The Harbours of England | Page 7

we should have had some other ideas even about horses than the best we can have now. But most assuredly, nothing that ever swung at the quay sides of Carthage, or glowed with crusaders' shields above the bays of Syria, could give to any contemporary human creature such an idea of the meaning of the word Boat, as may be now gained by any mortal happy enough to behold as much as a Newcastle collier beating against the wind. In the classical period, indeed, there was some importance given to shipping as the means of locking a battle-field together on the waves; but in the chivalric period, the whole mind of man is withdrawn from the sea, regarding it merely as a treacherous impediment, over which it was necessary sometimes to find conveyance, but from which the thoughts were always turned impatiently, fixing themselves in green fields, and pleasures that may be enjoyed by land--the very supremacy of the horse necessitating the scorn of the sea, which would not be trodden by hoofs.
It is very interesting to note how repugnant every oceanic idea appears to be to the whole nature of our principal English medi?val poet, Chaucer. Read first the Man of Lawe's Tale, in which the Lady Constance is continually floated up and down the Mediterranean, and the German Ocean, in a ship by herself; carried from Syria all the way to Northumberland, and there wrecked upon the coast; thence yet again driven up and down among the waves for five years, she and her child; and yet, all this while, Chaucer does not let fall a single word descriptive of the sea, or express any emotion whatever about it, or about the ship. He simply tells us the lady sailed here and was wrecked there; but neither he nor his audience appear to be capable of receiving any sensation, but one of simple aversion, from waves, ships, or sands. Compare with his absolutely apathetic recital, the description by a modern poet of the sailing of a vessel, charged with the fate of another Constance:
"It curled not Tweed alone, that breeze-- For far upon Northumbrian seas It freshly blew, and strong; Where from high Whitby's cloistered pile, Bound to St. Cuthbert's holy isle, It bore a bark along. Upon the gale she stooped her side, And bounded o'er the swelling tide As she were dancing home. The merry seamen laughed to see Their gallant ship so lustily Furrow the green sea foam."
Now just as Scott enjoys this sea breeze, so does Chaucer the soft air of the woods; the moment the older poet lands, he is himself again, his poverty of language in speaking of the ship is not because he despises description, but because he has nothing to describe. Hear him upon the ground in Spring:
"These woodes else recoveren greene, That drie in winter ben to sene, And the erth waxeth proud withall, For sweet dewes that on it fall, And the poore estate forget, In which that winter had it set: And then becomes the ground so proude, That it wol have a newe shroude, And maketh so queint his robe and faire, That it had hewes an hundred paire, Of grasse and floures, of Inde and Pers, And many hewes full divers: That is the robe I mean ywis Through which the ground to praisen is."
In like manner, wherever throughout his poems we find Chaucer enthusiastic, it is on a sunny day in the "good green-wood," but the slightest approach to the sea-shore makes him shiver; and his antipathy finds at last positive expression, and becomes the principal foundation of the Frankeleine's Tale, in which a lady, waiting for her husband's return in a castle by the sea, behaves and expresses herself as follows:--
"Another time wold she sit and thinke, And cast her eyen dounward fro the brinke; But whan she saw the grisly rockes blake, For veray fere so wold hire herte quake That on hire feet she might hire not sustene Than wold she sit adoun upon the grene, And pitously into the see behold, And say right thus, with careful sighes cold. 'Eterne God, that thurgh thy purveance Ledest this world by certain governance, In idel, as men sain, ye nothing make. But, lord, thise grisly fendly rockes blake, That semen rather a foule confusion Of werk, than any faire creation Of swiche a parfit wise God and stable, Why han ye wrought this werk unresonable?'"
The desire to have the rocks out of her way is indeed severely punished in the sequel of the tale; but it is not the less characteristic of the age, and well worth meditating upon, in comparison with the feelings of an unsophisticated modern French or English girl among the black rocks of Dieppe or Ramsgate.
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