When that my fourthe husband was on bier,
I wept algate, and made a sorry cheer,
As wives musten for it is usage;
And with my kerchief covered my visage;
But, for that I was purveyed of a mate,
I wept but small, and that I undertake.
The hard-hearted selfishness which does not bestow a thought upon the dead, being solely intent upon enjoying existence with the living, comes out in a yet more odious light when she narrates her feelings at the funeral. Her mind is entirely taken up with the young clerk, and mainly with admiration of his figure:
When that I saw him go
After the bier, methought he had a pair
Of legges and of feet so clean and fair
That all my heart I gave unto his hold.
[27] She does not in the original profess "to repent it still," and for the excellent reason that, after a period of rebellion on the part of the clerk, he had become a puppet in her hands, and had rendered up both himself and his chattels to her undisputed management.
[28] The wife of Bath says she insisted upon going from house to house, according to her former custom, and the clerk set his face against the practice. His instances from Roman story were directed against this special failing, and were not general declamations on the virtue of Roman matrons and Gracchus' mother. The clerk told the gossiping, intriguing dame that Simplicius Gallus left his wife for ever, merely because he caught her looking out of the door with her head uncovered. He told her of another Roman that in the same manner deserted his wife because she one day went to see a game without his knowledge. His quotation from Holy Writ is not "some grave sentence," but the particular sentence of Ecclesiasticus which says, "Give the water no passage; neither a wicked woman liberty to gad abroad." When the context has been generalised the lines which follow have not the accumulative sting of the original, where they are an additional example of the evil consequences of suffering women to rove about. Pope has further weakened their force by supposing them to have no higher authority than the opinion of the clerk. In Chaucer they are given as a proverb, and the husband urges them with triumph because they convey the general experience of mankind. The language is stronger than in Pope. Instead of mildly pronouncing that the man who suffers his wife to visit "halwes" or the shrines of saints "deserves a fool's cap," the proverb declares that he "is worthy to be hanged on the galwes."
[29] The clerk in the original reads with greater assiduity than "oft at evening."
He had a book that gladly night and day,
For his desport he woulde read alway.
After describing the contents of the book the wife of Bath adds,
And alle these were bound in one volume;
And every night and day was his custume,
When he had leisure and vacatioun
From other worldes occupation,
To reden in this book of wicked wives.
This portion of the narrative in Chaucer is exceedingly pleasant and natural. The wife says that she paid no regard to the clerk's Roman precedents, his quotations from Scripture, his old saws and proverbs.