From Chaucer to Tennyson
are the emblem of his doctrine, which now is dispersed all the world
over."
[Footnote 7: Pigs.]
[Footnote 8: Will.]
[Footnote 9: Dream.]
Although the writings thus far mentioned are of very high interest to
the student of the English language and the historian of English manners
and culture, they cannot be said to have much importance as mere
literature. But in Geoffrey Chaucer (died 1400) we meet with a poet of
the first rank, whose works are increasingly read and will always
continue to be a source of delight and refreshment to the general reader
as well as a "well of English undefiled" to the professional man of
letters. With the exception of Dante, Chaucer was the greatest of the
poets of mediaeval Europe, and he remains one of the greatest of English
poets, and certainly the foremost of English story tellers in verse. He
was the son of a London vintner, and was in his youth in the service of
Lionel, Duke of Clarence, one of the sons of Edward III. He made a
campaign in France in 1359-60, when he was taken prisoner. Afterward he
was attached to the court and received numerous favors and appointments.
He was sent on several diplomatic missions by the king, three of them to
Italy, where, in all probability, he made the acquaintance of the new
Italian literature, the writings of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. He
was appointed at different times comptroller of the wool customs,
comptroller of petty customs, and clerk of the works. He sat for Kent in
Parliament, and he received pensions from three successive kings. He was
a man of business as well as books, and he loved men and nature no less
than study. He knew his world; he "saw life steadily and saw it whole."
Living at the center of English social and political life, and
resorting to the court of Edward III., then the most brilliant in
Europe, Chaucer was an eye-witness of those feudal pomps which fill the
high-colored pages of his contemporary, the French chronicler,
Froissart. His description of a tournament in the _Knight's Tale_ is
unexcelled for spirit and detail. He was familiar with dances, feasts,
state ceremonies, and all the life of the baronial castle, in bower and
hall: the "trompes with the loude minstralcie," the heralds, the ladies,
and the squires. He knew--
What hawkes sitten on the perch above,
What houndes liggen[10] on the floor adown.
But his sympathy reached no less the life of the lowly; the poor widow
in her narrow cottage, and that "trewe swynkere[11] and a good," the
plowman whom Langland had made the hero of his vision. He is, more than
all English poets, the poet of the lusty spring, of "Aprille with her
showres sweet" and the "foules song;" of "May with all her floures and
her green;" of the new leaves in the wood, and the meadows new powdered
with the daisy, the mystic Marguerite of his _Legend of Good Women_. A
fresh vernal air blows through all his pages.
[Footnote 10: Lie.]
[Footnote 11: Laborer.]
In Chaucer's earlier works, such as the translation of the _Romaunt of
the Rose_ (if that be his), the _Boke of the Duchesse_, the _Parlament
of Foules_, the _Hous of Fame_, as well as in the _Legend of Good
Women_, which was later, the inspiration of the French court poetry of
the 13th and 14th centuries is manifest. He retains in them the mediaeval
machinery of allegories and dreams, the elaborate descriptions of
palaces, temples, portraitures, etc., which had been made fashionable in
France by such poems as Guillaume de Lorris's _Roman de la Rose_, and
Jean Machault's _La Fontaine Amoureuse_. In some of these the influence
of Italian poetry is also perceptible. There are suggestions from
Dante, for example, in the _Parlament of Foules_ and the _Hous of Fame_,
and _Troilus and Cresseide_ is a free handling rather than a translation
of Boccaccio's _Filostrato_. In all of these there are passages of great
beauty and force. Had Chaucer written nothing else, he would still have
been remembered as the most accomplished English poet of his time, but
he would not have risen to the rank which he now occupies, as one of the
greatest English poets of all time. This position he owes to his
masterpiece, the _Canterbury Tales_. Here he abandoned the imitation of
foreign models and the artificial literary fashions of his age, and
wrote of real life from his own ripe knowledge of men and things.
The _Canterbury Tales_ are a collection of stories written at different
times, but put together, probably, toward the close of his life. The
frame-work into which they are fitted is one of the happiest ever
devised. A number of pilgrims who are going on horseback to the shrine
of St. Thomas a Becket, at Canterbury, meet at the Tabard Inn, in
Southwark, a suburb of London. The jolly host of the Tabard, Harry
Bailey, proposes that on their way to Canterbury, each of the company
shall tell two tales, and two more on their way back, and that the one
who tells the best shall have a supper at the cost of the rest when they
return to the inn. He himself accompanies them as judge and "reporter."
In the setting of the stories there is thus a constant feeling of
movement and the air of all outdoors. The little "head-links" and
"end-links" which bind them together give incidents of the journey and
glimpses of the talk of the pilgrims, sometimes amounting, as in the
prologue of the _Wife of Bath_, to full and almost dramatic
character-sketches. The stories, too, are dramatically suited to the
narrators. The general prologue is a series of such character-sketches,
the most perfect in English poetry. The portraits of the pilgrims are
illuminated with the soft brilliancy and the minute loving fidelity of
the miniatures in the old missals, and with the same quaint precision in
traits of expression and in costume. The pilgrims are not all such as
one would meet nowadays at an English inn. The presence of a knight, a
squire, a yeoman archer, and especially of so many kinds of
ecclesiastics, a nun, a friar, a monk, a pardoner, and a sompnour or
apparitor, reminds us that the England of that day must have been less
like Protestant England, as we know it, than like the Italy of some
fifty years ago. But however the outward face of society may have
changed, the Canterbury pilgrims remain, in Chaucer's descriptions,
living and universal types of human nature. The _Canterbury Tales_ are
twenty-four in number. There were thirty-two pilgrims, so that if
finished as designed the whole collection would have numbered one
hundred and twenty-eight stories.
Chaucer is the bright consummate flower of the English Middle Age. Like
many another great poet he put the final touch to the various literary
forms that he found in cultivation. Thus his _Knight's Tale_, based upon
Boccaccio's _Teseide_, is the best of English mediaeval romances. And yet
the _Rime of Sir Thopas_, who goes seeking an elf queen for his mate,
and is encountered by the giant Sir Olifaunt, burlesques these same
romances with their impossible adventures and their tedious rambling
descriptions. The tales of the prioress and the second nun are saints'
legends. The _Monk's Tale_ is a set of dry, moral apologues in the
manner of his contemporary, the "moral Gower." The stories told by the
reeve, miller, friar, sompnour, shipman, and merchant belong to the
class of _fabliaux_, a few of which existed in English, such as _Dame
Siriz_, the _Lay of the Ash_, and the _Land of Cokaygne_, already
mentioned. The _Nonne Preste's Tale_, likewise, which Dryden modernized
with admirable humor, was of the class of _fabliaux_, and was suggested
by a little poem in forty lines, _Dou Coc et Werpil_, by Marie de
France, a Norman poetess of the 13th century. It belonged, like the
early English poem of _The Fox and the Wolf_, to the popular animal saga
of _Reynard the Fox_. The _Franklin's Tale_, whose scene is Brittany,
and the _Wife of Bath's Tale_ which is laid in the time of the British
Arthur, belong to the class of French _lais_, serious metrical tales
shorter than the romance and of Breton origin, the best representatives
of which are the elegant and graceful _lais_ of Marie de France.
Chaucer was our first great master of laughter and of tears. His serious
poetry is full of the tenderest pathos. His loosest tales are
delightfully humorous and life-like. He is the kindliest of satirists.
The knavery, greed, and hypocrisy of the begging friars and the sellers
of indulgences are exposed by him as pitilessly as by Langland and
Wiclif, though his mood is not, like theirs, one of stern, moral
indignation, but rather the good-natured scorn of a man of the world.
His charity is broad enough to cover even the corrupt sompnour, of whom
he says,
And yet in sooth he was a good felawe.
Whether he shared Wiclif's opinions is unknown, but John of Gaunt, the
Duke of Lancaster and father of Henry IV., who was Chaucer's life-long
patron, was likewise Wiclif's great upholder against the persecution of
the bishops. It is, perhaps, not without significance that the poor
parson in the _Canterbury Tales_, the only one of his ecclesiastical
pilgrims whom Chaucer treats with respect, is suspected by the host of
the Tabard to be a "loller," that is, a Lollard, or disciple of Wiclif,
and that, because he objects to the jovial innkeeper's swearing "by
Goddes bones."
Chaucer's English is nearly as easy for a modern reader as Shakspere's,
and few of his words have become obsolete. His verse, when rightly read,
is correct and melodious. The early English was, in some respects, "more
sweet upon the tongue" than the modern language. The vowels had their
broad Italian sounds, and the speech was full of soft gutterals and
vocalic syllables, like the endings en, es, e, which made feminine
rhymes and kept the consonants from coming harshly together.
Great poet as Chaucer was, he was not quite free from the literary
weakness of his time. He relapses sometimes into the babbling style of
the old chroniclers and legend writers; cites "auctours" and gives long
catalogues of names and objects with a _naive_ display of learning; and
introduces vulgar details in his most exquisite passages. There is
something childish about almost all the thought and art of the Middle
Ages--at least outside of Italy, where classical models and traditions
never quite lost their hold. But Chaucer's artlessness is half the
secret of his wonderful ease in story-telling, and is so engaging that,
like a child's sweet unconsciousness, one would not wish it otherwise.
The _Canterbury Tales_ had shown of what high uses the English language
was capable, but the curiously trilingual condition of literature still
continued. French was spoken in the proceedings of Parliament as late as
the reign of Henry VI. (1422-1471). Chaucer's contemporary, John Gower,
wrote his _Vox Clamantis_ in Latin, his _Speculum Meditantis_ (a lost
poem), and a number of _ballades_ in Parisian French, and his _Confessio
Amantis_ (1393) in English. The last named is a dreary, pedantic work,
in some fifteen thousand smooth, monotonous, eight-syllabled couplets,
in which Grande Amour instructs the lover how to get the love of Bel
Pucel.
* * * * *
1. Early English Literature. Bernhard ten Brink. Translated
from the German by H.M. Kennedy. New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1883.
2. Morris and Skeat's Specimens of Early English. (Clarendon
Press Series.) Oxford.
3. The Vision of William concerning Piers the Plowman.
Edited by W.W. Skeat. Oxford, 1886.
4. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Tyrwhitt's Edition. New
York: D. Appleton & Co., 1883.
5. The Poetical Works of Geoffrey Chaucer. Edited by
Richard Morris. London: Bell & Daldy (6 volumes.)
CHAPTER II.
FROM CHAUCER TO SPENSER.
1400-1599.