CHAUCER
Chaucer has sometimes been represented as a French poet writing in
English—not only a ‘great translator’ as his friend Eustache Deschamps
called him, but so thoroughly in sympathy with the ideas and the style of
French poetry that he is French in spirit even when he is original. This
opinion about Chaucer is not the whole truth, but there is a great deal
in it. Chaucer got his early literary training from French authors;
particularly from the _Romance of the Rose_, which he translated, and
from the poets of his own time or a little earlier: Machaut, Deschamps,
Froissart, Granson. From these authors he learned the refinements of
courtly poetry, the sentiment and the elegant phrasing of the French
school, along with a number of conventional devices which were easier to
imitate, such as the allegorical dream in the fashion of the _Roman de la
Rose_. With Chaucer’s poetry, we might say, English was brought up to the
level of French. For two or three centuries English writers had been
trying to be as correct as the French, but had seldom or never quite
attained the French standard. Now the French were equalled in their own
style by an English poet. English poetry at last comes out in the same
kind of perfection as was shown in French and Provençal as early as the
twelfth century, in German a little later with narrative poets such as
Wolfram von Eschenbach, the author of _Parzival_, and lyric poets such as
Walther von der Vogelweide. Italian was later still, but by the end of
the thirteenth century, in the poets who preceded Dante, the Italian
language proved itself at least the equal of the French and Provençal,
which had ripened earlier. English was the last of the languages in which
the poetical ideal of the Middle Ages was realized—the ideal of courtesy
and grace.
One can see that this progress in English was determined by some general
conditions—the ‘spirit of the age’. The native language had all along
been growing in importance, and by the time of Chaucer French was no
longer what it had been in the twelfth or thirteenth centuries, the only
language fit for a gentleman. At the same time French literature retained
its influence and its authority in England; and the result was the
complete adaptation of the English language to the French manner of
thought and expression. The English poetry of Gower is enough to prove
that what Chaucer did was not all due to Chaucer’s original genius, but
was partly the product of the age and the general circumstances and
tendencies of literature and education. Gower, a man of literary talent,
and Chaucer, a man of genius, are found at the same time, working in the
same way, with objects in common. Chaucer shoots far ahead and enters on
fields where Gower is unable to follow him; but in a considerable part of
Chaucer’s work he is along with Gower, equally dependent on French
authority and equally satisfied with the French perfection. If there had
been no Chaucer, Gower would have had a respectable place in history as
the one ‘correct’ English poet of the Middle Ages, as the English
culmination of that courtly medieval poetry which had its rise in France
and Provence two or three hundred years before. The prize for style would
have been awarded to Gower; as it is, he deserves rather more
consideration than he has generally received in modern times. It is easy
to pass him over and to say that his correctness is flat, his poetical
art monotonous. But at the very lowest valuation he did what no one else
except Chaucer was able to do; he wrote a large amount of verse in
perfect accordance with his own critical principles, in such a way as to
stand minute examination; and in this he thoroughly expressed the good
manners of his time. He proved that English might compete with the
languages which had most distinguished themselves in poetry. Chaucer did
as much; and in his earlier work he did no more than Gower.
The two poets together, different as they are in genius, work in common
under the same conditions of education to gain for England the rank that
had been gained earlier by the other countries—France and Provence,
Germany and Italy. Without them, English poetry would have possessed a
number of interesting, a number of beautiful medieval works, but nothing
quite in the pure strain of the finest medieval art. English poetry would
still have reflected in its mirror an immense variety of life, a host of
dreams; but it would have wanted the vision of that peculiar courteous
grace in which the French excelled. Chaucer and Gower made up what was
lacking in English medieval poetry; the Middle Ages did not go by without
a proper rendering of their finer spirit in English verse.
But a great many ages had passed before Chaucer and Gower appeared, and
considered as spokesmen for medieval ideas they are rather belated.
England never quite made up what was lost in the time of depression, in
the century or two after the Norman Conquest. Chaucer and Gower do
something like what was done by the authors of French romance in the
twelfth century, such as Chrestien de Troyes, the author of _Enid_, or
Benoît de Sainte More, the author of the _Romance of Troy_. But their
writings do not alter the fact that England had missed the first
freshness of chivalrous romance. There were two hundred years between the
old French romantic school and Chaucer. Even the _Roman de la Rose_ is a
hundred years old when Chaucer translates it. The more recent French
poets whom Chaucer translates or imitates are not of the best medieval
period. Gower, who is more medieval than Chaucer, is a little behind his
time. He is mainly a narrative poet, and narrative poetry had been
exhausted in France; romances of adventure had been replaced by
allegories (in which the narrative was little worth in comparison with
the decoration), or, more happily, by familiar personal poems like those
in which Froissart describes various passages in his own life. Froissart,
it is true, the contemporary of Chaucer, wrote a long romance in verse in
the old fashion; but this is the exception that proves the rule:
Froissart’s _Meliador_ shows plainly enough that the old type of romance
was done. It is to the credit of Gower that although he wrote in French a
very long dull moralizing poem, he still in English kept in the main to
narrative. It may have been old-fashioned, but it was a success.
Gower should always be remembered along with Chaucer; he is what Chaucer
might have been without genius and without his Italian reading, but with
his critical tact, and much of his skill in verse and diction. The
_Confessio Amantis_ is monotonous, but it is not dull. Much of it at a
time is wearisome, but as it is composed of a number of separate stories,
it can be read in bits, and ought to be so read. Taken one at a time the
clear bright little passages come out with a meaning and a charm that may
be lost when the book is read too perseveringly.
The _Confessio Amantis_ is one of the medieval works in which a number of
different conventions are used together. In its design it resembles the
_Romance of the Rose_; and like the _Romance of the Rose_ it belongs to
the pattern of Boethius; it is in the form of a conversation between the
poet and a divine interpreter. As a collection of stories, all held
together in one frame, it follows the example set by _The Book of the
Seven Wise Masters_. Like the _Romance of the Rose_ again it is an
encyclopaedia of the art of love. Very fortunately, in some of the
incidental passages it gets away from conventions and authorities, and
enlarges in a modern good-tempered fashion on the vanities of the current
time. There is more wickedness in Gower than is commonly suspected.
Chaucer is not the only ironical critic of his age; and in his satire
Gower appears to be, no less than Chaucer, independent of French
examples, using his wit about the things and the humours which he could
observe in the real life of his own experience.
Chaucer’s life as a poet has by some been divided into three periods
called French, Italian and English. This is not a true description, any
more than that which would make of him a French poet merely, but it may
be useful to bring out the importance of Chaucer’s Italian studies.
Chaucer was French in his literary education, to begin with, and in some
respects he is French to the end. His verse is always French in pattern;
he did not care for the English alliterative verse; he probably like the
English romance stanza better than he pretended, but he uses it only in
the burlesque of _Sir Thopas_. In spite of his admiration for the Italian
poets, he never imitates their verse, except in one short passage where
he copies the _terza rima_ of Dante. He is a great reader of Italian
poems in the octave stanza, but he never uses that stanza; it was left
for the Elizabethans. He translates a sonnet by Petrarch, but he does not
follow the sonnet form. The strength and constancy of his devotion to
French poetry is shown in the Prologue to the _Legend of Good Women_. The
_Legend_ was written just before the _Canterbury Tales_; that is to say,
after what has been called the Italian period. But the ideas in the
Prologue to the _Legend_ are largely the ideas of the _Roman de la Rose_.
As for the so-called English period, in which Chaucer is supposed to come
to himself, to escape from his tutors, to deal immediately in his own way
with the reality of English life, it is true that the _Canterbury Tales_,
especially in the Prologue and the interludes and the comic stories, are
full of observation and original and fresh descriptive work. But they are
not better in this respect than _Troilus and Criseyde_, which is the
chief thing in Chaucer’s Italian period.
The importance of Chaucer’s Italian reading is beyond doubt. But it does
not displace the French masters in his affection. It adds something new
to Chaucer’s mind; it does not change his mind with regard to the things
which he had learned to value in French poetry.
When it is said that an English period came to succeed the Italian in
Chaucer’s life, the real meaning of this is that Chaucer was all the time
working for independence, and that, as he goes on, his original genius
strengthens and he takes more and more of real life into his view. But
there is no one period in which he casts off his foreign masters and
strikes out absolutely for himself. Some of his greatest imaginative
work, and the most original, is done in his adaptation of the story of
Troilus from an Italian poem of Boccaccio.
Chaucer represents a number of common medieval tastes, and many of these
had to be kept under control in his poetry. One can see him again and
again tempted to indulge himself, and sometimes yielding, but generally
securing his freedom and lifting his verse above the ordinary traditional
ways. He has the educational bent very strongly. That is shown in his
prose works. He is interested in popular philosophy and popular science;
he translates ‘Boece’, the Consolation of Philosophy, and compiles the
Treatise on the Astrolabe for ‘little Lewis my son’. The tale of
_Melibeus_ which Chaucer tells in his own person among the Canterbury
pilgrims is a translation of a moral work which had an extraordinary
reputation not very easy to understand or appreciate now Chaucer took it
up no doubt because it had been recommended by authors of good standing:
he translates it from the French version by Jean de Meung. The _Parson’s
Tale_ is an adaptation from the French, and represents the common form of
good sermon literature. Chaucer thus shared the tastes and the aptitudes
of the good ordinary man of letters. He was under no compulsion to do
hack work; he wrote those things because he was fond of study and
teaching, like the Clerk of Oxford in the _Canterbury Tales_. The
learning shown in his poems is not pretence; it came into his poems
because he had it in his mind. How his wit could play with his science is
shown in the _Hous of Fame_, where the eagle is allowed to give a popular
lecture on acoustics, but is prevented from going on to astronomy.
Chaucer dissembles his interest in that subject because he knows that
popular science ought not to interfere too much with the proper business
of poetry; he also, being a humorist, sees the comic aspect of his own
didactic tastes; he sees the comic opposition between the teacher anxious
to go on explaining and the listener not so ready to take in more. There
is another passage, in _Troilus_, where good literary advice is given
(rather in the style of Polonius) against irrelevant scientific
illustrations. In a love-letter you must not allow your work for the
schools to appear too obviously—
Ne jompre eek no discordant thing y-fere,
As thus, to usen termes of physik.
This may be fairly interpreted as Chaucer talking to himself. He knew
that he was inclined to this sort of irrelevance and very apt to drag in
‘termes of physik’, fragments of natural philosophy, where they were out
of place.
This was one of the things, one of the common medieval temptations, from
which he had to escape if he was to be a master in the art of poetry. How
real the danger was can be seen in the works of some of the Chaucerians,
e.g. in Henryson’s _Orpheus_, and in Gawain Douglas’s _Palace of Honour_.
Boethius is a teacher of a different sort from Melibeus, and the poet
need not be afraid of him. Boethius, the master of Dante, the disciple of
Plato, is one of the medieval authors who are not disqualified in any
century; with him Chaucer does not require to be on his guard. The
_Consolation of Philosophy_ may help the poet even in the highest reach
of his imagination; so Boethius is remembered by Chaucer, as he is by
Dante, when he has to deal solemnly with the condition of men on earth.
This is not one of the common medieval vanities from which Chaucer has to
escape.
Far more dangerous and more attractive than any pedantry of the schools
was the traditional convention of the allegorical poets, the _Rose_ and
all the attendants of the _Rose_. This was a danger that Chaucer could
not avoid; indeed it was his chief poetical task, at first, to enter this
dreamland and to come out of it with the spoils of the garden, which
could not be won except by a dreamer and by full subjection to all the
enchantments of the place. It was part of Chaucer’s poetic vocation to
comprehend and to make his own the whole spirit and language of the
_Roman de la Rose_ and also of the French poets who had followed, in the
century between. The _Complaint to Pity_ shows how he succeeded in this;
also the _Complaint of Mars_ and the poem called the _Complaint of
Venus_, which is a translation from Oton de Granson, ‘the floure of hem
that maken in France’. Chaucer had to do this, and then he had to escape.
This sort of fancy work, a kind of musical sentiment with a mythology of
personified abstract qualities, is the least substantial of all
things—thought and argument, imagery and utterance, all are of the finest
and most impalpable.
Thus am I slayn sith that Pité is deed:
Allas the day! that ever hit shulde falle!
What maner man dar now holde up his heed?
To whom shall any sorwful herte calle,
Now Crueltee hath cast to sleen us alle
In ydel hope, folk redelees of peyne?
Sith she is deed, to whom shul we compleyne
If this sort of verse had not been written, English poetry would have
missed one of the graces of medieval art—a grace which at this day it is
easy to despise. It is not despicable, but neither is it the kind of
beauty with which a strong imagination can be content, or indeed any mind
whatsoever, apart from such a tradition as that of the old ‘courtly
makers’. And it is worth remembering that not every one of the courtly
makers restricted himself to this thin, fine abstract melody. Eustache
Deschamps, for example, amused himself with humorous verse as well; and
for Froissart his ballades and virelais were only a game, an occasional
relief from the memoirs in which he was telling the story of his time.
Chaucer in fact did very little in the French style of abstract
sentiment. The longest of his early poems, _The Book of the Duchess_, has
much of this quality in it, but this does not make the poem. _The Book of
the Duchess_ is not abstract. It uses the traditional manner—dream,
mythology, and all—but it has other substance in it, and that is the
character of the Duchess Blanche herself, and the grief for her death.
Chaucer is here dealing with real life, and the conventional aids to
poetry are left behind.
How necessary it was to get beyond this French school is shown by the
later history of the French school itself. There was no one like Chaucer
in France; except perhaps Froissart, who certainly had plenty of real
life in his memoirs. But Froissart’s Chronicles were in prose, and did
nothing to cure the inanition of French poetry, which went on getting
worse and worse, so that even a poetic genius like Villon suffered from
it, having no examples to guide him except the thin ballades and rondeaux
on the hackneyed themes. R. L. Stevenson’s account of Charles d’Orleans
and his poetry will show well enough what sort of work it was which was
abandoned by Chaucer, and which in the century after Chaucer was still
the most favoured kind in France.
It should not be forgotten that Chaucer, though he went far beyond such
poetry as that of his French masters and of his own _Complaint to Pity_,
never turned against it. He escaped out of the allegorical garden of the
Rose, but with no resentment or ingratitude. He never depreciates the old
school. He must have criticized it—to find it unsatisfying is to
criticize it, implicitly at any rate; but he never uses a word of blame
or a sentence of parody. In his later writings he takes up the devices of
the Rose again; not only in the Prologue to the _Legend of Good Women_,
but also, though less obviously, in the _Squire’s Tale_, where the
sentiment is quite in harmony with the old French mode.
Chaucer wrote no such essay on poetry as Dante _de Vulgari Eloquentia_;
not even such a practical handbook of versification as was written by his
friend Eustache Deschamps. But his writings, like Shakespeare’s, have
many passages referring to the literary art—the processes of the
workshop—and a comparison of his poems with the originals which suggested
them will often bring out what was consciously in his mind as he
reflected on his work—as he calculated and altered, to suit the purpose
which he had before him.
Chaucer is one of the greatest of literary artists, and one of the
finest; so it is peculiarly interesting to make out what he thought of
different poetical kinds and forms which came in his way through his
reading or his own practice. For this object—i.e. to bring out Chaucer’s
aims and the way in which he criticized his own poetry—the most valuable
evidence is given by the poem of _Anelida and the False Arcite_. This is
not only an unfinished poem—Chaucer left many things unfinished—it is a
poem which changes its purpose as it goes on, which is written under two
different and discordant influences, and which could not possibly be made
harmonious without total reconstruction from the beginning. It was
written after Chaucer had gone some way in his reading of the Italian
poets, and the opening part is copied from the _Teseide_ of Boccaccio,
which is also the original of the _Knight’s Tale_. Now it was principally
through Boccaccio’s example that Chaucer learned how to break away from
the French school. Yet here in this poem of _Anelida_, starting with
imitation of Boccaccio, Chaucer goes back to the French manner, and works
out a theme of the French school—and then drops it, in the middle of a
sentence. He was distracted at that time, it is clear, between two
opposite kinds of poetry. His _Anelida_ is experimental work; in it we
can see how he was changing his mind, and what difficulty he had with the
new problems that were offered to him in his Italian books. He found in
Italian a stronger kind of narrative than he had been accustomed to,
outside of the Latin poets; a new kind of ambition, an attempt to rival
the classical authors in a modern language. The _Teseide_ (the _Theseid_)
of Boccaccio is a modern epic poem in twelve books, meant by its author
to be strong and solid and full; Chaucer in _Anelida_ begins to translate
and adapt this heroic poem—and then he turns away from the wars of
Theseus to a story of disappointed love; further, he leaves the narrative
style and composes for Anelida the most elaborate of all his lyric poems,
the most extreme contrast to the heavy epic manner in which his poem is
begun. The lyrical complaint of Anelida is the perfection of everything
that had been tried in the French school—a fine unsubstantial beauty so
thin and clear that it is hardly comprehensible at first, and never in
agreement with the forcible narrative verse at the beginning of the poem.
Chaucer here has been caught escaping from the Garden of the Rose; he has
heard outside the stronger music of the new Italian epic poetry, but the
old devotion is for the time too strong, and he falls back. His return is
not exactly failure, because the complaint of Anelida, which is in many
respects old-fashioned, a kind of poetry very near exhaustion, is also
one of the most elaborate things ever composed by Chaucer, such a proof
of his skill in verse as he never gives elsewhere.
The _Teseide_ kept him from sleeping, and his later progress cannot be
understood apart from this epic of Boccaccio. When Chaucer read the
Italian poets, he found them working with a new conception of the art of
poetry, and particularly a fresh comprehension of the Ancients. The
classical Renaissance has begun.
The influence of the Latin poets had been strong all through the Middle
Ages. In its lowest degree it helped the medieval poets to find matter
for their stories; the French _Roman d’Eneas_ is the work that shows this
best, because it is a version of the greatest Latin poem, and can be
easily compared with its original, so as to find out what is understood
and what is missed or travestied; how far the scope of the _Aeneid_ is
different from the old French order of romance.
But neither here nor generally elsewhere is the debt limited to the
matter of the stories. The sentiment, the pathos, the eloquence of
medieval French poetry is derived from Virgil and Ovid. The Latin poets
are the originals of medieval romance, far beyond what can be reckoned by
any comparison of plots and incidents. And the medieval poets in their
turn are the ancestors of the Renaissance and show the way to modern
poetry.
But the old French poets, though they did much for the classical
education of Europe, were inattentive to many things in classical poetry
which the Italians were the first to understand, even before the revival
of Greek, and which they appropriated for modern verse in time for
Chaucer to be interested in what they were doing. Shortly, they
understood what was meant by composition, proportion, the narrative
unities; they appreciated the style of Latin poetry as the French did
not; in poetical ornament they learned from Virgil something more
spiritual and more imaginative than the French had known, and for which
the term ‘ornament’ is hardly good enough; it is found in the similes of
Dante, and after him in Chaucer.
This is one of the most difficult and one of the most interesting parts
of literary history—the culmination and the end of the Middle Ages, in
which the principles of medieval poetry are partly justified and partly
refuted. As seen in the work of Chaucer, the effect of this new age and
the Italian poetry was partly the stronger and richer poetical language
and (an obvious sign of this strengthening) the similes such as were used
by the classical authors. But far more than this, a change was made in
the whole manner of devising and shaping a story. This change was
suggested by the Italian poets; it fell in with the change in Chaucer’s
own mind and with the independent growth of his strength. What he learned
as a critic from study he used as an artist at the time when his
imaginative power was quickest and most fertile. Yet before his journey
to Italy, and apparently before he had learnt any Italian, he had already
gone some way to meet the new poetry, without knowing it.
His earlier narrative poems, afterwards used for the tales of the Second
Nun, the Clerk of Oxford and the Man of Law, have at least one quality in
which they agree both with the Italians and with Chaucer’s maturest work.
The verse is stately, strong, _heroic_ in more senses than one. Chaucer’s
employment of the ten-syllable line in the seven-line stanza for
narrative was his own discovery. The decasyllabic line was an old
measure; so was the seven-line stanza, both in Provençal and French. But
the stanza had been generally restricted to lyric poetry, as in Chaucer’s
_Complaint to Pity_. It was a favourite stanza for ballades. French
poetry discouraged the stanza in narrative verse; the common form for
narrative of all sorts, and for preaching and satire as well, was the
short couplet—the verse of the _Roman de Troie_, the _Roman de Renart_,
the _Roman de la Rose_, the verse of the _Book of the Duchess_ and the
_Hous of Fame_. When Chaucer used the longer verse in his _Life of St.
Cecilia_ and the other earlier tales, it is probable that he was
following a common English opinion and taste, which tended against the
universal dominion of the short couplet. ‘Short verse’ was never put out
of use or favour, never insulted or condemned. But the English seem to
have felt that it was not enough; they wanted more varieties. They had
the alliterative verse, and, again, the use of the _rime couée_—_Sir
Thopas_ verse—was certainly due to a wish for variety. The long verse of
Robert of Gloucester was another possibility, frequently taken. After
Chaucer’s time, and seemingly independent of him, there were, in the
fifteenth century, still more varieties in use among the minstrels. There
was a general feeling among poets of all degrees that the short couplet
(with no disrespect to it) was not the only and was not the most powerful
of instruments. The technical originality of Chaucer was, first, that he
learned the secret of the ten-syllable line, and later that he used it
for regular narrative and made it the proper heroic verse in English. The
most remarkable thing in this discovery is that Chaucer began to conform
to the Italian rule before he knew anything about it. Not only are his
single lines much nearer to the Italian rhythm than the French. This is
curious, but it is not exceptional; it is what happens generally when the
French decasyllable is imitated in one of the Teutonic languages, and
Gower, who knew no Italian, or at any rate shows no sign of attending to
Italian poetry, writes his occasional decasyllabic lines in the same way
as Chaucer. But besides this mode of the single verse Chaucer agrees with
the Italian practice in using stanzas for long narrative poetry; here he
seems to have been led instinctively, or at least without any conscious
imitation, to agree with the poet whom he was to follow still further,
when once Boccaccio came in sight. This coincidence of taste in metre was
one thing that must have struck Chaucer as soon as he opened an Italian
book. Dante and Boccaccio used the same type of line as Chaucer had taken
for many poems before ever he learned Italian; while the octave stanzas
of Boccaccio’s epic—the common verse, before that, of the Italian
minstrels in their romances—must have seemed to Chaucer remarkably like
his own stanza in the _Life of St. Cecilia_ or the story of _Constance_.
This explains how it was that Chaucer, with all his admiration for
Italian poetry, never, except in one small instance, tries to copy any
Italian verse. He did not copy the Italian line because he had the same
line already from another source; and he did not copy Boccaccio’s octave
stanza because he had already another stanza quite as good, if not
better, in the same kind. One need not consider long, what is also very
very probable, that Chaucer felt the danger of too great attraction to
those wonderful new models; he would learn what he could (so he seems to
have thought to himself), but he would not give up what he had already
gained without them. Possibly the odd change of key, the relapse from
Italian to French style in _Anelida_, might be explained as Chaucer’s
reaction against the too overpowering influence of the new Italian
school. ‘Here is this brand-new epic starting out to conquer all the
world; no question but that it is triumphant, glorious, successful; and
we cannot escape; but before we join in the procession, and it is too
late to draw back, suppose we draw back _now_—into the old garden—to try
once more what may be made of the old French kind of music’. So possibly
we might translate into ruder terms what seems to be the artistic
movement in this remarkable failure by Chaucer.
Chaucer spent a long time thinking over the Italian poetry which he had
learned, and he made different attempts to turn it to profit in English
before he succeeded. One of his first complete poems after his Italian
studies had begun is as significant as _Anelida_ both with respect to the
difficulties that he found and also to the enduring influence of the
French school. In the _Parliament of Birds_, his style as far as it can
be tested in single passages seems to have learned everything there was
to be learned—
Through me men goon into the blisful place
Of hertès hele and dedly woundès cure;
Through me men goon unto the welle of Grace,
There grene and lusty May shal ever endure;
This is the way to all good aventure;
Be glad, thou reader, and thy sorrow offcaste!
All open am I; passe in and hy thee faste!
And, as for composition, the poem carries out to the full what the author
intends; the digressions and the slackness that are felt to detract from
the _Book of the Duchess_ have been avoided; the poem expresses the mind
of Chaucer, both through the music of its solemn verse, and through the
comic dialogue of the birds in their assembly. But this accomplished
piece of work, with all its reminiscences of Dante and Boccaccio, is old
French in its scheme; it is another of the allegorical dreams, and the
device of the Parliament of Birds is in French older than the _Romaunt of
the Rose_.
Chaucer is still, apparently, holding back; practising on the ground
familiar to him, and gradually working into his poetry all that he can
readily manage out of his Italian books. In _Anelida_ Italian and French
are separate and discordant; in the _Parliament of Birds_ there is a
harmony, but as yet Chaucer has not matched himself thoroughly against
Boccaccio. When he does so, in _Troilus_ and in the _Knight’s Tale_, it
will be found that he is something more than a translator, and more than
an adapter of minor and separable passages.
The _Teseide_ of Boccaccio is at last after many attempts—how many, it is
impossible to say—rendered into English by Chaucer, not in a translation,
but with a thorough recasting of the whole story. _Troilus and Criseyde_
is taken from another poem by Boccaccio. _Troilus_ and the _Knight’s
Tale_ are without rivals in English for the critical keenness which has
gone into them. Shakespeare has the same skill in dealing with his
materials, in choosing and rejecting, but Shakespeare was never matched,
as Chaucer was in these works, against an author of his own class, an
author, too, who had all the advantages of long training. The
interest—the historical interest at any rate—of Chaucer’s dealings with
Boccaccio is that it was an encounter between an Englishman whose
education had been chiefly French, and an Italian who had begun upon the
ways of the new learning. To put it bluntly, it was the Middle Ages
against the Renaissance; and the Englishman won on the Italian ground and
under the Italian rules. Chaucer judged more truly than Boccaccio what
the story of Palamon and Arcite was worth; the story of Troilus took
shape in his imagination with incomparably more strength and substance.
In both cases he takes what he thinks fit; he learned from Boccaccio, or
perhaps it would be truer to say he found out for himself in reading
Boccaccio what was the value of right proportion in narrative. He refused
altogether to be led away as Boccaccio was by the formal classical ideal
of epic poetry—the ‘receipt to make an epic poem’ which prescribed as
necessary all the things employed in the construction of the _Aeneid_.
Boccaccio is the first modern author who writes an epic in twelve books;
and one of his books is taken up with funeral games, because Virgil in
the _Aeneid_ had imitated the funeral games in Homer. In the time of Pope
this was still a respectable tradition. Chaucer is not tempted; he keeps
to what is essential, and in the proportions of his story and his
conception of the narrative unities he is saner than all the Renaissance.
One of the finest passages in English criticism of poetry is Dryden’s
estimate of Chaucer in the Preface to the _Fables_. Chaucer is taken by
Dryden, in the year 1700, as an example of that sincerity and truth to
Nature which makes the essence of classical poetry. In this classical
quality, Dryden thinks that Ovid is far inferior to Chaucer. Dryden makes
allowance for Chaucer’s old-fashioned language, and he did not fully
understand the beauty of Chaucer’s verse, but still he judges him as a
modern writer with respect to his imagination; to no modern writer does
he give higher praise than to Chaucer.
This truth to Nature, in virtue of which Chaucer is a classic, will be
found to be limited in some of his works by conventions which are not
always easy to understand. Among these should not be reckoned the dream
allegory. For though it may appear strange at first that Chaucer should
have gone back to this in so late a work as the Prologue to the _Legend
of Good Women_, yet it does not prevent him from speaking his mind either
in earlier or later poems. In the _Book of the Duchess_, the _Parliament
of Birds_, the Prologue to the _Legend_, one feels that Chaucer is
dealing with life, and saying what he really thinks, in spite of the
conventions. The _Hous of Fame_, which is a dream poem, might almost have
been written for a wager, to show that he could bring in everything
traditional, everything most common in the old artificial poetry, and yet
be original and fresh through it all. But there are some stories—the
_Clerk’s Tale_, and the _Franklin’s Tale_—in which he uses conventions of
another sort and is partially disabled by them. These are stories of a
kind much favoured in the Middle Ages, turning each upon one single
obligation which, for the time, is regarded as if it were the only rule
of conduct. The patience of Griselda is absolute; nothing must be allowed
to interfere with it, and there is no other moral in the story. It is one
of the frequent medieval examples in which the author can only think of
one thing at a time. On working out this theme, Chaucer is really tried
as severely as his heroine, and his patience is more extraordinary,
because if there is anything certain about him it is that his mind is
never satisfied with any one single aspect of any matter. Yet here he
carries the story through to the end, though when it is finished he
writes an epilogue which is a criticism on the strained morality of the
piece. The plot of the _Franklin’s Tale_ is another of the favourite
medieval type, where the ‘point of honour’, the obligation of a vow, is
treated in the same uncompromising way; Chaucer is here confined to a
problem under strict rules, a drama of difficulties without character.
In the _Legend of Good Women_ he is limited in a different way, and not
so severely. He has to tell ‘the Saints’ Lives of Cupid’—the Legends of
the Heroines who have been martyrs for love; and as in the Legend of the
Saints of the Church, the same motives are repeated, the trials of
loyalty, the grief and pity. The Legend was left unfinished, apparently
because Chaucer was tired. Yet it is not certain that he repented of his
plan, or that the plan was wrong. There may possibly have been in this
work something of the formalism which is common in Renaissance art, the
ambition to build up a structure in many compartments, each compartment
resembling all the others in the character of the subject and its general
lines. But the stories are distinct, and all are beautiful—the legends of
Cleopatra Queen and Martyr, of Thisbe and Ariadne, and the rest. Another
poem which may be compared with the _Legend of Good Women_ is the _Monk’s
Tale_—an early work to which Chaucer made later additions—his book of the
_Falls of Princes_. The Canterbury pilgrims find it too depressing, and
in their criticism of the Monk’s tragedies Chaucer may possibly have been
thinking also of his unfinished _Legend of Good Women_. But what has been
said of the Legend may be repeated about the _Monk’s Tale_; there is the
same kind of pathos in all the chapters, but they are all varied. One of
the tragedies is the most considerable thing which Chaucer took from
Dante; the story of Ugolino in the _Inferno_, ‘Hugelyn Erle of Pise’.
It is uncertain whether Chaucer knew the _Decameron_ of Boccaccio, but
the art of his comic stories is very like that of the Italian, to whom he
owed so much in other ways. It is the art of comic imagination, using a
perfect style which does not need to be compared with the unsophisticated
old French ribaldry of the _fabliaux_ to be appreciated, though a
comparison of that sort will show how far the Middle Ages had been left
behind by Boccaccio and Chaucer. Among the interludes in the _Canterbury
Tales_ there are two especially, the monologues of the Wife of Bath and
the Pardoner, where Chaucer has discovered one of the most successful
forms of comic poetry, and the Canon’s Yeoman’s prologue may be reckoned
as a third along with them, though there, and also in the _Canon’s
Yeoman’s Tale_, the humour is of a peculiar sort, with less character in
it, and more satire—like the curious learned satire of which Ben Jonson
was fond. It is remarkable that the tales told by the Wife of Bath and
the Pardoner are both in a different tone from their discourses about
themselves.
Without _Troilus and Criseyde_ the works of Chaucer would be an immense
variety—romance and sentiment, humour and observation, expressed in
poetical language that has never been equalled for truth and liveliness.
But it is only in _Troilus_ that Chaucer uses his full powers together in
harmony. All the world, it might be said, is reflected in the various
poems of Chaucer; _Troilus_ is the one poem which brings it all into a
single picture. In the history of English poetry it is the close of the
Middle Ages.
NOTE ON BOOKS
For the language: Anglo-Saxon can be learned in Sweet’s _Primer_ and
_Reader_ (Clarendon Press). Sweet’s _First Middle English Primer_ gives
extracts from the _Ancren Riwle_ and the _Ormulum_, with separate
grammars for the two dialects. But it is generally most convenient to
learn the language of Chaucer before attempting the earlier books. Morris
and Skeat’s _Specimens of Early English_ (two volumes, Clarendon Press)
range from the end of the English Chronicle (1153) to Chaucer; valuable
for literary history as well as philology. The nature of the language is
explained in Henry Bradley’s _Making of English_ (Clarendon Press), and
in Wyld’s _Study of the Mother Tongue_ (Murray).
The following books should be noted: Stopford Brooke, _Early English
Literature_ (Macmillan); Schofield, _English Literature from the Norman
Conquest to Chaucer_ (Macmillan); Jusserand, _Literary History of the
English People_ (Fisher Unwin); Chambers’ _Cyclopædia of English
Literature_, I; Ten Brink, _Early English Literature_ (Bell); Saintsbury,
_History of English Prosody_, I (Macmillan); Courthope, _History of
English Poetry_, I and II (Macmillan).
Full bibliographies are provided in the _Cambridge History of English
Literature_.
The bearings of early French upon English poetry are illustrated in
Saintsbury’s _Flourishing of Romance and Rise of Allegory_ (Blackwood).
Much of the common medieval tendencies may be learned from the earlier
part of Robertson’s _German Literature_ (Blackwood), and Gaspary’s
_Italian Literature_, translated by Oelsner (Bell). Some topics have been
already discussed by the present author in other works: _Epic and
Romance_ (Macmillan); _The Dark Ages_ (Blackwood); _Essays on Medieval
Literature_ (Macmillan).
The history of medieval drama in England, for which there was no room in
this book, is clearly given in Pollard’s _Miracle Plays, Moralities and
Interludes_ (Clarendon Press).
SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE
By R. W. Chambers
_Many years have passed since the publication of Ker’s volume in the_
Home University Library, _yet there is hardly a paragraph in it which
demands any serious addition or alteration. It is a classic of English
criticism, and any attempt to alter it, or ‘bring it up to date’, either
now or in future years, would be futile_.
_Ker deliberately refused to add an elaborate bibliography. But his_ Note
on Books _reminds us how, though his own work remains unimpaired, the
whole field of study has been altered, largely as a result of that work_.
Sweet’s books mark an epoch in Anglo-Saxon study, and have not lost their
practical value: to his _Primer_ and _Reader_ (Clarendon Press) must be
added the _Anglo-Saxon Reader_ of A. J. Wyatt (Cambridge University
Press, 1919, etc.). The earlier portion of Morris’s _Specimens of Early
English_, Part I (1150-1300), has been replaced by Joseph Hall’s
_Selections from Early Middle English_, 1130-1250, 2 vols. (Clarendon
Press, 1920); Part II, _Specimens_ (1298-1393), edited by Morris and
Skeat, has been replaced by _Fourteenth Century Verse and Prose_, edited
by Kenneth Sisam (Clarendon Press, 1921). To Wyld’s _Study of the Mother
Tongue_ must now be added his _History of Modern Colloquial English_ and
Otto Jespersen’s _Growth and Structure of the English Language_
(Blackwell, 1938).
_The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records_, edited by G. P. Krapp and others
(Columbia Univ. Press and Routledge, 6 vols, 1931, etc.), provide a
corpus of Anglo-Saxon poetry.
It is impossible to review editions of, or monographs on, individual
poems or authors, but some work done on _Beowulf_ and Chaucer may be
noted: editions of _Beowulf_, by Sedgefield (Manchester Univ. Press,
1910, etc.), by Wyatt and Chambers (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1914, etc.)
and by Klaeber (Heath & Co., 1922, etc.); R. W. Chambers, _Beowulf, an
Introduction_ (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1921, etc.), and W. W. Lawrence,
_Beowulf and Epic Tradition_ (Harvard Univ. Press, 1928, etc.); G. L.
Kittredge, _Chaucer and his Poetry_ (Harvard Univ. Press, 1915); J. L.
Lowes, _Geoffrey Chaucer_ (Oxford Univ. Press, 1934); F. N. Robinson,
_The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer_ (Oxford Univ. Press, 1933).
Fresh aspects of medieval literature are dealt with in G. R. Owst’s
_Preaching in Medieval England_ (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1926) and
_Literature and the Pulpit in Medieval England_ (Cambridge Univ. Press,
1933); R. W. Chambers, _The Continuity of English Prose_ (Oxford Univ.
Press, 1932); C. S. Lewis, _Allegory of Love_ (Clarendon Press, 1936);
Mr. Owst’s books serve to remind us that Ker’s work can still be
supplemented by minute study of fields which he, with his vast range over
the literatures of all Western Europe, had of necessity to leave
unexplored, when he closed his little book with Chaucer. The two most
startling new discoveries in Medieval English Literature fall outside the
limits which Ker set himself; they are _The Book of Margery Kempe_,
edited in 1940 for the Early English Text Society by Prof. S. B. Meech
and Miss Hope Emily Allen, and the Winchester manuscript of Malory’s
_Morte Darthur_, upon which Prof. Eugene Vinaver is now engaged.
The student will find particulars of the books he wants by consulting the
new bibliography of the _Cambridge History of English Literature_ or _A
Manual of the Writings in Middle English, 1050-1400_, by Prof. J. E.
Wells (Yale and Oxford Univ. Presses, 1916, with supplements).
FOOTNOTES
[1]
The Cædmon MS. in Oxford.
The Exeter Book.
The Vercelli Book.
The book containing the poems _Beowulf_ and _Judith_ in the Cotton
Library at the British Museum.
INDEX
Ælfric, 17, 40, 42, 43, 154, 155, 157
Alexander the Great, 51, 53, 105, 137
Alfred, King, 17, 19, 33, 34, 35, 41, 43
_Amadace, Sir_, 84, 130
_Amadas et Ydoine_, 55, 77
_Ancren Riwle_, 154-7
Andersen, Hans, 83, 128
_Anelida and Arcite_, 113, 174, 175, 180, 181
_Apollonius of Tyre_, 57
Arnold, Matthew, 8
Arthur, King, 50, 86, 87, 120
_Auchinleck MS._, 90
_Ayenbite of Inwit_, 150
Ballads, 116-23
Barbour, 162
Bede, 34, 37
Bentham on the Middle Ages, 10
_Beowulf_, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 29, 30, 34, 43, 45, 52
_Bestiary_, 138, 154
_Bevis of Southampton, Sir_, 25, 98
Boccaccio, 28, 174, 175, 179, 181, 182, 185
Boethius, 34, 41, 43, 171
_Book of the Duchess_, 173, 178, 181, 183
_Book of the Duchess Blanche_, 133
Britain,’ ‘Matter of, 50-1, 52, 53, 85
_Bruce_, 162
Bunyan, John, 98, 132, 138, 139, 145
Burne, Minstrel, 58
Burns, Robert, 56, 114, 115
Byrhtnoth, 29
Cædmon, 34, 35, 37
_Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale, The_, 186
Canute, his boat song, 107, 109
_Canterbury Tales, The_, 28, 64, 168, 170, 184, 185, 186
_Carole, The_, 61, 63, 64
_Chansons de Geste_, 52, 70
Charlemagne, 52, 53, 87
Chaucer, 20, 43, 55, 63, 64, 69, 94, 96, 97, 113, 133, 134, 140,
141, 143, 160, 163-86
_Chevelere Assigne_, 105
Chrestien de Troyes, 79, 80, 81, 82, 85, 166
Chronicle, The English, 41
_Clerk’s Tale, The_, 184
Clopinel, Jean, 140
_Cockayne, Land of_, 132
_Complaint to Pity_, 173, 178
_Confessio Amantis_, 133, 167
Courtly Poets, 63, 64, 66, 68
_Cuckoo Song_, 57, 59
_Cursor Mundi, The_, 161
Cynewulf, 37, 38, 39, 44
Dante, 8, 9, 65, 66, 75, 144, 160, 168, 171, 177, 179, 181, 185
_Deor’s Lament_, 38, 119
Deschamps, Eustace, 174
_Dream of the Rood, The_, 36, 37
Dryden on Chaucer, 183
_Emaré_, quoted, 97
_Fabliaux_, 127-32
_Faerie Queene, The_, 26, 99
_Fall of the Angels, The_, 36, 44
Faroese Ballads, 53, 119
_Ferabras, Sir_, 54
_Finnesburgh, The Fight at_, 26, 29
_Floris and Blanchefleur_, 89
France,’ ‘The Matter of, 50-1, 52, 53
_Franklin’s Tale, The_, 184
French Poetry, 48, 49, 50, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 59, 60, 69, 70, 72,
163, 176
_Friars of Berwick_, 130
Froissart, 166, 173
Gawain, Sir, 50, 52
_Gawain and the Green Knight_, 45, 60, 86, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105,
144
_Genesis_, Anglo-Saxon poem, 35
Geoffrey of Monmouth, 52, 86, 87
_Germania, The_, 18, 20, 21, 27
Giraldus Cambrensis, 62, 84, 108
Godric, St., 107, 108, 109
Gower, John, 55, 56, 63, 69, 134, 164, 165, 166, 167
Grimm, 13, 129
Guillaume de Lorris, 140
_Guy of Warwick_, 98
Hampole, Richard Rolle of, 63, 162
Harleian MS., the, 110-3, 114,116
_Havelock the Dane_, 45, 88, 89
Henryson, Robert, 125
_Hous of Fame, The_, 143, 170, 178, 184
Huchoun, 106
Huon of Bordeaux, Sir, 25
Ipomedon, Romance of, 76, 77, 78, 79
_Kerry Recruit, The_, 57, 58
_King Horn_, 88, 89, 98
_Knight’s Tale, The_, 175, 181, 182
_Lais_, Breton, 83, 86, 94
_Launfal, Sir_, 83, 84, 93
Layamon’s _Brut_, 45, 52, 87, 88, 153, 154
_Legend of Good Women, The_, 66, 72, 143, 168, 174, 183, 184
Lewes, Song on the Battle of, 111
_Libeaus, Sir_, 98, 99, 100, 102
_Luve Ron_, 109
Lydgate, John, 98
Lyndsay, Sir David, 161
Lyric poetry, 56-63, 107-23
Maldon, Battle of, 29, 30, 33, 39, 40, 43, 52
Malmesbury, William of, 44
Malory, 86, 88
_Man in the Moon_, 113
Map, Walter, 84, 87
Marie de France, 83, 84, 86, 94
_Melibeus_, 169
Michael of Kildare, Friar, 113
Minnesingers, 67, 69
Minot, Laurence, 95, 112
_Monk’s Tale, The_, 185
_Moral Ode_, 152, 153
_Morte Arthure_, in alliterative verse, 45, 60, 86, 105, 106
_Nibelungenlied_, 21, 22, 29, 48
_Odyssey, The_, 24
Ohthere, 19, 20
_Orfeo, Sir_, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 117
_Ormulum_, 57, 58, 59, 151
Osborne, Dorothy, 81
Ovid, read by French poets, 72, 176
_Owl and the Nightingale, The_, 64, 133-6
_Parliament of Birds_, 181, 183
_Pearl_, 103, 143
Petrarch, 49, 65, 66, 75, 143
_Piers Plowman_, 30, 31, 45, 143, 144-9
Provençal poetry, 67, 68, 69
Reynard the Fox, 124-7
_Riddles_, Anglo-Saxon, 40
_Rime of Sir Thopas_, 79, 94, 96, 97, 103, 104, 168, 178
Robert of Brunne, 159
Robert of Gloucester, 158, 178
Robin Hood, 122
Roland, 51, 52, 53
_Roman d’Eneas_, 71, 73, 176
_Roman de Troie_, 51, 52, 53, 71, 105
Rome,’ ‘The Matter of, 50, 51
_Rood, Dream of the_, 36, 37
_Rose, Roman de la_, 139-43, 163, 166, 167, 171, 173
_Ruin, The_, 39, 44
Ruskin, 8, 9
Ruthwell verses, the, 37
_St. Cecilia, Life of_, 178, 179
_Saints, Lives of the_, 43, 159
_Salomon and Saturnus_, 40
Saxo Grammaticus, 28, 48, 66
Science, popular, 160
_Scottish Field, The_, 30
_Seafarer, The_, 39
_Seven Wise Masters of Rome_, 137, 167
Sidney, Sir Philip, 72
Sigfred (Sigurd, or Siegfried the Volsung), 21, 22, 27
_Sirith, Dame_, 127
_Soul’s Ward_, 157
Spenser, 65, 73, 75, 99, 139
Tacitus, 18
Thomas de Hales, Friar, 109
_Thopas, Rime of Sir_, 79, 94, 96, 97, 103, 104, 168, 178
_Tristrem, Sir_, 90, 94, 99, 100, 120
_Troilus and Criseyde_, 51, 168, 170, 181, 182, 186
Verse, Anglo-Saxon, 30-40
—later alliterative, 45, 46
—rhyming, 57, 58, 59, 79, 114, 115, 178, 179
Voltaire, 49
_Vox and the Wolf, The_, 124
_Waldere_, Anglo-Saxon poem, 16, 22, 29
_Wanderer, The_, 39, 44
Wayland Smith, 34
Welsh poet writing English, 114
_Widsith_, 22, 26, 33, 38, 119
_Wife’s Complaint, The_, 39
William of Malmesbury, 28, 44
_William of Palerne_ (or _William and the Werwolf_), 55, 105
William of Poitiers, 47, 48, 114
Wycliffe, 42
_Ypotis_, 98
_Ywain and Gawain_, 80
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End of Project Gutenberg's Medieval English Literature, by William Paton Ker