The imitations of Chaucer's January and May, and Wife of Bath's Prologue, are executed with a degree of freedom, ease, and spirit, and at the same time with a judgment and delicacy which not only far exceeds what might have been expected from so young a writer, but which leave nothing to be wished for in the mind of the reader. The humour of Chaucer is translated into the lines of Pope, almost without suffering any evaporation.—Roscoe.
Pope's version of the Prologue of the Wife of Bath first appeared in a volume of Poetical Miscellanies, published by Steele, in 1714. The portrait of this repulsive woman is drawn by Chaucer with a vigorous hand. She is a wealthy cloth manufacturer, with a bold countenance, and more than masculine freedom of speech. She dresses ostentatiously, rides with spurs, and, glorying in her shame, openly boasts of the vices which less impudent women would carefully conceal. Her two predominant characteristics are an inordinate self-will which makes her resolve to rule her husbands with an absolute despotism, and an inordinate sensuality which has completely absorbed every finer sentiment. She not only avows her propensities, but exults in the deceit, the tricks, and the violence which she has employed to gratify them as so many testimonies to her cleverness and power. She has no compunctious visitings for the frauds she has practised, and the misery she has inflicted upon her deceased husbands. She speaks of the dead as of the living with brutal insensibility, and would think it a weakness to be swayed by a human feeling. The impersonation of domineering, heartless selfishness, her pride is to prevail by tyranny instead of by the gentle graces of feminine tenderness, and her pleasure is to indulge in worldly gaiety, and the gross gratifications of sense. Even her jovial good humour is hardly a redeeming feature in her character, for it mainly proceeds from her keen relish for physical enjoyments, and turns to temper the instant she is thwarted. It is difficult to conceive that anybody could be injured by reading her confessions, which have nothing alluring, but with Warton, we must condemn the taste which could select the story as a ground-work for the embellishments of modern verse. The character may exist in every generation. The unblushing candour with which it displays itself belonged to more outspoken times than our own. Chaucer painted from the life, and this portrait of a coarse, voluptuous, defiant woman of the citizen class, finds a place in his gallery, because she had a prominent place in the society of the middle ages. There was no rational motive for tricking her out in the newest fashion of a period to which she did not belong, and she might with advantage have been allowed to remain in her primitive place and garb. The indelicacy of the pieces he translated from Chaucer was, however, one of their recommendations to Pope, and they may have had a further attraction for him from the fact, that they held wives up to odium. His deformed and insignificant person was an antidote to love, and the court he paid to women met with a cold return. He retaliated with his pen for the mortification to which they exposed him, and he almost always represented them in a frivolous or degrading light. He may not improbably have had a pleasure in reproducing from Chaucer the caustic sentiments which were congenial to his own, and may have found some satisfaction for his wounded spirit in revenging indifference by satire.
Warton says that Pope has softened the more offensive passages in the Wife of Bath's Prologue, but his version, on the other hand, is often less decorous than the original. He has not justified his choice of the subject by his skill in the treatment of it. The adaptation is much inferior to the companion piece of January and May, and appears to have been thrown off in haste. There are a few, a very few, happy lines and expressions, but the bulk of the versification is not much above mediocrity, and is frequently below it. He has failed in the substance still more than in the form. Roscoe was of opinion that the humour of Chaucer had hardly suffered any evaporation. The admirers of the original have arrived at a different conclusion, and have contended, with almost one voice, that hardly any of the humour has been preserved. The genuine Prologue is alive with manners, passions, idiomatic conversations, and natural incidents. The copy is by comparison a dead, insipid dissertation. The mode in which Pope has abridged the narrative is one of many proofs that he only cared for characters in their broad outline, and had either no perception of the subtler workings of the mind, or no appreciation of them. If ever a reader masters the full sense of an author it must be when he translates him, and yet Pope has overlooked or rejected many of the happiest traits in Chaucer, and has falsified others, to the invariable injury of the story, and sometimes with a total disregard to consistency. Particular deficiencies are of little moment in the midst of general excellence, but in the present instance there is nothing to redeem the blots, and the narrative from first to last is a pale and feeble reflection of the original.
Warton asserts, on the authority of Harte, that Fenton believed that the version of the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, which appeared in Lintot's Miscellany under the name of Betterton, was the work of Pope, and Johnson adds that "Fenton made Pope a gay offer of five pounds if he would show the characters in Betterton's hand." The celebrated actor certainly left some literary papers behind him, if we may assume that a letter from Caryll to Pope, and which was published by the poet himself, is a genuine production. "I am very glad," Caryll writes, May 23, 1712, "for the sake of the widow, and for the credit of the deceased, that Betterton's remains are fallen into such hands, as may render them reputable to the one, and beneficial to the other." In a note Pope states that the remains were the modernised portions of Chaucer contained in the Miscellany of Lintot. There was no apparent motive for deception on the subject, and the internal evidence supports the conclusion that Betterton composed the translation, and that Pope merely revised it. It is a bald, worthless production, with a few lines or couplets which seem to have proceeded from a more practised versifier than the novice who put together the bulk of the work. The choicest parts are very little better than bad; for Pope was a provident poet, and he did not decorate Betterton with feathers which would have shone with lustre in his own plumage. The great actor, on his side, has signally failed in the point where his art might have been expected to teach him better. He who had such a deep insight into the characters he personated, and who gave voice, action, and gesture to all the passions with such fidelity and power, has pared away the dramatic vivacity of Chaucer and left only a vapid, hybrid compound which is neither modern nor mediæval. The sketch of the good parson is omitted altogether, doubtless because Dryden had already tried his hand upon it, and it was thought imprudent to provoke a comparison with his masterly paraphrase.
THE WIFE OF BATH.
HER PROLOGUE.
Behold the woes of matrimonial life,
And hear with rev'rence an experienced wife;
To dear-bought wisdom[1] give the credit due,
And think for once, a woman tells you true.
In all these trials I have borne a part,5
I was myself the scourge that caused the smart;
For, since fifteen,[2] in triumph have I led
Five captive husbands from the church to bed.
Christ saw a wedding once, the Scripture says,
And saw but one, 'tis thought, in all his days;10
Whence some infer, whose conscience is too nice,
No pious Christian ought to marry twice.