The Works of Alexander Pope Part 28

This is one of the deeper and more solemn touches which Pope systematically rejected. Although the old man gets reconciled to the loss of his sight, his jealousy remains unabated.]

[Footnote 48:

Oh! January, what might it thee avail If thou might see as far as shippes sail?

For as good is blind deceived be, As to be deceived when a man may see.]

[Footnote 49: Chaucer only says that they whispered through the crevice they discovered in the wall which divided the houses of their parents.

All their kisses were bestowed upon the wall itself, or as Sandys puts it in his translation of Ovid,

Their kisses greet The senseless stones, with lips that could not meet.]

[Footnote 50: This couplet, which is not in the original, is in the style of the pastorals which were common in Pope's youth.]

[Footnote 51:

Thou art the creature that I best love; For by the Lord that sit in heaven above, Lever I had to dyen on a knife.

Than thee offende, deare, trewe wife.]

[Footnote 52: By the injudicious interpolation of this parenthesis Pope makes the knight express his belief to May that she is more likely to be kept faithful by her love of money than by her sense of honour and religion. It is undeniable that covetousness would be the predominant motive with a depraved woman, such as was poor old January's wife, but this is not his settled conviction, and he would have shrunk from openly admitting the idea.]

[Footnote 53: The knight's promise was to be performed the next morning.

His doubt was whether May, on her side, would fulfil the pledge of perpetual fidelity. The ceremony is, therefore, reversed in the original, and January asks _her_ to kiss _him_ in token of her adhesion to the covenant.]

[Footnote 54: In the original the knight avows the jealousy, which in Pope's version he denies, and excuses his misgivings on the ground of May's beauty, and his own age. Having disclaimed all jealousy, there is no longer any meaning in representing him as pleading the inequality of his years to justify his conduct.]

[Footnote 55: May in the original is the same wicked, shameless woman that she is described by Pope, but Chaucer is content to put into her mouth the wish that she may die a foul death if she breaks her marriage vows. There is not a hint of the more frightful imprecation she invokes on herself in expressing the hope that she may descend alive into h.e.l.l when she commits the crime she is meditating at the moment.]

[Footnote 56: "Infidelity in women is a subject of the severest crimination among the Turks. When any of these miserable girls are apprehended, for the first time they are put to hard labor, &c.; but for the second, they are recommitted, and many at a time tied up in sacks, and taken in a boat to the Seraglio-Point, where they are thrown into the tide." Dallaway's Constantinople.--BOWLES.]

[Footnote 57: The squire kneeling to worship May as she pa.s.sed by is an exaggerated trait supplied by Pope.]

[Footnote 58: At the conclusion of the hypocritical rejoinder of May, in which she speaks the language of indignant innocence, the narrative goes on thus in the original:

And with that word she saw where Damyan Sat in the bush, and coughing, she began; And with her fingers signes made she, That Damyan should climb upon a tree, That charged was with fruit, and up he went, For verily he knew all her intent; For in a letter she had told him all Of this mattier, how he worke shall.]

[Footnote 59: These lines, which have no counterpart in Chaucer, owe their beauty to Dryden's Wife of Bath's Tale:

He saw a choir of ladies in a round, That featly footing seemed to skim the ground: Thus dancing hand in hand, so light they were, He knew not where they trod, on earth or air.]

[Footnote 60: The author of the apocryphal book of Ecclesiasticus.

Chaucer says that he seldom speaks of women with reverence, which is correct. The statement of Pope that the son of Sirach a.s.serted, like Solomon, that there was no such thing as a good woman, is in direct contradiction to various pa.s.sages among his precepts.]

[Footnote 61: There is no specification of "these ladies" in Chaucer.]

[Footnote 62:

Now by my mother Ceres' soul, I swear That I shall give her suffisaunt answere, And alle women after for her sake; That though they be in any guilt i-take, With face bold they shall themselves excuse, And bear them down that woulde them accuse.

For lack of answer none of them shall dyen.

All had ye seen a thing with both your eyen, Yet shall we women visage it hardily, And weep, and swear, and chide subtilely.]

[Footnote 63:

I wot well that this Jew, this Solomon, Found of us women fooles many one; But though he be founde no good woman, Yet hath there founde many another man Women full true, full good, and vertuous; Witness on them that dwell in Christes house; With martyrdom they proved their constaunce.]

[Footnote 64: Pluto and Proserpine each select that portion of the meaning which is convenient. Both senses are included in the words of Solomon, who at once a.s.serts the general wickedness of mankind, and the comparative worthlessness of women.]

[Footnote 65: The queen has just been boasting that she will endow the s.e.x with the art of ingenious lying to cover the violation of their most solemn vows, and now she tauntingly tells her husband that it is not in woman to break her word. This contradiction is imported into the story by Pope. The original is as follows:--

Dame, quoth this Pluto, be no longer wroth, I give it up; but since I swore mine oath, That I will grante him his sight again, My word shall stand, I warne you certain; I am a king it sit me not to lie.

And I, quoth she, am queen of faierie.

Her answer shall she have I undertake, Let us no more wordes hereof make.]

[Footnote 66: The allusion is to the common longing of pregnant women for particular articles of diet. May cries out that she shall expire unless she has some of the "small green pears" to eat, and then exclaims anew,

I tell you well, a woman in my plight May have to fruit so great an appet.i.te, That she may dyen, but she it have.]

[Footnote 67: The moral is Pope's own, and is in the dissolute spirit which had descended from the reign of Charles II. The comment on the story, in Chaucer, is put into the mouth of the host, who begs that he may be preserved from such a wife, and inveighs against the craft and misdoings of women.]

THE WIFE OF BATH.

HER PROLOGUE.

FROM CHAUCER.

The Wife of Bath is the other piece of Chaucer which Pope selected to imitate. One cannot but wonder at his choice, which perhaps nothing but his youth could excuse. Dryden, who is known not to be nicely scrupulous, informs us, that he would not versify it on account of its indecency. Pope, however, has omitted or softened the grosser and more offensive pa.s.sages. Chaucer afforded him many subjects of a more sublime and serious species; and it were to be wished Pope had exercised his pencil on the pathetic story of the patience of Griselda, or Troilus and Cressida, or the complaint of the Black Knight; or, above all, on Cambuscan and Canace. From the accidental circ.u.mstance of Dryden and Pope having copied the gay and ludicrous parts of Chaucer, the common notion seems to have arisen, that Chaucer's vein of poetry was chiefly turned to the light and the ridiculous. But they who look into Chaucer will soon be convinced of this prevailing prejudice, and will find his comic vein, like that of Shakespeare, to be only like one of mercury, imperceptibly mingled with a mine of gold. Mr. Hughes withdrew his contributions to a volume of Miscellaneous Poems, published by Steele, because this Prologue was to be inserted in it, which he thought too obscene for the gravity of his character. "The extraordinary length,"

says Mr. Tyrwhitt, "of the Wife of Bath's Prologue, as well as the vein of pleasantry that runs through it, is very suitable to the character of the speaker. The greatest part must have been of Chaucer's own invention, though one may plainly see that he had been reading the popular invectives against marriage, and women in general, such as the Roman de la Rose, Valerius ad Rufinum de non ducenda uxore, and particularly Hieronymus contra Jovinianum. The holy Father, by way of recommending celibacy, has exerted all his learning and eloquence, and he certainly was not deficient in either, to collect together and aggravate whatever he could find to the prejudice of the female s.e.x.

Among other things he has inserted his own translation (probably) of a long extract from what he calls, Liber Aureolus Theophrasti de Nuptiis.

Next to him in order of time was the treatise ent.i.tled, Epistola Valerii ad Rufinum de non ducenda uxore. It has been printed, for the similarity of its sentiments I suppose, among the works of St. Jerome, though it is evidently of a much later date. Tanner, from Wood's MSS. Collection, attributes it to Walter Mapes. I should not believe it to be older; as John of Salisbury, who has treated of the same subject in his Polycrat.

l. viii. c. xl. does not appear to have seen it. To these two books Jean de Meun has been obliged for some of the severest strokes in his Roman de la Rose; and Chaucer has transfused the quintessence of all the three works upon the subject of matrimony, into his Wife of Bath's Prologue and Merchant's Tale."

The lines of Pope in the piece before us are spirited and easy and have, properly enough, a free colloquial air. The tale, to which this is the prologue, has been versified by Dryden, and is supposed to have been of Chaucer's own invention; as is the exquisite vision of the Flower and the Leaf, which has received a thousand new graces from the spirited and harmonious Dryden. It is to his Fables, (next to his Music Ode,) written when he was above seventy years old, that Dryden will chiefly owe his immortality; and among these, particularly to the well-conducted tale of Palamon and Arcite, the pathetic picture of Sigismunda, the wild and terrible graces of Theodore and Honoria, and the sportive pleasantry of Cymon and Iphigenia. The warmth and melody of these pieces has never been excelled in our language; I mean in rhyme. It is mortifying and surprising to see the cold and contemptuous manner in which Dr. Johnson speaks of these capital pieces, which he says "require little criticism, and seem hardly worth the rejuvenescence, as he affectedly calls it, which Dryden has bestowed upon them." It is remarkable, that in his criticisms he has not even mentioned the Flower and Leaf.

These pieces of Chaucer were not the only ones that were versified by Pope. Mr. Harte a.s.sured me, that he was convinced by some circ.u.mstances which Fenton, his friend, communicated to him, that Pope wrote the characters, that make the introduction to the Canterbury Tales, published under the name of Betterton.--WARTON.

Dr. Warton thinks, "one cannot but wonder at Pope's choice from Chaucer of these stories, when so many more are to be found in him more poetical." His observation on Chaucer's poems is very just, but the fact is, Pope by this very selection showed the bent of his mind,--that it was rather turned to satire and ridicule, than to the more elevated strains of poetry.--BOWLES.

The imitations of Chaucer's January and May, and Wife of Bath's Prologue, are executed with a degree of freedom, ease, and spirit, and at the same time with a judgment and delicacy which not only far exceeds what might have been expected from so young a writer, but which leave nothing to be wished for in the mind of the reader. The humour of Chaucer is translated into the lines of Pope, almost without suffering any evaporation.--ROSCOE.

Pope's version of the Prologue of the Wife of Bath first appeared in a volume of Poetical Miscellanies, published by Steele, in 1714. The portrait of this repulsive woman is drawn by Chaucer with a vigorous hand. She is a wealthy cloth manufacturer, with a bold countenance, and more than masculine freedom of speech. She dresses ostentatiously, rides with spurs, and, glorying in her shame, openly boasts of the vices which less impudent women would carefully conceal. Her two predominant characteristics are an inordinate self-will which makes her resolve to rule her husbands with an absolute despotism, and an inordinate sensuality which has completely absorbed every finer sentiment. She not only avows her propensities, but exults in the deceit, the tricks, and the violence which she has employed to gratify them as so many testimonies to her cleverness and power. She has no compunctious visitings for the frauds she has practised, and the misery she has inflicted upon her deceased husbands. She speaks of the dead as of the living with brutal insensibility, and would think it a weakness to be swayed by a human feeling. The impersonation of domineering, heartless selfishness, her pride is to prevail by tyranny instead of by the gentle graces of feminine tenderness, and her pleasure is to indulge in worldly gaiety, and the gross gratifications of sense. Even her jovial good humour is hardly a redeeming feature in her character, for it mainly proceeds from her keen relish for physical enjoyments, and turns to temper the instant she is thwarted. It is difficult to conceive that anybody could be injured by reading her confessions, which have nothing alluring, but with Warton, we must condemn the taste which could select the story as a ground-work for the embellishments of modern verse. The character may exist in every generation. The unblushing candour with which it displays itself belonged to more outspoken times than our own.

Chaucer painted from the life, and this portrait of a coa.r.s.e, voluptuous, defiant woman of the citizen cla.s.s, finds a place in his gallery, because she had a prominent place in the society of the middle ages. There was no rational motive for tricking her out in the newest fashion of a period to which she did not belong, and she might with advantage have been allowed to remain in her primitive place and garb.

The indelicacy of the pieces he translated from Chaucer was, however, one of their recommendations to Pope, and they may have had a further attraction for him from the fact, that they held wives up to odium. His deformed and insignificant person was an antidote to love, and the court he paid to women met with a cold return. He retaliated with his pen for the mortification to which they exposed him, and he almost always represented them in a frivolous or degrading light. He may not improbably have had a pleasure in reproducing from Chaucer the caustic sentiments which were congenial to his own, and may have found some satisfaction for his wounded spirit in revenging indifference by satire.

Warton says that Pope has softened the more offensive pa.s.sages in the Wife of Bath's Prologue, but his version, on the other hand, is often less decorous than the original. He has not justified his choice of the subject by his skill in the treatment of it. The adaptation is much inferior to the companion piece of January and May, and appears to have been thrown off in haste. There are a few, a very few, happy lines and expressions, but the bulk of the versification is not much above mediocrity, and is frequently below it. He has failed in the substance still more than in the form. Roscoe was of opinion that the humour of Chaucer had hardly suffered any evaporation. The admirers of the original have arrived at a different conclusion, and have contended, with almost one voice, that hardly any of the humour has been preserved.