TEMPORARY PREFACE TO THE SIX-TEXT EDITION, PART I. SEC. 1. Cause of this Publication. (May be skipt as gossip.) ... 2. Choice of Manuscripts, 3 private, 3 public 5. The general Agreement of the MSS, and Mr Earle's 6. On the Treatment of the MSS ... ... ... ... PAGE 1 5 44 86 87 89 7. A few Notes on the Prologue, (with Mr Skeat's Letter justifying Chaucer's Hath in the Ram his halfe cours i-ronne,' A. 8) 8. Mr Skeat's Letter on the days of the Tournament, &c., in The Knight's Tale, and the probable date of Chaucer's writing the Tale, A.D. 1387. (Notes, p. 104) 9. Intentions, (with some words on Uniform Spelling, p. 113) 106 103 § 1. My first purpose was to send out these parts of Texts without any words of introduction, but as some friends I care for said that it would not be fair to plump down before them, unknowing in manuscripts and Chaucer cram, the bare texts, I am obliged to say what little I can, though at the risk of having to unsay part of it when fuller knowledge comes to me, or those who now have it, speak out, and prove me wrong. But before entering into other details, let me state that the publication of these texts, and the foundation of the Society, are due mainly to the accom b plished American scholar, Professor F. J. Child of Harvaril, who called forth the publication of the Percy Folio Manuscript. The first time he wrote to me asking that more Chaucer MSS should be printed, must have been soon after the time when, nearly twelve years ago, I took my first Chaucer class at the Working Men's College, and went for it to see the British Museum MSS of the Canterbury Tales, and specially to collate part of the Harleian MS 7334 with Mr Thomas Wright's print of it. I then conceived the hope that I might some day edit Chaucer; but other work intervened; and when, on my telling Mr George Bell in 1864 that his neck ought to be wrung if he merely reprinted Tyrwhitt's text in his new Aldine edition, -he kindly asked me if I would edit Chaucer's works for him, I was obliged, for want of both knowledge and time, to hand over the task to my friend Mr Richard Morris, who, I do not hesitate to say, has produced the best text of Chaucer yet printed. But as Mr Morris was obliged to print his text of the Poems, without giving the collations of such MSS as he had made, Professor Child still pressed me for a print of two or three of the best MSS of the Canterbury Tales. He had produced in the United States in 1862, his masterly and exhaustive essay on the use of the final e in the Harleian MS 7334, as printed in Mr T. Wright's edition of the Canterbury Tales for the Percy Society; and I felt that some return was due to him from England for it. Moreover, any one who reads the Canterbury Tales, and gets to know the man Chaucer, must delight in and love him, and must feel sorry that so little has been done for the works of the genial bright soul, whose humour and wit, whose grace and tenderness, whose power and beauty, are the chief glory of our Early Literature. Shakspere critics there had been without end, a Shakspere Society too-no end of minor Shakspere Societies:-but who ever heard of a Chaucer Society till our own began? What Chaucer critic had there been, till lately, except Tyrwhitt? Was the work of the Thynnes, Warton, Urry, &c., or of our moderns, enough for CHAUCER? Surely not. The Early English Text Society had, by Mr Skeat's generous help, undertaken to do justice to Chaucer's great contemporary-above him in moral height, below him in poetic power-William, the author of The Vision of Piers Plowman, by an edition of the three versions of his chief work, executed with Mr Skeat's well-proved ability, fullness, and care. The hands of that Society were too full to undertake an edition of Chaucer, or the texts of him that Professor Child wanted; and there was therefore nothing for it, but to have a Chaucer Society, for which I could print Manuscripts, and get friends to write essays, and print originals, that would be useful for an edition of the Poet's works by some man, or men, more fit for the task than myself. I am bound to confess that my love for Chaucerand he comes closer to me than any other poet, except Tennyson-would not by itself have made me give up the time and trouble I can so ill afford to bestow on this task; but when an American, who had done the best bit of work on Chaucer's words, asked, and kept on asking, for texts of our great English poet, could an Englishman keep on refusing to produce them? When that American had laid aside his own work to help, heart and soul, in the great struggle for freeing his land from England's legacy to it, the curse of slavery, could one who honoured him for it, who felt strongly how mean had been the feeling of England's upper and middle classes on the War, as contrasted with the nobleness of our suffering working-men,—could one such, I say, fail to desire to sacrifice something that he might help to weave again one bond between (at least) the Chaucerlovers of the Old Country and the New? No. That educated England may never so again fail in sympathy with all that is noblest in the education of America, I sincerely trust. But the Oxford rejection of Gladstone followed the Oxford rejection of Peel, while Cambridge has never been able to tolerate a Peel or a Gladstone in any state; and therefore one must not expect too much. Meantime, here is Part I of six texts of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. 'If any subscriber, ex-Southern or -Northern, requires an apology for the statement above, I desire that he may find it in the saying of a clerical friend of mine, a dignified Member of Convocation, who in answer to my argument that the Romance-element-shown in the doctrines of Apostolical Succession, Baptismal Regeneration, &c. was the ruinous one to the Church, answered, "My dear fellow, the Romance-element is the only one that makes men of us, and is worth fighting for. You're as mad as a hatter about your Early English Texts, and you wouldn't be worth a penny if you weren't." [P.S. "One must not expect too much" (1. 2 from top). Compare the following extract from the letter of the New-York special correspondent in America of the Daily News, dated Dec. 17, and contained in the Daily News of Dec. 30, 1868, the day after I wrote the passage above. "Talking of the tendency of the American press to the fostering of hatred to England, in which so many Englishmen devoutly believe, I was a good deal amused last evening by lighting on the following in the Saturday Review of Nov. 21: 'But a genuine American believes, or at least his English admirers believe for him, that such an admirable product of civilization as himself cannot be too many times repeated. He establishes his spittoons and other institutions a thousand miles further to the west, and proclaims that the great designs of Heaven for the regeneration of the world are advancing rapidly to their fulfilment. The civilization which he propagates is better perhaps than barbarism, and that is the utmost that can be said in favour of it. The language which he speaks is an ugly corruption of English, and we can hardly conceive a greater misfortune to the world than that this language should be generally adopted.' "If I did not remember the comments of this same journal, and of the Times, on American men, manners, and things during the war, I should say that this was as gross a piece of insult to a nation as I had ever seen in print. But this I will say, that anything approaching to it in ignorant brutality I have never seen in any American newspaper laying the smallest claim to respectability, or anything in any American newspaper so well calculated to excite hatred between the two countries. When people in England hold up their hands over the part played by press writers in fostering enmity between the 'two kindred peoples,' they must therefore fix their eyes, not on New York, but on London." May knowledge of this fact spread in America, that, mixed with many sensible men and (P.S.) one Caliban (Athenæum, Feb. 13, 1869, p. 243, col. 1) who write for The Saturday, are some pert puppies who much need their mammies to box their little ears and send them to bed. Till the time comes for that maternal popping, Americans should be "amused" by our small curs' yelps. It's generally the big dogs that they yowl at. Let our friends over the water also note what the old snarls and howls of The Saturday § 2. Manuscripts chosen for printing. In the autumn of 1861, while on a walking-tour through Sussex, I had seen Lord Leconfield's MS of the Canterbury Tales, and both then and on a subsequent journey to Petworth, I thought the MS was old and good enough to deserve collation for the next edition of Chaucer. In 1864, I think, by Dr G. H. Kingsley's kindness, I had an opportunity of collating part of the Ellesmere MS, which proved to be a good text, without the provincialisms of the Harleian 7334, but with (as it then seemed to me) a superfluity of final e's to its shall's, ing's, &c. At a later date Mr Wm. W. E. Wynne of Peniarth, the legatee of the Hengwrt collection, was kind enough to bring his MS of the Tales to town for me; and a collation of part of it with a page or two of the Man of Law's Tale from Tyrwhitt's favourite MS (the Cambridge Univ. Dd. 4. 24) that Mr W. Aldis Wright had printed privately as a basis for his edition, showed that the Hengwrt MS had more of Mr Richard Morris's theoretical final e's than the Dd. MS, and was probably more worth printing. Here then were three Manuscripts which, as being in private hands, and not therefore so generally accessible as others in public libraries, it was desirable to print; and the owners of these MSS at once generously consented to let them be put in type. A fourth private MS I wished also to see-from the character of it left at the British Museum by the late Mr Garnett-and if it proved good, to print, that from the Stowe collection (I believe), the Collection which Lord Ashburnham bought, and has almost "buried in one of those sepulchres of MSS which, by courtesy, are called Libraries" (Tyrwhitt's Cant. Tales, iv. 166-7, Int. Disc. § xxvi). But unfortunately my applications to Lord Ashburnham have proved of as little against Mr Bright have lately turned to. Their turn for a change will come some day.] |