Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845

Such were the feelings under whose influence our humble heroine pursued her mountain journey, of a few miles, to the place of meeting with her parents; and it was probably beneath the roof of the lone cottage in the cloud that, under the same morbid mood of mind, she penned a letter to Mr Fitzarthur, which was afterwards discovered, dated at top "My Wedding Day," containing a passionate appeal on behalf of her father, for a bond of legal indemnification to be executed before night, as a present which she had set her heart on giving her father, as a bridal one, that very day. Arrived at the house fitted up for the hated supplanter of her father, "Lewis the Spy," her heart beat so violently before she could firm her nerves to ring the bell, that she stood leaning some time against the wall. This old house was now almost rebuilt, and not without regard to rural beauty, in harmony with the fine scenery of an antique park, with its mossy ivied remains of walls and venerable trees overshadowing it, and was called "The Little Hall of the Park." She sighed deeply as she glanced at its comfortable aspect, remembering how long it had formed the secret object of her mother's little ambition (for the dame had a touch of pride in her composition beyond her ever-contented mate) to occupy that little hall. It seemed so appropriate that the lesser squire – the great squire's friend – should also have his "hall," though a little one!

Indeed, it had been in incipient repair for him, that the old men might spend their winter evenings together at the real hall, divided but by a short path, across an angle of the park, without a dreary walk for Bevan impending over the end of their carouse, with never-wearied reminiscences of their boyhood – when sudden death stopped all proceedings, and left poor Bevan alone in the world, as it seemed to him – "in simplicity a child," and as imbecile in conflict with it as any child.

She nerved her mind and hand by an effort, and rang the bell – (the bell, there a modern innovation.) No sound but its own distant deadened one, was heard within; but some dog in the rear barked, and then howled, as if alarmed at the sudden breach of long prevailing silence. Again she rang – again the troubled growl and bark, suppressed by fear of the only living thing, as it seemed, within hearing, alone responded. The situation was very solitary, the only adjacent house, the hall, being yet tenantless, and night was gathering fast; for that storm which had first detained her in the lofty region, (where a darker storm had gathered round her mind and soul,) had desolated the lower country all day, flooded the brooks, and delayed her on the road during several hours.

She fancied a sort of suppressed commotion within, as of whisperings and stealthy steps, and one voice she clearly overheard, but it was not her father's. Whether it was that of Lewis (who, however, was not yet residing there) she knew not, never having heard it in her life; he avoiding, as was stated, direct intercourse with her – disappearing "like a guilty thing" whenever her figure appeared in distant approach. What should this mean? Wild fears, even superstitious ones, of some indefinite ill or horror impending, began to shake her forced fortitude, as she stood, half-fearing to ring again – again to hear the melancholy voice of the dog, as of one lost – to wait – listen – and dream of – David – death – murder – or even worse, till even the giant horror – the jail! – and the white-headed prisoner, shrank before the present ominous mystery – ominous of she knew not what, therefore involving every thing dreadful. Meanwhile, the swinging of the large oak branches in the close of a squally day, their groaning, and the vast glooms that their foliage shed all below, the twilight rapidly deepening into confirmed night, all tended to the inspiration of a wild unearthly melancholy. Suddenly the door was opened, while she hesitated to ring again, and by a black man! Persons of colour are rarely seen inland, in Wales, and Winifred had never visited a seaport of any consequence; so that even this was almost a shock. She quickly, however, guessed that this was a servant of the "Nabob," brought over with him. The man, learning her name, bade her enter, adding, that she would see her father soon, but that "massa" was within, settling some affairs with Mr Lewis, and begged to see her. A sort of grim grin, though joined to a deference that seemed, to her troubled and broken spirit, and sunken heart, a cruel mockery, relaxed the man's features, and half shocked, half irritated her. Her spirits, however, rose with the occasion, demanding all her fortitude and all her tact; for now she was to make that impression on this terrible suitor's fancy, through which alone she could work out her father's salvation. In a few minutes more, she stood in the same apartment with her David's detested rival! The embers of a large fire, decayed, cast red twilight, which made it appear already dark without; and there he stood, at the long room's extreme end, between her and the hearth.

To Winifred, the personal attributes of the man, whom in her awful resolve she regarded merely as the instrument of that filial good work, were utterly indifferent; yet she stopped – she shuddered – and trembled all over, as she caught the mere outline of his figure by the fire-light. There he was! to her idea, the embodied evil genius of her family! the sullen apostate from the finer part of love – the victim of satiety, (as rumour said,) the selfish contemner of women's better feelings! – indifferent to all but person in his election of a wife; willing to unite himself with one whose heart and mind were stranger to him, on bare report of her health and beauty, and some slight recollections of her childhood! Seeing her stop, and even totter, he advanced a few steps; but she, with the instinctive recoil and antipathy of some feeble creature from its natural enemy, retreated at his first movement – and, shocked by this betrayed repugnance, he again stood irresolute. Then rushed back upon her heart, with all the horror of novelty, the renunciation of poor David, now it was on the point of being sealed for ever. Now father, mother, all beside, was forgotten – the ghastliness of a terrible struggle within, the stern horror of confirmed despair, began to disguise her beauty as with a death-pale mask – the features grew rigid, her heart beat audibly, her ears rang and tingled, and sight grew dim. She was fainting, falling. Mr Fitzarthur sprang to support her, but putting his arms too boldly round her waist, that detested freedom at once startled her into temporary self-possession, back into life. She gasped, struggled against him, as if she had rather have fallen than have been supported by him; and turned to him that white face, white even to the lips, imploringly, where was still depicted her unconquerable aversion. Some astonishment seemed to rivet that look upon his face, but half-visible by the dusky light – astonishment no longer painful, when the Nabob, emboldened, renewed his now permitted clasp, and only uttering "My dear! don't you know me?" in the tenderest tone to which ever manly voice was modulated, increased his grasp to a passionate embrace, advanced his face – his mouth to hers, advanced and pressed unresisted – and before her bewildered eyes closed in that fainting fit which had been but suspended, stood revealed to them (as proved by one delighted smile, flashed out of all the settled gloom of that countenance,) as her heart's own David – no longer the night – wandering poor Telynwr, but David Fitzarthur of Talylynn, Esq.

The story of the eccentric East Indian may be shortly told. From childhood he was the victim of excessive morbid sensibility, and constitutional melancholy. The jovial habits of his good-natured Welsh uncle were repugnant to his nature; and after becoming an orphan, the solitary boy had no human object on which the deep capacity for tenderness of his occult nature could be exerted. Thus forced by his fate into solitariness of habits, and secreted emotions, he was deemed unsocial, and reproached for what he felt was his misfortune – the being wholly misunderstood by those his early lot was cast among. Hence his perverted ardour of affection was misplaced on the lower living world – dog, cat, or owl, whatever chance made his companions. Returning to India, where he had known two parents, to meet no longer the tenderness of even one, the melancholy boy-exile (for Wales he ever regarded as his country) increased in morbid estrangement from mankind, as he increased in years; till his maturity nearly realized the misanthropic unsocial character for which his youth had been unjustly reproached. Though in the high road to a splendid fortune, he loathed East Indian society, far beyond all former loathing of fox-hunters and topers in Wales, whose green mountains now became (conformably to the nature, "semper varium et mutabile," of the melancholic) the very idols of his romantic regrets and fondest memory. In India were neither green fields nor green hearts. External nature and human nature appeared equally to languish under that enfeebling hot death in the atmosphere, which seemed to wither female beauty in the moment that it ripened. The pallidness of the European beauties, sickly as the clime, disgusted him – their venality still more. Female fortune-hunters were far more intolerable to his delicacy than the coarsest hunter of vermin – fox or hare – ever had been at his uncle's hall, whom he began to esteem, and sincerely mourned – when death had removed all of him from his memory but his kindness, his desire to amuse him, the "sulky boy," his substantial goodness and warm-heartedness. Knowing that every female in his circle was well informed of his ample fortune, still accumulating, he fancied art, deceit, coquetry in every smile and glance, (for suspicion of human hearts and motives ever besets the melancholic character;) and thus, it was natural that he should sometimes sigh over the idea of some fresh mountain beauty, not trained by parents in the art and to the task of husband-hunting. Even the soft-faced child, just growing into woman, who had held her pinafore for fruit, in the orchard, whose half-fallen apple-tree was his almost constant seat, floated across his vacant, yet restless mind. In truth, when she surprised him in his part of sexton to his owl, she had evinced rather more sympathy than she had admitted to his other self, David the wood-wanderer; and though she had indeed laughed, it was with tears in her eyes, elicited by one she detected in the shy averted orbs of his. Yet was the sweetness of the little Welsh girl left behind, for a long time, even when manhood failed to banish its idea, no more than his statue to Pygmalion, or his watery image to Narcissus. But having no female society, save those marketable forms that he distrusted and despised; yet pining, in his romantic refinement, for pure passion – for reciprocal passion – panting to be loved for himself alone, he kept imagining her developed graces, exaggerating the conceit of some childish tenderness toward himself, his position and his nervous infirmity keeping a solitude of soul and heart ever round him, into which no female form had free and constant admission, but that aërial one, the little Winifred, of far, far off, green Wales! The promise of pure beauty, which her childhood gave, his dream fulfilled; and his imagination seized and cherished the beautiful cloud, painted by fancy, till it became the goddess of his idolatry, though conscious of the self-delusion, and retained with that tenacity conceivable, perhaps, to the morbidly sensitive alone. The habit of yielding to the importunity of one idea, strengthens itself; every recurrence of it produces quicker sensibility to the next; deeper and deeper impression follows, till one form of mania supervenes – that which consists in the undue mastery and eternal presence of one idea.

Childish and fugitive as it seemed, a passion had actually commenced in his boy's heart, which clung to that of the man, though under the same light, fragile, and dreamlike form. Poetry might liken it to the mere frothy foam of the infant cataract, when it gushes out of the breast of the mountain to the rising sun, which, arrested by an intense frost, ere it can fall, in the very act of evanishing, there hangs, still hangs, the mere air-bubbles congealed into crystal vesicles, defying all the force of the mounted sun to dissipate their delicate white beauty, evanescent as it looks. The chill and the impenetrability of heart, kept by circumstances within him, such frost might typify – that pure, fragile-seeming, yet durable passion, that snow-foam of the waterfall. True it was that this fantastic fancy had the power to draw him to his Welsh patrimony earlier than worldly ambition would have warranted. But his after conduct – his actual overtures were not so wildly romantic, as might appear from the foregoing narrative; but of this in the sequel.

And where was her father – mother? Why had the law been allowed by this eccentric lover to violate the humble sanctuary of home, at the desolate Llaneol? What was become of the wicker chair? Was the hated Lewis to be maintained in his usurpation of the chair of Bevan's ancestral post of steward, (for his father had been steward to the father of the squire deceased?) Above all, was Dame Bevan to see that home of her heart's hope, the permanent home of the harsh supplanter of her husband? Passing over the affecting scene of poor Winifred's fainting, which drew round her father and mother, and others from below, proceed we to answer those queries and conclude our tale.

When perfectly restored, Winifred, leaning on the arm of her future husband, accompanied her parents down into the comfortable kitchen, where, by a huge fire, stood the veritable wicker chair, familiar to her eyes from infancy, rickety as ever, but surviving its desecration by the boys at the auction; and looking round, she saw standing the whole solid old oaken furniture, coffers, dressers, &c., even to the same bright brazen skillets, pewter dishes, and sundries – the pride of Mistress Bevan's heart, the splendour of better days. Mr Fitzarthur led the old man by the hand to his own chair, his wife to another; and then, having seated himself by their daughter, began, over the fumes of tea and coffee, (the honours of which pleasant meal, so needful after her agitation, he solicited Winifred to perform,) to narrate various matters, which we must condense into a nutshell.

To their surprise and amusement, they now learned that the hated "spy" who had prowled round their folds and fields so long, would resign to Mistress Bevan the house in which they sat, and that atonement made, vanish into thin air —a vox et preterea nihil! being in reality the Proteus-like, mysterious, handsome, though sallow stranger, and no stranger, sitting among them!

We said that Mr Fitzarthur's conduct in espousing this long-unseen mistress of his fancy, was not quite so extraordinary and wild as it appeared. For coming back grown into maturity, and altered by climate in complexion and all characteristics, he found himself quite unrecognised, and conceived the idea of at once reconnoitring his dilapidated estate, and watching the conduct of his long-remembered Winifred. Two disguises seemed necessary toward these two purposes, and he adopted the two we have seen, one on the "hither side Tivy," the other on the "far side Tivy," which his coracle allowed him to cross at pleasure. His close watch of the blameless girl's whole life confirmed the warm and romantic wishes of his soul, which her beauty inspired – that beauty as fully confirming the vision of his love-dream when far and long away.

It was during the alarm of her prolonged fainting, produced by the surprise of this discovery, and the previous agitations, (whereby, perhaps, the prudence rather than the affection of the eccentric lover was impeached,) that her mother, searching her pocket for a bottle of volatile salts, turned forth the letter lately referred to, melancholy evidence of the desperate extremity to which two powerful antagonist passions – love, and filial love – had driven a mind not unfortified by religion, but beleaguered by despair and all its powers, till resolution failed, and peril impended over an otherwise almost spotless soul.

As the old man's affections were not wholly weaned from Llaneol, ruinous as it was, his son-in-law had it restored as a temporary summer residence for the old people, as well as occasionally for himself and his beloved bride.

It hardly needs to be told, that the arrest and its executors were but parts of the delusion, the amount of real infliction being no more than a ride in a fine morning of some miles. Whether the whole, as involving some little added trouble of mind to that whose whole weight he was going so soon to remove, was too severe a penance for the steward's neglect, may be variously judged by various readers. In the halcyon days that followed, Winifred never forgot the place on the Tivy bank where she slept and dropped her book; nor did the happy husband, melancholic no more, forsake his coracle or his harp utterly, but would often serenade his lady-love (albeit his wedded love also) on some golden evening, as she sat among the cowslips and harebells, that enamelled with floral blue and gold the greensward bank of the Tivy, under the fine sycamore tree – the "trysting-place" of their romantic assignations.

NORTH'S SPECIMENS OF THE BRITISH CRITICS

NO. VI

SUPPLEMENT TO DRYDEN ON CHAUCER

From the grand achievements of Glorious John, one experiences a queer revulsion of the currency in the veins in passing to the small doings of Messrs Betterton, Ogle, and Co., in 1737 and 1741; and again, to the still smaller of Mr Lipscomb in 1795, in the way of modernizations of Chaucer. Who was Mr Betterton, nobody, we presume, now knows; assuredly he was not Pope, though there is something silly to that effect in Joseph Warton, which is repeated by Malone. "Mr Harte assured me," saith Dr Joseph, "that he was convinced by some circumstances which Fenton had communicated to him, that Pope wrote the characters that make the introduction (the Prologue) to the Canterbury Tales, published under the name of Betterton." Betterton is bitter bad; Ogle, "wersh as cauld parritch without sawte!" Lipscomb is a jewel. In a postscript to his preface he says, "I have barely time here, the tales being already almost all printed off, to apologize to the reader for having inserted my own translation of The Nun's Priest's Tale, instead of that of Dryden; but the fact is, I did not know that Dryden's version existed; for having undertaken to complete those of the Canterbury Tales which were wanting in Ogle's collection, and the tale in question not being in that collection, I proceeded to supply it, having never till very lately, strange as it may seem, seen the volume of Dryden's Fables in which it may be found!!"

It is diverting to hear the worthy who, in 1795, had never seen Dryden's Fables, offering to the public the first completed collection of the Canterbury Tales in a modern version, "under the reasonable confidence that the improved taste in poetry, and the extended cultivation of that, in common with all the other elegant arts, which so strongly characterizes the present day, will make the lovers of verse look up to the old bard, the father of English poetry, with a veneration proportioned to the improvements they have made in it." It grieves him to think that the language in which Chaucer wrote "has decayed from under him." That reason alone, he says, can justify the attempt of exhibiting him in a modern dress; and he tells us that so faithfully has he adhered to the great original, that they who have not given their time to the study of the old language, "must either find a true likeness of Chaucer exhibited in this version, or they will find it nowhere else." With great solemnity he says, "Thence I have imposed it on myself as a duty somewhat sacred to deviate from my original as little as possible in the sentiment, and have often in the language adopted his own expressions, the simplicity and effect of which have always forcibly struck me, wherever the terms he uses (and that happens not unfrequently) are intelligible to modern ears." Yes – Gulielme Lipscomb, thou wert indeed a jewel.

Happy would he have been to accompany his version of Chaucer with notes. "But though the version itself has been an agreeable and easy rural occupation, yet in a remote village, near 250 miles from London, the very books, trifling as they may seem, to which it would be necessary to refer to illustrate the manners of the 14th century, were not to be procured; and parochial and other engagements would not admit of absence sufficient to consult them where they are to be found; it is not therefore for want of deference to the opinions of those who have recommended a body of notes that they do not accompany these Tales." Yes – Gulielme, thou wert a jewel.

It is, however, but too manifest from his alleged versions, that not only did Mr Lipscomb of necessity eschew the perusal of "the books, trifling as they may seem, to which it would be necessary to refer to illustrate the manners of the 14th century," but that he continued to his dying day almost as ignorant of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales as of Dryden's Fables.

In his preface he tells one very remarkable falsehood. "The Life of Chaucer, and the Introductory Discourse to the Canterbury Tales, are taken from the valuable edition of his original works published by Mr Tyrwhitt." The Introductory Discourse is so taken; but it is plain that poor, dear, fibbing Willy Lipscomb had not looked into it, for it contradicts throughout all the statements in the life of Chaucer, which is not from Tyrwhitt, but clumsily cribbed piecemeal by Willy himself from that rambling and inaccurate one by a Mr Thomas in Urry's edition. Lipscomb is lying on our table, and we had intended to quote a few specimens of him and his predecessor Ogle; but another volume that had fallen aside a year or two ago, has of itself mysteriously reappeared – and a few words of it in preference to other "haverers."

Mr Horne, the author of "The False Medium," "Orion," the "Spirit of the Age," and some other clever brochures in prose and in verse, in the laboured rather than elaborate introduction to "The Poems of Geoffrey Chaucer, modernized," (1841,) by Leigh Hunt, Wordsworth, Robert Bell, Thomas Powell, Elizabeth Barrett, and Zachariah Azed, gives us some threescore pages on Chaucer's versification; but, though they have an imposing air at first sight, on inspection they prove stark-naught. He seems to have a just enough general notion of the principle of the verse in the Canterbury Tales; but with the many ways of its working – the how, the why, and the wherefore – he is wholly unacquainted, though he dogmatizes like a doctor. He soon makes his escape from the real difficulties with which the subject is beset, and mouths away at immense length and width about what he calls "the secret of Chaucer's rhythm in his heroic verse, which has been the baffling subject of so much discussion among scholars, a trifling increase in the syllables occasionally introduced for variety, and founded upon the same laws of contraction by apostrophe, syncope, &c., as those followed by all modern poets; but employed in a more free and varied manner, all the words being fully written out, the vowels sounded, and not subjected to the disruption of inverted commas, as used in after times." This "secret" was patent to all the world before Mr Horne took pen in hand, and his eternal blazon of it is too much now for ears of flesh and blood. The modernized versions, however, are respectably executed – Leigh Hunt's admirably; and we hope for another volume. But Mr Horne himself must be more careful in his future modernizations. The very opening of the Prologue is not happy.

In Chaucer it runs thus: —

"Whannè that April with his shourès soteThe droughte of March hath perced to the rote,And bathed every veine in swiche licour,Of whiche vertue engendered is the flour;When Zephyrus eke with his sotè brethe,Enspired hath in every holt and hetheThe tendre croppès, and the yongè sonneHath in the Ram his halfè cours yronne,And smalè foulès maken melodie,That slepen allè night with open eye,So priketh hem nature in hire corages;Than longen folk to gon on pilgrimages,And palmeres for to seken strangè strondes,To servè halwes couthe in sondry londes," &c.

Thus modernized by Mr Home: —