For out of oldë feldës, as men saith, 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 mediævai 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 sho vs 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 festeyngës 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 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 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, Papelardic, 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 ɔgue 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 ndoubtedly 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, ne would be of no greater importance to us than Gower or Lydgate. It takes more than learning, more than a gift for |