Creators
Page 3
At the same time, the number of people literate in English was increasing rapidly. In Chaucer’s lifetime, scores of first-class schools, led by William of Wykham’s great foundation, Winchester College (still in existence), were founded, together with twenty distinct colleges of higher education at Oxford and Cambridge. Four times as many English manuscripts survive from the fourteenth century as from the thirteenth. There are, for instance, twenty medical manuscripts in English from the thirteenth century, 140 in the fourteenth, and 872 in the fifteenth.2 By the time Chaucer died, there were about 200 stationers and book craftsmen operating in London. The number of “clerks”—a new term to describe men whose business it was to write and copy documents—was already formidable—120 in the Chancery alone.3 Men (and some women) were acquiring libraries for their private pleasure, to supplement the growing number of institutional libraries in monasteries, colleges, and cathedrals. When Chaucer died, over 500 private book collections existed, and the price of paper had fallen so fast that a sheet of eight-octavo pages cost only one penny.4
Chaucer’s entry into history thus came at an auspicious moment for writers. Yet it was not so much an entry as a transformation. He found a language; he left a literature. No man ever had so great an impact on a written tongue, not even Dante, who transformed Florentine into the language of Italy. For Chaucer had the creative gift of appealing strongly to a great number of people, then and now. Before him there was very little. Beowulf is in Old English, almost incomprehensible today to English-speaking readers, and dull, too. No one ever reads Beowulf unless forced to do so (in schools or universities) or paid to do so (as on the BBC). Gawayn and the Green Knight is little more attractive. Of Middle English works, Langland’s Piers Ploughman is taught or read as a duty, never for pleasure. Chaucer is in a class by himself, and a class joined by no one until Shakespeare’s day. He was, and is, read for delight, and in joy. Over eighty complete manuscripts by Chaucer have survived, out of many hundreds—perhaps over 1,000—published in the fifteenth century. Many of them bear the marks of continuous circulation and perusal. When printing came to England, Caxton pounced on The Canterbury Tales and published it, not once but twice. It has been in print for 520 years, and even today it is one of the texts that teenagers begin in compulsion but finish in delight. And Chaucer has attracted a body of commentary and elucidation over the centuries which is rivaled only by Shakespeare.5
How did this happen? What was so special about Geoffrey Chaucer that gives him this unique status as the founder of English literature? We here enter one of the personal mysteries that always seems to surround acts of creation. For, on the surface, there was nothing particularly outstanding about Chaucer. He might be described as un homme moyen sensuel of the fourteenth century. The three contemporary portraits we have of him, the basis of an extensive iconography in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (and thereafter), show him as a jolly, prosperous, happy member of the late medieval upper middle class.6 He was the son of a successful London vintner, John Chaucer (c. 1312–1368), and was educated at home. His family provided an excellent upbringing. Vintners have tended to be well-traveled, sophisticated men, with many links abroad, especially in Italy, France, the Rhineland, and the Iberian countries, often in high circles. John Ruskin, one of the best-educated Englishmen of the nineteenth century, was likewise the son of a vintner and was taught at home. When Chaucer was a teenager, his father secured him a post as page in the household of Lionel, afterward duke of Clarence, third son of Edward III. Lionel, who was two years older than Chaucer, married first the greatest Anglo-Irish heiress of the day and then the leading Italian heiress, Violante Visconti.7 It would be difficult to think of a more sophisticated “finishing” for the young Chaucer. He was thereafter at ease in any society, including the highest, at home and abroad. Lionel had a taste for magnificence, which Chaucer admired. When he set off to claim his Visconti bride in 1368, he had a train of 457 men and 1,280 horses, and at the wedding the aged poet Petrarch was a guest at the high table. By this time, of course, Chaucer had moved on. In 1359 he was in France with Edward III’s invading army and was taken prisoner and ransomed. He married (probably in 1366) Philippa, and had three children by her: Thomas, Louis (or Lewis), and Elizabeth. Philippa was the daughter of Sir Paon Roet of Hainault; more important, she was the sister of Katherine Swynford, third wife of John of Gaunt, Edward III’s richest and best-connected son. This connection ensured that Chaucer had Gaunt’s powerful patronage throughout his career. He thus held many positions at court and in the royal service, including membership in several important diplomatic missions—to Genoa and Florence (1372–1373), to Spain, and to France and Lombardy (1378). From 1374 on, he held a lucrative post as head of the London customs, with an official house. In 1386, he was knight of the shire for Kent, where he had a house and lands. He also served (in 1391–1400) as deputy forester for Petherton in Somerset, where he likewise had an estate. His official duties mean that he crops up in the records at least 493 times, and is, or ought to be, better known to us than any other English medieval writer. But these records are disappointingly impersonal, and efforts to bring Chaucer’s official activities to vigorous life have been only partly successful.8
What does seem clear, however, is that Chaucer’s career at the courts of Edward III and Richard II had its ups and downs. Though his connection with Gaunt brought him jobs, perks, and money, it also involved him in party politics, which could bring trouble as well as rewards. In 1389 he was appointed to the great office of clerk of the King’s Works, which put him in charge of Westminster Palace, the Tower, and eight of the royal residences; the next year St. George’s Chapel, Windsor, where the Knights of the Garter were installed, was added to his duties. This clerkship was a position of considerable power and a means of acquiring wealth. But a year later, he resigned it and moved himself to Somerset. Politics? It seems likely. Chaucer certainly suffered in 1386, during the rule of Thomas, duke of Gloucester, who ousted the “John of Gaunt Gang” from power. This was the year of the only political reference in Chaucer’s poetry, the line “That all is lost for lack of steadfastness.” Chaucer deplored cowardice in any context, politics included.9 But he seems to have flourished under Henry IV, as his gratuity of £20 a year was promptly renewed by the new monarch. Much of his life was spent at the very heart of medieval government at Westminster, since he had a home in the garden of the Lady Chapel of the Abbey, on the spot where later was built Henry VII’s magnificent late-Gothic chapel; and Chaucer’s body was the first to be placed in the section of the Abbey that we now call the Poets’ Corner.
The richness and variety of Chaucer’s career gave him opportunities few English men of letters have enjoyed. He traveled at the highest level all over western Europe, and he saw at close quarters the workings of half a dozen courts. He was involved professionally with the army and navy, international commerce, the export and import trade, central and local government finance, parliament and the law courts, the Exchequer and Chancery, the agricultural and forestry activities of the crown estates—and of private estates too—and the workings of internal commerce and industry, especially the building trade. Diplomacy and the church, politics and the law, the nation’s well-being in war and peace—all these spheres were familiar to him. He must have met and conversed with almost everyone of consequence in England over many decades, and with plenty of notables from the Continent too. Among those with whom we know he had dealings were great merchants like Sir Nicholas Brembre, Sir William Walworth, and Sir John Philpot; the Lollard Knights, followers of William Wycliffe (Sir Lewis Clifford, Sir John Clan-vowe, Sir Richard Sturry, and Sir William Neville); diplomats and officials such as Sir Guichard d’Angle, Sir Peter Comtenay, the Bishop of Durham Walter Skirlawe, Sir William de Beauchamp, and Sir John Burley; and grandees like Gaunt himself.10 Chaucer worked at the heart of the establishment of Plantagenet England and was familiar with its corridors of power. He knew how to get a tally paid by the Exchequer and, the most va
luable trick of all, how to get a writ through Chancery, with its Great Seal attached. He knew, too, how to get entrée to the King’s Privy Chamber, and how to get a room allotted to him in a royal palace or tent city. At the same time, he never lost contact with his middle-class and trading origins. He carried with him the prudent habits of the City of London and the country lore of a modest mansion in the Kentish Weald—he knew inns and staging posts, shops and workplaces, smithies and ferryboats, cross-Channel packets, and inshore fisheries. He certainly spoke and read French and Italian, and probably some German, Flemish, and Spanish. Like many another English autodidact, including at least two monarchs, King Alfred and Queen Elizabeth I, he knew enough Latin to translate Boethius’s De Consolatione Philosophiae, and he was familiar with the works of Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch (he may, indeed, have met the last two).11
That Chaucer was influenced in his writing by French and Italian literature, then much more advanced than England’s, was inevitable and, indeed, can be demonstrated by internal evidence in his work. He often followed continental forms. Thus his first masterpiece, The Book of the Duchess, a poem of 1,334 lines written in 1369, when he was in his late twenties, followed the French device of the dream, as does the 2,158-line House of Fame (unfinished), written in 1374–1385 at intervals during his busy official career. His longest poem, Troilus and Criseyde, of 8,239 lines, from the second half of the 1380s, is taken direct, so far as the story goes, from Boccaccio’s Il Filostrato. But that is only the final stage in a long genealogy of borrowings going back through Guido delle Cotoune via Benoit de Sante-Maure to Dares Phrygius and Dictys Cretensis. Apart from the story, Chaucer’s poem has little in common with Boccaccio’s, striking a note of high seriousness and sadness quite lacking in the Italian.12 Chaucer looked to others for structure and metrical tricks, but never for content. This is particularly noticeable in his relationship with Dante, whom he admired—who hasn’t?—but essentially ignored. Their minds and worlds of thought were quite different. Indeed, Chaucer, with a clear reference to Dante, admits in Troilus, “Of heaven and hell I have no power to sing.”13 We have here the first indication of a great divide already opening between English and Continental literature—an English concentration on the concrete and practical, as opposed to the abstract.
A more pertinent question is what made Chaucer a poet in the first place. With a successful official career already launched, why turn to verse with what can only be called professional determination and ardor? Though Chaucer never tells us what drove him to literature, he more than once complains how hard it is to become a master of words. As he writes in yet another dream poem, The Parliament of Fowls, a delightful fantasy of birds choosing their mates on St. Valentine’s Day (1382):
That lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne,
Th’assay so hard, so sharp the conquerynge.
No poet, grumbling as he trudges upstairs to his study to begin the day’s quota of lines, has ever put it better. Why, then, did Chaucer embrace the craft with such tenacity? Here, I think, the Continental evidence is highly relevant. Poets, so far as we can tell, had no status in England in 1360. It was a different matter across the Channel, as Chaucer discovered. At the courts of France and Burgundy poets were held in high regard and were able to advance their own careers, and help their families, by pleasing verse-loving, sentimental princes. Chaucer found that in Italy Dante was the one truly national figure; Dante’s fame, beginning shortly after his death in 1321, had spread everywhere by the time Chaucer came to Italy. Boccaccio and Petrarch, both still living, were also celebrated and revered, the toasts of courts, the favorites of princes. Such favor was not, as yet, to be had in England, but it could be earned. Chaucer also noted that celebrity and favors were most commonly secured by such poets when they turned their skills to vers d’occasion, jubilee poems to mark princely feasts and red-letter days. He wrote accordingly. Thus his Book of the Duchess was almost certainly an allegorical lament on the death of Blanche of Lancaster, first wife of his patron, John of Gaunt; and The Parliament of Fowls celebrated the marriage of his king and benefactor to Anne of Bohemia.14
That Chaucer, a man of robust practicality, with his eye to the main chance, was influenced by such considerations of worldly glory and reward cannot be doubted. One of his perks was a daily measure of wine, and his connections ensured that it was of high quality. He must often, as he sipped it at his writing desk (“to refosculate his spirits,” as Hobbes put it), have reflected that the craft, hard though it was, brought its rewards in this world. Yet this is plainly not the whole story, or even half of it. No one who reads Troilus and Criseyde or The Canterbury Tales, his two great masterworks, can mistake the pervading note of relish: Chaucer loved to write. Writing was life to him—breakfast, dinner, and supper; meat and drink; the purpose, solace, comfort, and reward of existence. His early essays in verse gradually built up a great reservoir of self-confidence, so that the thin trickle of ideas, similes, metaphors, devices, and word ecstacies gradually turned into an irresistible torrent, a raging, foaming river of felicity that brought him great happiness to pour upon the page. Such self-confidence is of the essence of creation. In a writer of genius like Chaucer—or Shakespeare, Dickens, and Kipling, the English writers he most resembles—confidence with words, ideas, images, and sheer verbal acrobatics takes over the personality, so that exercise of the skill becomes a daily necessity, and expression of what lies within the mind is as unavoidable as emptying the bladder and bowels (a comparison which would have appealed to Chaucer’s earthy tastes). Chaucer wrote because he had to write, out of compulsive delight.
He was intoxicated with words, as we shall see. But he was also entranced by men and women, their endless variety, their individual foibles and peculiar habits, their weird tastes and curious manners, their innocence and their cunning, their purity and lewdness, their humanity. What went on in his mind, as he observed his fellows—and no writer’s work ever gave better opportunity to see a wider spectrum of activities—was the astounding, almost miraculous, indeed divine comedy of people; and the phrase had a much closer application to his work than to Dante’s. Chaucer could be, when it was right, censorious and condemnatory, scornful and satirical; he could laugh and even sneer, inveigh against and rage at the wicked and petty. But it is clear he loved the human race, and the English in particular—they were his literary meat. Such love of humanity had to come out, just as did the hot, foaming words in which he expressed it.
So in the late 1380s or early 1390s, Chaucer, having written in Troilus a great poem of dignified beauty, began The Canterbury Tales. It was as though the whole of his life had been a preparation for this astonishing summation of the fourteenth-century English. There is nothing like it in the whole of western literature. Balzac’s Comédie Humaine and Zola’s Rougon-Maquart novels are, by comparison, sketchy and incomplete, as well as gruesomely long-winded compared with Chaucer’s matchless brevity. The England of his day is all there in the Prologue and the connecting links and in the tales themselves—church and state; rich and poor; town and village; saint and sinner; honor; greed, deception, and guile; innocence and virtue both heroic and quotidian: all the pride, pathos, grandeur, pettiness, and sheer appetite of life as he had watched it in his time. In creating this vast, wide-ranging work of art he pinched ideas from others, and some of his plots are lifted whole, but all is transformed and made into something new, rich, and strange by his genius. Moreover the essential structure of a pilgrimage to Canterbury, with each of a mix of pilgrims forming a cross section of life, each telling a tale, is essentially Chaucer’s own. Nothing could have been more apposite for his experience and peculiar skills. It is an outstanding example of a creative idea producing a volcanic explosion of consequential ideas, which pour forth from the source in an irresistible flow.
Chaucer was probably the first man, and certainly the first writer, to see the English nation as a unity. This was his great appeal to his contemporaries, for the long war with France
produced a sustained wave of patriotism, people no longer seeing each other as Norman or Saxon but as English, who no longer read French much and who wanted to read about themselves in English.15 What Chaucer gave them was this, and something more: his was the English they spoke. It was one of his great creative gifts, which no one else was to possess to the same degree until Shakespeare came along, that he could write in a variety of vernaculars. There was the basic distinction, well understood by his time, between hieratic and demotic, or what people called “lered” or “lewed” (learned or lewd). The word “lewed” or “lewd” already meant vulgar but had not yet acquired its connotation of obscenity. Lered was full of Latinizing and French words; lewd was made up of much shorter words largely of remote Germanic origin, including vulgarisms the knightly class was not supposed to use (the men did; not the ladies, as a rule). Chaucer could not only write in both vernaculars (others could do that); he could also mingle them. In his dream poem The House of Fame, he as author has a dialogue with the Eagle, an upper-class bird which is so lered that it can rhyme “dissymulacious” with “reparacions” and “renovelauches” with “aqueyntaunces,” but can also, when it feels inclined, descends to demotic speech: