Something has been already said as to the conflict of opinion
concerning the period of Geoffrey Chaucer's birth, the precise date of
which is very unlikely ever to be ascertained. A better fortune has
attended the anxious enquiries which in his case, as in those of other
great men have been directed to the very secondary question of ancestry
and descent,--a question to which, in the abstract at all events, no
man ever attached less importance than he. Although the name "Chaucer"
is (according to Thynne), to be found on the lists of Battle Abbey,
this no more proves that the poet himself came of "high parage," than
the reverse is to be concluded from the nature of his coat-of-arms,
which Speght thought must have been taken out of the 27th and 28th
Propositions of the First Book of Euclid. Many a warrior of the Norman
Conquest was known to his comrades only by the name of the trade which
he had plied in some French or Flemish town, before he attached himself
a volunteer to Duke William's holy and lucrative expedition; and it is
doubtful whether even in the fourteenth century the name "Le Chaucer"
is, wherever it occurs in London, used as a surname, or whether in some
instances it is not merely a designation of the owner's trade. Thus we
should not be justified in assuming a French origin for the family from
which Richard le Chaucer, whom we know to have been the poet's
grandfather, was descended. Whether or not he was at any time a
shoemaker (chaucier, maker of chausses), and accordingly belonged to a
gentle craft otherwise not unassociated with the history of poetry,
Richard was a citizen of London, and vintner, like his son John after
him. John Chaucer, whose wife's Christian name may be with tolerable
safety set down as Agnes, owned a house in Thames Street, London, not
far from the arch on which modern pilgrims pass by rail to Canterbury
or beyond, and in the neighbourhood of the great bridge, which in
Chaucer's own day, emptied its travellers on their errands, sacred or
profane, into the great Southern road, the Via Appia of England. The
house afterwards descended to John's son, Geoffrey, who released his
right to it by deed in the year 1380. Chaucer's father was probably a
man of some substance, the most usual personal recommendation to great
people in one of his class. For he was at least temporarily connected
with the Court, inasmuch as he attended King Edward III and Queen
Philippa on the memorable journey to Flanders and Germany, in the
course of which the English monarch was proclaimed Vicar of the Holy
Roman Empire on the left bank of the Rhine. John Chaucer died in 1366,
and in course of time his widow married another citizen and vintner.
Thomas Heyroun, John Chaucer's brother of the half-blood, was likewise
a member of the same trade; so that the young Geoffrey was certainly
not brought up in an atmosphere of abstinence. The "Host" of the
"Canterbury Tales," though he takes his name from an actual personage,
may therefore have in him touches of a family portrait; but Chaucer
himself nowhere displays any traces of a hereditary devotion to
Bacchus, and makes so experienced a practitioner as the "Pardoner" the
mouthpiece of as witty an invective against drunkenness as has been
uttered by any assailant of our existing licensing laws. Chaucer's own
practice as well as his opinion on this head is sufficiently expressed
in the characteristic words he puts into the mouth of Cressid:--
In every thing, I wot, there lies measure:
For though a man forbid all drunkenness,
He biddeth not that every creature
Be drinkless altogether, as I guess.
Of Geoffrey Chaucer we know nothing whatever from the day of his birth
(whenever it befell) to the year 1357. His earlier biographers, who
supposed him to have been born in 1328, had accordingly a fair field
open for conjecture and speculation. Here it must suffice to risk the
asseveration, that he cannot have accompanied his father to Cologne in
1338, and on that occasion have been first "taken notice of" by king
and queen, if he was not born till two or more years afterwards. If,
on the other hand, he was born in 1328, both events MAY have taken
place. On neither supposition is there any reason for believing that
he studied at one--or at both--of our English Universities. The poem
cannot be accepted as Chaucerian, the author of which (very possibly by
a mere dramatic assumption) declares:--
Philogenet I call'd am far and near,
Of Cambridge clerk;
nor can any weight be attached to the circumstance that the "Clerk,"
who is one of the most delightful figures among the Canterbury
Pilgrims, is an Oxonian. The enticing enquiry as to so WHICH of the
sister Universities may claim Chaucer as her own must, therefore, be
allowed to drop, together with the subsidiary question, whether
stronger evidence of local colouring is furnished by the "Miller's"
picture of the life of a poor scholar in lodgings at Oxford, or by the
"Reeve's" rival narrative of the results of a Trumpington walk taken by
two undergraduates of the "Soler Hall" at Cambridge. Equally baseless
is the supposition of one of Chaucer's earliest biographers, that he
completed his academical studies at Paris--and equally futile the
concomitant fiction that in France "he acquired much applause by his
literary exercises." Finally, we have the tradition that he was a
member of the Inner Temple--which is a conclusion deduced from a piece
of genial scandal as to a record having been seen in that Inn of a fine
imposed upon him for beating a friar in Fleet-street. This story was
early placed by Thynne on the horns of a sufficiently decisive dilemma:
in the days of Chaucer's youth, lawyers had not yet been admitted into
the Temple; and in the days of his maturity he is not very likely to
have been found engaged in battery in a London thoroughfare.
We now desert the region of groundless conjecture, in order with the
year 1357 to arrive at a firm though not very broad footing of facts.
In this year, "Geoffrey Chaucer" (whom it would be too great an effort
of scepticism to suppose to have been merely a namesake of the poet) is
mentioned in the Household Book of Elizabeth Countess of Ulster, wife
of Prince Lionel (third son of King Edward III, and afterwards Duke of
Clarence), as a recipient of certain articles of apparel. Two similar
notices of his name occur up to the year 1359. He is hence concluded
to have belonged to Prince Lionel's establishment as squire or page to
the Lady Elizabeth; and it was probably in the Prince's retinue that he
took part in the expedition of King Edward III into France, which began
at the close of the year 1359 with the ineffectual siege of Rheims, and
in the next year, after a futile attempt upon Paris, ended with the
compromise of the Peace of Bretigny. In the course of this campaign
Chaucer was taken prisoner; but he was released without much loss of
time, as appears by a document bearing date March 1st, 1360, in which
the king contributes the sum of 16 pounds for Chaucer's ransom. We may
therefore conclude that he missed the march upon Paris, and the
sufferings undergone by the English army on their road thence to
Chartres--the most exciting experiences of an inglorious campaign; and
that he was actually set free by the Peace. When, in the year 1367, we
next meet with his name in authentic records, his earliest known
patron, the Lady Elizabeth, is dead; and he has passed out of the
service of Prince Lionel into that of King Edward himself, as Valet of
whose Chamber or household he receives a yearly salary for life of
twenty marks, for his former and future services. Very possibly he had
quitted Prince Lionel's service when in 1361 that Prince had by reason
of his marriage with the heiress of Ulster been appointed to the Irish
government by his father, who was supposed at one time to have destined
him for the Scottish throne.
Concerning the doings of Chaucer in the interval between his liberation
from his French captivity and the first notice of him as Valet of the
King's Chamber we know nothing at all. During these years, however, no
less important a personal event than his marriage was by earlier
biographers supposed to have occurred. On the other hand, according to
the view which commends itself to several eminent living commentators
of the poet, it was not courtship and marriage, but a hopeless and
unrequited passion, which absorbed these years of his life. Certain
stanzas in which, as they think, he gave utterance to this passion are
by them ascribed to one of these years; so that if their view were
correct, the poem in question would have to be regarded as the earliest
of his extant productions. The problem which we have indicated must
detain us for a moment.
It is attested by documentary evidence, that in the year 1374, Chaucer
had a wife by name Philippa, who had been in the service of John of
Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, and of his Duchess (doubtless his second
wife, Constance), as well as in that of his mother the good Queen
Philippa, and who, on several occasions afterwards, besides special new
year's gifts of silver-gilt cups from the Duke, received her annual
pension of ten marks through her husband. It is likewise proved that,
in 1366, a pension of ten marks was granted to _a_ Philippa Chaucer,
one of the ladies of the Queen's Chamber. Obviously, it is a highly
probable assumption that these two Philippa Chaucers were one and the
same person; but in the absence of any direct proof it is impossible to
affirm as certain, or to deny as demonstrably untrue, that the Philippa
Chaucer of 1366 owed her surname to marriage. Yet the view was long
held, and is still maintained by writers of knowledge and insight, that
the Phillipa of 1366 was at that date Chaucer's wife. In or before
that year he married, it was said, Philippa Roet, daughter of Sir Paon
de Roet of Hainault, Guienne King of Arms, who came to England in Queen
Philippa's retinue in 1328. This tradition derived special
significance from the fact that another daughter of Sir Paon,
Katharine, widow of Sir Hugh Swynford, was successively governess,
mistress, and (third) wife to the Duke of Lancaster, to whose service
both Geoffrey and Philippa Chaucer were at one time attached. It was
apparently founded on the circumstance that Thomas Chaucer, the
supposed son of the poet, quartered the Roet arms with his own. But
unfortunately there is no evidence to show that Thomas Chaucer was a
son of Geoffrey; and the superstructure must needs vanish with its
basis. It being then no longer indispensable to assume Chaucer to have
been a married man in 1366, the Philippa Chaucer of that year MAY have
been only a namesake, and possibly a relative, of Geoffrey; for there
were other Chaucers in London besides him and his father (who died this
year), and one Chaucer at least has been found who was well-to-do
enough to have a Damsel of the Queen's Chamber for his daughter in
these certainly not very exclusive times.
There is accordingly no PROOF that Chaucer was a married man before
1374, when he is known to have received a pension for his own and his
wife's services. But with this negative result we are asked not to be
poor-spirited enough to rest content. At the opening of his "Book of
the Duchess," a poem certainly written towards the end of the year
1369, Chaucer makes use of certain expressions, both very pathetic and
very definite. The most obvious interpretation of the lines in
question seems to be that they contain the confession of a hopeless
passion, which has lasted for eight years--a confession which certainly
seems to come more appropriately and more naturally from an unmarried
than from a married man. "For eight years," he says, or seems to say,
"I have loved, and loved in vain--and yet my cure is never the nearer.
There is but one physician that can heal me--but all that is ended and
done with. Let us pass on into fresh fields; what cannot be obtained
must needs be left." It seems impossible to interpret this passage (too
long to cite in extenso) as a complaint of married life. Many other
poets have indeed complained of their married lives, and Chaucer (if
the view to be advanced below be correct) as emphatically as any. But
though such occasional exclamations of impatience or regret--more
especially when in a comic vein--may receive pardon, or even provoke
amusement, yet a serious and sustained poetic version of Sterne's "sum
multum fatigatus de uxore mea" would be unbearable in any writer of
self-respect, and wholly out of character in Chaucer. Even Byron only
indited elegies about his married life after his wife HAD LEFT HIM.
Now, among Chaucer's minor poems is preserved one called the "Complaint
of the Death of Pity," which purports to set forth "how pity is dead
and buried in a gentle heart," and, after testifying to a hopeless
passion, ends with the following declaration, addressed to Pity, as in
a "bill" or letter:--
This is to say: I will be yours for ever,
Though ye me slay by Cruelty, your foe;
Yet shall my spirit nevermore dissever
From your service, for any pain or woe,
Pity, whom I have sought so long ago!
Thus for your death I may well weep and plain,
With heart all sore, and full of busy pain.
If this poem be autobiographical, it would indisputably correspond well
enough to a period in Chaucer's life, and to a mood of mind preceding
those to which the introduction to the "Book of the Duchess" belongs.
If it be not autobiographical--and in truth there is nothing to prove
it such, so that an attempt has been actually made to suggest its
having been intended to apply to the experiences of another man--then
the "Complaint of Pity" has no special value for students of Chaucer,
since its poetic beauty, as there can be no harm in observing, is not
in itself very great.
To come to an end of this topic, there seems no possibility of escaping
from one of the following alternatives. EITHER the Philippa Chaucer of
1366 was Geoffrey Chaucer's wife, whether or not she was Philippa Roet
before marriage, and the lament of 1369 had reference to another
lady--an assumption to be regretted in the case of a married man, but
not out of the range of possibility. OR--and this seems on the whole
the most probable view--the Philippa Chaucer of 1366 was a namesake
whom Geoffrey married some time after 1369, possibly, (of course only
POSSIBLY,) the very lady whom he had loved hopelessly for eight years,
and persuaded himself that he had at last relinquished--and who had
then relented after all. This last conjecture it is certainly
difficult to reconcile with the conclusion at which we arrive on other
grounds, that Chaucer's married life was not one of preponderating
bliss. That he and his wife were COUSINS is a pleasing thought, but
one which is not made more pleasing by the seeming fact that, if they
were so related, marriage in their case failed to draw close that
hearts' bond which such kinship at times half unconsciously knits.
Married or still a bachelor, Chaucer may fairly be supposed, during
part of the years previous to that in which we find him securely
established in the king's service, to have enjoyed a measure of
independence and leisure open to few men in his rank of life, when once
the golden days of youth and early manhood have passed away. Such
years are in many men's lives marked by the projection, or even by the
partial accomplishment, of literary undertakings on a large scale, and
more especially of such as partake of an imitative character. When a
juvenile and facile writer's taste is still unsettled, and his own
style is as yet unformed, he eagerly tries his hand at the reproduction
of the work of others; translates the "Iliad" or "Faust," or suits
himself with unsuspecting promptitude to the production of masques, or
pastorals, or life dramas--or whatever may be the prevailing fashion in
poetry--after the manner of the favourite literary models of the day.
A priori, therefore, everything is in favour of the belief hitherto
universally entertained, that among Chaucer's earliest poetical
productions was the extant English translation of the French "Roman de
la Rose." That he made SOME translation of this poem is a fact resting
on his own statement in a passage indisputably written by him (in the
"Prologue" to the "Legend of Good Women"); nor is the value of this
statement reduced by the negative circumstance, that in the
extraordinary tag (if it may be called by so irreverent a name) to the
extant "Canterbury Tales," the "Romaunt of the Rose" is passed over in
silence, or at least not nominally mentioned, among the objectionable
works which the poet is there made to retract. And there seems at
least no necessity for giving in to the conclusion that Chaucer's
translation has been lost, and was not that which has been hitherto
accepted as his. For this conclusion is based upon the use of a formal
test, which in truth need not be regarded as of itself absolutely
decisive in any case, but which in this particular instance need not be
held applicable at all. A particular rule against rhyming with one
another particular sounds, which in his later poems Chaucer seems
invariably to have followed, need not have been observed by him in what
was actually, or all but, his earliest. The unfinished state of the
extant translation accords with the supposition that Chaucer broke it
off on adopting (possibly after conference with Gower, who likewise
observes the rule) a more logical practice as to the point in question.
Moreover, no English translation of this poem besides Chaucer's is ever
known to have existed.
Whither should the youthful poet, when in search of materials on which
to exercise a ready but as yet untrained hand, have so naturally turned
as to French poetry, and in its domain whither so eagerly as to its
universally acknowledged master-piece? French verse was the delight of
the Court, into the service of which he was about this time preparing
permanently to enter, and with which he had been more or less connected
from his boyhood. In French Chaucer's contemporary Gower composed not
only his first longer work, but not less than fifty ballads or sonnets,
and in French (as well as in English) Chaucer himself may have possibly
in his youth set his own 'prentice hand to the turning of "ballades,
rondels, virelayes." The time had not yet arrived, though it was not
far distant, when his English verse was to attest his admiration of
Machault, whose fame Froissart and Froissart's imitations had brought
across from the French Court to the English; and when Gransson, who
served King Richard II as a squire, was extolled by his English adapter
as the "flower of them that write in France." But as yet Chaucer's own
tastes, his French blood, if he had any in his veins, and the
familiarity with the French tongue which he had already had
opportunities of acquiring, were more likely to commend to him
productions of broader literary merits and a wider popularity. From
these points of view, in the days of Chaucer's youth, there was no
rival to the "Roman de la Rose," one of those rare works on which the
literary history of whole generations and centuries may be said to
hinge. The Middle Ages, in which from various causes the literary
intercommunication between the nations of Europe was in some respects
far livelier than it has been in later times, witnessed the appearance
of several such works--diverse in kind but similar to one another in
the universality of their popularity: "The Consolation of Philosophy,"
the "Divine Comedy," the "Imitation of Christ," the "Roman de la Rose,"
the "Ship of Fools." The favour enjoyed by the "Roman de la Rose," was
in some ways the most extraordinary of all. In France, this work
remained the dominant work of poetic literature, and "the source whence
every rhymer drew for his needs" down to the period of the classical
revival led by Ronsard (when it was edited by Clement Marot, Spenser's
early model). In England, it exercised an influence only inferior to
that which belonged to it at home upon both the matter and the form of
poetry down to the renascence begun by Surrey and Wyatt. This
extraordinary literary influence admits of a double explanation. But
just as the authorship of the poem was very unequally divided between
two personages, wholly divergent in their purposes as writers, so the
POPULARITY of the poem is probably in the main to be attributed to the
second and later of the pair.
To the trouvere Guillaume de Lorris (who took his name from a small
town in the valley of the Loire) was due the original conception of the
"Roman de la Rose," for which it is needless to suspect any extraneous
source. To novelty of subject he added great ingenuity of treatment.
Instead of narrative of warlike adventures he offered to his readers a
psychological romance, in which a combination of symbolisations and
personified abstractions supplied the characters of the moral conflict
represented. Bestiaries and Lapidaries had familiarised men's minds
with the art of finding a symbolical significance in particular animals
and stones; and the language of poets was becoming a language of
flowers. On the other hand, the personification of abstract qualities
was a usage largely affected by the Latin writers of the earlier Middle
Ages, and formed a favourite device of the monastic beginnings of the
Christian drama. For both these literary fashions, which mildly
exercised the ingenuity while deeply gratifying the tastes of mediaeval
readers, room was easily found by Guillaume de Lorris within a
framework in itself both appropriate and graceful. He told (as
reproduced by his English translator) how in a dream he seemed to
himself to wake up on a May morning. Sauntering forth, he came to a
garden surrounded by a wall, on which were depicted many unkindly
figures, such as Hate and Villainy, and Avarice and Old Age, and
another thing
That seemed like a hypocrite,
And it was cleped pope holy.
Within, all seemed so delicious that, feeling ready to give an hundred
pound for the chance of entering, he smote at a small wicket and was
admitted by a courteous maiden named Idleness. On the sward in the
garden were dancing its owner, Sir Mirth, and a company of friends; and
by the side of Gladness the dreamer saw the God of Love and his
attendant, a bachelor named Sweet-looking, who bore two bows, each with
five arrows. Of these bows the one was straight and fair, and the other
crooked and unsightly, and each of the arrows bore the name of some
quality or emotion by which love is advanced or hindered. And as the
dreamer was gazing into the spring of Narcissus (the imagination), he
beheld a rose-tree "charged full of roses," and, becoming enamoured of
one of them, eagerly advanced to pluck the object of his passion. In
the midst of this attempt he was struck by arrow upon arrow, shot
"wonder smart" by Love from the strong bow. The arrow called Company
completes the victory; the dreaming poet becomes the Lover ("L'Amant"),
and swears allegiance to the God of Love, who proceeds to instruct him
in his laws; and the real action (if it is to be called such) of the
poem begins. This consists in the Lover's desire to possess himself of
the Rosebud, the opposition offered to him by powers both good and
evil, and by Reason in particular, and the support which he receives
from more or less discursive friends. Clearly, the conduct of such a
scheme as this admits of being varied in many ways and protracted to
any length; but its first conception is easy and natural, and when it
was novel to boot, was neither commonplace nor ill-chosen.
After writing about one-fifth of the 22,000 verses of which the
original French poem consists, Guillaume de Lorris, who had executed
his part of the task in full sympathy with the spirit of the chivalry
of his times, died, and left the work to be continued by another
trouvere, Jean de Meung (so-called from the town, near Lorris, in which
he lived). "Hobbling John" took up the thread of his predecessor's
poem in the spirit of a wit and an encyclopaedist. Indeed, the latter
appellation suits him in both its special and its general sense.
Beginning with a long dialogue between Reason and the Lover, he was
equally anxious to display his freedom of criticism and his
universality of knowledge, both scientific and anecdotical. His vein
was pre-eminently satirical and abundantly allusive; and among the
chief objects of his satire are the two favourite themes of medieval
satire in general, religious hypocrisy (personified in "Faux-Semblant,"
who has been described as one of the ancestors of "Tartuffe"), and the
foibles of women. To the gross salt of Jean de Meung, even more than
to the courtly perfume of Guillaume de Lorris, may be ascribed the
long-lived popularity of the "Roman de la Rose"; and thus a work, of
which already the theme and first conception imply a great step
forwards from the previous range of mediaeval poetry, became a
favourite with all classes by reason of the piquancy of its flavour,
and the quotable applicability of many of its passages. Out of a
chivalrous allegory Jean de Meung had made a popular satire; and though
in its completed form it could look for no welcome in many a court or
castle,--though Petrarch despised it, and Gerson in the name of the
Church recorded a protest against it,--and though a bevy of offended
ladies had well-nigh taken the law into their own hands against its
author,--yet it commanded a vast public of admirers. And against such
a popularity even an offended clergy, though aided by the sneers of the
fastidious and the vehemence of the fair, is wont to contend in vain.
Chaucer's translation of this poem is thought to have been the cause
which called forth from Eustace Deschamps, Machault's pupil and nephew,
the complimentary ballade in the refrain of which the Englishman is
saluted as
Grant translateur, noble Gelfroi Chaucier.
But whether or not such was the case, his version of the "Roman de la
Rose" seems, on the whole, to be a translation properly so
called--although, considering the great number of MSS. existing of the
French original, it would probably be no easy task to verify the
assertion that in one or the other of these are to be found the few
passages thought to have been interpolated by Chaucer. On the other
hand, his omissions are extensive; indeed, the whole of his translation
amounts to little more than one-third of the French original. It is
all the more noteworthy that Chaucer reproduces only about one-half of
the part contributed by Jean de Meung, and again condenses this half to
one-third of its length. In general, he has preserved the French names
of localities, and even occasionally helps himself to a rhyme by
retaining a French word. Occasionally he shows a certain timidity as a
translator, speaking of "the tree which in France men call a pine," and
pointing out, so that there may be no mistake, that mermaidens are
called it "sereyns" (sirenes) in France. On the other hand, his
natural vivacity now and then suggests to him a turn of phrase or an
illustration of his own. As a loyal English courtier he cannot compare
a fair bachelor to any one so aptly as to "the lord's son of Windsor;"
and as writing not far from the time when the Statute of Kilkenny was
passed, he cannot lose the opportunity of inventing an Irish parentage
for Wicked-Tongue:
So full of cursed rage
It well agreed with his lineage;
For him an Irishwoman bare.
The debt which Chaucer in his later works owed to the "Roman of the
Rose" was considerable, and by no means confined to the favourite
May-morning exordium and the recurring machinery of a vision--to the
origin of which latter (the dream of Scipio related by Cicero and
expounded in the widely-read Commentary of Macrobius) the opening lines
of the "Romaunt" point. He owes to the French poem both the germs of
felicitous phrases, such as the famous designation of Nature as "the
Vicar of the almighty Lord," and perhaps touches used by him in
passages like that in which he afterwards, with further aid from other
sources, drew the character of a true gentleman. But the main service
which the work of this translation rendered to him was the opportunity
which it offered of practising and perfecting a ready and happy choice
of words,--a service in which, perhaps, lies the chief use of all
translation, considered as an exercise of style. How far he had
already advanced in this respect, and how lightly our language was
already moulding itself in his hands, may be seen from several passages
in the poem; for instance, from that about the middle, where the old
and new theme of self-contradictoriness of love is treated in endless
variations. In short, Chaucer executed his task with facility, and
frequently with grace, though for one reason or another he grew tired
of it before he had carried it out with completeness. Yet the
translation (and this may have been among the causes why he seems to
have wearied of it) has notwithstanding a certain air of schoolwork;
and though Chaucer's next poem, to which incontestable evidence assigns
the date of the year 1369, is still very far from being wholly
original, yet the step is great from the "Romaunt of the Rose" to the
"Book of the Duchess."
Among the passages of the French "Roman de la Rose" omitted in
Chaucer's translation are some containing critical reflexions on the
character of kings and constituted authorities--a species of
observations which kings and constituted authorities have never been
notorious for loving. This circumstance, together with the reference
to Windsor quoted above, suggests the probability that Chaucer's
connexion with the Court had not been interrupted, or had been renewed,
or was on the eve of renewing itself, at the time when he wrote this
translation. In becoming a courtier, he was certainly placed within
the reach of social opportunities such as in his day he could nowhere
else have enjoyed. In England as well as in Italy during the
fourteenth and the two following centuries; as the frequent recurrence
of the notion attests, the "good" courtier seemed the perfection of the
idea of gentleman. At the same time exaggerated conceptions of the
courtly breeding of Chaucer's and Froissart's age may very easily be
formed; and it is almost amusing to contrast with Chaucer's generally
liberal notions of manners, severe views of etiquette like that
introduced by him at the close of the "Man of Law's Tale," where he
stigmatizes as a solecism the statement of the author from whom he
copied his narrative, that King Aella sent his little boy to invite the
emperor to dinner. "It is best to deem he went himself."
The position which in June, 1367, we find Chaucer holding at Court is
that of "Valettus" to the King, or, as a later document of May, 1368,
has it, of "Valettus Camerae Regis"--Valet or Yeoman of the King's
Chamber. Posts of this kind, which involved the ordinary functions of
personal attendance--the making of beds, the holding of torches, the
laying of tables, the going on messages, etc.--were usually bestowed
upon young men of good family. In due course of time a royal valet
usually rose to the higher post of royal squire--either "of the
household" generally, or of a more special kind. Chaucer appears in
1368 as an "esquire of less degree," his name standing seventeenth in a
list of seven-and-thirty. After the year 1373 he is never mentioned by
the lower, but several times by Latin equivalents of the higher, title.
Frequent entries occur of the pension or salary of twenty marks granted
to him for life; and, as will be seen, he soon began to be employed on
missions abroad. He had thus become a regular member of the royal
establishment, within the sphere of which we must suppose the
associations of the next years of his life to have been confined. They
belonged to a period of peculiar significance both for the English
people and for the Plantagenet dynasty, whose glittering exploits
reflected so much transitory glory on the national arms. At home,
these years were the brief interval between two of the chief
visitations of the Black Death (1361 and 1369), and a few years earlier
the poet of the "Vision" had given voice to the sufferings of the poor.
It was not, however, the mothers of the people crying for their
children whom the courtly singer remembered in his elegy written in the
year 1369; the woe to which he gave a poetic expression was that of a
princely widower temporarily inconsolable for the loss of his first
wife. In 1367 the Black Prince was conquering Castile (to be lost
again before the year was out) for that interesting protege of the
Plantagenets and representative of legitimate right, Don Pedro the
Cruel, whose daughter the inconsolable widower was to espouse in 1372,
and whose "tragic" downfall Chaucer afterwards duly lamented in his
"Monk's Tale":--
O noble, O worthy Pedro, glory of Spain,
Whom fortune held so high in majesty!
As yet the star of the valiant Prince of Wales had not been quenched in
the sickness which was the harbinger of death; and his younger brother,
John of Gaunt, though already known for his bravery in the field (he
commanded the reinforcements sent to Spain in 1367), had scarcely begun
to play the prominent part in politics which he was afterwards to fill.
But his day was at hand, and the anti-clerical tenour of the
legislation and of the administrative changes of these years was in
entire harmony with the policy of which he was to constitute himself
the representative. 1365 is the year of the Statute of Provisors, and
1371 that of the dismissal of William of Wykeham.
John of Gaunt was born in 1340, and was, therefore, probably of much
the same age as Chaucer, and like him now in the prime of life.
Nothing could accordingly be more natural than that a more or less
intimate relation should have formed itself between them. This
relation, there is reason to believe, afterwards ripened on Chaucer's
part into one of distinct political partisanship, of which there could
as yet (for the reason given above) hardly be a question. There was,
however, so far as we know, nothing in Chaucer's tastes and tendencies
to render it antecedently unlikely that he should have been ready to
follow the fortunes of a prince who entered the political arena as an
adversary of clerical predominance. Had Chaucer been a friend of it in
principle, he would hardly have devoted his first efforts as a writer
to the translation of the "Roman de la Rose." In so far, therefore,
and in truth it is not very far, as John of Gaunt may be afterwards
said to have been a Wycliffite, the same description might probably be
applied to Chaucer. With such sentiments a personal orthodoxy was
fully reconcileable in both patron and follower; and the so-called
"Chaucer's A. B. C.," a version of a prayer to the Virgin in a French
poetical "Pilgrimage," might with equal probability have been put
together by him either early or late in the course of his life. There
was, however, a tradition, repeated by Speght, that this piece was
composed "at the request of Blanche, Duchess of Lancaster, as a prayer
for her private use, being a woman in her religion very devout." If so,
it must have been written before the Duchess's death, which occurred in
1369; and we may imagine it, if we please, with its twenty-three
initial letters blazoned in red and blue and gold on a flyleaf inserted
in the Book of the pious Duchess,--herself, in the fervent language of
the poem, an illuminated calendar, as being lighted in this world with
the Virgin's holy name.
In the autumn of 1369, then, the Duchess Blanche died an early death;
and it is pleasing to know that John of Gaunt, to whom his marriage
with her had brought wealth and a dukedom, ordered services, in pious
remembrance of her, to be held at her grave. The elaborate elegy
which--very possibly at the widowed Duke's request--was composed by
Chaucer, leaves no doubt as to the identity of the lady whose loss it
deplores:--
--Goode faire "White" she hight;
Thus was my lady named right;
For she was both fair and bright.
But, in accordance with the taste of his age, which shunned such sheer
straightforwardness in poetry, the "Book of the Duchess" contains no
further transparent reference to the actual circumstances of the wedded
life which had come to so premature an end--for John of Gaunt had
married Blanche of Lancaster in 1359;--and an elaborate framework is
constructed round the essential theme of the poem. Already, however,
the instinct of Chaucer's own poetic genius had taught him the value of
personal directness; and, artificially as the course of the poem is
arranged, it begins in the most artless and effective fashion with an
account given by the poet of his own sleeplessness and its cause
already referred to--an opening so felicitous that it was afterwards
imitated by Froissart. And so, Chaucer continues, as he could not
sleep, to drive the night away he sat upright in his bed reading a
"romance," which he thought better entertainment than chess or
draughts. The book which he read was the "Metamorphoses" of Ovid; and
in it he chanced on the tale of Ceyx and Alcyone--the lovers whom, on
their premature death, the compassion of Juno changed into the seabirds
that bring good luck to mariners. Of this story (whether Chaucer
derived it direct from Ovid, or from Machault's French version is
disputed), the earlier part serves as the introduction to the poem.
The story breaks off--with the dramatic abruptness in which Chaucer is
a master, and which so often distinguishes his versions from their
originals--at the death of Alcyone, caused by her grief at the tidings
brought by Morpheus of her husband's death. Thus subtly the god of
sleep and the death of a loving wife mingle their images in the poet's
mind; and with these upon him he falls asleep "right upon his book."
What more natural, after this, than the dream which came to him? It
was May, and he lay in his bed at morning-time, having been awakened
out of his slumbers by the "small fowls," who were carolling forth
their notes--"some high, some low, and all of one accord." The birds
singing their matins around the poet, and the sun shining brightly
through his windows stained with many a figure of poetic legend, and
upon the walls painted in fine colours "both text and gloss, and all
the Romaunt of the Rose"--is not this a picture of Chaucer by his own
hand, on which, one may love to dwell? And just as the poem has begun
with a touch of nature, and at the beginning of its main action has
returned to nature, so through the whole of its course it maintains the
same tone. The sleeper awakened--still of course in his dream--hears
the sound of the horn, and the noise of huntsmen preparing for the
chase. He rises, saddles his horse, and follows to the forest, where
the Emperor Octavian (a favourite character of Carolingian legend, and
pleasantly revived under this aspect by the modern romanticist, Ludwig
Tieck--in Chaucer's poem probably a flattering allegory for the King)
is holding his hunt. The deer having been started, the poet is
watching the course of the hunt, when he is approached by a dog, which
leads him to a solitary spot in a thicket among mighty trees; and here
of a sudden he comes upon a man in black, sitting silently by the side
of a huge oak. How simple and how charming is the device of the
faithful dog acting as a guide into the mournful solitude of the
faithful man! For the knight whom the poet finds thus silent and
alone, is rehearsing to himself a lay, "a manner song," in these
words:--
I have of sorrow so great wone,
That joye get I never none,
Now that I see my lady bright,
Which I have loved with all my might,
Is from me dead, and is agone.
Alas! Death, what aileth thee
That thou should'st not have taken me,
When that thou took'st my lady sweet?
That was so fair, so fresh, so free,
So goode, that men may well see
Of all goodness she had no meet.
Seeing the knight overcome by his grief, and on the point of fainting,
the poet accosts him, and courteously demands his pardon for the
intrusion. Thereupon the disconsolate mourner, touched by this token of
sympathy, breaks out into the tale of his sorrow which forms the real
subject of the poem. It is a lament for the loss of a wife who was
hard to gain (the historical basis of this is unknown, but great
heiresses are usually hard to gain for cadets even of royal houses),
and whom, alas! her husband was to lose so soon after he had gained
her. Nothing could be simpler, and nothing could be more delightful
than the Black Knight's description of his lost lady as she was at the
time when he wooed and almost despaired of winning her. Many of the
touches in this description--and among them some of the very
happiest--are, it is true, borrowed from the courtly Machault; but
nowhere has Chaucer been happier, both in his appropriations and in the
way in which he has really converted them into beauties of his own,
than in this, perhaps the most lifelike picture of maidenhood in the
whole range of our literature. Or is not the following the portrait of
an English girl, all life and all innocence--a type not belonging, like
its opposite, to any "period" in particular--?
I saw her dance so comelily,
Carol and sing so sweetely,
And laugh, and play so womanly,
And looke so debonairly,
So goodly speak and so friendly,
That, certes, I trow that nevermore
Was seen so blissful a treasure.
For every hair upon her head,
Sooth to say, it was not red,
Nor yellow neither, nor brown it was,
Methought most like gold it was.
And ah! what eyes my lady had,
Debonair, goode, glad and sad,
Simple, of good size, not too wide.
Thereto her look was not aside.
Nor overthwart;
but so well set that, whoever beheld her was drawn and taken up by it,
every part of him. Her eyes seemed every now and then as if she were
inclined to be merciful, such was the delusion of fools: a delusion in
very truth, for
It was no counterfeited thing;
It was her owne pure looking;
So the goddess, dame Nature,
Had made them open by measure
And close; for were she never so glad,
Not foolishly her looks were spread,
Nor wildely, though that she play'd;
But ever, methought, her eyen said:
"By God, my wrath is all forgiven."
And at the same time she liked to live so happily that dulness was
afraid of her; she was neither too "sober" nor too glad; in short, no
creature had over more measure in all things. Such was the lady whom
the knight had won for himself, and whose virtues he cannot weary of
rehearsing to himself or to a sympathising auditor.
"Sir!" quoth I, "where is she now?"
"Now?" quoth he, and stopped anon;
Therewith he waxed as dead as stone,
And said: "Alas that I was bore!
That was the loss! and heretofore
I told to thee what I had lost.
Bethink thee what I said. Thou know'st
In sooth full little what thou meanest:
I have lost more than thou weenest.
God wot, alas! right that was she."
"Alas, sir, how? what may that be?
"She is dead." "Nay?" "Yes, by my truth!"
Is that your loss? by God, it is ruth."
And with that word, the hunt breaking up, the knight and the poet
depart to a "long castle with white walls on a rich hill" (Richmond?),
where a bell tolls and awakens the poet from his slumbers, to let him
find himself lying in his bed, and the book with its legend of love and
sleep resting in his hand. One hardly knows at whom more to
wonder--whether at the distinguished French scholar who sees so many
trees that he cannot see a forest, and who, not content with declaring
the "Book of the Duchess," as a whole as well as in its details, a
servile imitation of Machault, pronounces it at the same time one of
Chaucer's feeblest productions; or at the equally eminent English
scholar who, with a flippancy which for once ceases to be amusing,
opines that Chaucer ought to "have felt ashamed of himself for this
most lame and impotent conclusion" of a poem "full of beauties," and
ought to have been "caned for it!" Not only was this "lame and
impotent conclusion" imitated by Spenser in his lovely elegy,
"Daphnaida" (I have been anticipated in pointing out this fact by the
author of the biographical essay on "Spenser" in this series--an essay
to which I cannot help taking this opportunity of offering a tribute of
sincere admiration. It may not be an undesigned coincidence that the
inconsolable widower of the "Daphnaida" is named Alcyon, while
Chaucer's poem begins with a reference to the myth of Ceyx and Alcyone.
Sir Arthur Gorges re-appears in Alcyon in "Colin Clout's come home
again."); but it is the first passage in Chaucer's writings revealing,
one would have thought unmistakeably, the dramatic power which was
among his most characteristic gifts. The charm of this poem,
notwithstanding all the artificialities with which it is overlaid, lies
in its simplicity and truth to nature. A real human being is here
brought before us instead of a vague abstraction; and the glow of life
is on the page, though it has to tell of death and mourning. Chaucer
is finding his strength by dipping into the true spring of poetic
inspiration; and in his dreams he is awaking to the real capabilities
of his genius. Though he is still uncertain of himself and dependent
on others, it seems not too much to say that already in this "Book of
the Duchess" he is in some measure an original poet.
How unconscious, at the same time, this waking must have been is
manifest from what little is known concerning the course of both his
personal and his literary life during the next few years. But there is
a tide in the lives of poets, as in those of other men, on the use or
neglect of which their future seems largely to depend. For more
reasons than one Chaucer may have been rejoiced to be employed on the
two missions abroad, which apparently formed his chief occupation
during the years 1370-1373. In the first place, the love of books,
which he so frequently confesses, must in him have been united to a
love of seeing men and cities; few are observers of character without
taking pleasure in observing it. Of his literary labours he probably
took little thought during these years; although the visit which in the
course of them he paid to Italy may be truly said to have constituted
the turning-point in his literary life. No work of his can be ascribed
to this period with certainty; none of importance has ever been
ascribed to it.
On the latter of these missions Chaucer, who left England in the winter
of 1372, visited Genoa and Florence. His object at the former city was
to negotiate concerning the settlement of a Genoese mercantile factory
in one of our ports, for in this century there already existed between
Genoa and England a commercial intercourse, which is illustrated by the
obvious etymology of the popular term "jane" occurring in Chaucer in
the sense of any small coin. ("A jane" is in the "Clerk's Tale" said
to be a sufficient value at which to estimate the "stormy people") It
has been supposed that on this journey he met at Padua Petrarch, whose
residence was near by at Arqua. The statement of the "Clerk" in the
"Canterbury Tales" that he learnt the story of patient Griseldis "at
Padua of a worthy clerk...now dead," who was called "Francis Petrarch,
the laureate poet," may of course merely imply that Chaucer borrowed
the "Clerk's Tale" from Petrarch's Latin version of the original by
Boccaccio. But the meeting which the expression suggests may have
actually taken place, and may have been accompanied by the most
suitable conversation which the imagination can supply; while, on the
other hand, it is a conjecture unsupported by any evidence whatever,
that a previous meeting between the pair had occurred at Milan in 1368,
when Lionel Duke of Clarence was married to his second wife with great
pomp in the presence of Petrarch and of Froissart. The really
noteworthy point is this: that while neither (as a matter of course)
the translated "Romaunt of the Rose," nor the "Book of the Duchess"
exhibits any traces of Italian influence, the same assertion cannot
safely be made with regard to any important poem produced by Chaucer
after the date of this Italian journey. The literature of Italy which
was--and in the first instance through Chaucer himself--to exercise so
powerful an influence upon the progress of our own, was at last opened
to him, though in what measure, and by what gradations, must remain
undecided. Before him lay both the tragedies and the comedies, as he
would have called them, of the learned and brilliant Boccaccio--both
his epic poems and that inexhaustible treasure-house of stories which
Petrarch praised for its pious and grave contents, albeit they were
mingled with others of undeniable jocoseness--the immortal
"Decamerone." He could examine the refined gold of Petrarch's own
verse with its exquisite variations of its favourite pure theme and its
adequate treatment of other elevated subjects; and he might gaze down
the long vista of pictured reminiscences, grand and sombre, called up
by the mightiest Muse of the Middle Ages, the Muse of Dante. Chaucer's
genius, it may said at once was not TRANSFORMED by its contact with
Italian literature; for a conscious desire as well as a conscientious
effort is needed for bringing about such a transformation; and to
compare the results of his first Italian journey with those of Goethe's
pilgrimage across the Alps, for instance, would be palpably absurd. It
might even be doubted whether for the themes which he was afterwards
likely to choose, and actually did choose, for poetic treatment the
materials at his command in French (and English) poetry and prose would
not have sufficed him. As it was, it seems probable that he took many
things from Italian literature; it is certain that he learnt much from
it. There seems every reason to conclude that the influence of Italian
study upon Chaucer made him more assiduous as well as more careful in
the employment of his poetic powers--more hopeful at once, if one may
so say, and more assured of himself.
Meanwhile, soon after his return from his second foreign mission, he
was enabled to begin a more settled life at home. He had acquitted
himself to the satisfaction of the Crown, as is shown by the grant for
life of a daily pitcher of wine, made to him on April 23rd, 1374, the
merry day of the Feast of St. George. It would of course be a mistake
to conclude, from any seeming analogies of later times, that this
grant, which was received by Chaucer in money-value, and which seems
finally to have been commuted for an annual payment of twenty marks,
betokened on the part of the King a spirit of patronage appropriate to
the claims of literary leisure. How remote such a notion was from the
minds of Chaucer's employers is proved by the terms of the patent by
which, in the month of June following, he was appointed Comptroller of
the Customs and Subsidy of wools, skins, and tanned hides in the port
of London. This patent (doubtless according to the usual official
form) required him to write the rolls of his office with his own hand,
to be continually present there, and to perform his duties in person
and not by deputy. By a warrant of the same month Chaucer was granted
the pension of 10 pounds for life already mentioned, for services
rendered by him and his wife to the Duke and Duchess of Lancaster and
to the Queen; by two successive grants of the year 1375 he received
further pecuniary gratifications of a more or less temporary nature;
and he continued to receive his pension and allowance for robes as one
of the royal esquires. We may therefore conceive of him as now
established in a comfortable as well as seemingly secure position. His
regular work as comptroller (of which a few scattered documentary
vestiges are preserved) scarcely offers more points for the imagination
to exercise itself upon than Burns's excisemanship or Wordsworth's
collectorship of stamps (It is a curious circumstance that Dryden
should have received as a reward for his political services as a
satirist, an office almost identical with Chaucer's. But he held it
for little more than a year.), though doubtless it must have brought
him into constant contact with merchants and with shipmen, and may have
suggested to him many a broad descriptive touch. On the other hand, it
is not necessary to be a poet to feel something of that ineffable ennui
of official life, which even the self-compensatory practice of arriving
late at one's desk, but departing from it early, can only abate, but
not take away. The passage has been often quoted in which Chaucer half
implies a feeling of the kind, and tells how he sought recreation from
what Charles Lamb would have called his "works" at the Custom House in
the reading, as we know he did in the writing, of other books:--
--when thy labour done all is,
And hast y-made reckonings,
Instead of rest and newe things
Thou go'st home to thine house anon,
And there as dumb as any stone
Thou sittest at another book.
The house at home was doubtless that in Aldgate, of which the lease to
Chaucer, bearing date May, 1374, has been discovered; and to this we
may fancy Chaucer walking morning and evening from the riverside, past
the Postern Gate by the Tower. Already, however, in 1376, the routine
of his occupations appears to have been interrupted by his engagement
on some secret service under Sir John Burley; and in the following
year, and in 1378, he was repeatedly abroad in the service of the
Crown. On one of his journeys in the last-named year he was attached
in a subordinate capacity to the embassy sent to negotiate for the
marriage with the French King Charles V's daughter Mary to the young
King Richard II, who had succeeded to his grandfather in 1377,--one of
those matrimonial missions which, in the days of both Plantagenets and
Tudors, formed so large a part of the functions of European diplomacy,
and which not unfrequently, as in this case at least ultimately, came
to nothing. A later journey in May of the same year took Chaucer once
more to Italy, whither he had been sent with Sir Edward Berkeley to
treat with Bernardo Visconti, joint lord of Milan, and "scourge of
Lombardy," and Sir John Hawkwood--the former of whom finds a place in
that brief mirror of magistrates, the "Monk's Tale." It was on this
occasion that of the two persons whom, according to custom, Chaucer
appointed to appear for him in the Courts during his absence, one was
John Gower, whose name as that of the second poet of his age is
indissolubly linked with Chaucer's own.
So far, the new reign, which had opened amidst doubts and difficulties
for the country, had to the faithful servant of the dynasty brought an
increase of royal goodwill. In 1381--after the suppression of the
great rebellion of the villeins--King Richard II had married the
princess whose name for a season linked together the history of two
countries the destinies of which had before that age, as they have
since, lain far asunder. Yet both Bohemia and England, besides the
nations which received from the former the impulses communicated to it
by the latter, have reason to remember Queen Anne the learned and the
good; since to her was probably due in the first instance the
intellectual intercourse between her native and her adopted country.
There seems every reason to believe that it was the approach of this
marriage which Chaucer celebrated in one of the brightest and most
jocund marriage-poems ever composed by a laureate's hand; and if this
was so, he cannot but have augmented the favour with which he was
regarded at Court. When, therefore, by May, 1382, his foreign journeys
had come to an end, we do not wonder to find that, without being called
upon to relinquish his former office, he was appointed in addition to
the Comptrollership of the Petty Customs in the Port of London, of
which post he was allowed to execute the duties by deputy. In
November, 1384, he received permission to absent himself from his old
comptrollership for a month, and in February, 1385, was allowed to
appoint a (permanent) deputy for this office also. During the month of
October, 1386, he sat in Parliament at Westminster as one of the
Knights of the Shire for Kent, where we may consequently assume him to
have possessed landed property. His fortunes, therefore, at this
period had clearly risen to their height; and naturally enough his
commentators are anxious to assign to these years the sunniest, as well
as some of the most elaborate, of his literary productions. It is
altogether probable that the amount of leisure now at Chaucer's command
enabled him to carry into execution some of the works for which he had
gathered materials abroad and at home, and to prepare others. Inasmuch
as it contains the passage cited above, referring to Chaucer's official
employment, his poem called the "House of Fame" must have been written
between 1374 and 1386 (when Chaucer quitted office), and probably is to
be dated near the latter year. Inasmuch as both this poem and "Troilus
and Cressid" are mentioned in the Prologue to the "Legend of Good
Women," they must have been written earlier than it; and the dedication
of "Troilus" to Gower and Strode very well agrees with the relations
known to have existed about this time between Chaucer and his
brother-poet. Very probably all these three works may have been put
forth, in more or less rapid succession, during this fortunate season
of Chaucer's life.
A fortunate season--for in it the prince who, from whatever cause, was
indisputably the patron of Chaucer and his wife, had, notwithstanding
his unpopularity among the lower orders, and the deep suspicion
fostered by hostile whisperings against him in his royal nephew's
breast, still contrived to hold the first place by the throne. Though
serious danger had already existed of a conflict between the King and
his uncle, yet John of Gaunt and his Duchess Constance had been
graciously dismissed with a royal gift of golden crowns, when in July,
1386, he took his departure for the continent, to busy himself till his
return home in November, 1389, with the affairs of Castile, and with
claims arising out of his disbursements there. The reasons for
Chaucer's attachment to this particular patron are probably not far to
seek; on the precise nature of the relation between them it is useless
to speculate. Before Wyclif's death in 1384, John of Gaunt had openly
dissociated himself from the reformer; and whatever may have been the
case in his later years, it was certainly not as a follower of his old
patron that at this date Chaucer could have been considered a
Wycliffite.
Again, this period of Chaucer's life may be called fortunate, because
during it he seems to have enjoyed the only congenial friendships of
which any notice remains to us, The poem of "Troilus and Cressid" is,
as was just noted, dedicated to "the moral Gower and the philosophical
Strode." Ralph Strode was a Dominican of Jedburgh Abbey, a travelled
scholar, whose journeys had carried him as far as the Holy Land, and
who was celebrated as a poet in both the Latin and the English tongue,
and as a theologian and philosopher. In connexion with speculations
concerning Chaucer's relations to Wycliffism it is worth noting that
Strode, who after his return to England was appointed to superintend
several new monasteries, was the author of a series of controversial
arguments against Wyclif. The tradition, according to which he taught
one of Chaucer's sons, is untrustworthy. Of John Gower's life little
more is known than of Chaucer's; he appears to have been a Suffolk man,
holding manors in that county as well as in Essex, but occasionally to
have resided in Kent. At the period of which we are speaking, he may
be supposed, besides his French productions, to have already published
his Latin "Vox Clamantis"--a poem which, beginning with an allegorical
narrative of Wat Tyler's rebellion, passes on to a series of reflexions
on the causes of the movement, conceived in a spirit of indignation
against the corruptions of the Church, but not of sympathy with
Wycliffism. This is no doubt the poem which obtained for Gower the
epithet "moral" (i.e. sententious) applied to him by Chaucer, and
afterwards by Dunbar, Hawes, and Shakspere. Gower's "Vox Clamantis" and
other Latin poems (including one "against the astuteness of the Evil
One in the matter of Lollardry") are forgotten; but his English
"Confessio Amantis" has retained its right to a place of honour in the
history of our literature. The most interesting part of this poem, its
"Prologue," has already been cited as of value for our knowledge of the
political and social condition of its times. It gives expression to a
conservative tone and temper of mind; and like many conservative minds,
Gower's had adopted, or affected to adopt, the conviction that the
world was coming to an end. The cause of the anticipated catastrophe
he found in the division, or absence of concord and love, manifest in
the condition of things around. The intensity of strife visible among
the conflicting elements of which the world, like the individual human
being, is composed, too clearly announced the imminent end of all
things. Would that a new Arion might arise to make peace where now is
hate; but, alas! the prevailing confusion is such that God alone may
set it right. But the poem which follows cannot be said to sustain the
interest excited by this introduction. Its machinery was obviously
suggested by that of the "Roman de la Rose," though, as Warton has
happily phrased it, Gower, after a fashion of his own, blends Ovid's
"Art of Love" with the Breviary. The poet, wandering about in a
forest, while suffering under the smart of Cupid's dart, meets Venus,
the Goddess of Love, who urges him, as one upon the point of death, to
make his full confession to her clerk or priest, the holy father
Genius. This confession hereupon takes place by means of question and
answer; both penitent and confessor entering at great length into an
examination of the various sins and weaknesses of human nature, and of
their remedies, and illustrating their observations by narratives,
brief or elaborate, from Holy Writ, sacred legend, ancient history, and
romantic story. Thus Gower's book, as he says at its close, stands
"between earnest and game," and might be fairly described as a "Romaunt
of the Rose," without either the descriptive grace of Guillaume de
Lorris, or the wicked wit of Jean de Meung, but full of learning and
matter, and written by an author certainly not devoid of the art of
telling stories. The mind of this author was thoroughly didactic in
its bent; for the beauty of nature he has no real feeling, and though
his poem, like so many of Chaucer's, begins in the month of May, he is
(unnecessarily) careful to tell us that his object in going forth was
not to "sing with the birds." He could not, like Chaucer, transfuse
old things into new, but there is enough in his character as a poet to
explain the friendship between the pair, of which we hear at the very
time when Gower was probably preparing his "Confessio Amantis" for
publication.
They are said afterwards to have become enemies; but in the absence of
any real evidence to that effect we cannot believe Chaucer to have been
likely to quarrel with one whom he had certainly both trusted and
admired. Nor had literary life in England already advanced to a stage
of development of which, as in the Elizabethan and Augustan ages,
literary jealousy was an indispensable accompaniment. Chaucer is
supposed to have attacked Gower in a passage of the "Canterbury Tales,"
where he incidentally declares his dislike (in itself extremely
commendable) of a particular kind of sensational stories, instancing
the subject of one of the numerous tales in the "Confessio Amantis."
There is, however, no reason whatever for supposing Chaucer to have
here intended a reflection on his brother poet, more especially as the
"Man of Law," after uttering the censure, relates, though probably not
from Gower, a story on a subject of a different kind likewise treated
by him. It is scarcely more suspicious that when Gower, in a second
edition of his chief work, dedicated in 1393 to Henry, Earl of Derby
(afterwards Henry IV), judiciously omitted the exordium and altered the
close of the first edition, both of which were complimentary to Richard
II, he left out, together with its surrounding context, a passage
conveying a friendly challenge to Chaucer as a "disciple and poet of
the God of Love."
In any case there could have been no political difference between them,
for Chaucer was at all times in favour with the House of Lancaster,
towards whose future head Gower so early contrived to assume a correct
attitude. To him--a man of substance, with landed property in three
counties--the rays of immediate court-favour were probably of less
importance than to Chaucer; but it is not necessity only which makes
courtiers of so many of us: some are born to the vocation, and Gower
strikes one as naturally more prudent and cautious--in short, more of a
politic personage--than Chaucer. He survived him eight years--a blind
invalid, in whose mind at least we may hope nothing dimmed or blurred
the recollection of a friend to whom he owes much of his fame.
In a still nearer relationship,--on which the works of Chaucer that may
certainly or probably be assigned to this period throw some light,--it
seems impossible to describe him as having been fortunate. Whatever
may have been the date and circumstances of his marriage, it seems, at
all events in its later years, not to have been a happy one. The
allusions to Chaucer's personal experience of married life in both
"Troilus And Cressid" and the "House of Fame" are not of a kind to be
entirely explicable by that tendency to make a mock of women and of
marriage, which has frequently been characteristic of satirists, and
which was specially popular in an age cherishing the wit of Jean de
Meung, and complacently corroborating its theories from naughty Latin
fables, French fabliaux, and Italian novelle. Both in "Troilus And
Cressid" and in the "House of Fame" the poet's tone, when he refers to
himself, is generally dolorous; but while both poems contain
unmistakeable references to the joylessness of his own married life, in
the latter he speaks of himself as "suffering debonairly,"--or, as we
should say, putting a good face upon--a state "desperate of all bliss."
And it is a melancholy though half sarcastic glimpse into his domestic
privacy which he incidentally, and it must be allowed rather
unnecessarily, gives in the following passage of the same poem:--
"Awake!" to me he said,
In voice and tone the very same
THAT USETH ONE WHO I COULD NAME;
And with that voice, sooth to say(n)
My mind returned to me again;
For it was goodly said to me;
So was it never wont to be.
In other words, the kindness of the voice reassured him that it was NOT
the same as that which he was wont to hear close to his pillow! Again,
the entire tone of the Prologue to the "Legend of Good Women" is not
that of a happy lover; although it would be pleasant enough,
considering that the lady who imposes on the poet the penalty of
celebrating GOOD women is Alcestis, the type of faithful wifehood, to
interpret the poem as not only an amende honorable to the female sex in
general, but a token of reconciliation to the poet's wife in
particular. Even in the joyous "Assembly of Fowls," a marriage-poem,
the same discord already makes itself heard; for it cannot be without
meaning that in his dream the poet is told by "African,"--
--thou of love hast lost thy taste, I guess,
As sick men have of sweet and bitterness;
and that he confesses for himself that, though he has read much of
love, he knows not of it by experience. While, however, we reluctantly
accept the conclusion that Chaucer was unhappy as a husband, we must at
the same time decline, because the husband was a poet, and one of the
most genial of poets, to cast all the blame upon the wife, and to write
her down a shrew. It is unfortunate, no doubt, but it is likewise
inevitable, that at so great a distance of time the rights and wrongs
of a conjugal disagreement or estrangement cannot with safety be
adjusted. Yet again, because we refuse to blame Philippa, we are not
obliged to blame Chaucer. At the same time it must not be concealed,
that his name occurs in the year 1380 in connexion with a legal process
of which the most obvious, though not the only possible, explanation is
that he had been guilty of a grave infidelity towards his wife. Such
discoveries as this last we might be excused for wishing unmade.
Considerable uncertainty remains with regard to the dates of the poems
belonging to this seemingly, in all respects but one, fortunate period
of Chaucer's life. Of one of these works, however, which has had the
curious fate to be dated and re-dated by a succession of happy
conjectures, the last and happiest of all may be held to have
definitively fixed the occasion. This is the charming poem called the
"Assembly of Fowls," or "Parliament of Birds"--a production which seems
so English, so fresh from nature's own inspiration, so instinct with
the gaiety of Chaucer's own heart, that one is apt to overlook in it
the undeniable vestiges of foreign influences, both French and Italian.
At its close the poet confesses that he is always reading, and
therefore hopes that he may at last read something "so to fare the
better." But with all this evidence of study the "Assembly of Fowls"
is chiefly interesting as showing how Chaucer had now begun to select
as well as to assimilate his loans; how, while he was still moving
along well-known tracks, his eyes were joyously glancing to the right
and the left; and how the source of most of his imagery at all events
he already found in the merry England around him, even as he had chosen
for his subject one of real national interest.
Anne of Bohemia, daughter of the great Emperor Charles IV, and sister
of King Wenceslas, had been successively betrothed to a Bavarian prince
and to a Margrave of Meissen, before--after negotiations which,
according to Froissart, lasted a year--her hand was given to the young
King Richard II of England. This sufficiently explains the general
scope of the "Assembly of Fowls," an allegorical poem written on or
about St. Valentine's Day, 1381--eleven months or nearly a year after
which date the marriage took place. On the morning sacred to lovers
the poet (in a dream, of course, and this time conducted by the
arch-dreamer Scipio in person) enters a garden containing in it the
temple of the god of Love, and filled with inhabitants mythological and
allegorical. Here he sees the noble goddess Nature, seated upon a hill
of flowers, and around her "all the fowls that be," assembled as by
time honoured custom on St. Valentine's Day, "when every fowl comes
there to choose her mate." Their huge noise and hubbub is reduced to
order by Nature, who assigns to each fowl its proper place--the birds
of prey highest; then those that eat according to natural inclination--
--worm or thing of which I tell no tale;
then those that live by seed; and the various members of the several
classes are indicated with amusing vivacity and point, from the royal
eagle "that with his sharp look pierceth the sun," and "other eagles of
a lower kind" downwards. We can only find room for a portion of the
company:--
The sparrow, Venus' son; the nightingale
That clepeth forth the fresh leaves new;
The swallow, murd'rer of the bees small,
That honey make of flowers fresh of hue;
The wedded turtle, with his hearte true;
The peacock, with his angels' feathers bright,
The pheasant, scorner of the cock by night.
The waker goose, the cuckoo, ever unkind;
The popinjay, full of delicacy;
The drake, destroyer of his owne kind;
The stork, avenger of adultery;
The cormorant, hot and full of gluttony
The crows and ravens with their voice of care;
And the throstle old, and the frosty fieldfare.
Naturalists must be left to explain some of these epithets and
designations, not all of which rest on allusions as easily understood
as that recalling the goose's exploit on the Capitol; but the vivacity
of the whole description speaks for itself. One is reminded of
Aristophanes' feathered chorus; but birds are naturally the delight of
poets, and were befriended by Dante himself.
Hereupon the action of the poem opens. A female eagle is wooed by
three suitors--all eagles; but among them the first, or royal eagle,
discourses in the manner most likely to conciliate favour. Before the
answer is given, a pause furnishes an opportunity to the other fowls
for delighting in the sound of their own voices, Dame Nature proposing
that each class of birds shall, through the beak of its representative
"agitator," express its opinion on the problem before the assembly.
There is much humour in the readiness of the goose to rush in with a
ready-made resolution, and in the smart reproof administered by the
sparrow-hawk amidst the uproar of "the gentle fowls all." At last
Nature silences the tumult, and the lady-eagle delivers her answer, to
the effect that she cannot make up her mind for a year to come; but
inasmuch as Nature has advised her to choose the royal eagle, his is
clearly the most favourable prospect. Whereupon, after certain fowls
had sung a roundel, "as was always the usance," the assembly, like some
human Parliaments, breaks up with shouting;
(Than all the birdis song with sic a schout
That I annone awoik quhair that I lay
Dunbar, "The Thrissil and the Rois.")
and the dreamer awakes to resume his reading.
Very possibly the "Assembly of Fowls" was at no great interval of time
either followed or preceded by two poems of far inferior interest--the
"Complaint of Mars" (apparently afterwards amalgamated with that of
"Venus"), which is supposed to be sung by a bird on St. Valentine's
morning, and the fragment of "Queen Anelida and false Arcite." There
are, however, reasons which make a less early date probable in the case
of the latter production, the history of the origin and purpose of
which can hardly be said as yet to be removed out of the region of mere
speculation. In any case, neither of these poems can be looked upon as
preparations, on Chaucer's part, for the longer work on which he was to
expend so much labour; but in a sense this description would apply to
the translation which, probably before he wrote "Troilus and Cressid,"
certainly before he wrote the Prologue to the "Legend of Good Women,"
he made of the famous Latin work of Boethius, "the just man in prison,"
on the "Consolation of Philosophy." This book was, and very justly so,
one of the favourite manuals of the Middle Ages, and a treasure-house
of religious wisdom to centuries of English writers. "Boice of
Consolacioun" is cited in the "Romaunt of the Rose"; and the list of
passages imitated by Chaucer from the martyr of Catholic orthodoxy and
Roman freedom of speech is exceedingly long. Among them are the
ever-recurring diatribe against the fickleness of fortune, and (through
the medium of Dante) the reflection on the distinction between gentle
birth and a gentle life. Chaucer's translation was not made at
second-hand; if not always easy it is conscientious, and interpolated
with numerous glosses and explanations thought necessary by the
translator. The metre of "The Former Life" he at one time or another
turned into verse of his own.
Perhaps the most interesting of the quotations made in Chaucer's poems
from Boethus occurs in his "Troilus and Cressid," one of the many
medieval versions of an episode engrafted by the lively fancy of an
Anglo-Norman trouvere upon the deathless, and in its literary
variations incomparably luxuriant, growth of the story of Troy. On
Benoit de Sainte-Maure's poem Guido de Colonna founded his Latin-prose
romance; and this again, after being reproduced in languages and by
writers almost innumerable, served Boccaccio as the foundation of his
poem "Filostrato"--i.e. the victim of love. All these works, together
with Chaucer's "Troilus and Cressid," with Lydgate's "Troy-Book," with
Henryson's "Testament of Cressid" (and in a sense even with
Shakespere's drama on the theme of Chaucer's poem), may be said to
belong to the second cycle of modern versions of the tale of Troy
divine. Already their earlier predecessors had gone far astray from
Homer, of whom they only know by hearsay, relying for their facts on
late Latin epitomes, which freely mutilated and perverted the Homeric
narrative in favour of the Trojans--the supposed ancestors of half the
nations of Europe. Accordingly, Chaucer, in a well-known passage in
his "House of Fame," regrets, with sublime coolness, how "one said that
Homer" wrote "lies,"
Feigning in his poetries
And was to Greekes favourable.
Therefore held he it but fable.
But the courtly poets of the romantic age of literature went a step
further, and added a mediaeval colouring all their own. One converts
the Sibyl into a nun, and makes her admonish Aeneas to tell his beads.
Another--it is Chaucer's successor Lydgate--introduces Priam's sons
exercising their bodies in tournaments and their minds in the glorious
play of chess, and causes the memory of Hector to be consecrated by the
foundation of a chantry of priests who are to pray for the repose of
his soul. A third finally condemns the erring Cressid to be stricken
with leprosy, and to wander about with cup and clapper, like the
unhappy lepers in the great cities of the Middle Ages. Everything, in
short, is transfused by the spirit of the adapters' own times; and so
far are these writers from any weakly sense of anachronism in
describing Troy as if it were a moated and turreted city of the later
Middle Ages, that they are only careful now and then to protest their
own truthfulness when anything in their narrative seems UNLIKE the days
in which they write.
But Chaucer, though his poem is, to start with, only an English
reproduction of an Italian version of a Latin translation of a French
poem, and though in most respects it shares the characteristic features
of the body of poetic fiction to which it belongs, is far from being a
mere translator. Apart from several remarkable reminiscences
introduced by Chaucer from Dante, as well as from the irrepressible
"Romaunt of the Rose," he has changed his original in points which are
not mere matters of detail or questions of convenience. In accordance
with the essentially dramatic bent of his own genius, some of these
changes have reference to the aspect of the characters and the conduct
of the plot, as well as to the whole spirit of the conception of the
poem. Cressid (who, by the way, is a widow at the outset--whether she
had children or not, Chaucer nowhere found stated, and therefore leaves
undecided) may at first sight strike the reader as a less consistent
character in Chaucer than in Boccaccio. But there is true art in the
way in which, in the English poem, our sympathy is first aroused for
the heroine, whom, in the end, we cannot but condemn. In Boccaccio,
Cressid is fair and false--one of those fickle creatures with whom
Italian literature, and Boccaccio in particular, so largely deal, and
whose presentment merely repeats to us the old cynical half-truth as to
woman's weakness. The English poet, though he does not pretend that
his heroine was "religious" (i.e. a nun to whom earthly love is a sin),
endears her to us from the first; so much that "O the pity of it" seems
the hardest verdict we can ultimately pass upon her conduct. How, then,
is the catastrophe of the action, the falling away of Cressid from her
truth to Troilus, poetically explained? By an appeal--pedantically
put, perhaps, and as it were dragged in violently by means of a
truncated quotation from Boethius--to the fundamental difficulty
concerning the relations between poor human life and the government of
the world. This, it must be conceded, is a considerably deeper problem
than the nature of woman. Troilus and Cressid, the hero sinned against
and the sinning heroine, are the VICTIMS OF FATE. Who shall cast a
stone against those who are, but like the rest of us, predestined to
their deeds and to their doom; since the co-existence of free-will with
predestination does not admit of proof? This solution of the conflict
may be morally as well as theologically unsound; it certainly is
aesthetically faulty; but it is the reverse of frivolous or commonplace.
Or let us turn from Cressid, "matchless in beauty," and warm with sweet
life, but not ignoble even in the season of her weakness, to another
personage of the poem. In itself the character of Pandarus is one of
the most revolting which imagination can devise; so much so that the
name has become proverbial for the most despicable of human types.
With Boccaccio Pandarus is Cressid's cousin and Troilus' youthful
friend, and there is no intention of making him more offensive than are
half the confidants of amorous heroes. But Chaucer sees his dramatic
opportunity; and without painting black in black and creating a monster
of vice, he invents a good-natured and loquacious, elderly go-between,
full of proverbial philosophy and invaluable experience--a genuine
light comedy character for all times. How admirably this Pandarus
practises as well as preaches his art; using the hospitable Deiphobus
and the queenly Helen as unconscious instruments in his intrigue for
bringing the lovers together:--
She came to dinner in her plain intent;
But God and Pandar wist what all this meant.
Lastly, considering the extreme length of Chaucer's poem, and the very
simple plot of the story which it tells, one cannot fail to admire the
skill with which the conduct of its action is managed. In Boccaccio
the earlier part of the story is treated with brevity, while the
conclusion, after the catastrophe has occurred and the main interest
has passed, is long drawn out. Chaucer dwells at great length upon the
earlier and pleasing portion of the tale, more especially on the
falling in love of Cressid, which is worked out with admirable
naturalness. But he comparatively hastens over its pitiable end--the
fifth and last book of his poem corresponding to not less than four
cantos of the "Filostrato." In Chaucer's hands, therefore, the story is
a real love-story, and the more that we are led to rejoice with the
lovers in their bliss, the more our compassion is excited by the
lamentable end of so much happiness; and we feel at one with the poet,
who, after lingering over the happiness of which he has in the end to
narrate the fall, as it were unwillingly proceeds to accomplish his
task, and bids his readers be wroth with the destiny of his heroine
rather than with himself. His own heart, he says, bleeds and his pen
quakes to write what must be written of the falsehood of Cressid, which
was her doom.
Chaucer's nature, however tried, was unmistakeably one gifted with the
blessed power of easy self-recovery. Though it was in a melancholy
vein that he had begun to write "Troilus and Cressid," he had found
opportunities enough in the course of the poem for giving expression to
the fresh vivacity and playful humour which are justly reckoned among
his chief characteristics. And thus, towards its close, we are not
surprised to find him apparently looking forward to a sustained effort
of a kind more congenial to himself. He sends forth his "little book,
his little tragedy," with the prayer that, before he dies, God his
Maker may send him might to "make some comedy." If the poem called the
"House of Fame" followed upon "Troilus and Cressid" (the order of
succession may, however, have been the reverse), then, although the
poet's own mood had little altered, yet he had resolved upon essaying a
direction which he rightly felt to be suitable to his genius.
The "House of Fame" has not been distinctly traced to any one foreign
source; but the influence of both Petrarch and Dante, as well as that
of classical authors, are clearly to be traced in the poem. And yet
this work, Chaucer's most ambitious attempt in poetical allegory, may
be described not only as in the main due to an original conception, but
as representing the results of the writer's personal experience. All
things considered, it is the production of a man of wonderful reading,
and shows that Chaucer's was a mind interested in the widest variety of
subjects, which drew no invidious distinctions, such as we moderns are
prone to insist upon, between Arts and Science, but (notwithstanding an
occasional deprecatory modesty) eagerly sought to familiarise itself
with the achievements of both. In a passage concerning the men of
letters who had found a place in the "House of Fame," he displays not
only an acquaintance with the names of several ancient classics, but
also a keen appreciation, now and then perhaps due to instinct, of
their several characteristics. Elsewhere he shows his interest in
scientific inquiry by references to such matters as the theory of sound
and the Arabic system of numeration; while the Mentor of the poem, the
Eagle, openly boasts his powers of clear scientific demonstration, in
averring that he can speak "lewdly" (i.e. popularly) "to a lewd man."
The poem opens with a very fresh and lively discussion of the question
of dreams in general--a semi-scientific subject which much occupied
Chaucer, and upon which even Pandarus and the wedded couple of the
"Nun's Priest's Tale" expend their philosophy.