and the "Legend of Good Women" seems, in point of fact, to have been intended to offer some such kind of amends as is here declared to be called for. But the balance still remains heavy against the poet"s sentiments of gallantry and respect for women. It should at the same time be remembered that among the "Canterbury Tales" the two which are of their kind the most effective, const.i.tute tributes to the most distinctively feminine and wifely virtue of fidelity. Moreover, when coming from such personages as the pilgrims who narrate the "Tales" in question, the praise of women has special significance and value. The "Merchant" and the "Shipman" may indulge in facetious or coa.r.s.e jibes against wives and their behaviour, but the "Man of Law," full of grave experience of the world, is a witness above suspicion to the womanly virtue of which his narrative celebrates so ill.u.s.trious an example, while the "Clerk of Oxford" has in his cloistered solitude, where all womanly blandishments are unknown, come to the conclusion that:
Men speak of Job, most for his humbleness, As clerkes, when they list, can well indite, Of men in special; but, in truthfulness, Though praise by clerks of women be but slight, No man in humbleness can him acquit As women can, nor can be half so true As women are, unless all things be new.
As to marriage, Chaucer may be said generally to treat it in that style of laughing with a wry mouth, which has from time immemorial been affected both in comic writing and on the comic stage, but which, in the end, even the most determined old bachelor feels an occasional inclination to consider monotonous.
In all this, however, it is obvious that something at least must be set down to conventionality. Yet the best part of Chaucer"s nature, it is hardly necessary to say, was neither conventional nor commonplace. He was not, we may rest a.s.sured, one of that numerous cla.s.s which in his days, as it does in ours, composed the population of the land of Philistia--the persons so well defined by the Scottish poet, Sir David Lyndsay (himself a courtier of the n.o.blest type):--
Who fixed have their hearts and whole intents On sensual l.u.s.t, on dignity, and rents.
Doubtless Chaucer was a man of practical good sense, desirous of suitable employment and of a sufficient income; nor can we suppose him to have been one of those who look upon social life and its enjoyments with a jaundiced eye, or who, absorbed in things which are not of this world, avert their gaze from it altogether. But it is hardly possible that rank and position should have been valued on their own account by one who so repeatedly recurs to his ideal of the true gentleman, as to a conception dissociated from mere outward circ.u.mstances, and more particularly independent of birth or inherited wealth. At times, we know, men find what they seek; and so Chaucer found in Boethius and in Guillaume de Lorris that conception which he both translates and reproduces, besides repeating it in a little "Ballade," probably written by him in the last decennium of his life. By far the best-known and the finest of these pa.s.sages is that in the "Wife of Bath"s Tale," which follows the round a.s.sertion that the "arrogance"
against which it protests is not worth a hen; and which is followed by an appeal to a parallel pa.s.sage in Dante:--
Look, who that is most virtuous alway Privy and open, and most intendeth aye To do the gentle deedes that he can, Take him for the greatest gentleman.
Christ wills we claim of Him our gentleness, Not of our elders for their old riches.
For though they give us all their heritage Through which we claim to be of high parage, Yet may they not bequeathe for no thing-- To none of us--their virtuous living, That made them gentlemen y-called be, And bade us follow them in such degree.
Well can the wise poet of Florence, That Dante highte, speak of this sentence; Lo, in such manner of rhyme is Dante"s tale: "Seldom upriseth by its branches small Prowess of man; for G.o.d of His prowess Wills that we claim of Him our gentleness; For of our ancestors we no thing claim But temporal thing, that men may hurt and maim."
(The pa.s.sage in Canto 8 of the "Purgatorio" is thus translated by Longfellow:
"Not oftentimes upriseth through the branches The probity of man; and this He wills Who gives it, so that we may ask of Him."
Its intention is only to show that the son is not necessarily what the father is before him; thus, Edward I of England is a mightier man than was his father Henry III. Chaucer has ingeniously, though not altogether legitimately, pressed the pa.s.sage into his service.)
By the still ign.o.bler greed of money for its own sake there is no reason whatever to suppose Chaucer to have been at any time actuated; although, under the pressure of immediate want, he devoted a "Complaint" to his empty purse, and made known, in the proper quarters, his desire to see it refilled. Finally, as to what is commonly called pleasure, he may have shared the fashions and even the vices of his age; but we know hardly anything on the subject, except that excess in wine, which is often held a pardonable peccadillo in a poet, receives his emphatic condemnation. It would be hazardous to a.s.sert of him, as Herrick a.s.serted of himself that though his "Muse was jocund, life was chaste;" inasmuch as his name occurs in one unfortunate connexion full of suspiciousness. But we may at least believe him to have spoken his own sentiments in the Doctor of Physic"s manly declaration that
--of all treason sovereign pestilence Is when a man betrayeth innocence.
His true pleasures lay far away from those of vanity and dissipation.
In the first place, he seems to have been a pa.s.sionate reader. To his love of books he is constantly referring; indeed, this may be said to be the only kind of egotism which he seems to take a pleasure in indulging. At the opening of his earliest extant poem of consequence, the "Book of the d.u.c.h.ess," he tells us how he preferred to drive away a night rendered sleepless through melancholy thoughts, by means of a book, which he thought better entertainment than a game either at chess or at "tables." This pa.s.sion lasted longer with him than the other pa.s.sion which it had helped to allay; for in the sequel to the well-known pa.s.sage in the "House of Fame," already cited, he gives us a glimpse of himself at home, absorbed in his favourite pursuit:--
Thou go"st home to thy house anon, And there, as dumb as any stone, Thou sittest at another book, Till fully dazed is thy look; And liv"st thus as a hermit quite, Although thy abstinence is slight.
And doubtless he counted the days lost in which he was prevented from following the rule of life which elsewhere be sets himself, to study and to read alway, day by day," and pressed even the nights into his service when he was not making his head ache with writing. How eager and, considering the times in which he lived, how diverse a reader he was, has already been abundantly ill.u.s.trated in the course of this volume. His knowledge of Holy Writ was considerable, though it probably for the most part came to him at second-hand. He seems to have had some acquaintance with patristic and homiletic literature; he produced a version of the homily on Mary Magdalene, improperly attributed to Origen; and, as we have seen, emulated King Alfred in translating Boethius"s famous manual of moral philosophy. His Latin learning extended over a wide range of literature, from Virgil and Ovid down to some of the favourite Latin poets of the Middle Ages. It is to be feared that he occasionally read Latin authors with so eager a desire to arrive at the contents of their books that he at times mistook their meaning--not far otherwise, slightly to vary a happy comparison made by one of his most eminent commentators, than many people read Chaucer"s own writings now-a-days. That he possessed any knowledge at all of Greek may be doubted, both on general grounds and on account of a little slip or two in quotation of a kind not unusual with those who quote what they have not previously read. His "Troilus and Cressid" has only a very distant connexion indeed with Homer, whose "Iliad," before it furnished materials for the mediaeval Troilus-legend, had been filtered through a brief Latin epitome, and diluted into a Latin novel, and a journal kept at the seat of war, of altogether apocryphal value. And, indeed, it must in general be conceded that, if Chaucer had read much, he lays claim to having read more; for he not only occasionally ascribes to known authors works which we can by no means feel certain as to their having written, but at times he even cites (or is made to cite in all the editions of his works), authors who are altogether unknown to fame by the names which he gives to them. But then it must be remembered that other mediaeval writers have rendered themselves liable to the same kind of charge.
Quoting was one of the dominant literary fashions of the age; and just as a word without an oath went for but little in conversation, so a statement or sentiment in writing aquired greatly enhanced value when suggested by authority, even after no more precise a fashion than the use of the phrase "as old books say." In Chaucer"s days the equivalent of the modern "I have seen it said SOMEWHERE"--with perhaps the venturesome addition: "I THINK, in Horace" had clearly not become an objectionable expletive.
Of modern literatures there can be no doubt that Chaucer had made substantially his own, the two which could be of importance to him as a poet. His obligations to the French singers have probably been over-estimated--at all events if the view adopted in this essay be the correct one, and if the charming poem of the "Flower and the Leaf,"
together with the lively, but as to its meaning not very transparent, so-called "Chaucer"s Dream," be denied admission among his genuine works. At the same time, the influence of the "Roman de la Rose" and that of the courtly poets, of whom Machault was the chief in France and Froissart the representative in England, are perceptible in Chaucer almost to the last, nor is it likely that he should ever have ceased to study and a.s.similate them. On the other hand, the extent of his knowledge of Italian literature has probably till of late been underrated in an almost equal degree. This knowledge displays itself not only in the imitation or adaptation of particular poems, but more especially in the use made of incidental pa.s.sages and details. In this way his debts to Dante were especially numerous; and it is curious to find proofs so abundant of Chaucer"s relatively close study of a poet with whose genius his own had so few points in common. Notwithstanding first appearances, it is an open question whether Chaucer had ever read Boccaccio"s "Decamerone," with which he may merely have had in common the sources of several of his "Canterbury Tales." But as he certainly took one of them from the "Teseide" (without improving it in the process), and not less certainly, and adapted the "Filostrato" in his "Troilus and Cressid," it is strange that he should refrain from naming the author to whom he was more indebted than to any one other for poetic materials.
But wide and diverse as Chaucer"s reading fairly deserves to be called, the love of nature was even stronger and more absorbing in him than the love of books. He has himself, in a very charming pa.s.sage, compared the strength of the one and of the other of his predilections:--
And as for me, though I have knowledge slight, In bookes for to read I me delight, And to them give I faith and full credence, And in my heart have them in reverence So heartily, that there is game none That from my bookes maketh me be gone, But it be seldom on the holiday,-- Save, certainly, when that the month of May Is come, and that I hear the fowles sing, And see the flowers as they begin to spring, Farewell my book, and my devotion.
Undoubtedly the literary fashion of Chaucer"s times is responsible for part of this May-morning sentiment, with which he is fond of beginning his poems (the Canterbury pilgrimage is dated towards the end of April--but is not April "messenger to May"?). It had been decreed that flowers should be the badges of nations and dynasties, and the tokens of amorous sentiment; the rose had its votaries, and the lily, lauded by Chaucer"s "Prioress" as the symbol of the Blessed Virgin; while the daisy, which first sprang from the tears of a forlorn damsel, in France gave its name (marguerite) to an entire species of courtly verse. The enthusiastic adoration professed by Chaucer, in the "Prologue" to the "Legend of Good Women," for the daisy, which he afterwards identifies with the good Alceste, the type of faithful wifehood, is of course a mere poetical figure. But there is in his use of these favourite literary devices, so to speak, a variety in sameness significant of their accordance with his own taste, and of the frank and fresh love of nature which animated him, and which seems to us as much a part of him as his love of books. It is unlikely that his personality will over become more fully known than it is at present; nor is there anything in respect of which we seem to see so clearly into his inner nature, as with regard to these twin predilections, to which he remains true in all his works, and in all his moods. While the study of books was his chief pa.s.sion, nature was his chief joy and solace; while his genius enabled him to transfuse what he read in the former, what came home to him in the latter was akin to that genius itself; for he at times reminds us of his own fresh Canace, whom he describes as looking so full of happiness during her walk through the wood at sunrise:--
What for the season, what for the morning And for the fowles that she hearde sing, For right anon she wiste what they meant Right by their song, and knew all their intent.
If the above view of Chaucer"s character and intellectual tastes and tendencies be in the main correct, there will seem to be nothing paradoxical in describing his literary progress, so far as its data are ascertainable, as a most steady and regular one. Very few men awake to find themselves either famous or great of a sudden, and perhaps as few poets as other men, though it may be heresy against a venerable maxim to say so. Chaucer"s works form a clearly recognisable series of steps towards the highest achievement of which, under the circ.u.mstances in which he lived and wrote, he can be held to have been capable; and his long and arduous self-training, whether consciously or not directed to a particular end, was of that sure kind from which genius itself derives strength. His beginnings as a writer were dictated, partly by the impulse of that imitative faculty which, in poetic natures, is the usual precursor of the creative, partly by the influence of prevailing tastes and the absence of native English literary predecessors whom, considering the circ.u.mstances of his life and the nature of his temperament, he could have found it a congenial task to follow. French poems were, accordingly, his earliest models; but fortunately (unlike Gower, whom it is so instructive to compare with Chaucer, precisely because the one lacked that gift of genius which the other possessed) he seems at once to have resolved to make use for his poetical writings of his native speech. In no way, therefore, could he have begun his career with so happy a promise of its future, as in that which he actually chose. Nor could any course so naturally have led him to introduce into his poetic diction the French idioms and words already used in the spoken language of Englishmen, more especially in those cla.s.ses for which he in the first instance wrote, and thus to confer upon our tongue the great benefit which it owes to him. Again most fortunately, others had already pointed the way to the selection for literary use of that English dialect which was probably the most suitable for the purpose; and Chaucer as a Southern man (like his "Parson of a Town") belonged to a part of the country where the old alliterative verse had long since been discarded for cla.s.sical and romance forms of versification. Thus the "Romaunt of the Rose" most suitably opens his literary life--a translation in which there is nothing original except an occasional turn of phrase, but in which the translator finds opportunity for exercising his powers of judgment by virtually re-editing the work before him. And already in the "Book of the d.u.c.h.ess," though most unmistakeably a follower of Machault, he is also the rival of the great French trouvere, and has advanced in freedom of movement not less than in agreeableness of form. Then, as his travels extended his acquaintance with foreign literatures to that of Italy, he here found abundant fresh materials from which to feed his productive powers, and more elaborate forms in which to clothe their results; while at the same time comparison, the kindly nurse of originality, more and more enabled him to recast instead of imitating, or encouraged him freely to invent. In "Troilus and Cressid" he produced something very different from a mere condensed translation, and achieved a work in which he showed himself a master of poetic expression and sustained narrative; in the "House of Fame" and the "a.s.sembly of Fowls" he moved with freedom in happily contrived allegories of his own invention; and with the "Legend of Good Women" he had already arrived at a stage when he could undertake to review, under a pleasant pretext, but with evident consciousness of work done, the list of his previous works. "He hath," he said of himself, "made many a lay and many a thing." Meanwhile the labour incidentally devoted by him to translation from the Latin, or to the composition of prose treatises in the scholastic manner of academical exercises, could but little affect his general literary progress. The mere scholarship of youth, even if it be the reverse of close and profound, is wont to cling to a man through life and to a.s.sert its modest claims at any season; and thus, Chaucer"s school-learning exercised little influence either of an advancing or of a r.e.t.a.r.ding kind upon the full development of his genius. Nowhere is he so truly himself as in the masterpiece of his last years. For the "Canterbury Tales," in which he is at once greatest, most original, and most catholic in the choice of materials as well as in moral sympathies, bears the unmistakeable stamp of having formed the crowning labour of his life--a work which death alone prevented him from completing.
It may be said, without presumption, that such a general view as this leaves ample room for all reasonable theories as to the chronology and sequence, where these remain more or less unsettled, of Chaucer"s indisputably genuine works. In any case, there is no poet whom, if only as an exercise in critical a.n.a.lysis, it is more interesting to study and re-study in connexion with the circ.u.mstances of his literary progress. He still, as has been seen, belongs to the Middle Ages, but to a period in which the n.o.blest ideals of these Middle Ages are already beginning to pale and their mightiest inst.i.tutions to quake around him; in which learning continues to be in the main scholasticism, the linking of argument with argument, and the acc.u.mulation of authority upon authority, and poetry remains to a great extent the crabbedness of clerks or the formality of courts. Again, Chaucer is mediaeval in tricks of style and turns of phrase; he often contents himself with the tritest of figures and the most unrefreshing of ancient devices, and freely resorts to a mixture of names and a.s.sociations belonging to his own times with others derived from other ages. This want of literary perspective is a sure sign of mediaevalism, and one which has amused the world, or has jarred upon it, since the Renascence taught men to study both cla.s.sical and biblical antiquity as realities, and not merely as a succession of pictures or of tapestries on a wall. Chaucer mingles things mediaeval and things cla.s.sical as freely as he brackets King David with the philosopher Seneca, or Judas Iscariot with the Greek "dissimulator"
Sinon. His Dido, mounted on a stout palfrey paper white of hue, with a red-and-gold saddle embroidered and embossed, resembles Alice Perrers in all her pomp rather than the Virgilian queen. Jupiter"s eagle, the poet"s guide and instructor in the allegory of the "House of Fame,"
invokes "Saint Mary, Saint James," and "Saint Clare" all at once; and the pair of lovers at Troy sign their letters "la vostre T." and la vostre C." Anachronisms of this kind (of the danger of which, by the way, to judge from a pa.s.sage in the "Prologue" to the "Legend of Good Women," Chaucer would not appear to have been wholly unconscious) are intrinsically of very slight importance. But the morality of Chaucer"s narratives is at times the artificial and overstrained morality of the Middle Ages, which, as it were, clutches hold of a single idea to the exclusion of all others--a morality which, when carried to its extreme consequences, makes monomaniacs as well as martyrs, in both of which species, occasionally perhaps combined in the same persons, the Middle Ages abound. The fidelity of Griseldis under the trials imposed upon her by her, in point of fact, brutal husband is the fidelity of a martyr to unreason. The story was afterwards put on the stage in the Elizabethan age; and though even in the play of "Patient Grissil" (by Chettle and others), it is not easy to reconcile the husband"s proceedings with the promptings of common sense, yet the playwrights, with the instinct of their craft, contrived to introduce some element of humanity into his character and of probability into his conduct.
Again the supra-chivalrous respect paid by Arviragus, the Breton knight of the "Franklin"s Tale," to the sanct.i.ty of his wife"s word, seriously to the peril of his own and his wife"s honour, is an effort to which probably even the Knight of La Mancha himself would have proved unequal. It is not to be expected that Chaucer should have failed to share some of the prejudices of his times as well as to fall in with their ways of thought and sentiment; and though it is the "Prioress"
who tells a story against the Jews which pa.s.ses the legend of Hugh of Lincoln, yet it would be very hazardous to seek any irony in this legend of bigotry. In general, much of that naivete which to modern readers seems Chaucer"s most obvious literary quality must be ascribed to the times in which he lived and wrote. This quality is in truth by no means that which most deeply impresses itself upon the observation of any one able to compare Chaucer"s writings with those of his more immediate predecessors and successors. But the sense in which the term naif should be understood in literary criticism is so imperfectly agreed upon among us, that we have not yet even found an English equivalent for the word.
To Chaucer"s times, then, belongs much of what may at first sight seem to include itself among the characteristics of his genius; while, on the other hand, there are to be distinguished from these the influences due to his training and studies in two literatures--the French and the Italian. In the former of these he must have felt at home, if not by birth and descent, at all events by social connexion, habits of life, and ways of thought, while in the latter he, whose own country"s was still a half-fledged literary life, found ready to his hand masterpieces of artistic maturity, lofty in conception, broad in bearing, finished in form. There still remain, for summary review, the elements proper to his own poetic individuality--those which mark him out not only as the first great poet of his own nation, but as a great poet for all times.
The poet must please; if he wishes to be successful and popular, he must suit himself to the tastes of his public; and even if he be indifferent to immediate fame, he must, as belonging to one of the most impressionable, the most receptive species of humankind, live in a sense WITH and FOR his generation. To meet this demand upon his genius, Chaucer was born with many gifts which he carefully and a.s.siduously exercised in a long series of poetical experiments, and which he was able felicitously to combine for the achievement of results unprecedented in our literature. In readiness of descriptive power, in brightness and variety of imagery, and in flow of diction, Chaucer remained unequalled by any English poet, till he was surpa.s.sed--it seems not too much to say, in all three respects--by Spenser. His verse, where it suits his purpose, glitters, to use Dunbar"s expression, as with fresh enamel, and its hues are variegated like those of a Flemish tapestry. Even where his descriptive enumerations seem at first sight monotonous or perfunctory, they are in truth graphic and true in their details, as in the list of birds in the "a.s.sembly of Fowls," quoted in part on an earlier page of this essay, and in the shorter list of trees in the same poem, which is, however, in its general features imitated from Boccaccio. Neither King James I of Scotland, nor Spenser, who after Chaucer essayed similar tours de force, were happier than he had been before them. Or we may refer to the description of the preparations for the tournament and of the tournament itself in the "Knight"s Tale," or to the thoroughly Dutch picture of a disturbance in a farm-yard in the "Nun"s Priest"s." The vividness with which Chaucer describes scenes and events as if he had them before his own eyes, was no doubt, in the first instance, a result of his own imaginative temperament; but one would probably not go wrong in attributing the fulness of the use which he made of this gift to the influence of his Italian studies--more especially to those which led him to Dante, whose mult.i.tudinous characters and scenes impress themselves with so singular and immediate a definiteness upon the imagination. At the same time, Chaucer"s resources seem inexhaustible for filling up or rounding off his narratives with the aid of chivalrous love or religious legend, by the introduction of samples of scholastic discourse or devices of personal or general allegory. He commands, where necessary, a rhetorician"s readiness of ill.u.s.tration, and a masque-writer"s inventiveness, as to machinery; he can even (in the "House of Fame") conjure up an elaborate but self-consistent phantasmagory of his own, and continue it with a fulness proving that his fancy would not be at a loss for supplying even more materials than he cares to employ.
But Chaucer"s poetry derived its power to please from yet another quality; and in this he was the first of our English poets to emulate the poets of the two literatures to which in the matter of his productions, and in the ornaments of his diction, he owed so much.
There is in his verse a music which hardly ever wholly loses itself, and which at times is as sweet as that in any English poet after him.
This a.s.sertion is not one which is likely to be gainsaid at the present day, when there is not a single lover of Chaucer who would sit down contented with Dryden"s condescending mixture of censure and praise.
"The verse of Chaucer," he wrote, "I confess, is not harmonious to us.
They who lived with him, and some time after him, thought it musical; and it continues so, even in our judgment, if compared with the numbers of Lydgate and Gower, his contemporaries: there is a rude sweetness of a Scotch tune in it, which is natural and pleasing, though not perfect." At the same time, it is no doubt necessary, in order to verify the correctness of a less balanced judgment, to take the trouble, which, if it could but be believed, is by no means great, to master the rules and usages of Chaucerian versification. These rules and usages the present is not a fit occasion for seeking to explain.
(It may, however, be stated that they only partially connect themselves with Chaucer"s use of forms which are now obsolete--more especially of inflexions of verbs and substantives (including several instances of the famous final e), and contractions with the negative ne and other monosyllabic words ending in a vowel, of the initial syllables of words beginning with vowels or with the letter h. These and other variations from later usage in spelling and p.r.o.nunciation--such as the occurrence of an e (sometimes sounded and sometimes not) at the end of words in which it is now no longer retained, and again the frequent accentuation of many words of French origin in their last syllable, as in French, and of certain words of English origin a.n.a.logously--are to be looked for as a matter of course in a last writing in the period of our language in which Chaucer lived. He clearly foresaw the difficulties which would be caused to his readers by the variations of usage in spelling and p.r.o.nunciation--variations to some extent rendered inevitable by the fact that he wrote in an English dialect which was only gradually coming to be accepted as the uniform language of English writers. Towards the close of his "Troilus and Cressid," he thus addresses his "little book," in fear of the mangling it might undergo from scriveners who might blunder in the copying of its words, or from reciters who might maltreat its verse in the distribution of the accents:--
And, since there is so great diversity In English, and in writing of our tongue, I pray to G.o.d that none may miswrite thee Nor thee mismetre, for default of tongue, And wheresoe"er thou mayst be read or sung, That thou be understood, G.o.d I beseech.
But in his versification he likewise adopted certain other practices which had no such origin or reason as those already referred to. Among them were the addition, at the end of a line of five accents, of an unaccented syllable; and the subst.i.tution, for the first foot of a line either of four or of five accents, of a single syllable. These deviations from a stricter system of versification he doubtless permitted to himself, partly for the sake of variety, and partly for that of convenience; but neither of them is peculiar to himself, or of supreme importance for the effect of his verse. In fact, he seems to allow as much in a pa.s.sage of his "House of Fame," a poem written, it should, however, be observed, in an easy-going form of verse (the line of four accents) which in his later period Chaucer seems with this exception to have invariably discarded. He here beseeches Apollo to make his rhyme
somewhat agreeable, Though some verse fail in a syllable.
But another of his usages--the misunderstanding of which has more than anything else caused his art as a writer of verse to be misjudged--seems to have been due to a very different cause. To understand the real nature of the usage in question it is only necessary to seize the principle of Chaucer"s rhythm. Of this principle it was well said many years ago by a most competent authority--Mr. R. Horne--that, it is "inseparable from a full or fair exercise of the genius of our language in versification." For though this usage in its full freedom was gradually again lost to our poetry for a time, yet it was in a large measure recovered by Shakspere and the later dramatists of our great age, and has since been never altogether abandoned again--not even by the correct writers of the Augustan period--till by the favourites of our own times it is resorted to with a perhaps excessive liberality. It consists simply in SLURRING over certain final syllables--not eliding them or contracting them with the syllables following upon them, but pa.s.sing over them lightly, so that, without being inaudible, they may at the same time not interfere with the rhythm or beat of the verse. This usage, by adding to the variety, incontestably adds to the flexibility and beauty of Chaucer"s versification.)
With regard to the most important of them is it not too much to say that instinct and experience will very speedily combine to indicate to an intelligent reader where the poet has resorted to it. WITHOUT intelligence on the part of the reader, the beautiful harmonies of Mr.
Tennyson"s later verse remain obscure; so that, taken in this way the most musical of English verse may seem as difficult to read as the most rugged; but in the former case the lesson is learnt not to be lost again, in the latter the tumbling is ever beginning anew, as with the rock of Sisyphus. There is nothing that can fairly be called rugged in the verse of Chaucer.
And fortunately there are not many pages in this poet"s works devoid of lines or pa.s.sages the music of which cannot escape any ear, however unaccustomed it may be to his diction and versification. What is the nature of the art at whose bidding ten monosyllables arrange themselves into a line of the exquisite cadence of the following:--
And she was fair, as is the rose in May?
Nor would it be easy to find lines surpa.s.sing in their melancholy charm Chaucer"s version of the lament of Medea, when deserted by Jason,--a pa.s.sage which makes the reader neglectful of the English poet"s modest hint that the letter of the Colchian princess may be found at full length in Ovid. The lines shall be quoted verbatim, though not literatim; and perhaps no better example, and none more readily appreciable by a modern ear, could be given than the fourth of them of the harmonious effect of Chaucer"s usage of SLURRING, referred to above:--
Why liked thee my yellow hair to see More than the boundes of mine honesty?
Why liked me thy youth and thy fairness And of thy tongue the infinite graciousness?
O, had"st thou in thy conquest dead y-bee(n), Full myckle untruth had there died with thee.
Qualities and powers such as the above, have belonged to poets of very various times and countries before and after Chaucer. But in addition to these he most a.s.suredly possessed others, which are not usual among the poets of our nation, and which, whencesoever they had come to him personally, had not, before they made their appearance in him, seemed indigenous to the English soil. It would indeed be easy to misrepresent the history of English poetry, during the period which Chaucer"s advent may be said to have closed, by ascribing to it a uniformly solemn and serious, or even dark and gloomy, character. Such a description would not apply to the poetry of the period before the Norman Conquest, though, in truth, little room could be left for the play of fancy or wit in the hammered-out war-song, or in the long-drawn scriptural paraphrase. Nor was it likely that a contagious gaiety should find an opportunity of manifesting itself in the course of the versification of grave historical chronicles, or in the tranquil objective reproduction of the endless traditions of British legend. Of the popular songs belonging to the period after the Norman Conquest, the remains which furnish us with direct or indirect evidence concerning them hardly enable us to form an opinion. But we know that (the cavilling spirit of Chaucer"s burlesque "Rhyme of Sir Thopas"
notwithstanding) the efforts of English metrical romance in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were neither few nor feeble, although these romances were chiefly translations, sometimes abridgments to boot--even the Arthurian cycle having been only imported across the Channel, though it may have thus come back to its original home. There is some animation in at least one famous chronicle in verse, dating from about the close of the thirteenth century; there is real spirit in the war-songs of Minot in the middle of the fourteenth; and from about its beginnings dates a satire full of broad fun concerning the jolly life led by the monks. But none of these works or of those contemporary with them show that innate lightness and buoyancy of tone, which seems to add wings to the art of poetry. Nowhere had the English mind found so real an opportunity of poetic utterance in the days of Chaucer"s own youth as in Langland"s unique work, national in its allegorical form and in its alliterative metre; and nowhere had this utterance been more stern and severe.
No sooner, however, has Chaucer made his appearance as a poet, than he seems to show what mistress"s badge he wears, which party of the two that have at most times divided among them a national literature and its representatives he intends to follow. The burden of his song is "Si douce est la marguerite:" he has learnt the ways of French gallantry as if to the manner born, and thus becomes, as it were without hesitation or effort, the first English love-poet. Nor--though in the course of his career his range of themes, his command of materials, and his choice of forms are widely enlarged--is the gay banner under which he has ranged himself ever deserted by him. With the exception of the "House of Fame," there is not one of his longer poems of which the pa.s.sion of love, under one or another of its aspects, does not either const.i.tute the main subject or (as in the "Canterbury Tales") furnish the greater part of the contents. It is as a love-poet that Gower thinks of Chaucer when paying a tribute to him in his own verse; it is to the attacks made upon him in his character as a love-poet, and to his consciousness of what he has achieved as such, that he gives expression in the "Prologue" to the "Legend of Good Women," where his fair advocate tells the G.o.d of Love:--
The man hath served you of his cunning, And furthered well your law in his writing, All be it that he cannot well indite, Yet hath he made unlearned folk delight To serve you in praising of your name.
And so he resumes his favourite theme once more, to tell, as the "Man of Law" says, "of lovers up and down, more than Ovid makes mention of in his old "Epistles."" This fact alone--that our first great English poet was also our first English love-poet, properly so called--would have sufficed to transform our poetic literature through his agency.
What, however, calls for special notice, in connexion with Chaucer"s special poetic quality of gaiety and brightness, is the preference which he exhibits for treating the joyous aspects of this many-sided pa.s.sion. Apart from the "Legend of Good Women," which is specially designed to give brilliant examples of the faithfulness of women under circ.u.mstances of trial, pain, and grief, and from two or three of the "Canterbury Tales," he dwells with consistent preference on the bright side of love, though remaining a stranger to its divine radiance, which shines forth so fully upon us out of the pages of Spenser. Thus, in the "a.s.sembly of Fowls" all is gaiety and mirth, as indeed beseems the genial neighbourhood of Cupid"s temple. Again, in "Troilus and Cressid," the earlier and cheerful part of the love-story is that which he developes with unmistakeable sympathy and enjoyment, and in his hands this part of the poem becomes one of the most charming poetic narratives of the birth and growth of young love, which our literature possesses--a soft and sweet counterpart to the consuming heat of Marlowe"s unrivalled "Hero and Leander." With Troilus it was love at first sight--with Cressid a pa.s.sion of very gradual growth. But so full of nature is the narrative of this growth, that one is irresistibly reminded at more than one point of the inimitable creations of the great modern master in the description of women"s love. Is there not a touch of Gretchen in Cressid, retiring into her chamber to ponder over the first revelation to her of the love of Troilus?--
Cressid arose, no longer there she stayed, But straight into her closet went anon, And set her down, as still as any stone, And every word gan up and down to wind, That he had said, as it came to her mind.