XVIJONAH IN LANCASHIRE

The author ofPatience—the otherPatience, I mean, not the Gilbert opera—is beginning to be discovered even by the average reader. It is not long since we had modernised versions of his two most remarkable poems,PearlandSir Gawayne and the Green Knight. Gaston Paris describes the latter as “the jewel of English mediæval literature,” and even among those who read idly for amusement it should become a favourite book in Mr. Ernest Kirtlan’s easy rendering. Who the maker of these poems was we know not. Editors have invented a personal history for him, but other editors have ruthlessly pulled it to pieces. It was suggested that he wrote the romanceSir Gawaynein his gaudy youth. Then, having lost a child, he composed inPearla passionate lament for her. Afterwards, in the evening of his life, he wrotePatienceas an expression of his submission to the will of God.Mr. Bateson will have nothing to do either with this pathetic life-history or with the chronology. He regardsPatienceas the earliest of the poems, and is of the opinion thatPearl, far from being a lament for a lost child, is “largely a theological discussion in elegiac form.” One would think there must be something seriously wrong in a poem about which a dispute of the kind could rage among the interpreters. But this is not necessarily so. No one denies that theSong of Solomonis a great poem, and yet men have quarrelled as to whether it should be read as the holiest of symbolic poems or as an early masterpiece of the fleshly school of literature. Coming toPatienceitself, I fancy that the man who could discover personal confessions in it could discover personal confessions in Euclid. I find it difficult to believe in the bereaved father who turned for a lesson in resignation to the story of Jonah. It is the homilist, not the tortured human being, who fishes in the Book of Jonah for comfortable morals.Patienceis a sermon addressed to other people, not to the poet’s own soul. Feeling this, one may allow oneself to be amused by its quaintness as well as to admire the hue and vigour of its narrative.

Patienceis the story of Jonah told by an original artist. Jonah is here painted in Englishcolours. He is the Jonah not of a tragic-hearted Hebrew but of a familiar Lancashire man who wrote in a Lancashire dialect at the time of Chaucer. Tertullian had written a Latin poem on the same theme, and Mr. Bateson gives us the text of this in an appendix, suggesting, as other scholars have done, that it is one of the sources ofPatience. The Jonah of Tertullian, however, is a formal figure compared to the Jonah of the Englishman. Jonah in the old Lancashire poem is a lithe and live fellow from the moment at which he steps aboard the ship to make his escape from the perilous will of God.

Was neuer so joyful a Jue as Jonas was thenne,

we are told in a lively line at this point of the narrative. The storm that follows is described with such a sense of reality that it has been suggested that the poet himself must have experienced some such tempest when making a pilgrimage to Compostella, “the favourite journey of Englishmen at the time,” and a journey of the ancient popularity of which we are still reminded in the streets of London once a year when children set up their grottoes on the footpaths as an excuse for begging pennies. Mr. Bateson attempts to bring home to us the desperate circumstances of seafaring in the MiddleAges by quoting the statement that “John of Gaunt, on one occasion, was tossing about in the Channel for nine months, unable to land at Calais.” I confess I cannot believe the story in this form, and we need no such incredible example to enable us to realise the terrors of the storm that swept down on Jonah, when the frightened sailors attempted to lighten the ship by throwing overboard

Her bagges, and her feather-beddes, and her bryght wedes.

The introduction of the feather-beds into the narrative would alone be a sufficient reason for welcoming the Lancashire version of the Jonah story. The description of the panic-stricken sailors “glewing,” or calling, on their very various gods (who included Fernagu, a French giant) is another addition that pleases by its strangeness:

Bot vchon glewed on his god thet gayned hym beste;Summe to Vernagu ther vouched avowes solemne,Summe to Diana deuout, and derf Nepturne,To Mahoun and to Mergot, the Mone and the Sunne.

Bot vchon glewed on his god thet gayned hym beste;

Summe to Vernagu ther vouched avowes solemne,

Summe to Diana deuout, and derf Nepturne,

To Mahoun and to Mergot, the Mone and the Sunne.

Both in Tertullian and inPatienceJonah is made not only to sleep but to snore while the others pray during the storm. Tertullian puts it:

Sternentem inflata resonabat nare soporem.

The English poet writes still more vividly that Jonah lay in the bottom of the boat,

Slypped vpon a sloumbe-slepe, and sloberande he routes.

A “freke,” or man, was sent to rouse him and to prepare him for the casting of lots:

The freke hym frunt with his fot, and bede hym ferk up.

Then came the casting of the lots:

And ay the lote, vpon laste, lymped on Jonas.

The sailors immediately began to upbraid Jonah in masculine English:

What the deuel hest thou don, dotede wrech?What seches thou on see, synful schrewe,With thy lastes [crimes] so luther [evil] to lose vus vchone?

What the deuel hest thou don, dotede wrech?

What seches thou on see, synful schrewe,

With thy lastes [crimes] so luther [evil] to lose vus vchone?

Soon after follows the decision to throw him overboard:

Now is Jonas the Jwe jugged to drowne.

“A wylde walteande whale” comes up opportunely to the side of the boat:

And swyftely swenged hym to swepe, and his swallow opened...,With-outen towche of any tothe he tult in his throte.

And swyftely swenged hym to swepe, and his swallow opened...,

With-outen towche of any tothe he tult in his throte.

In spite of his safe passage beyond the whale’s teeth, however, Jonah’s plight was not an enviable one:

Lorde! colde was his cumfort, and his care huge.

The poet describes him as passing down the throat like a “mote in at a minster door”:

He glydes in by the gills ...;Ay, hele ouer hed, hourlande aboute,Til he blunt [staggered] in a blok as brod as a halle;And ther he festnes the fete, and fathmes about,And stod up in his stomak, that stank as the deuel.

He glydes in by the gills ...;

Ay, hele ouer hed, hourlande aboute,

Til he blunt [staggered] in a blok as brod as a halle;

And ther he festnes the fete, and fathmes about,

And stod up in his stomak, that stank as the deuel.

So realistic is the description of the whale’s inside that Mr. Bateson thinks it likely that the poet had been listening to the stories of whalers. He also endorses the poet’s view of the horrors of the situation by quoting one writer who states that “the breath of the whale is frequently attended by such an insupportable smell as to bring on disorder of the brain.” If the whale made Jonah feel sick, however, Jonah, according to the poet, had much the same effect on the whale. In a moving two lines on the whale’s discomforts we are told:

For thet mote in his mawe made hym, I trowe,Though hit lyttel were hym wyth, to wamel at his hert.

For thet mote in his mawe made hym, I trowe,

Though hit lyttel were hym wyth, to wamel at his hert.

These two lines Mr. Bateson translates into colourless modern English: “For the mote made him—though it were little as compared with him—to feel sick,” and adds for our information that “the reader of whaling stories will recall how frequently the whale suffers from dyspepsia!”

We need not follow the poet in detail through the rest of the narrative, which is full of life-giving detail till the end. After God had commanded thewhale——

That he hym sput spakly vpon spare drye,

we see Jonah washing his muddy mantle on the beach and proceeding with his message of doom to the “burgesses and bachelors” of Nineveh. The gourd under which he sleeps becomes a “wodbynde” (some kind of convolvulus): it is “hedera,” or ivy, in the Vulgate. Jonah’s delight, as he lay under it—“so glad of his gay lodge”—is amusingly described.He——

Lys loltrande ther-inne lokande to toune.

So contentedly did he “loll” there, indeed—“so blithe of his wood-bine”—that he cared not a penny for any “diet” that day; and when it “nighed to night” and “nappe hym bihoued,” he slept the sleep of the just “vnder leues.” Inhis account of Jonah’s anger against God, and God’s argument in favour of sparing Nineveh, the poet elaborates as ever the Bible narrative, and the appeal for the right of the inhabitants to live is tenderer than in the more concise original. God pleads, for instance, for the “lyttel bairnes on barme (breast) that neuer bale wrought,” and the reference to “much cattle” becomes:

And als ther ben doumbe bestes in the burgh many.

I do not suggest thatPatienceis better than the Book of Jonah, or as good, but that it has the vitality of an original work. The poet has a personal knowledge of character—a sense of drama, and a sense of life. Mr. Bateson’s edition of the poem was first published seven years ago. He has now largely recast and rewritten it. I have taken some liberties with his text in quoting it, slightly modernising it in places. It is an edition for students of mediæval literature rather than for the general reader. But with the help of its excellent glossary others than scholars should be able to enjoy it if they are prepared to take a little pains. And it is worth taking pains to become acquainted with so vivid and robust a poet as the author ofSir Gawayne and the Green Knight.

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