Читать книгу A History of Story-telling - Arthur Ransome - Страница 12

'A certain carpenter, residing in a city near the sea, very covetous and very wicked, collected a large sum of money, and placed it in the trunk of a tree, which he stationed by his fireside, and which he never lost sight of. A place like this, he thought, no one could suspect; but it happened, that while all his household slept, the sea overflowed its boundaries, broke down that side of the building where the log was situated, and carried it away. It floated many miles from its original destination, and reached at length a city in which there lived a person who kept open house. Arising early in the morning, he perceived the trunk of a tree in the water, and thinking it would be of service to him, he brought it to his own home. He was a liberal, kind-hearted man, and a great benefactor to the poor. It one day chanced that he entertained some pilgrims in his house; and the weather being extremely cold, he cut up the log for firewood. When he had struck two or three blows with the axe, he heard a rattling sound; and cleaving it in twain, the gold pieces rolled out in every direction. Greatly rejoiced at the discovery, he reposited them in a secure place, until he should ascertain who was the owner.

'Now the carpenter, bitterly lamenting the loss of his money, travelled from place to place in pursuit of it. He came, by accident, to the house of the hospitable man who had found the trunk. He failed not to mention the object of his search; and the host, understanding that the money was his, reflected whether his title to it were good. "I will prove," said he to himself, "if God will that the money should be returned to him." Accordingly he made three cakes, the first of which he filled with earth, the second with the bones of dead men, and in the third he put a quantity of the gold which he had discovered in the trunk. "Friend," said he, addressing the carpenter, "we will eat three cakes, composed of the best meat in my house. Chuse which you will have." The carpenter did as he was directed, he took the cakes and weighed them in his hand, one after another, and finding that the earth weighed heaviest, he chose it. "And if I want more, my worthy host," added he, "I will have that"—laying his hand upon the cake containing the bones. "You may keep the third cake yourself." "I see clearly," murmured the host, "I see very clearly that God does not will the money to be returned to this wretched man." Calling, therefore, the poor and infirm, the blind and the lame, and opening the cake of gold in the presence of the carpenter, to whom he spoke, "Thou miserable varlet, this is thine own gold. But thou preferredst the cake of earth and dead men's bones. I am persuaded, therefore, that God wills not that I return thee thy money." Without delay, he distributed the whole among the paupers, and drove the carpenter away in great tribulation.'

So much for the story, which is indeed rather long to be quoted in so small a book. But listen now to the application:—

'My beloved, the carpenter is any worldly-minded man; the trunk of the tree denotes the human heart, filled with the riches of this life. The host is a wise confessor. The cake of earth is the world; that of the bones of dead men is the flesh; and that of gold is the kingdom of heaven.'

Chaucer and Boccaccio.

The modern novel could have no beginning in a literature so far removed from ordinary life as the romances, so brief in narration, so pious in ideal as the Gesta. Something more of flesh and blood, something of coarser grain than dreams, on the one hand, and on the other something fuller fleshed than the skeletonic anecdote (however marrowy its bones) was needed to produce it. It needed men and women, and it needed a more delicate narrative form, portraiture, and the fine art of story-telling, Chaucer, and Boccaccio. Chaucer, for all that he wrote in verse, was not a trouveur when he was at his best. Boccaccio was not a collector of anecdotes. The new classical learning had given them humaner outlooks. The attitude of the Canterbury Tales is not that of the Song of Roland, or the Morte Darthur; the attitude of the Decameron is not that of the Gesta. Chaucer and Boccaccio, sometimes at least, were plain men, pleasantly conscious of their humanity, telling stories to amuse their friends.

Chaucer was a middle-class Englishman, Boccaccio a middle-class Italian. They both wrote in languages that were scarcely older than themselves, in languages that were rather popular than learned. They were both in a sense mediators between the classical culture and their own people. There the resemblance ends, and their personal characters begin to seal the impressions they made on their respective literatures. They represent two quite distinct advances in the art of story-telling, the one in material, the other in technique. In both of them there is a personal honesty of workmanship that makes their work their own. The names of the trouveurs are lost, or, at least, not connected with what they did. They were workers on a general theme, and counted no more in the production of the whole than the thousand men who chiselled out each his piece of carving round the arches of Notre Dame. They were the tools of their nations. Chaucer and Boccaccio were men whose workmanship had its special marks, its private personality. They were artists in their own right and not artisans.

chaucer

GEOFFREY CHAUCER

Chaucer.

Chaucer's was a fairly simple nature. He seems to have taken to Renaissance fashions just as he took to Renaissance learning, without in the least disturbing the solid Englishness of his foundation. He married a Damsell Philippa without letting his marriage interfere with an ideal and unrequited passion like that of Petrarch for Laura. He had Jean de Meung's own reverence for the classics. 'Go litel book, go litel my tragedie,' he says in 'Troilus and Criseyd,

'And kiss the steppes, wher-as thou seest pace

Virgil, Ovyde, Omer, Lucan, and Stace.'

And yet few men have about them less of a classical savour. He may well have liked 'at his beddes heed

'Twenty bokes clad in blak or reed,

Of Aristotle and his philosophye,'

but he was a man of the true 'Merry England,' when oxen were roasted whole on feast-days, and pigs ran in the London streets. He followed the Court, but he knew the populace. His father was a vintner in Thames Street, and in the Cheapside taverns Chaucer found some of the material that his travels and learning taught him how to use. On St. George's day 1374 he was granted a pitcher of wine daily for life by his Majesty Edward the Third. It is probable that he met Petrarch at Padua. These two facts seem to me to present no very hollow portrait of the man.

Portraiture.

He brought into the art of story-telling a new clearness of sight in looking at other people and at the manners of the time. The romances had not represented contemporary life, but rather contemporary ideals. No one can pretend to find in Lancelot, in Roland, in Isoud of the White Hands, character-sketch or portrait. Lancelot is the perfect knight, Roland the perfect warrior, Isoud the beautiful woman. They were not a knight, a warrior, a woman. Those who heard the tales used the names as servant-girls use names in modern novels of plot, as pegs on which to hang their own emotions and their own ambitions. The lady who listened with her chin upon her hands as the trouveurs chanted before her, took herself the part of Isoud, and gave her lover or the lover for whom she hoped the attributes of Tristram. The jack-squire listening near the foot of the table himself felt Roland's steed between his legs. These names of romance were qualities not people. The Wife of Bath is a very different matter.

'In al the parisshe wyf ne was ther noon

That to th' offering bifore hir sholde goon;

And if ther dide, certeyn, so wrooth was she,

That she was out of alle charitee.

Hir coverchiefs ful fyne were of ground;

I dorste swere they weyeden ten pound

That on a Sonday were upon hir heed.

Hir hosen weren of fyn scarlet reed,

Ful streite y-teyd, and shoos ful moiste and newe.

Bold was hir face, and fair, and reed of hewe.

She was a worthy womman al hir lyve,

Housbondes at chirche-dore she hadde fyve,

Withouten other companye in youthe;

But therof nedeth nat to speke as nouthe.

And thryes hadde she been at Jerusalem;

She hadde passed many a straunge streem;

At Rome she hadde been, and at Boloigne,

In Galice at seint Jame, and at Coloigne.

She coude much of wandring by the weye;

Gat-tothed was she, soothly for to seye.

Upon an amblere esily she sat,

Y-wimpled wel, and on hir heed an hat

As brood as is a bokeler or a targe;

A foot-mantel aboute hir hipes large,

And on hir feet a paire of spores sharpe.

In felawschip wel coude she laughe and carpe.

Of remedyes of love she knew perchaunce,

For she coude of that art the olde daunce.'

She is there, solid, garrulous, herself. She does not get husbands because she is a worshipped goddess, but because she is a practical woman. Bold indeed would be the lady who in imagination played her part. The Wife is no empty fancy dress in which we move and live; she is well filled out with her own flesh, and we watch her from outside as we would watch a neighbour. Hers is no veil of dreams, but a good and costly one, bought at Bristol Fair by one or other of her five husbands whom she has badgered into getting it.

Story-tellers before Chaucer seemed scarcely to have realised that men were more than good or bad, brave or coward. You hated a man, or you loved him, laughed at, or admired him; it never occurred to you to observe him. Every man was man, every woman woman. It was not until the Renaissance that modern story-telling found one of its motives, which is, that there are as many kinds of man and woman as there are men and women in the world. Then, at last, character and individuality became suddenly important. Passion, reverence, charm had existed before in story-telling. To these was now added another possibility of the art in portrait painting. So was the modern world differentiated from the dark ages; blinking in the unaccustomed light, men began to look at one another. In painting, almost simultaneously with literature, the new power found expression. The Van Eycks were alive before Chaucer was dead, and in the careful, serene painting of 'John Arnolfini and his Wife,' is the observant spirit of the Canterbury Tales. That woman standing there in her miraculously real green robe, her linen neat upon her head, her hand laid in her husband's, and her eyes regarding his pious, solemn gesture as if she had consented in her own mind to see him painted as he wished, and not betray her sense of humour, the man, the pattens on the floor, the little dog, and the detailed chandelier, are all painted as if in Chaucer's verse. The identity of them is the amazing thing; their difference from all the other men and women of the town, the difference of their room from all other rooms, and their little dog from all other little dogs. To compare that married couple with any knight and lady carved in stone, hands folded over breasts, on a tomb in an old church, is to compare the modern with the mediæval, and the Wife of Bath with Guenevere or the Wife of Sir Segwarides.

Prose and verse.

After Chaucer, narrative scarcely developed except in prose. Scott, indeed, nearly five centuries later, wrote his first tales in verse, but the rhyming story-teller disappeared in the greater author of the Waverley Novels.[3] Chaucer himself is interesting for marking the transition. He had many attributes of later narrative, in his round English humour, in his concern with actual life, although in this essay I have only needed him to illustrate the beginnings of the portrait-making that has since become so important a byway of the art. But while his verse in the Canterbury Tales has the effect of good prose, his prose, excellent elsewhere, is here unwieldy and beyond his governance. He expressed the new attitude in the old way; but when he was only nine years old, there had been written in Italy prose tales that have hardly been excelled as examples of the two forms of the short story. Chaucer was born in 1340. In 1349 Boccaccio finished the Decameron.

Boccaccio.

Boccaccio had a more intricate mind than Chaucer's, and a more elaborate life. He is said to have been an illegitimate son of a Florentine merchant and a Frenchwoman, and the two nations certainly seem to have contributed to his character. He spent six years of his youth apprenticed to a merchant in Paris, forsook business, and was sent to learn law, and only in the end persuaded his father to let him devote himself to books. He had a knowledge of the world uncommon even in his day, and a knowledge of letters that was rare. He was something of a scholar, something of a courtier, and, particularly, something of a poet. Sentence after sentence in the Decameron glides by like a splash of sunlight on a stream with floating blossoms. I must quote one of his poems in Rossetti's most beautiful translation:—

'By a clear well, within a little field

Full of green grass and flowers of every hue,

Sat three young girls, relating (as I knew)

Their loves. And each had twined a bough to shield

Her lovely face; and the green leaves did yield

The golden hair their shadow; while the two

Sweet colours mingled, both blown lightly through

With a soft wind for ever stirred and still'd.

After a little while one of them said

(I heard her), 'Think! If, ere the next hour struck,

Each of our lovers should come here to-day,

Think you that we should fly or feel afraid?'

To whom the others answered, 'From such luck

A girl would be a fool to run away.'

He could write a poem like that; he could write the Decameron; he could write books of greater impropriety; and at the end of his life could beg his friends to leave such books alone, devoting himself to the compilation of ponderous works of classical learning. There is a legend of a deathbed vision of Judgment where Boccaccio figured, which, being reported to him, nearly gave the wit, the scholar, and the gallant the additional mask of the Carthusian religious.

boccaccio

GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO

But the Boccaccio of the Decameron was the mature young man, of personal beauty, and nimble tongue, a Dioneo, who had his own way with the company in which he found himself, and was licensed, like a professional jester, to say the most scandalous things. He knew the rich colour, classical learning, and jollity of morals of the Court of Naples. Here he heard the travelling story-tellers, and perhaps learnt from them a little of the art of narrative. He knew the Gesta Romanorum, and began to collect tales himself with the idea of making some similar collection. Noting story after story that he heard told (for it would be ridiculous to reason from the widespread origin of his tales that he had a stupendous knowledge of the world's books), he wrote them with a perfect feeling for value and proportion. In him the story-teller ceased to be an improviser. In his tales the longwindedness of the trouveurs was gone, gone also the nakedness of the anecdote. He refused to excuse them with the moral tags of the Gesta. These new forms were not things of utility that needed justification; they were things of independent beauty.

His story-telling.

Boccaccio was intent simply on the art of telling tales. He knew enough of classical literature to feel the possible dignity and permanence of prose, and he told his stories as they were told to him in a supple, pleasant vernacular that obeyed him absolutely and never led him off by its own strangeness into byways foreign to the tales and to himself. He found his material in anecdotes of current gossip, like Cecco Angiolieri's misadventure with his money, his palfrey, and his clothes, and in popular tales like that of the overpatient Griselda. He took it in the rough and shaped it marvellously, creating two forms, the short story proper, the skilful development of a single episode, and the little novel, the French nouvelle, a tale whose incidents are many and whose plot may be elaborate. From his day to our own these two forms have scarcely altered, and in the use of both of them he showed that invaluable art, so strenuously attained by later story-tellers, of compelling us to read with him to the end, even if we know it, for the mere joy of narrative, the delight of his narrating presence. We are so well content with Chaucer's gorgeous improvisations that we never ask whether this piece or that is relevant to the general theme. But in Boccaccio there are no irrelevancies, praise that can be given to few story-tellers before the time of the self-conscious construction of men like Poe, and the austere selection of men like Mérimée and Flaubert.

Importance of framework in books of short tales.

Even without their setting his tales would have been something memorable, something that lifted the art to a new level and made less loving workmanship an obvious backsliding. But stories put together do not make good books. The Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles are very short and make a collection of anecdotes. The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes are very long and stand and fall each one alone. But the Canterbury Tales are the better for that merry company on pilgrimage. And when Queen Joan of Naples, profligate, murderess, and bluestocking, asked Boccaccio to put his stories in a book, it was well that he should have the plague of 1348 to set as purple velvet underneath his gems—the morality inseparable from the tales was so simple and so careless. Boccaccio's attitude was that of his age. Man has wants: if he can satisfy them, good: if not, why then it may ease his sorrow to hear it professionally expressed:—'Help me,' as Chaucer says:—

'Help me that am the sorwful instrument

That helpeth lovers, as I can, to pleyne!'

As for good fortune, it is taken as naïvely as by the topers in the song:—

'Maults gone down, maults gone down

From an old angel to a French crown.

And every drunkard in this town

Is very glad that maults gone down.'

When Troilus is happy with Cressida, Chaucer smiles aside:—'With worse hap God let us never mete.' And Boccaccio, after describing a scene that in England at the present day would be the prelude to a case at law, and columns of loathsomely prurient newspaper reports, ejaculates with simple piety:—'God grant us the like.' The Decameron owes much of its dignity and permanence to its double frame, to the Court of Story-telling in the garden on the hill, and to the deeper irony that places it, sweet, peaceful, and insouciant, in the black year of pestilence and death.