There are rivers great and fine
Of oil, of milk, honey, and wine.
Water serveth there for nothing
Save to look at, and for washing:
or listen to Hendyng’s shrewd comments on human nature:—
Many a man saith, were he rich,
There shoulde none be me y-lyche[34]
To be good and free;
But when he hath ought bygeten[35]
All the freedom is forgeten
And laid under knee.
“He is free of his horse, that never had one,”
Quoth Hendyng.
The prose of the period is still less inspiring than the poetry. Not even Chaucer discovered that prose-writing is an art. Works of any importance were written in Latin, and such English prose as there was, consisted in sermons, lives of the saints, etc. Now and then some author happens upon a telling phrase or an apt illustration, but such instances are few and obviously accidental. French influence was too strong for native literature to put forth any very vigorous shoots of its own, and attempts to force homilies, scientific treatises, and historical records into French rhyme forms led to the production of such dreary works as the Cursor Mundi or Layamon’s Brut.
By the fourteenth century, however, Normans and Saxons had long since begun to amalgamate, and the Hundred Years’ War did much to foster the spirit of patriotism, and thus weld together the conflicting elements of which the nation was composed. Different dialects prevailed in different parts of the country, but they were at least varieties of English, and English was the language of the people as a whole. French, whether of Paris or of Stratford atte Bowe, was learned as a foreign tongue, although as late as the end of the fourteenth century we still find Gower writing indifferently in Latin, French, and English. It needed only that there should arise an author great enough to establish some one dialect—or combination of dialects—as standard English, and this creation of language from dialect, we owe—among other things—in large measure to Chaucer.
London was already the centre of English trade and industry, and the circumstances of its position, which brought its inhabitants into contact with both Northerners and Southerners, made its dialect particularly suitable for the standard language of the country. Chaucer, as we have seen, was London born and bred, and wrote naturally in the “cokeneye” dialect, thus helping to establish it as the common speech. The modern reader who turns over the pages of the Ayenbite of Inwit or the Ancren Riwle finds himself confronted by what is practically a foreign tongue; it is excusable if he finds even Piers Plowman baffling in places, and has difficulty in construing such passages as:—
He was pale as a pelet, in the palsye he semed,
And clothed in a caurimaury, I couthe it nouȝte discreue;
In kirtel and kourteley, and a knyf bi his syde;
Of a freres frokke were þe forsleues,[36]
but Chaucer’s English, full as it may be of old and decayed terms, presents few serious difficulties to any ordinary intelligence. We may have to look up a word here and there in the glossary, or find ourselves puzzled by some astronomical or chemical terms, but these are merely by the way, and Chaucer fairly lays claim to the title of Father, not only of English poetry, but of modern English.
In metre his work is no less remarkable. Professor Skeat, in his introduction to the Oxford edition of Chaucer’s works, gives a list of no less than thirteen metres which he introduced into English poetry, consisting for the most part of modifications and alterations of French and Italian models.
The so-called Chaucerian stanza consists of seven lines of iambic verse rhyming ababbcc—e. g.:
Ămōng thĭse chīldrĕn wās ă wīdwë̆s sōnë
Ă lītĕl clērgeŏn, sēvĕn yēēr ŏf āgë,
Thăt dāy by̆ dāy tŏ scōlë̆ wās hĭs wōnë,
Ănd ēēk ălsō, whĕr-ās hĕ sāūgh th’ ĭmāgë
Ŏf Crīstĕs mōdĕr, hādde⁀hĕ īn ŭsāgë
Ăs hīm wăs tāūght, tŏ knēle⁀adōūn and sēyë
Hĭs Āvé̆ Mārie,⁀ăs hē gŏth bȳ thĕ wēyë.
It is a modification of a form used by Boccaccio, and was itself possibly used by Spenser as the basis of his peculiar stanza. Chaucer employs it very largely for narrative purposes, preventing it from becoming monotonous by varying the place of the cæsura, and freely adding or suppressing weak syllables when he so desires. Mr. A. W. Pollard, in his article on Chaucer in the Encyclopædia Britannica, declares that the English poet borrowed both his stanza and his decasyllabic line from Guillaume de Machault. The point of the whole matter, however, lies, not in whether Chaucer was indebted to French or Italian sources for his metres, but in the fact that he revealed the latent possibilities of English as a poetic medium.
It is usual to divide Chaucer’s life into three periods, and to speak of him as successively under French, Italian, and English influence, and although, as Professor Ker has pointed out, this method is open to some objections, it brings out certain critical points of interest and is worth adhering to for the sake of clearness.
French, as we have seen, had long been the dominant influence in English literature. To French erotic poetry we owe the elaborate code of duties owed by husband to wife and lover to mistress, and the whole artificial convention which prescribed unhappy love affairs and revelled in the minute analysis of over-strained emotion. “In poetry and life,” says Ten Brink, “fashion required an educated young man, especially one in the service of the court, to fall in love at the earliest opportunity, and, if possible, hopelessly.” We have already seen Chaucer obeying this convention in the Book of the Duchesse and the Parlement of Foules, and to these may be added the Compleinte unto Pitè, the Compleint to his Lady, Merciles Beaute, To Rosemounde, Against Women Unconstant, An Amorous Compleint, and Book I, stanza 3 of Troilus and Criseyde. The poet protests so much that it is difficult to believe that he is describing anything more than a lover bewailing his unhappy lot (in the French fashion). Evidently French love-poetry appealed strongly to his imagination, for one of his earliest works is a translation of the famous Romance of the Rose. This long, allegorical poem (the original consists of over 22,000 lines), falls into two parts. The first, by Guillaume de Lorris, describes the search of the ideal lover for the mystic rose. The hero is admitted by the portress Idleness into a fair garden of flowers, where he finds Sir Mirth, Lady Courtesy, Dame Gladness, and many another gallant and debonair knight and lady. In this garden is the enchanted Well of Love, in whose depths the lover beholds the image of the Rose. He tries to seize it, and finds that a hard struggle lies before him ere he can hope to win the prize of love. Lorris left the poem unfinished, and the second part was added by Jean le Meung, a cynic with no very high opinion of women or of love. He introduces a sceptical friend who has a long conversation with the lover in which he points out with extreme clearness the drawbacks of marriage and the frailties of women.
The English version of the poem consists of three fragments, A, B, and C (it is only 7,696 lines in all), and scholars are divided in opinion as to how much of the translation is actually by Chaucer himself. Professor Saintsbury, in the Cambridge History of Literature considers that Chaucer is probably the author of A, possibly the author of B, and probably not the author of C. He must, however, have been known as the translator of the later part, for in the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women (written about 1385), the god of love scolds the poet severely on the ground,—
Thou hast translated the Romauns of the Rose
That is an hereyse ageyns my lawe.
Another early work is the A.B.C., a hymn in honour of the Virgin, modelled upon a similar poem by Guillaume de Deguileville. Deguileville was well known as a devotional writer at the time, and according to Speght Chaucer’s paraphrase was written “at the request of Blanch Duchesse of Lancaster, as a praier for her priuat vse, being a woman in her religion very deuout.” There is, however, no evidence of this, and Ten Brink believes that the A.B.C. dates from a later
period when the poet was passing through a phase of deep religious feeling. Whatever the facts about this particular poem may be, it is interesting to notice that even in these early days Chaucer combined some of the qualities of a satirist with those of an idealist.
His first great original work was produced in 1369, when John of Gaunt’s beautiful and charming young wife died. The Book of the Duchesse makes no pretence to originality of treatment. The poet, after a conventional lament over the conventional hard-heartedness of his mistress, falls into a conventional slumber in the course of which he has a conventional dream that he is following a conventional hunt in a conventional forest. Here he meets a handsome young man
Of the age of four and twenty yeer
·····
And he was clothed al in blakke.
The young man is complaining to himself most piteously:—
Hit was gret wonder that nature
Might suffre(n) any creature
To have swich sorwe and be not deed.
The poet is touched by his sorrow, and since they have evidently lost the hunt, he begs the mourner to tell him of “his sorwes smerte.” This opens the way for a long, rambling lament, full of allusions to classical mythology. So involved is it, that the poet finds some difficulty in grasping the point, and cuts into a description of the lady’s charms with a puzzled,—
Sir ... wher is she now?
The brief answer—
I have lost more than thou wenest
·····
She is deed—
strikes a note of tragedy which is beyond the scope of the youthful poet as yet, and the elegy ends abruptly with
Is that your los? by god hit is routhe.[37]
The scheme of the poem is simple, the idea is borrowed from French laments, and whole passages are translated from de Machault’s Le Dit de la Fontaine Amoureuse and Remède de la Fortune, but through all the stiffness and conventionality, all the obvious immaturity, there flash unmistakable signs of vigorous and original genius. Every poet of the day finds himself wandering in a forest, but Chaucer alone meets
A whelp that fauned me as I stood,
That hadde y-followed, and coude no good,
Hit com and creep to me as lowe,
Right as hit hadde me y-knowe,
Hild doun his heed and joyned his eres
And leyde al smothe doun his heres;
or notices with tender amusement the
many squirelles, that sete
Ful hye upon the trees, and ete,
And in hir maner made festes.
The praises of many fair ladies were sung by troubadour and minstrel, but it would be hard to find another heroine possessed of the gaiety and vigour and charm of Blanche:—
I saw hir daunce so comlily
Carole and singe so swetely,
Laughe and pleye so womanly,
And loke so debonairly,
So goodly speke and so frendly,
That certes I trow that evermore
Nas seyn so blisful a tresore
·····
Therewith hir liste so wel to live,
That dulnesse was of hir a-drad.
Already Chaucer shows that truth to life, that impatience of artificiality which are to become two of his most striking characteristics.
A number of experiments in verse follow. Chaucer had a habit of rough-casting a poem, then leaving it for some time, and eventually using it in a more or less modified form in some later work. The story of Ceys and Alcioun, which forms part of the introduction to the Book of the Duchesse, originally appears to have been written as a separate poem, and between 1369 and 1379 we find no fewer than seven works, in prose and poetry, which were afterwards embodied in the Canterbury Tales: the Lyf of St. Cecyle (afterwards used for the Second Nonnes Tale); parts of the Monkes Tale; the greater part of the Clerkes Tale; Palamon and Arcite (which forms the basis of the Knightes Tale); the Tale of Melibeus; the Persones Tale; and the Man of Lawe’s Tale. In addition to these come the Compleint to his Lady; An Amorous Compleint; Womanly Noblesse; Compleint unto Pitè; Anelida and Arcite (containing ten stanzas from Palamon); Of the Wretched Engendring of Mankind (a prose translation of Innocent III’s De Miseria Humanæ Conditionis, of which the title alone remains, though fragments of it are used in the Man of Lawe’s Tale); a translation of Boëthius’s Consolations of Philosophy; the Complaint of Mars; Troilus and Criseyde; Wordes to Adam Scriveyn; The Former Age; Fortune. Apart from Troilus and Criseyde and the poems afterwards used in the Canterbury Tales, none of these works are of any great importance in themselves, but in them we see a steady development in technical skill. The verse of the Book of the Duchesse is easy and flowing but not distinguished. The Compleint unto Pitè shows a freedom and boldness in the use of the French seven-lined stanza which marks a new departure in English versification. Chaucer tries his hand at roundels and balades, at narrative poetry and love laments, and the result is that he attains a suppleness and melody unknown to his predecessors and unfortunately ignored by his immediate successors. The music of his verse is not the least of his contributions to a literature, whose exponents could placidly remark
And trouthe of metre I sette also a-syde;
For of that art I hadde as tho no guyde
Me to reduce when I went a-wronge:
I toke none hede nouther of shorte nor longe.
Lydgate did not begin to write until after Chaucer’s death, but the lines quoted above from the Troy Book exactly express the point of view of the majority of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century poets.
In 1372, as we have seen, Chaucer went to Italy, and the influence of Italian poetry upon him can hardly be exaggerated. Professor Ten Brink believes that the influence of Dante was largely responsible for a sudden quickening and deepening of religious feeling in Chaucer, and he attributes the A.B.C., the Lyf of St. Cecyle, and the translation of the De Miseria Humanæ Conditionis to this period. Whether he is right or wrong in this respect (and Professor Skeat dates both the A.B.C. and the Lyf of St. Cecyle before the Italian journey) there can be no question as to Chaucer’s profound admiration for the author of the Divina Commedia. The Inuocacio ad Mariam which prefaces the Second Nonnes Tale is drawn from the concluding canto of the Paradiso, the most striking of all the Monk’s tales
Of him that stood in greet prosperitee
And is y-fallen out of heigh degree
Into miserie, and endeth wrecchedly,
is that of Count Hugo of Pisa, which is drawn direct from Canto XXXIII of the Inferno, and it is impossible not to feel that the intense reverence for things holy which underlay all Chaucer’s shrewdness and humour, may have been due—at least in part—to the influence of one of the greatest of all religious poets. Of Petrarch he speaks with admiration in the preface to the tale which he borrows from him, but except for a translation of the eighty-eighth sonnet which is inserted in Book I of Troilus and Criseyde, under the heading Cantus Troili, there is little evidence of any direct influence. From Boccaccio he borrowed freely, with a royal bettering in the borrowing. Troilus and Criseyde is taken bodily from the Filostrato, though with numerous additions, omissions, alterations, and adaptations: the Knightes Tale is condensed from the twelve books of the Teseide: the idea of the Canterbury Tales is taken from that of the Decamerone, though with the very significant difference that whereas Boccaccio’s story-tellers are all drawn from one class and are shut off from intercourse with the outer world, Chaucer’s range from knight to miller, from aristocratic prioress to bourgeois wife of Bath, and the fact of their being on a pilgrimage affords opportunity for incident on the way and for the introduction of fresh characters, thus giving scope for far greater variety and keeping far more closely in touch with actual life.
Between 1377 and 1382 he translated Boëthius’s De Consolatione Philosophiæ, a work which evidently produced a deep impression upon him.
In 1382 Chaucer produced another topical poem. So far he had addressed himself to John of Gaunt—
for whom not only the Book of the Duchesse, but the scandalous Compleint of Mars is said to have been written; now he addresses King Richard, and after the fashion of the day clothes in allegorical compliment the story of his wooing of Anne of Bohemia, who had twice before been engaged to other suitors. The wedding festivities lasted over February 14, when St. Valentine marries every year,
The lyric lark, and the grave whispering dove,
The sparrow that neglects his life for love,
The household bird with the red stomacher;
and the opportunity was too good a one to be lost. Chaucer saluted his king and queen in the Parlement of Foules, which though partially based on the fabliau of Hucline and Eglantine and containing passages from Dante and Boccaccio, is in all essentials a thoroughly original work. The poet, as usual, falls asleep and has a dream. He is taken by Scipio Africanus (he had just been reading the Somnium Scipionis), to the gate of a park which he is told none but the servants of Love may enter. Although he himself is but dull and has lost the taste of love he is permitted to see what passes in order that he may describe it, and is led into a beautiful garden in which many fair ladies, such as Beautee and Jolyte, are disporting themselves under the eye of Cupid. A number of women are dancing round a temple of brass, before whose door
Dame Pees sat with a curteyn in hir hond.
A long description of the temple and its occupants (Venus, Bacchus, Ceres, etc.) follows, and the poet then passes once more into the open air where
... in a launde[38] upon a hille of floures
he finds the “noble goddesse Nature,” who has sent for every bird to come and choose its mate in honour of St. Valentine. Upon her hand she holds
A formel[39] egle, of shap the gentileste[40]
That ever she among hir werkes fonde.
Chaucer and His Times Page 3