No More Learning

Sui temporis lucerna habebatur ad docte scribendum
in lingua vulgari, as Bale remarks; and it is worth noting that, in
the syntax of Ben Jonson's English Grammar, Gower is cited as an
authority more often than any other writer. It may be observed
that, by Morsbach's test of a comparison with contemporary London
documents, both Chaucer and Gower are shown to be more con-


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153
servative of the full forms of inflection than the popular speech,
and Gower is, in this respect, apparently less modern than Chaucer.
He adopted a system of spelling which is more careful and con-
sistent than that of most other Middle English authors, and, in
general, he seems to have been something of a purist in matters of
language.
With regard to versification, the most marked feature of Gower's
verse is its great regularity and the extent to which inflectional
endings are utilised for metrical purposes. We have here what we
might have expected from the author's French verse, very great
syllabic accuracy and a very regular beat, an almost complete
combination of the accentual with the syllabic principle. As an
indication of the extent of this regularity, it may be mentioned
that in the whole of Confessio Amantis, which contains more
than thirty-three thousand four-accent lines, there are no examples
of the omission, so frequent in Chaucer, of the first unaccented
syllable. Displacement of the natural accent of words and the
slurring over of light syllables are far less frequent with Gower than
with Chaucer, and in purity of rime, also, he is somewhat more
strict. The result of Gower's syllabic accuracy is, no doubt, a
certain monotony of rhythm in his verse; but, on the other
hand, the author is careful so to distribute his pauses as not
to emphasise the rime unduly. He runs on freely from one
couplet to another, breaking the couplet more often than not
in places where a distinct pause occurs, and especially at the end
of a paragraph, so that the couplet arrangement is subordinated
distinctly, as it is also by Chaucer, to the continuity of the narrative.
The five-accent line is written by Gower in stanzas only, as in the
Supplication of the eighth book and in the English poem addressed
to Henry IV. In these it is a marked success, showing the same
technical skill that we note elsewhere, with more variety of rhythm
and a certain stately dignity which can hardly appear in the short
couplet.
After Confessio Amantis, which seems to have assumed its
final form in 1393, 'the sextenthe yer of King Richard,' Gower
produced some minor Latin poems treating of the political evils of
the times; and then, on the eve of his own marriage, he added, as
a kind of appendix to Confessio Amantis, a series of eighteen
French ballades on the virtue of the married state. After the fall
of Richard II he produced three more poetical works, again in
three different languages. In English, he wrote the poem already
referred to, In Praise of Peace (Carmen de pacis commendacione)
<


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154
John Gower
in fifty-five seven-line stanzas. In French, we have the series of
ballades commonly known as Cinkante Balades, dealing with love
according to the conventions of the age, but often in a graceful
and poetical fashion. These may have been written earlier, but
they were put together in their present form, as the author says, to
furnish entertainment to the court of king Henry IV, and were
dedicated to the king in two introductory ballades. It is clear that
the feelings expressed are, for the most part, impersonal; sometimes
the lover speaks and sometimes the lady, and the poems are evidently
adapted to a diversity of circumstances. As poetry, they are much
superior to those on marriage, and if they had been written in
English, they would doubtless have been recognised as an interesting
and valuable addition to the literature of the time. In Latin, the
author sets forth his final view of contemporary history and politics
in the Cronica Tripertita, a poem in leonine hexameters, in which
the events of the last twelve years of the reign of Richard II are
narrated, and the causes of his deposition set forth, as seen from
the point of view of an earnest supporter of the Lancastrian party.
As the title implies, it is in three parts, the first dealing with the
events of the year 1387, and the proceedings of the appellants, the
second with the year 1397, when Richard at length took vengeance
on his opponents and the third with the deposition of Richard II
and the accession of Henry IV. This work has no poetical merits,
but a certain amount of historical interest attaches to it. Some
minor Latin poems, including an epistle addressed to the king,
also belong to this final period of Gower's literary life. Either
in the first or the second year of the reign of Henry IV he became
blind and ceased to write, as he himself tells us; and in the epistle
to archbishop Arundel, which is prefixed to Vox Clamantis in
the All Souls MS (Hanc epistolam subscriptam corde deuoto misit
senex et cecus Iohannes Gower), he touchingly dwells upon the
blessing of light
That Gower, through the purity of his English style and the
easy fluency of his expression, exercised a distinct influence upon
the development of the language, is undoubted, and, in the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries, he was, on this account, uncritically classed
with Chaucer. He is placed with Chaucer as an equal by the
author of The Kingis Quair, by Occleve, by Dunbar, by Skelton
and even by Sidney in The Defence of Poesie. But, in fact,
though he may fairly be joined with Chaucer as one of the autho-
rities for standard English, his mind was essentially formed in a
medieval mould, and, as regards subject and treatment, he looks


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155
backwards rather than forwards. The modern note which was
struck by Chaucer is almost entirely absent here. This medi-
evalism, however, in itself has a certain charm, and there are
qualities of this kind in Confessio Amantis which are capable
still of giving genuine pleasure to the reader, while, at the same
time, we are bound to acknowledge the technical finish of the style,
both in the French and in the English poems. The author had a
strong feeling for correctness of language and of metre, and, at
the same time, his utterance is genuinely natural and unaffected.
In his way he solved the problem of combining rhetorical artifice
with simplicity of expression, and, if his genius moves within
somewhat narrow limits, yet, within those limits, it moves securely.


## p. 156 (#174) ############################################

CHAPTER VII
CHAUCER
Of the date of the birth of Geoffrey Chaucer we have no
direct knowledge. But indirect evidence of various kinds fixes
it between 1328, when his father, John Chaucer, was still un-
married, and 1346, before which date his own statement, at the
Scroope-Grosvenor suit in 1386, of his age as 'forty years or more'
would place it. Within this rather wide range, selection has,
further, to be guided by certain facts to be mentioned presently;
and, for some time past, opinion has. generally adopted, in face of
some difficulties, the date about 1340. ' John Chaucer himself
was a citizen and vintner of London, the son of Robert le Chaucer,
who, in 1310, was collector of the customs on wine, and who had
property at Ipswich and elsewhere in Suffolk. In 1349, John was
certainly married to an Agnes whose maiden surname is unknown,
who survived him and, in 1367, married again : therefore, unless
she was the vintner's second wife, she must have been Chaucer's
mother. The father seems to have had some link of service
with the royal household, and the poet was connected with it
more or less all his days. Probably he was born in Thames Street,
London, where his father had a house at the time of his death
in 1366.
We first hear of Chaucer himself (or, at least, of a Geoffrey
Chaucer who is not likely to be anyone else) in 1357, when
he received a suit of livery as member of the household of
Edward III's son Lionel (afterwards duke of Clarence), or of his
wife Elizabeth de Burgh. Two years later, he served in France, was
taken prisoner at a place called 'Retters' (alternately identified
with Retiers near Rennes, and with Rethel near Reims), but was
liberated on ransom by March 1360—the king subscribing £16
(= over £200 now) towards the sum paid. Seven years later,
on 2 June 1367, Edward gave him an annuity of 20 marks for
life, as to dilectus valettus noster, and he rose to be esquire at
9
:


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Life
157
the end of next year. Meanwhile, at a time earlier than that of
his own pension, on 12 September 1366, another of half the amount
had been granted to Philippa Chaucer, one of the damsels of the
queen's chamber: and this Philippa, beyond reasonable doubt,
must have been the poet's wife. If she was born Philippa Roet
or Rouet, daughter of Sir Payn Roet, a Hainault knight, and sister
of Katharine Rouet or Swynford, third wife of John of Gaunt,
Chaucer's undisputed patronage by 'time-honoured Lancaster'
would have been a matter of course. But we do not know Philippa's
parentage for certain. There is also much doubt about the family
that Geoffrey and Philippa may have had. The poet directly
dedicates, in 1391, his Astrolabe to 'little Lewis my son, who
was then ten years old; but of this son we hear nothing more.
On the other hand, chancellor Gascoigne, in the generation after
Chaucer's death, speaks of Thomas Chaucer, a known man of
position and wealth in the early fifteenth century, as Chaucer's
son : and this Thomas took the arms of Rouet late in life, while,
in 1381, John of Gaunt himself established an Elizabeth Chaucer
as a nun at Barking. Beyond these facts and names nothing
is known.
Of Chaucer himself-or, at least, of a Geoffrey Chaucer who, as
it is very important to remember, and as has not always been
remembered, may not be the same in all cases—a good many
facts are preserved, though these facts are in very few cases, if
any, directly connected with his literary position. By far the
larger part of the information concerns grants of money, sometimes
connected with the public service in war, diplomacy and civil
duties. He joined the army in France again in 1369; and, next
year, was abroad on public duty of some kind. In 1372, he was
sent to Genoa to arrange for the selection of some English port as
a headquarters for Genoese trade, and must have been absent
for a great part of the twelvemonth between the November of that
year and of the next. On St George's day 1374, he began to receive
from the king a daily pitcher of wine, commuted later for money.
In the following month, he leased the gatehouse of Aldgate from the
corporation, and, a month later again, was made controller of customs
for wool, etc. , in the port of London, receiving, in this same June,
an additional pension of £10 a year from John of Gaunt to himself
and his wife. Wardships, forfeitures and other casualties fell to
him, and, in 1377, he went on diplomatic duties to Flanders and to
France. In 1378, after the death of Edward III and the accession
of Richard II, it is thought that he was again in France and,


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158
Chaucer
later in that year, he certainly went once more to Italy, in the
mission to Bernabo Visconti of Milan. These duties did not
interfere with the controllership; to which another, that of the
petty customs, was added in 1382, and we have record of various
payments and gifts to him up to the autumn of 1386, when he sat
in parliament as knight of the shire for Kent, and gave evidence
in the Scroope-Grosvenor case.
Then the tide turned against him. In the triumph of the duke
of Gloucester and the eclipse of Gaunt during his absence in
Spain, Chaucer lost his controllership; and it would appear that,
in 1387, his wife died. In May, 1388, he assigned his pensions and
allowances to another person, which looks like (though it cannot
be said certainly to be) a sign of financial straits in the case of a
man whose party was out of favour. But the fall of Gloucester
and the return of John of Gaunt brought him out of the shadow
again. In July 1389, he was made clerk of the works to the king
at various places; and, in the next year (when, as part of his now
duty, he had to do with St George's chapel, Windsor), commissioner
of roads between Greenwich and Woolwich. This latter post he
seems to have retained; the clerkship he only held for two years.
On 6 September 1390, he fell twice in one day among the same
thieves, and was robbed of some public money, which, however, he
was excused from making good. During parts of this year and
the next, he held an additional post, that of the forestership of
North Petherton Park in Somerset. In 1394 he received from
Richard a fresh pension of £20 (say £300) a year. But, judging
by the evidence of records of advances and protections from
suits for debt, he seems to have been needy. In 1398, however,
he obtained an additional tun of wine a year from Richard; while
that luckless prince's ouster and successor, John of Gaunt's son,
added, in October 1399, forty marks to the twenty pounds, making
the poet's yearly income, besides the tun of wine, equal, at least, to
between £600 and £700 of our money. On the strength of this,
possibly, Chaucer (who had given up the Aldgate house thirteen
years before, and whose residence in the interval is unknown) took
a lease of a house in the garden of St Mary's, Westminster. But
he did not enjoy it for a full year, and dying (according to his
tomb, which is, however, of the sixteenth century) on 25 October
1400, was buried in Westminster Abbey, in the chapel of St
Benedict, thus founding Poet's Corner. That he was actually
dead by the end of that year is proved by the cessation of entries
as to his pensions. Almost every known incident in his life has


## p. 159 (#177) ############################################

Life
159
been mentioned in this summary, for the traditions of his residence
at Woodstock and of his beating a Franciscan friar in Fleet street
have been given up—the latter perhaps hastily. One enigmatical
incident remains-to wit, that in May 1380, one Cecilia de Chaum-
paigne gave Chaucer a release de raptu meo. There is, however,
no probability that there was anything in this case more romantic
or more shocking than one of the attempts to kidnap a ward of
property and marry him or her to somebody in whom the kidnapper
was interested-attempts of which, curiously enough, Chaucer's own
father is known to have been nearly the victim. Otherwise, 'there
is namore to seyn,' so far as true history goes. And it does not
seem necessary to waste space in elaborate confutation of un-
historical traditions and assertions, which, though in some cases
of very early origin, never had any basis of evidence, and, in most
cases, can be positively disproved. They have, for some decades, ,
passed out of all books of the slightest authority, except as matter
for refutation; and it is questionable whether this last process
itself does not lend them an injudicious survival. It will be
observed, however, that, in the authentic account, as above given,
while it is possible that some of its details may apply to a Geoffrey
Chaucer other than the poet whom we honour, there is not one
single one of them which concerns him as a poet at all. There are,
however, one or two references in his lifetime, and a chain, un-
broken for a long time, of almost extravagantly laudatory comments
upon his work, starting with actual contemporaries. Though there
can be little doubt that the pair met more than once, Froissart's
mention of him is only in reference to diplomatic and not literary
business. But Eustache Deschamps, perhaps, on the whole, the
foremost poet of France in Chaucer's time, has left a ballade of
the most complimentary character, though, already anticipating
the French habit of looking always at French literature first, it
addresses him as grant translateur, which, beyond doubt, he was.
In a certainly contemporary work of English prose, The Testament
of Love, which, for sheer want of careful examination, was long
attributed to Chaucer and which is now decided to be the work of
one Usk, who was executed in 1386 by the Gloucester faction,
Chaucer is spoken of with equal admiration, and his work is largely
drawn upon. Scogan, another contemporary and a correspondent
of his, celebrates him; and a far more important person than
these, the poet Gower, his personal friend, has left a well-known
tribute. The two principal poets of the next generation, in
England, Occleve and Lydgate, were, the former certainly,
,
,


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160
Chaucer
1
6
the latter probably, personal friends likewise : and, while both
are copious in laudation, Occleve has left us a portrait of Chaucer
illuminated on the margin of one of his own MSS. Through-
out the fifteenth and early sixteenth century, the chorus of praise
from poets, Scottish as well as English, continues unabated
and uninterrupted. Caxton, though never executing a complete
edition, repeatedly prints part of the works and is followed by
others; and, towards the middle of the sixteenth century, in a
passage which writers on Chaucer have generally missed, Lilius
Giraldus, one of the foremost humanists of Italy, in a survey
of European letters, recognises the eminence of Chaucer in
English.
We must, however, now make a further advance, and turn from
the 'Chaucer' who figures in records, and the 'Chaucer' who is
eulogised as a poet, to that other sense of 'Chaucer' which
indicates the work, not the man—the work which gained for the
man the reputation and the eulogy. Uncritically accepted, and
recklessly amplified during more than three centuries, it has, since
the masterly investigations of Tyrwhitt in the latter part of the
eighteenth century, been subjected to a process of severe thinning,
on principles which will be referred to again. Of external, or
rather positive, evidence of early date, we have some, but not a
very great deal—and that not of the most unexceptionable kind.
The help of the MSS is only partial; for no one of them is ac-
cepted by anyone as an autograph, and no one of them contains
all the pieces which the severest methods of separation have left to
Chaucer. But, in two of these pieces, which themselves as wholes
are undoubted, there are lists, ostensibly by the poet, of his own
works, and cross-references in other places. The fullest of these
the list contained in the palinode or retraction at the end of The
Parson's Tale and The Canterbury Tales generally-has, indeed,
been suspected by some, apparently without any reason, except that
they would rather Chaucer had not repented of things of which, as
it seems to them, he had no reason to repent. But, even in case of
forgery, the forger would, probably, have taken care to be correct
in his attribution. This list contains Troilus; The book [House]
of Fame; The book of the XXV Ladies [Legend of Good
Women]; The book of the Duchess ; The book of St Valentine's
day of the Parliament of Birds (Fowls] ; The Canterbury Tales
themselves, where the repentance extends only to those that
'gounen into sinne'; The book of the Lion; and many others
which he cannot remember, while Boece is specified as requiring


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Canon of Works
161
6
no repentance. All these exist except The book of the Lion.
Further, in the body of the Tales, in the introduction to The
Man of Law's Prologue, Chaucer is mentioned by name with an
unmistakably autobiographical humility, whether serious or humor-
ous; and the Legend is again acknowledged under the general
title of the Seintes Legende of Cupyde. ' Now, in the Legend
itself, there is another list of works claimed by the author in which
Troilus, The House of Fame, The book of the Duchess (Death of
Blanche], The Parliament of Fowls and Boece reappear, and The
Rose, Palamon and Arcite and divers smaller works named and
unnamed are added. This, however, does not exhaust the list of
contemporary testimony, though it may exhaust that of Chaucer's
own definite claim to the works specified. Lydgate, besides referring
to a mysterious 'Dant in English,' which some have identified
with The House of Fame, specifies the A B C, Anelida and Arcite,
The Complaint of Mars and the Treatise on the Astrolabe. But
there is another witness, a certain John Shirley, who seems to
have passed his first youth when Chaucer died, and not to have
died himself till the fifteenth century was more than half over.
He has left us copies, ascribed by himself to Chaucer, of the three
poems last mentioned as ascribed also by Lydgate, and of the
minor pieces entitled The Complaint unto Pity, The Complaint of
Venus, Fortune, Truth, Gentilesse, Lack of Steadfastness and the
Empty Purse. The epistles (or 'envoys') to Scogan and Bukton,
the Rosemounde ballade, The Former Age and one or two scraps
are also definitely attributed to the poet in early MSS.
This concludes the list of what we may, without too much
presumption, call authenticated works, or at least titles, which
is rather different. Not all even of these were printed by
Caxton or by his immediate successors; but Caxton gave two
editions of The Canterbury Tales, and added others of Troilus
and Criseyde, of The Parliament of Fowls, of The House of
Fame, etc. , confining himself to, though not reaching, the limit
of the authenticated pieces. Pynson, in 1526, outstripped this by
including La Belle Dame sans Merci. It was not till 1532 that
the first collected edition appeared, under the care of Francis
Thynne, clerk of the kitchen to Henry VIII, who was assisted
by Sir Brian Tuke, and who, apparently, took great trouble to
consult all the MSS that he could lay hold of. This volume
occupies an important position and has recently been reprinted
in facsimile. It contains thirty-five several poems enumerated in
its table of contents, with a few short pieces which seem to have
11
6
a
B. L. II.
CH. VII.


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162
Chaucer
been afterthoughts, and are of no mark or likelihood. One of
these is actually assigned to Gower and one to Scogan, though it
contains work of Chaucer. But the rest seem to have been con-
sidered Chaucer's by Thynne, though he excuses himself by a
saving phrase. They are The Canterbury Tales, The Romaunt of
the Rose, Troilus and Criseyde, The Testament and Complaint
of Cresseid, The Legend of Good Women, A Goodly Ballade of
Chaucer, Boethius, The Dream of Chaucer, (The book of the
Duchess), The Envoy to Bukton, The Assembly [Parliament] of
Fowls, The Flower of Courtesy, The Death of Pity, La Belle Dame
sans Merci, Anelida and Arcite, The Assembly of Ladies, the
Astrolabe, The Complaint of the Black Knight, A Praise of Women,
The House of Fame, The Testament of Love, The Lamentation
of Mary Magdalen, The Remedy of Love, The Complaints of
Mars and Venus, The Letter of Cupid, A Ballade in Commenda-
tion of our Lady, The Cuckoo and the Nightingale, Steadfastness,
Good Counsel of Chaucer, Fortune, The Envoy to Scogan, Sapience,
the Empty Purse and a poem on Circumstance.
In 1542, a new edition of Thynne's collection appeared with one
piece added, The Plowman's Tale (a piece of Lollardy not in
the least like Chaucer), and a third followed, with alterations of
order, in 1550. It was not long after this that [Sir] Thomas Wilson
in his Rhetoric (1553) declared that 'the fine courtier will speak
nothing but Chaucer. ' In 1561, a fresh admission of new matter
was made under the guidance of John Stow, the antiquary. The
new pieces were chiefly short ballades, and the like, but one very
important poem of length, The Court of Love, appeared for the
first time; and, nearly forty years later, in 1597—8, Thomas
Speght, in a fresh edition thought also to represent Stow, pub-
lished another notable piece, The Flower and the Leaf, together
with a new Chaucer's Dream, indicating also two other things, Jacke
Upland and Chaucer's A B C. There were editions in 1602 and
1687; but nothing further of importance was added till the edition
begun by Urry and published after his death in 1721. Here
appeared The Tale of Gamelyn, The Pardoner and Tapster, an
account of what happened after the pilgrims had reached Canter-
bury, and The Second Merchant's Tale or Tale of Beryn. 'The
whole dissembly' of Chaucer's works, genuine and spurious, had
now appeared except a very few short pieces, probably genuine,
which have recently been unearthed. The process of wholesale
agglomeration was ended; but it was some time before the inevit-
able reaction of meticulous scrutiny and separation was to begin.


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Early Editions
163
In fact, though Dryden, at the very juncture of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, had, on all but metrical points, done the
fullest justice to Chaucer, his own imitations had rather obscured
the original; and even Spenser fared better than his predecessor.
Except Dryden himself, the last intelligent enthusiasts for Chaucer,
who, up to Spenser's own death, had united the suffrages of all the
competent, were Sir Francis Kynaston (an eccentric and minor
but true poet, whose worship took the odd form of translating
Troilus into Latin, keeping the rime royal) and the earl of
Leicester, Algernon Sidney's elder brother (the 'lord Lisle'
of the Commonwealth, but no regicide), who, as Dryden himself
tells us, dissuaded him from modernising out of reverence for
the original. By most writers, for the greater part of a century- ,
Addison himself being their spokesman-Chaucer was regarded as
an antiquated buffoon, sometimes coarsely amusing, and a con-
venient pattern for coarseness worse than his own. The true
restorer of Chaucer, and the founder of all intelligent study of his
work, was Thomas Tyrwhitt (1730—86), fellow of Merton College,
Oxford, who, in 1775, published an edition of The Canterbury Tales
with prefatory matter, and a glossary dealing with the whole
subjecte Tyrwhitt had no theory to serve and no arbitrary
standard to apply; but he had a combined knowledge of classical
and medieval literature then probably unequalled in Europe,
a correct ear, a sense of poetry and a singularly sane judgment
strengthened and directed by legal training. He did not proceed
by electing certain of the works to a position of canon and deter-
mining the reprobation of others by reference to this-a proceeding
itself reprobated by the best principles of law, logic and literature.
He knew, doubtless, that, although The Canterbury Tales themselves
are Chaucer's beyond all reasonable doubt, no testimony that we
have, from Lydgate's onward, authenticates any particular form
of them like an autograph MS, or a modern printed book issued
by the author. He knew also, doubtless, that it cannot be safe
to assume that an author, especially in such days as Chaucer's,
must have rigidly observed the same standards of grammar, diction
and prosody at all times of his life-that, for instance, if we did so,
we should, on the evidence of one edition of The Essay of Dramatic
Poesy, assume that Dryden preferred to put the preposition at the
end of the clause, and on that of another decide that he avoided
this. He, therefore, proceeded on the only sound plan—that of
sifting out, first, things certainly, and then, things probably, false-
of gathering first the tares according to the advice of the parable
11-2


## p. 164 (#182) ############################################

164
Chaucer
---
- and so, by successive degrees, winnowing a surer and purer wheat
for garnering after it had been itself threshed and cleansed from
offal and impurity.
The beginning of the process was easy enough: for some
things had been expressly included by Thynne in the original
collection as not Chaucer's, and these or others were, in some cases,
known, practically beyond doubt, to be the work of actual and
identified persons. Such was the case with Gower's and Scogan's
verses above referred to, with Lydgate's Tale of Thebes, etc. and
with the very remarkable and beautiful Testament of Cresseid, which,
on the clearest internal showing, could not be Chaucer's, and which
had been printed earlier as the work of the Scottish poet Henryson.
The Letter of Cupid is not only acknowledged by Occleve, but
actually dated after Chaucer's death ; and La Belle Dame sans
Merci is not only attributed in MS to Sir Richard Ros, but is
adapted from Alain Chartier, who belonged to the next century.
Other pieces Tyrwhitt rejected for different reasons, all valid-
Gamelyn, The Plowman's Tale, that of Beryn, The Pardoner and
the Tapster, The Lamentation of Mary Magdalen, The Assembly
of Ladies, etc. —while he brushed away contemptuously at a sweep
the heap of rubbish' added by Stow. He left the following
verse, besides The Canterbury Tales, the two undoubtedly genuine
prose works and The Testament of Love (which he had evidently
not had time to examine carefully):—The Romaunt of the
Rose, Troilus and Criseyde, The Court of Love, The Complaint
unto Pity, Anelida and Arcite, The Assembly [Parliament] of
Fowls, The Complaint of the Black Knight (which had not then
been identified as Lydgate's), the A B C, Chaucer's Dream,
The Flower and the Leaf, The Legend of Good Women, The
Complaints of Mars and Venus and The Cuckoo and the Night-
ingale, with nine shorter poems. It is, however, very important
to observe that, though Tyrwhitt had read all these pieces for his
glossary, he did not edit their text; and, therefore, cannot be
taken as vouching fully for their authenticity. It is, for instance,
pretty certain that if he had so edited The Testament of Love he
would have discovered that it was not Chaucer's, whether he did
or did not discover whose it actually was.
But great as was the service which Tyrwhitt did in sweeping
out of the Chaucerian treasury much, if not all, of what had no
business to be there, it was still greater in respect of the principal
genuine treasure, which alone he subjected to thorough critical
editing. It is quite astonishing, a century and a quarter after his


## p. 165 (#183) ############################################

Tyrwhitt's Recension 165
work, to find how far he was in advance not merely of all his
predecessors in the study of Chaucer but-in one of the most
important points—of many who have followed. Whether it was
in consequence of Chaucer's uniquely clear understanding of
English versification as shown in his predecessors, or of his
setting a standard too high for his contemporaries, or merely
of a tyrannous change in the language, it is certain that even
his immediate successors (in some cases actually contemporary
with him) failed to reproduce the harmony of his verse in the
very act of imitating it, and that following generations misunder-
stood it altogether. Some have thought that this misunderstanding
extended even to Spenser; but, while disagreeing with them as to
this, one may doubt whether Spenser's understanding of it was not
more instinctive than analytic. Dryden frankly scouted the notion of
Chaucer's metre being regular: though it is nearly as much so, even
on Dryden's own principles, as his own. Tyrwhitt at once laid his
finger on the cause of the strange delusion of nearly three centuries
by pointing out what he calls 'the pronunciation of the feminine -e';
and, though in following up the hint which he thus gave, he may
have failed to notice some of the abnormalities of the metre (such
as the presence of lines of nine syllables only) and so have patched
unnecessarily here and there, these cases are very exceptional.
He may not have elaborated for Chaucer a system of grammar
so complete and so complex as that which has been elaborated for
him by subsequent ingenuity, to amend the errors of contemporary
script. But his text was based upon a considerable collation of
MSS in the first place; in the second, on an actual reading-
astonishing for the time when we remember that this also had
to be mostly in MS of Chaucer's English, as well as foreign, prede-
cessors and contemporaries; and, in the third, on careful examina-
tion of the poems themselves with, for guide, an ear originally
sensitive and subsequently well-trained. Of the result, it is enough
to borrow the-in the original-rather absurd hyperbole applied
earlier to Kynaston's Troilus in the words 'None sees Chaucer
but in Kynaston. ' It was hardly possible for the ordinary reader
to see Chaucer' till he saw him in Tyrwhitt; and in Tyrwhitt he
saw him, as far as The Canterbury Tales were concerned, in some-
thing very like a sufficient presentment.
But, just as Chaucer himself had gone so far beyond his
contemporaries in the practice of poesy, that they were unable
fully to avail themselves of what he did, so Tyrwhitt was too far in
advance of the English scholarship of his age for very much use to


## p. 166 (#184) ############################################

166
Chaucer
be immediately made of his labours. For some half-century, or
even longer, after his first edition, little was done in regard to
the text or study of Chaucer, though the researches of Sir Harris
Nicolas threw much light on the facts of his life. But the in-
creasing study of Middle English language and literature could
not fail to concentrate itself on the greatest of Middle English
writers; and a succession of scholars, of whom Wright and Morris
a
were the most remarkable among the earlier generation, and
Skeat and Furnivall among the later, have devoted themselves
to the subject, while, of the societies founded by the last
named, the Early English Text Society is accumulating, for the
first time in an accessible form, the literature which has to be
compared with Chaucer, and the Chaucer Society has performed
the even greater service of giving a large proportion of the MSS
themselves, with apparatus criticus for their understanding and
appreciation. Complete agreement, indeed, has not been—and,
perhaps, can never be expected to be-reached on the question
how far grammatical and other variables are to be left open or
subjected to a norm, arrived at according to the adjuster's con-
struing of the documents of the period; but the differences
resulting are rarely, if ever, of strictly literary importance.
Meanwhile, the process of winnowing which Tyrwhitt began
has been carried out still farther: partly by the discovery of
authors to whom pieces must or may be assigned rather than
to Chaucer, partly by the application of grammatical or other
tests of the internal kind. Thus, The Complaint of the Black
Knight was found to be ascribed to Lydgate by Shirley, a great
admirer and student, as has been said, of Chaucer himself, and,
apparently, contemporary with Lydgate daring all their lives.
The Cuckoo and the Nightingale-a very agreeable early poem
-was discovered by Skeat to be assigned in MS to 'Clanvowe,
who has been sufficiently identified with a Sir Thomas Clan-
vowe of the time. The Testament of Love, one of the most
evidently un-Chaucerian of these things when examined with care,
has, in the same way, turned out to be certainly (or with strong
probability) the work of Thomas Usk, as has been mentioned.
Two other very important and beautiful, though very late, attribu-
tions allowed by Tyrwhitt, though in the conditions specified, have
also been black-marked, not for any such reason, but for alleged
‘un-Chaucerism'in grammar, rime, etc. , and also for such reasons
as that The Flower and the Leaf is apparently put in the
mouth of a woman and The Court of Love in that of a person who
6


## p. 167 (#185) ############################################

Later Rearrangements
167
calls himself 'Philogenet, of Cambridge, clerk,' to which we have
not any parallel elsewhere in Chaucer. These last arguments are
weak; but there is no doubt that The Flower and the Leaf
(of which no MS is now accessible) to some extent, and The Court
of Love (of which we have a single late MS) still more, are, in
linguistic character, younger than Chaucer's time, and could only
be his if they had been very much rewritten. These, and the other
poems excluded, will be dealt with in a later chapter.
In these exclusions, and, still more, in another to which we are
coming, very great weight has been attached to some peculiari-
ties of rime pointed out first by Henry Bradshaw, the most
important of which is that Chaucer never (except in Sir Thopas,
where it is alleged that he is now parodying the Romances) rimes
a word in -y to a word in -ye throughout the pieces taken as
granted for his. The value of this argument must, of course, be
left to the decision of everyone of full age and average wits ; for
it requires no linguistic or even literary knowledge to guide the
decision. To some it seems conclusive; to others not so.
It has, however, been used largely in the discussion of the last
important poem assigned to Chaucer, The Romaunt of the Rose,
and is, perhaps, here of most importance. It is not denied by
.
anybody that Chaucer did translate this, the most famous and
popular poem in all European literature for nearly three centuries.
The question is whether the translation that we have or part of
it, if not the whole-is his. No general agreement has yet been
reached on this point even among those who admit the validity of
the rime test and other tests referred to; but most of them allow
that the piece stands on a different footing from others, and most
modern editions admit it to a sort of 'court of the gentiles. '
The two prose works, The Tales, The Legend, Troilus, The House
of Fame, the A B C, The Duchess, the three Complaints (unto
Pity, of Mars and to his Lady), Anelida and Arcite, The Par-
liament of Fowls, and some dozen or sixteen (the number varies
slightly) of minor poems ranging from a few lines to a page or so,
are admitted by all. Of these, some critical account must now be
given. But something must first be said on a preliminary point of
importance which has occupied scholars not a little, and on which
fairly satisfactory agreement has been reached : and that is the
probable order of the works in composition.
It has been observed that the facts of Chaucer's life, as known,
furnish us with no direct information concerning his literary work,
of any kind whatsoever. But, indirectly, they, as collected, furnish
6


## p. 168 (#186) ############################################

168
Chaucer
us with some not unimportant information—to wit, that in his
youth and early manhood he was much in France, that in early
middle life he was not a little in Italy and that he apparently
spent the whole of his later days in England. Now, if we take the
more or less authenticated works, we shall find that they sort
themselves up into three bundles more or less definitely consti-
tuted. The first consists of work either directly or pretty closely
translated or imitated from the French, and couched in forms
more or less French in origin—The Romaunt of the Rose, The
Complaints, The book of the Duchess, the minor ballades, etc.
The second consists of two important pieces directly traceable
to the Italian originals of Boccaccio, Troilus and Criseyde and
The Knight's Tale, with another scarcely less suggested by the
same Italian author, The Legend of Good Women, and, perhaps,
others still, including some of The Canterbury Tales besides The
Knights. The third includes the major and most characteristic
part of The Tales themselves from The Prologue onward, which
are purely and intensely English. Further, when these bundles
(not too tightly tied up nor too sharply separated from each other)
are surveyed, we find hardly disputable internal evidence that
they succeeded each other in the order of the events of his life.
The French division is not only very largely second-hand, but is
full of obvious tentative experiments; the author is trying his
hand, which, as yet, is an uncertain one, on metre, on language, on
subject; and, though he often does well, he seldom shows the
supremacy and self-confidence of mature genius. In the Italian
bundle he has gained very much in these respects: we hear a
voice we have not heard before and shall not hear again—the
voice of an individual, if not yet a consummate, poet.
But his
themes are borrowed; he embroiders rather than weaves. In the
third or English period all this is over. 'Here is God's plenty,'
as Dryden admirably said; and the poet is the steward of the
god of poets, and not the mere interpreter of some other poet.
He has his own choice of subject, his own grasp of character and
his own diction and plot. He is at home. And it is a significant
fact that we have references to other works in The Tales, but none
to The Tales in other works. We may, therefore, conclude, without
pushing the classification to a perilous particularity, that it is
generally sound
We now come, without further difficulty or doubt, to those
parts of the works about which there is little or no contention;
only prefixing a notice of the English Romaunt of the Rose with


## p. 169 (#187) ############################################

Romaunt of the Rose 169
full reference to the cautions given previously. For this we have
but one MS (in the Hunterian collection at Glasgow) and the
early printed version of Thynne. The translation is very far from
complete, representing only a small part of the great original work
of Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, and it is not continuous
even as it is. The usual practice of modern commentators has been
to break it up into three parts-A, B and C; but, by applying
to this division the rime and other tests before referred to, very
different results have been reached. The solution most in favour
is that Chaucer may not improbably have written A, may more or
less possibly have written C, but can hardly have written B, which
abounds in northern forms. It is, however, certain that he actually
translated this very part, inasmuch as he refers to it in The Legend.
Whatever may be the facts in these respects, there is a general
agreement of the competent that, from the literary point of view,
the whole is worthy of Chaucer and of the original. Of this
original, the earlier or Lorris part is one of the most beautiful
works of the Middle Ages, while the second or longer part by
Jean de Meun is one of the shrewdest and most characteristic,
The two authors were singularly different, but their English
translator, whoever he was, has shown himself equal to either
requirement, after a fashion which only a consummate man of letters
could display-such a man for instance as he to whom we owe
both the Prioress and the Wife of Bath. The soft love allegory of
the earlier part, with its lavish description and ornament, is not
rendered more adequately than the sharp satire and somewhat
pedantic learning of the second. The metre is that of the original
-the octosyllabic couplet—which was, on the whole, the most
popular literary measure of the Middle Ages in English, French
and German alike, and which had been practised in England for
nearly 200 years. To escape monotony and insignificance in this
is difficult, especially if the couplets are kept more or less distinct,
and if the full eight syllables and no more are invariably retained.
The English poet has not discovered all his possibilities of varia-
tion, but he has gone far in this direction. He has also been
curiously successful in sticking very closely to the matter of his
original without awkwardness, and, where he amplifies, amplifying
with taste. English literature up to, and even after, the time is
full of translation; is, indeed, very largely made up of it. But
there is no verse translation which approaches this in the com-
bined merits of fidelity, poetry and wit. The date is very un-
certain, but it must be early; some, who think the poem may all


## p. 170 (#188) ############################################

170
Chaucer
be Chaucer's, connect it with an early possible sojourn of his in
the north with the household of Lionel or his wife.
There are few data for settling the respective periods of com-
position of the early minor poems. If The book of the Duchess
(Blanche of Lancaster, who died in 1369) be really of the earliest
and The Complaint unto Pity is not usually assigned to an earlier
date-Chaucer was a singularly late-writing poet. But we may,
of course, suppose that his earlier work is lost, or that he devoted
the whole of his leisure (it must be remembered that he was in
the service' in various ways) to the Rose. On the other hand,
the putting of The Complaint of Mars as late as 1379 depends
solely upon a note by Shirley, connecting it with a court scandal
between Isabel of Castille, duchess of York, and John Holland,
duke of Exeter—for which there is no intrinsic evidence whatso-
ever. From a literary point of view one would put it much
earlier. With the exception of The Parliament of Fowls, which
has been not unreasonably connected with the marriage of
Richard II to Anne of Bohemia in 1382, internal evidence of style,
metrical experiment, absence of strongly original passages and
the like, would place all these poems before Troilus, and some
of them at a very early period of the poet's career, whensoever it
may have begun. Of the three which usually dispute the position
of actual primacy of date, The book of the Duchess or The Death
of Blanche is a poem of more than 1300 lines in octosyllables,
not quite so smooth as those of The Romaunt, but rather more
adventurously split up. The matter is much patched together out
of medieval commonplaces, but has touches both of pathos and
picturesqueness. The much shorter Complaint unto Pity has, for
its special interest, the first appearance in English, beyond all
reasonable doubt, of the great stanza called rime royal--that is
to say, the seven-lined decasyllabic stanza rimed ababbcc, which
held the premier position for serious verse in English poetry till
the Spenserian dethroned it. The third piece, Chaucer's A B C,
is in the chief rival of rime royal, the octave ababbcbc. The
other he probably took from the French : it is noticeable that
the A B C (a series of stanzas to our Lady, each beginning with
a different letter of the alphabet in regular order), though actually
adapted from the French of Deguileville, is in a quite different
metre, which may have been taken from Italian or French. And
one would feel inclined to put very close to these The Complaint
of Mars and A Complaint to his Lady, in which metrical ex-
ploration is pushed even further to nine-line stanzas aabaabbcc


## p. 171 (#189) ############################################

Early Poems
171
in the first, and ten-line as well as terza rima in the second. These
evidences of tentative work are most interesting and nearly de-
cisive in point of earliness ; but it is impossible to say that the
poetical value of any of these pieces is great.
In Anelida and Arcite and The Parliament of Fowls this
value rises very considerably. Both are written in the rime
royal-a slight anachronism of phrase as regards Chaucer, since
it is said to be derived from the use of the measure by James I
of Scotland in The Kingis Quair, but the only distinguishing
name for it and much the best. To this metre, as is shown from
these two poems and, still more, by Troilus, Chaucer had taken a
strong fancy; and he had not merely improved, if not yet quite
perfected, his mastery of it purely as metre, but had gone far to
provide himself with a poetic diction, and a power of writing
phrase, suitable to its purely metrical powers. The first named
piece is still a 'complaint'-queen Anelida bewailing the falseness
of her lover Arcite. But it escapes the cut-and-dried character
of some of the earlier work; and, in such a stanza as the following:
Whan sbe shal ete, on him is so hir thoght,
That wel unnethe of mete took she keep;
And whan that she was to hir reste broght,
On him she thoghte alwey till that she sleep;
Whan he was absent, provely she weep;
Thus liveth fair Anelida the quene
For fals Arcite, that did hir al this tene-
the poem acquires that full-blooded pulse of verse, the absence of
which is the fault of so much medieval poetry. That it is not,
however, very late is clear from the curious included, or concluding,
Complaint in very elaborate and varied choric form. The poem
is connected with The Knight's Tale in more than the name of
Arcite.
It is, thus, the inferior of The Parliament of Fowls. This
opens with the finest piece of pure poetry which, if the order
adopted be correct, Chaucer had yet written,
The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne,
Th’ assay so hard, so sharp the conquering,
The dredful joye, that alwey slit so yerne,
Al this mene I by love, that my feling
Astonyeth with his wonderful worching
So soro y-wis, that whan I on him thinke,
Nat wot I wel wher that I wake or winke;
and it includes not a few others, concluding, like Anelida, with a
lyric, shorter and more of the song kind, ‘Now welcom somer,' in
roundel form. This piece is also the first in which we meet most
.


## p. 172 (#190) ############################################

172
Chaucer
of the Chaucerian qualities—the equally felicitous and felicitously
blended humour and pathos, the adoption and yet transcendence
of medieval commonplaces (the dream, the catalogues of trees and
birds, the classical digressions and stuffings), and, above all, the
faculty of composition and handling, so as to make the poem,
whatever its subject, a poem, and not a mere copy of verses.
As yet, however, Chaucer had attempted nothing that much
exceeded, if it exceeded at all, the limits of occasional poetry;
while the experimental character, in metre especially, had dis-
tinguished his work very strongly, and some of it (probably most)
had been mere translation. In the work which, in all probability,
came next, part of which may have anticipated The Parliament
of Fowls, he was still to take a ready-prepared canvas of subject,
but to cover it with his own embroidery to such an extent as to
make the work practically original, and he was to confine it to
the metre that he had by this time thoroughly proved—the rime
royal itself.
In Troilus and Criseyde, to which we now come, Chaucer had
entirely passed his apprentice stage ; indeed, it may be said that,
in certain lines, he never went further, though he found new lines
and carried on others which here are only seen in their beginning.
The story of the Trojan prince Troilus and his love for a damsel
&
(who, from a confused remembrance of the Homeric heroines, was
successively called Briseida and Griseida or Criseida) is one of
those developments of the tale of Troy which, unknown to classical
tradition, grew up and were eagerly fostered in the Middle Ages.
Probably first sketched in the curious and still uncertainly dated
works of Dictys Cretensis and Dares Phrygius, it had been worked
up into a long legend in the Roman de Troie of Benoit de
Sainte More, a French trouvère of the late twelfth century; these,
according to medieval habit, though with an absence of acknow-
ledgment by no means universal or even usual, had been adapted
bodily a hundred years later in the prose Latin Hystoria Troiana
of Guido delle Colonne. On this, in turn, Boccaccio, somewhat
before the middle of the fourteenth century, based his poem of n
Filostrato in ottava rima; and, from the Filostrato, Chaucer took
the story. Not more, however, than one-third of the actual Troilus
and Criseyde is, in any sense, translated from Boccaccio, who is
never named by the English poet, though he has references to
a mysterious 'Lollius. ' But such points as this last cannot be
dealt with here.
What really concerns us is that, in this poem, Chaucer, though


## p. 173 (#191) ############################################

Troilus and Criseyde 173
still playing the part of hermit-crab—in a manner strange to
modern notions, but constantly practised in medieval times and
by no means unusual in Shakespeare-has quite transformed the
house which he borrowed and peopled it with quite different
inhabitants. This is most remarkable in the case of Pandarus :
but it is hardly less so in those of Troilus and Criseyde them-
selves. Indeed, in this poem Chaucer has not only given us
a full and finished romance, but has endowed it with what,
as a rule, medieval romance conspicuously lacked-interest of
character as well as of incident, and interest of drama as well as
of narrative. Discussions (which need not be idle and should
not be other than amicable) have been, and may be, held on the
question whether Chaucer himself is not a sixteenth-seventeenth
century dramatist, and a nineteenth century novelist, who happened
to be born in the fourteenth century: and Troilus is one of the
first texts which lend themselves to this discussion. The piece
is somewhat too long; it has (which amounts to much the same
thing) too many digressions, and (again much the same thing) the
action is too seldom concentrated and ‘spirited up'-there is too
much talk and too little happens. But these were faults so
ingrained in medieval literature that even Chaucer could not
entirely get rid of them : and hardly anyone before him had got
rid of them to the same extent.
And if the comparative excellence of the story be great, the
positive excellence of the poetry is greater. Of the rime royal
stanza the poet is now a perfect master; and, if his diction has not
acquired its full suppleness and variety of application, its dignity
and its facility for the purposes to which it is actually applied
leave nothing whatever to be desired. A list of show passages
would be out of place here; it is enough to say that nowhere,
from the fine opening to the far finer close, is the medium of verse
and phrase other than fully adequate to the subject and the poet's
intention. It is, on the whole, the weakest point of medieval
poetry, that, with subjects of the most charming kind, and frequent
felicities of sentiment and imagery, the verse lacks finish, and the
phrase has no concentrated fire or sweetness. In Troilus this
ceases to be the case.
Very strong arguments, in the absence of positive evidence,
would be required to make us regard a work of such maturity
as early; and the tendency has been to date it about 1383. Of
late, however, attempts have been made to put it six or seven
years earlier, on the strength, chiefly, of a passage in the Mirour


## p. 174 (#192) ############################################

174
Chaucer
de l'Omme, attributed to Gower and supposed to be itself of
about 1376. Here it may be enough to say that, even if the
passage be certainly Gower's and certainly as early as this, it
need not refer to Chaucer's Troilus at all, or, at any rate, to
any tale of Troilus that Gower knew Chaucer to have finished.
That the poet, at this time still a busy man and having many
irons, literary and other, in the fire, may have been a considerable
time over so long a book, even to the length of having revised it,
as some think, is quite possible. That, as a whole, and as we have
it, it can be other than much later than the recognised 'early'
poems, is, on sound principles of literary criticism, nearly impos-
sible; the later date suits much better than the earlier both with
what followed as well as with what went before!
In any case, Chaucer's position and prospects as a poet on the
morrow, whenever this was, of his finishing Troilus, are interesting
to consider. He had mastered, and, to some extent, transformed,
the romance. Was he to continue this? Is it fortunate that he
did not? Is not a Lancelot and Guinevere or a Tristram and
Iseult handled à la Troilus rather to be deplored as a vanished
possibility? It would appear that he asked himself something like
this question; and, if the usually accepted order of his works be
correct, he was somewhat irresolute in answering it—at any rate
for a time, if not always. It is probable that, at any rate, The
Knight's Tale, the longest and most finished constituent of the
Canterbury collection, was begun at this time. It is somewhat
out of proportion and keeping with its fellows, is like Troilus taken
from a poem of Boccaccio's and, like Troilus, is a romance proper,
but even further carried out of its kind by story and character
interest, mixture of serious and lighter treatment and brilliancy
of contributory parts. It seems not improbable that the unfinished
and, indeed, hardly begun Squire's Tale, which would have made
such a brilliant pendant, is also of this time as well as St Cecily
and, perhaps, other things. But the most considerable products of
this period of hesitation are, undoubtedly, The House of Fame and
The Legend of Good Women. Neither of these is complete; in
fact, Chaucer is a poet of torsi; but each is an effort in a different
and definite direction, and both are distinguished remarkably from
each other, from their predecessor Troilus, and from The Canter.
bury Tales, which, as an entire scheme, no doubt succeeded them.
The House of Fame is one of the most puzzling of Chaucer's
· See bibliography ondex Tatldok.


## p. 175 (#193) ############################################

The House of Fame
175
9
productions. There are divers resemblances to passages in Dante
(“the great poet of Itaile,' as Chaucer calls him in another place),
and some have even thought that this poem may be the 'Dant in
English,' otherwise unidentified, which was attributed to him by
Lydgate ; but perhaps this is going too far. In some respects, the
piece is a reversion-in metre, to the octosyllable ; in general
plan, to the dream-form; and, in episode, to the promiscuous
classical digression : the whole story of the Aeneid being most
eccentrically included in the first book, while it is not till the
second that the main subject begins by a mysterious and gorgeous
eagle carrying the poet off, like Ganymede, but not to heaven, only
to the House of Fame itself. The allegorical description of the
house and of its inhabitants is brilliantly carried on through the
third book, but quite abruptly cut short; and there is no hint of
what the termination was to be. The main differentia of the poem,
however, is, besides a much firmer and more varied treatment
of the octosyllable, an infusion of the ironic and humorous element
of infinitely greater strength than in any previous work, irresistibly
suggesting the further development of the vein first broached in
the character of Pandarus. Nothing before, in this respect, in
English had come near the dialogue with the eagle and parts of
the subsequent narrative. It failed to satisfy the writer, however;
and, either because he did not find the plan congenial, or because
he found the metre once for all and for the last time even as he
had improved it—too cramping for his genius, he tried another
experiment in The Legend of Good Women, an experiment in
one way, it would seem, as unsatisfactory as that of The House
of Fame, in another, a reaching of land, firmly and finally. The
existence of a double prologue to this piece, comparatively lately
found out, has, of necessity, stimulated the mania for arranging and
rearranging Chaucer's work; but it need not do so in the very
least. The whole state of this work, if it teaches us anything,
teaches us that Chaucer was a man who was as far as possible
removed from the condition which labours and 'licks' at a piece
of work, till it is thoroughly smooth and round, and then turns
it out to fend for itself. If two of Chaucer's friends had pre-
vailed on him to give them each an autograph copy of a poem
of his, it is much more probable than not that the copies
would have varied—that that 'God's plenty of his would have
manifested itself in some changes. The work itself is quite un-
affected by the accident of its double proem. Whether it was
really intended as a palinode for abuse of women in earlier books


## p. 176 (#194) ############################################

176
Chaucer
may be seriously doubted; the pretence that it was is quite like
Chaucer's fun,' and quite like the usual fashion of ushering in
literary work with some excuse, once almost universal and still
not quite unknown. For the actual substance-stories of famous
and unhappy dames and damsels of old, who were, like Guinevere,
'good lovers'—he had precedents in two of his favourite authors,
Ovid and Boccaccio; and this would have been more than enough
for him. But, in handling them, he took a metre—which we cannot
say he had never used before, because we do not know the
exact dates of the original forms of The Knight's Tale and other
things, but—which had been sporadically and half-accidentally
practised in Middle English to no very small extent; which had
recently been used in France, where the single decasyllabic line
had been familiar ever since the dawn of French literature proper;
and of which, as it was, he had written many hundreds at the end
of his rime royal in Troilus and elsewhere. This is the great
decasyllabic or heroic couplet; the ‘riding rime' (not yet ‘riding,'
as Troilus was not yet royal'); the ouster of the octosyllabic as
staple of English verse; the rival of the stanza for two centuries,
and something like the tyrant of English prosody for two more;
and still one of the very greatest of English metres for every
purpose but the pure lyric.
The work resulting is of the greatest interest, and has been,
as a rule, rather undervalued. Tennyson judged better when he
made it the inspiration of one of the greatest of his own early
poems. The prologue, in whichever form we take it, is the most
personal, the most varied and, perhaps, the most complete utterance
that we have from Chaucer as far as substance goes, though it is
not his most accomplished performance as art. He is evidently at
a sort of watershed, looking before and after—but especially after-
at his own work. The transitions of mood, and of attention to
subject, are remarkable. In particular, that instantaneous shifting
from grave to gay, and from the serious to the humorous, which
puzzles readers not to the English manner born, and of which he,
Shakespeare and Thackeray are the capital representatives, per-
vades the whole piece like the iridescence in shot silk or in certain
enamels. The allegory of the leaf and the flower; the presence
of the god of love and his wrath with those who treat him lightly;
the intercession of the gracious lady Alcestis ; the poet's apology
and his determination to turn into English divers classical stories
as a penance, are all mixed up with descriptions of nature,
with innocent pedantry (which, in fact, determines the fashion


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The Canterbury Tales 177
of the penance or for which the penance is an excuse) and with
touches of temporal colour and respect of distinguished persons.
All combine to make the thing unique. And both here and in
the actual legends of the martyrs of love, from Cleopatra to
Hypermnestra, the immense capacities of the metre are well
manifested, though not, of course, either with the range or with
the perfection of The Canterbury Tales themselves. It is very
interesting to find that in this first essay in it he has had a
presentiment of its great danger-monotony-and, though he
has naturally not discovered all the preservatives, he is almost
naïvely observant of one—the splitting of the couplet at a para-
graph’s end.
Still, that he was dissatisfied is evident, not merely from the in-
completeness of the actual scheme, but from off-signs of impatience
and discomfort in its course. The uniformity of subject, and the
mainly literary character of the treatment required, obviously
weighed on him. He wanted life and colour,' which here he could
not give or, rather, which he could have given, but which he was
anxious to apply to a larger and fresher scheme, a more varied
repertory, and one which, above all, would enable him not only to
take his models from the actual, but often, if not always, to give
manners and character and by-play, as well as fresco painting from
the antique, with a mainly sentimental connection of background
and subject.
That he found what he wanted in the scheme of The Canterbury
Tales, and that, though these also are unfinished (in fact not half-
finished according to their apparent design), they are one of the
greatest works of literature-everybody knows. Of the genesis
of the scheme itself nobody knows anything. As Dickens says,
'I thought of Mr Pickwick': so, no doubt, did Chaucer 'think of'
his pilgrims. It has been suggested—and denied—that Boccaccio,
so often Chaucer's immediate inspirer, was his inspirer in this case
also, by the scheme and framework of The Decameron. It is,
indeed, by no means unlikely that there was some connection ;
but the plan of collecting individually distinct tales, and
uniting them by means of a framework of central story, was
immemorial in the east; and at least one example of it had
been naturalised in Europe, under many different forms, for a
couple of centuries, in the shape of the collection known as The
Seven Sages. It is not necessary to look beyond this for general
suggestion; and the still universal popularity of pilgrimages pro-
vided a more special hint, the possibilities of which it certainly
12
L. L. II.
CH. VII.


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178
Chaucer
did not require Chaucer's genius to recognise. These fortuitous
associations-masses of drift-wood kept together for a time and
then separated-offer almost everything that the artist, desirous
of painting character and manners on the less elaborate and more
varied scale, can require. Though we have little of the kind from
antiquity, Petronius shows us the germs of the method; and, since
medieval literature began to become adult in Italy, it has been
the commonest of the common.
To what extent Chaucer regarded it, not merely as a convenient
vehicle for anything that he might take a fancy to write, but
as a useful one to receive anything of the less independent kind
that he had already written, is a very speculative question. But
the general tendency has been to regard The Knights T'ale, that
of the Second Nun and, perhaps, others, as examples of this latter
process, while an interesting hypothesis has been started that the
capital Tale of Gamelyn—which we find mixed up with Chaucer's
works, but which he cannot possibly have written-may have been
selected by him and laid by as the subject of rehandling into a
Canterbury item. But all this is guesswork; and, perhaps, the
elaborate attempts to arrange the tales in a consistent order are
a a little superfluous. The unquestionable incompleteness of the
whole and of some of the parts, the irregular and unsystematic
character of the minor prologues and framework-pieces, alike
preclude the idea of a very orderly plan, worked out so far as it
went in an orderly fashion. In fact, as has been hinted above,
such a thing is repugnant to Chaucer's genius as manifested not
merely here but everywhere.
Fortunately, however, he was able to secure a sufficient number
of happy moments to draw the main part of the framework-The
Prologue, in which the plan of the whole is sketched, the important
characters delineated and the action launched-without gap or
lapse. For it would be short-sighted to regard the grouping
of certain figures in an undescribed batch as an incompleteness.
Some writers of more methodical disposition would probably, have
proceeded from this to work out all the framework part, including,
perhaps, even a termination, however much liberty they might
reserve to themselves for the inset tales. But this was not
Chaucer's way. There have been controversies even as to the
exact number of tales that he originally promises or suggests :
and the incident of the canon's yeoman shows that he might
very well have reinforced his company in numbers, and have
treated them to adventures of divers kinds. In fact, the unknown


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The Canterbury Tales 179
deviser of The Pardoner and the Tapster, though what he has
produced is quite unlike Chaucer in form, has been much less
out of the spirit and general verisimilitude of the whole work
than more modern continuators. But it is most probable that
the actual frame-stuff-B0 much of it as is genuine (for there are
fragments of link in some MSS which are very unlikely to be
80) was composed by its author in a very haphazard manner,
sometimes with the tale he had in his mind, sometimes to cobble
on one which he had written more or less independently. The
only clear string of connection from first to last is the pervading
personality of the host, who gives a unity of character, almost as
great as the unity of frame-story, to the whole work, inviting,
criticising, admiring, denouncing, but always keeping himself in
evidence. As to the connection of origin between individual tales
and the whole, more hazardous conjectures in things Chaucerian
have been made than that the couplet-verse pieces were all or
mostly written or rewritten directly for the work, and that those
in other metres and in prose were the adopted part of the family.
But this can never be known as a fact. What is certain is that
the couplets of The Prologue, which must be of the essence of the
scheme, and those of most parts of it where the couplets appear,
are the most accomplished, various, thoroughly mastered verse
that we find in Chaucer himself or in any English writer up to
his time, while they are not exceeded by any foreign model unless
it be the terza rima of Dante. A medium which can render, as
they are rendered here, the manners-painting of The Prologue,
the comic monodrama of The Wife of Bath and the magnificent
description of the temple of Mars, has handed in its proofs'
once for all.
Whether, however, it was mere impatience of steady labour on
one designed plan, or a higher artistic sense which transcended
a mere mechanical conception of unity, there can be no doubt
of the felicity of the result. Without the various subject and
quality, perhaps even without the varied metre, of the tales, the
peculiar effect of 'God's plenty' (a phrase itself so felicitous that
it may be quoted more than once) would not be produced ; and
the essential congruity of the tales as a whole with the mixed
multitude supposed to tell them, would be wholly impossible.
Nothing is more remarkable than the intimate connection be-
tween the tales and The Prologue. They comment and complete
each other with unfailing punctuality. Not only is it of great
importance to read the corresponding portion of The Prologue
1242


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180
Chaucer
with each tale; not only does each tale supply, as those of the
Monk and the Prioress especially, important correction as well
as supplement; but it is hardly fantastic to say that the whole
Prologue ought to be read, or vividly remembered, before reading
each tale, in order to get its full dramatic, narrative and pictorial
effect. The sharp and obvious contrasts, such as that of The
Knight's Tale with the two that follow, though they illustrate
the clearness with which the greatest English men of letters
appreciated the value of the mixture of tragedy or romance with
farce or comedy, are less instructive, and, when properly appre-
ciated, less delightful, than other contrasts of a more delicate kind.
Such is the way in which the satire of Sir Thopas is left to the
host to bring out; and yet others, where the art of the poet is
probably more instinctive than deliberate, such as the facts that
nobody is shocked by The Wife of Bath's Prologue (the inter-
ruption by the friar and summoner is of a different character), and
(still more incomprehensible to the mere modern) that nobody
is bored by The Tale of Melibeus. Of the humour which is so
constantly present, it will be more convenient to speak presently
in a separate passage. It cannot be missed: though it may some-
times be mistaken. The exquisite and unlaboured pathos which
accompanies it, more rarely, but not less consummately, shown,
has been acknowledged even by those who, like Matthew Arnold,
have failed to appreciate Chaucer as a whole. But, on the
nature and constitution of that variety, which has also been
insisted on, it may be desirable to say something here and at
once.
It is no exaggeration or flourish, but a sound and informing
critical and historical observation, to say that The Canterbury
Tales supply a miniature or even microcosm, not only of English
poetry up to their date, but of medieval literature, barring the
strictly lyrical element, and admitting a part only of the didactic,
but enlarged and enriched by additional doses, both of the per-
sonal element and of that general criticism of life which, except
in Dante, had rarely been present. The first or Knight's Tale
is romance on the full, if not on the longest, scale, based on
Boccaccio's Teseide, but worked out with Chaucer's now invariable
idiosyncrasy of handling and detail; true to the main elements
of 'fierce wars and faithful loves'; possessing much more regular
plot than most of its fellows; concentrating and giving body to
their rather loose and stock description; imbued with much more
individuality of character; and with the presence of the author not


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The Canterbury Tales 181
obtruded but constantly throwing a shadow. That it is represen-
tative of romance in general may escape those who are not, as,
perhaps, but a few are, thoroughly acquainted with romance at
large and especially those who do not know that the man of the
twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries regarded the heroes
of the Charlemagne and Arthur stories, and those of antiquity, as
absolutely on a par.
With the high seriousness and variegated decoration of this
romance of adventure and quality contrast the two tales that
follow, one derived from a known fabliau, the other, possibly,
original, but both of the strict fabliau kind-that is to say, the
story of ordinary life with a preferably farcical tendency. If the
morals are not above those of the time, the nature and the manners
of that time the nature and manners no longer of a poetic Utopia,
localised, for the moment, in France or Britain or Greece or Rome
or Jerusalem or Ind, but of the towns and villages of England-
are drawn with a vividness which makes their French patterns
tame. What threatens a third story of this same kind, The Cook's
Tale, is broken off short without any explanation after about
fifty lines-one MS asserting that Chaucer 'maked namore' of it.
The Man of Law's Tale, the pathetic story of the guiltless and
injured Constance, returns to a favourite romance-motive and
treats it in rime royal-the most pathetic of metres—while The
Shipman falls back on the fabliau and the couplet. But Chaucer
was not the man to be monotonous in his variety. The next pair,
The Prioress's Tale and Chaucer's own Sir Thopas, indeed, keep
up the alternation of grave and gay, but keep it up in quite
a different manner. Appropriately in every way, the beautiful
and pathetic story of the innocent victim of Jewish ferocity is
an excursion into that hagiology which was closely connected
with romance, and which may even, perhaps, be regarded as one of
its probable sources. But the burlesque of chivalrous adoration
is not of the fabliau kind at all : it is parody of romance itself,
or, at least, of its more foolish and more degenerate offshoots. For,
be it observed, there is in Chaucer no sign whatever of hostility to,
or undervaluation of the nobler romance in any way, but, on the
contrary, great and consummate practice thereof on his own part.
Now, parody, as such, is absolutely natural to man, and it had been
frequent in the Middle Ages, though, usually, in a somewhat rough
and horseplayful form. Chaucer's is of the politest kind possible.
The verse, though singsong enough, is of the smoothest variety of
“romance six' or rime couée (664664 aabccb); the hero is 'a


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182
Chaucer
very parfit carpet knight'; it cannot be proved that, after his long
preparation, he did not actually encounter something more terrible
than buck and hare, and it is impossible not to admire his deter-
mination to be satisfied with nobody less than the Fairy Queen to
love par amours. But all the weak points of the weaker romances,
such as Torrent and Sir Eglamour, are brought out as pitilessly
as politely. It is one of the minor Chaucerian problems (perhaps
of as much importance as some that have received more attention),
whether the host's outburst of wrath is directed at the thing as a
romance or as a parody of romance. It is certain that uneducated
and uncultivated people do not, as a rule, enjoy the finer irony;
that it makes them uncomfortable and suspicious of being laughed
at themselves. And it is pretty certain that Chaucer was aware of
this point also in human nature.
Of The Tale of Melibeus something has been said by a hint
already. There is little doubt that, in a double way, it is meant
as a contrast not merely of grave after gay, but of good, sound,
serious stuff after perilously doubtful matter. And it is appre-
ciated accordingly as, in the language of Tennyson's farmer,
'whot a owt to 'a said. ' But the monk's experience is less happy,
and his catalogue of unfortunate princes, again strongly indebted
to Boccaccio, is interrupted and complained of, not merely by the
irrepressible and irreverent host but by the knight himself-the
pattern of courtesy and sweet reasonableness. The criticism is
curious, and the incident altogether not less so. The objection
to the histories, as too dismal for a mixed and merry company, is
not bad in itself, but a little inconsistent considering the patience
with which they had listened to the woes of Constance and the
prioress's little martyr, and were to listen (in this case without
even the sweetmeat of a happy ending) to the physician's story
of Virginia. Perhaps the explanation is meant to be that the
monk's accumulation of 'dreriment'-disaster heaped on disaster,
without sufficient detail to make each interesting—was found
oppressive: but a subtler reading may not be too subtle. Although
Chaucer's flings at ecclesiastics have been exaggerated since it
pleased the reformers to make arrows out of them, they do exist.
He had thought it well to atone for the little gibes in The Prologue
at the prioress's coquettishness of way and dress by the pure and
unfeigned pathos and piety of her tale. But he may have meant
to create a sense of incongruity, if not even of hypocrisy, between
the frank worldliness of the monk-his keenness for sport, his
objection to pore over books, his polite contempt of 'Austin,'
-
6


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The Canterbury Tales 183
his portly person—and his display of studious and goody pes-
simism. At any rate, another member of the cloth, the nun's
priest, restores its popularity with the famous and incomparable
tale of the Cock and the Fox, known as far back as Marie de
France, and, no doubt, infinitely older, but told here with the
quintessence of Chaucer's humour and of his dramatic and narra-
tive craftsmanship. There is uncertainty as to the actual order
here; but the Virginia story, above referred to, comes in fairly
well, and it is noticeable that the doctor, evidently a good judge
of symptoms and of his patients' powers of toleration, cuts it short.
After this, the ancient and grisly but powerful legend of Death and
the robbers strikes a new vein-in this case of eastern origin,
probably, but often worked in the Middle Ages. It comes with
a sort of ironic yet avowed impropriety from the pardoner : but
we could have done with more of its kind. And then we have
one of the most curious of all the divisions, the long and brilliant
Wife of Bath's Prologue, with her short, and by no means
insignificant but, relatively, merely postscript-like, tale.