The English Novel and the Principle of its Development. Sidney Lanier
the Parson's Tale with a bit of it. As the Canterbury Pilgrims are jogging merrily along, presently it appears that but one more tale is needed to carry out the original proposition, and so the ever-important Host calls on the Parson for it, as follows:
As we were entryng at a thropes ende,
For while our Hoost, as he was wont to gye,
As in this caas, our joly compaignye,
Seyde in this wise: "Lordyngs, everichoon,
Now lakketh us no tales moo than oon," etc.,
and turning to the Parson,
"Sir Prest," quod he, "artow a vicary?
Or arte a persoun? Say soth, by thy fey,
Be what thou be, ne breke thou nat oure pley; For every man, save thou, hath told his tale. Unbokele and schew us what is in thy male. Tel us a fable anoon, for cokkes boones!"
Whereupon the steadfast parson proceeds to assure the company that whatever he may have in his male [wallet] there is none of your light-minded and fictitious verse in it; nothing but grave and reverend prose.
This Persoun him answerede al at oones:
Thou getest fable noon i-told for me.
(And you will presently observe that "fable" in the parson's mind means very much the same with verse or poetry, and that the whole business of fiction—that same fiction which has now come to occupy such a commanding place with us moderns, and which we are to study with such reverence under its form of the novel—implies downright lying and wickedness.)
Thou getist fable noon i-told for me;
For Paul, that writeth unto Timothe,
Repreveth hem that weyveth soothfastnesse.
And tellen fables and such wrecchednesse, etc.,
For which I say, if that yow list to heere
Moralite and virtuous mateere,
(That is—as we shall presently see—prose).
And thanne that ye will geve me audience,
I wol ful fayne at Cristes reverence,
Do you pleasaunce leful, as I can;
But trusteth wel, I am a Suthern man,
I can nat geste, rum, ram, ruf, by letter,
Ne, God wot, rym hold I but litel better;
And therfor, if yow list, I wol not glose,
I wol yow telle a mery tale in prose.
Here our honest parson, (and he was honest;) I am frightfully tempted to go clean away from my path and read that heart-filling description of him which Chaucer gives in the general Prologue to the Canterbury Tales sweeps away the whole literature of verse and of fiction with the one contemptuous word "glose"—by which he seems to mean a sort of shame-faced lying all the more pitiful because done in verse—and sets up prose as the proper vehicle for "moralite and virtuous mateere."
With this idea of the function of prose, you will not be surprised to find, as I read these opening sentences of the pastor's so-called tale, that the style is rigidly sententious, and that the movement of the whole is like that of a long string of proverbs, which, of course, presently becomes intolerably droning and wearisome. The parson begins:
"Many ben the weyes espirituels that leden folk to our Lord Ihesu Crist, and to the regne of glorie; of whiche weyes ther is a ful noble wey, which may not faile to no man ne to womman, that thurgh synne hath mysgon fro the right wey of Jerusalem celestial; and this wey is cleped penitence. Of which men schulden gladly herken and enquere with al here herte, to wyte, what is penitence, and whens is cleped penitence? And in what maner and in how many maneres been the acciones or workynge of penitence, and how many speces ben of penitence, and which thinges apperteynen and byhoven to penitence and whiche thinges destourben penitence."
In reading page after page of this bagpipe-bass, one has to remember strenuously all the moral beauty of the Parson's character in order to forgive the droning ugliness of his prose. Nothing could better realize the description which Tennyson's Northern Farmer gives of his parson's manner of preaching and the effect thereof:
An' I hallus comed to t' choorch afoor my Sally wur deäd,
An' 'eerd un a bummin' awaäy loike a buzzard-clock ower my yeäd;
An' I niver knaw'd what a meäned, but I thowt a 'ad summut to saäy,
An' I thowt a said what a owt to 'a said, an' I comed awaäy.
It must be said, however, in justice to Chaucer, that he writes better prose than this when he really sets about telling a tale. What the Parson calls his "tale" turns out, to the huge disgust, I suspect, of several other pilgrims besides the host, to be nothing more than a homily or sermon, in which the propositions about penitence, with many minor heads and sub-divisions, are unsparingly developed to the bitter end. But in the Tale of Melibœus his inimitable faculty of story-telling comes to his aid, and determines his sentences to a little more variety and picturesqueness, though the sententious still predominates. Here, for example, is a bit of dialogue between Melibœus and his wife, which I selected because, over and above its application here as early prose, we will find it particularly suggestive presently when we come to compare it with some dialogue in George Eliot's Adam Bede, where the conversation is very much upon the same topic.
It seems that Melibœus, being still a young man, goes away into the fields, leaving his wife Prudence and his daughter—whose name some of the texts give in its Greek form as Sophia, while others, quaintly enough, call her Sapience, translating the Greek into Latin—in the house. Thereupon "three of his olde foos" (says Chaucer) "have it espyed, and setten laddres to the walles of his hous, and by the wyndowes ben entred, and beetyn his wyf, and wounded his daughter with fyve mortal woundes, in fyve sondry places, that is to sayn, in here feet, in her handes, in here eres, in her nose, and in here mouth; and lafte her for deed, and went away." Melibœus assembles a great counsel of his friends, and these advise him to make war, with an interminable dull succession of sententious maxims and quotations which would merely have maddened a modern person to such a degree that he would have incontinently levied war upon his friends as well as his enemies. But after awhile Dame Prudence modestly advises against the war. "This Melibœus answerde unto his wyf Prudence: 'I purpose not,' quod he, 'to werke by this counseil, for many causes and resouns; for certes every wight wolde holde me thanne a fool, this is to sayn, if I for thy counseil wolde chaunge things that affirmed ben by somany wise.
Secondly, I say that alle wommen be wikked, and noon good of hem alle. For of a thousand men, saith Solomon, I find oon good man; but certes of alle wommen good womman find I never noon. And also certes, if I governede am by thy counseil, it schulde seme that I hadde given to the over me the maistry; and God forbid er it so were. For Ihesus Syrac saith,'" etc., etc. You observe here, although this is dialogue between man and wife, the prose nevertheless tends to the sententious, and every remark must be supported with some dry old maxim or epigrammatic saw. Observe too, by the way,—and we shall find this point most suggestive in studying the modern dialogue in George Eliot's novels, etc.,—that there is absolutely no individuality or personality in the talk; Melibœus drones along exactly as his friends do, and his wife quotes old authoritative saws, just as he does. But Dame Prudence replies,—and all those who are acquainted with the pungent Mrs. Poyser in George Eliot's Adam Bede will congratulate Melibœus that his foregoing sentiments concerning woman were uttered five hundred years before that lady's tongue began to wag,—"When Dame Prudence, ful debonerly and with gret pacience, hadde herd al that her housbande liked for to saye, thanne axede sche of him license for to speke, and sayde in this wise: 'My Lord,' quod sche, 'as to your firste resoun, certes it may lightly be answered; for I say it is no foly to chaunge counsel when the thing is chaungid, or elles when the thing semeth otherwise than it was bifoore.'" This very wise position she supports with argument and authority, and then goes on boldly to attack not exactly Solomon's wisdom, but the number of data from which he drew it. "'And though that Solomon