Chaucer And His Times Part 18

And in her hand a scepter of delight.

This is Dame Sapyence, and with her come Diana, Jephtha's daughter, Palamon, Arcite and Emily, Troilus and Cressida, David and Bathsheba, Delilah, Cleopatra, Jacob and Rachel, Venus (whose "hair as gold or topasis was hewit") and a number more famous lovers of antiquity. A "ballet of inconstant love" follows. This offends Venus, and the poet is brought before her to answer for his lack of respect. Poetry, the Muses, and the Poets from Homer to Chaucer and Dunbar, form a Court. Calliope pleads for him, and he is allowed to atone for his misdeed by composing "A ballet for Venus' pleasour," which so delights the company that he is invited to join the cavalcade. After travelling through Germany, France, Italy, and other countries, they reach the Fountain of the Muses. Here they alight:--

Our horses pastured in ain pleasand plane, Low at the foot of ain fair grene montane, Amid ain mead shaddowit with cedar trees,

where

... beriall stremis rinnand ouir stanerie greis[220]

Made sober noise, the shaw dinned agane For birdis song and sounding of the beis.[221]

In the midst of the field Douglas finds a gorgeous pavilion in which knights and ladies are feasting, while a poet relates the brave deeds of those who in the past proved "maist worthie of thair handis." After listening to these heroic tales the company once more sets out. Beyond Damascus they reach their journey's end. The poet is guided by a nymph to the foot of a steep mountain, at the summit of which stands the Palace of Honour. As he climbs he sees before him a dreadful abyss out of which proceed flames. His ears are filled with the sound of terrible cries; on either side lie dead bodies. These beings in torment are they who set out to pursue Honour, but "fell on sleuthfull sleip," and so were "drownit in the loch of cair." (It has been suggested by critics bent on finding an original for the _Pilgrim's Progress_, that Bunyan found in this the idea of his "byway to h.e.l.l.") At last he reaches the Palace, where he is shown many treasures, including Venus' mirror, which reflects "the deidis and fatis of euerie eirdlie wicht." Prince Honour is attended by all the virtues, and the poem ends by contrasting worldly and heavenly honour and commending virtue.

The gracious figure of Sapience, her dress gleaming with jewels, her head crowned with a diadem, is very different from any being of Lydgate's or Occleve's creation; already the first rays of Renaissance light are showing above the horizon, and the cold gray mists of fifteenth-century poetry are dispersing before its warmth and brilliance; but the radiance that heralds the new era is that of sunrise, flushing the world with a wonder of colour, rather than of that light of common day in which Chaucer is content to walk. In the great age to come, the Elizabethans are to show how the rapture and intoxication of beauty may be combined with the sternest realism, but in the early sixteenth century the children of the new birth walk with uncertain steps towards the dawn.

The poet who most clearly shows the growing love of beauty, and at the same time is most truly in sympathy with Chaucer, is William Dunbar. No other poet of the period has such skill in versification, such freshness and vigour, or such variety. His humour is as all-pervading as Chaucer's.

Now he addresses a daring poem to King James, slyly laughing at one of his numerous love affairs; now he writes the story of the _Two Friars of Berwick_, or the _Treatise of the Two Married Women and the Widow_, broadly comic fabliaux which might well have found a place among the _Canterbury Tales_. One of the wittiest of his poems is the _Visitation of St. Francis_, in which the poet describes how his patron saint appeared to him in a dream, bidding him wear the habit of a friar. Dunbar answers slyly that he has noticed more bishops than friars are among the saints, so perhaps it will be as well if St. Francis, to make all sure, provides him with a bishop's robes instead, and then he is sure to go to heaven.

Whereupon his visitant reveals himself in his true character and vanishes in a cloud of brimstone. Two little lyrics on James Dog, Keeper of the Queen's wardrobe, are very characteristic. In the first, "whan that he had offendit him," each verse ends with the refrain:--

Madame, ye have a dangerous Dog;

in the second, when the quarrel had been made up, the refrain runs:--

He is na Dog: he is a Lamb.

As Mr. Gregory Smith points out, "Dunbar is unlike Henryson in lacking the gentler and more intimate fun of their master. He is a satirist in the stronger sense; more boisterous in his fun, and showing, in his wildest frolics, an imaginative range which has no counterpart in the southern poet"; but his sincerity and virility, his boyish sense of fun, remind us of Chaucer again and again. The Reve would thoroughly have enjoyed telling the story of the flying friar of Tungland who courted disaster by using hen's feathers. Chaucerian, too, in the truest sense, is Dunbar's power of combining this keen sense of the ridiculous with a no less keen appreciation of beauty. The charm of his verse is incontestible, and his skill in making effective use of burdens and refrains shows an ear sensitive to music. _The Thistle and the Rose_, written in honour of the marriage of James IV and Margaret Tudor, borrows its idea from the _Parlement of Foules_, and has something of Chaucer's tenderness and charm. Dame Nature commands all birds, beasts, and flowers to appear before her, and after some debate proceeds to crown the thistle with rubies, while the birds unite in singing the praises of the "freshe Rose of colour red and white."

The _Golden Targe_, an allegorical poem of the conventional type, in which the shield of Reason proves no defence against the arrows of Beauty, contains a description of spring which Chaucer himself never equalled:--

Full angel-like the birdes sang their houres Within their curtains green, into their boweres Apparelled white and red with blossoms sweet; Enamelled was the field with all coloures The pearly dropes shook in silver showeres While all in balm did branch and leaves flete[222]

To part from Phbus did Aurora weep; Her crystal tears I saw hang on the floweres Which he for love all drank up with his heat.

For mirth of May with skippes and with hoppes The birdes sang upon the tender croppes[223]

With curious notes as Venus chapell clerkes; The rose yong, new spreding of her knoppes[224]

War powdered bright with hevenly beriall[225] droppes Through beames red, burning as ruby sparkes The skyes rang for shouting of the larkes.

And in addition to all these, Dunbar writes serious religious poetry on such subjects as _Love, Earthly and Divine_, draws a by no means unimpressive picture of the _Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins_, and in his _Lament for the Makaris_ (poets), with its haunting refrain:--

_Timor Mortis conturbat me_

shows a sense of the transitoriness of all earthly pleasure.

Enough has already been said to show that the influences that moulded sixteenth-century literature in England were not such as to lead its poets to model themselves on Chaucer. In the _Golden Targe_, Dunbar gives expression to the popular view of Chaucer in his day:--

O reverend Chaucer, rose of rethoris[226] all, As in our tongue a flower imperial, That rose in Britain ever, who readeth right, Thou bear'st, of makers[227] the triumph royal; Thy fresh enamelled termes celestial This matter could illumined have full bright, Wert thou not of our English all the light, Surmounting every tongue terrestrial As far as Mayes morrow doth midnight?

And here again, as in Occleve, we see that it is for his language rather than for his invention that the poet is praised. But the sixteenth century saw the change from Middle English to Modern, a change which, for the time being, lost men the key to Chaucer's verse. Old inflections had gradually dropped off, the accented "e" which ends so many of Chaucer's words had become mute, and the result was that the poets of the new age found Chaucer's lines impossible to scan. A generation whose taste was formed on Cla.s.sical and Italian models, whose precisians urged the necessity of discarding "bald and beggarly rhymning" in favour of the cla.s.sical system of accent, had not patience enough to rediscover the laws that governed Chaucer's verse. It says much for the insight and genuine poetic taste of Elizabethan critics that they one and all speak of Chaucer with admiration and respect. Fresh editions of his works continued to appear at frequent intervals throughout the century, and frequent references to his name show that they were well known to the poets of the period. To Spenser he is "The G.o.d of shepheards":--

Who taught me homely, as I can, to make.

He, whilst he lived, was the soueraigne head Of shepheards all, that been with loue ytake;

and he goes on to protest that

... all hys pa.s.sing skil with him is fledde, The fame whereof doth dayly greater growe.

The famous reference in the _Faerie Queene_ to

Dan Chaucer, well of Englishe undefyled, On Fames eternal beadroll worthie to be fyled,

has become part of the Chaucerian critic's stock in trade, and is as apt and as well-known as Dryden's phrase which speaks of Chaucer as "a perpetual fountain of good sense." Book III, canto xxv of the _Faerie Queene_ contains a paraphrase of some of the lines on true love in the _Frankleyns Tale_, and Book IV boldly promises to continue the story of

Couragious Cambell, and stout Triamond, With Canacee and Cambine linckt in lovely bond.

Whether the Spenserian stanza is a modification of the rhyme royal or of the stanza used by Boccaccio and Ariosto it is impossible to say--all three are obviously related to each other--but in view of Spenser's admiration for Chaucer, and his deliberate attempt to use "Chaucerisms,"

it is at least probable that in this respect the _Faerie Queene_ owes a debt to _Troilus and Criseyde_. In _Mother Hubbard's Tale_ and _Colin Clouts come home again_, Spenser is frankly, though unsuccessfully, imitating Chaucer's style. William Browne, the poet of Tavistock, also showed his admiration for Chaucer by an attempt to imitate him in his _Shepheard's Pipe_, a series of eclogues modelled partly on the _Shepherd's Calendar_ and partly on the _Canterbury Tales_. In the concluding lines of the first eclogue, which contains the story of Jonathas, Browne confesses his indebtedness to Occleve:--

Scholler unto t.i.tyrus t.i.tyrus the bravest swaine Ever lived on plaine ...

thus using for Chaucer the name bestowed on him by Spenser.

During the seventeenth century Chaucer's fame seems to have suffered a temporary eclipse. Between 1602 and 1687 not a single edition of his works appeared, and the edition of 1687 is in reality no more than a re-issue of Speght's. The poets hardly mention his name. Milton does indeed make a reference to the _Squieres Tale_, but his works show no trace of Chaucer's influence. Towards the end of the century, however, there was a revival of interest. Dryden tells us that Mr. Cowley declared he had no taste of him, but my lord of Leicester, on the other hand, was so warm an admirer of the _Canterbury Tales_ that he thought it "little less than profanation and sacrilege" to modernise their language, and not until his death did Dryden venture to turn into modern English the tales of the Knight, the Nun's Priest, and the Wife of Bath, and the character of the poor Parson in the _Prologue_. The wigs and ruffles of the seventeenth century, however, suit but ill the st.u.r.dy figure of the fourteenth-century poet. We stand aghast before Dryden's Arcite, who, in the throes of death, exclaims:--

No language can express the smallest part Of what I feel, and suffer in my heart,

How I have loved; excuse my faltering tongue: My spirit's feeble, and my pains are strong.

This I may say, I only grieve to die, Because I lose my charming Emily.

It is an excellent specimen of the poetry of 1699, but it is not Chaucer.

Dryden is, indeed, far more eighteenth than seventeenth century in feeling, and while the authors of the eighteenth century are too really great not to appreciate true poetry wherever they see it, their own taste leads them to the erection of "neat Modern buildings" rather than to the admiration of "an ancient majestick piece of Gothick Architecture," and all attempts to combine the two must necessarily be foredoomed to failure.

Pope paraphrases the _Hous of Fame_; Prior writes _Two Imitations of Chaucer_, viz. _Susanah and the Two Elders_, and _Earl Robert's Mice_; Gay writes a comedy on the Wife of Bath, with Chaucer himself for hero; the Rev. Thomas Warton, who, as professor of poetry at Oxford, ought to have known better, writes an elegy on the death of Pope in an extraordinary jargon which he apparently considers Chaucerian English. (See Miss Spurgeon's _Chaucer devant la Critique_, pp. 62-75.) But while these, and numerous other works of the same kind, prove that Chaucer was widely read at the time, they afford no evidence at all of his having any direct influence upon the general development of eighteenth-century poetry. His place as an English cla.s.sic is firmly established, but centuries have pa.s.sed since he wrote, and the point of view of the men of the new age differs too widely from that of their forefathers for any imitation to be possible, except by way of a conscious experiment. The most amazing of all modernisations was that of 1841. Richard Hengist Horne, inspired, if we may believe his own words, by no less a person than Wordsworth, hit on the most unfortunate idea of issuing Chaucer's poems in two volumes done into modern English by a sort of joint-stock company of contemporary poets.

Wordsworth himself, Leigh Hunt, Miss Barrett, Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, Bulwer-Lytton and the Cowden Clarkes, were to be among the contributors. Landor showed his usual common-sense by refusing to take any part in it, and his letter to Horne on the subject is worth quoting: "Indeed I _do_ admire him (Chaucer), or rather, love him.... Pardon me if I say that I would rather see Chaucer quite alone, in the dew of his sunny morning, than with twenty clever gentlefolks about him, arranging his shoestrings and b.u.t.toning his doublet. I like even his _language_. I will have no hand in breaking his dun but rich-painted gla.s.s to put in (if clearer) much thinner panes." It is comforting to reflect that the first volume proved a failure, and the second never saw the light.

Fortunately the labours of such scholars as Professor Skeat and Dr.

Furnivall have saved us from all fear of being left in future to the tender mercies of the moderniser. However great may be the changes that are to pa.s.s over our language, however strange the tongue of fourteenth-century England may sound in the ears of our descendants, Chaucer's English has been preserved once for all, and never again can we lose the key to his world of harmony and delight.

In Chaucer I am sped His tales I have red; His mater is delectable Solacious and commendable; His english wel alowed, So as it enprowed,[228]

For as it is enployed There is no englyshe voyd-- At those days moch commended, And now men wold haue amended His englishe where-at they barke, And marre all they warke; Chaucer, that famous Clarke His tearmes were not darcke, But pleasunt, easy, and playne; No worde he wrote in vayne.

(Skelton, introductory lines to the _Book of Phillip sparow_, 1507?)

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