Will it _do_ to say anything more about Chaucer? Can any one hope to say
anything, not new, but even fresh, on a topic so well worn? It may well
be doubted; and yet one is always the better for a walk in the morning
air,--a medicine which may be taken over and over again without any
sense of sameness, or any failure of its invigorating quality. There is
a pervading wholesomeness in the writings of this man,--a vernal
property that soothes and refreshes in a way of which no other has ever
found the secret. I repeat to myself a thousand times,--
“Whan that Aprilë with his showrës sotë
The droughte of March hath percëd to the rotë,
And bathëd every veine in swich licour
Of which vertue engendered is the flour,--
When Zephyrus eek with his swetë breth
Enspirëd hath in every holt and heth
The tender croppës, and the yongë sonne
Hath in the ram his halfë cors yronne,
And smalë foulës maken melodië,”--
and still at the thousandth time a breath of uncontaminate springtide
seems to lift the hair upon my forehead. If here be not the _largior
ether_, the serene and motionless atmosphere of classical antiquity, we
find at least the _seclusum nemus_, the _domos placidas_, and the
_oubliance_, as Froissart so sweetly calls it, that persuade us we are
in an Elysium none the less sweet that it appeals to our more purely
human, one might almost say domestic, sympathies. We may say of
Chaucer’s muse, as Overbury of his milkmaid, “her breath is her own,
which scents all the year long of _June_ like a new-made haycock.” The
most hardened _roué_ of literature can scarce confront these simple and
winning graces without feeling somewhat of the unworn sentiment of his
youth revive in him. Modern imaginative literature has become so
self-conscious, and therefore so melancholy, that Art, which should be
“the world’s sweet inn,” whither we repair for refreshment and repose,
has become rather a watering-place, where one’s own private touch of the
liver-complaint is exasperated by the affluence of other sufferers whose
talk is a narrative of morbid symptoms. Poets have forgotten that the
first lesson of literature, no less than of life, is the learning how to
burn your own smoke; that the way to be original is to be healthy; that
the fresh color, so delightful in all good writing, is won by escaping
from the fixed air of self into the brisk atmosphere of universal
sentiments; and that to make the common marvellous, as if it were a
revelation, is the test of genius. It is good to retreat now and then
beyond earshot of the introspective confidences of modern literature,
and to lose ourselves in the gracious worldliness of Chaucer. Here was a
healthy and hearty man, so genuine that he need not ask whether he were
genuine or no, so sincere as quite to forget his own sincerity, so truly
pious that he could be happy in the best world that God chose to make,
so humane that he loved even the foibles of his kind. Here was a truly
epic poet, without knowing it, who did not waste time in considering
whether his age were good or bad, but quietly taking it for granted as
the best that ever was or could be for _him_, has left us such a picture
of contemporary life as no man ever painted. “A perpetual fountain of
good-sense,” Dryden calls him, yes, and of good-humor, too, and
wholesome thought. He was one of those rare authors whom, if we had met
him under a porch in a shower, we should have preferred to the rain. He
could be happy with a crust and spring-water, and could see the shadow
of his benign face in a flagon of Gascon wine without fancying Death
sitting opposite to cry _Supernaculum!_ when he had drained it. He could
look to God without abjectness, and on man without contempt. The pupil
of manifold experience,--scholar, courtier, soldier, ambassador, who had
known poverty as a housemate and been the companion of princes,--his was
one of those happy temperaments that could equally enjoy both halves of
culture,--the world of books and the world of men.
“Unto this day it doth mine hertë boote,
That I have had my world as in my time!”
The portrait of Chaucer, which we owe to the loving regret of his
disciple Occleve, confirms the judgment of him which we make from his
works. It is, I think, more engaging than that of any other poet. The
downcast eyes, half sly, half meditative, the sensuous mouth, the broad
brow, drooping with weight of thought, and yet with an inexpugnable
youth shining out of it as from the morning forehead of a boy, are all
noticeable, and not less so their harmony of placid tenderness. We are
struck, too, with the smoothness of the face as of one who thought
easily, whose phrase flowed naturally, and who had never puckered his
brow over an unmanageable verse.
Nothing has been added to our knowledge of Chaucer’s life since Sir
Harris Nicholas, with the help of original records, weeded away the
fictions by which the few facts were choked and overshadowed. We might
be sorry that no confirmation has been found for the story, fathered on
a certain phantasmal Mr. Buckley, that Chaucer was “fined two shillings
for beating a Franciscan friar in Fleet Street,” if it were only for the
alliteration; but we refuse to give up the meeting with Petrarch. All
the probabilities are in its favor. That Chaucer, being at Milan, should
not have found occasion to ride across so far as Padua, for the sake of
seeing the most famous literary man of the day, is incredible. If
Froissart could journey on horseback through Scotland and Wales, surely
Chaucer, whose curiosity was as lively as his, might have ventured what
would have been a mere pleasure-trip in comparison. I cannot easily
bring myself to believe that he is not giving some touches of his own
character in that of the Clerk of Oxford:--
“For him was liefer have at his bed’s head
A twenty bookës clothed in black and red
Of Aristotle and his philosophië
Than robës rich, or fiddle or psaltrië:
But although that he were a philosòpher
Yet had he but a little gold in coffer:
Of study took he mostë care and heed;
Not one word spake he morë than was need:
All that he spake it was of high prudèncë,
And short and quick, and full of great sentencë;
Sounding in moral virtue was his speech
And gladly would he learn and gladly teach.”
That, himself as plump as Horace, he should have described the Clerk as
being lean, will be no objection to those who remember how carefully
Chaucer effaces his own personality in his great poem. Our chief debt to
Sir Harris Nicholas is for having disproved the story that Chaucer,
imprisoned for complicity in the insurrection of John of Northampton,
had set himself free by betraying his accomplices. That a poet, one of
whose leading qualities is his good sense and moderation, and who should
seem to have practised his own rule, to
“Fly from the press and dwell with soothfastness;
Sufficë thee thy good though it be small,”
should have been concerned in any such political excesses, was
improbable enough; but that he should add to this the baseness of broken
faith was incredible except to such as in a doubtful story
“Demen gladly to the badder end.”
Sir Harris Nicholas has proved by the records that the fabric is
baseless, and we may now read the poet’s fine verse,
“Truth is the highest thing a man may keep,”
without a pang. We are thankful that Chaucer’s shoulders are finally
discharged of that weary load, “The Testament of Love.”[8] The later
biographers seem inclined to make Chaucer a younger man at his death in
1400 than has hitherto been supposed. Herr Hertzberg even puts his birth
so late as 1340. But, till more conclusive evidence is produced, we
shall adhere to the received dates as on the whole more consonant with
the probabilities of the case. The monument is clearly right as to the
year of his death, and the chances are at least even that both this and
the date of birth were copied from an older inscription. The only
counter-argument that has much force is the manifestly unfinished
condition of the “Canterbury Tales.” That a man of seventy odd could
have put such a spirit of youth into those matchless prologues will
not, however, surprise those who remember Dryden’s second spring-time.
It is plain that the notion of giving unity to a number of disconnected
stories by the device which Chaucer adopted was an afterthought. These
stories had been written, and some of them even published, at periods
far asunder, and without any reference to connection among themselves.
The prologues, and those parts which internal evidence justifies us in
taking them to have been written after the thread of plan to string them
on was conceived, are in every way more mature,--in knowledge of the
world, in easy mastery of verse and language, and in the overpoise of
sentiment by judgment. They may with as much probability be referred to
a green old age as to the middle-life of a man who, upon any theory of
the dates, was certainly slow in ripening.
* * * * *
The formation of a Chaucer Society, now four centuries and a half after
the poet’s death, gives suitable occasion for taking a new observation
of him, as of a fixed star, not only in our own, but in the European
literary heavens, “whose worth’s unknown although his height be taken.”
The admirable work now doing by this Society, whose establishment was
mainly due to the pious zeal of Mr. Furnivall, deserves recognition from
all who know how to value the too rare union of accurate scholarship
with minute exactness in reproducing the text. The six-text edition of
the “Canterbury Tales,” giving what is practically equivalent to six
manuscript copies, is particularly deserving of gratitude from this side
the water, as it for the first time affords to Americans the opportunity
of independent critical study and comparison. This beautiful work is
fittingly inscribed to our countryman, Professor Child, of Harvard, a
lover of Chaucer, “so proved by his wordës and his werke,” who has done
more for the great poet’s memory than any man since Tyrwhitt. We
earnestly hope that the Society may find enough support to print all the
remaining manuscript texts of importance, for there can hardly be any
one of them that may not help us to a valuable hint. The works of Mr.
Sandras and Herr Hertzberg show that this is a matter of interest not
merely or even primarily to English scholars. The introduction to the
latter is one of the best essays on Chaucer yet written, while the
former, which is an investigation of the French and Italian sources of
the poet, supplies us with much that is new and worth having as respects
the training of the poet, and the obstacles of fashion and taste through
which he had to force his way before he could find free play for his
native genius or even so much as arrive at a consciousness thereof. M.
Sandras is in every way a worthy pupil of the accomplished M. Victor
Leclerc, and, though he lays perhaps a little too much stress on the
indebtedness of Chaucer in particulars, shows a singularly intelligent
and clear-sighted eye for the general grounds of his claim to greatness
and originality. It is these grounds which I propose chiefly to examine
here.
The first question we put to any poet, nay, to any so-called national
literature, is that which Farinata addressed to Dante, _Chi fur li
maggior tui?_ Here is no question of plagiarism, for poems are not made
of words and thoughts and images, but of that something in the poet
himself which can compel them to obey him and move to the rhythm of his
nature. Thus it is that the new poet, however late he come, can never be
forestalled, and the ship-builder who built the pinnace of Columbus has
as much claim to the discovery of America as he who suggests a thought
by which some other man opens new worlds to us has to a share in that
achievement by him unconceived and inconceivable. Chaucer undoubtedly
began as an imitator, perhaps as mere translator, serving the needful
apprenticeship in the use of his tools. Children learn to speak by
watching the lips and catching the words of those who know how already,
and poets learn in the same way from their elders. They import their raw
material from any and everywhere, and the question at last comes down to
this,--whether an author have original force enough to assimilate all he
has acquired, or that be so overmastering as to assimilate _him_. If the
poet turn out the stronger, we allow him to help himself from other
people with wonderful equanimity. Should a man discover the art of
transmuting metals and present us with a lump of gold as large as an
ostrich-egg, would it be in human nature to inquire too nicely whether
he had stolen the lead?
Nothing is more certain than that great poets are not sudden prodigies,
but slow results. As an oak profits by the foregone lives of immemorial
vegetable races that have worked-over the juices of earth and air into
organic life out of whose dissolution a soil might gather fit to
maintain that nobler birth of nature, so we may be sure that the genius
of every remembered poet drew the forces that built it up out of the
decay of a long succession of forgotten ones. Nay, in proportion as the
genius is vigorous and original will its indebtedness be greater, will
its roots strike deeper into the past and grope in remoter fields for
the virtue that must sustain it. Indeed, if the works of the great poets
teach anything, it is to hold mere invention somewhat cheap. It is not
the finding of a thing, but the making something out of it after it is
found, that is of consequence. Accordingly, Chaucer, like Shakespeare,
invented almost nothing. Wherever he found anything directed to Geoffrey
Chaucer, he took it and made the most of it. It was not the subject
treated, but himself, that was the new thing. _Cela m’appartient de
droit_, Molière is reported to have said when accused of plagiarism.
Chaucer pays that “usurious interest which genius,” as Coleridge says,
“always pays in borrowing.” The characteristic touch is his own. In the
famous passage about the caged bird, copied from the “Romaunt of the
Rose,” the “gon eten wormes” was added by him. We must let him, if he
will, eat the heart out of the literature that had preceded him, as we
sacrifice the mulberry-leaves to the silkworm, because he knows how to
convert them into something richer and more lasting. The question of
originality is not one of form, but of substance, not of cleverness, but
of imaginative power. Given your material, in other words the life in
which you live, how much can you see in it? For on that depends how much
you can make of it. Is it merely an arrangement of man’s contrivance, a
patchwork of expediencies for temporary comfort and convenience, good
enough if it last your time, or is it so much of the surface of that
ever-flowing deity which we call Time, wherein we catch such fleeting
reflection as is possible for us, of our relation to perdurable things?
This is what makes the difference between Æschylus and Euripides,
between Shakespeare and Fletcher, between Goethe and Heine, between
literature and rhetoric. Something of this depth of insight, if not in
the fullest, yet in no inconsiderable measure, characterizes Chaucer. We
must not let his playfulness, his delight in the world as mere
spectacle, mislead us into thinking that he was incapable of serious
purpose or insensible to the deeper meanings of life.
There are four principal sources from which Chaucer may be presumed to
have drawn for poetical suggestion or literary culture,--the Latins, the
Troubadours, the Trouvères, and the Italians. It is only the two latter
who can fairly claim any immediate influence in the direction of his
thought or the formation of his style. The only Latin poet who can be
supposed to have influenced the spirit of mediæeval literature is Ovid.
In his sentimentality, his love of the marvellous and the picturesque,
he is its natural precursor. The analogy between his Fasti and the
versified legends of saints is more than a fanciful one. He was
certainly popular with the poets of the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries. Virgil had wellnigh become mythical. The chief merit of the
Provençal poets is in having been the first to demonstrate that it was
possible to write with elegance in a modern dialect, and their interest
for us is mainly as forerunners, as indications of tendency. Their
literature is prophecy, not fulfilment. Its formal sentiment culminated
in Laura, its ideal aspiration in Beatrice. Shakespeare’s hundred and
sixth sonnet, if, for the imaginary mistress to whom it was addressed,
we substitute the muse of a truer conception and more perfected
utterance, represents exactly the feeling with which we read Provençal
poetry:--
“When in the chronicle of wasted Time
I see descriptions of the fairest wights
And beauty making beautiful old rhyme
In praise of ladies dead and lovely knights,
* * * * *
I see their antique pen would have expressed
Even such a beauty as you master now;
So all their praises are but prophecies
Of this our time, all you prefiguring,
And, for they looked but with divining eyes,
They had not skill enough your worth to sing.”
It is astonishing how little of the real life of the time we learn from
the Troubadours except by way of inference and deduction. Their poetry
is purely lyric in its most narrow sense, that is, the expression of
personal and momentary moods. To the fancy of critics who take their
cue from tradition, Provençe is a morning sky of early summer, out of
which innumerable larks rain a faint melody (the sweeter because rather
half divined than heard too distinctly) over an earth where the dew
never dries and the flowers never fade. But when we open Raynouard it is
like opening the door of an aviary. We are deafened and confused by a
hundred minstrels singing the same song at once, and more than suspect
that the flowers they welcome are made of French cambric spangled with
dewdrops of prevaricating glass. Bernard de Ventadour and Bertrand de
Born are wellnigh the only ones among them in whom we find an original
type. Yet the Troubadours undoubtedly led the way to refinement of
conception and perfection of form. They were the conduit through which
the failing stream of Roman literary tradition flowed into the new
channel which mediæval culture was slowly shaping for itself. Without
them we could not understand Petrarca, who earned the manufacture of
artificial bloom and fictitious dew-drop to a point of excellence where
artifice, if ever, may claim the praise of art. Without them we could
not understand Dante, in whom their sentiment for woman was idealized by
a passionate intellect and a profound nature, till Beatrice becomes a
half-human, half-divine abstraction, a woman still to memory and
devotion, a disembodied symbol to the ecstasy of thought. The Provençal
love-poetry was as abstracted from all sensuality as that of Petrarca,
but it stops short of that larger and more gracious style of treatment
which has secured him a place in all gentle hearts and refined
imaginations forever. In it also woman leads her servants upward, but it
is along the easy slopes of conventional sentiment, and no Troubadour so
much as dreamed of that loftier region, native to Dante, where _the_
woman is subtilized into _das Ewig-Weibliche_, type of man’s finer
conscience and nobler aspiration made sensible to him only through her.
On the whole, it would be hard to find anything more tediously
artificial than the Provençal literature, except the reproduction of it
by the Minnesingers. The _Tedeschi lurchi_ certainly _did_ contrive to
make something heavy as dough out of what was at least light, if not
very satisfying, in the canorous dialect of Southern Gaul. But its doom
was inevitably predicted in its nature and position, nay, in its very
name. It was, and it continues to be, a strictly _provincial_
literature, imprisoned within extremely narrow intellectual and even
geographical limits. It is not race or language that can inflict this
leprous isolation, but some defect of sympathy with the simpler and more
universal relations of human nature. You cannot shut up Burns in a
dialect bristling with archaisms, nor prevent Béranger from setting all
pulses a-dance in the least rhythmic and imaginative of modern tongues.
The healthy temperament of Chaucer, with its breadth of interest in all
ranks and phases of social life, could have found little that was
sympathetic in the evaporated sentiment and rhetorical punctilios of a
school of poets which, with rare exceptions, began and ended in courtly
dilettantism.
The refined formality with which the literary product of Provençe is for
the most part stamped, as with a trademark, was doubtless the legacy of
Gallo-Roman culture, itself at best derivative and superficial. I think,
indeed, that it may well be doubted whether Roman literature, always a
half-hardy exotic, could ripen the seeds of living reproduction. The
Roman genius was eminently practical, and far more apt for the triumphs
of politics and jurisprudence than of art. Supreme elegance it could and
did arrive at in Virgil, but, if I may trust my own judgment, it
produced but one original poet, and that was Horace, who has ever since
continued the favorite of men of the world, an apostle to the Gentiles
of the mild cynicism of middle-age and an after-dinner philosophy.
Though in no sense national, he was, more truly than any has ever been
since, till the same combination of circumstances produced Béranger, an
urbane or city poet. Rome, with her motley life, her formal religion,
her easy morals, her spectacles, her luxury, her suburban country-life,
was his muse. The situation was new, and found a singer who had wit
enough to turn it to account. There are a half-dozen pieces of Catullus
unsurpassed (unless their Greek originals should turn up) for lyric
grace and fanciful tenderness. The sparrow of Lesbia still pecks the
rosy lips of his mistress, immortal as the eagle of Pindar. One profound
imagination, one man, who with a more prosperous subject might have been
a great poet, lifted Roman literature above its ordinary level of
tasteful common-sense. The invocation of Venus, as the genetic force of
nature, by Lucretius, seems to me the one sunburst of purely poetic
inspiration which the Latin language can show. But this very force,
without which _neque fit lœtum neque amabile quicquam_ was wholly
wanting in those poets of the post-classic period, through whom the
literary influences of the past were transmitted to the romanized
provincials. The works of Ausonius interest us as those of our own
Dwights and Barlows do. The “Conquest of Canaan” and the “Columbiad”
were Connecticut epics no doubt, but still were better than nothing in
their day. If not literature, they were at least memories of literature,
and such memories are not without effect in reproducing what they
regret. The provincial writers of Latin devoted themselves with a dreary
assiduity to the imitation of models which they deemed classical, but
which were truly so only in the sense that they were the more
decorously respectful of the dead form in proportion as the living
spirit had more utterly gone out of it. It is, I suspect, to the
traditions of this purely rhetorical influence, indirectly exercised,
that we are to attribute the rapid passage of the new Provençal poetry
from what must have been its original popular character to that highly
artificial condition which precedes total extinction. It was the
alienation of the written from the spoken language (always, perhaps,
more or less malignly operative in giving Roman literature a
cold-blooded turn as compared with Greek), which, ending at length in
total divorce, rendered Latin incapable of supplying the wants of new
men and new ideas. The same thing, I am strongly inclined to think, was
true of the language of the Troubadours. It had become literary, and so
far dead. It is true that no language is ever so far gone in consumption
as to be beyond the great-poet-cure. Undoubtedly a man of genius can out
of his own super-abundant vitality compel life into the most decrepit
vocabulary. But it is by the infusion of his own blood, as it were, and
not without a certain sacrifice of power. No such rescue came for the
_langue d’oc_, which, it should seem, had performed its special function
in the development of modern literature, and would have perished even
without the Albigensian war. The position of the Gallo-Romans of the
South, both ethical and geographical, precluded them from producing
anything really great or even original in literature, for that must have
its root in a national life, and this they never had. After the
Burgundian invasion their situation was in many respects analogous to
our own after the Revolutionary War. They had been thoroughly romanized
in language and culture, but the line of their historic continuity had
been broken. The Roman road, which linked them with the only past they
knew, had been buried under the great barbarian land-slide. In like
manner we, inheriting the language, the social usages, the literary and
political traditions of Englishmen, were suddenly cut adrift from our
historical anchorage. Very soon there arose a demand for a native
literature, nay, it was even proposed that, as a first step toward it,
we should adopt a lingo of our own to be called the Columbian or
Hesperian. This, to be sure, was never accomplished, though our English
cousins seem to hint sometimes that we have made very fair advances
toward it; but if it could have been, our position would have been
precisely that of the Provençals when they began to have a literature of
their own. They had formed a language which, while it completed their
orphanage from their imperial mother, continually recalled her, and kept
alive their pride of lineage. Such reminiscences as they still retained
of Latin culture were pedantic and rhetorical,[9] and it was only
natural that out of these they should have elaborated a code of poetical
jurisprudence with titles and subtitles applicable to every form of
verse and tyrannous over every mode of sentiment. The result could not
fail to be artificial and wearisome, except where some man with a truly
lyrical genius could breathe life into the rigid formula and make it
pliant to his more passionate feeling. The great service of the
Provençals was that they kept in mind the fact that poetry was not
merely an amusement, but an art, and long after their literary activity
had ceased their influence reacted beneficially upon Europe through
their Italian pupils. They are interesting as showing the tendency of
the Romanic races to a scientific treatment of what, if it be not
spontaneous, becomes a fashion and erelong an impertinence. Fauriel has
endeavored to prove that they were the first to treat the mediæval
heroic legends epically, but the evidence is strongly against him. The
testimony of Dante on this point is explicit,[10] and moreover not a
single romance of chivalry has come down to us in a dialect of the pure
Provencal.
The Trouvères, on the other hand, are apt to have something naive and
vigorous about them, something that smacks of race and soil. Their very
coarseness is almost better than the Troubadour delicacy, because it was
not an affectation. The difference between the two schools is that
between a culture pedantically transmitted and one which grows and
gathers strength from natural causes. Indeed, it is to the North of
France and to the Trouvères that we are to look for the true origins of
our modern literature. I do not mean in their epical poetry, though
there is something refreshing in the mere fact of their choosing native
heroes and legends as the subjects of their song. It was in their
_Fabliaux_ and _Lais_ that, dealing with the realities of the life about
them, they became original and delightful in spite of themselves. Their
_Chansons de Geste_ are fine specimens of fighting Christianity, highly
inspiring for men like Peire de Bergerac, who sings
“Bel m’es can aug lo resso
Que fai l’ausbercs ab l’arso,
Li bruit e il crit e il masan
Que il corn e las trombas fan”;[11]
but who after reading them--even the best of them, the Song of
Roland--can remember much more than a cloud of battle-dust, through
which the paladins loom dimly gigantic, and a strong verse flashes here
and there like an angry sword? What are the _Roman d’avantures_, the
cycle of Arthur and his knights, but a procession of armor and plumes,
mere spectacle, not vision like their Grecian antitype, the Odyssey,
whose pictures of life, whether domestic or heroic, are among the
abiding consolations of the mind? An element of disproportion, of
grotesqueness,[12] earmark of the barbarian, disturbs us, even when it
does not disgust, in them all. Except the _Roland_, they all want
adequate motive, and even in that we may well suspect a reminiscence of
the Iliad. They are not without a kind of dignity, for manliness is
always noble, and there are detached scenes that are striking, perhaps
all the more so from their rarity, like the combat of Oliver and
Fierabras, and the leave-taking of Parise la Duchesse. But in point of
art they are far below even Firdusi, whose great poem is of precisely
the same romantic type. The episode of Sohrab and Rustem as much
surpasses the former of the passages just alluded to in largeness and
energy of treatment, in the true epical quality, as the lament of
Tehmine over her son does the latter of them in refined and natural
pathos. In our revolt against pseudo-classicism we must not let our
admiration for the vigor and freshness which are the merit of this old
poetry tempt us to forget that our direct literary inheritance comes to
us from an ancestry who would never have got beyond the Age of Iron but
for the models of graceful form and delicate workmanship which they
found in the tombs of an earlier race.
I recall but one passage (from _Jourdain de Blaivies_) which in its
simple movement of the heart can in any way be compared with Chaucer. I
translate it freely, merely changing the original assonance into rhyme.
Eremborc, to save the son of her liege-lord, has passed-off her own
child for his, only stipulating that he shall pass the night before his
death with her in the prison where she is confined by the usurper
Fromond. The time is just as the dreaded dawn begins to break.
“‘Garnier, fair son,’ the noble lady said,
‘To save thy father’s life must thou be dead;
And mine, alas, must be with sorrow spent,
Since thou must die, albeit so innocent!
Evening thou shalt not see that see’st the morn!
Woe worth the hour that I beheld thee born,
Whom nine long months within my side I bore!
Was never babe desired so much before.
Now summer will the pleasant days recall
When I shall take my stand upon the wall
And see the fair young gentlemen thy peers
That come and go, and, as beseems their years
Run at the quintain, strive to pierce the shield,
And in the tourney keep their sell or yield;
Then must my heart be tearswoln for thy sake
That’t will be marvel if it do not break.’
At morning, when the day began to peer,
Matins rang out from minsters far and near,
And the clerks sang full well with voices high.
‘God,’ said the dame, ‘thou glorious in the sky,
These lingering nights were wont to tire me so!
And this, alas, how swift it hastes to go!
These clerks and cloistered folk, alas, in spite
So early sing to cheat me of my night!’”
The great advantages which the _langue d’oil_ had over its sister
dialect of the South of France were its wider distribution, and its
representing the national and unitary tendencies of the people as
opposed to those of provincial isolation. But the Trouvères had also
this superiority, that they gave a voice to real and not merely
conventional emotions. In comparison with the Troubadours their
sympathies were more human, and their expression more popular. While the
tiresome ingenuity of the latter busied itself chiefly in the filigree
of wiredrawn sentiment and supersubtilized conceit, the former took
their subjects from the street and the market as well as from the
chateau. In the one case language had become a mere material for clever
elaboration; in the other, as always in live literature, it was a soil
from which the roots of thought and feeling unconsciously drew the
coloring of vivid expression. The writers of French, by the greater
pliancy of their dialect and the simpler forms of their verse, had
acquired an ease which was impossible in the more stately and sharply
angled vocabulary of the South. Their octosyllabics have not seldom a
careless facility not unworthy of Swift in his best mood. They had
attained the highest skill and grace in narrative, as the lays of Marie
de France and the _Lai de l’Oiselet_ bear witness[13]. Above all, they
had learned how to brighten the hitherto monotonous web of story with
the gayer hues of fancy.
It is no improbable surmise that the sudden and surprising development
of the more strictly epical poetry in the North of France, and
especially its growing partiality for historical in preference to
mythical subjects, were due to the Normans. The poetry of the Danes was
much of it authentic history, or what was believed to be so; the heroes
of their Sagas were real men, with wives and children, with relations
public and domestic, on the common levels of life, and not mere
creatures of imagination, who dwell apart like stars from the vulgar
cares and interests of men. If we compare Havelok with the least
idealized figures of Carlovingian or Arthurian romance, we shall have a
keen sense of this difference. Manhood has taken the place of caste, and
homeliness of exaggeration. Havelok says,--
“Godwot, I will with thee gang
For to learn some good to get;
Swinken would I for my meat;
It is no shame for to swinken.”
This Dane, we see, is of our own make and stature, a being much nearer
our kindly sympathies than his compatriot Ogier, of whom we are told,
“Dix piès de lonc avoit le chevalier.”
But however large or small share we may allow to the Danes in changing
the character of French poetry and supplanting the Romance with the
Fabliau, there can be little doubt either of the kind or amount of
influence which the Normans must have brought with them into England. I
am not going to attempt a definition of the Anglo-Saxon element in
English literature, for generalizations are apt to be as dangerous as
they are tempting. But as a painter may draw a cloud so that we
recognize its general truth, though the boundaries of real clouds never
remain the same for two minutes together, so amid the changes of feature
and complexion brought about by commingling of race, there still remains
a certain cast of physiognomy which points back to some one ancestor of
marked and peculiar character. It is toward this type that there is
always a tendency to revert, to borrow Mr. Darwin’s phrase, and I think
the general belief is not without some adequate grounds which in France
traces this predominant type to the Kelt, and in England to the Saxon.
In old and stationary communities, where tradition has a chance to take
root, and where several generations are present to the mind of each
inhabitant, either by personal recollection or transmitted anecdote,
everybody’s peculiarities, whether of strength or weakness, are
explained and, as it were, justified upon some theory of hereditary
bias. Such and such qualities he got from a grandfather on the spear or
a great-uncle on the spindle side. This gift came in a right line from
So-and-so; that failing came in by the dilution of the family blood with
that of Such-a-one. In this way a certain allowance is made for every
aberration from some assumed normal type, either in the way of
reinforcement or defect, and that universal desire of the human mind to
have everything accounted for--which makes the moon responsible for the
whimsies of the weathercock--is cheaply gratified. But as mankind in the
aggregate is always wiser than any single man, because its experience is
derived from a larger range of observation and experience, and because
the springs that feed it drain a wider region both of time and space,
there is commonly some greater or smaller share of truth in all popular
prejudices. The meteorologists are beginning to agree with the old women
that the moon _is_ an accessary before the fact in our atmospheric
fluctuations. Now, although to admit this notion of inherited good or
ill to its fullest extent would be to abolish personal character, and
with it, all responsibility, to abdicate freewill, and to make every
effort at self-direction futile, there is no inconsiderable alloy of
truth in it, nevertheless. No man can look into the title-deeds of what
may be called his personal estate, his faculties, his predilections, his
failings,--whatever, in short, sets him apart as a capital I,--without
something like a shock of dread to find how much of him is held in
mortmain by those who, though long ago mouldered away to dust, are yet
fatally alive and active in him for good or ill. What is true of
individual men is true also of races, and the prevailing belief in a
nation as to the origin of certain of its characteristics has something
of the same basis in facts of observation as the village estimate of the
traits of particular families. _Interdum vulgus rectum videt._
We are apt, it is true, to talk rather loosely about our Anglo-Saxon
ancestors, and to attribute to them in a vague way all the pith of our
institutions and the motive power of our progress. For my own part, I
think there is such a thing as being too Anglo-Saxon, and the warp and
woof of the English national character, though undoubtedly two elements
mainly predominate in it, is quite too complex for us to pick out a
strand here and there, and affirm that the _body_ of the fabric is of
this or that. Our present concern with the Saxons is chiefly a literary
one; but it leads to a study of general characteristics. What, then, so
far as we can make it out, seems to be their leading mental feature?
Plainly, understanding, common-sense,--a faculty which never carries its
possessor very high in creative literature, though it may make him great
as an acting and even thinking man. Take Dr. Johnson as an instance. The
Saxon, as it appears to me, has never shown any capacity for art, nay,
commonly commits ugly blunders when he is tempted in that direction. He
has made the best working institutions and the ugliest monuments among
the children of men. He is wanting in taste, which is as much as to say
that he has no true sense of proportion. His genius is his
_solidity_,--an admirable foundation of national character. He is
healthy, in no danger of liver-complaint, with digestive apparatus of
amazing force and precision. He is the best farmer and best grazier
among men, raises the biggest crops and the fattest cattle, and consumes
proportionate quantities of both. He settles and sticks like a diluvial
deposit on the warm, low-lying levels, physical and moral. He has a
prodigious talent, to use our Yankee phrase, of _staying put_. You
cannot move him; he and rich earth have a natural sympathy of cohesion.
Not quarrelsome, but with indefatigable durability of fight in him,
sound of stomach, and not too refined in nervous texture, he is capable
of indefinitely prolonged punishment, with a singularly obtuse sense of
propriety in acknowledging himself beaten. Among all races perhaps none
has shown so acute a sense of the side on which its bread is buttered,
and so great a repugnance for having fine phrases take the place of the
butyraceous principle. They invented the words “humbug,” “cant,” “sham,”
“gag,” “soft-sodder,” “flapdoddle,” and other disenchanting formulas
whereby the devil of falsehood and unreality gets his effectual _apage
Satana!_
An imperturbable perception of the _real_ relations of things is the
Saxon’s leading quality,--no sense whatever, or at best small, of the
ideal in him. He has no notion that two and two ever make five, which is
the problem the poet often has to solve. Understanding, that is,
equilibrium of mind, intellectual good digestion, this, with unclogged
biliary ducts, makes him mentally and physically what we call a very
fixed fact; but you shall not find a poet in a hundred thousand square
miles,--in many prosperous centuries of such. But one element of
incalculable importance we have not mentioned. In this homely nature,
the idea of God, and of a simple and direct relation between the
All-Father and his children, is deeply rooted. There, above all, will he
have honesty and simplicity; less than anything else will he have the
sacramental wafer,--that beautiful emblem of our dependence on Him who
giveth the daily bread; less than anything will he have this smeared
with that Barmecide butter of fair words. This is the lovely and noble
side of his character. Indignation at this will make him forget crops
and cattle; and this, after so many centuries, will give him at last a
poet in the monk of Eisleben, who shall cut deep on the memory of
mankind that brief creed of conscience,--“Here am I. God help me: I
cannot otherwise.” This, it seems to me, with dogged sense of
justice,--both results of that equilibrium of thought which springs
from clear-sighted understanding,--makes the beauty of the Saxon nature.
He believes in another world, and conceives of it without metaphysical
subtleties as something very much after the pattern of this, but
infinitely more desirable. Witness the vision of John Bunyan. Once beat
it into him that his eternal _well-being_, as he calls it, depends on
certain conditions, that only so will the balance in the ledger of
eternity be in his favor, and the man who seemed wholly of _this_ world
will give all that he has, even his life, with a superb simplicity and
scorn of the theatric, for a chance in the next. Hard to move, his very
solidity of nature makes him terrible when once fairly set agoing. He is
the man of all others slow to admit the thought of revolution; but let
him once admit it, he will carry it through and make it _stick_,--a
secret hitherto undiscoverable by other races.
But poetry is not made out of the understanding; that is not the sort of
block out of which you can carve wing-footed Mercuries. The question of
common-sense is always, “What is it good for?”--a question which would
abolish the rose and be answered triumphantly by the cabbage. The danger
of the prosaic type of mind lies in the stolid sense of superiority
which blinds it to everything ideal, to the use of anything that does
not serve the practical purposes of life. Do we not remember how the
all-observing and all-fathoming Shakespeare has typified this in Bottom
the weaver? Surrounded by all the fairy creations of fancy, he sends one
to fetch him the bag of a humble-bee, and can find no better employment
for Mustard-seed than to help Cavalero Cobweb scratch his ass’s head
between the ears. When Titania, queen of that fair ideal world, offers
him a feast of beauty, he says he has a good stomach to a pottle of
hay!
The Anglo-Saxons never had any real literature of their own. They
produced monkish chronicles in bad Latin, and legends of saints in worse
metre. Their earlier poetry is essentially Scandinavian. It was that
_gens inclytissima Northmannorum_ that imported the divine power of
imagination,--that power which, mingled with the solid Saxon
understanding, produced at last the miracle of Stratford. It was to this
adventurous race, which found America before Columbus, which, for the
sake of freedom of thought, could colonize inhospitable Iceland, which,
as it were, typifying the very action of the imaginative faculty itself,
identified itself always with what it conquered, that we owe whatever
aquiline features there are in the national physiognomy of the English
race. It was through the Normans that the English mind and fancy,
hitherto provincial and uncouth, were first infused with the lightness,
grace, and self-confidence of Romance literature. They seem to have
opened a window to the southward in that solid and somewhat sombre
insular character, and it was a painted window all aglow with the
figures of tradition and poetry. The old Gothic volume, grim with
legends of devilish temptation and satanic lore, they illuminated with
the gay and brilliant inventions of a softer climate and more genial
moods. Even the stories of Arthur and his knights, toward which the
stern Dante himself relented so far as to call them _gratissimas
ambages_, most delightful circumlocutions, though of British original,
were first set free from the dungeon of a barbarous dialect by the
French poets, and so brought back to England, and made popular there by
the Normans.
Chaucer, to whom French must have been almost as truly a mother tongue
as English, was familiar with all that had been done by Troubadour or
Trouvère. In him we see the first result of the Norman yeast upon the
home-baked Saxon loaf. The flour had been honest, the paste well
kneaded, but the inspiring leaven was wanting till the Norman brought it
over. Chaucer works still in the solid material of his race, but with
what airy lightness has he not infused it? Without ceasing to be
English, he has escaped from being insular. But he was something more
than this; he was a scholar, a thinker, and a critic. He had studied the
_Divina Commedia_ of Dante, he had read Petrarca and Boccaccio, and some
of the Latin poets. He calls Dante the great poet of Italy, and Petrarch
a learned clerk. It is plain that he knew very well the truer purpose of
poetry, and had even arrived at the higher wisdom of comprehending the
aptitudes and limitations of his own genius. He saw clearly and felt
keenly what were the faults and what the wants of the prevailing
literature of his country. In the “Monk’s Tale” he slyly satirizes the
long-winded morality of Gower, as his prose antitype, Fielding, was to
satirize the prolix sentimentality of Richardson. In the rhyme of Sir
Thopas he gives the _coup de grace_ to the romances of Chivalry, and in
his own choice of a subject he heralds that new world in which the
actual and the popular were to supplant the fantastic and the heroic.
Before Chaucer, modern Europe had given birth to one great poet, Dante;
and contemporary with him was one supremely elegant one, Petrarch. Dante
died only seven years before Chaucer was born, and, so far as culture is
derived from books, the moral and intellectual influences they had been
subjected to, the speculative stimulus that may have given an impulse to
their minds,--there could have been no essential difference between
them. Yet there are certain points of resemblance and of contrast, and
those not entirely fanciful, which seem to me of considerable interest.
Both were of mixed race, Dante certainly, Chaucer presumably so. Dante
seems to have inherited on the Teutonic side the strong moral sense, the
almost nervous irritability of conscience, and the tendency to mysticism
which made him the first of Christian poets,--first in point of time and
first in point of greatness. From the other side he seems to have
received almost in overplus a feeling of order and proportion, sometimes
wellnigh hardening into mathematical precision and formalism,--a
tendency which at last brought the poetry of the Romanic races to a
dead-lock of artifice and decorum. Chaucer, on the other hand, drew from
the South a certain airiness of sentiment and expression, a felicity of
phrase, and an elegance of turn hitherto unprecedented and hardly yet
matched in our literature, but all the while kept firm hold of his
native soundness of understanding, and that genial humor which seems to
be the proper element of worldly wisdom. With Dante, life represented
the passage of the soul from a state of nature to a state of grace; and
there would have been almost an even chance whether (as Burns says) the
_Divina Commedia_ had turned out a song or a sermon, but for the
wonderful genius of its author, which has compelled the sermon to sing
and the song to preach, whether they would or no. With Chaucer, life is
a pilgrimage, but only that his eye may be delighted with the varieties
of costume and character. There are good morals to be found in Chaucer,
but they are always incidental. With Dante the main question is the
saving of the soul, with Chaucer it is the conduct of life. The distance
between them is almost that between holiness and prudence. Dante applies
himself to the realities and Chaucer to the scenery of life, and the
former is consequently the more universal poet, as the latter is the
more truly national one. Dante represents the justice of God, and
Chaucer his loving-kindness. If there is anything that may properly be
called satire in the one, it is like a blast of the divine wrath, before
which the wretches cower and tremble, which rends away their cloaks of
hypocrisy and their masks of worldly propriety, and leaves them
shivering in the cruel nakedness of their shame. The satire of the other
is genial with the broad sunshine of humor, into which the victims walk
forth with a delightful unconcern, laying aside of themselves the
disguises that seem to make them uncomfortably warm, till they have made
a thorough betrayal of themselves so unconsciously that we almost pity
while we laugh. Dante shows us the punishment of sins against God and
one’s neighbor, in order that we may shun them, and so escape the doom
that awaits them in the other world. Chaucer exposes the cheats of the
transmitter of metals, of the begging friars, and of the pedlers of
indulgences, in order that we may be on our guard against them in this
world. If we are to judge of what is national only by the highest and
most characteristic types, surely we cannot fail to see in Chaucer the
true forerunner and prototype of Shakespeare, who, with an imagination
of far deeper grasp, a far wider reach of thought, yet took the same
delight in the pageantry of the actual world, and whose moral is the
moral of worldly wisdom only heightened to the level of his wide-viewing
mind, and made typical by the dramatic energy of his plastic nature.
Yet if Chaucer had little of that organic force of life which so
inspires the poem of Dante that, as he himself says of the heavens, part
answers to part with mutual interchange of light, he had a structural
faculty which distinguishes him from all other English poets, his
contemporaries, and which indeed is the primary distinction of poets
properly so called. There is, to be sure, only one other English writer
coeval with himself who deserves in any way to be compared with him, and
that rather for contrast than for likeness.
With the single exception of Langland, the English poets, his
contemporaries, were little else than bad versifiers of legends classic
or mediæval, as happened, without selection and without art. Chaucer is
the first who broke away from the dreary traditional style, and gave not
merely stories, but lively _pictures_ of real life as the ever-renewed
substance of poetry. He was a reformer, too, not only in literature, but
in morals. But as in the former his exquisite tact saved him from all
eccentricity, so in the latter the pervading sweetness of his nature
could never be betrayed into harshness and invective. He seems incapable
of indignation. He mused good-naturedly over the vices and follies of
men, and, never forgetting that he was fashioned of the same clay, is
rather apt to pity than condemn. There is no touch of cynicism in all he
wrote. Dante’s brush seems sometimes to have been smeared with the
burning pitch of his own fiery lake. Chaucer’s pencil is dipped in the
cheerful color-box of the old illuminators, and he has their patient
delicacy of touch, with a freedom far beyond their somewhat mechanic
brilliancy.
English narrative poetry, as Chaucer found it, though it had not
altogether escaped from the primal curse of long-windedness so painfully
characteristic of its prototype, the French Romance of Chivalry, had
certainly shown a feeling for the picturesque, a sense of color, a
directness of phrase, and a simplicity of treatment which give it graces
of its own and a turn peculiar to itself. In the easy knack of
story-telling, the popular minstrels cannot compare with Marie de
France. The lightsomeness of fancy, that leaves a touch of sunshine and
is gone, is painfully missed in them all. Their incidents enter
dispersedly, as the old stage directions used to say, and they have not
learned the art of concentrating their force on the key-point of their
hearers’ interest. They neither get fairly hold of their subject, nor,
what is more important, does it get hold of them. But they sometimes
yield to an instinctive hint of leaving-off at the right moment, and in
their happy negligence achieve an effect only to be matched by the
highest successes of art.
“That lady heard his mourning all
Right under her chamber wall,
In her oriel where she was,
Closëd well with royal glass;
Fulfilled it was with imagery
Every window, by and by;
On each side had there a gin
Sperred with many a divers pin;
Anon that lady fair and free
Undid a pin of ivory
And wide the window she open set,
The sun shone in at her closet.”
It is true the old rhymer relapses a little into the habitual drone of
his class, and shows half a mind to bolt into their common inventory
style when he comes to his _gins_ and _pins_, but he withstands the
temptation manfully, and his sunshine fills our hearts with a gush as
sudden as that which illumines the lady’s oriel. Coleridge and Keats
have each in his way felt the charm of this winsome picture, but have
hardly equalled its hearty honesty, its economy of material, the supreme
test of artistic skill. I admit that the phrase “_had_ there a gin” is
suspicious, and suggests a French original, but I remember nothing
altogether so good in the romances from the other side of the Channel.
One more passage occurs to me, almost incomparable in its simple
straightforward force and choice of the right word.
“Sir Graysteel to his death thus thraws,
He welters [wallows] and the grass updraws;
* * * * *
A little while then lay he still,
(Friends that saw him liked full ill,)
And bled into his armor bright.”
The last line, for suggestive reticence, almost deserves to be put
beside the famous
“Quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante”
of the great master of laconic narration. In the same poem[14] the
growing love of the lady, in its maidenliness of unconscious betrayal,
is touched with a delicacy and tact as surprising as they are
delightful. But such passages, which are the despair of poets who have
to work in a language that has faded into diction, are exceptional. They
are to be set down rather to good luck than to art. Even the stereotyped
similes of these fortunate illiterates, like “weary as water in a weir,”
or “glad as grass is of the rain,” are new, like nature, at the
thousandth repetition. Perhaps our palled taste overvalues the wild
flavor of these wayside treasure-troves. They are wood-strawberries,
prized in proportion as we must turn over more leaves ere we find one.
This popular literature is of value in helping its toward a juster
estimate of Chaucer by showing what the mere language was capable of,
and that all it wanted was a poet to put it through its paces. For
though the poems I have quoted be, in their present form, later than he,
they are, after all, but modernized versions of older copies, which they
doubtless reproduce with substantial fidelity.
It is commonly assumed that Chaucer did for English what Dante is
supposed to have done for Italian and Luther for German, that he, in
short, in some hitherto inexplicable way, created it. But this is to
speak loosely and without book. Languages are never made in any such
fashion, still less are they the achievement of any single man, however
great his genius, however powerful his individuality. They shape
themselves by laws as definite as those which guide and limit the growth
of other living organisms. Dante, indeed, has told us that he chose to
write in the tongue that might be learned of nurses and chafferers in
the market. His practice shows that he knew perfectly well that poetry
has needs which cannot be answered by the vehicle of vulgar commerce
between man and man. What he instinctively felt was, that there was the
living heart of all speech, without whose help the brain were powerless
to send will, motion, meaning, to the limbs and extremities. But it is
true that a language, as respects the uses of literature, is liable to a
kind of syncope. No matter how complete its vocabulary may be, how
thorough an outfit of inflections and case-endings it may have, it is a
mere dead body without a soul till some man of genius set its arrested
pulses once more athrob, and show what wealth of sweetness, scorn,
persuasion, and passion lay there awaiting its liberator. In this sense
it is hardly too much to say that Chaucer, like Dante, found his native
tongue a dialect and left it a language. But it was not what he did with
deliberate purpose of reform, it was his kindly and plastic genius that
wrought this magic of renewal and inspiration. It was not the new words
he introduced,[15] but his way of using the old ones, that surprised
them into grace, ease, and dignity in their own despite. In order to
feel fully how much he achieved, let any one subject himself to a
penitential course of reading in his contemporary, Gower, who worked in
a material to all intents and purposes the same, or listen for a moment
to the barbarous jangle which Lydgate and Occleve contrive to draw from
the instrument their master had tuned so deftly. Gower has positively
raised tediousness to the precision of science, he has made dulness an
heirloom for the students of our literary history. As you slip to and
fro on the frozen levels of his verse, which give no foothold to the
mind, as your nervous ear awaits the inevitable recurrence of his rhyme,
regularly pertinacious as the tick of an eight-day clock and reminding
you of Wordsworth’s
“Once more the ass did lengthen out
The hard, dry, seesaw of his horrible bray,”
you learn to dread, almost to respect, the powers of this indefatigable
man. He is the undertaker of the fair mediæval legend, and his style has
the hateful gloss, the seemingly unnatural length, of a coffin. Love,
beauty, passion, nature, art, life, the natural and theological
virtues,--there is nothing beyond his power to disenchant, nothing out
of which the tremendous hydraulic press of his allegory (or whatever it
is, for I am not sure if it be not something even worse) will not
squeeze all feeling and freshness and leave it a juiceless pulp. It
matters not where you try him, whether his story be Christian or pagan,
borrowed from history or fable, you cannot escape him. Dip in at the
middle or the end, dodge back to the beginning, the patient old man is
there to take you by the button and go on with his imperturbable
narrative. You may have left off with Clytemnestra, and you begin again
with Samson; it makes no odds, for you cannot tell one from tother. His
tediousness is omnipresent, and like Dogberry he could find in his heart
to bestow it all (and more if he had it) on your worship. The word
_lengthy_ has been charged to our American account, but it must have
been invented by the first reader of Gower’s works, the only inspiration
of which they were ever capable. Our literature had to lie by and
recruit for more than four centuries ere it could give us an equal
vacuity in Tupper, so persistent a uniformity of commonplace in the
“Recreations of a Country Parson.” Let us be thankful that the
industrious Gower never found time for recreation!
But a fairer as well as more instructive comparison lies between Chaucer
and the author of “Piers Ploughman.” Langland has as much tenderness, as
much interest in the varied picture of life, as hearty a contempt for
hypocrisy, and almost an equal sense of fun. He has the same easy
abundance of matter. But what a difference! It is the difference between
the poet and the man of poetic temperament. The abundance of the one is
a continual fulness within the fixed limits of good taste; that of the
other is squandered in overflow. The one can be profuse on occasion; the
other is diffuse whether he will or no. The one is full of talk; the
other is garrulous. What in one is the refined _bonhomie_ of a man of
the world, is a rustic shrewdness in the other. Both are kindly in their
satire, and have not (like too many reformers) that vindictive love of
virtue which spreads the stool of repentance with thistle-burrs before
they invite the erring to seat themselves therein. But what in “Piers
Ploughman” is sly fun, has the breadth and depth of humor in Chaucer;
and it is plain that while the former was taken up by his moral purpose,
the main interest of the latter turned to perfecting the form of his
work. In short, Chaucer had that fine literary sense which is as rare as
genius, and, united with it, as it was in him, assures an immortality of
fame. It is not merely what he has to say, but even more the agreeable
way he has of saying it, that captivates our attention and gives him an
assured place in literature. Above all, it is not in detached passages
that his charm lies, but in the entirety of expression and the
cumulative effect of many particulars working toward a common end. Now
though _ex ungue leonem_ be a good rule in comparative anatomy, its
application, except in a very limited way, in criticism is sure to
mislead; for we should always bear in mind that the really great writer
is great in the mass, and is to be tested less by his cleverness in the
elaboration of parts than by that _reach_ of mind which is incapable of
random effort, which selects, arranges, combines, rejects, denies itself
the cheap triumph of immediate effects, because it is absorbed by the
controlling charm of proportion and unity. A careless good-luck of
phrase is delightful; but criticism cleaves to the teleological
argument, and distinguishes the creative intellect, not so much by any
happiness of natural endowment as by the marks of design. It is true
that one may sometimes discover by a single verse whether an author have
imagination, or may make a shrewd guess whether he have style or no,
just as by a few spoken words you may judge of a man’s accent; but the
true artist in language is never spotty, and needs no guide-boards of
admiring italics, a critical method introduced by Leigh Hunt, whose
feminine temperament gave him acute perceptions at the expense of
judgment. This is the Bœotian method, which offers us a brick as a
sample of the house, forgetting that it is not the goodness of the
separate bricks, but the way in which they are put together, that brings
them within the province of art, and makes the difference between a heap
and a house. A great writer does not reveal himself here and there, but
everywhere. Langland’s verse runs mostly like a brook, with a beguiling
and wellnigh slumberous prattle, but he, more often than any writer of
his class, flashes into salient lines, gets inside our guard with the
home-thrust of a forthright word, and he gains if taken piecemeal. His
imagery is naturally and vividly picturesque, as where he says of Old
Age,--
“Eld the hoar
That was in the vauntward,
And bare the banner before death,”--
and he softens to a sweetness of sympathy beyond Chaucer when he speaks
of the poor or tells us that Mercy is “sib of all sinful”; but to
compare “Piers Ploughman” with the “Canterbury Tales” is to compare
sermon with song.
Let us put a bit of Langland’s satire beside one of Chaucer’s. Some
people in search of Truth meet a pilgrim and ask him whence he comes. He
gives a long list of holy places, appealing for proof to the relics on
his hat:--
“‘I have walked full wide in wet and in dry
And sought saints for my soul’s health.’
‘Know’st thou ever a relic that is called Truth?
Couldst thou show us the way where that wight dwelleth?’
‘Nay, so God help me,’ said the man then,
‘I saw never palmer with staff nor with scrip
Ask after him ever till now in this place.’”
This is a good hit, and the poet is satisfied; but, in what I am going
to quote from Chaucer, everything becomes picture, over which lies broad
and warm the sunshine of humorous fancy.
“In oldë dayës of the King Artour
Of which that Britouns speken gret honour,
All was this lond fulfilled of fayerie:
The elf-queen with her joly compaignie
Dancëd ful oft in many a grenë mede:
This was the old opinion as I rede;
I speke of many hundrid yer ago:
But now can no man see none elvës mo,
For now the gretë charite and prayëres
Of lymytours and other holy freres
That sechen every lond and every streem,
As thick as motis in the sonnëbeam,
Blessyng halles, chambres, kichenës, and boures,
Citees and burghës, castels hihe and toures,
Thorpës and bernes, shepnes and dayeries,
This makith that ther ben no fayeries.
For ther as wont to walken was an elf
There walkith none but the lymytour himself,
In undermelës and in morwenynges.
And sayth his matyns and his holy thinges,
As he goth in his lymytatioun.
Wommen may now go saufly up and doun;
In every bush or under every tre
There is none other incubus but he,
And he ne wol doon hem no dishonóur.”
How cunningly the contrast is suggested here between the Elf-queen’s
jolly company and the unsocial limiters, thick as motes in the sunbeam,
yet each walking by himself! And with what an air of innocent
unconsciousness is the deadly thrust of the last verse given, with its
contemptuous emphasis on the _he_ that seems so well-meaning! Even
Shakespeare, who seems to come in after everybody has done his best with
a “Let me take hold a minute and show you how to do it,” could not have
bettered this.
“Piers Ploughman” is the best example I know of what is called popular
poetry,--of compositions, that is, which contain all the simpler
elements of poetry, but still in solution, not crystallized around any
thread of artistic purpose. In it appears at her best the Anglo-Saxon
Muse, a first cousin of Poor Richard, full of proverbial wisdom, who
always brings her knitting in her pocket, and seems most at home in the
chimney-corner. It is genial; it plants itself firmly on human nature
with its rights and wrongs; it has a surly honesty, prefers the
downright to the gracious, and conceives of speech as a tool rather than
a musical instrument. If we should seek for a single word that would
define it most precisely, we should not choose simplicity, but
homeliness. There is more or less of this in all early poetry, to be
sure; but I think it especially proper to English poets, and to the most
English among them, like Cowper, Crabbe, and one is tempted to add
Wordsworth,--where he forgets Coleridge’s private lectures. In reading
such poets as Langland, also, we are not to forget a certain charm of
distance in the very language they use, making it unhackneyed without
being alien. As it is the chief function of the poet to make the
familiar novel, these fortunate early risers of literature, who gather
phrases with the dew still on them, have their poetry done for them, as
it were, by their vocabulary. But in Chaucer, as in all great poets, the
language gets its charm from him. The force and sweetness of his genius
kneaded more kindly together the Latin and Teutonic elements of our
mother tongue, and made something better than either. The necessity of
writing poetry, and not mere verse, made him a reformer whether he would
or no; and the instinct of his finer ear was a guide such as none before
him or contemporary with him, nor indeed any that came after him, till
Spenser, could command. Gower had no notion of the uses of rhyme except
as a kind of crease at the end of every eighth syllable, where the verse
was to be folded over again into another layer. He says, for example,
“This maiden Canacee was hight,
Both in the day and eke by night,”
as if people commonly changed their names at dark. And he could not even
contrive to say this without the clumsy pleonasm of _both_ and _eke_.
Chaucer was put to no such shifts of piecing out his metre with
loose-woven bits of baser stuff. He himself says, in the “Man of Law’s
Tale,”--
“Me lists not of the chaff nor of the straw
To make so long a tale as of the corn.”
One of the world’s three or four great story-tellers, he was also one of
the best versifiers that ever made English trip and sing with a gayety
that seems careless, but where every foot beats time to the tune of the
thought. By the skilful arrangement of his pauses he evaded the
monotony of the couplet, and gave to the rhymed pentameter, which he
made our heroic measure, something of the architectural repose of blank
verse. He found our language lumpish, stiff, unwilling, too apt to speak
Saxonly in grouty monosyllables; he left it enriched with the longer
measure of the Italian and Provençal poets. He reconciled, in the
harmony of his verse, the English bluntness with the dignity and
elegance of the less homely Southern speech. Though he did not and could
not create our language (for he who writes to be read does not write for
linguisters), yet it is true that he first made it easy, and to that
extent modern, so that Spenser, two hundred years later, studied his
method and called him master. He first wrote _English_; and it was a
feeling of this, I suspect, that made it fashionable in Elizabeth’s day
to “talk pure Chaucer.” Already we find in his works verses that might
pass without question in Milton or even Wordsworth, so mainly unchanged
have the language of poetry and the movement of verse remained from his
day to our own.
“Thou Polymnia
On Pérnaso, that, with[16] thy sisters glade,
By Helicon, not far from Cirrea,
Singest with voice memorial in the shade,
Under the laurel which that may not fade.”
“And downward from a hill under a bent
There stood the temple of Mars omnipotent
Wrought all of burned steel, of which th’ entrée
Was long and strait and ghastly for to see:
The northern light in at the doorës shone
For window in the wall ne was there none
Through which men mighten any light discerne;
The dore was all of adamant eterne.”
And here are some lines that would not seem out of place in the
“Paradise of Dainty Devises”:--
“Hide, Absolom, thy giltë [gilded] tresses clear,
Esther lay thou thy meekness all adown.
* * * * *
Make of your wifehood no comparison;
Hide ye your beauties Ysoude and Elaine,
My lady cometh, that all this may distain.”
When I remember Chaucer’s malediction upon his scrivener, and consider
that by far the larger proportion of his verses (allowing always for
change of pronunciation) are perfectly accordant with our present
accentual system, I cannot believe that he ever wrote an imperfect line.
His ear would never have tolerated the verses of nine syllables, with a
strong accent on the first, attributed to him by Mr. Skeate and Mr.
Morris. Such verses seem to me simply impossible in the pentameter
iambic as Chaucer wrote it. A great deal of misapprehension would be
avoided in discussing English metres, if it were only understood that
quantity in Latin and quantity in English mean very different things.
Perhaps the best quantitative verses in our language (better even than
Coleridge’s) are to be found in Mother Goose, composed by nurses wholly
by ear and beating time as they danced the baby on their knee. I suspect
Chaucer and Shakespeare would be surprised into a smile by the learned
arguments which supply their halting verses with every kind of excuse
except that of being readable. When verses were written to be chanted,
more license could be allowed, for the ear tolerates the widest
deviations from habitual accent in words that are sung. _Segnius
irritant demissa per aurem._ To some extent the same thing is true of
anapæstic and other tripping measures, but we cannot admit it in
marching tunes like those of Chaucer. He wrote for the eye more than for
the voice, as poets had begun to do long before.[17] Some loose talk of
Coleridge, loose in spite of its affectation of scientific precision,
about “retardations” and the like, has misled many honest persons into
believing that they can make good verse out of bad prose. Coleridge
himself, from natural fineness of ear, was the best metrist among modern
English poets, and, read with proper allowances, his remarks upon
versification are always instructive to whoever is not rhythm-deaf. But
one has no patience with the dyspondæuses, the pæon primuses, and what
not, with which he darkens verses that are to be explained only by the
contemporary habits of pronunciation. Till after the time of Shakespeare
we must always bear in mind that it is not a language of books but of
living speech that we have to deal with. Of this language Coleridge had
little knowledge, except what could be acquired through the ends of his
fingers as they lazily turned the leaves of his haphazard reading. If
his eye was caught by a single passage that gave him a chance to
theorize he did not look farther. Speaking of Massinger, for example, he
says, “When a speech is interrupted, or one of the characters speaks
aside, the last syllable of the former speech and first of the
succeeding Massinger counts for one, because both are supposed to be
spoken at the same moment.
‘And felt the sweetness _of’t_
‘_How_ her mouth runs over.’”
Now fifty instances may be cited from Massinger which tell against this
fanciful notion, for one that seems, and only seems, in its favor. Any
one tolerably familiar with the dramatists knows that in the passage
quoted by Coleridge, the _how_ being emphatic, “_how her_” was
pronounced _how’r_. He tells us that “Massinger is fond of the anapæst
in the first and third foot, as:--
‘Tŏ yoŭr mōre | thăn mās|cŭlinĕ rēa|sŏn thāt | cŏmmānds ’ĕm ||.’
Likewise of the second pæon (⌣--⌣⌣) in the first foot, followed by four
trochees (--⌣), as:--
‘Sŏ grēēdĭly̆ | lōng fōr, | knōw theĭr | tītĭll|ātiŏns.’”
In truth, he was no fonder of them than his brother dramatists who, like
him, wrote for the voice by the ear. “To your” is still one syllable in
ordinary speech, and “masculine” and “greedily” were and are
dissyllables or trisyllables according to their place in the verse.
Coleridge was making pedantry of a very simple matter. Yet he has said
with perfect truth of Chaucer’s verse, “Let a few plain rules be given
for sounding the final è of syllables, and for expressing the
terminations of such words as _ocëan_ and _natiön_, &c., as
dissyllables,--or let the syllables to be sounded in such cases be
marked by a competent metrist. This simple expedient would, with a very
few trifling exceptions, where the errors are inveterate, enable any one
to feel the perfect smoothness and harmony of Chaucer’s verse.” But let
us keep widely clear of Latin and Greek terms of prosody! It is also
more important here than even with the dramatists of Shakespeare’s time
to remember that we have to do with a language caught more from the ear
than from books. The best school for learning to understand Chaucer’s
elisions, compressions, slurrings-over and runnings-together of
syllables is to listen to the habitual speech of rustics with whom
language is still plastic to meaning, and hurries or prolongs itself
accordingly. Here is a contraction frequent in Chaucer, and still
common in New England:--
“But me were lever than [lever ’n] all this town, quod he.”
Let one example suffice for many. To Coleridge’s rules another should be
added by a wise editor; and that is to restore the final _n_ in the
infinitive and third person plural of verbs, and in such other cases as
can be justified by the authority of Chaucer himself. Surely his ear
could never have endured the sing-song of such verses as
“I couth_e_ tell_e_ for a gown_e_-cloth,”
or
“Than ye to me schuld brek_e_ your_e_ trouth_e_.”
Chaucer’s measure is so uniform (making due allowances) that words
should be transposed or even omitted where the verse manifestly demands
it,--and with copyists so long and dull of ear this is often the case.
Sometimes they leave out a needful word:--
“But er [the] thunder stynte, there cometh rain,”
“When [that] we ben yflattered and ypraised,”
“Tak [ye] him for the greatest gentleman.”