" CHAUCER FOR CHILDREN."
(TO THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR."]
&a,—Will you allow me to answer your correspondent "0.," who last week recommended the reprint of the old modernisation of Chaucer's stories, by Mr. Cowden Clarke? As this has been already suggested to me half-a-dozen times, it may be as well to point out why no modernised Chaucer " familiar " to the public "for five-and-forty years" is now worth reprinting. Numerous attempts have been made to popularise our earliest great poet. They have been either extracts from Chaucer and other authors, badly modernised, and not adapted to the young, or mere para- phrases (doing no justice to the poet's manner and treatment) of stories and fabliaux not Chaucer's at all, but popular material poetically worked up by him. This kind of free rendering is hardly to be called modernising Chaucer. To take a man's sub- ject and clothe it in a new form is not interpreting him. Never- theless any rechauffi of Chaucer's works is better than none, and these various publications have been useful in their day. But all of them are variously inaccurate and unsatisfactory in matter and in method, and rather aim at supplanting the genuine text than helping us to appreciate it.
There is one solitary exception—Wordsworth's faultlessly beautiful version of the " Prioresa's Tale." At the same time, the right way to do justice to a writer like Chaucer is to present in parallel columns the original and the translation, the latter not as a substitute, but as a key.
The many important new facts about Chaucer's life and works brought to light during the last few years have put all old editions out of court. Various absurd theories respecting him have been dispelled ; the date of his birth corrected from 1328 to 1340, works falsely attributed to Chaucer assigned through internal evidence to their real authors, and many other errors rectified.
There has been hitherto no popular book incorporating the recent discoveries about Chaucer,—no book revealing Chaucer's beauties, his wisdom, his deep insight into human character, and reproducing the atmosphere of the fourteenth century in a form. attractive to the young. The want of such a book induced me to prepare my "Chaucer for Children," in which I have merely opened a mine of wealth, which remains to be further worked.— I am, Sir, &c.,
16 Welbeck Street, W., January 2. M. E. HAWEIS.
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