Chaucer

Grant translateur, n.o.ble Gelfroi Chaucier.

But whether or not such was the case, his version of the "Roman de la Rose" seems, on the whole, to be a translation properly so called--although, considering the great number of MSS. existing of the French original, it would probably be no easy task to verify the a.s.sertion that in one or the other of these are to be found the few pa.s.sages thought to have been interpolated by Chaucer. On the other hand, his omissions are extensive; indeed, the whole of his translation amounts to little more than one-third of the French original. It is all the more noteworthy that Chaucer reproduces only about one-half of the part contributed by Jean de Meung, and again condenses this half to one-third of its length. In general, he has preserved the French names of localities, and even occasionally helps himself to a rhyme by retaining a French word. Occasionally he shows a certain timidity as a translator, speaking of "the tree which in France men call a pine," and pointing out, so that there may be no mistake, that mermaidens are called it "sereyns" (sirenes) in France. On the other hand, his natural vivacity now and then suggests to him a turn of phrase or an ill.u.s.tration of his own. As a loyal English courtier he cannot compare a fair bachelor to any one so aptly as to "the lord"s son of Windsor;"

and as writing not far from the time when the Statute of Kilkenny was pa.s.sed, he cannot lose the opportunity of inventing an Irish parentage for Wicked-Tongue:

So full of cursed rage It well agreed with his lineage; For him an Irishwoman bare.

The debt which Chaucer in his later works owed to the "Roman of the Rose" was considerable, and by no means confined to the favourite May-morning exordium and the recurring machinery of a vision--to the origin of which latter (the dream of Scipio related by Cicero and expounded in the widely-read Commentary of Macrobius) the opening lines of the "Romaunt" point. He owes to the French poem both the germs of felicitous phrases, such as the famous designation of Nature as "the Vicar of the almighty Lord," and perhaps touches used by him in pa.s.sages like that in which he afterwards, with further aid from other sources, drew the character of a true gentleman. But the main service which the work of this translation rendered to him was the opportunity which it offered of practising and perfecting a ready and happy choice of words,--a service in which, perhaps, lies the chief use of all translation, considered as an exercise of style. How far he had already advanced in this respect, and how lightly our language was already moulding itself in his hands, may be seen from several pa.s.sages in the poem; for instance, from that about the middle, where the old and new theme of self-contradictoriness of love is treated in endless variations. In short, Chaucer executed his task with facility, and frequently with grace, though for one reason or another he grew tired of it before he had carried it out with completeness. Yet the translation (and this may have been among the causes why he seems to have wearied of it) has notwithstanding a certain air of schoolwork; and though Chaucer"s next poem, to which incontestable evidence a.s.signs the date of the year 1369, is still very far from being wholly original, yet the step is great from the "Romaunt of the Rose" to the "Book of the d.u.c.h.ess."

Among the pa.s.sages of the French "Roman de la Rose" omitted in Chaucer"s translation are some containing critical reflexions on the character of kings and const.i.tuted authorities--a species of observations which kings and const.i.tuted authorities have never been notorious for loving. This circ.u.mstance, together with the reference to Windsor quoted above, suggests the probability that Chaucer"s connexion with the Court had not been interrupted, or had been renewed, or was on the eve of renewing itself, at the time when he wrote this translation. In becoming a courtier, he was certainly placed within the reach of social opportunities such as in his day he could nowhere else have enjoyed. In England as well as in Italy during the fourteenth and the two following centuries; as the frequent recurrence of the notion attests, the "good" courtier seemed the perfection of the idea of gentleman. At the same time exaggerated conceptions of the courtly breeding of Chaucer"s and Froissart"s age may very easily be formed; and it is almost amusing to contrast with Chaucer"s generally liberal notions of manners, severe views of etiquette like that introduced by him at the close of the "Man of Law"s Tale," where he stigmatizes as a solecism the statement of the author from whom he copied his narrative, that King Aella sent his little boy to invite the emperor to dinner. "It is best to deem he went himself."

The position which in June, 1367, we find Chaucer holding at Court is that of "Valettus" to the King, or, as a later doc.u.ment of May, 1368, has it, of "Valettus Camerae Regis"--Valet or Yeoman of the King"s Chamber. Posts of this kind, which involved the ordinary functions of personal attendance--the making of beds, the holding of torches, the laying of tables, the going on messages, etc.--were usually bestowed upon young men of good family. In due course of time a royal valet usually rose to the higher post of royal squire--either "of the household" generally, or of a more special kind. Chaucer appears in 1368 as an "esquire of less degree," his name standing seventeenth in a list of seven-and-thirty. After the year 1373 he is never mentioned by the lower, but several times by Latin equivalents of the higher, t.i.tle.

Frequent entries occur of the pension or salary of twenty marks granted to him for life; and, as will be seen, he soon began to be employed on missions abroad. He had thus become a regular member of the royal establishment, within the sphere of which we must suppose the a.s.sociations of the next years of his life to have been confined. They belonged to a period of peculiar significance both for the English people and for the Plantagenet dynasty, whose glittering exploits reflected so much transitory glory on the national arms. At home, these years were the brief interval between two of the chief visitations of the Black Death (1361 and 1369), and a few years earlier the poet of the "Vision" had given voice to the sufferings of the poor.

It was not, however, the mothers of the people crying for their children whom the courtly singer remembered in his elegy written in the year 1369; the woe to which he gave a poetic expression was that of a princely widower temporarily inconsolable for the loss of his first wife. In 1367 the Black Prince was conquering Castile (to be lost again before the year was out) for that interesting protege of the Plantagenets and representative of legitimate right, Don Pedro the Cruel, whose daughter the inconsolable widower was to espouse in 1372, and whose "tragic" downfall Chaucer afterwards duly lamented in his "Monk"s Tale":--

O n.o.ble, O worthy Pedro, glory of Spain, Whom fortune held so high in majesty!

As yet the star of the valiant Prince of Wales had not been quenched in the sickness which was the harbinger of death; and his younger brother, John of Gaunt, though already known for his bravery in the field (he commanded the reinforcements sent to Spain in 1367), had scarcely begun to play the prominent part in politics which he was afterwards to fill.

But his day was at hand, and the anti-clerical tenour of the legislation and of the administrative changes of these years was in entire harmony with the policy of which he was to const.i.tute himself the representative. 1365 is the year of the Statute of Provisors, and 1371 that of the dismissal of William of Wykeham.

John of Gaunt was born in 1340, and was, therefore, probably of much the same age as Chaucer, and like him now in the prime of life.

Nothing could accordingly be more natural than that a more or less intimate relation should have formed itself between them. This relation, there is reason to believe, afterwards ripened on Chaucer"s part into one of distinct political partisanship, of which there could as yet (for the reason given above) hardly be a question. There was, however, so far as we know, nothing in Chaucer"s tastes and tendencies to render it antecedently unlikely that he should have been ready to follow the fortunes of a prince who entered the political arena as an adversary of clerical predominance. Had Chaucer been a friend of it in principle, he would hardly have devoted his first efforts as a writer to the translation of the "Roman de la Rose." In so far, therefore, and in truth it is not very far, as John of Gaunt may be afterwards said to have been a Wycliffite, the same description might probably be applied to Chaucer. With such sentiments a personal orthodoxy was fully reconcileable in both patron and follower; and the so-called "Chaucer"s A. B. C.," a version of a prayer to the Virgin in a French poetical "Pilgrimage," might with equal probability have been put together by him either early or late in the course of his life. There was, however, a tradition, repeated by Speght, that this piece was composed "at the request of Blanche, d.u.c.h.ess of Lancaster, as a prayer for her private use, being a woman in her religion very devout." If so, it must have been written before the d.u.c.h.ess"s death, which occurred in 1369; and we may imagine it, if we please, with its twenty-three initial letters blazoned in red and blue and gold on a flyleaf inserted in the Book of the pious d.u.c.h.ess,--herself, in the fervent language of the poem, an illuminated calendar, as being lighted in this world with the Virgin"s holy name.

In the autumn of 1369, then, the d.u.c.h.ess Blanche died an early death; and it is pleasing to know that John of Gaunt, to whom his marriage with her had brought wealth and a dukedom, ordered services, in pious remembrance of her, to be held at her grave. The elaborate elegy which--very possibly at the widowed Duke"s request--was composed by Chaucer, leaves no doubt as to the ident.i.ty of the lady whose loss it deplores:--

--Goode faire "White" she hight; Thus was my lady named right; For she was both fair and bright.

But, in accordance with the taste of his age, which shunned such sheer straightforwardness in poetry, the "Book of the d.u.c.h.ess" contains no further transparent reference to the actual circ.u.mstances of the wedded life which had come to so premature an end--for John of Gaunt had married Blanche of Lancaster in 1359;--and an elaborate framework is constructed round the essential theme of the poem. Already, however, the instinct of Chaucer"s own poetic genius had taught him the value of personal directness; and, artificially as the course of the poem is arranged, it begins in the most artless and effective fashion with an account given by the poet of his own sleeplessness and its cause already referred to--an opening so felicitous that it was afterwards imitated by Froissart. And so, Chaucer continues, as he could not sleep, to drive the night away he sat upright in his bed reading a "romance," which he thought better entertainment than chess or draughts. The book which he read was the "Metamorphoses" of Ovid; and in it he chanced on the tale of Ceyx and Alcyone--the lovers whom, on their premature death, the compa.s.sion of Juno changed into the seabirds that bring good luck to mariners. Of this story (whether Chaucer derived it direct from Ovid, or from Machault"s French version is disputed), the earlier part serves as the introduction to the poem.

The story breaks off--with the dramatic abruptness in which Chaucer is a master, and which so often distinguishes his versions from their originals--at the death of Alcyone, caused by her grief at the tidings brought by Morpheus of her husband"s death. Thus subtly the G.o.d of sleep and the death of a loving wife mingle their images in the poet"s mind; and with these upon him he falls asleep "right upon his book."

What more natural, after this, than the dream which came to him? It was May, and he lay in his bed at morning-time, having been awakened out of his slumbers by the "small fowls," who were carolling forth their notes--"some high, some low, and all of one accord." The birds singing their matins around the poet, and the sun shining brightly through his windows stained with many a figure of poetic legend, and upon the walls painted in fine colours "both text and gloss, and all the Romaunt of the Rose"--is not this a picture of Chaucer by his own hand, on which, one may love to dwell? And just as the poem has begun with a touch of nature, and at the beginning of its main action has returned to nature, so through the whole of its course it maintains the same tone. The sleeper awakened--still of course in his dream--hears the sound of the horn, and the noise of huntsmen preparing for the chase. He rises, saddles his horse, and follows to the forest, where the Emperor Octavian (a favourite character of Carolingian legend, and pleasantly revived under this aspect by the modern romanticist, Ludwig Tieck--in Chaucer"s poem probably a flattering allegory for the King) is holding his hunt. The deer having been started, the poet is watching the course of the hunt, when he is approached by a dog, which leads him to a solitary spot in a thicket among mighty trees; and here of a sudden he comes upon a man in black, sitting silently by the side of a huge oak. How simple and how charming is the device of the faithful dog acting as a guide into the mournful solitude of the faithful man! For the knight whom the poet finds thus silent and alone, is rehearsing to himself a lay, "a manner song," in these words:--

I have of sorrow so great wone, That joye get I never none, Now that I see my lady bright, Which I have loved with all my might, Is from me dead, and is agone.

Alas! Death, what aileth thee That thou should"st not have taken me, When that thou took"st my lady sweet?

That was so fair, so fresh, so free, So goode, that men may well see Of all goodness she had no meet.

Seeing the knight overcome by his grief, and on the point of fainting, the poet accosts him, and courteously demands his pardon for the intrusion. Thereupon the disconsolate mourner, touched by this token of sympathy, breaks out into the tale of his sorrow which forms the real subject of the poem. It is a lament for the loss of a wife who was hard to gain (the historical basis of this is unknown, but great heiresses are usually hard to gain for cadets even of royal houses), and whom, alas! her husband was to lose so soon after he had gained her. Nothing could be simpler, and nothing could be more delightful than the Black Knight"s description of his lost lady as she was at the time when he wooed and almost despaired of winning her. Many of the touches in this description--and among them some of the very happiest--are, it is true, borrowed from the courtly Machault; but nowhere has Chaucer been happier, both in his appropriations and in the way in which he has really converted them into beauties of his own, than in this, perhaps the most lifelike picture of maidenhood in the whole range of our literature. Or is not the following the portrait of an English girl, all life and all innocence--a type not belonging, like its opposite, to any "period" in particular--?

I saw her dance so comelily, Carol and sing so sweetely, And laugh, and play so womanly, And looke so debonairly, So goodly speak and so friendly, That, certes, I trow that nevermore Was seen so blissful a treasure.

For every hair upon her head, Sooth to say, it was not red, Nor yellow neither, nor brown it was, Methought most like gold it was.

And ah! what eyes my lady had, Debonair, goode, glad and sad, Simple, of good size, not too wide.

Thereto her look was not aside.

Nor overthwart;

but so well set that, whoever beheld her was drawn and taken up by it, every part of him. Her eyes seemed every now and then as if she were inclined to be merciful, such was the delusion of fools: a delusion in very truth, for

It was no counterfeited thing; It was her owne pure looking; So the G.o.ddess, dame Nature, Had made them open by measure And close; for were she never so glad, Not foolishly her looks were spread, Nor wildely, though that she play"d; But ever, methought, her eyen said: "By G.o.d, my wrath is all forgiven."

And at the same time she liked to live so happily that dulness was afraid of her; she was neither too "sober" nor too glad; in short, no creature had over more measure in all things. Such was the lady whom the knight had won for himself, and whose virtues he cannot weary of rehearsing to himself or to a sympathising auditor.

"Sir!" quoth I, "where is she now?"

"Now?" quoth he, and stopped anon; Therewith he waxed as dead as stone, And said: "Alas that I was bore!

That was the loss! and heretofore I told to thee what I had lost.

Bethink thee what I said. Thou know"st In sooth full little what thou meanest: I have lost more than thou weenest.

G.o.d wot, alas! right that was she."

"Alas, sir, how? what may that be?

"She is dead." "Nay?" "Yes, by my truth!"

Is that your loss? by G.o.d, it is ruth."

And with that word, the hunt breaking up, the knight and the poet depart to a "long castle with white walls on a rich hill" (Richmond?), where a bell tolls and awakens the poet from his slumbers, to let him find himself lying in his bed, and the book with its legend of love and sleep resting in his hand. One hardly knows at whom more to wonder--whether at the distinguished French scholar who sees so many trees that he cannot see a forest, and who, not content with declaring the "Book of the d.u.c.h.ess," as a whole as well as in its details, a servile imitation of Machault, p.r.o.nounces it at the same time one of Chaucer"s feeblest productions; or at the equally eminent English scholar who, with a flippancy which for once ceases to be amusing, opines that Chaucer ought to "have felt ashamed of himself for this most lame and impotent conclusion" of a poem "full of beauties," and ought to have been "caned for it!" Not only was this "lame and impotent conclusion" imitated by Spenser in his lovely elegy, "Daphnaida" (I have been antic.i.p.ated in pointing out this fact by the author of the biographical essay on "Spenser" in this series--an essay to which I cannot help taking this opportunity of offering a tribute of sincere admiration. It may not be an undesigned coincidence that the inconsolable widower of the "Daphnaida" is named Alcyon, while Chaucer"s poem begins with a reference to the myth of Ceyx and Alcyone.

Sir Arthur Gorges re-appears in Alcyon in "Colin Clout"s come home again."); but it is the first pa.s.sage in Chaucer"s writings revealing, one would have thought unmistakeably, the dramatic power which was among his most characteristic gifts. The charm of this poem, notwithstanding all the artificialities with which it is overlaid, lies in its simplicity and truth to nature. A real human being is here brought before us instead of a vague abstraction; and the glow of life is on the page, though it has to tell of death and mourning. Chaucer is finding his strength by dipping into the true spring of poetic inspiration; and in his dreams he is awaking to the real capabilities of his genius. Though he is still uncertain of himself and dependent on others, it seems not too much to say that already in this "Book of the d.u.c.h.ess" he is in some measure an original poet.

How unconscious, at the same time, this waking must have been is manifest from what little is known concerning the course of both his personal and his literary life during the next few years. But there is a tide in the lives of poets, as in those of other men, on the use or neglect of which their future seems largely to depend. For more reasons than one Chaucer may have been rejoiced to be employed on the two missions abroad, which apparently formed his chief occupation during the years 1370-1373. In the first place, the love of books, which he so frequently confesses, must in him have been united to a love of seeing men and cities; few are observers of character without taking pleasure in observing it. Of his literary labours he probably took little thought during these years; although the visit which in the course of them he paid to Italy may be truly said to have const.i.tuted the turning-point in his literary life. No work of his can be ascribed to this period with certainty; none of importance has ever been ascribed to it.

On the latter of these missions Chaucer, who left England in the winter of 1372, visited Genoa and Florence. His object at the former city was to negotiate concerning the settlement of a Genoese mercantile factory in one of our ports, for in this century there already existed between Genoa and England a commercial intercourse, which is ill.u.s.trated by the obvious etymology of the popular term "jane" occurring in Chaucer in the sense of any small coin. ("A jane" is in the "Clerk"s Tale" said to be a sufficient value at which to estimate the "stormy people") It has been supposed that on this journey he met at Padua Petrarch, whose residence was near by at Arqua. The statement of the "Clerk" in the "Canterbury Tales" that he learnt the story of patient Griseldis "at Padua of a worthy clerk...now dead," who was called "Francis Petrarch, the laureate poet," may of course merely imply that Chaucer borrowed the "Clerk"s Tale" from Petrarch"s Latin version of the original by Boccaccio. But the meeting which the expression suggests may have actually taken place, and may have been accompanied by the most suitable conversation which the imagination can supply; while, on the other hand, it is a conjecture unsupported by any evidence whatever, that a previous meeting between the pair had occurred at Milan in 1368, when Lionel Duke of Clarence was married to his second wife with great pomp in the presence of Petrarch and of Froissart. The really noteworthy point is this: that while neither (as a matter of course) the translated "Romaunt of the Rose," nor the "Book of the d.u.c.h.ess"

exhibits any traces of Italian influence, the same a.s.sertion cannot safely be made with regard to any important poem produced by Chaucer after the date of this Italian journey. The literature of Italy which was--and in the first instance through Chaucer himself--to exercise so powerful an influence upon the progress of our own, was at last opened to him, though in what measure, and by what gradations, must remain undecided. Before him lay both the tragedies and the comedies, as he would have called them, of the learned and brilliant Boccaccio--both his epic poems and that inexhaustible treasure-house of stories which Petrarch praised for its pious and grave contents, albeit they were mingled with others of undeniable jocoseness--the immortal "Decamerone." He could examine the refined gold of Petrarch"s own verse with its exquisite variations of its favourite pure theme and its adequate treatment of other elevated subjects; and he might gaze down the long vista of pictured reminiscences, grand and sombre, called up by the mightiest Muse of the Middle Ages, the Muse of Dante. Chaucer"s genius, it may said at once was not TRANSFORMED by its contact with Italian literature; for a conscious desire as well as a conscientious effort is needed for bringing about such a transformation; and to compare the results of his first Italian journey with those of Goethe"s pilgrimage across the Alps, for instance, would be palpably absurd. It might even be doubted whether for the themes which he was afterwards likely to choose, and actually did choose, for poetic treatment the materials at his command in French (and English) poetry and prose would not have sufficed him. As it was, it seems probable that he took many things from Italian literature; it is certain that he learnt much from it. There seems every reason to conclude that the influence of Italian study upon Chaucer made him more a.s.siduous as well as more careful in the employment of his poetic powers--more hopeful at once, if one may so say, and more a.s.sured of himself.

Meanwhile, soon after his return from his second foreign mission, he was enabled to begin a more settled life at home. He had acquitted himself to the satisfaction of the Crown, as is shown by the grant for life of a daily pitcher of wine, made to him on April 23rd, 1374, the merry day of the Feast of St. George. It would of course be a mistake to conclude, from any seeming a.n.a.logies of later times, that this grant, which was received by Chaucer in money-value, and which seems finally to have been commuted for an annual payment of twenty marks, betokened on the part of the King a spirit of patronage appropriate to the claims of literary leisure. How remote such a notion was from the minds of Chaucer"s employers is proved by the terms of the patent by which, in the month of June following, he was appointed Comptroller of the Customs and Subsidy of wools, skins, and tanned hides in the port of London. This patent (doubtless according to the usual official form) required him to write the rolls of his office with his own hand, to be continually present there, and to perform his duties in person and not by deputy. By a warrant of the same month Chaucer was granted the pension of 10 pounds for life already mentioned, for services rendered by him and his wife to the Duke and d.u.c.h.ess of Lancaster and to the Queen; by two successive grants of the year 1375 he received further pecuniary gratifications of a more or less temporary nature; and he continued to receive his pension and allowance for robes as one of the royal esquires. We may therefore conceive of him as now established in a comfortable as well as seemingly secure position. His regular work as comptroller (of which a few scattered doc.u.mentary vestiges are preserved) scarcely offers more points for the imagination to exercise itself upon than Burns"s excisemanship or Wordsworth"s collectorship of stamps (It is a curious circ.u.mstance that Dryden should have received as a reward for his political services as a satirist, an office almost identical with Chaucer"s. But he held it for little more than a year.), though doubtless it must have brought him into constant contact with merchants and with shipmen, and may have suggested to him many a broad descriptive touch. On the other hand, it is not necessary to be a poet to feel something of that ineffable ennui of official life, which even the self-compensatory practice of arriving late at one"s desk, but departing from it early, can only abate, but not take away. The pa.s.sage has been often quoted in which Chaucer half implies a feeling of the kind, and tells how he sought recreation from what Charles Lamb would have called his "works" at the Custom House in the reading, as we know he did in the writing, of other books:--

--when thy labour done all is, And hast y-made reckonings, Instead of rest and newe things Thou go"st home to thine house anon, And there as dumb as any stone Thou sittest at another book.

The house at home was doubtless that in Aldgate, of which the lease to Chaucer, bearing date May, 1374, has been discovered; and to this we may fancy Chaucer walking morning and evening from the riverside, past the Postern Gate by the Tower. Already, however, in 1376, the routine of his occupations appears to have been interrupted by his engagement on some secret service under Sir John Burley; and in the following year, and in 1378, he was repeatedly abroad in the service of the Crown. On one of his journeys in the last-named year he was attached in a subordinate capacity to the emba.s.sy sent to negotiate for the marriage with the French King Charles V"s daughter Mary to the young King Richard II, who had succeeded to his grandfather in 1377,--one of those matrimonial missions which, in the days of both Plantagenets and Tudors, formed so large a part of the functions of European diplomacy, and which not unfrequently, as in this case at least ultimately, came to nothing. A later journey in May of the same year took Chaucer once more to Italy, whither he had been sent with Sir Edward Berkeley to treat with Bernardo Visconti, joint lord of Milan, and "scourge of Lombardy," and Sir John Hawkwood--the former of whom finds a place in that brief mirror of magistrates, the "Monk"s Tale." It was on this occasion that of the two persons whom, according to custom, Chaucer appointed to appear for him in the Courts during his absence, one was John Gower, whose name as that of the second poet of his age is indissolubly linked with Chaucer"s own.

So far, the new reign, which had opened amidst doubts and difficulties for the country, had to the faithful servant of the dynasty brought an increase of royal goodwill. In 1381--after the suppression of the great rebellion of the villeins--King Richard II had married the princess whose name for a season linked together the history of two countries the destinies of which had before that age, as they have since, lain far asunder. Yet both Bohemia and England, besides the nations which received from the former the impulses communicated to it by the latter, have reason to remember Queen Anne the learned and the good; since to her was probably due in the first instance the intellectual intercourse between her native and her adopted country.

There seems every reason to believe that it was the approach of this marriage which Chaucer celebrated in one of the brightest and most jocund marriage-poems ever composed by a laureate"s hand; and if this was so, he cannot but have augmented the favour with which he was regarded at Court. When, therefore, by May, 1382, his foreign journeys had come to an end, we do not wonder to find that, without being called upon to relinquish his former office, he was appointed in addition to the Comptrollership of the Petty Customs in the Port of London, of which post he was allowed to execute the duties by deputy. In November, 1384, he received permission to absent himself from his old comptrollership for a month, and in February, 1385, was allowed to appoint a (permanent) deputy for this office also. During the month of October, 1386, he sat in Parliament at Westminster as one of the Knights of the Shire for Kent, where we may consequently a.s.sume him to have possessed landed property. His fortunes, therefore, at this period had clearly risen to their height; and naturally enough his commentators are anxious to a.s.sign to these years the sunniest, as well as some of the most elaborate, of his literary productions. It is altogether probable that the amount of leisure now at Chaucer"s command enabled him to carry into execution some of the works for which he had gathered materials abroad and at home, and to prepare others. Inasmuch as it contains the pa.s.sage cited above, referring to Chaucer"s official employment, his poem called the "House of Fame" must have been written between 1374 and 1386 (when Chaucer quitted office), and probably is to be dated near the latter year. Inasmuch as both this poem and "Troilus and Cressid" are mentioned in the Prologue to the "Legend of Good Women," they must have been written earlier than it; and the dedication of "Troilus" to Gower and Strode very well agrees with the relations known to have existed about this time between Chaucer and his brother-poet. Very probably all these three works may have been put forth, in more or less rapid succession, during this fortunate season of Chaucer"s life.

A fortunate season--for in it the prince who, from whatever cause, was indisputably the patron of Chaucer and his wife, had, notwithstanding his unpopularity among the lower orders, and the deep suspicion fostered by hostile whisperings against him in his royal nephew"s breast, still contrived to hold the first place by the throne. Though serious danger had already existed of a conflict between the King and his uncle, yet John of Gaunt and his d.u.c.h.ess Constance had been graciously dismissed with a royal gift of golden crowns, when in July, 1386, he took his departure for the continent, to busy himself till his return home in November, 1389, with the affairs of Castile, and with claims arising out of his disburs.e.m.e.nts there. The reasons for Chaucer"s attachment to this particular patron are probably not far to seek; on the precise nature of the relation between them it is useless to speculate. Before Wyclif"s death in 1384, John of Gaunt had openly dissociated himself from the reformer; and whatever may have been the case in his later years, it was certainly not as a follower of his old patron that at this date Chaucer could have been considered a Wycliffite.

Again, this period of Chaucer"s life may be called fortunate, because during it he seems to have enjoyed the only congenial friendships of which any notice remains to us, The poem of "Troilus and Cressid" is, as was just noted, dedicated to "the moral Gower and the philosophical Strode." Ralph Strode was a Dominican of Jedburgh Abbey, a travelled scholar, whose journeys had carried him as far as the Holy Land, and who was celebrated as a poet in both the Latin and the English tongue, and as a theologian and philosopher. In connexion with speculations concerning Chaucer"s relations to Wycliffism it is worth noting that Strode, who after his return to England was appointed to superintend several new monasteries, was the author of a series of controversial arguments against Wyclif. The tradition, according to which he taught one of Chaucer"s sons, is untrustworthy. Of John Gower"s life little more is known than of Chaucer"s; he appears to have been a Suffolk man, holding manors in that county as well as in Ess.e.x, but occasionally to have resided in Kent. At the period of which we are speaking, he may be supposed, besides his French productions, to have already published his Latin "Vox Clamantis"--a poem which, beginning with an allegorical narrative of Wat Tyler"s rebellion, pa.s.ses on to a series of reflexions on the causes of the movement, conceived in a spirit of indignation against the corruptions of the Church, but not of sympathy with Wycliffism. This is no doubt the poem which obtained for Gower the epithet "moral" (i.e. sententious) applied to him by Chaucer, and afterwards by Dunbar, Hawes, and Shakspere. Gower"s "Vox Clamantis" and other Latin poems (including one "against the astuteness of the Evil One in the matter of Lollardry") are forgotten; but his English "Confessio Amantis" has retained its right to a place of honour in the history of our literature. The most interesting part of this poem, its "Prologue," has already been cited as of value for our knowledge of the political and social condition of its times. It gives expression to a conservative tone and temper of mind; and like many conservative minds, Gower"s had adopted, or affected to adopt, the conviction that the world was coming to an end. The cause of the antic.i.p.ated catastrophe he found in the division, or absence of concord and love, manifest in the condition of things around. The intensity of strife visible among the conflicting elements of which the world, like the individual human being, is composed, too clearly announced the imminent end of all things. Would that a new Arion might arise to make peace where now is hate; but, alas! the prevailing confusion is such that G.o.d alone may set it right. But the poem which follows cannot be said to sustain the interest excited by this introduction. Its machinery was obviously suggested by that of the "Roman de la Rose," though, as Warton has happily phrased it, Gower, after a fashion of his own, blends Ovid"s "Art of Love" with the Breviary. The poet, wandering about in a forest, while suffering under the smart of Cupid"s dart, meets Venus, the G.o.ddess of Love, who urges him, as one upon the point of death, to make his full confession to her clerk or priest, the holy father Genius. This confession hereupon takes place by means of question and answer; both penitent and confessor entering at great length into an examination of the various sins and weaknesses of human nature, and of their remedies, and ill.u.s.trating their observations by narratives, brief or elaborate, from Holy Writ, sacred legend, ancient history, and romantic story. Thus Gower"s book, as he says at its close, stands "between earnest and game," and might be fairly described as a "Romaunt of the Rose," without either the descriptive grace of Guillaume de Lorris, or the wicked wit of Jean de Meung, but full of learning and matter, and written by an author certainly not devoid of the art of telling stories. The mind of this author was thoroughly didactic in its bent; for the beauty of nature he has no real feeling, and though his poem, like so many of Chaucer"s, begins in the month of May, he is (unnecessarily) careful to tell us that his object in going forth was not to "sing with the birds." He could not, like Chaucer, transfuse old things into new, but there is enough in his character as a poet to explain the friendship between the pair, of which we hear at the very time when Gower was probably preparing his "Confessio Amantis" for publication.

They are said afterwards to have become enemies; but in the absence of any real evidence to that effect we cannot believe Chaucer to have been likely to quarrel with one whom he had certainly both trusted and admired. Nor had literary life in England already advanced to a stage of development of which, as in the Elizabethan and Augustan ages, literary jealousy was an indispensable accompaniment. Chaucer is supposed to have attacked Gower in a pa.s.sage of the "Canterbury Tales,"

where he incidentally declares his dislike (in itself extremely commendable) of a particular kind of sensational stories, instancing the subject of one of the numerous tales in the "Confessio Amantis."

There is, however, no reason whatever for supposing Chaucer to have here intended a reflection on his brother poet, more especially as the "Man of Law," after uttering the censure, relates, though probably not from Gower, a story on a subject of a different kind likewise treated by him. It is scarcely more suspicious that when Gower, in a second edition of his chief work, dedicated in 1393 to Henry, Earl of Derby (afterwards Henry IV), judiciously omitted the exordium and altered the close of the first edition, both of which were complimentary to Richard II, he left out, together with its surrounding context, a pa.s.sage conveying a friendly challenge to Chaucer as a "disciple and poet of the G.o.d of Love."

In any case there could have been no political difference between them, for Chaucer was at all times in favour with the House of Lancaster, towards whose future head Gower so early contrived to a.s.sume a correct att.i.tude. To him--a man of substance, with landed property in three counties--the rays of immediate court-favour were probably of less importance than to Chaucer; but it is not necessity only which makes courtiers of so many of us: some are born to the vocation, and Gower strikes one as naturally more prudent and cautious--in short, more of a politic personage--than Chaucer. He survived him eight years--a blind invalid, in whose mind at least we may hope nothing dimmed or blurred the recollection of a friend to whom he owes much of his fame.

In a still nearer relationship,--on which the works of Chaucer that may certainly or probably be a.s.signed to this period throw some light,--it seems impossible to describe him as having been fortunate. Whatever may have been the date and circ.u.mstances of his marriage, it seems, at all events in its later years, not to have been a happy one. The allusions to Chaucer"s personal experience of married life in both "Troilus And Cressid" and the "House of Fame" are not of a kind to be entirely explicable by that tendency to make a mock of women and of marriage, which has frequently been characteristic of satirists, and which was specially popular in an age cherishing the wit of Jean de Meung, and complacently corroborating its theories from naughty Latin fables, French fabliaux, and Italian novelle. Both in "Troilus And Cressid" and in the "House of Fame" the poet"s tone, when he refers to himself, is generally dolorous; but while both poems contain unmistakeable references to the joylessness of his own married life, in the latter he speaks of himself as "suffering debonairly,"--or, as we should say, putting a good face upon--a state "desperate of all bliss."

And it is a melancholy though half sarcastic glimpse into his domestic privacy which he incidentally, and it must be allowed rather unnecessarily, gives in the following pa.s.sage of the same poem:--

"Awake!" to me he said, In voice and tone the very same THAT USETH ONE WHO I COULD NAME; And with that voice, sooth to say(n) My mind returned to me again; For it was goodly said to me; So was it never wont to be.

In other words, the kindness of the voice rea.s.sured him that it was NOT the same as that which he was wont to hear close to his pillow! Again, the entire tone of the Prologue to the "Legend of Good Women" is not that of a happy lover; although it would be pleasant enough, considering that the lady who imposes on the poet the penalty of celebrating GOOD women is Alcestis, the type of faithful wifehood, to interpret the poem as not only an amende honorable to the female s.e.x in general, but a token of reconciliation to the poet"s wife in particular. Even in the joyous "a.s.sembly of Fowls," a marriage-poem, the same discord already makes itself heard; for it cannot be without meaning that in his dream the poet is told by "African,"--

--thou of love hast lost thy taste, I guess, As sick men have of sweet and bitterness;

and that he confesses for himself that, though he has read much of love, he knows not of it by experience. While, however, we reluctantly accept the conclusion that Chaucer was unhappy as a husband, we must at the same time decline, because the husband was a poet, and one of the most genial of poets, to cast all the blame upon the wife, and to write her down a shrew. It is unfortunate, no doubt, but it is likewise inevitable, that at so great a distance of time the rights and wrongs of a conjugal disagreement or estrangement cannot with safety be adjusted. Yet again, because we refuse to blame Philippa, we are not obliged to blame Chaucer. At the same time it must not be concealed, that his name occurs in the year 1380 in connexion with a legal process of which the most obvious, though not the only possible, explanation is that he had been guilty of a grave infidelity towards his wife. Such discoveries as this last we might be excused for wishing unmade.

Considerable uncertainty remains with regard to the dates of the poems belonging to this seemingly, in all respects but one, fortunate period of Chaucer"s life. Of one of these works, however, which has had the curious fate to be dated and re-dated by a succession of happy conjectures, the last and happiest of all may be held to have definitively fixed the occasion. This is the charming poem called the "a.s.sembly of Fowls," or "Parliament of Birds"--a production which seems so English, so fresh from nature"s own inspiration, so instinct with the gaiety of Chaucer"s own heart, that one is apt to overlook in it the undeniable vestiges of foreign influences, both French and Italian.

At its close the poet confesses that he is always reading, and therefore hopes that he may at last read something "so to fare the better." But with all this evidence of study the "a.s.sembly of Fowls"

is chiefly interesting as showing how Chaucer had now begun to select as well as to a.s.similate his loans; how, while he was still moving along well-known tracks, his eyes were joyously glancing to the right and the left; and how the source of most of his imagery at all events he already found in the merry England around him, even as he had chosen for his subject one of real national interest.