THE AMBASSADOR
"Adieu, mol lit, adieu, piteux regards;
Adieu, pain frais que l'on soulait trouver;
Il me convient porter honneur aux lards;
Il convient ail et biscuit avaler,
Et chevaucher un perilleux cheval."
EUSTACHE DESCHAMPS
Although we have nothing important dating from before his thirtieth year,
we know from Chaucer's own words that he wrote many "Balades, Roundels,
and Virelays" which are now lost; or, as he puts it in his last rueful
Retractation, "many a song and many a lecherous lay." These were no doubt
fugitive pieces, often written for different friends or patrons, and put
abroad in their names. Besides these, we know that he translated certain
religious works, including the famous "Misery of Human Life" of Pope
Innocent the Third. Piety and Profanity, prayers and curses, jostle each
other in Chaucer's early life as in the society round him: we may think of
his own Shipman, thoroughly orthodox after his simple fashion, but
silencing the too Puritanical parson with a rattling oath at close range,
and proceeding to "clynken so mery a belle" that we feel a sort of
treachery in pausing to wonder how such a festive tale could be brought
forth for a company of pilgrims as a pill to purge heterodoxy!
The first of his early poems which we can date with any certainty is also
the best worth dating. This is the "Dethe of Blaunche the Duchesse," in
memory of John of Gaunt's first wife, who died in September, 1369. The
poem is obviously immature and unequal, but full of delightful passages,
fresh to us even where the critics trace them to some obvious French
source. Such, for instance, is the beginning of his dream, where he
describes the inevitable May morning--inevitable in medieval verse, but
here and there, when he or his fellow-poets are in their happiest mood, as
fresh again as Nature herself, who is never tired of harping on the same
old themes of sunshine and blue sky and fresh air. He wakes at dawn to
hear the birds singing their matins at his eaves; his bedroom walls are
painted with scenes from the "Romance of the Rose," and broad sunlight
streams through the storied glass upon his bed. He throws open the
casement: "blue, bright, clear was the air, nor in all the welkin was one
cloud." A bugle rings out; he hears the trampling of horse and hounds; the
Emperor Octavian's hunt is afoot--or, in plainer prose, King Edward the
Third's. The poet joins them; a puppy comes up fawning, starting away,
fawning again, until it has led him apart from the rest.
It came and crept to me as low
Right as it hadde me y-knowe,
Held down his head and joined his ears,
And laid all smoothe down his hairs.
I would have caught it, and anon
It fled, and was from me gone;
And I him followed, and it forth went
Down by a flowery greene went [glade
Full thick of grass, full soft and sweet
With floweres fele, fair under feet. [many
Here he finds a young knight all in black, mourning by himself. A little
unobtrusive sympathy unlocks the young man's heart. She was "my hap, my
heal, and all my bliss;" "and goode faire White she hight." The first
meeting had been as sudden as that of Dante and Beatrice: a medieval
garden-party--"the fairest companye of ladies, that ever man with eye had
seen together in one place," and one among them who "was like none of all
the rout," but who outshone the rest as the sun outshines moon and stars--
For every hair upon her head,
Sooth to say, it was not red;
Nor neither yellow nor brown it was,
Me thoughte most like gold it was.
Her eyes shone with such simple enjoyment of life that "fools" were apt to
read a special welcome in her glance, to their bitter disappointment in
course of time. She disdained the "knakkes smale," the little coquettish
tricks of certain other ladies, who send their lovers half round the
world, and give them but cold cheer on their return. The rest of the
personal description is more commonplace, and (however faithful to
medieval precedent) a little too like some modern sportsman's enumeration
of his horse's points. The course of true love did not run too smoothly
here. On the knight's first proposal, "she saide 'nay!' all utterly." But
"another year," when she had learned to know him better, she took him to
her mercy, and they lived full many a year in bliss, only broken now by
her death. The poem, which had rather dragged at the beginning, here ends
abruptly, as though Chaucer had tired of it. He has no effectual comfort
to offer in such a sorrow; the hunt breaks in upon their dialogue; King
and courtiers ride off to a long white-walled castle on a hill, where a
bell rings the hour of noon and wakes the poet from his dream.
When we have reckoned up all Chaucer's debts to his predecessors in this
poem--and they are many--there is ample proof left of his own originality.
Moreover, we cannot too often remind ourselves that the idea of copyright,
either legal or moral, is modern. In the scarcity of books which reigned
before the days of printing, the poet who "conveyed" most might well be
the greatest benefactor to mankind. The educated public, so far as such a
body then existed, rather encouraged than reprobated the practice of
borrowing; and the poet, like the modern schoolboy versifier, was
applauded for his skill in weaving classical tags into his own work.
Chaucer differed from his predecessors, and most of his successors, less
in the amount which he borrowed than in the extraordinary vitality and
originality which he infused into the older work. If we had only these
fragments of his early works, we should still understand how Deschamps
praises him as "King of worldly love in Albion"; we should still feel
something of that charm of language which earned the poet his popularity
at Court and his promotion to important offices.
It is well known that medieval society had not developed the minute
sub-divisions of labour which have often been pushed to excess in modern
times. The architect was simply a master-mason; the barber was equally
ready to try his hand on your beard or on a malignant tumour; the King
might choose for his minister a frankly incapable personal favourite, or
send out his most gorgeously accoutred knights on a reconnaissance which
would have been infinitely better carried out by a trained scout.
Similarly, the poets of the 14th century were very frequently sent abroad
as ambassadors; Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio had already set Chaucer this
example, which his friend Eustache Deschamps was soon to follow. The
choice implied, no doubt, a subtle tribute to the power of rhetoric, under
which category poetry was often classed. The rarity of book-learning did
not indeed give the scholar a higher value in general society than he
commands nowadays, or bring more grist to his mill; he and his horse were
commonly lean enough, and his only worldly treasures were his score of
books at his bed's head. But the medieval mind, which persistently
invested lunatics with the highest prophetic qualities, seems to have had
an equally touching faith in poetic clairvoyance at times when common
sense was at fault, and to have called upon a Dante or a Chaucer just as,
in similar emergencies, it called upon particular saints whose
intercession was least invoked in everyday life. Much, of course, is to be
explained by the fact that formal and elaborate public speeches were as
necessary as spectacular display on these embassies; but, even so, we may
wonder that the Ravennati ever entrusted an embassy to Dante, who is
recorded to have been so violent a political partisan that he was capable
of throwing stones even at women in the excitement of discussion. Chaucer,
however, had neither the qualities nor the defects of such headlong
fanaticism; and from the frequency with which he was employed we may infer
that he showed real talents for diplomacy.
His first employment of the kind was in 1370, when, a year after he had
taken part in a second French campaign, he was "abroad in the King's
service" during the summer. Whither he went is uncertain, probably to the
Netherlands or Northern France, since his absence was brief. In 1371 and
1372 he regularly received his pension with his own hands (as the still
extant household accounts of Edward III. show), until November of the
latter year, when he "was joined in a commission with James Pronam and
John de Mari, citizens of Genoa, to treat with the Duke, citizens, and
merchants of Genoa, for the purpose of choosing some port in England where
the Genoese might form a commercial establishment."[44] This journey
lasted about a year, and Chaucer received for his expenses 138 marks, or
about L1400 modern value. The roll which records these payments mentions
that Chaucer's business had taken him to Florence as well as Genoa; and
here, as so often happens in history, a stray word recorded in the driest
of business documents opens out a vista of things in themselves most
romantic.
Of all that makes the traveller's joy in modern Italy, the greater part
was already there for Chaucer to see, with much more that he saw and that
we never shall. The sky, the air, and the landscape were practically the
same, except for denser forests, and, no doubt, fewer lemon and orange
trees. The traveller, it is true, was less at leisure to observe some of
these things, and less inclined to find God's hand in the mountains or the
sea. Chaucer is so far a man of his time as to show no delight in the
sterner moods of Nature; we find in his works none of that true love of
mountain scenery which comes out in the "Pearl" and in early Scottish
poetry; and when he has to speak of Custance's sea-voyages, he expedites
them as briefly and baldly as though they had been so many business
journeys by rail. Deschamps, and the anonymous English poet of fifty years
later, show us how little cause a man had to love even the Channel passage
in the rough little boats of those days, "a perilous horse to ride,"
indeed; rude and bustling sea-folk, plentiful tributes to Neptune, scant
elbow room--
"Bestow the boat, boatswain, anon,
That our pilgrims may play thereon;
For some are like to cough and groan ...
This meanewhile the pilgrims lie
And have their bowles fast them by
And cry after hot Malvoisie ...
Some laid their bookes on their knee,
And read so long they might not see:--
'Alas! mine head will cleave in three!'"[45]
Worse passages still were matters of common history; Froissart tells us
how Herve de Leon "took the sea [at Southampton] to the intent to arrive
at Harfleur; but a storm took him on the sea which endured fifteen days,
and lost his horse, which were cast into the sea, and Sir Herve of Leon
was so sore troubled that he had never health after." King John of France,
a few years later, took eleven days to cross the Channel,[46] and Edward
III. had one passage so painful that he was reduced to explain it by the
arts of "necromancers and wizards." Moreover, nearly all Chaucer's
embassies came during those evil years after our naval defeat of 1372,
when our fleets no longer held the Channel, and the seas swarmed with
French privateers. Nor were the mountains less hated by the traveller, or
less dangerous in reality, with their rude horse-tracks and ruder
mountain-folk, half herdsmen, half brigands. First there were the Alps to
be crossed, and then, from Genoa to Florence, "the most desolate, the most
solitary way that lies between Lerici and Turbia."[47] But, after all
these difficulties, Italy showed herself as hospitable as the approaches
had been inhospitable:
"Il fait bien bon demeurer
Au doux chateau de Pavie."[48]
We must not forget these more material enjoyments, for they figure largely
among the impressions of a still greater man, in whose intellectual life
the journey to Italy marks at least as definite an epoch; not the least
delightful passages of Goethe's _Italienische Reise_ are those which
describe his delight in seeing the oranges grow, or the strange fish
brought out of the sea.
For Goethe, the soul of Italy was in its pagan antiquity; but Chaucer
found there a living art and living literature, the noblest in the then
world. The great semicircle of houses standing upon projecting arches
round the harbour of Genoa, which survived to be drawn by Ruskin in their
decay, would at once strike a noble note of contrast to the familiar
wooden dwellings built over Thames shingle at home; everywhere he would
find greater buildings and brighter colours than in our northern air. The
pale ghosts of frescoes which we study so regretfully were then in their
first freshness, with thousands more which have long since disappeared.
Wherever he went, the cities were already building, or had newly built,
the finest of the Gothic structures which adorn them still; and Chaucer
must have passed through Pisa and Florence like a new AEneas among the
rising glories of Carthage. A whole population of great artists vied with
each other in every department of human skill--
"Qualis apes aestate nova per florea rura
Exercet sub sole labor--"
Giotto and Andrea Pisano were not long dead; their pupils were carrying on
the great traditions; and splendid schools of sculpture and painting
flourished, especially in those districts through which our poet's
business led him. Still greater was the intellectual superiority of Italy.
To find an English layman even approaching in learning to Dante, or a
circle of English students comparable to that of Petrarch and Boccaccio,
we must go forward nearly two centuries, to Sir Thomas More and the eve of
the Reformation. Moreover, the stimulus of Dante's literary personality
was even greater than the example of his learning. On the one hand, he
summed up much of what was greatest in the thought of the Middle Ages; on
the other, he heralded modern freedom of thought by his intense
individualism and the frankness with which he asserted his own personal
convictions. More significant even than the startling freedom with which
Dante wielded the keys of heaven and hell is the fundamental independence
of his whole scheme of thought. When he set the confessedly adulterous
Cunizza among the blessed, and cast down so many popes to hell, he was
only following with unusual boldness a fairly common medieval precedent.
But in taking as his chief guides through the mysteries of religion a
pagan poet, a philosopher semi-pagan at the best, and a Florentine lady
whom he had loved on earth--in this choice, and in his corresponding
independence of expression, he gave an impetus to free thought far beyond
what he himself can have intended. Virgil's parting speech at the end of
the "Purgatorio," "Henceforward take thine own will for thy guide.... I
make thee King and High Priest over thyself," conveyed a licence of which
others availed themselves more liberally than the man who first uttered
it. Dante does indeed work out the problem of life for himself, but he
does so with the conclusions of St. Bernard and Hugh of St. Victor, St.
Thomas Aquinas and St. Bonaventura, always before his eyes. Others after
him followed his liberty of thought without starting from the same initial
attachment to the great theologians of the past; and, though Petrarch and
Boccaccio lived and died as orthodox Roman Catholics, yet their appeal to
the literature of antiquity had already begun the secular and even
semi-pagan intellectual movement which goes by the name of the
Renaissance. In short, the Italian intellect of the 14th century afforded
a striking example of the law that an outburst of mysticism always
provokes an equally marked phase of free thought; enthusiasm may give the
first impulse, but cannot altogether control the direction of the movement
when it has once begun. It will be seen later on that Chaucer was no
stranger to the religious difficulties of his age. The ferment of Italian
free thought seems (as Professor ten Brink has remarked) to have worked
effectually upon a mind which "was going through an intense religious
crisis."[49] Dante's mysticism may well have carried Chaucer off his feet
for a time; we probably owe to this, as well as to his regret for much
that had been wasted in his youth, the religious poems which are among the
earliest extant from his pen. "Chaucer's A. B. C.," a rapturous hymn to
the Virgin, strikes, from its very first line, a note of fervour far
beyond its French original; few utterances of medieval devotion approach
more perilously near to Mariolatry than this--"Almighty and all-merciable
Queen"! Another poem of the same period is the "Life of St. Cecilia,"
with its repentant prologue, its hymn to the Virgin translated from Dante,
and its fervent prayer for help against temptation--
Now help, thou meek and blissful faire maid
Me flemed wretch in this desert of gall; [banished
Think on the woman Canaanee, that said
That whelpes eaten some of the crumbes all
That from their lordes table been y-fall;
And though that I, unworthy son of Eve
Be sinful, yet accept now my believe....
And of thy light my soul in prison light,
That troubled is by the contagion
Of my body, and also by the weight
Of earthly lust, and false affection:
O haven of refuge, O salvation
Of them that be in sorrow and in distress
Now help, for to my work I will me dress.[50]
But much as Chaucer translated bodily from Dante in different poems, and
mighty as is the impulse which he owns to having received from him, the
great Florentine's style impressed him more deeply than his thought. In
matter, Chaucer is far more akin to Petrarch and Boccaccio, from whom he
also borrowed even more freely. But in style he owes most to Dante, as
Dante himself owes to Virgil. We may clearly trace this influence in
Chaucer's later concentration and perfection of form; in the pains which
he took to bend his verse to every mood, and in the skilful blending of
comedy and tragedy which enabled Chaucer so far to outdo Petrarch and
Boccaccio in the tales which he borrowed from them. Much of this was, no
doubt, natural to him; but neither England nor France could fully have
developed it. His two Italian journeys made him a changed man, an artist
in a sense in which the word can be used of no English poet before him,
and of none after him until the 16th century brought English men of
letters again into close communion with Italian poetry.
Did Chaucer make the personal acquaintance, on this first Italian journey,
of Petrarch and Boccaccio, who were beyond dispute the two greatest living
men of letters in Europe besides himself? His own words in the prologue of
the "Clerk's Tale" would seem to testify to personal intercourse with the
former; and most biographers have assumed that it is not only the
fictitious Clerk, but the real poet, who confesses to have learned the
story of Griselda straight from Petrarch. The latter, as we know from his
own letters, was in the height of his enthusiasm about the tale, which he
had just translated into Latin from the "Decameron" during the very year
of Chaucer's visit; and M. Jusserand justly points out that the English
poet's fame was already great enough in France to give him a ready
passport to a man so interested in every form of literature, and with such
close French connections, as Petrarch. The meeting has been strongly
doubted, partly on the ground that whereas the Clerk learned the tale from
Petrarch "at Padua," the aged poet was in fact during Chaucer's Italian
journey at Arqua, a village sixteen miles off in the Euganean hills. It
has, however, been conclusively proved that the ravages of war had driven
Petrarch down from his village into the fortified town of Padua, where he
lived in security during by far the greater part, at any rate, of this
year; so that this very indication of Padua, which had been hastily
assumed as a proof of Chaucer's ignorance, does in fact show that he
possessed such accurate and unexpected information of Petrarch's
whereabouts as might, of itself, have suggested a suspicion of personal
intercourse.[51] This is admirably illustrated by the story of Chaucer's
relations with the other great Italian, Boccaccio. Since Chaucer certainly
went to Florence, and probably left only a few weeks, or even a few days,
before Boccaccio's first lecture there on Dante; since, again, he copies
or translates from Boccaccio even more than from Petrarch, it has been
naturally suggested that the two must have met. But here we find a curious
difficulty. Great as are Chaucer's literary obligations to the author of
the "Decameron," he not only never mentions him by name, but, on those
occasions where he quotes directly and professes to acknowledge his
authority, he invariably gives some other name than Boccaccio's.[52] It
is, of course, barely conceivable that the two men met and quarrelled, and
that Chaucer, while claiming the right of "conveying" from Boccaccio as
much as he pleased, not only deliberately avoided giving the devil his
due, but still more deliberately set up other false names which he decked
out with Boccaccio's true feathers. But such a theory, which should surely
be our last resort in any case, contradicts all that we know of Chaucer's
character. Almost equally improbable is the suggestion that, without any
grudge against Boccaccio, Chaucer simply found it convenient to hide the
amount of his indebtedness to him. Here again (quite apart from the
assumed littleness for which we find no other evidence in Chaucer) we see
that in Dante's and Petrarch's cases he proclaims his debt with the most
commendable frankness. The third theory, and on the whole the most
probable, is that Chaucer translated from Italian books which, so far as
he was concerned, were anonymous or pseudonymous. Medieval manuscripts
were quite commonly written without anything like the modern title-page;
and, even when the author's name was recorded on the first page, the
frequent loss of that sheet by use left the book nameless, and at the
mercy of any possessor who chose to deck it with a title after his own
fancy.[53] Therefore it is not impossible that Chaucer, who trod the
streets of Boccaccio's Florence, and saw the very trees on the slopes of
Fiesole under which the lovers of the "Decameron" had sat, and missed by a
few weeks at most the bodily presence of the poet, may have translated
whole books of his without ever realizing their true authorship. In those
days of difficult communication, no ignorance was impossible. In 1371 the
King's Ministers imagined that England contained 40,000 parishes, while in
fact there were less than 9000. Chroniclers, otherwise well informed,
assure us that the Black Death killed more people in towns like London and
Norwich than had ever lived in them. Bishop Grandisson of Exeter, one of
the most remarkable prelates of the 14th century, imagined Ireland to be a
more populous country than England. It is perfectly possible, therefore,
that Chaucer and Boccaccio, who were in every way so close to each other
during these twelve months of 1372-3, were yet fated to remain strangers
to each other; and this lends all the more force to the fact that Chaucer
knew Petrarch to have spent the year at Padua, and not at his own home.
It may be well to raise here the further question: Had not Chaucer already
met Petrarch on an earlier Italian journey, which would relegate this of
1372-3 to the second place? In 1368, Lionel of Clarence was married for
the second time to Violante Visconti of Milan. Petrarch was certainly an
honoured guest at this wedding, and Speght, writing in 1598, quotes a
report that Chaucer was there too in attendance on his old master. This,
however, was taken as disproved by the more recent assertion of Nicholas
that Chaucer drew his pension in England "with his own hands" during all
this time. Here again, however, Mr. Bromby's researches have reopened the
possibility of the old tradition.[54] He ascertained, by a fresh
examination of the original Issue Rolls, that the pension was indeed paid
to Geoffrey Chaucer on May 25th, while the wedding party was on its way to
Milan, but the words _into his own hands_ are omitted from this particular
entry. The omission may, of course, be merely accidental; but at least it
destroys the alleged disproof, and leaves us free to take Speght's
assertion at its intrinsic worth. Chaucer's own silence on the subject may
have a very sufficient cause, the reason which he himself puts into the
Knight's mouth in protest against the Monk's fondness for tragedies--
... for little heaviness
Is right enough to many folk, I guess.
I say for me it is a great dis-ease,
Where as men have been in great wealth and ease,
To hearen of their sudden fall, alas!
Few weddings have been more tragic than that of Chaucer's old master. The
Duke, tallest and handsomest of all the Royal princes, set out with a
splendid retinue, taking 457 men and 1280 horses over sea with him. There
were great feasts in Paris and in Savoy by the way; greater still at Milan
on the bridegroom's arrival. But three months after the wedding "my lord
Lionel of England departed this world at Asti in Piedmont.... And, for
that the fashion of his death was somewhat strange, my lord Edward
Despenser, his companion, who was there, made war on the Duke of Milan,
and harried him more than once with his men; but in process of time my
lord the Count of Savoy heard tidings thereof and brought them to one
accord." This, and another notice equally brief, is all that we get even
from the garrulous Froissart about this splendid and tragic marriage, with
its suspicion of Italian poison, at which he himself was present.[55] Why
should not Chaucer have been equally reticent? Indeed, we know that he
was, for he never alludes to a tragedy which in any case must have touched
him very nearly, just as he barely mentions two other far blacker chapters
in his life--the Black Death, and Wat Tyler's revolt. It is still
possible, therefore, to hope that he may have met Petrarch not only at
Padua in 1372-3, but even earlier at the magnificent wedding feast of
Milan.