of the Renascence is stirring within him, but it is not in his relation to the ancients that we detect it; it is rather in his 'humanism—in his openness of mind, in his fresh delight in visible and sensible things, in his sense of the variety of human character and motive, and of the pity of human fate. French poetry plays a far larger part in Chaucer's work than do the classical writers. Whether or not his name implies that he was partly French in blood, he certainly spent some time in France, first as a prisoner of war (A.D. 1359) and afterwards on the king's business. He began life as a page in the household of the Duke of Clarence, where French was no doubt spoken as much as English; and his attention was early drawn to that trouvèreliterature which in the days of his youth formed the chief reading of the court circles. In point of fact, all his writings up to 1372 (the date of his first visit to Italy) are either translations or imitations, more or less close, of French poems; and even after he had returned, impressed with the ineffaceable charm of Italy, he still looked to France for much of his material. One of his earliest and one of his very latest poems, the A. B. C. and the Compleynte of Venus, are translations from De Deguileville and Gransson; the Boke of the Duchesse derives much from a poem of Machault; the Ballads and Roundels, of which a few remain to us, probably out of very many, are French in form; and it is in a poem of Eustache Deschamps that we find what appears to be the first model of the ten-syllabled rhyming couplet which Chaucer made his own, and which has since become one of the most distinctive forms of English verse. The comic stories in the Canterbury Tales are mostly based on the fabliaux, a department of literature which has always seemed to belong pre-eminently to the countrymen of la Fontaine. But among French poems, that which made the deepest mark on him was the 'Roman de la Rose,' the first and principal specimen of what M. Sandras, Chaucer's French critic, has happily called the psychological epic. This poem, as is well known, was begun by Guillaume de Lorris under Louis IX, and continued at immense length by Jean de Meung forty years later, under Philip the Fair; the former poet's work being an elaborate and thrice-refined love allegory, and that of the latter being a fierce satire against all that the Middle Age was accustomed to reverence-women, nobles, priests. The two parts of the poem, however, agreed in form; that is, they substituted for the heroic romances of the preceding centuries those allegorical abstractions, those 'indirect crook'd ways,' with which scholasticism had infected European thought. L'Amant, in his search for the Rose of Beauty, Déduit, Papelardie, l'Oiseuse, Faux-Semblant, are, as a French critic puts it, 'members of the family of Entities and Quiddities that were born to the realist doctors.' The vogue of the 'Roman' was immense, and Chaucer, that 'grant translateur,' translated it, as the Prologue to the Legende bears witness, and as Lydgate also affirms in his catalogue of the master's works. The most recent critics, with Mr. Bradshaw and Professor Ten Brink at their head, have indeed denied Chaucer's claim to that version of the Romaunt which till lately has always passed for his; and in obedience to their opinion we have separated from the body of Chaucer's acknowledged writings the passage of that poem that we are able to quote; but the question is one which, as far as Chaucer's debt to French literature is concerned, is of little importance. Translate the Romaunt he certainly did, and the impression it made upon him was deep and lasting. On the one hand it furnished him with a whole allegorical mythology, as well as with his stock landscape, his stock device of the Dream, and even (we may at least imagine) confirmed him in the choice of the flowing eight-syllabled couplet for the Hous of Fame; and on the other, it furnished him with those weapons of satire which he used with such effect in the Pardoner's prologue and elsewhere. Twenty years ago a vigorous attempt was made in M. Sandras' Étude sur Chaucer to show that the English poet, though a man of original genius, was in point of matter, from first to last, an imitator of the trouvères. A more rational criticism has since then put the case in a truer light, and shown not only the bold independence of his models which Chaucer exhibited from the beginning, but the fact that it was only in early life that he got his chief models from France. The great event of his life was undoubtedly his first Italian journey, during which, if we are to trust an old tradition that has never been disproved, he met Petrarch at Padua. From this time onward he wrote with a firmer pen and with a closer adherence to truth, and the foreign examples that he henceforth followed were not French but Italian, not Guillaume de Lorris and Machault, but Dante, Boccaccio, and, to a certain extent, Petrarch. He does not, it is true, altogether depart from his old methods; the dream of the Romaunt reappears in the Parlement and in the Hous of Fame; the May morning and the daisy introduce the Legende. But there is no comparison between the workmanship of the two periods, and whereas that of the first is loose and disjointed, that of the second-except perhaps in the case of the Hous of Fame, which is more than half comic, a sort of travesty of the Divina Commedia, and therefore not to be judged by strict rules-that of the second is compact, well-ordered, and guided by the true artist's mastery over his materials. Italy in fact gave to Chaucer at precisely the right moment just that stimulus and that external standard which he required for the true completion of his work; and rendered him in its own way the same service that the study of Greek rendered to Europe in general a century later. His debt to Italy was both direct and indirect. From Dante, whose genius was so wholly unlike his own, he took a great number of isolated passages (the, Troylus and the Parlement especially are full of reminiscences of the great Florentine); and he took also, as we said, the hint for the Hous of Fame, that most notable burlesque poem, where the serious meaning lies so near to the humorous outside. From Petrarch, 'Whos rethorykë sweete Enlumined al Itaille of poetrye,' he took, besides minor borrowings, the Clerkes Tale, almost exactly translating it from the laureate's Latin rendering of Boccaccio's story. From Boccaccio, whom by a strange irony of literary fortune he seems not to have known by name, he freely translated his two longest and, in a sense, greatest poems, Troylus and Criseyde and The Knightes Tale; and it is possible, though by no means certain, that the framework of the Canterbury Tales was suggested by the Decameron. But more important than this direct debt was what he indirectly owed to these great writers. He first learnt from them the art of constructing a story, that art which, as he afterwards developed it, has made of him unquestionably our chief narrative poet. It was from them-for, strange to say, he had read Virgil without learning it—that he first learnt the necessity of self-criticism; of that severe process, so foreign to the mediæval mind, which deliberates, sifts, tests, rejects, and alters, before a work is sent out into the world. So much for Chaucer's books and their effect on him. Were there however no more in him than what his books put into him, he would be of no greater importance to us than Gower or Lydgate. It takes more than learning, more than a gift for selection and adaptation, to make a poet. Those intimate verses, which we have quoted from the Legende, themselves proceed to tell us of a passion which is stronger in him than the passion for reading. 'I reverence my books,' he says, 'So hertely that there is gamë noon Save certeynly whan that the moneth of May What he here calls May, with its birds and flowers, really means Nature as a whole; not external nature only, but the world with its rich variety of sights and sounds and situations, especially its most varied product, Man. As to his feeling for external nature, indeed, it might be called limited; it is only to the birds and the flowers, the 'schowres swote' and the other genial gifts of spring that it seems to extend. Not only is there no trace in him of that 'religion of Nature' which is so powerful a factor in modern poetry, but there is nothing that in the least resembles those elaborate backgrounds in which the genius of Spenser takes such delight. Nay, in the poet to whom we owe the immortal group of pilgrims, there is little even of that minute local observation of places and their features, that memory for the grave-covered plains of Arles or the shattered banks of the Adige, which made a part of Dante's genius, and gives such vividness to the phantom landscape of his poem. While the Inferno has been mapped out for centuries, it is only to-day, after long discussion, that our scholars are able to make a map of the pilgrimage to Canterbury. But although the distinctive sense of landscape is for the most part absent, how keen is the poet's eye for colour, for effective detail! Who but Chaucer, while avoiding altogether the inventory style of the ordinary romancer, a style on which he himself poured ridicule in his Sir Thopas, could have brought such a glittering barbaric presence before us as this of the King of Inde ? 'The gret Emetrius, the King of Inde, Couched with perlës white and round and grete; His crispë heer like ringës was yronne, And that was yelwe and glitered as the sonne... And as a leon he his looking cast.' Or such a sketch in black and white as this first glimpse of Creseide ?— Among these other folke was Creseide In widowes habit blak: but nathëles Or such an intense and concentrated piece of colour as his 'His comb was redder than the fyn coral And like the burnischt gold was his colour.' As for the world of man and human character, it is here admittedly that Chaucer's triumphs have been greatest. In this respect his fame is so well established that there is little need to dwell on qualities with which he makes his first and deepest impression, and which moreover will be abundantly illlustrated by the extracts which follow. In his treatment of external nature, there are limits beyond which Chaucer cannot go—the limits of his time, of a more certain, a more easily satisfied age than ours. But in his sympathy with man, with human action and human feeling, his range is very great and his handling infinitely varied. The popular opinion of centuries has fixed upon the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales as his masterpiece, because it is there that this dramatic power of his, this realistic gift which can grasp at will 1 without mate or peer. 2 crowd. 3 jct. ♦ tocs. |