The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [56]
equality of numbers in every verse which we call heroic, was either not known, or not always practiced in Chaucer’s age. It were an easy matter to produce some thousands of his verses, which are lame for want of half a foot, and sometimes a whole one, and which no pronunciation can make otherwise. We can only say, that he lived in the infancy of our poetry, and that nothing is brought to perfection at first. We must be children before we grow men.47
This passage from the preface to Dryden’s Fables Ancient and Modern, suggesting that the history of literature is a “progress narrative,” starting with the primitive past and progressing to a more sophisticated or grown-up present (that category in motion called modernity), will ultimately be proved a fable. Not that Dryden thought Chaucer wasn’t literature—quite the contrary, he was “the father of English poetry,” to be regarded in the same honorific light “as the Grecians held Homer, or the Romans Virgil.” Nonetheless, Dryden undertook to translate Chaucer, turning his tales “into modern English,” despite the objections of some that Chaucer was “dry, old-fashioned wit” not worth the effort, and the complaints of others that much of the beauty of the text would be lost. To the latter, he replied roundly that “not only their beauty, but their being is lost, where they are no longer understood, which is the present case. I grant that something must be lost in all transfusion, that is, in all translations; but the sense will remain, which would otherwise be lost, or, at least, be maimed, when it is scarce intelligible, and that but to a few. How few are there who can read Chaucer so as to understand him perfectly? And if imperfectly, then with less profit, and no pleasure.”48 Dryden accused the purists, who argued that one should read Chaucer in the original or not at all, of being like misers who hoard up their treasures rather than spending or sharing them. He was pleased, though, to note that “Mademoiselle de Scudéry” was at the same time translating Chaucer into modern French (though he speculated that she must be using an old Provençal translation, “for how she should come to understand old English, I know not”). Still, the moment seemed fated: “that, after certain periods of time, the fame and memory of great Wits should be renewed.”49
The example of Donne is one kind of rediscovery of a lost or neglected text, and the example of Chaucer’s metrics, another. But what happens when the text supposedly lost from one era and found in another is discovered to be a new creation? One striking example took place at the end of the eighteenth century, when a teenage boy living in Bristol, England, produced (on parchment or vellum), circulated, and published poems supposedly written by a fifteenth-century priest—poems that, even after the imposture was detected, attracted the attention and admiration of several major Romantic poets.
The young poet was Thomas Chatterton, whose tragic early death—he poisoned himself with arsenic at the age of seventeen, despairing of success in London, starving, and unwilling to return in defeat to Bristol—was surely part of his romantic appeal. Chatterton’s “Rowley” poems, attributed to the fifteenth-century personage Thomas Rowley, were much superior, critics have agreed, to the modern poems written in his own voice and name. He had access to a number of old pieces of parchment and to a mysterious chest of documents in the Bristol church of St. Mary Redcliffe, and in his early teens, he set about, imaginatively and industriously, creating for himself a history and a lexicon for Rowley’s ancient writings.