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GEOFFREY CHAUCER.

[GEOFFREY CHAUCER, born in London probably about 1340, died at Westminster in 1400. He was the son of a vintner; was page in Prince Lionel's household, served in the army, was taken prisoner in France. He was afterwards valet and squire to Edward III, and went as king's commissioner to Italy in 1372, and later. He was Controller of the Customs in the port of London from 1381 to 1386, was M. P. for Kent in 1386, Clerk of the King's Works at Windsor in 1389, and died poor. Mr. Furnivall divides his poetical history into four periods: (1) up to 1371, including the early poems, viz the A. B. C, the Compleynte to Pité, the Boke of the Duchesse, and the Compleynte of Mars; (2) from 1372 to 1381, including the Troylus and Criseyde, Anelida, and the Former Age; (3) the best period, from 1381 to 1389, including the Parlement of Foules, the Hous of Fame, the Legende of Goode Women, and the chief of the Canterbury Tales; (4) from 1390 to 1400, including the latest Canterbury Tales, and the Ballades and Poems of Reflection and later age, of which the last few, like the Steadfastness, show failing power.]

It is natural that a book which aims at including the best that has been done in English verse should begin with Chaucer, to whom no one has ever seriously denied the name which Dryden gave him, of the Father of English poetry. The poems of an earlier date, the Brut and the Ormulum, the Romances and the Homilies, have indeed an interest of their own; but it is a purely antiquarian interest, and even under that aspect it does not exist for the reader of Chaucer, who cannot in any sense be said to have been inspired by them. English poetry, distinguished on the one hand from the 'rym dogerel' of the romancers, which is not poetry, and on the other from Beowulf, which is poetry but not, in the ordinary sense, English, begins in the reign of Edward III, with Chaucer and his lesser contemporaries. In them we see at a

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glance that the step has been taken which separates the rhymer from the poet, the 'maker,' who has something new to say, and has found the art of saying it beautifully. The poet, says an Elizabethan critic, 'can express the true and lively of everything which is set before him, and which he taketh in hand to describe'words that exactly meet Chaucer's case, and draw the line between himself and his predecessors. In the half century before Chaucer there had indeed been isolated poems--a lyric or two of real freshness and beauty-but not till that time of heightened national life, of wider culture, and of more harmonised society into which he was born, was there a sufficiency either of ideas or of accessible poetical material on English ground to shape and furnish an imaginative development like his. To him first among the writers of English it was given to catch and to express 'the true and lively' throughout a broad life of human range and feeling. Before him there had been story-telling, there had been stray notes of poetry but in Chaucer England brought forth her first poet, as modern times count poetry; her first skilled and conscious workman, who, coming in upon the stores of natural fact open to all alike, was enabled to communicate to whatever he touched that colour, that force, that distinction, in virtue of which common life and common feelings turn to poetry. And having found her poet, she did not fail to recognise him. Very soon, as Gower's 'Venus' says of him in the often-quoted lines,

Of ditës and of songës glad

The whiche he for my sakë made
The land fulfilled is over al.'

The themes of his books run glibly from the tongue of his own 'Sergeaunt of Lawe,' like matter familiar to all. His literary contemporaries felt and confessed in him the Poet's mysterious gifts, and his height above themselves. The best English poetical opinion, in the mouth of Spenser, Sidney, Milton, Dryden, has continuously acknowledged him; while the more our later world turns back to him, and learns to read and understand him, the stronger grows his claim in even our critical modern eyes, not only to the antiquarian charm of the storyteller and the 'translateur,' but to the influence and honours of the poet.

Chaucer then is for us the first English poet, and as such has all the interest that attaches to a great original figure. But he makes

no parade of his originality; on the contrary, like all mediæval writers, he translates, and borrows, and is anxious to reveal his authorities, lest he should be thought to be palming off mere frivolous inventions of his own. Other men's work is to him an ever open storehouse to be freely used, now for foundation, now for ornament. Hence with a writer like Chaucer the examination of his sources is at once more possible and more fruitful than is the case with a later poet. We know that every writer is in a great measure the creation of the books he has read and the times he has lived in ; but with a modern writer, or one like Virgil, it is impossible to disengage these influences with any real success. Not so with Chaucer and the poets of a young, unformed civilisation; they bear on their foreheads the traces of their origin. They reflect simply and readily the influence of the moment; happiness or sorrow, success or failure, this book or that-each has its instant effect on their work, so that it becomes a matter of real importance for him who would appreciate an early poet to know what he read and how he lived. Accordingly, from very early times, from the time of Stowe, Speght, and the Thynnes, those who have cared for Chaucer have shown a curiosity about the influences that formed him. A century ago, Tyrwhitt did as much as one man could to set the study of these influences on a sound footing, and in our own day the labours of the Chaucer Society and of Professor Ten Brink and other Germans have furnished us with a nearly complete apparatus for conducting it. With infinite industry, such as is shown in Mr. Furnivall's Six-Text edition of the poet, they have given us what materials exist for settling Chaucer's text; they have separated, on evidence both internal and derived from the circumstances of his life and times, his genuine work from the spurious pieces that tradition had thrust upon him; and they have skilfully tracked his poems to their sources. On ground so prepared we may tread firmly, and even in a short sketch like the present, which attempts no more than to present results that are generally agreed upon, it is possible to speak with some approach to certainty.

Chaucer was a great reader, and in more than one well-known passage he tells us what he felt for books.

On bookës for to rede I me delyte,

And to hem yive I feyth and ful credence,'

he says, in the prologue to the Legende of Goode Women. Books are to him the soil from which knowledge springs :

For out of oldë feldës, as men saith,
Cometh al this newë corn from yeer to yere,
And out of oldë bokës, in good faith,

Cometh al this newë science that men lere.'

He reads 'the longë day ful fast'; and it is no vain fancy which would discover in the book-loving 'Clerke of Oxenford' some traits that the poet has transferred from his own character. He knew Latin, French, and Italian, and was familiar with the best that had been written in those languages. His Latin studies included Boethius, whose book De Consolatione Philosophiae he translated into English; Macrobius, as far as the Somnium Scipionis is concerned; Livy and others of the great Roman prose writers, and many of the poets, 'Ovide, Lucan, Stace,' with Virgil and probably Claudian. But it must be remembered that he read Latin not as we read it, but as we read a modern foreign language, rapidly rather than exactly, with more desire to come by a rough and ready way to the sense than to be clear about the structure of the sentences. He cared very little either for grammar or for prosody; he talks of Æneas and Anchises, and some would believe that he makes of Lollius, the correspondent of Horace, 'myn auctour Lollius,' a historian of the Trojan war.1 In the same way, of the historical study of Latin literature, of the conscious attempt to realise the life of classical times, there is no trace in Chaucer. His favourite Latin writers were unquestionably Boethius and Ovid, as they were the favourites of the middle ages in general; Boethius, of whom a recent editor has counted nineteen imitations before the end of the fifteenth century, and Ovid, whose Ars Amandi and Metamorphoses were the storehouse of the medieval love-poet and story-teller. Nothing, on the other hand, shows more clearly the limitations of Chaucer's genius than his attitude towards Virgil.

1 Horace to Lollius, Epp. 1. 2. I—

'Trojani belli scriptorem, maxime Lolli,

Dum tu declamas Romae, Praeneste relegi.'

Dr. Latham supposes that Chaucer mistook the name of the person addressed for the historian, and Prof. Ten Brink suggests that he read— 'Trojani belli scriptorum maxime, Lolli,

Dum tu declamas Romae, Praeneste te legi.'

The false quantity would be no argument against this ingenious supposition; but what is more to the point is that the context shows Horace to be writing about a third person. Besides, it is not certain that Chaucer had read Horace.

No 'long study and great love' had made him search the volume of that 'honour and light of other poets' as Dante was made to search it; on the contrary, he prefers the romantic exaggerations of Statius, and it is for the rhetorical Lucan that he reserves the epithet of 'the gret poete.' Among the Good Women of the Legende comes Dido, it is true, and her story is taken more from the Eneid than from the Heroides. But what a change has passed over the tale since the religious Roman, charged with the sense of destiny, called away his hero from the embraces of the love-lorn queen to the work of founding the empire of the world! The fresshë lady, of the citee queene, Stood in the temple, in her estat royalle, So richëly, and eke so faire withalle, So yong, so lusty, with her eighen glade, That yf the God that heven and erthë made Wolde han a love, for beautë and goodnesse, And womanhode, and trouthe, and semlynesse, Whom sholde he loven but this lady swete? Ther nys no woman to him half so mete.'

Such is Dido; while the grave Trojan, for whom in Virgil the gods are contending, becomes in Chaucer's hands a mere vulgar deceiver, a 'grete gentilman' indeed to outward seeming, that has the gifts of pleasing, and can

Wel doon al his obeysaunce

To hire at festeÿngës and at daunce,'

but hollow at heart, false in his oaths and in his tears; in a word, a cool, unscrupulous seeker of bonnes fortunes. And again, at the central point of all, what has become of the 'conscious heaven' and 'pronuba Juno'?

For ther hath Æneas yknyled soo,

And tolde her al his herte and al his woo;

And sworn so depë to hire to be trewe

For wele or woo, and chaungë for noo newe,

And as a fals lover so wel kan pleyne

That sely Dido rewed on his peyne,

And toke him for housbonde, and was his wife
For evermor, whil that hem lastë lyfe.'

Chaucer, in fact, is purely medieval in his rendering of antiquity, and among the ancient writers he turns with the greatest sympathy to those in whom the romantic element is strongest. The spirit

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