The Press. — London, England, 1855-04-21 00:00:00

Sittratart. Poetical Works of Geoffrey Chaucer. V ols. 1., 11., and 111. Annotated Edition of the English Poets. By Robert Bell. London : I. W. Parker and Son. THE subject of poetry is of such importance in the cousideration of a national literature that we have devoted a large portion of our space to the criticism of the continuous edition of British poets, of which the volumes before us are the last instalments. Partly on account of the over production in the last age, adorned with such names as those of Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Moore, Wilson, and some others, and partly from the absorption of high mental faculties conse quent on the recent marvellous revelations in the physical sciences, the poetical element in its active powers has been much depressed. But though contemporary poets aro few, the readers of our great authors are as numerous as ever, and those who in prose minister to the mind of the age are specially familiar with the great masters of verse. There are some who think that the present dearth of original poetry is likely to continue. They sups ose that in the rest of our national career science and the fine arts will occupy all the higher intellects, and that people have be come too fond of facts fur poetry. In such speculations there is only limited truth. We believe, however, that mere sentimentalists, warblers of the boudoirs, melodious composers of mediocre verse, never had a worse chance) than now of a week's audience. Thirty years since we had amongst us a flourishing school of improvisatore artists, whose names only glimmer in the popular memory, though numerous editions once testified to their popularity. They were not poets ; they created nothing out of their imagination, be cause they did not see into Nature or her workings. They mistook the spasmodical for the passionate ; and they did not feel in stinctively the wide difference between poetry and versified rhetoric. In Dryden's language— They fagotted their notions as they fell, And if they rhymed and rattled, all was well. On taking up their volumes now we see that they were only turners of couplets. What Archbishop Whateley said of loquacious people applies to the whole school of rhetorical versifiers :—" It is not that they have a great " command of language, but that language has " a great command of them." For minds morbidly-disposed to confound highly-coloured verbosity with the picto rial effects of suggestive poetry, we know no better cure than a study of the justly venerated Chaucer. It is not our object here to offer any elaborate estimate of his works. Posterity was once happily defined as " the " reading and thinking few," and by that high and select tribunal a decisive verdict has been pronounced which cannot be reversed. In saying so much we do not forget that the fame of Chaucer has been assailed with some dis paragement, and we think that Mr. Bell ought to have made a cento of the dicta uttered on Chaucer by , some of our greatest authorities in poetry. He has partly done so at the com mencement of his introduction : properly designated the Father of —quiret his right not • earliest THE PRESS. modern ideas and nurtured in a totally different school of verse have not been back ward in expressing hearty praise of Chaucer. We learn from Spence that Pope said—" I read " Chaucer still with as much pleasure as any " of our poets," and he then added what seems to us to be the exact merit of Chaucer :—" He is a master of manners and description, and " the first tale-teller in the true enlivened " natural way." Dryden, also, in the preface to his " Fables," has paid a sincere homage to the author of " The Canterbury Tales," and excited himself to the utinost in his modern version of " The Knighte's Tale," according to Walton " the most animated and harmonious " piece of versification in the English lan " guage." In apostrophising the long line of English worthies, after alluding to Shak speare and Spenser, we find Thomson writing of the laughing sage, Chaucer, whose native manners•painting verse, Well moralised, shines through the Gothic cloud Of time and language o'er thy genius thrown ! And turning from what the masters of song have said of him, we are content to cite from one of our living critics the opinion of Mr. Hallam :—" I do not know that any other " country, except Italy, produced his equal in "variety of invention, acuteness of observation, "or felicity of expression." But Mr. Hallam's remark, "except Italy," reminds us that Chaucer has sometimes been injuriously compared with the illustrious Italian writers of his own age. In his admira tion of his author we do not think that Mr. Bell has sufficiently indicated what may he said "at the other side." Thus Chalmers says of Chaucer:—" His language will still remain " an insurmountable obstacle with that mime " sous class of readers to whom poets must " look for universal approbation." Berington, also, in his " Literary History of the Middle Ages," observes :—" I would willingly learn by " how many have ' The Canterbury Tales' been " read, and particularly by how many with the " feeling of delight; " and we could cite other evidence to show that Chaucer is by no means an object of universal admiration. But the genuine merits of his works are in nowise better proved than that they could in mo dern times stand close examination and obtain such tributes as we have cited. The edition of Chaucer by Mr. Bell is the most copiously " annotated " of all the poets in the series, and we think that it ought to have been the first in publication. From the quantity that has been written on the author of " The Canterbury Tales," selection and com parison would appear to be the chief duty devolving on a modern editor. Yet such is not the case. There is still the difficulty of obtaining an accurate text. The editions of Speght, Stowe, and Urry, are admitted to be corrupt, and though Tyrwhitt deserves in finitely more praise than his successor, Mr. Wright, has allowed to him, still we have re ceived an immense addition of mediaeval knowledge since the days (1775) of Tyrwhitt. We could desire that Mr. Bell would be more minute in presenting his readers with a full catalogue of antecedent editions of the different poets whom he edits. Thus many would like to know that a volume of selections from Chaucer, " modernised " by various hands, was published some years ago. Amongst its con tributors were Miss Barrett (now Mrs. Brown ing), and Mr. Bell himself. There has also been an American edition of Chaucer, which we have never seen. Tyrwhitt, Sir Harris Nicholas, and Mr. Thomas Wright, are the chief predecessors of Mr. Bell, and of their labours he has freely availed himself, confessing his special obliga tions to Mr. Wright, and to the Rev. John Mounteney Jephson. The latter gentleman Mr. Bell says, has rendered to me and the public an important service in the notes on " The Canterbury Tales," and in the moe material parts of the introduction. The variety of his 1- taintnents, and the influence of his cultivated taste, willbe felt in all those places which the reader may consider lest entitled to critical approbation. Thus it will be seen that abundant store, of knowledge have been placed at the editir's disposal. In his estimate of Chaucer Mr. Bell it our opinion trenches on the panegyrist : With a complete oommand of the springs of usversal interest, the tragical sad the humorous, the *oleo and SATURDAY, the gay, the sublime and the grotesque, he applied his knowledge of life and nature, his' consummate art, the copious resources of an imagination that seemed incapable of exhaustion, and a power of expression as extensive as the empire of his genius, to the creation of works which, while they reflect in vivid colours the features of his own time, possess also an enduring value for all time to come. If Mr. Bell had been writing of the most creative of poetical intellects he could scarcely have said more. " The springs of " universal interest" were certainly under the power of Chaucer. The breadth of his mind was even more remarkable than its sublimity. " His knowledge of life and nature" can never be omitted in any estimate of his merits. But when we are told of " his con " summate art," and of " the resources of an " imagination that seemed incapable of ex " haustion," we must recollect how frequently indebted Chaucer was to foreign models, and how much of his subject matter was borrowed. On this latter phase of his undeniable genius, we are disposed to concur with Coleridge, when he says in his " Literary Remains," Chaucer must be read with an eye to the " Norman-French Trouveres,' of whom he is " the best representative in England." But we thoroughly subscribe to the follow ing vigorous and exact passage of criti cism : The peculiar interest of Chaucer's poetry arises not only from its intrinsic merit, but from the singularly clear and full idea it conveys of a state of society for which modem experience furnishes no parallel, while, at the same time, it is pregnant with elements of thought which exert an in. fiuence even in our own day. A close observer of character, and of all those fugitive traits that mark and indicate its individual peculiarities, Chaucer has adopted in "The Canterbury Tales" a plan that enables him to depict almost every class of society, and which also combines in itself the various kinds of composition employed as the vehicles of popular beliefs and feel►ngs in the middle ages. From his works may be learned much more satisfactorily than from the chronicles of his contemporaries, or the more elaborate compilations of later historians, the modes of thought, habits, and manners which prevailed in the reigns of Edward 111. and his immediate successors ; the era in which the Norman and Saxon races became fused, and our language and social institutions assumed forms that have descended with some modifications to the present time. Mr. Bell then gives a luminous historical review of the state of European society at the time of Chaucer, and shows us how the poet may in many things be received as a repre• sentative of his age. He then passes on to the text of his author, and discusses with great ability the questions of his ortho graphy, pronunciation, and prosody. It is on this part of the subject that the obstacles are interspersed which prevent Chaucer from being populary read, and the grave question arises whether English readers must be con tent to study him in obsolete diction or accept him " modernised." If ever there was a writer who could have succeeded in giving us a poetical and popular version of Chaucer, it was Dryden. He had all the qualities requisite—affluence of dio tion, an eye for the picturesque, and majestic harmony of numbers. He was also practised in paraphrases and translations. Yet we mast concur with Mr. Bell when he says: — The " Fables" of Dryden are es well known to the mass of the public as any poems in the language ; but it may be doubted whether they have increased the desire for a mote ittimate acquaintance with Chaucer, or contributed to the ettension of his fame. On the contrary, they have helped nither to obstruct his popularity, by encouraging the notion fiat he must be interpolated, expanded, and purified to slit the modern taste, and that if he is to be read at all it oust be through the medium of an interpreter. " The Knighte's Tale " as rendered by Dryden in his " Pahemon and Amite" is a glowing piece of poetry, but it really conveys ,co idea whatever of Chaucer. We are told by Dryden himself, in his " Letter to the Duke of Ormond," that in Chaucer's poetry "there "is the rude sweetness of a Scotch tune, " though not perfect " ; and " glorious John " in his versions of his original has given us, not the melody of an air from " the North countrie," but the luscious cadences of Italian music. We believe that it would be impos sible to modernise Chaucer. The laws of prosody alone interpose obstacles that cannot he overcome. Wo shall see this at once by citing one of the examples from Mr. Bell's introduction. Before doing so we must ob serve that, while in his general views of the versification of Chaucer Mr. Bell is right, we do not think that he is sufficiently plain for popular readers in his explanation of the metre of the poet,. gehaare who • know-little Geoffrey Cliau-r is properly designated the Father of English Poetry. He acctuirek his right to that title not only on the ground of being our earliest poet, but because the foundations he laid still support the fabric of our poetical literature, and will outlast the vicissitude's of taste and language. His greatest contemporaries and succes- sors have recognised and confirmed his claim to this dis- tinction. Lydgate calls him " the chief poet of Bretayne," and the " lode-sterre" of our language, and says that he was the first to distil and rain the gold dewdrops of speech and eloquence into our tongue; Occleve calls him ' the fynder of our fayre langage; " Roger Aecham describes him as the " English Homer," and considers " his sayinges to have as much authority as eyther Sophocles or Euri,•• - . n greke ;" k and Spenser speaks of him as the ' .Isfe)l-ralla t and " the well of English nude.... " ,- 1 , k i ll/Olefin clogue " Spenser also . e. ;':•: • . • i vt .Tity us. But it might be . 'i t ' ,the • -—• s cited by Mr. Bell . op:4 ~ . th antique modes of evidence of the last- in, ~ ~h, . ... :x• , i,-.. , ' ono who wrote and thought in : .: ppinite4,643. But minds reared in