Adventures in Criticism | Page 8

miswryte thee, Ne thee mismetre for
defaute of tonge. And red wher-so thou be, or elles songe, That thou be

understoude I God beseche!..."
And therewith, as though on purpose to defeat his fears, he proceeded
to turn three stanzas of Boccaccio into English that tastes almost as
freshly after five hundred years as on the day it was written. He is
speaking of Hector's death:--
"And whan that he was slayn in this manere, His lighte goost ful
blisfully it went Up to the holownesse of the seventh spere In convers
leting every element; And ther he saugh, with ful avysement, The
erratik starres, herkening armonye With sownes ful of hevenish
melodye.
"And down from thennes faste he gan avyse This litel spot of erthe, that
with the see Embraced is, and fully gan despyse This wrecched world,
and held al vanitee To respect of the pleyn felicitee That is in hevene
above; and at the laste, Ther he was slayn, his loking down he caste;
"And in himself he lough right at the wo Of hem that wepten for his
death so faste; And dampned al our werk that folweth so The blinde
lust, the which that may not laste, And sholden al our harte on hevene
caste. And forth he wente, shortly for to telle, Ther as Mercurie sorted
him to dwelle...."
Who have prepared our ears to admit this passage, and many as fine?
Not the editors, who point out very properly that it is a close translation
from Boccaccio's "Teseide," xi. 1-3. The information is valuable, as far
as it goes; but what it fails to explain is just the marvel of the
passage--viz., the abiding "Englishness" of it, the native ring of it in our
ears after five centuries of linguistic and metrical development. To
whom, besides Chaucer himself, do we owe this? For while Chaucer
has remained substantially the same, apparently we have an aptitude
that our grandfathers and great-grandfathers had not. The answer surely
is: We owe it to our nineteenth century poets, and particularly to
Tennyson, Swinburne, and William Morris. Years ago Mr. R.H. Horne
said most acutely that the principle of Chaucer's rhythm is "inseparable
from a full and fair exercise of the genius of our language in
versification." This "full and fair exercise" became a despised, almost a

lost, tradition after Chaucer's death. The rhythms of Skelton, of Surrey,
and Wyatt, were produced on alien and narrower lines. Revived by
Shakespeare and the later Elizabethans, it fell into contempt again until
Cowper once more began to claim freedom for English rhythm, and
after him Coleridge, and the despised Leigh Hunt. But never has its full
liberty been so triumphantly asserted as by the three poets I have
named above. If we are at home as we read Chaucer, it is because they
have instructed us in the liberty which Chaucer divined as the only true
way.
FOOTNOTES:
[A] The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer. Edited, from numerous
manuscripts, by the Rev. Walter W. Skeat, Litt. D., LL.D., M.A. In six
volumes. Oxford: At the Clarendon Press. 1894.
[B] Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Edited, with Notes and Introduction,
by Alfred W. Pollard. London: Macmillan & Co.

"THE PASSIONATE PILGRIM."
January 5, 1805. "The Passionate Pilgrim."
The Passionate Pilgrim (1599). Reprinted with a Note about the Book,
by Arthur L. Humphreys. London: Privately Printed by Arthur L.
Humphreys, of 187, Piccadilly. MDCCCXCIV.
I was about to congratulate Mr. Humphreys on his printing when, upon
turning to the end of this dainty little volume, I discovered the
well-known colophon of the Chiswick Press--"Charles Whittingham &
Co., Took's Court, Chancery Lane, London." So I congratulate Messrs.
Charles Whittingham & Co. instead, and suggest that the imprint
should have run "Privately Printed for Arthur L. Humphreys."
This famous (or, if you like it, infamous) little anthology of thirty
leaves has been singularly unfortunate in its title-pages. It was first
published in 1599 as The Passionate Pilgrims. By W. Shakespeare. At

London. Printed for W. Jaggard, and are to be sold by W. Leake, at the
Greyhound in Paules Churchyard. This, of course, was disingenuous.
Some of the numbers were by Shakespeare: but the authorship of some
remains doubtful to this day, and others the enterprising Jaggard had
boldly conveyed from Marlowe, Richard Barnefield, and Bartholomew
Griffin. In short, to adapt a famous line upon a famous lexicon, "the
best part was Shakespeare, the rest was not." For this, Jaggard has been
execrated from time to time with sufficient heartiness. Mr. Swinburne,
in his latest volume of Essays, calls him an "infamous pirate, liar, and
thief." Mr. Humphreys remarks, less vivaciously, that "He was not
careful and prudent, or he would not have attached the name of
Shakespeare to a volume which was only partly by the bard--that