhythm; [p. 108→] and where is the exquisite melody of the last, in the lame and disjointed modern verse,—“The tender shoots of green, and the young sun”? But it is needless to proceed further, although, on turning over the first half-dozen pages, more obvious objections present themselves—for example, in the graphic description of the Prioresse, we are told—
At mete was she wel ytaughte withalle,
She lette no morsel from hire lippes falle,
Ne wette hire fingres in hire sauce depe;
Wel coude she carie a morsel and wel kepe,
That no drope ne fell upon hire brest:
In curtesie was sette ful moche hire lest:
Hire over lippe wiped she so clene
The in hire cuppe was no ferthing sene
Of grese whan she dronken hadde hire draught.
Now it is very probable that if the reader be not familiar with our old writers, he may not understand the passage in italics,—is it more intelligible in Mr. Horne’s version?—
—in her cup there was no farthing seen
Of grease!
If the reader does not understand the old poet, how is he to understand the modern? In the one case the exact meaning of the words is obscure, but the sense is obvious; a ferthing must mean something very small, a flake, a scale, a crumb, as we should say, if speaking of bread instead of meat: but in the other, the words a farthing of grease are intelligible, and their meaning and their application absurd. Again, Chaucer tells us of the Clerk of Oxenforde—
As lene was his hors as is a rake,
And he was not right fat I undertake,
But loked holwe, and thereto soberly.
Ful threadbare was his overest courtepy.
This, we admit, is not very intelligible, and accordingly Tyrwhitt adds a note, to explain that “overest courtepy” signifies “his uppermost short cloak;” and Mr. Horne, by way of making the reader acquainted with the Poet, puts the prose commentator into verse, and the line is thus rendered:—
His uppermost short cloak was a bare thread!
But in every page, almost every line, Mr. Horne stumbles, and often from mere wanton tampering with the original. The hosiers shops, for example, must have made the reader familiar with the word hosen, and yet, where Chaucer tells us of the Wife of Bath,—
Hire hosen weren of fine scarlet rede,
Mr. Horne must needs alter it to—
Her stockings fine were of a scarlet red.
Mr. Horne has surely mistaken the Wife of Bath for the Prioresse: Madam Eglantine, it is true, was too modest to allow her hosen to be seen, or Chaucer might have described them as Mr. Horne has characterized those of the Wife of Bath—as hosen fine,—but Chaucer knew better the tastes of the Wife of Bath—he does not say that her hosen “were fine,” but of a fine flaming scarlet red, and she was very proud of them.
To keep up the dramatic interest so remarkable in the Canterbury Tales, and which the Prologue awakens, it is followed in this modern version by—The Cuckoo and the Nightingale. The Legend of Ariadne, and other poems, which have no relation or connexion whatever with the Pilgrims and the Prologue. Mr. Wordsworth, like a worshipper of genius and a true poet, selected the purely imaginative poems to try his skill on. Mr. Powell, Miss Barrett, and Mr. Bell are entitled to like praise. Mr. Leigh Hunt, Mr. Horne, and Z.A.Z. venture boldly on the tales. Of Mr. Horne we have spoken—Z.A.Z. keeps somewhat closely to his text, and where he finds a difficulty he leaves it as he found it. There is a natural, easy, and colloquial air about Mr. Hunt’s versification that is in keeping with his author: he is the best refashioner of Chaucer, and seems to have a just and appreciating relish for the old poet; but when he tells us that love will warrant liberties, he should not have forgotten that Love commands respect, Age reverence, and Genius something on this side of idolatry.
[Peter Cunningham]
Reviewed:
The Poems of Geoffrey Chaucer Modernized, ed. R.H. Horne, London: 1841.
___________________
