Book: Dreamthorp

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As a matter of course, on this special shelf of books will be found
Boswell's "Life of Johnson"--a work in our literature unique, priceless.
That altogether unvenerable yet profoundly venerating Scottish
gentleman,--that queerest mixture of qualities, of force and weakness,
blindness and insight, vanity and solid worth,--has written the finest
book of its kind which our nation possesses. It is quite impossible to
over-state its worth. You lift it, and immediately the intervening years
disappear, and you are in the presence of the Doctor. You are made free
of the last century, as you are free of the present. You double your
existence. The book is a letter of introduction to a whole knot of
departed English worthies. In virtue of Boswell's labours, we know
Johnson--the central man of his time--better than Burke did, or
Reynolds,--far better even than Boswell did. We know how he expressed
himself, in what grooves his thoughts ran, how he ate, drank, and slept.
Boswell's unconscious art is wonderful, and so is the result attained.
This book has arrested, as never book did before, time and decay. Bozzy
is really a wizard: he makes the sun stand still. Till his work is done,
the future stands respectfully aloof. Out of ever-shifting time he has
made fixed and permanent certain years, and in these Johnson talks and
argues, while Burke listens, and Reynolds takes snuff, and Goldsmith,
with hollowed hand, whispers a sly remark to his neighbour. There have
they sat, these ghosts, for seventy years now, looked at and listened to
by the passing generations; and there they still sit, the one voice going
on! Smile at Boswell as we may, he was a spiritual phenomenon quite as
rare as Johnson. More than most he deserves our gratitude. Let us hope
that when next Heaven sends England a man like Johnson, a companion and
listener like Boswell will be provided. The Literary Club sits forever.
What if the Mermaid were in like eternal session, with Shakspeare's
laughter ringing through the fire and hail of wit!

By the strangest freak of chance or liking, the next book on my shelf
contains the poems of Ebenezer Elliott, the Corn-law Rhymer. This
volume, adorned by a hideous portrait of the author, I can well remember
picking up at a bookstall for a few pence many years ago. It seems
curious to me that this man is not in these days better known. A more
singular man has seldom existed,--seldom a more genuine. His first
business speculation failed, but when about forty he commenced again, and
this time fortune made amends for her former ill-treatment. His
warehouse was a small, dingy place, filled with bars of iron, with a bust
of Shakspeare looking down on the whole. His country-house contained
busts; of Achilles, Ajax, and Napoleon. Here is a poet who earned a
competence as an iron-merchant; here is a monomaniac on the Corn-laws,
who loved nature as intensely as ever did Burns or Wordsworth. Here is a
John Bright uttering himself in fiery and melodious verse,--Apollo with
iron dust on his face, wandering among the Sheffield knife-grinders! If
you wish to form some idea of the fierce discontent which thirty years
ago existed amongst the working men of England, you should read the
Corn-law Rhymes. The Corn-laws are to him the twelve plagues of Egypt
rolled together. On account of them he denounces his country as the
Hebrew prophets were wont to denounce Tyre and Sidon. His rage breaks
out into curses, which are _not_ forgiveness. He is maddened by the
memory of Peterloo. Never, perhaps, was a sane human being so tyrannised
over by a single idea. A skeleton was found on one of the Derbyshire
hills. Had the man been crossed in love? had he crept up there to die in
the presence of the stars? "Not at all," cries Elliott; "he was a victim
of the Corn-laws, who preferred dying on the mountain-top to receiving
parish pay." In his wild poem all the evil kings in Hades descend from
their thrones when King George enters. They only let slip the dogs of
war; he taxed the people's bread. "Sleep on, proud Britoness!" he
exclaims over a woman at rest in the grave she had purchased. In one of
his articles in _Tait's Magazine_, he seriously proposed that tragedies
should be written showing the evils of the Corn-laws, and that on a given
night they should be performed in every theatre of the kingdom, so that
the nation might, by the speediest possible process, be converted to the
gospel of Free-trade. In his eyes the Corn-laws had gathered into their
black bosoms every human wrong: repeal them, and lo! the new heavens and
the new earth! A poor and shallow theory of the universe, you will say;
but it is astonishing what poetry he contrives to extract out of it. It
is hardly possible, without quotation, to give an idea of the rage and
fury which pervade these poems. He curses his political opponents with
his whole heart and soul. He pillories them, and pelts them with dead
cats and rotten eggs. The earnestness of his mood has a certain terror
in it for meek and quiet people. His poems are of the angriest, but
their anger is not altogether undivine. His scorn blisters and scalds,
his sarcasm flays; but then outside nature is constantly touching him
with a summer breeze or a branch of pink and white apple-blossom, and his
mood becomes tenderness itself. He is far from being lachrymose; and
when he is pathetic, he affects one as when a strong man sobs. His anger
is not nearly so frightful as his tears. I cannot understand why Elliott
is so little read. Other names not particularly remarkable I meet in the
current reviews--his never. His book stands on my shelf, but on no other
have I seen it. This I think strange, because, apart from the intrinsic
value of his verse as verse, it has an historical value. Evil times and
embittered feelings, now happily passed away, are preserved in his books,
like Pompeii and Herculaneum in Vesuvian lava. He was a poet of the
poor, but in a quite peculiar sense. Burns, Crabbe, Wordsworth, were
poets of the poor, but mainly of the peasant poor. Elliott is the poet
of the English artisans,--men who read newspapers and books, who are
members of mechanics' institutes, who attend debating societies, who
discuss political measures and political men, who are tormented by
ideas,--a very different kind of persons altogether. It is easier to
find poetry beneath the blowing hawthorn than beneath the plumes of
factory or furnace smoke. In such uninviting atmospheres Ebenezer
Elliott found his; and I am amazed that the world does not hold it in
greater regard, if for nothing else than for its singularity.


There is many another book on my shelf on which I might dilate, but this
gossiping must be drawn to a close. When I began, the wind was bending
the trees, and the rain came against the window in quick, petulant
dashes. For hours now, wind and rain have ceased, the trees are
motionless, the garden walk is dry. The early light of wintry sunset is
falling across my paper, and, as I look up, the white Dante opposite is
dipped in tender rose. Less stern he looks, but not less sad, than he
did in the morning. The sky is clear, and an arm of bleak pink vapour
stretches up into its depths. The air is cold with frost, and the rain
which those dark clouds in the east hold will fall during the night in
silent, feathery flakes. When I wake to-morrow, the world will be
changed, frosty forests will cover my bedroom panes, the tree branches
will be furred with snows; and to the crumbs which it is my daily custom
to sprinkle on the shrubbery walk will come the lineal descendant of the
charitable redbreast that covered up with leaves the sleeping children in
the wood.




GEOFFREY CHAUCER

Chaucer is admitted on all hands to be a great poet, but, by the
general public at least, he is not frequently read. He is like a
cardinal virtue, a good deal talked about, a good deal praised,
honoured by a vast amount of distant admiration, but with little
practical acquaintance. And for this there are many and obvious
reasons. He is an ancient, and the rich old mahogany is neglected for
the new and glittering veneer. He is occasionally gross; often tedious
and obscure; he frequently leaves a couple of lovers, to cite the
opinions of Greek and Roman authors; and practice and patience are
required to melt the frost of his orthography, and let his music flow
freely. In the conduct of his stories he is garrulous, homely, and
slow-paced. He wrote in a leisurely world, when there was plenty of
time for writing and reading, long before the advent of the printer's
devil or of Mr. Mudie. There is little of the lyrical element in him.
He does not dazzle by sentences. He is not quotable. He does not
shine in extracts so much as in entire poems. There is a pleasant
equality about his writing; he advances through a story at an even
pace, glancing round him on everything with curious, humourous eyes,
and having his say about everything. He is the prince of
story-tellers, and however much he may move others, he is not moved
himself. His mood is so kindly that he seems always to have written
after dinner, or after hearing good news,--that he had received from
the king another grant of wine, for instance,--and he discourses of
love and lovers' raptures, and the disappointments of life, half
sportively, half sadly, like one who has passed through all, felt the
sweetness and the bitterness of it, and been able to strike a balance.
He had his share of crosses and misfortune, but his was a nature which
time and sorrow could only mellow and sweeten; and for all that had
come and gone, he loved his "books clothed in black and red," to sit at
good men's feasts; and if silent at table, as the Countess of Pembroke
reported, the "stain upon his lip was wine." Chaucer's face is to his
writings the best preface and commentary; it is contented-looking, like
one familiar with pleasant thoughts, shy and self-contained somewhat,
as if he preferred his own company to the noisy and rude companionship
of his fellows; and the outlines are bland, fleshy, voluptuous, as of
one who had a keen relish for the pleasures that leave no bitter
traces. Tears and mental trouble, and the agonies of doubt, you cannot
think of in connexion with it; laughter is sheathed in it, the light of
a smile is diffused over it. In face and turn of genius he differs in
every respect from his successor, Spenser; and in truth, in Chaucer and
Spenser we see the fountains of the two main streams of British song:
the one flowing through the drama and the humourous narrative, the
other through the epic and the didactic poem. Chaucer rooted himself
firmly in fact, and looked out upon the world in a half-humourous,
half-melancholy mood. Spenser had but little knowledge of men as
_men_; the cardinal virtues were the personages he was acquainted with;
in everything he was "high fantastical," and, as a consequence, he
exhibits neither humour nor pathos. Chaucer was thoroughly national;
his characters, place them where he may,--in Thebes or Tartary,--are
natives of one or other of the English shires. Spenser's genius was
country-less as Ariel; search ever so diligently, you will not find an
English daisy in all his enchanted forests. Chaucer was tolerant of
everything, the vices not excepted; morally speaking, an easy-going
man, he took the world as it came, and did not fancy himself a whit
better than his fellows. Spenser was a Platonist, and fed his grave
spirit on high speculations and moralities. Severe and chivalrous,
dreaming of things to come, unsuppled by luxury, unenslaved by passion,
somewhat scornful and self-sustained, it needed but a tyrannous king,
an electrical political atmosphere, and a deeper interest in theology
to make a Puritan of him, as these things made a Puritan of Milton.
The differences between Chaucer and Spenser are seen at a glance in
their portraits. Chaucer's face is round, good-humoured,
constitutionally pensive, and thoughtful. You see in it that he has
often been amused, and that he may easily be amused again. Spenser's
is of sharper and keener feature, disdainful, and breathing that
severity which appertains to so many of the Elizabethan men. A
fourteenth-century child, with delicate prescience, would have asked
Chaucer to assist her in a strait, and would not have been
disappointed. A sixteenth-century child in like circumstances would
have shrunk from drawing on herself the regards of the sterner-looking
man. We can trace the descent of the Chaucerian face and genius in
Shakspeare and Scott, of the Spenserian in Milton and Wordsworth. In
our day, Mr. Browning takes after Chaucer, Mr. Tennyson takes after
Spenser.

Hazlitt, writing of the four great English poets, tells us, Chaucer's
characteristic is intensity, Spenser's remoteness, Milton's sublimity,
and Shakspeare's everything. The sentence is epigrammatic and
memorable enough; but so far as Chaucer is concerned, it requires a
little explanation. He is not intense, for instance, as Byron is
intense, or as Wordsworth is intense. He does not see man like the
one, nor nature like the other. He would not have cared much for
either of these poets. And yet, so far as straightforwardness in
dealing with a subject, and complete though quiet realisation of it
goes to make up intensity of poetic mood, Chaucer amply justifies his
critic. There is no wastefulness or explosiveness about the old
writer. He does his work silently, and with no appearance of effort.
His poetry shines upon us like a May morning; but the streak over the
eastern hill, the dew on the grass, the wind that bathes the brows of
the wayfarer, are not there by haphazard: they are the results of
occult forces, a whole solar system has had a hand in their production.
From the apparent ease with which an artist works, one does not readily
give him credit for the mental force he is continuously putting forth.
To many people, a chaotic "Festus" is more wonderful than a rounded,
melodious "Princess." The load which a strong man bears gracefully
does not seem so heavy as the load which the weaker man staggers under.
Incompletion is force fighting; completion is force quiescent, its work
done. Nature's forces are patent enough in some scarred volcanic moon
in which no creature can breathe; only the sage, in some soft green
earth, can discover the same forces reft of fierceness and terror, and
translated into sunshine, and falling dew, and the rainbow gleaming on
the shower. It is somewhat in this way that the propriety of Hazlitt's
criticism is to be vindicated. Chaucer is the most simple, natural,
and homely of our poets, and whatever he attempts he does thoroughly.
The Wife of Bath is so distinctly limned that she could sit for her
portrait. You can count the embroidered sprigs in the jerkin of the
squire. You hear the pilgrims laugh as they ride to Canterbury. The
whole thing is admirably life-like and seems easy, and in the seeming
easiness we are apt to forget the imaginative sympathy which bodies
forth the characters, and the joy and sorrow from which that sympathy
has drawn nurture. Unseen by us, the ore has been dug, and smelted in
secret furnaces, and when it is poured into perfect moulds, we are apt
to forget by what potency the whole thing has been brought about.

And, with his noticing eyes, into what a brilliant, many tinted world
was Chaucer born! In his day life had a certain breadth, colour, and
picturesqueness which it does not possess now. It wore a braver dress,
and flaunted more in the sun. Five centuries effect a great change on
manners. A man may nowadays, and without the slightest suspicion of
the fact, brush clothes with half the English peerage on a sunny
afternoon in Pall Mall. Then it was quite different. The fourteenth
century loved magnificence and show. Great lords kept princely state
in the country; and when they came abroad, what a retinue, what waving
of plumes, and shaking of banners, and glittering of rich dresses!
Religion was picturesque, with dignitaries, and cathedrals, and fuming
incense, and the Host carried through the streets. The franklin kept
open house, the city merchant feasted kings, the outlaw roasted his
venison beneath the greenwood tree. There was a gallant monarch and a
gallant court. The eyes of the Countess of Salisbury shed influence;
Maid Marian laughed in Sherwood. London is already a considerable
place, numbering, perhaps, two hundred thousand inhabitants, the houses
clustering close and high along the river banks; and on the beautiful
April nights the nightingales are singing round the suburban villages
of Strand, Holborn, and Charing. It is rich withal; for after the
battle of Poitiers, Harry Picard, wine-merchant and Lord Mayor,
entertained in the city four kings,--to wit, Edward, king of England,
John, king of France, David, king of Scotland, and the king of Cyprus;
and the last-named potentate, slightly heated with Harry's wine,
engaged him at dice, and being nearly ruined thereby, the honest
wine-merchant returned the poor king his money, which was received with
all thankfulness. There is great stir on a summer's morning in that
Warwickshire castle,--pawing of horses, tossing of bridles, clanking of
spurs. The old lord climbs at last into his saddle and rides off to
court, his favourite falcon on his wrist, four squires in immediate
attendance carrying his arms; and behind these stretches a merry
cavalcade, on which the chestnuts shed their milky blossoms. In the
absence of the old peer, young Hopeful spends his time as befits his
rank and expectations. He grooms his steed, plays with his hawks,
feeds his hounds, and labours diligently to acquire grace and dexterity
in the use of arms. At noon the portcullis is lowered, and out shoots
a brilliant array of ladies and gentlemen, and falconers with hawks.
They bend their course to the river, over which a rainbow is rising
from a shower. Yonder young lady is laughing at our stripling squire,
who seems half angry, half pleased: they are lovers, depend upon it. A
few years, and the merry beauty will have become a noble, gracious
woman, and the young fellow, sitting by a watch-fire on the eve of
Cressy, will wonder if she is thinking of him. But the river is
already reached. Up flies the alarmed heron, his long blue legs
trailing behind him; a hawk is let loose; the young lady's laugh has
ceased as, with gloved hand shading fair forehead and sweet gray eye,
she watches hawk and heron lessening in heaven. The Crusades are now
over, but the religious fervour which inspired them lingered behind; so
that, even in Chaucer's day, Christian kings, when their consciences
were oppressed by a crime more than usually weighty, talked of making
an effort before they died to wrest Jerusalem and the sepulchre of
Christ from the grasp of the infidel. England had at this time several
holy shrines, the most famous being that of Thomas a Becket at
Canterbury, which attracted crowds of pilgrims. The devout travelled
in large companies: and, in the May mornings, a merry sight it was as,
with infinite clatter and merriment, with bells, minstrels, and
buffoons, they passed through thorp and village, bound for the tomb of
St. Thomas. The pageant of events, which seems enchantment when
chronicled by Froissart's splendid pen, was to Chaucer contemporaneous
incident; the chivalric richness was the familiar and every-day dress
of his time. Into this princely element he was endued, and he saw
every side of it,--the frieze as well as the cloth of gold. In the
"Canterbury Tales" the fourteenth century murmurs, as the sea murmurs
in the pink-mouthed shells upon our mantelpieces.

Of his life we do not know much. In his youth he studied law and
disliked it,--a circumstance common enough in the lives of men of
letters, from his time to that of Shirley Brooks. How he lived, what
he did when he was a student, we are unable to discover. Only for a
moment is the curtain lifted, and we behold, in the old quaint peaked
and gabled Fleet Street of that day, Chaucer thrashing a Franciscan
friar (friar's offence unknown), for which amusement he was next
morning fined two shillings. History has preserved this for us, but
has forgotten all the rest of his early life, and the chronology of all
his poems. What curious flies are sometimes found in the historic
amber! On Chaucer's own authority, we know that he served under Edward
III. in his French campaign, and that he for some time lay in a French
prison. On his return from captivity he married; he was valet in the
king's household, he was sent on an embassy to Genoa, and is supposed
to have visited Petrarch, then resident at Padua, and to have heard
from his lips the story of "Griselda,"--a tradition which one would
like to believe. He had his share of the sweets and the bitters of
life. He enjoyed offices and gifts of wine, and he felt the pangs of
poverty and the sickness of hope deferred. He was comptroller of the
customs for wools; from which post he was dismissed,--why, we know not;
although one cannot help remembering that Edward made the writing out
of the accounts in Chaucer's own hand the condition of his holding
office, and having one's surmises. Foreign countries, strange manners,
meetings with celebrated men, love of wife and children, and their
deaths, freedom and captivity, the light of a king's smile and its
withdrawal, furnished ample matter of meditation to his humane and
thoughtful spirit. In his youth he wrote allegories full of ladies and
knights dwelling in impossible forests and nursing impossible passions;
but in his declining years, when fortune had done all it could for him
and all it could against him, he discarded these dreams, and betook
himself to the actual stuff of human nature. Instead of the "Romance
of the Rose," we have the "Canterbury Tales" and the first great
English poet. One likes to fancy Chaucer in his declining days living
at Woodstock, with his books about him, and where he could watch the
daisies opening themselves at sunrise, shutting themselves at sunset,
and composing his wonderful stories, in which the fourteenth century
lives,--riding to battle in iron gear, hawking in embroidered jerkin
and waving plume, sitting in rich and solemn feast, the monarch on the
dais.

Chaucer's early poems have music and fancy, they are full of a natural
delight in sunshine and the greenness of foliage; but they have little
human interest. They are allegories for the most part, more or less
satisfactorily wrought out. The allegorical turn of thought, the
delight in pageantry, the "clothing upon" of abstractions with human
forms, flowered originally out of chivalry and the feudal times.
Chaucer imported it from the French, and was proud of it in his early
poems, as a young fellow of that day might be proud of his horse
furniture, his attire, his waving plume. And the poetic fashion thus
set retained its vitality for a long while,--indeed, it was only
thoroughly made an end of by the French Revolution, which made an end
of so much else. About the last trace of its influence is to be found
in Burns' sentimental correspondence with Mrs. M'Lehose, in which the
lady is addressed as Clarinda, and the poet signs himself Sylvander.
It was at best a mere beautiful gauze screen drawn between the poet and
nature; and passion put his foot through it at once. After Chaucer's
youth was over, he discarded somewhat scornfully these abstractions and
shows of things. The "Flower and the Leaf" is a beautiful-tinted
dream; the "Canterbury Tales" are as real as anything in Shakspeare or
Burns. The ladies in the earlier poems dwell in forests, and wear
coronals on their heads; the people in the "Tales" are engaged in the
actual concerns of life, and you can see the splashes of mire upon
their clothes. The separate poems which make up the "Canterbury Tales"
were probably written at different periods, after youth was gone, and
when he had fallen out of love with florid imagery and allegorical
conceits; and we can fancy him, perhaps fallen on evil days and in
retirement, anxious to gather up these loose efforts into one
consummate whole. If of his flowers he would make a bouquet for
posterity, it was of course necessary to procure a string to tie them
together. These necessities, which ruin other men, are the fortunate
chances of great poets. Then it was that the idea arose of a meeting
of pilgrims at the Tabard in Southwark, of their riding to Canterbury,
and of the different personages relating stories to beguile the tedium
of the journey. The notion was a happy one, and the execution is
superb. In those days, as we know, pilgrimages were of frequent
occurrence; and in the motley group that congregated on such occasions,
the painter of character had full scope. All conditions of people are
comprised in the noisy band issuing from the courtyard of the Southwark
inn on that May morning in the fourteenth century. Let us go nearer,
and have a look at them.

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