Chaucer And His Times Part 2

I can nat geste--rum, ram, ruf--by lettre--

but perhaps his strictures must not be taken too seriously, as he goes on to say:--

Ne, G.o.d wot, rym holde I but litel bettre--

a sentiment with which we can hardly imagine Chaucer to have been in sympathy. As a matter of fact, the lyric verse which lightens up the three hundred years from the Conquest to Chaucer, has a daintiness and grace which show that the poetic sense of England was by no means dead. _Sumer is ic.u.men in, Lenten is come with love to toune, Of one that is so fair and bright_, and numberless other songs with which recent anthologies have made everyone familiar are sufficient evidence of this. But these are chance flowers blossoming haphazard beside the dusty highway.

One well-beaten track, it is true, does lead us through green glades and meadows enamelled with eye-pleasing flowers to the mysterious depths of enchanted forests haunted by fell enchanters and baleful dragons, but the metrical romances are for the most part more or less direct translations from French originals, and show little that is distinctively English, beyond a tendency to cut the sentiment and come to the story.[33]

To French influence also we owe the development of satire. Old Norse and Icelandic poetry abound in instances of dry humour, but the Anglo-Saxon idea of repartee seems--if we may judge by pre-Conquest literature--to have consisted chiefly in such grim jests as baking the head of your enemy's son in a pie and inviting the father to dinner. Tenderness, pa.s.sion, imagination, are to be found in such poems as _Beowulf_, the _Husband's Lament_, _Judith_, but it is not until French wit flashes across English seriousness that we travel to the Land of c.o.kaygne, where

There are rivers great and fine Of oil, of milk, honey, and wine.

Water serveth there for nothing Save to look at, and for washing:

or listen to Hendyng's shrewd comments on human nature:--

Many a man saith, were he rich, There shoulde none be me y-lyche[34]

To be good and free; But when he hath ought bygeten[35]

All the freedom is forgeten And laid under knee.

"He is free of his horse, that never had one,"

Quoth Hendyng.

The prose of the period is still less inspiring than the poetry. Not even Chaucer discovered that prose-writing is an art. Works of any importance were written in Latin, and such English prose as there was, consisted in sermons, lives of the saints, etc. Now and then some author happens upon a telling phrase or an apt ill.u.s.tration, but such instances are few and obviously accidental. French influence was too strong for native literature to put forth any very vigorous shoots of its own, and attempts to force homilies, scientific treatises, and historical records into French rhyme forms led to the production of such dreary works as the _Cursor Mundi_ or Layamon's _Brut_.

By the fourteenth century, however, Normans and Saxons had long since begun to amalgamate, and the Hundred Years' War did much to foster the spirit of patriotism, and thus weld together the conflicting elements of which the nation was composed. Different dialects prevailed in different parts of the country, but they were at least varieties of English, and English was the language of the people as a whole. French, whether of Paris or of Stratford atte Bowe, was learned as a foreign tongue, although as late as the end of the fourteenth century we still find Gower writing indifferently in Latin, French, and English. It needed only that there should arise an author great enough to establish some one dialect--or combination of dialects--as standard English, and this creation of language from dialect, we owe--among other things--in large measure to Chaucer.

London was already the centre of English trade and industry, and the circ.u.mstances of its position, which brought its inhabitants into contact with both Northerners and Southerners, made its dialect particularly suitable for the standard language of the country. Chaucer, as we have seen, was London born and bred, and wrote naturally in the "c.o.keneye"

dialect, thus helping to establish it as the common speech. The modern reader who turns over the pages of the _Ayenbite of Inwit_ or the _Ancren Riwle_ finds himself confronted by what is practically a foreign tongue; it is excusable if he finds even _Piers Plowman_ baffling in places, and has difficulty in construing such pa.s.sages as:--

He was pale as a pelet, in the palsye he semed, And clothed in a caurimaury, I couthe it nou?te discreue; In kirtel and kourteley, and a knyf bi his syde; Of a freres frokke were e forsleues,[36]

but Chaucer's English, full as it may be of old and decayed terms, presents few serious difficulties to any ordinary intelligence. We may have to look up a word here and there in the glossary, or find ourselves puzzled by some astronomical or chemical terms, but these are merely by the way, and Chaucer fairly lays claim to the t.i.tle of Father, not only of English poetry, but of modern English.

In metre his work is no less remarkable. Professor Skeat, in his introduction to the Oxford edition of Chaucer's works, gives a list of no less than thirteen metres which he introduced into English poetry, consisting for the most part of modifications and alterations of French and Italian models.

The so-called Chaucerian stanza consists of seven lines of iambic verse rhyming _ababbcc_--_e. g._:

Among thise children was a widwe?s sone A litel clergeon, seven yeer of age, That day by? day to scole? was his wone, And eek also, wher-as he saugh th' image Of Cristes moder, hadde?he in usage As him was taught, to knele?adoun and seye His _Ave? Marie_,?as he goth b? the weye.

It is a modification of a form used by Boccaccio, and was itself possibly used by Spenser as the basis of his peculiar stanza. Chaucer employs it very largely for narrative purposes, preventing it from becoming monotonous by varying the place of the caesura, and freely adding or suppressing weak syllables when he so desires. Mr. A. W. Pollard, in his article on Chaucer in the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_, declares that the English poet borrowed both his stanza and his decasyllabic line from Guillaume de Machault. The point of the whole matter, however, lies, not in whether Chaucer was indebted to French or Italian sources for his metres, but in the fact that he revealed the latent possibilities of English as a poetic medium.

It is usual to divide Chaucer's life into three periods, and to speak of him as successively under French, Italian, and English influence, and although, as Professor Ker has pointed out, this method is open to some objections, it brings out certain critical points of interest and is worth adhering to for the sake of clearness.

French, as we have seen, had long been the dominant influence in English literature. To French erotic poetry we owe the elaborate code of duties owed by husband to wife and lover to mistress, and the whole artificial convention which prescribed unhappy love affairs and revelled in the minute a.n.a.lysis of over-strained emotion. "In poetry and life," says Ten Brink, "fashion required an educated young man, especially one in the service of the court, to fall in love at the earliest opportunity, and, if possible, hopelessly." We have already seen Chaucer obeying this convention in the _Book of the d.u.c.h.esse_ and the _Parlement of Foules_, and to these may be added the _Compleinte unto Pite_, the _Compleint to his Lady, Merciles Beaute_, _To Rosemounde_, _Against Women Unconstant_, _An Amorous Compleint_, and Book I, stanza 3 of _Troilus and Criseyde_.

The poet protests so much that it is difficult to believe that he is describing anything more than a lover bewailing his unhappy lot (in the French fashion). Evidently French love-poetry appealed strongly to his imagination, for one of his earliest works is a translation of the famous _Romance of the Rose_. This long, allegorical poem (the original consists of over 22,000 lines), falls into two parts. The first, by Guillaume de Lorris, describes the search of the ideal lover for the mystic rose. The hero is admitted by the portress Idleness into a fair garden of flowers, where he finds Sir Mirth, Lady Courtesy, Dame Gladness, and many another gallant and debonair knight and lady. In this garden is the enchanted Well of Love, in whose depths the lover beholds the image of the Rose. He tries to seize it, and finds that a hard struggle lies before him ere he can hope to win the prize of love. Lorris left the poem unfinished, and the second part was added by Jean le Meung, a cynic with no very high opinion of women or of love. He introduces a sceptical friend who has a long conversation with the lover in which he points out with extreme clearness the drawbacks of marriage and the frailties of women.

The English version of the poem consists of three fragments, A, B, and C (it is only 7,696 lines in all), and scholars are divided in opinion as to how much of the translation is actually by Chaucer himself. Professor Saintsbury, in the _Cambridge History of Literature_ considers that Chaucer is probably the author of A, possibly the author of B, and probably not the author of C. He must, however, have been known as the translator of the later part, for in the _Prologue to the Legend of Good Women_ (written about 1385), the G.o.d of love scolds the poet severely on the ground,--

Thou hast translated the Romauns of the Rose That is an hereyse ageyns my lawe.

Another early work is the A.B.C., a hymn in honour of the Virgin, modelled upon a similar poem by Guillaume de Deguileville. Deguileville was well known as a devotional writer at the time, and according to Speght Chaucer's paraphrase was written "at the request of Blanch d.u.c.h.esse of Lancaster, as a praier for her priuat vse, being a woman in her religion very deuout." There is, however, no evidence of this, and Ten Brink believes that the A.B.C. dates from a later period when the poet was pa.s.sing through a phase of deep religious feeling. Whatever the facts about this particular poem may be, it is interesting to notice that even in these early days Chaucer combined some of the qualities of a satirist with those of an idealist.

His first great original work was produced in 1369, when John of Gaunt's beautiful and charming young wife died. The _Book of the d.u.c.h.esse_ makes no pretence to originality of treatment. The poet, after a conventional lament over the conventional hard-heartedness of his mistress, falls into a conventional slumber in the course of which he has a conventional dream that he is following a conventional hunt in a conventional forest. Here he meets a handsome young man

Of the age of four and twenty yeer

And he was clothed al in blakke.

The young man is complaining to himself most piteously:--

Hit was gret wonder that nature Might suffre(n) any creature To have swich sorwe and be not deed.

The poet is touched by his sorrow, and since they have evidently lost the hunt, he begs the mourner to tell him of "his sorwes smerte." This opens the way for a long, rambling lament, full of allusions to cla.s.sical mythology. So involved is it, that the poet finds some difficulty in grasping the point, and cuts into a description of the lady's charms with a puzzled,--

Sir ... wher is she now?

The brief answer--

I have lost more than thou wenest

She is deed--

strikes a note of tragedy which is beyond the scope of the youthful poet as yet, and the elegy ends abruptly with

Is that your los? by G.o.d hit is routhe.[37]

The scheme of the poem is simple, the idea is borrowed from French laments, and whole pa.s.sages are translated from de Machault's _Le Dit de la Fontaine Amoureuse_ and _Remede de la Fortune_, but through all the stiffness and conventionality, all the obvious immaturity, there flash unmistakable signs of vigorous and original genius. Every poet of the day finds himself wandering in a forest, but Chaucer alone meets

A whelp that fauned me as I stood, That hadde y-followed, and coude no good, Hit com and creep to me as lowe, Right as. .h.i.t hadde me y-knowe, Hild doun his heed and joyned his eres And leyde al smothe doun his heres;

or notices with tender amus.e.m.e.nt the

many squirelles, that sete Ful hye upon the trees, and ete, And in hir maner made festes.

The praises of many fair ladies were sung by troubadour and minstrel, but it would be hard to find another heroine possessed of the gaiety and vigour and charm of Blanche:--

I saw hir daunce so comlily Carole and singe so swetely, Laughe and pleye so womanly, And loke so debonairly, So goodly speke and so frendly, That certes I trow that evermore Nas seyn so blisful a tresore

Therewith hir liste so wel to live, That dulnesse was of hir a-drad.

Already Chaucer shows that truth to life, that impatience of artificiality which are to become two of his most striking characteristics.