Medieval English Literature Part 8

CHAPTER IX CHAUCER

Chaucer has sometimes been represented as a French poet writing in English-not only a 'great translator' as his friend Eustache Deschamps called him, but so thoroughly in sympathy with the ideas and the style of French poetry that he is French in spirit even when he is original. This opinion about Chaucer is not the whole truth, but there is a great deal in it. Chaucer got his early literary training from French authors; particularly from the _Romance of the Rose_, which he translated, and from the poets of his own time or a little earlier: Machaut, Deschamps, Froissart, Granson. From these authors he learned the refinements of courtly poetry, the sentiment and the elegant phrasing of the French school, along with a number of conventional devices which were easier to imitate, such as the allegorical dream in the fashion of the _Roman de la Rose_. With Chaucer's poetry, we might say, English was brought up to the level of French. For two or three centuries English writers had been trying to be as correct as the French, but had seldom or never quite attained the French standard. Now the French were equalled in their own style by an English poet. English poetry at last comes out in the same kind of perfection as was shown in French and Provencal as early as the twelfth century, in German a little later with narrative poets such as Wolfram von Eschenbach, the author of _Parzival_, and lyric poets such as Walther von der Vogelweide. Italian was later still, but by the end of the thirteenth century, in the poets who preceded Dante, the Italian language proved itself at least the equal of the French and Provencal, which had ripened earlier. English was the last of the languages in which the poetical ideal of the Middle Ages was realized-the ideal of courtesy and grace.

One can see that this progress in English was determined by some general conditions-the 'spirit of the age'. The native language had all along been growing in importance, and by the time of Chaucer French was no longer what it had been in the twelfth or thirteenth centuries, the only language fit for a gentleman. At the same time French literature retained its influence and its authority in England; and the result was the complete adaptation of the English language to the French manner of thought and expression. The English poetry of Gower is enough to prove that what Chaucer did was not all due to Chaucer's original genius, but was partly the product of the age and the general circ.u.mstances and tendencies of literature and education. Gower, a man of literary talent, and Chaucer, a man of genius, are found at the same time, working in the same way, with objects in common. Chaucer shoots far ahead and enters on fields where Gower is unable to follow him; but in a considerable part of Chaucer's work he is along with Gower, equally dependent on French authority and equally satisfied with the French perfection. If there had been no Chaucer, Gower would have had a respectable place in history as the one 'correct' English poet of the Middle Ages, as the English culmination of that courtly medieval poetry which had its rise in France and Provence two or three hundred years before. The prize for style would have been awarded to Gower; as it is, he deserves rather more consideration than he has generally received in modern times. It is easy to pa.s.s him over and to say that his correctness is flat, his poetical art monotonous. But at the very lowest valuation he did what no one else except Chaucer was able to do; he wrote a large amount of verse in perfect accordance with his own critical principles, in such a way as to stand minute examination; and in this he thoroughly expressed the good manners of his time. He proved that English might compete with the languages which had most distinguished themselves in poetry. Chaucer did as much; and in his earlier work he did no more than Gower.

The two poets together, different as they are in genius, work in common under the same conditions of education to gain for England the rank that had been gained earlier by the other countries-France and Provence, Germany and Italy. Without them, English poetry would have possessed a number of interesting, a number of beautiful medieval works, but nothing quite in the pure strain of the finest medieval art. English poetry would still have reflected in its mirror an immense variety of life, a host of dreams; but it would have wanted the vision of that peculiar courteous grace in which the French excelled. Chaucer and Gower made up what was lacking in English medieval poetry; the Middle Ages did not go by without a proper rendering of their finer spirit in English verse.

But a great many ages had pa.s.sed before Chaucer and Gower appeared, and considered as spokesmen for medieval ideas they are rather belated.

England never quite made up what was lost in the time of depression, in the century or two after the Norman Conquest. Chaucer and Gower do something like what was done by the authors of French romance in the twelfth century, such as Chrestien de Troyes, the author of _Enid_, or Benoit de Sainte More, the author of the _Romance of Troy_. But their writings do not alter the fact that England had missed the first freshness of chivalrous romance. There were two hundred years between the old French romantic school and Chaucer. Even the _Roman de la Rose_ is a hundred years old when Chaucer translates it. The more recent French poets whom Chaucer translates or imitates are not of the best medieval period. Gower, who is more medieval than Chaucer, is a little behind his time. He is mainly a narrative poet, and narrative poetry had been exhausted in France; romances of adventure had been replaced by allegories (in which the narrative was little worth in comparison with the decoration), or, more happily, by familiar personal poems like those in which Froissart describes various pa.s.sages in his own life. Froissart, it is true, the contemporary of Chaucer, wrote a long romance in verse in the old fashion; but this is the exception that proves the rule: Froissart's _Meliador_ shows plainly enough that the old type of romance was done. It is to the credit of Gower that although he wrote in French a very long dull moralizing poem, he still in English kept in the main to narrative. It may have been old-fashioned, but it was a success.

Gower should always be remembered along with Chaucer; he is what Chaucer might have been without genius and without his Italian reading, but with his critical tact, and much of his skill in verse and diction. The _Confessio Amantis_ is monotonous, but it is not dull. Much of it at a time is wearisome, but as it is composed of a number of separate stories, it can be read in bits, and ought to be so read. Taken one at a time the clear bright little pa.s.sages come out with a meaning and a charm that may be lost when the book is read too perseveringly.

The _Confessio Amantis_ is one of the medieval works in which a number of different conventions are used together. In its design it resembles the _Romance of the Rose_; and like the _Romance of the Rose_ it belongs to the pattern of Boethius; it is in the form of a conversation between the poet and a divine interpreter. As a collection of stories, all held together in one frame, it follows the example set by _The Book of the Seven Wise Masters_. Like the _Romance of the Rose_ again it is an encyclopaedia of the art of love. Very fortunately, in some of the incidental pa.s.sages it gets away from conventions and authorities, and enlarges in a modern good-tempered fashion on the vanities of the current time. There is more wickedness in Gower than is commonly suspected.

Chaucer is not the only ironical critic of his age; and in his satire Gower appears to be, no less than Chaucer, independent of French examples, using his wit about the things and the humours which he could observe in the real life of his own experience.

Chaucer's life as a poet has by some been divided into three periods called French, Italian and English. This is not a true description, any more than that which would make of him a French poet merely, but it may be useful to bring out the importance of Chaucer's Italian studies.

Chaucer was French in his literary education, to begin with, and in some respects he is French to the end. His verse is always French in pattern; he did not care for the English alliterative verse; he probably like the English romance stanza better than he pretended, but he uses it only in the burlesque of _Sir Thopas_. In spite of his admiration for the Italian poets, he never imitates their verse, except in one short pa.s.sage where he copies the _terza rima_ of Dante. He is a great reader of Italian poems in the octave stanza, but he never uses that stanza; it was left for the Elizabethans. He translates a sonnet by Petrarch, but he does not follow the sonnet form. The strength and constancy of his devotion to French poetry is shown in the Prologue to the _Legend of Good Women_. The _Legend_ was written just before the _Canterbury Tales_; that is to say, after what has been called the Italian period. But the ideas in the Prologue to the _Legend_ are largely the ideas of the _Roman de la Rose_.

As for the so-called English period, in which Chaucer is supposed to come to himself, to escape from his tutors, to deal immediately in his own way with the reality of English life, it is true that the _Canterbury Tales_, especially in the Prologue and the interludes and the comic stories, are full of observation and original and fresh descriptive work. But they are not better in this respect than _Troilus and Criseyde_, which is the chief thing in Chaucer's Italian period.

The importance of Chaucer's Italian reading is beyond doubt. But it does not displace the French masters in his affection. It adds something new to Chaucer's mind; it does not change his mind with regard to the things which he had learned to value in French poetry.

When it is said that an English period came to succeed the Italian in Chaucer's life, the real meaning of this is that Chaucer was all the time working for independence, and that, as he goes on, his original genius strengthens and he takes more and more of real life into his view. But there is no one period in which he casts off his foreign masters and strikes out absolutely for himself. Some of his greatest imaginative work, and the most original, is done in his adaptation of the story of Troilus from an Italian poem of Boccaccio.

Chaucer represents a number of common medieval tastes, and many of these had to be kept under control in his poetry. One can see him again and again tempted to indulge himself, and sometimes yielding, but generally securing his freedom and lifting his verse above the ordinary traditional ways. He has the educational bent very strongly. That is shown in his prose works. He is interested in popular philosophy and popular science; he translates 'Boece', the Consolation of Philosophy, and compiles the Treatise on the Astrolabe for 'little Lewis my son'. The tale of _Melibeus_ which Chaucer tells in his own person among the Canterbury pilgrims is a translation of a moral work which had an extraordinary reputation not very easy to understand or appreciate now Chaucer took it up no doubt because it had been recommended by authors of good standing: he translates it from the French version by Jean de Meung. The _Parson's Tale_ is an adaptation from the French, and represents the common form of good sermon literature. Chaucer thus shared the tastes and the apt.i.tudes of the good ordinary man of letters. He was under no compulsion to do hack work; he wrote those things because he was fond of study and teaching, like the Clerk of Oxford in the _Canterbury Tales_. The learning shown in his poems is not pretence; it came into his poems because he had it in his mind. How his wit could play with his science is shown in the _Hous of Fame_, where the eagle is allowed to give a popular lecture on acoustics, but is prevented from going on to astronomy.

Chaucer dissembles his interest in that subject because he knows that popular science ought not to interfere too much with the proper business of poetry; he also, being a humorist, sees the comic aspect of his own didactic tastes; he sees the comic opposition between the teacher anxious to go on explaining and the listener not so ready to take in more. There is another pa.s.sage, in _Troilus_, where good literary advice is given (rather in the style of Polonius) against irrelevant scientific ill.u.s.trations. In a love-letter you must not allow your work for the schools to appear too obviously-

Ne jompre eek no discordant thing y-fere, As thus, to usen termes of physik.

This may be fairly interpreted as Chaucer talking to himself. He knew that he was inclined to this sort of irrelevance and very apt to drag in 'termes of physik', fragments of natural philosophy, where they were out of place.

This was one of the things, one of the common medieval temptations, from which he had to escape if he was to be a master in the art of poetry. How real the danger was can be seen in the works of some of the Chaucerians, e.g. in Henryson's _Orpheus_, and in Gawain Douglas's _Palace of Honour_.

Boethius is a teacher of a different sort from Melibeus, and the poet need not be afraid of him. Boethius, the master of Dante, the disciple of Plato, is one of the medieval authors who are not disqualified in any century; with him Chaucer does not require to be on his guard. The _Consolation of Philosophy_ may help the poet even in the highest reach of his imagination; so Boethius is remembered by Chaucer, as he is by Dante, when he has to deal solemnly with the condition of men on earth.

This is not one of the common medieval vanities from which Chaucer has to escape.

Far more dangerous and more attractive than any pedantry of the schools was the traditional convention of the allegorical poets, the _Rose_ and all the attendants of the _Rose_. This was a danger that Chaucer could not avoid; indeed it was his chief poetical task, at first, to enter this dreamland and to come out of it with the spoils of the garden, which could not be won except by a dreamer and by full subjection to all the enchantments of the place. It was part of Chaucer's poetic vocation to comprehend and to make his own the whole spirit and language of the _Roman de la Rose_ and also of the French poets who had followed, in the century between. The _Complaint to Pity_ shows how he succeeded in this; also the _Complaint of Mars_ and the poem called the _Complaint of Venus_, which is a translation from Oton de Granson, 'the floure of hem that maken in France'. Chaucer had to do this, and then he had to escape.

This sort of fancy work, a kind of musical sentiment with a mythology of personified abstract qualities, is the least substantial of all things-thought and argument, imagery and utterance, all are of the finest and most impalpable.

Thus am I slayn sith that Pite is deed: Allas the day! that ever hit shulde falle!

What maner man dar now holde up his heed?

To whom shall any sorwful herte calle, Now Crueltee hath cast to sleen us alle In ydel hope, folk redelees of peyne?

Sith she is deed, to whom shul we compleyne

If this sort of verse had not been written, English poetry would have missed one of the graces of medieval art-a grace which at this day it is easy to despise. It is not despicable, but neither is it the kind of beauty with which a strong imagination can be content, or indeed any mind whatsoever, apart from such a tradition as that of the old 'courtly makers'. And it is worth remembering that not every one of the courtly makers restricted himself to this thin, fine abstract melody. Eustache Deschamps, for example, amused himself with humorous verse as well; and for Froissart his ballades and virelais were only a game, an occasional relief from the memoirs in which he was telling the story of his time.

Chaucer in fact did very little in the French style of abstract sentiment. The longest of his early poems, _The Book of the d.u.c.h.ess_, has much of this quality in it, but this does not make the poem. _The Book of the d.u.c.h.ess_ is not abstract. It uses the traditional manner-dream, mythology, and all-but it has other substance in it, and that is the character of the d.u.c.h.ess Blanche herself, and the grief for her death.

Chaucer is here dealing with real life, and the conventional aids to poetry are left behind.

How necessary it was to get beyond this French school is shown by the later history of the French school itself. There was no one like Chaucer in France; except perhaps Froissart, who certainly had plenty of real life in his memoirs. But Froissart's Chronicles were in prose, and did nothing to cure the inanition of French poetry, which went on getting worse and worse, so that even a poetic genius like Villon suffered from it, having no examples to guide him except the thin ballades and rondeaux on the hackneyed themes. R. L. Stevenson's account of Charles d'Orleans and his poetry will show well enough what sort of work it was which was abandoned by Chaucer, and which in the century after Chaucer was still the most favoured kind in France.

It should not be forgotten that Chaucer, though he went far beyond such poetry as that of his French masters and of his own _Complaint to Pity_, never turned against it. He escaped out of the allegorical garden of the Rose, but with no resentment or ingrat.i.tude. He never depreciates the old school. He must have criticized it-to find it unsatisfying is to criticize it, implicitly at any rate; but he never uses a word of blame or a sentence of parody. In his later writings he takes up the devices of the Rose again; not only in the Prologue to the _Legend of Good Women_, but also, though less obviously, in the _Squire's Tale_, where the sentiment is quite in harmony with the old French mode.

Chaucer wrote no such essay on poetry as Dante _de Vulgari Eloquentia_; not even such a practical handbook of versification as was written by his friend Eustache Deschamps. But his writings, like Shakespeare's, have many pa.s.sages referring to the literary art-the processes of the workshop-and a comparison of his poems with the originals which suggested them will often bring out what was consciously in his mind as he reflected on his work-as he calculated and altered, to suit the purpose which he had before him.

Chaucer is one of the greatest of literary artists, and one of the finest; so it is peculiarly interesting to make out what he thought of different poetical kinds and forms which came in his way through his reading or his own practice. For this object-i.e. to bring out Chaucer's aims and the way in which he criticized his own poetry-the most valuable evidence is given by the poem of _Anelida and the False Arcite_. This is not only an unfinished poem-Chaucer left many things unfinished-it is a poem which changes its purpose as it goes on, which is written under two different and discordant influences, and which could not possibly be made harmonious without total reconstruction from the beginning. It was written after Chaucer had gone some way in his reading of the Italian poets, and the opening part is copied from the _Teseide_ of Boccaccio, which is also the original of the _Knight's Tale_. Now it was princ.i.p.ally through Boccaccio's example that Chaucer learned how to break away from the French school. Yet here in this poem of _Anelida_, starting with imitation of Boccaccio, Chaucer goes back to the French manner, and works out a theme of the French school-and then drops it, in the middle of a sentence. He was distracted at that time, it is clear, between two opposite kinds of poetry. His _Anelida_ is experimental work; in it we can see how he was changing his mind, and what difficulty he had with the new problems that were offered to him in his Italian books. He found in Italian a stronger kind of narrative than he had been accustomed to, outside of the Latin poets; a new kind of ambition, an attempt to rival the cla.s.sical authors in a modern language. The _Teseide_ (the _Theseid_) of Boccaccio is a modern epic poem in twelve books, meant by its author to be strong and solid and full; Chaucer in _Anelida_ begins to translate and adapt this heroic poem-and then he turns away from the wars of Theseus to a story of disappointed love; further, he leaves the narrative style and composes for Anelida the most elaborate of all his lyric poems, the most extreme contrast to the heavy epic manner in which his poem is begun. The lyrical complaint of Anelida is the perfection of everything that had been tried in the French school-a fine unsubstantial beauty so thin and clear that it is hardly comprehensible at first, and never in agreement with the forcible narrative verse at the beginning of the poem.

Chaucer here has been caught escaping from the Garden of the Rose; he has heard outside the stronger music of the new Italian epic poetry, but the old devotion is for the time too strong, and he falls back. His return is not exactly failure, because the complaint of Anelida, which is in many respects old-fashioned, a kind of poetry very near exhaustion, is also one of the most elaborate things ever composed by Chaucer, such a proof of his skill in verse as he never gives elsewhere.

The _Teseide_ kept him from sleeping, and his later progress cannot be understood apart from this epic of Boccaccio. When Chaucer read the Italian poets, he found them working with a new conception of the art of poetry, and particularly a fresh comprehension of the Ancients. The cla.s.sical Renaissance has begun.

The influence of the Latin poets had been strong all through the Middle Ages. In its lowest degree it helped the medieval poets to find matter for their stories; the French _Roman d'Eneas_ is the work that shows this best, because it is a version of the greatest Latin poem, and can be easily compared with its original, so as to find out what is understood and what is missed or travestied; how far the scope of the _Aeneid_ is different from the old French order of romance.

But neither here nor generally elsewhere is the debt limited to the matter of the stories. The sentiment, the pathos, the eloquence of medieval French poetry is derived from Virgil and Ovid. The Latin poets are the originals of medieval romance, far beyond what can be reckoned by any comparison of plots and incidents. And the medieval poets in their turn are the ancestors of the Renaissance and show the way to modern poetry.

But the old French poets, though they did much for the cla.s.sical education of Europe, were inattentive to many things in cla.s.sical poetry which the Italians were the first to understand, even before the revival of Greek, and which they appropriated for modern verse in time for Chaucer to be interested in what they were doing. Shortly, they understood what was meant by composition, proportion, the narrative unities; they appreciated the style of Latin poetry as the French did not; in poetical ornament they learned from Virgil something more spiritual and more imaginative than the French had known, and for which the term 'ornament' is hardly good enough; it is found in the similes of Dante, and after him in Chaucer.

This is one of the most difficult and one of the most interesting parts of literary history-the culmination and the end of the Middle Ages, in which the principles of medieval poetry are partly justified and partly refuted. As seen in the work of Chaucer, the effect of this new age and the Italian poetry was partly the stronger and richer poetical language and (an obvious sign of this strengthening) the similes such as were used by the cla.s.sical authors. But far more than this, a change was made in the whole manner of devising and shaping a story. This change was suggested by the Italian poets; it fell in with the change in Chaucer's own mind and with the independent growth of his strength. What he learned as a critic from study he used as an artist at the time when his imaginative power was quickest and most fertile. Yet before his journey to Italy, and apparently before he had learnt any Italian, he had already gone some way to meet the new poetry, without knowing it.

His earlier narrative poems, afterwards used for the tales of the Second Nun, the Clerk of Oxford and the Man of Law, have at least one quality in which they agree both with the Italians and with Chaucer's maturest work.

The verse is stately, strong, _heroic_ in more senses than one. Chaucer's employment of the ten-syllable line in the seven-line stanza for narrative was his own discovery. The decasyllabic line was an old measure; so was the seven-line stanza, both in Provencal and French. But the stanza had been generally restricted to lyric poetry, as in Chaucer's _Complaint to Pity_. It was a favourite stanza for ballades. French poetry discouraged the stanza in narrative verse; the common form for narrative of all sorts, and for preaching and satire as well, was the short couplet-the verse of the _Roman de Troie_, the _Roman de Renart_, the _Roman de la Rose_, the verse of the _Book of the d.u.c.h.ess_ and the _Hous of Fame_. When Chaucer used the longer verse in his _Life of St.

Cecilia_ and the other earlier tales, it is probable that he was following a common English opinion and taste, which tended against the universal dominion of the short couplet. 'Short verse' was never put out of use or favour, never insulted or condemned. But the English seem to have felt that it was not enough; they wanted more varieties. They had the alliterative verse, and, again, the use of the _rime couee_-_Sir Thopas_ verse-was certainly due to a wish for variety. The long verse of Robert of Gloucester was another possibility, frequently taken. After Chaucer's time, and seemingly independent of him, there were, in the fifteenth century, still more varieties in use among the minstrels. There was a general feeling among poets of all degrees that the short couplet (with no disrespect to it) was not the only and was not the most powerful of instruments. The technical originality of Chaucer was, first, that he learned the secret of the ten-syllable line, and later that he used it for regular narrative and made it the proper heroic verse in English. The most remarkable thing in this discovery is that Chaucer began to conform to the Italian rule before he knew anything about it. Not only are his single lines much nearer to the Italian rhythm than the French. This is curious, but it is not exceptional; it is what happens generally when the French decasyllable is imitated in one of the Teutonic languages, and Gower, who knew no Italian, or at any rate shows no sign of attending to Italian poetry, writes his occasional decasyllabic lines in the same way as Chaucer. But besides this mode of the single verse Chaucer agrees with the Italian practice in using stanzas for long narrative poetry; here he seems to have been led instinctively, or at least without any conscious imitation, to agree with the poet whom he was to follow still further, when once Boccaccio came in sight. This coincidence of taste in metre was one thing that must have struck Chaucer as soon as he opened an Italian book. Dante and Boccaccio used the same type of line as Chaucer had taken for many poems before ever he learned Italian; while the octave stanzas of Boccaccio's epic-the common verse, before that, of the Italian minstrels in their romances-must have seemed to Chaucer remarkably like his own stanza in the _Life of St. Cecilia_ or the story of _Constance_.

This explains how it was that Chaucer, with all his admiration for Italian poetry, never, except in one small instance, tries to copy any Italian verse. He did not copy the Italian line because he had the same line already from another source; and he did not copy Boccaccio's octave stanza because he had already another stanza quite as good, if not better, in the same kind. One need not consider long, what is also very very probable, that Chaucer felt the danger of too great attraction to those wonderful new models; he would learn what he could (so he seems to have thought to himself), but he would not give up what he had already gained without them. Possibly the odd change of key, the relapse from Italian to French style in _Anelida_, might be explained as Chaucer's reaction against the too overpowering influence of the new Italian school. 'Here is this brand-new epic starting out to conquer all the world; no question but that it is triumphant, glorious, successful; and we cannot escape; but before we join in the procession, and it is too late to draw back, suppose we draw back _now_-into the old garden-to try once more what may be made of the old French kind of music'. So possibly we might translate into ruder terms what seems to be the artistic movement in this remarkable failure by Chaucer.

Chaucer spent a long time thinking over the Italian poetry which he had learned, and he made different attempts to turn it to profit in English before he succeeded. One of his first complete poems after his Italian studies had begun is as significant as _Anelida_ both with respect to the difficulties that he found and also to the enduring influence of the French school. In the _Parliament of Birds_, his style as far as it can be tested in single pa.s.sages seems to have learned everything there was to be learned-

Through me men goon into the blisful place Of hertes hele and dedly woundes cure; Through me men goon unto the welle of Grace, There grene and l.u.s.ty May shal ever endure; This is the way to all good aventure; Be glad, thou reader, and thy sorrow offcaste!

All open am I; pa.s.se in and hy thee faste!

And, as for composition, the poem carries out to the full what the author intends; the digressions and the slackness that are felt to detract from the _Book of the d.u.c.h.ess_ have been avoided; the poem expresses the mind of Chaucer, both through the music of its solemn verse, and through the comic dialogue of the birds in their a.s.sembly. But this accomplished piece of work, with all its reminiscences of Dante and Boccaccio, is old French in its scheme; it is another of the allegorical dreams, and the device of the Parliament of Birds is in French older than the _Romaunt of the Rose_.

Chaucer is still, apparently, holding back; practising on the ground familiar to him, and gradually working into his poetry all that he can readily manage out of his Italian books. In _Anelida_ Italian and French are separate and discordant; in the _Parliament of Birds_ there is a harmony, but as yet Chaucer has not matched himself thoroughly against Boccaccio. When he does so, in _Troilus_ and in the _Knight's Tale_, it will be found that he is something more than a translator, and more than an adapter of minor and separable pa.s.sages.

The _Teseide_ of Boccaccio is at last after many attempts-how many, it is impossible to say-rendered into English by Chaucer, not in a translation, but with a thorough recasting of the whole story. _Troilus and Criseyde_ is taken from another poem by Boccaccio. _Troilus_ and the _Knight's Tale_ are without rivals in English for the critical keenness which has gone into them. Shakespeare has the same skill in dealing with his materials, in choosing and rejecting, but Shakespeare was never matched, as Chaucer was in these works, against an author of his own cla.s.s, an author, too, who had all the advantages of long training. The interest-the historical interest at any rate-of Chaucer's dealings with Boccaccio is that it was an encounter between an Englishman whose education had been chiefly French, and an Italian who had begun upon the ways of the new learning. To put it bluntly, it was the Middle Ages against the Renaissance; and the Englishman won on the Italian ground and under the Italian rules. Chaucer judged more truly than Boccaccio what the story of Palamon and Arcite was worth; the story of Troilus took shape in his imagination with incomparably more strength and substance.

In both cases he takes what he thinks fit; he learned from Boccaccio, or perhaps it would be truer to say he found out for himself in reading Boccaccio what was the value of right proportion in narrative. He refused altogether to be led away as Boccaccio was by the formal cla.s.sical ideal of epic poetry-the 'receipt to make an epic poem' which prescribed as necessary all the things employed in the construction of the _Aeneid_.

Boccaccio is the first modern author who writes an epic in twelve books; and one of his books is taken up with funeral games, because Virgil in the _Aeneid_ had imitated the funeral games in Homer. In the time of Pope this was still a respectable tradition. Chaucer is not tempted; he keeps to what is essential, and in the proportions of his story and his conception of the narrative unities he is saner than all the Renaissance.

One of the finest pa.s.sages in English criticism of poetry is Dryden's estimate of Chaucer in the Preface to the _Fables_. Chaucer is taken by Dryden, in the year 1700, as an example of that sincerity and truth to Nature which makes the essence of cla.s.sical poetry. In this cla.s.sical quality, Dryden thinks that Ovid is far inferior to Chaucer. Dryden makes allowance for Chaucer's old-fashioned language, and he did not fully understand the beauty of Chaucer's verse, but still he judges him as a modern writer with respect to his imagination; to no modern writer does he give higher praise than to Chaucer.

This truth to Nature, in virtue of which Chaucer is a cla.s.sic, will be found to be limited in some of his works by conventions which are not always easy to understand. Among these should not be reckoned the dream allegory. For though it may appear strange at first that Chaucer should have gone back to this in so late a work as the Prologue to the _Legend of Good Women_, yet it does not prevent him from speaking his mind either in earlier or later poems. In the _Book of the d.u.c.h.ess_, the _Parliament of Birds_, the Prologue to the _Legend_, one feels that Chaucer is dealing with life, and saying what he really thinks, in spite of the conventions. The _Hous of Fame_, which is a dream poem, might almost have been written for a wager, to show that he could bring in everything traditional, everything most common in the old artificial poetry, and yet be original and fresh through it all. But there are some stories-the _Clerk's Tale_, and the _Franklin's Tale_-in which he uses conventions of another sort and is partially disabled by them. These are stories of a kind much favoured in the Middle Ages, turning each upon one single obligation which, for the time, is regarded as if it were the only rule of conduct. The patience of Griselda is absolute; nothing must be allowed to interfere with it, and there is no other moral in the story. It is one of the frequent medieval examples in which the author can only think of one thing at a time. On working out this theme, Chaucer is really tried as severely as his heroine, and his patience is more extraordinary, because if there is anything certain about him it is that his mind is never satisfied with any one single aspect of any matter. Yet here he carries the story through to the end, though when it is finished he writes an epilogue which is a criticism on the strained morality of the piece. The plot of the _Franklin's Tale_ is another of the favourite medieval type, where the 'point of honour', the obligation of a vow, is treated in the same uncompromising way; Chaucer is here confined to a problem under strict rules, a drama of difficulties without character.

In the _Legend of Good Women_ he is limited in a different way, and not so severely. He has to tell 'the Saints' Lives of Cupid'-the Legends of the Heroines who have been martyrs for love; and as in the Legend of the Saints of the Church, the same motives are repeated, the trials of loyalty, the grief and pity. The Legend was left unfinished, apparently because Chaucer was tired. Yet it is not certain that he repented of his plan, or that the plan was wrong. There may possibly have been in this work something of the formalism which is common in Renaissance art, the ambition to build up a structure in many compartments, each compartment resembling all the others in the character of the subject and its general lines. But the stories are distinct, and all are beautiful-the legends of Cleopatra Queen and Martyr, of Thisbe and Ariadne, and the rest. Another poem which may be compared with the _Legend of Good Women_ is the _Monk's Tale_-an early work to which Chaucer made later additions-his book of the _Falls of Princes_. The Canterbury pilgrims find it too depressing, and in their criticism of the Monk's tragedies Chaucer may possibly have been thinking also of his unfinished _Legend of Good Women_. But what has been said of the Legend may be repeated about the _Monk's Tale_; there is the same kind of pathos in all the chapters, but they are all varied. One of the tragedies is the most considerable thing which Chaucer took from Dante; the story of Ugolino in the _Inferno_, 'Hugelyn Erle of Pise'.

It is uncertain whether Chaucer knew the _Decameron_ of Boccaccio, but the art of his comic stories is very like that of the Italian, to whom he owed so much in other ways. It is the art of comic imagination, using a perfect style which does not need to be compared with the unsophisticated old French ribaldry of the _fabliaux_ to be appreciated, though a comparison of that sort will show how far the Middle Ages had been left behind by Boccaccio and Chaucer. Among the interludes in the _Canterbury Tales_ there are two especially, the monologues of the Wife of Bath and the Pardoner, where Chaucer has discovered one of the most successful forms of comic poetry, and the Canon's Yeoman's prologue may be reckoned as a third along with them, though there, and also in the _Canon's Yeoman's Tale_, the humour is of a peculiar sort, with less character in it, and more satire-like the curious learned satire of which Ben Jonson was fond. It is remarkable that the tales told by the Wife of Bath and the Pardoner are both in a different tone from their discourses about themselves.

Without _Troilus and Criseyde_ the works of Chaucer would be an immense variety-romance and sentiment, humour and observation, expressed in poetical language that has never been equalled for truth and liveliness.