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CLASSICS REVISITED (5)
Chaucer, Canterbury Tales
The English and Scottish Popular Ballad
Machiavelli, The Prince
Chaucer was the first European writer after the Classical period to enter upon the new
world of the novel, centuries before anybody else penetrated as deeply into that
complicated territory. Medieval romance was exactly that: romance — static, like the
art of heraldry. Dante’s Divine Comedy takes place in moral regions where
decisions are over. The inhabitants of Purgatory can grow toward Paradise — but only
along predetermined lines, independent of one another and of their own wills. The Divine
Comedy as Dante’s interior panorama, a completely metaphorical Remembrance
of Things Past, has dramatic development, but not in the novelistic or theatrical
sense. Serial and linear collections like Boccaccio’s Decameron have no
necessary connection between the stories and their narrators. The settings are
conveniences; the language is rhetorical.
Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde are dynamic
structures of evolving interpersonal relations. On each type of character, like sculpture
on an armature, a unique individual is erected with a minimum of rhetoric and a maximum of
effective characterization. At the end of the “Prologue” a crowd of people have
come to life. The tensions and affections that exist between them have been defined. From
then on the Canterbury Pilgrims jostle, argue, push and pull, and twist in the fields of
force set up by their manifold personalities, each one a center of power. However
interesting in themselves, the Tales are each a metaphor of the personality of the teller;
each Tale affects the listeners. In the “links” between Tales the narrators are
represented and redefined in special relationships, much as the characters in a play are
intensified in each new scene.
Chaucer’s pilgrims can be sorted into categories — the Seven Deadly Sins:
pride, sloth, anger, lust, avarice, gluttony, envy; the Seven Cardinal Virtues: faith,
hope, charity, prudence, temperance, justice, fortitude; the four humours: blood, bile,
black bile, phlegm; the influence of the known planets and the Houses of the Zodiac —
but this is far from reducing his psychology or philosophy of the personality to
schematization. These thirty-five factors, their commutations and permutations, can be
figured out arithmetically and are a tidy sum. Besides, each traveler is defined in the
first instance by occupation and most of them by native province; each person is strongly
characterized by individually developed sexuality; each is a special, complex aspect of
maleness or femaleness. This is a larger apparatus for a theory of character than that
employed by modern novelists raised on the simple Old Testament schemata of
psychoanalysis.
Turn and turn about, the characters of the pilgrimage and the characters of their Tales
develop not only a drama of great complexity but also a number of theses which Chaucer
exposes with artistic discretion and subtle modulation. For instance, a philosophy of
marriage is developed by the dialectic conflict of the Wife of Bath, the Clerk, the
Merchant, and the Franklin, with asides and assists from the Host, the fictional Chaucer,
and various others. Paralleling this dialectic is another on love itself, of which the
Knight’s Tale and the Miller’s Tale as ironic mirror-images of each other are
the most obvious. By the time the pilgrimage is over, Chaucer has defined sexual love in
terms of a philosophy of the sacrament of marriage centuries in advance of those of most
Catholic theologians — a middle-class marriage of free and equal personalities —
and contrasted it with feudal chivalry.
There are dozens of subtle touches that show uncanny social and historical insight. In
the “Prologue,” in fifteen lines given to the Merchant, Chaucer defines
mercantile capitalism with the skill and the understanding of a Marx, and with
considerably fewer words. The Merchant is dressed at the height of middle-class rather
than aristocratic fashion. A master of the new science of double-entry bookkeeping, he is
a passionate defender of the freedom of the seas and an expert at taking advantage of valuta
— the differences in national currencies. He has his own well-developed theology to
outwit the feudal Church’s prohibition of usury. Most important, his fortune is
founded on the skillful, covert manipulation of debt. Most academic critics, themselves
still living by feudal standards, miss the irony of this last item. The Merchant is not
hoodwinking his creditors; the entire economy that he represents is founded on debt,
called credit in the new theology. As Chaucer says, “Forsooth he was a worthy man
withall / But sooth to seyn, I know not how men him call” — which doesn’t
mean the fictional Chaucer didn’t know his name.
Hardly a characterization in the Tales or in the “Prologue” and
“links” does not lend itself to similar careful exegesis. However, we can
approach Chaucer’s meanings only through several levels of irony — the irony of
the pilgrimage with its incongruous constituents; the irony of the narrators, especially
as they use their Tales to attack or flatter one another; the irony of the fictional
Chaucer, the overall narrator, represented as an innocent, good-natured bufflehead; and
the irony of the real Chaucer. Each of these levels distorts, reshapes, and finally
increases the definition of the characters in their interrelations. The last level, the
poet and master of the show can sometimes be slyly bitter indeed. Few people even now
realize that his Lady Prioress is portrayed as a profoundly evil woman and her Tale is a
piece of bigotry that leaves even the audience of fourteenth-century pilgrims for once
speechless. Like a dream told to a psychoanalyst, each Tale reveals the deepest
complexities of character. The Tales judge the narrators.
Chaucer was a man of the world in a sense in which no other major English poet has ever
been — a man of affairs, like Bagehot, Defoe, Fielding, or Clarendon. This gives his
style an operative force found commonly only in China, where great statesmen were great
poets. He uses language as a man uses it to get results. His knowledge of human beings is
derived from a vast variety of practical situations in a busy life in county courts and in
the courts of Italian princes and the French King. His sly knowledge of human duplicity,
so like Bertolt Brecht’s, he had learned as a Comptroller of Petty Customs and a
hearer of provincial lawsuits, an environment not unlike the inner life of the German
Communist Party. No English poet is a greater master of words that count. Even his
parodies of Early Renaissance rhetoric mock their originals with Chaucer’s
irrepressible clarity. Each situation, each character, and the overall milieu are defined
like the “poetic situation” in Classic Chinese poetry. Hour, season, weather,
topography, dramatic context, mood are indicated with just words enough — with
controlled modesty.
One of the most remarkable things about Chaucer is that he has almost no vices. Great
poets like Shakespeare and Baudelaire are destructive models for poetic practice; Milton
and Virgil have so many vices that modern taste can scarcely stomach them at all. In Troilus
and Criseyde and The Canterbury Tales Chaucer is close to being a perfect
model. If you want to learn to write, this is the way to do it. If you want to be a
writer, this is the way to live — out in the world amongst men who think of language
as an effective instrument of action.
* * *
A generation ago Chaucer was still being taught to high school seniors in the original
language. No translation into modern English can transmit all Chaucer’s many virtues.
Both wit and music are missed. There are good modern versions in cheap Penguin, Mentor,
and Modern Library editions to read along with the original. After a little practice,
Chaucer’s language turns out to be not all that strange.
At the height of the Age of Enlightenment, of rationalism, and the worship of classical
order, men grew weary of the neat, domesticated universe they had constructed for
themselves and began to seek in older times, and remote places, and in the lower classes,
uncorrupted by the narrow discipline of their superiors, the values which were so
conspicuously lacking in eighteenth-century culture. The most sensitive organisms
discovered that the society was suffering from spiritual malnutrition. Once new elements
of the diet were discovered, the hunger of the public made them immensely popular. We call
this movement the beginnings of Romanticism. In English it centers on the discovery of
folklore, the return to nature, the idealization of the common people, the poetry of Burns
and Blake, of the young Wordsworth and Coleridge. Crucial in this development was the
popularization of folksong amongst a cultivated audience. The values of a preliterate or
illiterate society became suddenly popular amongst the highly literate. Percy’s Reliques
of Ancient English Poetry and Scott’s Border Minstrelsy were not only
best sellers in their own day, but both are still in print, at least in Great Britain.
The “problem of the ballad” has usually been considered one of origins. On
the contrary, the important question is its ever-increasing popularity. Why today should a
singer be able to fill an auditorium with thousands of people, come to hear her sing the
songs of herdsmen and peasants and cattle rustlers five hundred years gone, and this not
only in Great Britain and America, but in Berlin or Tokyo?
The ballad has been defined as a folksong which tells a story, concentrating on the
dramatic situation of the climax, rather than long narrative unfolding action and
reaction. The tale is presented directly in act and speech with little or no comment by
the narrator. Although the most violent passions may be shown by the characters, the maker
of the ballad remained austerely unmoved. So does the performer. Emotional comment, where
it occurs, comes through a special kind of rhetoric peculiar to the ballad, often
especially in some of the refrains, dependent upon the use of rather remote metaphors to
intensify the psychological situation. Most ballads are in “ballad measure,”
four lines of alternating eight and six syllables — really fourteen syllables or
seven stressed syllables with a strong pause after the eighth — rhyming usually at
the end of each fourteen syllables. However this pattern varies constantly even within the
same song. What varies it is the fluency of the music clustered around a simple melodic
pattern, which a good ballad singer seldom, stanza for stanza, exactly repeats.
The English and Scottish ballads, so far as they can be dated from internal evidence,
seem to have reached their highest development in the troubled times of the War of the
Roses and the consolidation of the Tudor monarchy, the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
They have been called collectively the folk epic of a minor Heroic Age or Time of
Troubles. It is true that the long drawn-out struggle over the emerging wool economy of
northern England and the Scottish Border had many of the elements of a Heroic Age, but
contrary to Arnold Toynbee’s hypothesis, ballads of the same type were collected in
stable, agricultural, untroubled parts of England. Ballads of the Scottish and English
type are found from Mongolia to Spain, and they are still being made from the Appalachians
to Yugoslavia. The greatest collection is that of S. Grundtvig and A. Olrik, made in
Denmark in the middle of the nineteenth century. Many of the Danish ballads give the
— false — impression of being direct translations from the classic English
collection of F.J. Child made at the end of the century. This is sometimes the case even
when both the Danish and the British ballads concern known historical figures in their
respective countries and are, within the limits of dramatic license, both approximately
true. In other words many ballads are archetypal dramatic situations that wander through
space and time seeking body in history.
What are these situations? They are rigorously personal. Battles of the Scottish
Border, cattle and sheep raids, sieges of castles, family feuds, are shorn of the
complications and ramifications of history. They are reduced to the starkest relations
between human beings, presented at their moments of greatest intensity. This is equally
true of the few religious ballads with a Christian story and of the ballads of the
supernatural, many of which contain elements of pre-Christian belief or ritual. People
come back from the dead unable to rest because they are bound by the sorrow of their
survivors. Men are rapt away into fairyland or saved from thralldom there in the world
that is entered through the fairy mounds, where the people of the Sidhe, the old Celtic
gods, live under, or rather, beyond, in a kind of fourth dimension, the grass-grown grave
mounds and ruins of an older race. Long stories, for instance of Orpheus who survives as
King Orfeo, are reduced to a crystalline dramatic moment. There is a remarkable similarity
between the earlier ballads, especially those of the supernatural, and the Japanese Nô
plays. In both dramatic realization comes not as the culmination of a process, but as the
precipitate of a situation. Most of the great British ballads could be turned into Nô
plays and vice versa. Some have identical plots.
Perhaps this comparison reveals the secret of the ballads’ ever increasing
popularity until today, when enormously popular folk singers have become determinants not
just of contemporary poetry and song, but of an ever-growing new sensibility — a new
culture. The classic ballads deal with human lives which have been taken out of the tangle
of grasping and using of an acquisitive and exploitative social system by the sheer
intensity of the ultimate meaning of human relationships. The ballads deal with people who
have been opted out by circumstance. They are living, or dying, or have died, in realms
where motives are as pure as they can be. They have the unearthly glamour of beings acting
beyond the world, like the demigods of Sophocles. The Russian students sing “Stenka
Razin” and American students sing “Lord Thomas and Fair Eleanor” for the
same reason. Their values are utterly incompatible with society as now organized, here or
there. The world of the ballads may not be the ideal society of Marx or Plato, but it is a
supernatural realm where nothing is important but the things that really matter. Of course
this is Romanticism pushed to its ultimate, but it is also the morality of classical
drama, a terrible intensity of life pushed to its limits, beyond all responsibilities of
the getting and spending that lay waste our time.
So the great ballads of the common people at the end of the Middle Ages are more
popular today than they have ever been because we are witnessing the evolution of a
counterculture, antagonistic to the dominant one, whose principal characteristic might
well be defined as the taking seriously of the ethics and morality of the dramas of
folksong.
The literature of balladry is enormous. Child’s great collection is in paperback,
five volumes. The melodies most commonly sung are in Cecil Sharp’s One Hundred
English Folksongs and English Folksongs from the Southern Appalachians. Much
of Grundtvig is available in translation. There are many state and regional collections.
B.H. Bronson, The Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads, gathers all variants of
text and music. He gives, in volume two, 198 versions of “Barbara Allen”! There
are collections, in English, of ballads from Mongolian, Yugoslavian, and dozens of other
peoples. H.C. Sargent and G.L. Kittredge, English and Scottish Ballads, Edited from
the Collections of Francis James Child (Boston, 1904) is still the standard
one-volume edition. The Penguin book and The Oxford Book of Ballads are
overedited.
To reread Machiavelli’s The Prince in middle age in the afternoon of a
century of political horror is to experience a wistful incongruity: What were the four
hundred years of scandal all about? As objective analyst of successful despotism,
Machiavelli seems today too confident of the good sense of those clever and forceful
enough to rise to positions of tyranny. He assumes the fundamental good will of his prince
toward his subjects, or at least his intelligent rapacity and his accessibility to advice.
Our twentieth-century dictators all claim to have learned from Machiavelli. Mussolini even
wrote a preface to The Prince. Since the fall of Bismarck, they have violated
every item of his advice.
Machiavelli’s defenders have said he studied politics with the value-neuter eye of
a scientist. Yet in spite of his doubts of the natural goodness of man, he like Socrates
hoped that rulers of the State, one or many, might be more open to reason than not and if
presented with a demonstrable good would probably choose it. We do not think of
Machiavelli as tainted with the Socratic fallacy, but so it is. He is the most astute
philosopher of history after Thucydides, but both believed history might be taught to
behave itself — a belief for which their narratives give little warrant.
Most people read only The Prince, and they read that as advocating, from
general principles, a set of rules. The Prince and The Discourses on the
First Ten Books of Livy should be read together. Machiavelli’s realism brings to
its end a long tradition of manuals of advice to princes and descriptions of ideal states.
However much he tried for objectivity, Aristotle’s Politics is
half-prescriptive, and its Medieval successors are nothing else. Machiavelli realized that
the student of politics must concern himself with what is, not with what should be; that
if there was any meaning in historical process, it could be found only by inductive
analysis of what men have actually done; and that the greatest of fallacies is to start by
seeking first principles, transcendental sanctions, and final causes. He knew that the
hortatory philosophers of history and politics have only provided makers of history —
finders, keepers, and losers of power — with a rhetoric of noble fraud. He was the
first to understand that history is not going anywhere, it is just what happens, and the
only values operating in it are those of general welfare, the simple goods of actual men.
Neither history nor politics is logical. They are the first empiricisms, and the only
first principles of politics are the individuals who live it. The Prince studies
a practicable despotism — Cesare Borgia’s; The Discourses, a successful
republic — Rome, from the fall of the kings to the rise of the demagogues. Although
the analysis is couched in imperative form, the source of this imperative is mundane and
secular: the well-being of each citizen — not Freedom, or The Good, or Kingship, or
Democracy.
If we think of Machiavelli as writing speculatively in leisured retirement, we miss his
urgency. Venice, Milan, Florence, Naples, the Papacy were being emasculated, reduced to
pawns, and impoverished by the imperialism of France and Spain. In Dante’s De
Monarchia the union of Italy is an ideal. Machiavelli knew that it would have to be
achieved within a generation or the Italian cities would never recover. Union or decay
— this is the concern that motivates The Discourses, The Prince, The
Art of War, The History of Florence, The Life of Castruccio. The
plays, Mandragola and Clezia, satirize a sick, parasitic society.
Where even favorable critics have found Machiavelli’s attitude toward human nature
“crude, unsympathetic, and cynical,” I see the exasperation of desperation. When
he says that, tempted, even enlightened politicians probably will behave like fools or
rascals, he was hardly provided with contrary evidence by the words of Livy or the
experience of a lifetime. So he assumes that historical action will take place at the
lowest moral level necessary to ensure continuity. When the State or the individual actor
falls below that level, it goes out of existence. When it rises above it, history gains an
unexpected bonus. With a minimal faith in human motives, a tough-minded optimist may shape
a politics of possible goods. The alternative is withdrawal into a tightly organized
subculture where men live not by accident but for values, a garrison of ideals —
Plato’s Republic. Machiavelli is generally ironic, but his most overt irony
is reserved for the subculture he saw all about him that made such claims — the
Church and its territorial expression, the Papal state.
He believed that although men do not infallibly choose a demonstrable good, society
might be organized to ensure that they do so more often than not and that where they do
not, their choices of evil may cancel one another out. How? Machiavelli is seldom put
forward as an advocate of freedom, least of all freedom of speech. Yet at the beginning of
The Discourses he says, “Under the emperors from Nerva to Marcus Aurelius,
everyone could hold and defend any opinion he pleased, and enjoyed the greatest freedom of
action compatible with social order,” and this resulted in maximum happiness and
security and redounded to the glory of the rulers.
The opening paragraphs of The Discourses reveal Machiavelli’s difference
from previous writers on politics. He is a dynamist. “To have removed the cause of
social conflict from Rome would have been to deprive her of her power of growth.” He
stresses that the Roman constitution both generated tension and discharged it, and
“no faction, no private citizen ever attempted to call in the aid of a foreign power.
Having the remedy at home, there was no need to look abroad for it.”
For Machiavelli the end of politics is man, not the State; nor did he believe that
“war is the health of the State,” although in Renaissance Italy that was its
permanent condition. For him the end of war is peace, even behind the lines while war is
going on. Nor did he believe that ends justify means. He considers in detail what means
must be employed to create what ends — a quite different concept. He knows that
social good is only the good of multitudes of individual men and flourishes in a dynamic,
never a static context. The ideal norm, the paradigm structured by logical law, has no
relevance. Laws should be framed to enable the creative interaction of contradictories.
Perhaps better than Marx he understood that the forces behind contradictions of policy are
class struggles, but he believed that the good constitution should use rather than repress
class conflict, that it can be the fuel that runs the motor of society or the wildfire
that destroys it.
Like More’s, the virtues of Machiavelli’s prose survive all but the worst
translations. He was a man of affairs writing for nonliterary purposes and out of years of
experience in using language in matters of life and death. Italian as he wrote it was a
medium of direct communication, an instrument to achieve concrete ends — a practice
in which he had few followers until recent years. As a diversion he wrote the best Italian
comedy — as black humor quite the equal of Jonson’s Volpone — Mandragola,
a work of a most unliterary toughness and maturity of mind.
* * *
There are many good, cheap editions of The Prince; the one in the Modern
Library includes The Discourses. Mandragola is in Eric Bentley’s The
Classic Theater, Volume I.
Selections from Kenneth Rexroth’s Classics Revisited (copyright 1968
Kenneth Rexroth) and More Classics Revisited (copyright 1989 Kenneth Rexroth
Trust). Reproduced by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
Both of these volumes are in print and available from New Directions. Do yourself a favor and get them.
[Other “Classics Revisited” essays]
[REXROTH ARCHIVE]
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