endeavored to take away from us. This is his meeting with Petrarch, to
which he alludes in the prologue to the Clerk’s “Tale of Griseldis.”
There is no reason for doubting this that I am able to discover, except
that it is so pleasing to think of, and that Chaucer affirms it.
Chaucer’s embassy to Italy was in 1373, the last year of Petrarch’s
life, and it was in this very year that Petrarch first read the
“Decameron.” In his letter to Boccaccio he says: “The touching story of
Griseldis has been ever since laid up in my memory that I may relate it
in my conversations with my friends.” We are forced to believe so many
things that ought never to have happened that the heart ought to be
allowed to recompense itself by receiving as fact, without too close a
scrutiny of the evidence, whatever deserved to take place so truly as
this did. Reckoning back, then, by the finer astronomy of our poetic
instinct, we find that a conjunction of these two stars of song did
undoubtedly occur in that far-off heaven of the Past.
On the whole, we may consider the life of Chaucer as one of the
happiest, and also the most fortunate, that ever fell to the lot of
poets. In the course of it he must have been brought into relation
with all ranks of men. He had been a student of books, of manners,
and of countries. In his description of the Clerk of Oxford, in which
there is good ground for thinking that he alludes to some of his own
characteristics, he says:
For him was liefer have at his bed’s head
A twenty books clothed in black or red,
Of Aristotle and his philosophy,
Than robes rich, or fiddle or psaltery.
But albeit that he was a philosopher,
Yet had he but a little gold in coffer;
Of study took he the most care and heed,
Not a word spake he more than there was need;
And that was said in form and reverence,
And short and quick, and full of high sentence;
Sounding in moral virtue was his speech,
And gladly would he learn, and gladly teach.
What a pleasant, companionable nature the last verse testifies to. The
portrait of Chaucer, too, is perhaps more agreeable than that of any
other English poet. The downcast, meditative eyes, the rich mouth,
and the beautiful broad brow drooping with the weight of thought, and
yet with an eternal youth and freshness shining out of it as from the
morning forehead of a boy, are all remarkable, and their harmony with
each other in a placid tenderness not less so.
Chaucer’s beginnings as an author were translations from the French and
Italian. Imitations they should rather be called, for he put _himself_
into them, and the mixture made a new poem. He helped himself without
scruple from every quarter. And, indeed, there is nothing more clear
than that the great poets are not sudden prodigies, but slow results.
Just as an oak profits by the foregone lives of immemorial vegetable
races, so we may be sure that the genius of every remembered poet
drew the forces that built it up from the decay of a whole forest
of forgotten ones. And in proportion as the genius is vigorous and
original will its indebtedness be; will it strike its roots deeper into
the past and into remoter fields in search of the virtue that must
sustain it.
Accordingly, Chaucer, like Shakspeare, invented almost nothing.
Wherever he found anything directed to Geoffrey Chaucer he took it and
made the most of it. Indeed, the works of the great poets teach us to
hold invention somewhat cheap. The Provençal rhymers did the best to
invent things that nobody ever thought of before, and they succeeded in
producing what nobody ever thought of again. He must be a very great
poet indeed who can afford to say anything new.
In the great poets I think there is always a flavor of race or country
which gives them a peculiar nearness to those of the same blood,
and where the face of the individual nature is most marked, it will
be found that the type of family is also most deeply stamped. It is
remarkable that Chaucer, who probably spoke French as often and as
familiarly as English, who levied his contributions upon Norman,
Italian, and Latin writers, should yet have become (with an exception)
the most truly English of our poets.
In endeavoring to point out what seem to be the peculiar
characteristics of Chaucer, I think we shall find one of the chief
to be this--that he is the first poet who has looked to nature as a
motive of conscious emotion. Accordingly, his descriptions are always
simple and addressed to the eye rather than to the mind, or to the
fancy rather than to the imagination. Very often he is satisfied with
giving a list of flowers with no epithet, or one expressive of color or
perfume only.
Mr. Lowell here read a number of passages from the “Assembly of Fowls”
and other poems of Chaucer, with an extract from Spenser.
Now I observe that all Chaucer’s epithets are primary, or such as give
birth to the feeling; and all Shakspeare’s secondary, or such as the
feeling gives birth to. In truth, Shakspeare’s imagination is always
dramatic, even in his narrative poems, and it was so abundant that the
mere overflow of it has colored the very well-springs of the English
language, and especially of English poetry. On Chaucer, nature seems to
have always smiled (except in winter, which he cordially hated), and
no rumor of man’s fall appears to have reached the trees and birds and
flowers. Nature has taken to thinking lately, and a moral jumps up out
of a blossom, like a jack-in-a-box.
Another characteristic which we find in all the poems where Chaucer
speaks in his own person is a sentiment of _seclusion_. He always
dreams of walking in a park or a garden walled-in on every side. It is
not narrowness but privacy that he delights in, and a certain feeling
of generous limitation. In this his poems are the antithesis of
Milton’s, which always give a feeling of great spaces.
In description it would be hard to find Chaucer’s superior. His
style is distinguished always by an energetic simplicity, which is a
combination exceedingly rare. It was apparently natural to him. But
when he is describing anything that he loves, here is an inexpressible
tenderness, as if his eyes filled with tears. His narrative flows on
like one of our inland rivers, sometimes hastening a little, and in
its eddies seeming to run sunshine; sometimes lingering smoothly,
while here and there a beautiful quiet thought, a pure feeling, a
golden-hearted verse opens as quietly as a water-lily, and makes no
ripple. In modern times the desire for startling expression is so
strong that people hardly think a thought is good for anything unless
it goes off with a _pop_ like a gingerbeer cork.
In Chaucer’s pathetic passages (and they are many), the presence of
_pity_ is a thing to be noticed--and the more so as he is the best
pathetic story-teller among the English, and, except Dante, among the
modern poets. Chaucer, when he comes to the sorrow of his story, seems
to croon over the thoughts, and soothe them, and handle them with a
pleasant compassionateness, as a child treats a wounded bird which he
cannot make up his heart to let go, and yet fears to close his fingers
too firmly upon.
Mr. Lowell, in illustration, read from the “Man of Law’s Tale,” and
other of the poems.
What I have said of Chaucer’s pathos is equally true of his humor. It
never _in_vades a story, but _per_vades it. It circulates through all
his comic tales like lively blood, and never puddles on the surface any
unhealthy spots of extravasation. And this I take to be the highest
merit of narrative--diffusion without diffuseness.
I have not spoken yet of Chaucer’s greatest work, the “Canterbury
Tales.” He has been greatly commended for his skill in the painting of
character, and, indeed, nothing too good can be said of him in this
respect. But I think it is too much the fashion to consider Chaucer
as one of those Flemish painters who are called realists because
they never painted the reality, but only the _material_. It is true
that Chaucer is as minute in his costume as if he were illuminating
a missal. Nothing escapes him--the cut of the beard, the color of
the jerkin, the rustiness of the sword. He could not help this, his
eye for the picturesque is so quick and sure. But in drawing the
character it is quite otherwise. Here his style is large and free,
and he emphasizes, but not too strongly, those points only which are
essential, and which give variety to his picture without any loss to
the keeping. For he did not forget that he was painting history and not
a portrait. If his character of the good parson (which still stands
not only unmatched but unapproached by the many later attempts at the
same thing) seem an exception, it is yet in truth a confirmation of
what I have said. For, in this case, for the very sake of _keeping_, it
was necessary to be more full and careful, because the _good_ parson
alone must balance the friar, the pardoner, and all the other clerical
personages who are almost unmixedly evil. Justice is always a leading
quality in great minds, and by this single figure on one side and the
group on the other Chaucer satirizes the Church, as it can only be
satirized, by showing that it contrasts with that true religion with
which it should be identical. And was there ever anything so happy
as Chaucer’s satire! Commonly satire is unhappy, but Chaucer’s is
positively more kindly than the panegyric of some poets.
In calling Chaucer _genial_ I chose the word with forethought. This
geniality made it impossible that his satire should be intellectual.
The satire of the intellect deals with the outside only, trying the
thing satirized by a rigid standard. But it results from Chaucer’s
genial temperament that justice in him is so equipoised by love that
it becomes mercy, which is the point of rest between absolute law and
human frailty. Therefore Chaucer, properly speaking, is not a satirist
but a humorist; in other words, his satire is imaginative, and thus,
in perfect subordination to narrative (though not to dramatic) art, he
makes his characters satirize themselves. I suppose that no humorist
ever makes anybody so thoroughly an object of satire as himself--but
then one always satirizes himself kindly because he sees all sides.
Falstaff is an example of this. Now this is just the character of
imaginative or humorous satire, that the humorist enters his subject,
assumes his consciousness, and works wholly from within. Accordingly
when Chaucer makes his Frere or Pardoner expose all his own knaveries,
we feel not as if he said, “See what a precious scamp this fellow is,”
but “This is the way _we_ poor devils play fantastic tricks before high
heaven.” The butt of the humorist is Man (including himself and us);
the butt of the satirist is always individual man. The humorist says
_we_; the moralist and satirist, _thou_. Here is the strength of the
great imaginative satirist of modern times, Mr. Thackeray.
In satire, the antithesis of Chaucer is Pope; as a painter of life
and manners, Crabbe, who had great powers of observation without
imagination. Therefore what is simplicity in Chaucer is poverty in
Crabbe.
Chaucer is the first great poet who held up a mirror to
contemporary life in its objectivity, and for the mere sake of its
picturesqueness--that is, he is the first great poet who has treated
To-day as if it were as good as Yesterday. Dante wrote life also,
but it was his own life, and what is more, his own interior life.
All his characters are represented in their relation to _that_. But
Chaucer reflected life in its large sense--the life of _men_, from
the knight to the ploughman. Thus it is that he always quietly and
naturally rises above the Conventional into the Universal. And so
his great poem lives forever in that perennial contemporaneousness
which is the great privilege of genius. Thus the man of genius has a
double immortality--in heaven and on earth at the same time; and this
is what makes it good to _be_ a genius at all, that their beauty and
their goodness live after them, and every generation of men can say of
them--They are _our_ friends also.
I know not how to sum up what we feel about Chaucer except by saying,
what would have pleased him most, that we _love_ him. I would write on
the first page of his volume the inscription which he puts over the
gate in his “Assembly of Fowls”:
Through me men go into the blissful place
Of the heart’s heal, and deadly woundes cure;
Through me men go into the welle of Grace,
Where green and lusty May shall ever endure.
This is the way to all good aventure;
Be glad thou reader, and thy sorrow offcast.
All open am I, pass in, and hye thee fast.
LECTURE VI
SPENSER
(_Friday Evening, January 26, 1855_)
VI
Chaucer had been in his grave one hundred and fifty years before
England had secreted choice material enough to produce another great
poet. Or, perhaps, we take it for granted that Nature understands her
own business too well to make such productions cheap. Beauty, we know,
has no charm like that of its eternal unexpectedness, and the best
delight is that which blossoms from a stem of bare and long days.
Or is it that the spirit of man, of every race of men, has its fatal
ebbs and floods, its oscillations between the fluid ideal and the
solid matter-of-fact, so that the doubtful line of shore between is in
one generation a hard sandy actuality, with only such resemblances of
beauty as a dead sea-moss here and there, and in the next is whelmed
with those graceful curves of ever-gaining, ever-receding foam, and
that dance of joyous spray which knows not, so bright is it, whether it
be sea or sunshine.
What English Poetry was between Chaucer and Spenser there is no need to
say. Scotland had given birth to two or three poets of that kind which
is qualified by the epithet _national_, which is as much as saying that
they took account only of the universe to the north-northeast corner
of human nature instead of the whole circumference of it. England in
the meanwhile had been enriched with Sternhold and Hopkins, but on the
whole, the most important event between the death of Chaucer and the
publication of the “Faëry Queene” was the introduction of blank verse.
Perhaps the blank poetry suggested it.
Before the “Faëry Queene,” also, two long poems were printed and
popular--the “Mirror for Magistrates,” and “Albion’s England.” How the
first of these was ever read it is hard to conceive, unless we accept
the theory of some theologians that our earth is only a kind of penal
colony where men are punished for sins committed in some previous state
of existence. The other was the work of one Warner, a conveyancer, and
has a certain philological value now from its abounding in the popular
phrases of the day. It is worth notice, also, as containing the most
perfect example in the English language of what is called a conceit. It
occurs in his account of Queen Elinor’s treatment of Fair Rosamond:
With that she dashed her on the lips
So dyed double red;
Hard was the heart that struck the blow,
Soft were the lips that bled.
Which is nonsense and not poetry, though Dr. Percy admired it. Dr.
Donne, and the poets whom Dr. Johnson called metaphysical (as if all
poets are not so), is thought to be full of conceits. But the essence
of a conceit is not in a comparison being far-fetched,--the imagination
can make fire and water friendly when it likes,--but in playing upon
the meanings of two words where one is taken in a metaphorical sense.
This is a mark of the superficial mind always; whereas Donne’s may be
called a subterficial one, which went down to the roots of thought
instead of playing with its blossoms.
Not long after the “Faëry Queene” were published the “Polyolbion”
of Drayton, and the “Civil Wars” of Daniel. Both of these men were
respectable poets (especially Drayton), but neither of them could
reconcile poetry with gazetteering or chronicle-making. They are as
unlike as a declaration in love and a declaration in law.
This was the period of the Saurians in English Poetry, interminable
poems, book after book and canto after canto, like far-stretching
_vertebræ_, prodigious creatures that rendered the earth unfit
for the dwelling of Man. They are all dead now, the unwieldy
monsters--ichthyo-, plesio-, and megalosauri--they all sleep well,
and their huge remains are found imbedded in those vast morasses, the
“Collections of the Poets.” We wonder at the length of face and general
atra-bilious look that mark the portraits of that generation; but it is
no marvel when even the poetry was such downright hard work. Poems of
this sort might have served to while away the three-centuried evening
of antediluvian lives. It is easy to understand how our ancestors could
achieve great things when they encountered such hardships for mere
amusement. If we agree with Horace in pitying the pre-Homeric heroes
because they were without poets, we may sincerely commiserate our
forefathers of that generation because they had them. The reading of
one of these productions must have been nearly as long a business as
the taking of Troy, and deserved a poet to sing it. Perhaps fathers,
when their time on earth was up, folded the leaf down and left the task
to be finished by their sons--a dreary inheritance.
The popularity of such works shows the insatiable thirst of the
human soul for something which at least tried to be beyond mere
matter-of-fact. This thirst for the ideal transmuted these books into
poetry, just as the eternal drought of the desert turns muddy water
into nectar, and the famine of the shipwrecked sailor gives a flavor
beyond French cookery to a soup made of old shoes (_potage aux choux_).
But meanwhile Nature, who loves surprises, was quietly preparing a
noble one. A new poet had been born, and came upon that arid century
fresh and dewy as out of the first dawn that waked the birds in Eden.
A great poet is always impossible--till he comes, and then he seems
the simplest thing in the world to the commentators. He got this
notice here and the other there; similar subjects had been treated
by such a one, and the metre first used by another. They give us all
the terms of the equation; satisfy us that _a_ plus _b_ minus _c_
equals _x_, only we are left in the dark as to what _x_ is. The genius
continues to be an unknown quantity. The great poet is as original as
to-morrow’s sunrise, which will take the old clouds and vapors, and
little household smokes of our poor, worn-out earth to make a miracle
out of, and transfigure the old hills and fields and houses with the
enchantment of familiar novelty. It is this power of being at once
familiar and novel that distinguishes the primary poets. They give us
a new heaven and a new earth without the former things having passed
away,--whose very charm is that they have not,--a new heaven and a
new earth that we can possess by the fireside, in the street, and the
counting-room.
Edmund Spenser was born, like Chaucer, in London, in 1553, when
Cervantes was six years old. That sixteenth century was a miraculous
one. Scarce any other can show such a concurrence of great brains.
Mothers must have expected an attack of genius among their children,
as we look for measles or whooping-cough now. While Spenser was yet
delving over the _propria quæ maribus_, Shakspeare was stretching out
his baby arms and trying to get the moon to play with, and the little
Bacon, chewing upon his coral, had already learned the impenetrability
of matter. It almost takes one’s breath away to think that at the same
time “Hamlet” and the “Novum Organon” were at the mercy of teething and
the scarlet fever, unless, indeed, destiny takes care to lock the doors
against those child-stealing gypsies when she leaves such precious
things about.
Of Spenser’s personal history we know very little. He was educated at
Cambridge, where he took the degree of Master of Arts in 1576. He is
supposed to have passed the three following years with some relations
in the country, where he wrote verses and fell in love with a lady
whom he calls Rosalind, and of whom we know nothing further unless
we are satisfied to take the portrait which Shakspeare has associated
forever with the name which he complimented by adopting. He is said to
have been employed to carry a despatch or two, but Lord Burleigh did
not fancy him. Poor Lord Burleigh! Sidney and Raleigh, however, were
luckier. He was recommended to the great queen, and received at last
a grant of Kilcolman Castle and three thousand acres of land in the
south of Ireland. Here the “Faëry Queene” was in great part written. At
last came a rebellion. The wild kernes and gallow-glasses had not the
delicacy of the Emathian conqueror, and they burned the castle, from
which Spenser and his wife with two of their children barely escaped,
leaving an infant to perish in the flames. Spenser came to London and
died broken-hearted three months afterward, on the 16th of January,
1599. That rare nature was like a Venice glass, meant only to mantle
with the wine of the sunniest poetry. The first drop of poisonous
sorrow shattered it.
In 1579 Spenser published the “Shepherd’s Calendar,” a series of twelve
eclogues, one for each month in the year. In these poems he professedly
imitated Chaucer, whom he called his master, but without much success.
Even with the light reflected upon them from the lustre of his great
poem, one can find but little in them that is not dull. There are
indications in these poems, however, here and there, of a nice ear for
harmony in verse.
Spenser was the pure sense of the Beautiful put into a human body
only that it might have the means of communicating with men. His own
description of Clarion, the butterfly in his “Muiopotmos,” gives,
perhaps, the best possible idea of his own character.
Over the fields, in his frank lustiness,
And all the champaign o’er, he soared light
And all the country wide he did possess,
Feeding upon their pleasures bounteously,
That none gainsay, and none did him envy.
The woods, the rivers, and the meadows green,
With his air-cutting wings he measured wide,
Nor did he leave the mountains bare unseen,
Nor the rank grassy fens’ delights untried;
But none of these, however sweet they been,
Mote please his fancy, or him cause to abide;
His choiceful sense with every change doth flit,
No common things may please a wavering wit.
To the gay gardens his unstaid desire
Him wholly carried, to refresh his sprights;
There lavish Nature, in her last attire,
Pours forth sweet odors and alluring sights;
And Art, with her contending, doth aspire
To excel the natural with made delights,
And all that fair or pleasant may be found,
In riotous excess doth there abound.
There he arriving, round about doth flie,
From bed to bed, from one to the other border,
And takes survey with curious busy eye,
Of every flower and herb there set in order;
Now this, now that, he tasteth tenderly,
Yet none of them he rudely doth disorder;
He with his feet their silken leaves displace,
But pastures on the pleasures of each place.
And evermore with most variety
And change of sweetness (for all change is sweet),
He casts his glutton sense to satisfy,
Now sucking of the sap of herbs most meet,
Or of the dew which yet on them doth lie,
Now in the same bathing his tender feet;
And then he percheth on some branch thereby
To weather him, and his moist wings to dry.
And whatsoe’er of virtue good or ill,
Grew in his garden fetched from far away,
Of every one he takes and tastes at will,
And on their pleasures greedily doth prey;
Then, when he hath both played and fed his fill,
In the warm sun he doth himself embay,
And there him rests in riotous suffisance
Of all his gladfulness and kingly joyance.
What more felicity can fall a creature
Than to enjoy delight with liberty?
And to be lord of all the works of Nature,
To reign in the air from earth to highest sky?
To feed on flowers and weeds of glorious feature,
To take whatever thing doth please the eye?
Who rests not pleased with such happiness
Well worthy he to taste of wretchedness.
What poet has ever left us such a portrait of himself as this? In that
butterfly Spenser has symbolized the purely poetical nature. It will
be seen that there is no recognition of the moral sense whatever.
The poetic nature considered abstractly craves only beauty and
delight--without any thought beyond--
And whatsoe’er _of virtue good or ill_,
To feed on flowers and _weeds of glorious feature_.