The Works of Alexander Pope Part 31

[Footnote 8: The wife of Bath accuses her old husbands to their faces of having delivered this kind of railing lecture to her when they had come home at night "as drunk as mice." The drunkenness and the railing are alike inventions of her own, but she appeals to her niece, and Jenkin, the apprentice, to bear witness to the truth of her a.s.sertions. The version of Pope is not so vivid, so lively, or so close to nature as the original, and he has nearly pa.s.sed over one of the most prominent characteristics of the speech. When the wife of Bath taunts her husband with the reproaches she pretended he had heaped upon her, she intersperses her repet.i.tion of his objurgations with abusive and disdainful names by way of comment upon his monstrous sentiments. Old caynard or villain, Sir old lecher, thou very knave, lorel or worthless fellow, old dotard schrewe or sinner, old barrel full of lies, Sir old fool, are some of the appellations by which she marks her opinion of the doctrines she fathers upon him. After reciting his alleged complaint, that women concealed their vices till they were married, she adds that the maxim is worthy of "a schrewe," or scoundrel. When she imputes to him the declaration that no man would wed who was wise, or who desired to go to heaven, she follows it up with the wish that thunder and lightning would break his wicked neck. When he is charged with having said that there were three things that troubled earth, and that a wife was one of them, she hopes that the life of such a villain will be cut short. When she taxes him with quoting the proverb that a house not water-tight, a smoky chimney, and a scolding wife drove men from home, she retorts upon him that he is himself a scold, and intimates that his years are an aggravation of the vice. This is not only natural as the sort of scurrilous language which the wife of Bath would have used if the drunken invectives had been real, but was part of her plan for bringing her husbands into subjection. Her indignant recriminations were intended to browbeat them into meekness.]

[Footnote 9: She enlarges in the original upon this device, which was one of her capital resources. She quotes the proverb, that he first grinds who comes first to the mill, and upon this principle, when she had done wrong, she began by attacking her husband;

Or elles I had often time been spilt.

The poor man thus suddenly a.s.sailed stood upon the defensive, endeavoured to vindicate his innocence, and was heartily glad to hold his tongue on condition of receiving forgiveness for faults he had never committed.]

[Footnote 10: By pretending that she went out to watch her husbands she got the opportunity for indulging in freaks and jollity with her youthful friends.

Under that colour had I many a mirth.

For all such wit is given us of birth; Deceipt, weeping, spinning, G.o.d hath give To women kindely while they may live.

And thus of one thing I avaunte me, At th' end I had the bet in each degree, By sleight or force, or of some maner thing, As by continual murmur or chiding.

"Kindely" is by nature.]

[Footnote 11: In the original,

With empty hand men may no hawkes lure.

When the falconer had let fly his hawks, and wanted them to return, he was commonly obliged to entice them by some bait. The ta.s.sel, or tercel, was the male of the peregrine falcon, and was noted for its docility and gentleness. It would seem as if this species would obey the summons of the trainer without any other inducement, for when Juliet calls after Romeo, and he does not instantly reappear, she says,

O for a falconer's voice To lure this ta.s.sel-gentle back again.

[Footnote 12: In Chaucer she states that her husbands would grant all her demands to soothe her into good humour:

That made me that ever I would them chide.

For though the pope had seten them beside, I nold not spare them at their owne board, For, by my troth, I quit them word for word.

As help me very G.o.d omnipotent, Though I right now should make my testament, I owe them nought a word, that it nis quit; I brought it so aboute by my wit, That they must give it up, as for the best, Or elles had we never been in rest.

For though he looked as a grim lion, Yet should he fail of his conclusion.

Pope has omitted the latter half of the lines and thus obliterated one of those nicer traits of nature with which the original abounds. Men put on the grimness of the lion, and think to prevail by strength, but women conquer by pertinacity. The majority of men grow weary of perpetual conflict, and purchase peace by concession; but women of the stamp of the wife of Bath wilt wrangle for ever, and prefer endless discord to the subjugation of self-will. Dryden, adding to Virgil's thought, has expressed the idea, aen. v. 1024:

Ev'n Jove is thwarted by his haughty wife, Still vanquished yet she still renews the strife.]

[Footnote 13: Chaucer represents her as still youthful:

And I was young, and full of ragerie, Stubborn and strong and jolly as a pye.]

[Footnote 14:

The flour is gone, there nis no more to tell, The bran as I best can, now must I sell.]

[Footnote 15: In the original she does not say that she set his marrow frying, but that she fried him in his own grease, by stirring up in him the tormenting jealousy which his faithlessness had first engendered in herself.

I made him of the same wood a cross.

Not of my body in no foul manere; But certainly I made folk such cheer, That in his owne grease I made him fry For anger and for very jealousy.

By G.o.d, in earth I was his purgatory, For which I hope his soule be in glory.

For G.o.d it wot, he sat full still and sung, When that his shoe full bitterly him wrung.

There was no wight save G.o.d and he that wist In many wyse how sore I him twist.

This is a life-like portrait of a man tortured by inward pangs, and affecting an air of indifference while he did not dare to complain, from the consciousness that his greater offence would expose him to a crus.h.i.+ng retort.]

[Footnote 16: In the character which Chaucer gives of the wife of Bath he says,

And thrice had she been at Jerusalem; She hadde pa.s.sed many a strange stream; At Rome she hadde been, and at Boulogne, In Galice at Saint Jame, and at Cologne.

The reputed tomb of Saint James was at Compostella, in Galicia, and was a favourite resort of pilgrims. The wife of Bath may be supposed to have joined these expeditions quite as much from a love of roving and novelty as from superst.i.tious motives.]

[Footnote 17: Chaucer says he was buried under the rood-beam, or as it is usually called the rood-loft, which was placed on the top of the screen that separated the chancel from the nave. The name was derived from the rood or cross that stood in the centre with the effigy of our crucified Lord, and having on one side an image of the Virgin, and on the other of the apostle John. Pope buries the deceased husband in the churchyard, and the root is a wooden cross which has been erected upon his grave.]

[Footnote 18: Artemisia, wife of Mausolus, king of Caria. On the death of her husband, 352 B.C., she erected a monument to him at Halicarna.s.sus, which, from the beauty of its architecture and sculpture, was considered one of the seven wonders of the world. The Romans, says Pausanias, called all their most magnificent tombs _mausolea_ after this monument to Mausolua, and hence our modern term mausoleum. There is no mention of the tomb of Mausolus in Chaucer.]

[Footnote 19:

I trow I loved him beste for that he Was of his love daungerous to me.

We women have, if that I shall not lie, In this matter a queynte fantasy.

Wayte, what thing we may not lightly have, Thereafter will we soonest cry and crave.

Forbid us thing, and that desire we; Press on us fast, and thenne will we flee.

With danger outen alle we our ware; Great press at market maketh dear chaffare.

"Daungerous" in the second line means sparing, and in the last line but one, "with danger" signifies with a scarcity. Then, says the wife of Bath, we must produce all our own wares to give in exchange. At the date of her fifth marriage she was forty and the bridegroom was only twenty.

Everything is now reversed. Her first husbands had endowed her with all their property that they might buy a young wife in their old age. She, in turn, that she may procure a young husband, gives him

all the land and fee That ever was me give therebefore; But afterward repented me full sore.

Her aged mates had wors.h.i.+pped her, and she repaid them with disdain. In her mature years she is infatuated by a youth, and he, who has no relish for the homage of a matron of forty, slights her just as she had done her early husbands under similar circ.u.mstances.]

[Footnote 20: It would seem from Chaucer that the youth was a native of Bath, and had returned there when he had completed his education at Oxford:

He some time was a clerk of Oxenford, And had left school, and went at home to board, With my gossib, duelling in our town: G.o.d have her soul, her name was Alisoun.

"My gossib" is my G.o.dmother, and the wife of Bath, whose christian name was also Alisoun, had been named after her. Pope, by turning "_my_ gossip" into "_a_ gossip," has done away with the special relations.h.i.+p, and employed the word in its modern sense of a lover of t.i.ttle-tattle.]

[Footnote 21: In Chaucer she adds a more powerful motive:

what wist I where my grace Was shapen for to be, or in what place?

In other words, as she explains shortly afterwards, she was in search of a lover who might succeed the fourth husband whenever he died.]

[Footnote 22: "To perform a station," says Richelet, in his French Dictionary, "consists in visiting with devotion one or several churches a certain number of days and times, and praying there in order to propitiate the wrath of G.o.d, and obtain some favour from his mercy." The wife of Bath in the original says, that she attended vigils, processions, preachings, miracle-plays, and marriages, besides making pilgrimages, but "stations" are not included in her list. The Roman Catholicism of Pope had rendered the word familiar to him.]

[Footnote 23: The expression "I can't tell how" implies that the intimacy on the part of the wife of Bath was accidental, whereas it appears from Pope's context, and still more from the original, that it was a deliberate design:

Now will I telle forth what happed me.

I say that in the fieldes walked we Till truely we had such dalliance This clerk and I, that of my purveyance I spake to him, and saide how that he If I were widdow, shoulde wedde me.

For certainly I say for no bobaunce, Yet was I never withouten purveyance Of mariage, ne or no thinges eke; I hold a mouse's heart not worth a leek, That hath but oon hole to sterte to, And if that faile then is all i-do.

The acknowledgment that while married to one man she is always engaged to a second, seems to the wife of Bath to have nothing discreditable in it, and she only fears lest she should expose herself to the charge of vanity in a.s.serting that she can command a succession of admirers.]