Читать книгу Notes and Queries, Number 78, April 26, 1851 - Various - Страница 2

The Pilgrimage to Canterbury.

I quote these lines because I wish to show that Tyrwhitt, in taking them as indicative of the very day on which the journey to Canterbury was performed, committed a great mistake.

The whole of the opening of the prologue, down to the line last quoted, is descriptive, not of any particular day, but of the usual season of pilgrimages; and Chaucer himself plainly declares, by the words "in that seson, on a day"—that the day is as yet indefinite.

But because Tyrwhitt, who, although an excellent literary critic, was by no means an acute reader of his author's meaning, was incapable of appreciating the admirable combination of physical facts by which Chaucer has not only identified the real day of the pilgrimage, but has placed it, as it were, beyond the danger of alteration by any possible corruption in the text, he set aside these physical facts altogether, and took in lieu of them the seventh and eighth lines of the prologue quoted above, which, I contend, Chaucer did not intend to bear any reference to the day of the journey itself, but only to the general season in which it was undertaken.

But Tyrwhitt, having seized upon a favourite idea, seems to have been determined to carry it through, at any cost, even at that of altering the text from "the Ram" into "the Bull:" and I fear that he can scarcely be acquitted of unfair and intentional misquotation of Chaucer's words, by transposing "his halfe cours" into "half his course," which is by no means an equivalent expression. Here are his own words:

"When he (Chaucer) tells us that 'the shoures of April had perced to the rote the drought of March' (ver. 1, 2.), we must suppose, in order to allow due time for such an operation, that April was far advanced; while, on the other hand, the place of the sun, 'having just run half his course in the Ram' (ver. 7, 8.), restrains us to some day in the very latter end of March. This difficulty may, and, I think, should, be removed by reading in ver. 8. the Bull, instead of the Ram. All the parts of the description will then be consistent with themselves, and with another passage (ver. 4425.), where, in the best MSS., the eighte and twenty day of April is named as the day of the journey to Canterbury."—Introductory Discourse.

Accordingly, Mr. Tyrwhitt did not hesitate to adopt in his text the twenty-eighth of April as the true date, without stopping to examine whether that day would, or would not, be consistent with the subsequent phenomena related by Chaucer.

Notwithstanding Tyrwhitt's assertion of a difficulty only removable by changing the Ram into the Bull, there are no less than two ways of understanding the seventh and eighth lines of the prologue so as to be perfectly in accordance with the rest of the description. One of these would be to suppose the sign Aries divided into two portions (not necessarily equal in the phraseology of the time), one of which would appertain to March, anal the other to April—and that Chaucer, by the "halfe cours yronne," meant the last, or the April, half of the sign Aries. But I think a more probable supposition still would be to imagine the month of April, of which Chaucer was speaking, to be divided into two "halfe cours," in one of which the sun would be in Aries, and in the other in Taurus; and that when Chaucer says that "the yonge Sonne had in the Ram his halfe cours yronne," he meant that the Aries half of the month of April had been run through, thereby indicating in general terms some time approaching to the middle of April.

Both methods of explaining the phrase lead eventually to the same result, which is also identical with the interpretation of Chaucer's own contemporaries, as appears in its imitation by Lydgate in the opening of his "Story of Thebes:"

And it is by no means the least remarkable instance of want of perception in Tyrwhitt, that he actually cites these two lines of Lydgate's as corroborative of his own interpretation, which places the sun in the middle of Taurus.

I enter into this explanation, not that I think it necessary to examine too curiously into the consistency of an expression which evidently was intended only in a general sense, but that the groundlessness of Tyrwhitt's alleged necessity for the alteration of "the Ram" into "the Bull" might more clearly appear.

I have said that Tyrwhitt was not a competent critic of Chaucer's practical science, and I may perhaps be expected to point out some other instance of his failure in that respect than is afforded by the subject itself. This I may do by reference to a passage in "The Marchante's Tale," which evinces a remarkable want of perception not only in Tyrwhitt, but in all the editors of Chaucer that I have had an opportunity of consulting.

The morning of the garden scene is said in the text to be "er that dayes eight were passed of the month of Juil"—but, a little further on, the same day is thus described:

How is it possible that any person could read these lines and not be struck at once with the fact that they refer to the 8th of June and not to the 8th of July? The sun would leave Gemini and enter Cancer on the 12th of June; Chaucer was describing the 8th, and with his usual accuracy he places the sun "but litel fro" the summer solstice!

Since "Juil" is an error common perhaps to all previous editions, Tyrwhitt might have been excused for repeating it, if he had been satisfied with only that: but he must signalise his edition by inserting in the Glossary attached to it—"Juil, the month of July," referring, as the sole authority for the word, to this very line in question of "The Marchante's Tale!"

Nor does the proof, against him in particular, end even there; he further shows that his attention must have been especially drawn to this garden scene by his assertion that Pluto and Proserpine were the prototypes of Oberon and Titania; and yet he failed to notice a circumstance that would have added some degree of plausibility to the comparison, namely, that Chaucer's, as well as Shakspeare's, was a Midsummer Dream.

It is, perhaps, only justice to Urry to state that he appears to have been aware of the error that would arise from attributing such a situation of the sun to the month of July. The manner in which the lines are printed in his edition is this:—

It is just possible to twist the meaning of this into the eighth of the Kalends of July, by which the blunder would be in some degree lessened; but such a reading would be as foreign to Chaucer's astronomy as the lines themselves are to his poetry.

A. E. B.

Leeds, April 8. 1851.