Chaucer's hint, which is scarcely more than if the speaker had said in plain prose, "I have no faith in dreams, for they are wild visions which never come true," is transformed by Dryden into this exquisite passage:
Dreams are but interludes, which fancy makes;
When monarch-reason sleeps this mimic wakes;
Compounds a medley of disjointed things,
A mob of cobblers, and a court of kings:
Light fumes are merry, grosser fumes are sad;
Both are the reasonable soul run mad;
And many monstrous forms in sleep we see,
That neither were, nor are, nor e'er can be.
Sometimes forgotten things long cast behind
Rush forward in the brain, and come to mind;
The nurse's legends are for truths received,
And the man dreams but what the boy believed.
Sometimes we but rehearse a former play; }
The night restores our actions done by day, }
As hounds in sleep will open for their prey. }
Among the characteristics of the "poor parson" Chaucer mentions that
He was a shepherd, and no mercenary,
which is the only warrant the text afforded for these beautiful lines in the paraphrase of Dryden:
The prelate for his holy life he prized;
The worldly pomp of prelacy despised.
His Saviour came not with a gaudy show,
Nor was his kingdom of the world below.
Patience in want, and poverty of mind, }
These marks of church and churchmen he designed, }
And living taught, and dying left behind. }
The crown he wore was of the pointed thorn;
In purple he was crucified, not born.
They who contend for place and high degree,
Are not his sons, but those of Zebedee.
Having gained so much from the masculine and buoyant genius of Dryden, the newly fashioned tales took their rank as independent works, and were rather valued for their want of resemblance to Chaucer than because they were a true reflection of him. There are defects in the modern version. The language is sometimes too colloquial, and there are many careless lines; but in the main the verse bounds and dances along with equal strength, facility, and grace, exhibiting one of the most wonderful specimens in literature of the power, spirit, and abundance of the simplest English when moulded by a master. The Flower and the Leaf, which might have been written in the fairy land it describes, is pre-eminent above the rest for its bright unceasing flow of delicious poetry, for its chaste yet luxuriant diction, for its sustained and various melody, for its lovely pictures both earthly and ethereal, for its pure, refined, and elevating sentiment.
"By Dryden's Fables," says Johnson, "which had then been not long published, and were much in the hands of poetical readers, Pope was tempted to try his own skill in giving Chaucer a more fashionable appearance, and put January and May, and the Prologue of the Wife of Bath into modern English." January and May, which the poet says was translated when he was sixteen or seventeen, was not published till he was nearly twenty-one, having first appeared on May 2, 1709, in the sixth volume of Tonson's Miscellany. He imitated Dryden in abridging Chaucer, but his only addition of any moment to the Merchant's Tale is in the description of the fairies, which was borrowed from Dryden himself. His attempt was substantially limited to epitomising the original in refined language, and musical numbers. In this he succeeded, and more could not be expected of a youth. If he had aspired higher he could not at twenty have competed with his mighty predecessor. Dryden's tales are the productions of a great poetic genius. The January of Pope is the production of a clever versifier. The relative position which their respective translations of Chaucer occupy in their works accords with the difference in their execution. The adaptations of Dryden are commonly numbered among his choicest effusions. The versions of Pope hold a subordinate place among his writings, and are hardly taken into account in the estimate of his powers. The result vindicates the opinion of Lord Leicester, that in the conversion of Chaucer into modern English the loss exceeds the gain. Pope was not insensible to the dramatic qualities of his author. "I read him still," he said to Spence, "with as much pleasure as almost any of our poets. He is a master of manners, of description, and the first tale-teller in the true enlivened natural way." But in polishing him, something of the nature and liveliness was inevitably obliterated. He was, in many of his stories, an admirable novelist in verse, and he adopted a familiar style which permitted him to relate in rhyme, with the freedom of prose, the common talk of common men. His traits are in the highest degree colloquial, individual, and life-like, and his strong strokes are weakened, and his dramatic vivacity tamed down, when he is turned into smooth, harmonious, elegant poetry. The refinement in the form is not a compensation for the sacrifices in the substance, especially when the antique form is itself essential to teach us how our forefathers spoke, thought, and acted five hundred years ago. Every touch which renders the picture more modern, makes it less true. The translation of Pope is skilfully executed, but it is inferior in raciness and interest to an original which can be read by any educated Englishman. A few gratuitous defects have been imported into the modernised January and May. "Chaucer," says Dryden, "followed nature everywhere, but was never so bold to go beyond her." Pope has sometimes overstepped the limits. He has here and there exaggerated his original, and the truth and keeping of the characters are invariably injured by the change.
"I have confined my choice," said Dryden, "to such tales of Chaucer as savour nothing of immodesty. If I had desired more to please than to instruct, the Reeve, the Miller, the Shipman, the Merchant, the Sumner, and above all the Wife of Bath, in the prologue to her tale, would have procured me as many friends and readers, as there are beaus and ladies of pleasure in town. But I will no more offend against good manners. I am sensible as I ought to be of the scandal I have given by my loose writings, and make what reparation I am able by this public acknowledgment." Both the pieces which Pope selected were among the number which Dryden put under a ban, and the younger poet, perhaps, considered that when he had purified them from part of their coarseness, the objection would no longer apply. The apology which Chaucer urged for his plain speaking was that in telling a tale he must repeat it correctly, and not surrender truth to delicacy. "Yet if a man," replies Dryden, "should have enquired of him what need he had of introducing such characters where obscene words were proper in their mouths, but very indecent to be heard, I know not what answer he could have made." None was possible. The offence, nevertheless, was not what Dryden assumes. The same Chaucer who, in his carefulness to keep to nature, will have all his dramatis personæ talk according to their rank and callings, assuredly did not violate nature when he represented the religious and refined prioress, together with the other high-bred and decorous members of the party, as willing auditors of the broad and uncompromising language of their ruder companions. The presence of ladies and ecclesiastics was not the slightest check upon the tongues of the pilgrims, and it is evident that in ordinary social life, there was hardly any limit to the freedom of expression. But in every age a latitude is allowed in conversation which would be condemned in books, and Chaucer merely excused himself for recording in poetry the common colloquial terms of his day. Usage had rendered them inoffensive, and in themselves they argued no more impurity of thought than the equivalent circumlocutions of our own generation. The greater or less plainness of speech which has prevailed at different eras is often rather a question of manners than of morality. If Pope or Dryden had retained, in this particular, the phraseology of Chaucer, the adherence to the letter of the original would have completely falsified its spirit, just as words which are uttered with innocence by rustics in a cottage would be an evidence of the utmost depravity when spoken by a man of education in a drawing-room. The intention influences the effect, and the grossness of our early writers has not the taint to a reader of the present day which would attach to similar language when employed by corrupt minds in civilized times. All the expurgations of Pope were insufficient to make his version as little exceptionable in the eighteenth century as was the original of Chaucer to the world of the fourteenth century. A merchant in the reign of Queen Anne would not have ventured to recite the modernised story in a mixed company, where ladies like the prioress and the nuns were present. The tone of the work is even lowered in places. In the looser literature of Pope's youth, and especially in comedies, adultery in a wife only furnished food for laughter against the husband. This is the aspect which is imparted to the translation of January and May, and it cannot be denied that Chaucer himself in some of his other stories, is open to the charge of treating vice as a jest. But he did not fall into the error in the Merchant's Tale, where the supposed narrator, in accordance with his character, reprobates the criminal conduct of the treacherous squire and the faithless wife, at the same time that he exposes the doating folly of the amorous knight.