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Under Two Flags, Pt II. , Money . In Peril of His Life . India; What can it teach 138. 158. Jets and Flashes 1 Moonshine and Margue- ) rites i,^ Mr. Scarborough's/ Family, 2 Parts, each . . r. : Arden [^l Tower of Percemont ,;7 . Yolande 'J, Cruel London i.Q The Gilded Clique 2< - , Pike County Folks 2 ^ . Cricket on the Hearth., i^ Henry Esmond 3 j( Strange Adventures of a) Phaeton J j, Denis Duval ] ,', 01dCuriosityShop,P't 1. 1,' . 01dCuriosityShop,P'rtII.! , Ivanhoe, Part I j Ivanhoe, Part II ' ,, White Wings...... 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McCARTHY. 1 vol. 12mo., Lovell's Library No. 115, price 10 cents "A timely and exceedingly vigorous and interesting little volume. The book is worthy of attentive perusal, and wili be all the more interesting becauee it involves in its production the warm sympathies, the passionate enthusiasm, and the vivid brilliancy of style which one is glad to welcome from the sou of the distinguished journalist and author ■ —Christian Worlb. "All Irishmen who love their country, and all candid Englishmen, ought to welcome Mr Justin H. McCarthys litile volume— An Outline of Irish History. ' Those who want to know how it has come about that, as John Stuart Mill long ago pointed out, all cries for the remedy of specific Irish {;rievances are now merged in the dangerous demand for nationality, will do well to read Mr McCarthy s little book. It is eloquently written, and carries us from the earliet-t legends to the autumn of 1882. The charm of the btylc and the impetuousness m the flow of the narrative are refreshing and stimulating, and, as regards his tone impartiality. Mr McCarthy is far more just than i s Mr .Froude. ■"— Graphic. ■'A brightly written and intelligent account of the leading events in Irish annals. . . Mr, McCarthy has performed a diflicult task with commendable good spirit and impartiality '— Whitehall Review 'To those who enjoy exceptionally brilliant and vigorous writing, as wen as to those who desire to post themselves up in the Irish "question, we cordially recommend Mr McCarthy s little book.' —Evening News. ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS. Edited by JOHN MORLEY. Published in 13mo. vols., paper covers, price 10 cents each. Johnson. By Leslie Stephen. BcoTT. ByR H Hnton. Gibbon. By J C. Morison. Shelley, By J A. Symonds. Hume. By Prof Huxley. P. R.S, Goldsmith, By William Black. Defoe. By W. Mrteto Burns. By Principal Shairp Spenser. By the Very Rev the Dean of St Paul 8 Thackeray By A Trollope, Burke By John Moriey Bunyan By J A. Froude, Pope By Lesrlie Stephen. Byron By Pro'es^or NichoL CowPER. Bv Goldwin Smith Locke. By Professor Fowler. Wordsworth Bv F W H Myers. MiLTuN By Mark Pattison Southey By Profeeeor Dowden. Chaucer. By Prof. A. W Ward. New Tork: JOHN W. L.OVEL.L COIWPANY. CHAUCER BY / ADOLPHUS WILLIAM WARD NEW YORK JOHN W. LOVELL CO., PUBLISHERS 14 AND 16 Vesey Street NOTE. The peculiar conditions of this essay must be left to explain themselves. It could not have been written at all without the aid of the Publications of the Chaucer Society, and more especially of the labours of the Society's Director, Mr. Furnivall. To other recent writers on Chaucer — including Mr. Fleay, from whom I never differ but with hesitation — I have referred, in so far as it was in my power to do so. Perhaps I may take this oppor- tunity of expressing a wish that Pauli's History of England, a work beyond the compliment of an acknowledgment, were accessible to every English reader. A. W. W. CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. Page. Chaucer's Times , , 9 CHAPTER II, Chaucer's Life and Works yj CHAPTER III. Characteristics of Chaucer and of his Poetry . . . 94 CHAPTER IV. Epilogue . „ 122 CHAPTER V. Glossary . . . 129 CHAUCER. CHAPTER I. Chaucer's times. The biography of Geoffrey Chaucer is no longer a mixture of unsifted facts, and of more or less hazardous conjectures. Many and wide as are the gaps in our knowledge concerning the course of his outer life, and doubtful as many important passages of it re- main — in vexatious contrast with the certainty of other relatively insignificant data — we have at least become aware of the founda- tions on which alone a trustworthy account of it can be built. These foundations consist partly of a meagre though gradually in- creasing array of external evidence, chiefly to be found in public documents— in the Royal Wardrobe Book, the Issue Rolls of the Exchequer, the Custom Rolls, and such-like records — partly of the conclusions which may be drawn with confidence from the internal evidence of the poet's indisputably genuine works, together with a few references to him in the writings of his contemporaries or im- mediate successors. Which of his works are to be accepted as genuine, necessarily forms the subject of an antecedent enquiry, such as cannot with any degree of safety be conducted except on prin- ciples far from infallible with regard to all the instances to which they have been applied, but now accepted by the large majority of competent scholars. Thus, by a process which is in truth dulness and dryness itself, except to patient endeavour stimulated by the enthusiasm of special literary research, a limited number of results have been safely established, and others have, at all events, been placed beyond reasonable doubt. Around a third series of con- clusions or conjectures the tempest of controversy still rages ; and even now it needs a wary step to pass without fruitless deviations through a maze of assumptions consecrated by their longevity, or commended to sympathy by the fervour of personal conviction. A single instance must suffice to indicate both the difficulty and the significance of many of those questions of Chaucerian biography which, whether interesting or not in themselves, have to be de- termined before Chiucer's life can be written. They are not, " all and some," mere antiquarians' puzzles, of interest only to those lO CHAUCER. who have leisure and inclination for microscopic enquiries. So with the point immediately in view. It has been said with much force that Tyrwhitt, whose service to the study of Chaucer remain uneclipsed by those of any other scholar, would have composed a quite different biography of the poet, had he not been confounded by the formerly (and here and there still) accepted date of Chaucer's birth, the year 1328. For the correctness of this date Tyrwhitt " supposed " the poet's tombstone in Westminster Abbey to be the voucher ; but the slab placed on a pillar near his grave (it is said at the desire of Caxton) appears to have merely borne a Latin in- scription without any dates ; and the marble monument erected in its stead, "in the name of the Muses," by Nicolas Brigham in 1556, while giving October 25th, 1400, as the day of Chaucer's death, makes no mention either of the date of his birth or of the number of years to which he attained, and, indeed, promises no more informa- tion than it gives. That Chaucer's contemporary, the poet Gower, should have referred to him in the year 1392 as " now in his days Did," is at best a very vague sort of testimony, more especially as it is by mere conjecture that the vear of Gower's own birth is placed as far back as 1 320. Still less weight can be attached to the circumstance that another poet, Occleve, who clearly regarded himself as the disciple of one by many years his senior, in accord- ance with the common phraseology of his (and, indeed, of other) times, spoke of the older writer as his " father " and "father rev- erent." In a coloured portrait carefully painted from memory by Occleve on the margin of a manuscript, Chaucer is represented with grey hair and beard ; but this could not of itself be taken to contradict the supposition that he died about the age of sixty. And Leland's assertion that Chaucer attained to old age self-evi- dently rests on tradition only ; for Leland was born more than a century after Chaucer died. Nothing occurring in any of Chaucer's own works of undisputed genuineness throws any real light on the subject. His poem, t\\Q House of Fame, has been variously dated ; but at any period of his manhood he might have said, as he says there, that he was " too old " to learn astronomy, and preferred to take his science on faith. In the curious lines called UEnnoy de Chaucer a Scogan, the poet, while blaming his friend for his want of perseverance in a love-suit, classes himself among "them that be hoar and round of shape," and speaks of himself and his Muse as out of date and rusty. But there seems no sufficient reason for removing the date of the composition of these lines to an earlier year than 1393 ; and poets as well as other men since Chaucer have spoken of themselves as old and obsolete at fifty. A similar remark might be made concerning the reference to the poet's old age, "which dulleth him in his spirit," in the Complaifit of Venus^ generally ascribed to the last decennium of Chaucer's life. If we reject the evidence of a further passage, in the Ctickoo and the Nighti7is;ale^ a poem of disputed genuineness, we accordingly arrive at the conclusion that there is no reaso-vi for demurring to the only direct external evidence in existence as to the date of CHAUCER. I J Chaucer's birth. At a famous trial of a cause of chivalry held at Westminster in 1386, Chaucer, who had gone through part of a campaign with one of the litigants, appeared as a witness ; and on this occasion his age was, doubtless on his own deposition, re- corded as that of a man "of forty years and upwards," who had borne arms for twenty-seven years. A careful enquiry into the accuracy of the record as to the ages of the numerous other wit- nesses at the same trial has established it in an overwhelming majority of instances ; and it is absurd gratuitously to charge Chaucer with having understated his age from motives of vanity. The conclusion, therefore, seems to remain unshaken, that he was born about the year 1340, or some time between that year and 1345. Now, we possess a charming poem by Chaucer called the As- sembly of Fowls, elaborately courtly in its conception, and in its execution giving proofs of Itahan reading on the part of its author, as well as of a ripe humour such as is rarely an accompaniment of extreme youth. This poem has been thought by earher commenta- tors to allegorise an event known to have happened in 1358 ; by later critics another which occurred in 1364. Clearly, the assumption that the period from 1340 to 1345 includes the date of Chaucer's birth suffices of itself to stamp the one of these conjectures as un- tenable, and the other as improbable, and (when the style of the poem and treatment of its subject are taken into account) adds weight to the other reasons in favour of the date 1381 for the poem in question. Thus, backwards and forwards, the disputed points in Chaucer's biography and the question of his works are affected by one another. Chaucer's life, then, spans rather more than the latter half of the fourteenth century, the last year of which was indisputably the year of his death. In other words, it covers rather more than the interval between the most glorious epoch of Edward III.'s reign — for Crecy was fought in 1346 — and the downfall, in 1399, of his unfortunate successor Richard II. The England of this period was but a little land, if numbers be the test of^ greatness ; but in Edward III.'s time, as in that of Henry V., who inherited so much of Edward's policy and revived so much of his glory, there stirred in this little body a mighty heart. It is only of a small population that the author of the Vision concern- in(r Piers Plowman could have gathered the representatives into a 'single field, or that Chaucer himself could have composed a family picture fairly comprehending, though not altogether exhaust- ing, the chief national charactei'-tjqDes. In the year of King Richard II.'s accession (1377), according to a trustworthy calcula- tion based upon the result of that year's poll-tax, the total number of the inhabitants of England seems to have been two millions and a half. A quarter of a century earlier— in the days of Chaucer's boyhood — their numbers had been perhaps twice as large. For not less than four great pestilences (in 1348-9, 1361-2, 1369, and 1375-6), 13 CHAUCER. had swept over the land, and at least one-half of its population, including two-thirds of the inhabitants of the capital, had been carried off by the ravages of the obstinate epidemic — "the foul death of England," as it was called in a formula of execration in use among the people. In this year — 1377 — London, where Chau- cer was doubtless born, as well as bred, where the greater part of his life was spent, and where the memory of his name is one of those associations which seem familiarly to haunt the banks of the his- toric river from Thames Street to Westminster, apparently num- bered not more than 35,000 souls. But if, from the nature of the case, no place was more exposed than London to the inroads of the Black Death, neither was any other so likely elastically to re- cover from them. For the reign of Edward III. had witnessed a momentous advance in the prosperity of the capital — an advance reflecting itself in the outward changes introduced during the same period into the architecture of the city. Its wealth had grown larger as its houses had grown higher ; and mediaeval London, such as we are apt to picture it to ourselves, seems to have derived those leading features which it so long retained, from the days when Chaucer, with downcast but very observant eyes, passed along its street between Billingsgate and Aldgate. Still, here as elsewhere in England, the remembrance of the most awful physical visitations which have ever befallen the country must have long lingered ; and, after all has been said, it is wonderful that the traces of them should be so exceedingly scanty in Chaucer's pages. Twice only in his poems does he refer to the Plague : once in an allegorical fiction which is of Italian if not of French origin, and where, therefore, no special reference to the ravages of the disease in E 7tg I and m^yhQ intended when Death is said to have " a thousand slain this pesti- lence " — " . . , . He hath slain this year Hence over a mile, within a great village Both men and women, child and hind and page." The other allusion is a more than half humorous one. It occurs in the description of the Doctor of Physic^ the grave graduate in purple surcoat and blue white-furred hood ; nor, by the way, may this portrait itself be altogether without its use as throwing some light on the helplessness of fourteenth-century medical science. For though in all the world there was none like this doctor to speak of physic and of surgery ; though he was a very perfect practitioner, and never at a loss for telling the cause of any malady and for supplying the patient with the appropriate drug, sent in by the doctor's old and faithful friends the apothecaries ; tiiough he was well versed in all the authorities from ^sculapius to the writer of the Rosa Anglica (who cures inflammation homoeopathically by the use of red draperies); though, like a truly wise physician, he began at home by caring anxiously for his own digestion and for his peace of mind (" his study was but little in the Bible ") — yet the basis of his scientific knowledge was " astronomy," L e., astrol- CHAUCER. 13 ogy, "the better part of medicine," as Roger Bacoti calls it ; together with that " natural magic " by which, as Chaucer elsewhere tells us, the famous among the learned have known how to make men whole or sick. And there was one specific which, from a double point of view, Chaucer's Doctor of Physic esteemed very highly, and was loth to part with on frivolous pretexts. He was but easy (/. e.^ slack) of "dispence " : — " He kepte that he won in pestilence. For gold in physic is a cordial; Therefore he loved gold in special." Meanwhile the ruling classes seem to have been left untouched in heart by these successive ill-met and ill-guarded trials, which had first smitten the lower orders chiefly, then the higher with the lower (if the Plague of 1349 had swept off an archbishop, that of 1361 struck down, among others, Henry Duke of Lancaster, the father of Chau- cer's Duchess Blanche). Calamities such as these would assuredly have been treated as warnings sent from on high, both in earlier times, when a Church better braced for the due performance of its never-ending task, eagerly interpreted to awful ears the signs of the wrath of God, and by a later generation, leavened in spirit by the self-searching morality of Puritanism. But from the sorely-tried third quarter of the fourteenth century the solitary voice of Lang- land cries, as the voice of Conscience preaching with her cross, that " these pestilences " are the penalty of sin and of naught else. It. is assuredly presumptuous for one generation, without the fullest proof, to accuse another of thoughtlessness orheartlessness ; and though the classes for which Chaucer mainly wrote, and with which he mainly felt, were in ail probability as little inclined to im- prove the occasions of the Black Death as the middle classes of the present day would be to fall on their knees after a season of commercial ruin, yet signs are not wanting that in the later years of the fourteenth century words of admonition came to be not un- frequently spoken. The portents of the eventful year 1382 called forth moralisings in English verse, and the pestilence of 1391 a rhymed lamentation in Latin ; and at different dates in King Richard's reign, the poet Gower, Chaucer's contemporary and friend, inveighed both in Latin and in English, from his conserva- tive point of view, against the corruption and sinfulness of society at large. But by this time the great peasant insurrection had added its warning, to which it was impossible to remain deaf. A self-confident nation, however, is slow to betake itself to sackcloth and ashes. On the whole, it is clear that though the last years of Edward III. were a season of failure and disappoint- ment — though from the period of the First Pestilence ■^■^""^''ds ^h'- signs increase of the King's unpopularity ar--' content — yet the overburdened and enfee' almost as slowly as the King himself to tion of a conquering power. In 1363 h' pletion of his fiftieth year ; and three 14 CHAUCER. I time been gathered as satellites round the sun of his success. By 1371 he had lost all his allies, and nearly all the conquests gained by himself and the valiant Prince of Wales ; and during the years remaining to him his subjects hated his rule and angrily assailed his favourites. From bemg a conquering power the English mon- archy was fast sinking into an island which found it difficult to defend its own shores. There were times towards the close of Edward's, and early in his successor's reign, when matters would have gone hard with English traders, naturally desirous of having their money's worth for their subsidy of tonnage and poundage, and anxious, hke their type the Merchant in Chaucer, that " the sea were kept for anything " between Middleburgh and Harwich, had not some of them, such as the Londoner, John Philpot, occa- sionally armed and manned a squadron of ships on their own ac- count, in defiance of red tape and its censures. But in the days when Chaucer and the generation with which he grew up were young, the ardour of foreign conquest had not yet died out in the land, and clergy and laity cheerfully co-operated in bearing the burdens which military glory has at all times brought with it for a civihsed people. The high spirit of the English nation, at a time when the dechne in its fortunes was already near at hand (1366), is evident from the answer given to the application from Rome for the arrears of thirty-three years of the tribute promised by King John, or rather from what must unmistakably have been the drift of that answer. Its terms are unknown, but the demand was never afterwards repeated. The power of England, in the period of an ascendency to -which she so tenaciously sought to cling, had not been based only upon the valour of her arms. Our country was already a rich one in comparison with most others in Europe. Other purposes besides that of providing good cheer for a robust generation were served by the wealth of her great landed proprietors, and of the " worthy vavasours " (smaller land-owners) who, like Chaucer's Franklin — ■ a very Saint Julian or pattern of hospitality — knew not what it was to be "without baked meat in the house," where their " Tables dormant in the hall alway Stood ready covered all the longe day." From this source, and from the well-filled coffers of the traders, came the laity's share of the expenses of those foreign wars which did, so much to consolidate national feehng in England. The foreign companies of merchants long contrived to retain the chief share of the banking business and export trade assigned to them by the ^^hort-sighted commercial policy of Edward III., and the industries of Hanseatic and Flemish immi- "■n almost unbearable competition in our t the active import trade, which already oth nearer and remote parts of Chris- 'art^eJ^ in native handsi and En?-hsh L CHAUCER. 15 chivalry, diplomacy, and literature followed in the lines of the trade-routes to the'Baltic and the Mediterranean. Our mariners,, like their type the Shipman in Chaucer (an anticipation of the " Venturer'" of later days, with the pirate as yet, perhaps, more strongly marked in him than the patriot), "... Knew well all the havens, as they were From Gothland, to the Cape of Finisterre, And every creek in Brittany and Spain." Doubtless, as may be noticed in passing, much of the tendency on th-e part of our shipmen in this period to self-help, in offence as well as in defence, was due to the fact that the mercantile navy was frequently employed in expeditions of war, vessels and men being at times seized or impressed for the purpose by order of the Crown. On one of these occasions the port of Dartmouth, whence Chaucer at a venture ("for aught I wot ") makes his Ship- man hail, is found contributing a larger total of ships and men than any other port in England. For the rest, Flanders was cer- tainly still far ahead of her future rival in wealth and in mercantile and industrial activity ; as a manufacturing country she had no equal, and in trade the rival she chiefly feared was still the Ger- man Hansa. Chaucer's Merchant characteristically wears a " Flandrish beaver hat ; " and it is no accident that the scene of ih^ P a? doner' s Tale^ which begins with a description of " super- fluity abominable," is laid in Flanders. In England, indeed, the towns never came to domineer as they did in the Netherlands. Yet, since no trading country will long submit to be ruled by the landed interests only, so in proportion as the EngHsh towns, and London especially, grew richer, their voices were listened to in the settlement of the affairs of the nation. It might be very well for Chaucer to close the description of his Merchant with what looks very much like a fashionable writer's half sneer : — r / " Forsooth, he was a worthy man withal ; But, truly, I wot not how men him call." Yet not only was high political and social rank reached by indi- vidual " merchant princes," such as the wealthy William de la Pole, a descendant of whom is said (though on unsatisfactory evidence) to have been Chaucer's granddaughter, but the govern- ment of the country came to be very perceptibly influenced by the class from which they sprang. On the accession of Richard II., two London citizens were appointed controllers of the war-sub- sidies granted to the Crown : and in the Parliament of 1382 a committee of fourteen merchants refused to entertain the question of a merchants' loan to the King. The importance and self-con- sciousness of the smaller tradesmen and handicraftsmen increased with that of the great merchants. When, in 1393, King Richard II. marked the termination of his quarrel with the City of London by a stately procession through " new Troy," he was welcomed, 1 6 CHAUCER. according to the Friar who has commemorated the event in Latin verse, by the trades in an array resembling an angelic host ; and among the crafts enumerated we recognise several of those repre- sented in Chaucer's company of pilgrims — by the Carpenter, the Webbe (Weaver), and the Dyer, all clothed " . . .In one livery Of a solemn and great fraternity," The middle class, in short, was learning to hold up itshead, col« lectively and individually. The historical original of Chaucer's Host — the actual Master Harry Bailly, vintner and landlord of the Tabard Inn in Southwark, was likewise a member of Parliament, and very probably felt as sure of himself in real life as the mimic personage bearing his name does in its fictitious reproduction. And he and his fellows, the " poor and simple Commons " — for so humble was the style they were wont to assume in their addresses to the sovereign — began to look upon themselves, and to be looked upon, as a power in the State. The London traders and handi- craftsmen knew what it was to be well-to-do citizens, and if they had failed to understand it, home monition would have helped to make it clear to them: — " Well seemed each of them a fair burgess, For sitting in a guildhall on a dais. And each one for the wisdom that he can Was shapely for to be an alderman. They had enough of chattels and of rent, And very gladly would their wives assent ; And, truly, else they had been much to blame. It is full fair to be yclept maddme, And fair to go to vigils all before, And have a mantle royally y-bore." The English State had ceased to be the feudal monarchy — the ramification of contributory courts and camps — of the crude days of William the Conqueror and his successors. The Norman lords and their Enghsh dependents no longer formed two separate ele- ments in the body-politic. In the great French wars of Edward III., the English armies had no longer mainly consisted of the baronial levies. The nobles had indeed, as of old, ridden into bat< tie at the head of their vassals and retainers ; but the body of the force had been made up of Englishmen serving for pay, and armed with their national implement, the bow — such as Chaucer's Yeoman carried with him on the ride to Canterbury : — , " A sheaf of peacock arrows bright and keen Under his belt he bare fail thriftily. Well could he dress his tackle yeomanly ; His arrows drooped not with feathers low, And in his hand he bare a mighty bow." CHAUCER, ly The use of the bow was specially favoured by both Edward III. and his successor; and when, early in the next century, the chivalrous Scottish king, James I. (of whom mention will be made among Chaucer's poetic disciples) returned from his long Enghsh captivity to his native land, he had no more eager care than that his subjects should learn to emulate the English in the handling of their favourite weapon. Chaucer seems to' be unable to picture any army without it, and we find him relating how, from ancient Troy, " Hector and many a worthy wight out went With spear in hand, and with their big bows bent." No wonder that when the battles were fought by the people itself, and when the cost of the wars was to so large an extent defrayed by its self-imposed contributions, the Scottish and French cam- paigns should have called forth that national enthusiasm which found an echo in the songs of Lawrence Minot, as hearty war- poetry as has been composed in any age of our literature. They were put forth in 1352, and considering the unusual popularity they are said to have enjoyed, it is not impossible that they may have reached Chaucer's ears in his boyhood. Before the final collapse of the great King's fortunes, and his death in a dishonoured old age, the ambition of his heir, the proudest hope of both dynasty and nation, had overleapt itself, and the Black Prince had preceded his father to the tomb. The good ship England (so sang a contemporary poet) was left without rudder or helm ; and in a kingdom full of faction and discontent, the future of the Plantagenet throne depended on a child. While the young king's ambitious uncle, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lan- caster (Chaucer's patron), was in nominal retirement, and his academical ally, Wyclif, was gaining popularity as the mouthpiece of the resistance to the papal demands, there were fermenting beneath the surface elements of popular agitation, which had been but little taken into account by the political factions of Edward the Third's reign, and by that part of its society with which Chaucer was more especially connected. But the multitude, whose turn, in truth, comes but rarely in the history of a nation, must every now and then make itself heard, although poets may seem all but Wind and deaf to the tempest as it rises, and bursts, and passes away. Many causes had concurred to excite the insurrection which temporarily destroyed the influence of John of Gaunt, and which for long cast a deep shade upon the effects of the teaching of Wyclif. The acquisition of a measure of rights and power by the middle classes had caused a general swaying upwards ; and throughout the peoples of Europe floated those dreams and spec- ulations concerning the equality and fraternity of all men, which needed but a stimulus and an opportunity to assume the practical shape of a revolution. The melancholy thought which pervades Langland's Vision is still that of the helplessness of the poor ; and the remedy to which he looks against the corruption of the jfS CHAUCER. governing classes is the advent of a superhuman king, whom ha identifies with the ploughman himself, the representative of suf- fering humility. But about the same time as that of the com- position of this poem — or not long afterwards — Wyclif had sent forth among the people his "simple priests," who illustrated by contrast the conflict which his teaching exposed between the ex- isting practice of the Church and the original documents of her faith. The connexion between WycHf's teaching and the peasants' insurrection under Richard II. is as undeniable as that between Luther's doctrines and the great social uprising in Germany a century and a half afterwards. When, upon the declaration of the Papal Schism, Wyclif abandoned all hope of a reform of the Church from wn'thin, and, defying the injunctions of foe and friend alike, entered upon a course of theological opposition, the popular in- fluence of his followers must have tended to spread a theory admit- ting of very easy application ad hominem — the theory, namely, that the tenure of all offices, whether spiritual or temporal, is justified only by the personal fitness of their occupants. With such levelling doctrine, the Socialism of popular preachers like John Balle might seem to coincide with sufficient closeness ; and since worthiness was not to be found in the holders of either spiritual or temporal authority, of either ecclesiastical or lay wealth, the time had palpably come for the poor man to enjoy his own again. Then, the advent of a weak government, over which a power- ful kinsman of the King and unconcealed adversary of the Church . was really seeking to recover the control, and the imposition of a tax coming home to all men except actual beggars, and filling serfdom's cup of bitterness to overflowing, supplied the opportunity, and the insurrection broke out. Its violence fell short of that of the French Jacqtierie a quarter of a century earlier ; but no doubt could exist as to its critical importance. As it happened, the revolt turned with special fury against the possessions of the Duke of Lancaster, whose sympathies with the cause of ecclesiastical re- form it definitively extinguished. After the suppression of this appaUing movement by a party of Order, comprehending in it all who had anything to lose, a period of reaction ensued. In the reign of Richard II., whichever fac- tion might be in the ascendant, and whatever direction the King's own sympathies may have originally taken, the last state of the peasantry was without doubt worse than the first. Wycliffism as an influence rapidly declined with the death of Wyclif himself, as it hardly could but decline, considering the absence from his teach- ing of any tangible system of Church government ; and Lollardry came to be the popular name, or nickname, for any and every form of dissent from the existing system. Finally, Henry of Lan- caster, John of Gaunt's son, mounted the throne as a sort of saviour of society — a favourite character for usurpers to pose in before the applauding assemblage of those who claim "a stake in the country," Chaucer's contemporary, Gower, whose wisdom was of the kind which goes with the times, who was in turn CHAUCER. 19 a flatterer of Richard and (by the simple expedient of a revised second edition of his 7na^mi?n opus) a flatterer of Henry, offers better testimony than Chaucer to the conservatism of the upper classes of his age, and to the single-minded anxiety for the good times when " Justice of law is held ; The privilege of royalty Is safe, and all the barony Worshipped is in its estate. The people stands in obeisance Under the rule of governance." Chaucer is less explicit, and may have been too little of a politician by nature to care for preserving an outward consistency in his incidental remarks concerning the lower classes. In his Clerk's Tale he finds room for a very dubious commonplace about the "stormy people," its levity, untruthfulness, indiscretion, fickleness, and garrulity, and the folly of putting any trust in it. In his Nun's Priesfs Tmle he further enlivens one of the liveliest descriptions of a hue-and-cry ever put upon paper by a direct reference to the Peasants' Rebellion : — " So hideous was the noise, ah bencite ! That of a truth Jack Straw, and his meinie Not made never shoutes half so shrill, When that they any B'^leming meant to kill." Assuredly, again, there is an unmistakeably conservative tone in the ^<2;//^^ purporting to have been sent by him to King Richard^ with its refrain as to all being "lost for want of steadfastness," and its admonition to its sovereign to "... Shew forth the sword of castigati&n." On the other hand, it would be unjust to leave unnoticed the pass- age, at once powerful and touching, in the so-called Parson's Tale (the sermon which closes the Canterbury Tales as Chaucer left them), in which certain lords are reproached for taking of their bondmen amercements , " which might more reasonably be called extortions than amercements''' while lords in general are commanded to be good to their thralls (serfs), because " those that they clept thralls, be God's people; for humble folks be Christ's friends; they be contubernially with the Lord." The solitary type, however, of the labouring man proper which Chaucer, in manifest remem- brance of Langland's allegory, produces, is one which, beautiful and affecting as it is, has in it a flavour of the comfortable sentiment, that things are as they should be. This is — not, of course, the Parson himself, of which most significant character hereafter, but — the Parson's brother, the Ploiighman. He is a true labourer and a good, religious and charitable in his life, and always ready to pay his tithes. In short, he is a true Christian, but, at the same 20 CHAUCER. time, the ideal rather than the prototype, if one may so say, of the conservative working man. Such were some, though of course some only, of the general currents of English public life in the latter half — Chaucer's half — of the fourteenth century. Its social features were naturally in accordance with the course of the national history. In the first place, the slow and painful process of amalgamation between the Normans and the English was still unfinished, though the reign of Edward III. went far towards completing what had rapidly advanced since the reigns of John and Henry III. By the middle of the fourteenth century English had become, or was just becoming, the common tongue of the whole nation. Among the political poems and songs preserved from the days of Edward II., not a single one composed on Enghsh soil is written in French. Parliament was opened by an English speech in the year 1363, and in the previous year the proceedings in the law courts were ordered to be con- ducted in the native tongue. Yet when Chaucer wrote his Canter- bury Tales, it seems still to have continued the pedantic affectation of a profession for its members, like Chaucer's Man 'of Law, to introduce French law-terms into common conversation ; so that it is natural enough to find the Siinwioner following suit, and inter- larding his Tale with the Latin scraps picked up by him from the decrees and pleadings of the ecclesiastical courts. Meanwhile, manifold difficulties had delayed or interfered with the fusion be- tween the two races, before the victory of the English language showed this fusion to have been in substance accomplished. One of these difficulties, which has been sometimes regarded as funda- mental, has doubtless been exaggerated by national feeling on either side ; but that it existed is not to be denied. Already in those ages the national character and temperament of French and Enghsh differed largely from one another ; though the reasons why they so differed remain a matter of argument. In a dialogue, dated from the middle of the fourteenth century, the French inter- locutor attributes this difference to the respective national bever- ages : " We are nourished with the pure juice of the grape, while naught but the dregs is sold to the English, who will take anything for hquor that is liquid." The case is put with scarcely greater politeness by a living French critic of high repute, according to whom the English, still weighted down by Teutonic phlegm, were drunken gluttons, agitated at intervals by poetic enthusiasm, while the Normans, on the other hand, lightened by their transplantation, and by the admixture of a variety of elements, already found the claims of esp7'it developing themselves within them. This is an explanation which explains nothing — least of all, the problem : why the lively strangers should have required the contact with insular phlegm in order to receive the creative impulse — why, in other words, Norman-French literature should have derived so enormous an advantage from the transplantation of Normans to English ground. But the evil days wlien the literary labours of English' men had been little better than bond-service to the tastes of theit CHAUCER' 21 foreign masters had passed away, since the Norman barons had, from whatever motive, invited the commons of England to take a share with them in the national councils. After this, the question of the relations between the two languages, and the wider one of the relations between the two nationalities, could only be decided by the peaceable adjustment of the influences exercised by the one side upon the other. The Norman noble, his ideas, and the expression they found in forms of life and literature, had hence- forth, so to speak, to stand on their merits ; the days of their dominion, as a matter of course, had passed away. Together with not a little of their political power, the Norman nobles of Chaucer's time had lost something of the traditions of their order. Chivalry had not quite come to an end with the Crusaders ; but it was a difficult task to maintain all its laws, written and unwritten, in these degenerate days. No laurels were any longer to be gained in the Holy Land ; and though the cam- paigns of the great German Order against the pagans of Prussia and Lithuania attracted the service of many an English knight — in the middle of the century, Henry, Duke of Lancaster, fought there, as his grandson, afterwards King Henry IV., did forty years later — yet the substitute was hardly adequate in kind. Of the great mediaeval companies of Knights, the most famous had, early in the century, perished under charges which were undoubtedly in the main foul fictions, but at the same time were only too much in accord with facts betokening an unmistakeable decay of the true spirit of chivalry; before the century closed, lawyers were rolling parchments in the halls of the Templars by the Thames. Thus, though the age of chivalry had not yet ended, its supremacy was already on the wane, and its ideal was growing dim. In the history of English chivalry the reign of Edward III. is memorable, not only for the foundation of our most illustrious order of knighthood, but likewise for many typical acts of knightly valour and courtesy, as well on the part of the King when in his better days, as on that of his heroic son. Yet it cannot be by accident that an undefinable air of the old-fashioned clings to that most delightful of all Chau- cer's character sketches, the Knight of the Canterbtiry Tales. His warlike deeds at Alexandria, in Prussia, and elsewhere, may be illustrated from those of more than one actual knight of the times : and the whole description of him seems founded on one by a French poet of King John of Bohemia, who had at least the exter- nal features of a knight of the old school. The chivalry, however, which was in fashion as the century advanced, was one outwardly far removed from the sturdy simplicity of Chaucer's Knight, and inwardly often rotten in more than one vital part. In show and splendour a higher point was probably reached in Edward III.'s than in any preceding reign. The extravagance in dress which prevailed in this period is too well known a characteristic of it to need dwelling upon. Sumptuary laws in vain sought to restrain this foible ; and it rose to such a pitch as even to oblige men, lest they should be precluded from indulging in gorgeous raiment, to 22 CHAUCER, abandon hospitality, a far more amiable species of excess. When the kinds of clothing respectively worn by the different classes served as distinctions of rank, the display of splendour in one class could hardly fail to provoke emulation in the others. The long- lived EngHsh love for " crying " colours shows itself amusingly enough in the early pictorial representations of several of Chau- cer's Canterbury pilgrims, though in floridity of apparel, as of speech, the youthful Squire bears away the bell : — " Embroidered was he, as it were a mead All full freshest flowers, white and red." _y But of the artificiality and extravagance of the costumes of these times we have direct contemporary evidence and loud contemporary complaints. Now, it is the jagged cut of the garments, punched and shredded by the man-milliner; now, thfe wide and high collars and the long-pointed boots, which attract the indignation of the moralist : at one time he inveighs against the " horrible disordinate scantness " of the clothing worn by gallants, at another against the " out- rageous array " in which ladies love to exhibit their charms. The knights' horses are decked out with not less finery than are the knights themselves, with " curious harness, as in saddles and bridles, cruppers and breastplates, covered with precious clothing, and with bars and plates of gold and silver.' And though it is hazardous to stigmatise the fashions of any one period as specially grotesque, yet it is significant of this age to find the reigning court beauty ap- pearing at a tournament robed as Queen of the Sun ; while even a lady from a manufacturing district, the Wife of Bath, m,?i\its the most of her opportunities to be seen as well as to see. Her " kerchiefs " were " full fine " of texture, and weighed, one might be sworn, ten pound — " That on a Sunday were upon her head, Her hosen too were of fine scarlet re*d, Full straight y-tied, and shoes full moist and new. ****** Upon an ambler easily she sat, Y-wimpled well, and on her head a hat, As broad as is a buckler or a targe.'' So, with a foot-mantle round her hips, and a pair of sharp spurs on her feet, she looked as defiant as any self-conscious Amazon of any period. It might, perhaps, be shown how, in more important artistic efforts than fashions of dress, this age displayed its aversion from simplicity and moderation. At all events, the love of the florid and overloaded declares itself in what we know concerning the social hfe of the nobility, as, for instance, we find that life re- flected in the pages of Froissart, whose counts and lords seem neither to clothe themselves nor to feed themselves, -nor to talk, pray, or swear like ordinary mortals. The Vows of the Heron, 3, poem of the earlier part of King Edward III.'s reign, contains a CHAUCER. 23 choice collection of strenuous knightly oaths ; and in a humbler way the rest of the population very naturally imitated the parlance of their rulers, and in the words of the Parsoii's Tale, " dismem- bered Christ by soul, heart bones, and body." But there is one very much more important feature to be noticed in the social life of the nobility, for whom Chaucer's poetry must have largely replaced the French verse in which they had formerly dehghted. The relation between knight and lady plays a great part in the history as well as in the literature of the later Planta- genet period ; and incontestably its conceptions of this relation still retained much of the pure sentiment belonging to the best and most fervent times of Christian chivalry. The highest religious expression which has ever been given to man's sense of woman's mission, as his life's comfort and crown, was still a universally dominant belief. To the Blessed Virgin^King Edward III. ded- icated his principal religious foundation ; and Chaucer, to whatever extent his opinions or sentiments may have been in accordance with ideas of ecclesiastical reform, displays a pious devotion towards the foremost Saint of the Church. The lyric entitled the Praise of lVo?nen, in which she is enthusiastically recognised as the representative of the whole of her sex, is generall}^ rejected as not Chaucer's; but the elaborate "Orison to the Holy Virgin," begin- ning " Mother of God, and Virgin undefiled," seems to be correctly described as Oratio Gallfridi Chancer; and in Chance?-'' s A. B. C called La Pi^iere de Notice Dajne, a translation by him from a French original, we have a long address to the Blessed Virgin in twenty-three stanzas, each of which begins with one of the letters of the alphabet arranged in proper succes- sion. Nor, apart from the religious sentiment, had men yet alto- gether lost sight of the ideal of true knightly love, destined though this ideal was to be obscured in the course of time, until at last the Mo7't d^Arthtire was the favourite literary nourishment of the minions and mistresses of Edward IV. 's degenerate days. In his Book of the Dnchess Chaucer has left us a picture of true knightly love, together with one of true maiden purity. The lady celebrated in this poem was loth, merely for the sake of coquetting with their exploits, to send her knights upon errands of chivalry. — "... Into Walachy, To Prussia, and to Tartary, To Alexandria or Turkey." And doubtless there was many a gentle knight or squire to whom might have been applied the description given by the heroine of Chaucer's Troilus and Cresszd oi her lover, and of that which at tracted her in him : — " For trust ye well that your estate royal. Nor vain delight, nor only worthliness 24 CHAUCER. Of you in war or tourney martial, Nor pomp, array, nobility, riches, Of these none made me rue on your distress; But moral virtue, grounded tip on truth, That was the cause I first had on you ruth. " And gentle heart, and manhood that ye had, And that ye had (as methought) in despite Everything that tended unto bad, As rudeness, and as popular appetite, _ And that your reason bridled your delight ; 'Twas these did make 'bove every creature That I was yours, and shall while I may 'dure." And if true affection under the law still secured the sympathy of the better-balanced part of society, so the vice of those who made war upon female virtue, or the insolence of those who falsely boasted of their conquests, still incurred its resentment. Among the com- panies which in the House of Fame sought the favour of its mistress, Chaucer vigorously satirises the would-be lady-killers, who were content with the reputation of accomplished seducers ; and in Troilus and Cressid a shrewd observer exclaims with the utmost vivacity against " Such sort of folk — what shall I clepe them ? what t That vaunt themselves of women, and by name, That yet to them ne'er promised this or that, Nor knew them more, in sooth, than mine old hat." The same easy but sagacious philosopher (Pandarus) observes that the harm which is in this world springs as often from folly as from malice. But a deeper feeling animates the lament of the "good Alceste," in the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women, that among men the betrayal of women is now " held a game." So indisputably it was already often esteemed, in too close an accord- ance with examples set in the highest places in the land. If we are to credit an old tradition, a poem in which Chaucer narrates the amours of Mars and Venus was written by him at the request of John of Gaunt, to celebrate the adultery of the duke's sister-in-law with a nobleman, to whom the injured kinsman afterwards married one of his ow.n daughters ! But nowhere was the deterioration of sentiment on this head more strongly typified than in Edward III. himself. The King, who (if the pleasing tale be true which gave rise to some beautiful scenes in an old English drama) had in his early days royally renounced an unlawful passion for the fair Countess of Salisbury, came to be accused of at once violating his conjugal duty and neglecting his military glory for the sake of strange women's charms. The founder of the Order of the Garter — the device of which enjoined purity even of thought as a principle of conduct — died in the hands of a rapacious courtesan. Thus, in England, as in France, the ascendency is gained by ignobler views concerning the relation between the sexes — a relation to which the CHAUCER. 25 whole system of chivalry owed a great part of its vitality, and on the view of which prevailing in the most influential class of any nation, the social health of that nation must inevitably in no small measure depend. Meanwhile, the artificialities by means of which in France, up to the beginning of the fifteenth century, it was sought to keep alive an organised system of sentimentality in the social dealings between gentlemen and ladies, likewise found admission in England, but only in a modified degree. Here the fashion in question asserted itself only, or chiefly, in our poetic Hterature, and in the adoption by it of such fancies as the praise and worship of the daisy, with which we meet in the Prologue to Chaucer's Legend of Good Women ^ and in the Flower and the Leaf a most pleasing poem (suggested by a French model), which it is unfor- tunately no longer possible to number among his genuine works. The poem of the Court of Love, which was likewise long erron- eously attributed to him, may be the original work of an Enghsh author ; but in any case its main contents are a mere adaptation of a pecuhar outgrowth on a foreign soil of conceptions common to chivalry in general. Of another force, which in the Middle Ages shared with chivalry (though not with it alone) the empire over the minds of men, it would certainly be rash to assert that its day was passing away in the latter half of the fourteenth century. It has, indeed, been pointed out that the date at which Wyclif 's career as a reformer may be said to have begun almost coincides with that of the climax and first decline of feudal chivalry in England. But, without seeking to interpret coincidences, we know that, though the influence of the Christian Church, and that of its Roman branch in particular, has asserted and re-asserted itself in various ways and degrees in various ages, yet in England, as elsewhere, the epoch of its moral omnipotence had come to an end many generations before the dis- ruption of its external framework. In the fourteenth century men had long ceased to look for the mediation of the Church between an overbearing Crown and a baronage and commonalty eager for the maintenance of their rights or for the assertion of their claims. On the other hand, the conflicts which still recurred be- tween the temporal power and the Church had as little reference as ever to spiritual concerns. Undoubtedly, the authority of the Church over the minds of the people still depended in the main upon the spiritual influence she exercised over them ; and the desire for a reformation of the Church, which was already making itself felt in a gradually widening sphere, was, by the great majority of those who cherished it, held perfectly compatible with a recog- nition of her authority. The world, it has been well said, needed an enquiry extending over three centuries, in order to learn to walk without the aid of the Church of Rome. Wyclif, who sought to emancipate the human conscience from reliance upon any earthly authority intermediate between the soul and its Maker, reckoned without his generation ; and few, except those with whom audacity took the place of argument, followed him to the extreme results oi 26 CHAUCER. his speculations. The Great Schism rather stayed than prob g^ the growth of an English feeling against Rome, since it was iio-w- no longer necessary to acknowledge a Pope who seemed the hench- man of the arch-foe across the narrow seas. But although the progress of English sentiment towards the desire for liberation from Rome was to be interrupted by a lono- and seemingly decisive reaction, yet in the fourteenth, as in the sixteenth, century the most active cause of the alienation of the people from the Church was the conduct of the representatives of the Church themselves. The Reformation has most appropriately retained in history a name at first unsuspiciously apphed to the re- moval of abuses in the ecclesiastical administration and in the life of the clergy. What aid could be derived by those who really hungered for spiritual food, or what strength could accrue to the thoughtless faith of the light-hearted majority, from many of the most common varieties of the English ecclesiastic of the later Middle Ages ? Apart from the Italian and other foreign holders of English benefices, who left their flocks to be tended by deputy, and to be shorn by an army of the most offensive kind of tax-gath- erers, the native clergy included many species, but among them few which, to the popular eye, seemed to embody a high ideal of religious life. The times had by no means come to an end when many of the higher clergy sought to vie with the lay lords in war- like prowess. Perhaps the martial Bishop of Norwich, who, after persecuting the heretics at home, had commanded an army of cru- saders in Flanders, levied on behalf of Pope Urban VI. against the anti-Pope Clement VII. and his adherents, was in the poet Gower's mind when he complains that while "... The law is ruled so, That clerks unto the war intend, I wot not how they should amend The woeful world in other things, And so make peace between the Idngs After the law of charity, Which is the duty properly Belonging unto the priesthood." A more general complaint, however, was that directing itself against the extravagance and luxury of life in which the dignified clergy indulged. The cost of these unspiritual pleasures the great prelates had ample means for defraying in the revenues of their sees ; while lesser dignitaries had to be active in levying their dues or the fines of their courts, lest everything should flow into the re-, ceptacles of their superiors. So in Chaucer's Friar'' s Tale an un« friendly Regular says of an archdeacon : — ^_* For smalle tithes and for small offering He made the people piteously to sing. For ere the bishop caught them on his hook, They were down in the archedeacon's book." CHAUCER, 27 As a matter of course, the worthy who filled the office of Su7nmoner to the court of the archdeacon in question had a keen eye for the profitable improprieties subject to its penalties, and was aided in his efforts by the professional abettors of vice whom he kept " ready to his hand." Nor is it strange that the undisguised worldliness of many members of the clerical profession should have reproduced itself in other lay subordinates, even in the parish clerks, at all times apt to copy their betters, though we would fain hope such was not the case with the parish clerk, " the jolly Absalom " of the Miller's Tale. The love of gold had corrupted the acknowledged chief guardians of incorruptible treasures, even though few may have avowed this love as openly as the " idle " Canon, whose Yeo- man had so strange a tale to tell to the Canterbury pilgrims con- cerning his master's absorbing devotion to the problem of the mul- tiplication of gold. To what a point the popular discontent with the vices of the higher secular clergy had advanced in the last decennium of the century, may be seen from the poem called the Co?nJ)laint of the Ploughman — a production pretending to be by the same hand which in the Vision had dwelt on the sufferings of the people and on the sinfulness of the ruling classes. Justly or unjustly, the indictment was brought against the priests of being the agents of every evil influence among the people, the soldiers of an army of which the true head was not God, but Behal. In earlier days the Church had known how to compensate the people for the secular clergy's neglect, or imperfect performance, of its duties. But in no respect had the ecclesiastical world more changed than in this. The older monastic Orders had long since lost themselves in unconcealed worldliness ; how, for instance, had the Benedictines changed their character since the remote times when their Order had been the principal agent in revivifying the religion of the land ! Now, they were taunted with their very name, as having been bestowed upon them "by antiphrasis," i.e., by con- traries. From many of their monasteries, and from the inmates who dwelt in these comfortable halls, had vanished even all pre- tence of disguise. Chaucer's Monk paid no attention to th^ rule of St. Benedict, and of his disciple St. Maur, " Because that it was old and somewhat strait ; " and preferred to fall in with the notions of later times. He was an "outrider, that loved venery," and whom his tastes and capabilities would have well qualified for the dignified post of abbot. He had "full many a dainty horse " in his stable, and the swiftest of grey- hounds to boot ; and rode forth gaily, clad in superfine furs and a hood elegantly fastened with a gold pin, and tied into a love-knot at the "greater-end," while the bridle of his steed jingled as if its rider had been as good a knight as any of them — thrs last, by the way, a mark of ostentation against which Wyclif takes occasion specially to inveigh. This Monk (and Chaucer must say that he was. wise in his generation) could not understand why he should 28 CHA UCER, study books and unhinge his mind by the effort ; life was not worth having at the price ; and no one knew better to what use to put the pleasing gift of existence. Hence mine host of the Tabard, a very competent critic, had reason for the opinion which he communi- cated to the Monk : — * It is a noble pasture where thou go'st ; Thou art not like a penitent or ghost' In the Orders of nuns, certain corresponding features were becom- ing usual. But httle in the way of religious guidance could fall to the lot of a sisterhood presided over by such a Prioress as Chaucer's Madame Eglantine, whose mind — possibly because her nunnery fulfilled the functions of a finishing school for young ladies — was mainly devoted to French and deportment, or by such a one as the historical Lady Juliana Berners, of a rather later date, whose leis- ure hours produced treatises on hunting and hawking, and who would probably have, on behalf of her own sex, echoed the Monk^s contempt for the prejudice against the participation of the Religious in field-sports : — " He gave not for his text a pulled hen That saith, that hunters be no holy men." On the other hand, neither did the Mendicant Orders, instituted at alater date purposely to supply what the older Orders, as well as the secular clergy, seemed to have grown incapable of furnishing, any longer satisfy the reason of their being. In the fourteenth century the Dominicans, or Black Friars, who at London dwelt in such magnificence that king and Parliament often preferred a so- journ with them to abiding at Westminster, had in general grown accustomed to concentrate their activity upon the spiritual direction of the higher classes. But though they counted among them Englishmen of eminence (one of these was Chaucer's friend, "the philosophical Strode "), they, in truth, never played a more than secondary part in this country, to whose soil the delicate machinery of the Inquisition, of which they were by choice the managers, was never congenial. Of far greater importance for the population of England at large was the Order of the Franciscans, or (as they were here wont to call themselves or to be called) Minorites or Grey Friars. To them the poor had habitually looked for domestic ministrations, and for the inspiring and consoling eloquence of the pulpit ; and they had carried their labours into the midst of the suffering population, not afraid of association with that poverty which they were by their vow themselves bound to espouse, or of contact with the horrors of leprosy and the plague. Departing from the short-sighted policy of their illustrious founder, they had become a learned as well as a ministering and preaching Order ; and it was precisely from among them that, at Oxford and else- where, sprang a succession of learned monks, whose names are in- separably connected with some of the earliest English growths of CHAUCEk. 29 philosophical speculation and scientific research. Nor is it pos- sible to doubt that in the middle of the thirteenth century the monks of this Order at Oxford had exercised an appreciable in- fluence upon the beginnings of a political struggle of unequalled importance for the progress of our constitutional life. But in the Franciscans also the fourteenth century witnessed a change, which may be described as a gradual loss of the qualities for which they had been honourably distinguished ; and in England, as elsewhere, the spirit of the words which Dante puts into the mouth of St. Francis of Assisi was being verified by his degenerate children : — "So soft is flesh of mortals, that on earth A good beginning doth no longer last Than while an oak may bring its fruit to birth. " Outwardly, indeed, the Grey Friars might still often seem what their predecessors had been, and might thus retain a powerful in- fluence over the unthinking crowd, and to sheer worldlings appear, as heretofore, to represent a troublesome rjiemento of unexciting religious obligations ; " Preach not/' says Chaucer's Host^ " . . .As friars do in Lent, That they for our old sins may make us weep, Nor in such wise thy tale make us to sleep." But in general men were beginning to suspect the motives as well as to deride the practices of the Friars, to accuse them of lying against St. Francis, and desiderate for them an actual abode of fire, resembling that of which, in their favourite religious shows, they were wont to present the mimic semblance to the multitude. It was they who became in England, as elsewhere, the purveyors of charms and the organisers of. pious frauds, while the learning for which their Order had been famous was withering away into the yellow leaf of scholasticism. The Friar in general became the common butt of literary satire ; and though the populace still re- mained true to its favourite guides, a reaction was taking place in favour of the secular as against the regular clergy in the sympathies of the higher classes, and in the spheres of society most open to intellectual influences. The monks and the London multitude were at one time united against John of Gaunt, but it was from the ranks of the secular clergy that Wyclif came forth to challenge the ascen- dency of Franciscan scholasticism in his university. Meanwhile the poet who in the Poor Parson of the Town paints his ideal of a Christian minister — simple, poor, and devoted to his holy work — • has nothing but contempt for the friars at large, and for the whole machinery worked by them, half effete, and half spasmodic, and altogether sham. In'King Arthur's time, says that accurate and un- prejudiced observer, the ^Wife of Bath, the land was filled with fairies — now it is filled with friars as thick as motes in the beam of the sun. Among them there is the Pardoner — i. e., seller of par- dions (indulgences) — with his *' haughty" sermons, delivered "by so CHAUCER. rote " to congregation after congregation in the self-same words, and everywhere accompanied by the self-same tricks of anecdotes and jokes — with his Papal credentials, and with the pardons he has brought from Rome "all hot" — and with precious relics to rejoice the hearts of the faithful, and to fill his own pockets with the pro- ceeds : to wit, a pillowcase covered with the veil of Our Lady, and a piece of the sail of the ship in which St. Peter went out fishing on the Lake of Gennesareth. This worthy, who lays bare his own motives with unparalleled cynical brutality, is manifestly drawn from the life; or the portrait could not have been accepted which was presented alike by Chaucer, and by his contemporary Langland, and (a century and a half later) in the plagiarism of the orthodox Catholic John Heywood. There, again, is the Liinitou7'^ a friar licensed to beg, and to hear confession and grant absolution, within the lijnits of a certain district. He is described by Chaucer with so much humour that one can hardly suspect much exaggeration in the sketch. In him we have the truly popular ecclesiastic who springs from the people, lives among the people, and feels with the people. He is the true friend of the poor, and being such, has, as one might say, his finger in every pie ; for "a iiy and a friar will fall in every dish and every business." His readily-proffered arbi- tration settles the differences of the humbler classes at the " love- days," a favourite popular practice noted already in the Vision of Langland ; nor is he a niggard of the mercies which he is privileged to dispense : — " Full sweetly did he hear confession, And pleasant was his absolution. He was an easy man to give penance, Whereso wist to have a good pittance ; For unto a poor Order for to give, Is signe that a man is well y-shrive ; For if he gave, he dufste make a vaunt He wiste that a man was repentant. For many a man so hard is of his heart He can not weep although he sorely smart. Therefore, instead of weeping and of prayers, Men must give silver to the poore Freres," Already in the French Roman de la Rose the rivalry between the Friars and the Parish Priests is the theme of much satire, evidently unfavourable to the former and favourable to the latter; but in England, where Langland likewise dwells upon the jeal- ousy between them, it was specially accentuated by the assaults of Wyclif upon the Mendicant Orders. Wychf s Simple Priests, who at first ministered with the approval of the Bishops, differed from the Mendicants— first, by not being beggars ; and, secondly, by being poor. They might, perhaps, have themselves ultimately played the part of a new Order in England, had not Wyclif himself, by reject- ing the cardinal dogma of the Church, severed these followers of his from its organism and brought about their suppression. The ques- tion as to Chaucer's own attitude towards the Wycliffite movement CHAUCER. 31 will be more conveniently touched upon below ; but the tone is un- mistakeable of the references or allusions to LoUardry which he oc- casionally introduces into the mouth of his Host, whose voice is that vox -populi which the upper and middle classes so often arrogate to themselves. Whatever those classes might desire, it was not to have "cockle sown " by unauthorised intruders " in the corn" of their ordinary instruction. Thus there is a tone of genuine at- tachment to the " vested interest " principle, and of aversion from all such interlopers as lay preachers and the like, in the Hosfs ex- clamation, uttered after the Reeve has been (in his own style)" ser- moning " on the topic of old age : — ■ " What availeth all this wit ? What .-* should we speak all day of Holy Writ ? The devil surely made a reeve to preach ; " for which he is as well suited as a cobbler would be for turning mariner or physician ! ■~ — Thus, then, in the England of Chaucer's days we find the Church still in possession of vast temporal wealth and of great power and privileges — as well as of means for enforcing unity of pro- fession which the legislation of the Lancastrian dynasty, stimulated by the prevailing fears of heresy, was still further to increase. On the other hand, we find the influence of the clergy over the minds of the people diminished, though not extinguished. This was, in the case of the higher secular clergy, partly attributable to their self-indulgence or neglect of their functions, partly to their having been largely superseded by the Regulars in the control of the relig- ious life of the people. The Orders we find no longer at the height of their influence, but still powerful by their wealth, their numbers, there traditional hold upon the lower classes, and their determina- tion to retain this hold even by habitually resorting to the most du- bious of methods. Lastly, we find in the lower secular clergy, and doubtless may also assume it to have lingered among some of the regular, some of the salt left whose savour consists in a single- minded and humble resolution to maintain the highest standard of a rehgious life. But such " clerks " as these are at no time the most easily found, because it is not they who are always, running " unto London, unto St. Paul's," on urgent private affairs. What wonder that the real teaching of Wychf, of which the full signifi- cance could hardly be understood but by a select few, should have virtually fallen dead upon his generation, to which the various agitations and agitators, often mingling ideas of religious reform with social and political grievances, seemed to be identical in char- acter and ahke to require suppression ! In truth, of course, these movements and their agents were often very different from one another in their ends, and were not to be suppressed by the same processes. It should not be forgotten that in tliis century learning was, though only very gradually, ceasing to be a possession of the clergy 32 CHAUCER. alone. Much doubt remains as to the extent of education — if a little reading and less writing deserve the name — among the higher classes in this period of our national life. A cheering sign appears in the circumstance that the legal deeds of this age begin to bear signatures, and a reference to John of Trevisa would bear out Hallam's conjecture, that in the year 1400 " the average instruction of an English gentleman of the first class would comprehend com- mon reading and writing, a considerable knowledge of French, and a slight tincture of Latin." Certain it is that in this century the barren teaching of the Universities advanced but little towards the true end of all academical teaching — the encouragement and spread of the highest forms of national culture. To what use could a gentleman of Edward III.'s or Richard 1 1. 's day have put the acquirements of a Cle7'k of Oxenford in Aristotelian logic, supplemented perhaps by a knowledge of Priscian, and the rhetori- cal works of Cicero ? Chaucer's scholar, however much his learned modesty of manner and sententious brevity of speech may commend him to our sympathy and taste, is a man wholly out of the world in which he lives, though a dependent on its charity even for the means with which to purchase more of his beloved books. Prob- ably no trustworthier conclusions as to the hterary learning and studies of those days are to be derived from any other source than from a comparison of the few catalogues of contemporary libraries remaining to us ; and these help to show that the century was ap- proaching its close before a few sparse rays of the first dawn of the Italian Renascence reached England. But this ray was com- municated neither through the clergy nor through the Universities ; and such influence as was exercised by it upon the national mind was directly due to profane poets— men of the world, who, like Chaucer, quoted authorities even more abundantly than they used them, and made some of their happiest discoveries after the fashion in which the Oxford Clerk came across Petrarch's Latin version of the story of Patient Grissel : as it were by accident. There is only too ample a justification for leaving aside the records of the history of learning in England during the latter half of the four- teenth century in any sketch of the main influences which in that period determined or affected the national progress. It was not by his theological learning that Wyclif was brought into living con- tact with the current of popular thought and feeling. The Univer- sities were thriving exceedingly on the scholastic glories of pre- vious ages ; but the ascendency was passing away to which Ox- ford, had attained over Paris — during the earlier middle ages, and again in the fifteenth century until the advent of the Renascence, the central university of Europe in the favourite study of scholastic philosophy and theology. But we must turn from particular classes and ranks of men to the whole body of the population, exclusively of that great section of it which unhappily lay outside the observation of any but a very few writers, whether poets or historians. In the people at large vve may, indeed, easily discern in this period the signs of an ad' CHAUCER. zz vance towards that seif-government which is the true foundation of our national greatness. But, on the other hand, it is impossible not to observe how, while the moral ideas of the people were still under the control of the Church, the State in its turn still ubiquitous- ly interfered in the settlement of the conditions of social existence, fixing prices, controlling personal expenditure, regulating wages. Not until England had fully attained to the character of a commer- cial country, which it was coming gradually to assume, did its inhab- itants begin to understand the value of that which has gradually come to distinguish ours among the nations of Europe, viz., the right of individual Englishmen, as well as of the English people, to manage their own affairs for themselves. This may help to ex- plain what can hardly fail to strike a reader of Chaucer and of the few contemporary remains of our literature. About our national hfe in this period, both in its virtues and in its vices, there is some- thing — it matters little whether we call it — childlike or childish ; in its " apert" if not in its " privy" sides it lacks the seriousness be- longing to men and to generations, w^ho have learnt to control them- selves, instead of relying on the control of others. In illustration of this assertion, appeal might be made to several of the most salient features in the social life of the period. The extravagant expenditure in dress, fostered by a love of pageantry of various kinds encouraged by both chivalry and the Church, has been already referred to ; it was by no means distinctive of anyone class of the population. Among the friars who went about preach- ing homilies on the people's favourite vices some humorous rogues may, like the Pardoner of the Canterbury Tales, have made a point of treating their own favorite vice as their one and un- changeable text : — " My theme is always one, and ever was : Radix vialorum est cupiditas. " But others preferred to dwell on specifically lay sins ; and these moralists occasionally attributed to the love of expenditure on dress the impoverishment of the kingdom, forgetting, in their ignor- ance of political economy and defiance of common sense, that this result was really due to the endless foreign wars. Yet, in contrast with the pomp and ceremony of life, upon which so great an amount of money and time and thought was wasted, are noticeable short- comings by no means uncommon in the case of undeveloped civil- isations (as, for instance, among the most typically childish or childlike nationalities of the Europe of our own day), viz., discom- fort and uncleanliness of all sorts.* To this may be added the ex- cessive fondness for sports and pastimes of all kinds, in which na- tions are aptest to indulge before or after the era of their highest efforts — the desire to make life one long holiday, dividing it be- tween tournaments and the dalliance of courts of love, or between archery-meetings (skilfully substituted by royal command for less useful exercises), and the seductive company of " tumblers," "fruiterers," and " waferers." Futhermore, one may notice in all 34 CHA UCER. Classes a far from eradicated inclination to superstitions of every kind — whether those encouraged or those discouraged * by the Church — an inclination unfortunately fostered rather than checked by the uncertain gropings of contemporary science. Hence, the credulous acceptance of relics like those sold by the Pardoner^ and of legends like those related to Chaucer's Pilgrims by the Prioress (one of the numerous repetitions of a cruel calumny against the Jews), and by the Second Nun (the supra-sensual story of Saint Cecilia). Hence, on the other hand, the greedy hunger for the marvels of astrology and alchemy, notwithstanding the growing scepticism even of members of a class represented by Chaucer's Franklin towards "... Such folly As in our days is not held worth a fly," and notwithstanding the exposure of fraud by repentant or sickened accomplices, such as the gold-making Canon'' s Yeofnan. Hence, again, the vitality of such quasi-scientific fancies as the magic mirror, of which miraculous instrument the Squire's "half-told story " describes a specimen, referring to the incontestable author- ity of Aristotle and others, who write " in their lives " concerning quaint mirrors and perspective glasses, as is well known to those who have " heard the books " of these sages. Hence, finally, the corresponding tendency to eschew the consideration of serious re- ligious questions, and to leave them to clerks, as if they were crabbed problems of theology. For, in truth, while the most fertile and fer- tilising ideas of the Middle Ages had exhausted, or were rapidly com- ing to exhaust, their influence upon the people, the forms of the doc- trines of the Church — even of the most stimulative as well as of the most solemn among them — had grown hard and stiff. To those who received, if not to those who taught, these doctrines they seemed alike lifeless, unless translated into the terms of the merest earthly tran- sactions or the language of purely human relations. And thus, par- adoxical as it might seem, cool-headed and conscientious rulers of the Church thought themselves on occasion called upon to restrain rather than to stimulate the religious ardour of the multitude — fed as the flame was by very various materials. Perhaps no more characteristic narrative has come down to us from the age of the poet of the Canterbufy Tales than the story of Bishop (afterwards Archbishop) Sudbury and the Canterbury Pilgrims. In the year 1370 the land was agitated through its length and breadth, on the occasion of the fourth jubilee of the national saint, Thomas the Martyr. The pilgrims were streaming in numbers along the famil- iar Kentish road, when, on the very vigil of the feast, one of their companies was accidentally met by the Bishop of London. They demanded hi'? blessing; but, to their astonishment and indignation, he seized the occasion to read a lesson to the crowd on the useless- * " For holy Church's faith, in our belief, SuSereth no illusion us to erieve." The Franklin's Tale. CHA UCER. 35 ness to unrepentant sinners of the plenary indulgeHces,£or the sake of which they were wending their way to the Martyr's shrine. The rage of the multitude found a mouthpiece in a soldier, who loudly upbraided the Bishop for stirring up the people against St. Thomas, and warned him that a shameful death would befall him in conse- quence. The multitude shouted Aineii — and one is left to wonder whether any of the pious pilgrims who resented Bishop Sudbury's manly truthfulness swelled the mob which eleven years later butchered " the plunderer," as it called him, " of the Commons." It is such ghmpses as this which show us how important the Church had become towards the people. Worse was to ensue before the better came ; in the mean time, the nation was in that stage of its existence when the innocence of the child was fast losing itself, without the self-control of the man having yet taken its place. But the heart of England was sound the while. The national spirit of enterprise was not dead in any class, from knight to ship- man ; and faithfulness and chastity in woman were still esteemed the highest though not the universal virtues of her sex. The value of such evidence as the mind of a great poet speaking in his works furnishes for a knowledge of the times to which he belongs is inestimable ; for it shows us what has survived, as well as what what was doomed to decay, in the life of the nation with which that mind was in sensitive sympathy. And it therefore seemed not in- appropriate to approach, in the first instance, from this point of view, the subject of this biographical essay — Chaucer, "the poet of the dawn : " for in him there are many things significant of the age of transition in which he lived ; in him the mixture of French- man and Englishman is still in a sense incomplete, as that of their language is in the diction of his poems. His gaiety of heart is hardly English ; nor is his willing (though, to be sure, not invari- ably unquestioning) acceptance of forms into the inner meaning of which he does not greatly vex his soul by entering; nor his airy way of ridiculing what he has no intention of helping to overthrow; nor his light unconcern in the question whether he is, or is not, an immoral writer. Or, at least, in all of these things he has no share in qualities and tendencies, which influences and conflicts unknown to and unforeseen by him may be safely said to have ulti- mately made characteristic of' Englishmen. But he is English in his freedom and frankness of spirit ; in his manliness of mind ; in his preference for the good in things as they are to the good in things as they might be ; in his loyalty, his piety, his truthfulness. Of the great movement which was to mould the national character for at least a long series of generations he displays no serious fore- knowledge ; and of the elements already preparing to affect the course of that movement he shows a very incomplete conscious- ness. But of the health and strength which, after struggles many and various, made that movement possible and made it victorious, he, more than any of his contemporaries, is the living type and the speaking witness. Thus, like the times to which he belongs, he stands half in and half out of the Middle Ages, half in half out of a 36 CHA UCER. phase of our national life, which we can never hope to understand more than partially and imperfectly. And it is this, taken together with the fact that he is the first English poet to read whom is to enjoy him, and that he garnished not only our language but our literature with blossoms still adorning them in vernal freshness—' which makes Chaucer's figure so unique a one in the gallery of our great English writers, and gives to his works an interest so inex- haustible for the historical as well as for the literary student. CHAUCER. 3y CHAPTER II. CHAUCER'S LIFE AND WORKS. Something has been already said as to the conflict of opinion concerning the period of Geotfrey Chaucer's birth, the precise date of which is very unlikely ever to be ascertained. A better fortune has attended the anxious enquiries which in his case, as in those of other great men, have been directed to the very secondary question of ancestry and descent — a question to which, in the ab- stract at all events, no man ever attached less importance than he. Although the name Chaucer is (according to Thynne) to be found on the lists of Battle Abbey, this no more proves that the poet himself came of " high parage," than the reverse is to be concluded from the nature of his coat-of-arms, which Speght thought must have been taken out of the 27th and 28th Propositions of the First Book of Euchd. Many a warrior of the Norman Conquest was known to his comrades only by the name of the trade which he had plied in some French or Flemish town, before he attached himself a volunteer to Duke William's holy and lucrative expedition ; and it is doubtful whether, even in the fourteenth century, the name Le Chaucer is, wherever it occurs in London, used as a surname, or whether, in some instances, it is not merely a designation of the owner's trade. Thus we should not be justified in assuming a French origin for the family from which Richard le Chaucer, whom we know to have been the poet's grandfather, was descended. Whether or not he was at any time a shoemaker [chazicier, maker of chausses), and accordingly belonged to a gentle craft otherwise not unassociated with the history of poetry, Richard was a citizen of London, and vintiier, like his son John after him, John Chaucer, whose wife's Christian name may be with a tolerable safety set down as Agnes, owned a house in Thames Street, London, not far from the arch on which modern pilgrims pass by rail to Canterbury or beyond, and in the neighbourhood of the great bridge, which in Chaucer's own day emptied its travellers on their errands, sacred or profane, into the great Southern road, the Via Appia of Eng- land, The house afterwards descended to John's son, Geoffrey, who released his right to it by deed in the year 1380. Chaucer's father was probably a man of some substance, the most usual per- sonal recommendation to great people in one of his class. For he was at least temporarily connected with the Court, inasmuch as he attended Kmg Edward II L and Queen Philippa on the memorable 38 CHA UCER. journey to Flanders and Germany, in the course of which the EngHsh monarch was proclaimed Vicar of the Holy Roman Em- pire on the left bank of the Rhine. John Chaucer died in 1366, and in course of time his widow married another citizen and vint- ner. Thomas Heyroun, John Chaucer's brother of the half-blood, was likewise a member of the same trade ; so that the young Geof- frey was certainly not brought up in an atmosphere of abstinence. The Host of the Canterbury Tales, though he takes his name from an actual personage, may therefore have in him .touches of a family portrait ; but Chaucer himself nowhere displays any traces of a hereditary devotion to Bacchus, and makes so experienced a prac- titioner as the Pardoner the mouthpiece of as witty an invective against drunkenness as has been uttered by any assailant of our existing licensing laws. Chaucer's own practice, as well as his opinion on this head, is sufficiently expressed in the characteristic words he puts into the mouth of Cressid : — " In everything, I wot, there lies measure : For though a man forbid all drunkenness, He biddeih not that every creature Be drinkless altogether, as I guess." Of Geoffrey Chaucer we know nothing whatever from the day of his birth (whenever it befell) to the year 1357. His earlier biog- raphers, who supposed him to have been born in 1328, had ac- cordingly a fair field open for conjecture and speculation. Here it must suffice to risk the asseveration that he cannot have accom- panied his father to Cologne in 1338, and on that occasion have been first " taken notice of" by king and queen, if he was not born till two or more years afterwards. If, on the other hand, he was born in 1328, both events 7nay have taken place. On neither supposi- tion is there any reason for believing that he studied at one — or at both — of our English Universities. The poem cannot be accepted as Chaucerian, the author of which (very possibly by a mere dra- matic assumption) declares : — " Philogenet I call'd am far and near, Of Cambridge clerk ; " nor can any weight be attached to the circumstance that the Clerk, who is one of the most delightful figures among the Canterbury Pilgrims, is an Oxonian. The enticing enquiry as to which of the sister Universities may claim Chaucer as her own must, therefore, be allowed to drop, together with the subsidiary question, whether stronger evidence of local colouring is furnished by the Miller's picture of the life of a poor scholar in lodgings at Oxford, or by the Reeve's rival narrative of the results of a Trumpington walk taken by two undergraduates of the " Solar Hall " at Cambridge. Equally baseless is the supposition of one of Chaucer's earliest biographers, that he completed his academical studies at Paris — and equally futile the concomitant fiction that in France " he acquired much ap* CHAUCER. 39 plause by his literary exercises." Finally, we have the tradition that he was a member of the Inner Temple— which is a conclusion deduced from a piece of genial scandal as to a record having been seen in that inn of a fine imposed upon him for beating a friar in Fleet Street. This story was early placed by Thynne on the horns of a sufiBciently decisive dilemma : in the days of Chaucer's youth, lawyers had not yet been admitted into the Temple ; and in the days of his maturity he is not very likely to have been found en- gaged in battery in a London thoroughfare. We now desert the region of groundless conjecture, in order, with the year 1357, to arrive at a firm though not very broad foot- ing of facts. In this year, " Geoffrey Chaucer " (whom it would be too great an effort of scepticism to suppose to have been merely a namesake of the poet) is mentioned in the Household Book of Eliz- abeth, Countess of Ulster, wife of Prince Lionel (third son of King Edward III., and afterwards Duke of Clarence), as a recipient of certain articles of apparel. Two similar notices of his name occur up to the year 1359. He is hence concluded to have belonged to Prince Lionel's establishment as squire or page to the Lady Eliza- beth ; and it was probably in the Prince's retinue that he took part m the expedition of King Edward III. into France, which began at the close of the year 1359 with the ineffectual siege of Rheims, and in the next year, after a futile attempt upon Paris, ended with the compromise of the Peace of Bretigny. In the course of this campaign Chaucer was taken prisoner ; but he was released with- out much loss of time, as appears by a document bearing date March ist, 1360, in which the King contributes the sum of 16/. for Chaucer's ransom. We may, therefore, conclude that he missed the march upon Paris, and the sufferings undergone by the English army on their road thence to Chartres — the most exciting experi- ences of an inglorious campaign ; and that he was actually set free by the Peace. When, in the year 1367, we next meet with his name in authentic records, his earliest known patron, the Lady Ehzabeth, is dead ; and he has passed out of the service of Prince Lionel into that of King Edward himself, as Valet of whose Chamber or household he receives a yearly salary for life of twenty marks, for his former and future services. Very possibly he had quitted Prince Lionel's service when, in 1361, that Prince had, by reason of his marriage with the heiress of Ulster, been appointed to the Irish government by his father, who was supposed at one time to have destined him for the Scottish throne. Concerning the doings of Chaucer in the interval between his liberation from his French captivity and the first notice of him as Valet of the King's Chamber we know nothing at all. During these years, however, no less important a personal event than his mar- riage was by earlier biographers supposed to have occurred. On the other hand, according to the view which commends itself to several eminent living commentators of the poet, it was not court- ship and marriage, but a hopeless and unrequited passion, which absorbed these years of his life. Certain stanzas in which, as they 40 CHA UCER. think, It*- gavo utterance to this passion are by them ascribed to one of these years ; so that, if their view were correct, the poem in question would have to be regarded as the earliest of his extant productions. The problem which we have indicated must detain us for a moment. It is attested by documentary evidence that in the year 1374 Chaucer had a wife by name Philippa, who had been in the service of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, and of his Duchess (doubt- less his second wife, Constance), as well as in that of his mother, the good Queen Philippa, and who on several occasions afterwards, besides special new-year's gifts of silver-gilt cups from the Duke, received her annual pension of ten marks through her husband. It is likewise proved that, in 1366, a pension of ten marks was granted to a Philippa Chaucer, one of the ladies of the Queen's Chamber. Obviously, it is a highly probable assumption that these two Phil- ippa Chancers were one and the same person ; but in the absence of any direct proof i,t is impossible to affirm as certain, or to deny as demonstrably untrue, that the Philippa Chaucer of 1366 owed her surname to marriage. Yet the view was long held, and is still maintained by writers of knowledge and insight, that the Philippa of 1366 was at that date Chaucer's wife. In or before that year he married, it was said, Philippa Roet, daughter of Sir Paon de Roet of Hainault, Guienne King of Arms, who came to England in Queen Philippa's retinue in 1328. This tradition derived special significance from the fact that another daughter of Sir Paon, Katha- rine, widow of Sir Hugh Swynford, was successively governess, mistress, and (third) wife to the Duke of Lancaster, to whose ser- vice both Geoffrey and Philippa Chaucer were at one time attached. It was apparently founded on the circumstance that Thomas Chaucer, the supposed son of the poet, quartered the Roet arms with his own. But unfortunately there is no evidence to show that Thomas Chaucer was a son of Geoffrey ; and the superstructure must needs vanish with its basis. It being then no longer indis- pensable to assume Chaucer to have been a married man in 1366, the Philippa Chaucer of that year may have been only a namesake, and possibly a relative, of Geoffrey ; for there were other Chancers in London besides him and his father (who died this year), and one Chaucer at least has been found who was well-to-do enough to have a Damsel of the Queen's Chamber for his daughter in these cer- tainly not very exclusive times. There is, accordingly, no proof that Chaucer was a married man before 1374, when he is known to have received a pension for his own and his wife's services. But with this negative result we are asked not to be poor-spirited enough to rest content. At the opening of his Book of the Duchess^ a poem certainly written towards the end of the year 1369, Chaucer makes use of certain ex- pressions, both very pathetic and very definite. The most obvious interpretation of the lines in question seems to be that they contain the confession of a hopeless passion, which has lasted for eight years — a confession which certainly seems to come more appropri- CHAUCER. 41 ately and more naturally from an unmarried than from a married man. " For eigiit years," he says, or seems to say, " I have loved, and loved in vain — and yet my cure is never the nearer. There is but one physician that can heal me — but all that is ended and done with. Let us pass on into fresh fields ; what cannot be obtained must needs be left." It seems impossible to interpret this passage (too long to cite in extenso) as a complaint of married life. Many other poets have, indeed, complained of their married lives, and Chaucer (if the view to be advanced below be correct) as emphatically as any. But though such occasional exclamations of impatience or regret — more especially when in a comic vein — may receive pardon, or even provoke amusement, yet a serious and sustained poetic ver- sion of Sterne's '■'■ su7n multum fatigatus de uxore i?iea " would be unbearable in any writer of self-respect, and wholly out of charac- ter in Chaucer. Even Byron only indited elegies about his married life after his wife had left him. Now, among Chaucer's minor poems is preserved one called the Complaint of the Death of Pity, which purports to set forth " how pity is dead and buried in a gentle heart," and, after testifying to a hopeless passion, ends with the following declaration, addressed to Pity, as in a "bill" or letter : — " This is to say : I will be yours for ever, Though ye me slay by Cruelty, your foe; Yet shall myspirit nevermore dissever From your service, for any pain or woe, Pity, whom I have sought so long ago ! Thus for your death I may well weep and plain, With heart all sore, and full of busy pain." If this poem be autobiographical, it would indisputably correspond well enough to a period in Chaucer's life, and to a mood of mind preceding those to which the introduction to the Book of the Duchess belongs. If it be not autobiographical— and in truth there is nothing to prove it such, so that an attempt lias been actually made to suggest its having been intended to apply to the e:?:pe- riences of another man — then tlie Cov2plaint of Pity has no special value for students of Chaucer, since its poetic beauty, as there can be no harm in observing, is not in itself very great. To come to an end of this topic, there seems no possibility of escaping from one of the following alternatives : Either the Philippa Chaucer of 1366 was Geoffrey Chaucer's wife, whether or not she was Philippa Roet before marriage, and the lament of 1369 had reference to another lad}^ — an assumption to be regretted in the case of a married man, but not out of the range of possibility. Or — and this seems, on the whole, the most proloable view — the Philippa Chaucer of 1366 was a namesake whom Geoffrey married some time after 1369 — possibly (of course only ;^(9j-j-/(^/j.') the very ladv whom he had loved hopelessly for eight years, and persuaded himself that he had at last relinquished, and who had then relented after all. This last conjecture it is certainly difficult to reconcile 42 CHA UCER witn the conclusion at which we arrive on other grounds, that Chaucer's married life was not one of preponderating bliss. That he and his wife were cousins is a pleasing thought, but one which is not made more pleasing by the seeming fact that, if they were so related, marriage in their case failed to draw close that hearts' bond which such kinship at times half unconsciously knits. Married or still a bachelor, Chaucer may fairly be supposed, during part of the years previous to that in which we find him securely established in the King's service, to have enjoyed a measure of independence and leisure open to few men in his rank of life, when once the golden days of youth and early manhood have passed away. Such years are in many men's lives marked by the projection, or even by the partial accomplishment, of hterary undertakings on a large scale, and more especially of such as partake of an imitative character. When a juvenile and facile writer's taste is still unsettled, and his own style is as yet unformed, he eagerly tries his hand at the reproduction of the work of others ; translates the Iliad or Faust, or suits himself with unsuspecting promptitude to the production of masques, or pastorals, or life dramas — or what- ever may be the prevailing fashion in poetry — after the manner of the favourite Hterary models of the day. A priori, therefore, everything is in favour of the belief hitherto universally entertained, that among Chaucer's earliest poetical productions was the extant English translation of the French Roman de la Rose. That he made some translation of this poem is a fact resting on his own statement in a passage indisputably written by him (in the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women} j nor is the value of this statement reduced by the negative circumstance, that in the extraordinary tag (if it may be called by so irreverent a name) to the extant Canter- bury Tales, the Ronaunt of the Rose is passed over in silence, or at least not nominally mentioned, among the objectionable works which the poet is there made to retract. And there seems at least no ne- cessity for giving in to the conclusion that Chaucer's translation has been lost, and was not that which has been hitherto accepted as his. For this conclusion is based upon the use of a formal test, which, in truth, need not be regarded as of itself absolutely decisive in any case, but which in this particular instance need not be held applicable at all. A particular rule against rhyming with one anotlier particular sounds, which in his later poems Chaucer seems invariably to have followed, need not have been observed by him in what was actually, or all but, his earliest. The unfinished „ state of the extant translation accords with the supposition that Chaucer broke it off on adopting (possibly after conference with Gower, who likewise observes -the rule) a more logical practice as to the point in question. Moreover no English translation of this poem besides Chaucer's is ever known to have existed. Whither should the youthful poet, when in search of materials on which to exercise a ready but as yet untrained hand, have so naturally turned as to French poetry, and in its domain whither so eagerly as to its universally acknowledged master-piece .'' French CHA UCER 43 verse was the delight of the Court, into the service of which he was about this time preparing permanently to enter, and with which he had been more or less connected from his boyhood. In French, Chaucer's contemporary Govver composed not only his first longer work, but not less than fifty ballads or sonnets ; and in French (as well as in English) Chaucer himself may have possibly in his youth set his own 'prentice hand to the turning of '-'•bal- lades, rondels, virelayes.^' The time had not yet arrived, though it M'as not far distant, when his English verse was to attest his ad- miration of Machault, whose fame Froissart and Froissart's imita- tions had brought across from the French Court to the English, and when Gransson, who served King Richard II. as a squire, was ex- tolled by his English adapter as the "flower of them that write in France." But as yet Chaucer's own tastes, his French blood, if he had any in his veins, and the familiarity with the French tongue which he had already had opportunities of acquiring, were more likely to commend to him productions of broader literary merits and a wider popularity. From these points of view, in the days of Chaucer's youth, there was no rival to the Roman de la Rose, one of those rare works on which the literary history of whole gener- ations and centuries may be said to hinge. The Middle Ages, in which, from various causes, the literary intercommunication be- tween the nations of Europe was in some respects far livelier than it has been in later times, witnessed the appearance of several such works — diverse in kind, but similar to one another in the univer- sality of their popularity : the Consolatio7i of Philosophy, the Divine Comedy, the Imitation of Christ, the Ro7nan de la Rose, the Ship of Fools. The favour enjo3"ed by the Roman de la Rose was in some ways the most extraordinary of all. In France, this work remained the dominant work of poetic literature, and " the source whence every rhymer drew for his needs "down to the period of the classical revival led by Ronsard (when it was edited by Clement Marot, Spenser's early model). In England, it ex- ercised an influence only inferior to that which belonged to it at home upon both the matter and the form of poetry down to the renascence begun by Surrey and Wyatt. This extraordinary lit- erary influence admits of a double explanation. But just as the authorship of the poem was very unequally divided between two personages, wholly divergent in their purposes as writers, so the popularity of the poem is probably in the main to be attributed to the second and later of the pair. To the trouvere Guillaume de Lorris (who took his name from a small town in the valley of the Loire) was due the original concep- tion of the Roman de la Rose, for which it is needless to suspect any extraneous source. To noveltv of subject he added great in- genuity of treatment. Instead of a narrative of warlike adventures he offered to his readers a psychological romance, in which a com- bination of symbolisations and personified abstractions supplied the characters of the moral conflict represented. Bestiaries and Lapidaries familiarised men's minds with the art of finding a H CHAUCER. symbolical significance in particular animals and stones ; and the language of poets was becoming a language of flowers. On the other hand, the personification of abstract qualities was a usage largely affected by the Latin writers of the earlier Middle Ages, and formed a favourite device of the monastic beginnings of the Christian drama. For both these literary fashions, which mild/y exercised the ingenuity while deeply gratifying the tastes of medi- aeval readers, room was easily found by Guillaume de Lorris within a framework in itself both appropriate and graceful. He told (as re- produced by his English translator) how in a dream he seemed to himself to wake up on a May morning. Sauntering forth, he came to a garden surrounded by a wall, on which were depicted many unkindly figures, such as Hate and Villainy, and Avarice and Old Age, and another thing / " That seemed like a hypocrite, / And it was clcped pope holy." Within, all seemed so delicious that, feeling ready to give an hundred pound for the chance of entering, he smote at a small wicket, and was admitted by a courteous maiden named Idleness. On the sward in the garden were dancing its owner. Sir Mirth, and a company of friends ; and by the side of Gladness the dreamer saw the God of Love and his attendant, a bachelor named Sweet- looking, who bore two bows, each with five arrows. Of these bows the one was straight and fair, and the other crooked and unsightly, and each of the arrows bore the name of some quality or emotion by which love is advanced or hindered. And as the dreamer was gazing into the spring of Narcissus (the imagination), he beheld a rose-tree "charged full of roses," and, becoming enamoured of one of them, eagerly advanced to pluck the object of his passion. In the midst of this attempt he was struck by arrow upon arrow,, shot " wonder smart " by Love from the strong bow. The arrow called Company completes the victory ; the dreaming poet becomes the Lover {'VAmaiit)^ and swears allegiance to the God of Love, who proceeds to instruct him in his laws ; and the real action (if it is to be called such) of the poem begins. Th^s consists in the Lover's desire to possess himself of the Rosebud, the opposition of- fered to him by powers both good and evil, and by Reason in par- ticular, and the support which he receives from more or less dis- cursive friends. Clearly, the conduct of such a scheme as this admits of being varied in many ways and protracted to any length ; but its first conception is easy and natural, and, when it was novel to boot, was neither commonplace nor ill-chosen. After writing about one-fifth of the 22,ooq verses of which the original French poem consists, Guillaume de Lorris, who had ex- ecuted his part of the task in full sympathy with the spirit of the chivalry of his times, died, and left the work to be continued by another trouvh'e, Jean de Meung (so-called from the town, near Lorris, in which he lived). " Hobbling John " took up the thread of his predecessor's poem in the spirit of a wit and an encyclopa^ CHAUCER. 45 dist. Indeed, the latter appellation suits him in both its special and its general sense. Beginning with a long dialogue between Reason and the Lover, he was equally anxious to display his free- dom of criticism and his universality of knowledge, both scientific aid anecdotical. His vein was pre-eminently satirical and abund- antly allusive ; and among the chief objects of his satire are the two fa\ourite themes of mediaeval satire in general, religious hypocrisy (po-sonified in Faux-Semblant, who has been described as one of tte ancestors of Tartuffe), and the foibles of women. To the gros: salt of Jean de Meung, even more than to the courtly per- fume of Guillaume de Lorris, may be ascribed the long-lived pop- ularit' of the Ro?nan de la Rose; and thus a work, of which already the tli-me and first conception imply a great step forwards from the previous range of mediseval poetry, becamera favourite with all classes by reason of the piquancy of its flavour, and the quotable applicaDility of many of its passages. Out of a chivalrous allegory Jean de Meung had made a poputar satire ; and though in its com- pleted foim it "could look for no welcome in many a court or castle — though Petrarch despised it, and Gerson, in the name of the Church, recorded a protest against it — and though a bevy of of- fended ladi>s had w^ll-nigh taken the law into their own hands against its author — yet it commanded a vast public of admirers. And against such a popularity even an offended clergy, though aided by the sneers of the fastidious and the vehemence of the fair, is wont to cor.tend in vain. Chaucer's \ranslation of this poem is thought to have been the cause which cilled forth from Eustace Deschamps, Machault's pupil and nepLew, the complimentary ballade in the refrain of which the Englishman is saluted as Giant translateur, noble Geffroi Chancier." But whether or not such was the case, his version of the Roman de la Rose seem^, 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 assertion that in one or the other of these are to be found the /ew passages thoug'it 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 occasion* ally helps himself to a. rhyme by retaining a French word. Occa- sionally 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 "sereyns " {sirhies) in France. On the other hand, his natural vivacity now and then suggests to him a turn of phrase or an illustration of his 46 CHAUCER. own. As a loyal English courtier he cannot compare a fair bach- elor 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 passed, he cannot lose the opportunity of inventing an Irish par entage 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 Rman of the Rose was considerable, and by no means confined t^ the favourite May-morning exordium and the recurring machinery of a vision — to the origin of which latter (the dream of Scipio lelated by Cicero and expounded in the widely-read Commentary o/ Mac- robius) the opening lines of the Rojnaimt point. He owe^! 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 passages liie that in which he afterwards, with further aid from other source j^ 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 us^ of all trans- lation, considered as an exercise of style. How far \k had already advanced in this respect, and how lightly our language was already moulding itself in his hands, may be seen from several passages in the poem ; for instance, from that about the middle, where the old and new theme of self-contradictoriness of love is treated in end- less variations. In short, Chaucer executed his task with facility, and frequently with grace, though, for one reasqh or another, he grew tired of it before he had carried it out with completeness. Yet the translation (and this may have been ^mons; the causes why he seems to have wearied of it) has, notwitl:^tanding, a certain air of schoolwork ; and though Chaucer's next, poem, to which in- contestable evidence assigns the date of the yejir 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 Ducheh. Among the passages of the French Roman- de la Rose omitted in Chaucer's translation are some containing critical reflexions on the character of kings and constituted authorities — a species of ob- servations which kings and constituted authorities have never been notorious for loving. This circumstance, together with the re- ference 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 dav he could nowhere else have enjoyed. In England as well as in Italy, during the fourteenth and the tivo following centuries, as the frequent recurrence of the notion attests, the ''good" CHAUCER. 4y 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 ilmost amusing to contrast with Chaucer's generally liberal notions tf manners, severe views of etiquette like that introduced bv him a. the close of the Mail of Law's Tale, where he stigmatises as a sdecism the statement of the author from whom he copied his nar- ratve, that King JEWa. sent his little boy to invite the emperor to dimer. " It is best to deem he went himself." The position which in June, 1367, we find Chaucer holding at Cout is that of " Valettus " to the King, on as a later document of May 1368, has it, of "Valettus Camera Regis "—Valet or Yeoman of tie King's Chamber. Posts of this kind, which involved the ordiniry functions of personal attendance— the making of beds, the holdiig of torches, the laying of tables, the going on messages, etc.— vere usually bestowed upon young men of good family. In due coirse 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 de- gree," hs 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, tide. Frequent entries occur of tlie pension or salary of twenty maii This, then, seems 'the appropriate place for briefly reviewmg 'ttie vexed question — /^^j Chaucer a Wycliffitef Apart from the character of the Parson and from the Parson's Tale, what is the nature of our evidence on the subject ? In the first place, nothing could be clearer than that Chaucer w^as a very free-spoken critic of the life of the clergy— more especially of the Regular clergy— of his times. In this character he comes before us from his transla- tion of the Roman de la Rose to the Parson's Tale itself, where he inveighs with significant earnestness against self-indulgence on the part of those who are Religious, or have "entered into Orders, as sub-deacon, or deacon, or priest, or hospitallers.". In the Cafi- terbury Tales, above all, his attacks upon the Friars run nearly the whole gamut of satire, stopping short, perhaps, before the note of CHAUCER. 89 high moral indignation. Moreover, as has been seen, his long connexion with John of Gaunt is a well-established fact ; and it has thence been concluded that Chaucer fully shared the opinions and tendencies represented by his patron. In the supposition that Chaucer approved of the countenance for a long lime shown by John of Gaunt to Wyclif there is nothing improbable ; neither, however, is there anything improbable in this other supposition, that, when the Duke of Lancaster openly washed his hands of tiie heretical tenets to the utterance of which Wyclif had advanced, Chaucer, together with the large majority of Englishmen, held with the politic duke rather than with the still unflinching Reformer. So long as Wyclif's movement consisted only of an opposition to ecclesiastical pretensions on the one liand, and of an attempt to revive religious sentiment on the other, half the country or more was Wycliffite, and Chaucer no doubt with the rest. But it would require positive evidence to justify the belief that from this feeling Chaucer ever passed to sympathy with Lollardry, in the vague but sufficiently intelligible sense attaching to that term in the latter part of Richard the Second's reign. Richard II. himself, whose patronage of Chaucer is certain, in the end attempted rigorously to suppress Lollardry ; and Henry IV., the politic Jolin of Gaunt's yet more politic son, to whom Chaucer owed the prosperity enjoyed by him in the last year of his life, became a persecutor almost as soon as he became a king. Though, then, from the whole tone, of his mind, Chaucer could not but sympatliise with the opponents of ecclesiastical domination — though, as a man of free and critical spirit, and of an inborn ability for penetrating beneath the surface, he could not but find subjects for endless blame and satire in the members of those Mendicant Orders in whom his chief patron's academical ally had recognised the most formidable obstacles to the spread of pure re- ligion — yet all this would not justify us in regarding him as person- ally a Wycliffite. Indeed, we might as well at once borrow the phraseology of a recent respectable critic, and set down Dan Chau- cer as a Puritan ! The policy of his patron tallied with the view which a fresh practical mind such as Chaucer's would naturally be disposed to take of the influence of monks and friars, or at least of those monks and friars whose vices and foibles were specially prominent in his eyes. There are various reasons why men op- pose established institutions in the season of their decay ; but a fourteenth-century satirist of the monks, or even of the clergy at large, was not necessarily a Lollard, any more than a nineteenth- century objector to doctors' drugs is necessarily a homoeopathist. But, it is argued by some, Chaucer has not only assailed the false ; he has likewise extolled the true. He has painted both sides of the contrast. On the one side are the Monk, the Friar, and the rest of their fellows ; on the other is the Poor Parson of a Town — a portrait, if not of Wychf himself, at all events of a Wycliffite priest ; and in the Tale or sermon put in the Parson's mouth are recognisable beneath the accumulations of interested editors some go CHA UCER. of the characteristic marks of Wycliffism. Who is not acquainted with the exquisite portrait in question ? — '* A good man was there of religion. And was a poore Parson of a town. But rich he was of holy thought and work. He was also a learned man, a cievk That Christes Gospel truly woulde preach; And his parishioners devoutly teach. Benign he was, and wondrous diligent, And in adversity full patient. And such he was y-proved ofte sithes. Full loth he was to curse men for his tithes ; But rather would he give, without doubt, Unto his poor parishioners about Of his off'ring and eke of his substance. He could in little wealth have sufifisancc. Wide was his parish, houses far asunder, Yet failed he not for either rain or thunder In sickness nor mischance to visit all The furthest in his parish, great and small, Upon his feet, and in his hand a staff. This noble ensample to his sheep he gave, That first he wrought, and afterwards he taught | Out of the Gospel he those wordes caught ; And this figure he added eke thereto, That ' if gold ruste, what shall iron do .?' For if a priest be foul, on whom we trust, No wonder is it if a layman rust ; And shame it is, if that a priest take keep, A foul shepherd to see and a clean sheep ; Well ought a priest ensample for to give By his cleanness, how that his sheep should lire. He put not out his benefice on hire, And left his sheep encumbered in the mire, And ran to London unto Sainte Paul's, To seek himself a chantery for souls. Or maintenance with a brotherhood to hold ; But dwelt at home, and kepte well his fold, So that the wolf ne'er made it to miscarry; He was a shepherd and no mercenary. And though he holy were, and virtuous, He was to sinful man not despitous, And of his speech nor difficult nor digne, But in his teaching discreet and benign. For to draw folk to heaven by fairness, By good ensample, this was his business : But were there any person obstinate, What so he were, of high or low estate, Him would he sharply snub at once. Than this A better priest, I trow, there nowhere is. He waited for no pomp and reverence. Nor made himself a spiced conscience ; But Christes lore and His Apostles' twelve -'He taught, but first he followed it himself." CHAUCER. gi The most striking features in this portrait are undoubtedly those which are characteristics of the good and humble working clergy- man of all times ; and some of these, accordingly, Goldsmith could appropriately borrow for his gentle poetic sketch of his parson- brother in " Sweet Auburn." But there are likewise points in the sketch which may be fairly described as specially distinctive of Wyclif's Simple Priests — though, as should be pointed out, these Priests could not themselves be designated parsons of towns. Among the latter features are the specially evangelical source of the Parson'' s learning and teaching; and his outward appearance — the wandering, staff in hand, which was specially noted in an archiepis- copal diatribe against these novel ministers of the people. Yet it seems unnecessary to conclude anything beyond this : that the feature which Chaucer desired above all to mark and insist upon in his Parson, was the poverty and humility which in him contrasted with the luxurious self-indulgence of the Monk, and the blatant insolence of the Pardoner. From this point of view it is obvious why the Parson is made brother to the Plotighma7i j for, in draw- ing the latter, Chaucer cannot have forgotten 'that other Ploughman whom Langland's poem had identified with Him for whose sake Chaucer's poor workman laboured for his poor neighbours, with the readiness always shown by the best of his class. Nor need this recognition of the dignity of the lowly surprise us in Chaucer, who had both sense of justice and sense of humour enough not to flatter one class at the expense of the rest, and who elsewhere (in the Manciple's Tale) very forcibly puts the truth that what in a great man is called a coiip d'etat is called by a much simpler name in a humbler fellow-sinner. But though, in the Parson of a Town, Chaucer may not have wished to paint a Wyclififite priest — still less a Lollard, under which designation so many varieties of malcontents, in addition to the followers of Wychf, were popularly included — yet his eyes and ears were open ; and he knew well enough what the world and its chil- dren are at a^l times apt to call those who are not ashamed of their rehgion, as well as those who make too conscious a profession of it. The world called them Lollards at the close of the fourteenth century, and it called them Puritans at the close of the sixteenth, and Methodists at the close of the eighteenth. Doubtless the vintners and the shipmen of Chaucer's day, the patrons and pur- veyors of the playhouse in Ben Jonson's, the fox-hunting squires and town wits of Cowper's, hke their successors after them, were not specially anxious to distinguish nicely between more or less abominable varieties of saintliness. Hence, when Master Harry Bailly's tremendous oaths produce the gentlest of protests from the Parson, the jovial Host incontinently " smells a Lollard in the wind," and predicts (with a further flow of expletives) that there is a sermon to follow. Whereupon the Shipjna?i protests not less characteristically : — ** * Nay, by my father's soul, that shall he not,' Saide the Shipman ; ' here shall he not preach : 92 CHAUCER. He shall no gospel here explain or teach. We all believe in the great God,' quoth he ; * He woulde sowe some difficulty, Or springe cockle in our cleane corn.' " * After each of the pilgrims except the Parson has told a tale (so that obviously Chaucer designed one of the divisions of his work to close with the Parson'' s), he is again called upon by the Host. Here- upon appealing to the undoubtedly evangelical and, it might without straining be said, Wycliffite authority of Timothy, he promises as his contribution a " merry tale in prose," which proves to consist of a moral discourse. In its extant form the Parson'' s Tale con- tains, by the side of much that might suitably have come from a Wycliffite teacher, much of a directly opposite nature. For not only is the necessity of certain sacramental usages to which Wyclif strongly objected insisted upon, but the spoliation of Church prop- erty is unctuously inveighed against as a species of one of the cardinal sins. No enquiry could satisfactorily establish how much of this was taken over or introduced into the Parson's Tale by Chaucer himself. But one would fain at least claim for him a passage in perfect harmony with the character drawn (:>ii\\t Parson in the Prologue — a passage (already cited in part in the opening section of the present essay) where the poet advocates the cause of the poor in words which, simple as they are, deserve to be quoted side by side with that immortal character itself. The con- cluding lines may therefore be cited here : — " Think also that of the same seed of which churls spring, of the same seed spring lords; as well may the churl be saved as the lord. Wherefore I counsel thee, do just so with thy churl as thou wouldest thy lord did with thee, if thou wert in his plight. A very sinful man is a churl as towards sin. I counsel thee certainly, thou lord, that thou work in such wise with thy churls that they rather love thee than dread thee. I know well, where there is degree above degree, it is reasonable that men should do their duty where it is due ; but of a certainty, extortions, and despite of our underlings, are damnable." In sum, \\\Q Parson's Tale cannot, any more than the character of the Parson in the Prologue., be interpreted as proving Chaucer to have been a Wycliffite. But the one as well as the other proves him to have perceived much of what was noblest in the WyclifSte movement, and much of what was ignoblest in the reception with which it met at the hands of worldlings — before, with the aid of the State, the Church finally succeeded in crushing it, to all appearance, out of existence. The Parson's Tale contains a few vigorous touches, in addition to the fine passage quoted, which make it difficult to deny that Chaucer's hand was concerned in it. The inconsistency between the religious learning ascribed to the Parson and a passage in the Tale, where the author leaves certain things to be settled by di» * The nickname Lollards was erroneously derived from lo.j.a (tares.) vines, will not be held of much account. The most probable con- jecture seems, therefore, to be that the discourse has come down to us in a mutilated form. This ?nay be due to the Tale having remained unfinished at the time of Chaucer's death ; in which case it would form last words of no unfitting kind. As for the actual last words of the Canterbiay Tales — the so-called Prayer of Chau- cer — it would be unbearable to have to accept them as genuine. For in these the poet, while praying for the forgiveness of sins, is made specially to entreat the Divine pardon for his "translations and inditing in worldly vanities," which he '' revokes in his retrac- tions." These include, besides the Book of the Leo (doubtless a translation or adaptation from Machault) and many other books which the writer forgets, and " many a song and many a lecherous lay," all the principal poetical works of Chaucer (with the excep- tion of the Ro7naunt of the Rose) discussed in this essay. On the other hand, he offers thanks for having had the grace given him to compose his translation of Bcelhius and other moral and devo- tional works. There is, to be sure, no actual evidence to decide in either way tho question as to the genuineness of this Prayer^ which is entirely one of internal probability. Those who will may believe that the monks, who were the landlords of Chaucer's house at Westminster, had in one way or the other obtained a controlling mfiuence over his mind. Stranger things than this have happened ; but one prefers to believe that the poet of the Canterbury Tales remained master of himself to the last. He had written much which a dying man might regret; hut it would he sad to have to think that "because of humility," he bore false witness at the last against an immortal part of himself — his poetic genius. 94 CHAUCER. CHAPTER III. CHARACTERISTICS OF CHAUCER AND OF HIS POETRY. Thus, then, Chaucer had passed away — whether in good or in evil odour with the powerful interest with which John of Gaunt's son had entered into his unwritten concordate, after all, matters but little now. He is no dim shadow to us, even in his outward presence ; for we possess sufficient materials from which to picture to ourselves with good assurance what manner of man he was. Occleve painted from memory, on the margin of one of his own works, a portrait of his " worthy master," over against a passage in which, after praying the Blessed Virgin to intercede for the eternal happiness of one who had written so much in her honour, he proceeds as follows : — " Althougli his life be quenched, the resemblance Of him hath in me so fresh liveliness, That to put other men in re'membrance Of his person I have here his likeness Made, to this end in very soothfastness, That they that have of him lost thought and mind May by the painting here again him find." In this portrait, in which the experienced eye of Sir Harris Nicolas sees " incomparably the best portrait of Chaucer yet discovered," he appears as an elderly rather than aged man, clad in dark gown and hood — the latter of the fashion so familiar to us from this very picture, and from the well-known one of Chaucer's last patron, King Henry IV. His attitude in this likeness is that of a quiet talker, with downcast eyes, but sufficiently erect bearing of body. One arm is extended, and seems to be gently pointing some ob- servation which has just issued from the poet's lips. The other holds a rosary, which may be significant of the piety attributed to Chaucer by Occleve, or may be a mere ordinary accompaniment of conversation, as it is in parts of Greece to the present day. The features are mild but expressive, with just a suspicion — certainly no more — of saturnine or sarcastic humour. The lips are full, and the nose is what is called good by the Itcirned in such matters. Several other early portraits of Chaucer exist, all of which are stated to bear much resemblance to one anothei". Among them iy CHAUCER. 95 one in an early if not contemporary copy of Occleve's poems, full- length, and superscribed by the hand which wrote the manuscript. In another, which is extremely quaint, he appears on horseback, in commemoration of his ride to Canterbury, and is represented as short of stature, in accordance with the description of himself in the Canterbury Tales. For, as it fortunately happens, he has drawn his likeness for us with his own hand, as he appeared on the occasion to that most free-spoken of observers and most personal of critics, the host of the Tabard, the " cock " and marshal of the company of pilgrims. The fellow-travellers had just been wonderfully sobered fas well they might be) by the piteous tale of the Prioress concerning the little clergy-boy — how, after the wicked Jews had cut his throat be- cause he ever sang O Abjia Redeniptoris^ and had cast him into a pit, he was found there by his mother loudly giving forth the hymn in honour of the Blessed Virgin which he had loved so well. Mas- ter Harry Bailly was, as m duty bound, the first to interrupt by a string of jests the silence which had ensued : — " And then at first he looked upon me, And saide thus : ' What man art thou ? ' quoth he ; 'Thou lookest as thou wouldest find a hare, For ever upon the ground I see thee stare. Approach more near, and looke merrily! Now 'ware you, sirs, and let this man have space. He in the waist is shaped as well as I ; This were a puppet in an arm to embrace For any woman, small and fair of face. He seemeth elfish by his countenance. For unto no wight doth he dalliance.' " From this passage we may gather, not only that Chaucer was, as the Host of the Tabard's transparent self-irony implies, small of stature and slender, but that he was accustomed to be twitted on account of the abstracted or absent look which so often tempts children of the world to offer its wearer a penny for his thoughts. For " elfish " means bewitched by the elves, and hence vacant or absent in demeanour. It is thus, with a few modest but manifestly truthful touches, that Chaucer, after the manner of certain great painters, introduces his own figure into a quiet corner of his crowded canvas. But mere outward likeness is of little moment, and it is a more inter- esting enquiry whether there are any personal characteristics of another sort, which it is possible with safety to ascribe to him, and which must be, in a greater or less degree, connected with the dis- tinctive qualities of his hterary genius ; for in truth it is but a sorry makeshift of literary biographers to seek to divide a man who is an author into two separate beings, in order to avoid the conversely fallacious procedure of accounting for everything which an author has written by something which the man has done or been inclined to do. What true poet has sought to hide, or succeeded in hiding, (J 6 CHA UCER. his moral nature from his muse ? None in the entire band, from Petrarch to Villon, and least of all the poet whose song, like so much of Chaucer's, seems freshly derived from Nature's own in- spiration. One very pleasing quality in Chaucer must have been his mod- esty. In the course of his life this may have helped to recommend him to patrons so many and so various, and to make him the useful and trustworthy agent that he evidently became for confiden- tial missions abroad. Physically, as has been seen, he represents himself as prone to the habit of casting his eyes on the ground ; and we may feel tolerably sure that to this external manner corre- sponded a quiet, observant disposition, such as that which may be held to have distinguished the greatest of Chaucer's successors among English poets. To us, of course, this quality of modesty in Chaucer makes itself principally manifest in the opinion which he incidentally shows himself to entertain concerning his own rank and claims as an author. Herein, as in many other points, a con- trast is noticeable between him and the great Italian masters, who were so sensitive as to the esteem in which they and their poetry were held.- Who could fancy Chaucer crowned with laurel, like Petrarch, or even, like Dante, speaking with proud humility of "the beautiful style that has done honour to him," while acknowl- edging his obligation for it to a great predecessor ? Chaucer again and again disclaims all boasts of perfection, or pretensions to pre- eminence, as a poet. His Canterbury Pilgrims have in his name to disavow, like Persius, having slept on Mount Parnassus, or pos- sessing "rhetoric" enough to describe a heroine's beauty ; and he openly allows that his spirit grows dull as he grows older, and that he finds a difficulty as a translator in matching his rhymes to his French original. He acknowledges as incontestable the superiority of the poets of classical antiquity : — "... Little book, no writing thou envy, But subject to be all true poesy, And kiss the steps, where'er thou seest space Of Virgil, Ovid, Homer, Lucan, Stace."* But more than this. In the House of Fame he expressly declaims having in his light and imperfect verse sought to pretend to "mas- tery " in the art poetical ; and in a charmingly expressed passage of \}(\Q. Prologue \.Q> \\\^Legend of Good Women he describes himself as merely following in the wake of those who have already reaped the harvest of amorous song and have carried away the corn : — "And I come after, gleaning here and there, And am full glad if I can find an ear Of any goodly word that ye have left." Modesty of this stamp is perfectly compatible with a certain self- consciousness which is hardly ever absent from greatness, and * Statius. CHAUCER. 97 which at all events supplies a stimulus not easily dispensed with except by sustained effort on the part of a poet. The two qualities seem naturally to combine into that self-containedness (very differ- ent from self-contentedness) which distinguishes Chaucer, and which helps to give to his writings a manliness of tone, the direct opposite of the irretentive querulousness found in so great a num- ber of poets in all times. He cannot, indeed, be said to maintain an absolute reserve concerning himself and his affairs in his writ- ings; but as he grows older, he seems to become less and less in- clined to take the public into his confidence, or to speak of himself except in a pleasantly light and incidental fashion. And in the same spirit he seems, without ever folding his hands in his lap, or ceasing to be a busy man and an assiduous author, to have grown in- different to the lack of brilliant success in life, whether as a man of letters or otherwise. So at least one seems justified in interpret- ing a remarkable passage in the House of Fame, the poem in which perhaps, Chaucer allows us to see more deeply into his mind than in any other. After surveying the various company of those who had come as suitors for the favours of Fame, he tells us how it seemed to him (in his long December dream) that some one spoke to him in a kindly way, *' And saide : ' Friend, what is thy name ? Art thou come hither to have fame .-* ' ' Nay, forsoothe, friend ! ' quoth I ; ' I came not hither (grand merci !) For no such cause, by my head ! Sufficeth me, as I were dead, That no wight have my name in hand. I wot myself best how I stand ; For what I suffer, or what I think, I will myselfe all it drink. Or at least the greater part As far forth as I know my art. ' " With this modest and manly self-possession we shall not go far wrong in connecting what seems another very distinctly marked feature of Chaucer's inner nature. He seems to have arrived at a clear recognition of the truth with which Goethe humorously com- forted Eckermann in the shape of the proverbial saying, "Care has been taken that the trees shall not grow into the sky." Chaucer's, there is every reason to believe was a contented faith, as far re- moved from self-torturing unrest as from childish credulity. Hence his refusal to trouble himself, now that he has arrived at a good age, with original research as to the constellations. (The passage is all the more significant since Chaucer, as has been seen, actually possessed a very respectable knowledge of astronomy). That winged encyclopaedia, the Eagle, has just been regretting the poet's unwillingness to learn the position of the Great and the Little Bear, Castor and Pollux, and the rest, concerning which at present he does not know where they stand. But he replies, " No matter ! 98 CHAUCER. " *. . . It is no need ; I trust as well (so God me speed !) Them that write of this matter, As though I knew their places there.' " Moreover, he says (probably without implying any special allegori- cal meaning), they seem so bright that it would destroy my eyes to look upon them. Personal inspection, in his opinion, was not ne- cessary for a faith which at some times may, and at others must, take the place of knowledge ; for we find him, at the opening of the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women., in a passage the tone of which should not be taken to imply less than its words express, writing as follows : — "A thousand times I have heard men tell, That there is joy in heaven, and pain in hell ; And I accorde well that it is so. But natheless, yet wot I well also, That there is none doth in this country dwell That either hath in heaven been or hell, Or any other way could of it know, But that he heard, or found it written so, For by assay may no man proof receive. But God forbid that men should not believe More things than they have ever seen with eye Men shall not fancy everything a lie Unless themselves it see, or else it do; For, God wot, not the less a thing is true, Though every wight may not it chance to see." The central thought of these lines, though it afterwards receives a narrower and more commonplace application, is no other than that which has been so splendidly expressed by Spenser in the couplet : — " Why then should witless man so much misween That nothing is but that which he hath seen ?" The negative result produced in Chaucer's mind by this firm but placid way of regarding matters of faith was a distrust of astrology, alchemy, and all the superstitions which in the Parson'' s Tale are noticed as condemned by the Church. This distrust on Chaucer's part requires no further illustration after what has been said elsewhere ; it would have been well for his age if all its children had been as clear-sighted in these matters as he, to whom the practices connected with these delusive sciences seemed, and justly so from his point of view, no less impious than futile. His Cafion Veo7nan's Tale, a story of imposture so vividly dramatic in its catastrophe as to have suggested to Ben Jonson one of the most effective passages in his comedy The Alchemist, concludes with a moral of unmistakeable solemnity against the sinfulness, as well as uselessness, of " multiplying " (making gold by the arts of alchemy) : — CHAUCER. 99 "... Whoso maketh God his adversary, As for to work anything in contrary Unto His will, ccr'tes ne'er shall he thrive, Though that he multiply through all his life." But equally unmistakeable is the /^jzVzV^ side of this frame of mind in such a passage as the following — which is one of those belong- ing to Chaucer himself, and not taken from his French original — in The Man of Law's Tale. The narrator is speaking of the voyage of Constance, after her escape from the massacre in which, at a feast, all her fellow-Christians had been killed, and of how she was borae by the " wild wave " from " Surrey " (Syria) to the Northum- brian shore : " Here men might aske, why she was not slain ? Eke at the feast who might her body save 'i And I answere that demand again : "Who saved Daniel in th' horrible cave. When every wight save him, master or knave, The lion ate — before he could depart.? No wight but God, whom he bare in his heart." " In her," he continues, " God desired to show His miraculous power, so that we should see His mighty works ; for Christ, in whom we have a remedy for every ill, often by means of His own does things for ends of His own, which are obscure to the wit of man, incapable, by reason of our ignorance, of understanding His wise providence. But since Constance was not slain at the feast, it might be asked : Who kept her from drowning in the sea ? Who, then, kept Jonas in the belly of the whale till he was spouted up at Ninive ? Well do we know it was no one but He who kept the Hebrew people from drowning in the w^aters, and made them to pass through the sea with dry feet. Who bade the four spirits of the tempest, which have the power to trouble land and sea, north and south, and west and east, vex neither sea nor land nor the trees that grow on it ? Truly these things were ordered by Him who kept this woman safe from the tempest, as well when she awoke as wdien she slept. But whence might this woman have meat and drink, and how could her sustenance last out to her for three years and more ? Who, then, fed Saint Mary the Egyptian in the cavern or in the desert ? Assuredly no one but Christ. It was a great miracle to feed five thousand folk with five loaves and two fishes; but God in their great need sent to them abundance." As to the sentiments and opinions of Chaucer, then, on matters such as these, we can entertain no reasonable doubt. But we are altogether too ill acquainted with the details of his personal life, and with the motives which contributed to determine its course, to be able to arrive at any valid conclusions as to the way in which his principles affected his conduct. Enough has been already said concerning the attitude seemingly observed by him towards the great public questions, and the great historical events, of his day. lOo CHAUCER. If he had strong political opinions of his own, or strong personal views on questions either of ecclesiastical policy or of religious doctrine — in which assumptions there seems nothmg probable — he, at all events, did not wear his heart on his sleeve, or use his poe- try, allegorical or otherwise, as a vehicle of his wishes, hopes, or fears on these heads. The true breath of freedom could hardly be expected to blow through the precincts of a Plantagenet court. It Chaucer could write the pretty lines in the Manciple's Tale about the caged bird and its uncontrollable desire for liberty, his contem- porary Barbour could apostrophise Freedom itself as a noble thing, in words the simple manliness of which stirs the blood after a very different fashion. Concerning his domestic relations, we may re- gard it as virtually certain that he was unhappy as a husband, though tender and affectionate as a father. Considering how vast a proportion of the satire of all times — but more especially that of the Middle Ages, and in these again pre-eminently of the period of European Hterature which took its tone from Jean de Meung — is directed against woman and against married life, it would be diffi- cult to decide how much of the irony, sarcasm, and fun lavished by Chaucer on these themes is due to a fashion with which he readily fell in, and how much to the impulse of personal feehng. A per- fect anthology, or perhaps one should rather say, a complete her- barium, might be collected from his works of samples of these attacks on women. He has manifestly make a careful study of their ways, with which he now and then betrays that curiously intimate acquaintance to which we are accustomed in a Richardson or a Balzac. How accurate are such incidental remarks as this, that women are "full measurable " in such matters as sleep — not caring for so much of it at a time as men do ! How wonderfully natural is the description of Cressid's bevy of lady-visitors, attracted by the news that she is shortly to be surrendered to the Greeks, and of the " nice vanity " — i. e., foolish emptiness— of their con- solatory gossip. "As men see in town, and all about, that women are accustomed to visit their friends," so a swarm of ladies came to Cressid, " and sat themselves down, and said as I shall tell. ' I am delighted,' says one, ' that you will so soon see your father.' ' In- deed I am not so delighted,' says another, 'for we have not seen half enough of her since she has been at Troy.' ' I do hope,' quoth the third, ' that she will bring us back peace with her ; in which case may Almighty God guide her on her departure.' And Cressid heard these words and womanish things as if she were far away ; for she was burning all the time with another passion than anyof which they knew ; so that she almost felt her heart die for woe, and for weariness of that company." But his satire against women is rarely so innocent as this ; and though several ladies take part in the Canterbury Pilgrimage, yet pilgrim after pilgrim has his saw or jest against their sex. The courteous Ktiight cannot refrain from the generalisation that women all follow the favour of fortune. The Sttmmoner, who is of a less scrupulous sort, introduces a dia- tribe against women's passionate love of vengeance ; and the Ship- CHAUCER. loi maji seasons a story which requires no such addition by an enu- meration c^ their favourite foibles. But the climax is reached in the confessions of the Wife of Bath, who quite unhesitatingly says that women are best won by flattery and busy attentions ; that when won they desire to have the sovereignty over their husbands, and that they tell untruths and swear to them with twice the bold- ness of men; while as to the power of their tongue, she quotes the second-hand authority of her fifth husband for the saying that it is better to dwell with a lion or a foul dragon than with a woman ac- customed to chide. It is true that this same IVife of Bath dXso observes with an effective tu qtiOjice : " By God, if women had but written stories, As clerkes have within their oratories, They would have writ of men more wickedness Than all the race of Adam may redress ; " and the Lege7td of Good Women seems, in point of fact, to have been intended to offer some such kind of amends as is here de- clared 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 tl a" among the Ca7i- terbury Tales the two which are of their kind the most effective constitute 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 Merchaitt and the Shipman may indulge in facetious or coarse jibes against wives and their behaviour ; but the Man jf Law., full of grave experience of the world, is a witness above suspicion to the womanly virtue of which his narrative celebrates so illustrious 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 im- memorial 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 assured, one of that nu* 102 CHAUCER. merous class which in his day, as it does in ours, composed the population of the land of Philistia — the persons so well defined by Scottish poet, Sir David Lyndsay (himself a courtier of the the noblest type) : — " Who fixed have their hearts and whole intents On sensual lust, on dignit}^, and rents." Doubtless Chaucer was a man of practical good sense, desirous of suitable employment and of a sufficient income ; nor can we sup- pose him to have been one of those who looks 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 more out- ward circumstances, 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 re- peating 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 passages is that in the Wife of B aM s Tale^ which follows the round assertion that the " arrogance " against which it protests is not worth a hen : and which is followed by an appeal to a parallel passage 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 God 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 passage in Canto viii. of the Pur gator io 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 Englanh is a mightier man than was his father Henry III. Chaucej has ingeniously, though not altogether legitimately, pressed the passage into his service. CHAUCER. 103 But the still ignobler 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 Complamt 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 fashion 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 pardon- able peccadillo in a poet, receives his emphatic condemnation. It would be hazardous to assert of him, as Herrick asserted of himself, that though his " Muse was jocund, his life was chaste ; " inasmuch as his name occurs in one unfortunate connection full of suspicious- ness. 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 dissi- pation. In the first place, he seems to have been a passionate 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 Duchess, he tells us how he preferred to drive away a night rendered sleepless through melan- choly thoughts, by means of a book, which he thought better enter- tainment than a game either at chess or at " tables." This passion lasted longer with him than the other passion which it had helped to allay ; for in the sequel to the well known passage in the House of Fa77te, already cited, he gives us a glimpse of himself at home, absorbed in his favourite pursuit : — " Thou go' St home to thy house anoi 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 he 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 illustrated 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 Bo- I04 CHAUCER. ethius's famous mannal 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 th.e 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 l)y one of his most eminent commentators, than many people read Chaucer's 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 shp or two in quotation of a kind not unusual with those who quote what they have not previously read. His T7'oilus 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, in- deed, it must in general be conceded that, if Chaucer had read much, he lays claim to having read more ; for he not only occasion- ally 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 acquired a 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 literature 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 admis- sion among his genuine works. At the same time, the influence of the Ro7nan 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 assimilate 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 adapta- tion of particular poems, but more especially in the use made of inci- dental passages and details. In this way his debts to Dante were especially numerous ; and it is curious to find proofs so abundant CHAUCER. 105 of Chaucer's relatively close study of a poet with whose genius his own had so few points in common. Notwithstanding first appear- ances, 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 passage, compared the strength of the one and of the other of his predilections : — " And as for me, though I have knowledge sHght, In bookes for to read I me deHght, 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 be- ginning liis 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 for- lorn 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 IVomen, 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 ever become more fully known than it is at present ; nor is there anytiiing 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 pas- sion, nature was his chief joy and solace ; while his genius enabled Io6 CHAUCER. 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 re- minds us of his own fresh Canace, whom he describes as looking so full of happiness during her walk through the wood at sun- rise :— " 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 noth- ing 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 sud- den, and perhaps as few poets as other men, though it may be her- esy 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 circumstances 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 pre- cursor of the creative, partly by the influence of prevaihng tastes and the absence of native English literary predecessors whom, con- sidering the circumstances of his life and the nature of his tempera- ment, he could have found it a congenial task to follow. French poems were, accordingly, his earliest models ; but fortunately (un- like 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 classes for which he in the first instance v/rote, and thus to confer upon our tongue the great benefit which it owes to him. Agaiurmost fortunately, others had already pointed the way to the selection for literary use of that Enghsh dialect which was probably the most suitable for the purpose ; and Chaucer, as a Southern man (like \\\s, Parson of a Town), belonged to a part of the country where the old alliterative verse had long since been discarded for classical and romance forms of versification. Thus the Roinaunt of the Ross most suitably opens his hterary life — a translation in which there is nothing original except an occasional turn of phrase, but in which the translator finds oppor- tunity for exercising his powers of judgment by virtually re-edit- ing the work before him. And already in the Book of the Duchess, CHAUCER. 107 though most unmistakeably a follower of Machault, he is also the rival of the great P'rench trotcvhre, 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 imi- tating, or encouraged him freely to invent. In Trolius and Crcssid he produced something very different from a mere condensed trans- lation, and achieved a work in which he showed himself a master of poetic expression and sustained narrative ; in the House of Fame and the AssE/jibly of Fowls he moved with freedom in hap- pily contrived allegories of his own invention ; and with the Legend of Good Wo-)icn lis 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 labor incidentally devoted by him to translation from the Latin, or to the composition of prose treatises in the schol- astic manner of academical exercises, could but little affect his gen- eral 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 assert its modest claims at any season; and thus Chaucer's school-learning exercised little influence either of an advan'^ing or of a retarding kind upon the full development of his genius. Nowhere is lu so truly himself as in the masterpiece of his last years. P^or the Cante?'bu?y 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 labor 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 ail reasonable theories as to the chronology and sequence, where these remain more or less un- settled, of Chaucer's indisputably genuine works. In any case, there is no poet whom, if only as an exercise in critical analysis, it is more interesting to study and re-study in connexion with the circumstances of his literary progress. He still, as has been seen, belongs to the Middle Ages, but to a period in which the noblest ideals of these Middle Ages are already beginning to pale and their mightiest institutions to quake around him ; in which learning continues to be in the main sciiolasticism, the linking of argument with argument, and tlie accumulation 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 associations belonging to his own times with others derived from other ages. This want of io8 CHAUCER. 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 classical and Biblical antiquity as real- ities, and not merely as a succession of pictures or of tapestries on a wall. Chaucer mingles things mediaeval and things classical 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 Ferrers 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 " /(X vostre 7"." and '•'■la vostre C.'''' Anachronisms of this kind . (of the danger of which, by the way, to judge from a passage 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 nar-. ratives 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, com- bined 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 play-wrights, 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 Franklht's Tale, to the sanctity 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 passes 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 im- presses 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 w^z/* should be understood in literary criticism is so imperfectly agreed upon among us, that we have not yet even found an English equivalent foi the word. CHAUCER. 109 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 con- nexion, 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 con- ception, broad in bearing, finished in form. There still remain, for summary review, the elements proper to his own poetic indi- viduahty — 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 popu- lar, 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 impressionable, the most receptive species of humankind, live, in a sense, with a.nd/or his generation. To meet this demand upon his genius, Chaucer was born with many gifts which he carefully and assiduously exercised in a long series of poetical experiments, and which he was able felicitously 'to combine for the achievements of results unprecedented in our literature. In readi- ness of descriptive power, in brightness and variety of imagery, and in flow of diction, Chaucer remained unequalled by any Eng- lish poet, till he was surpassed — it seems not too much to say, in all three respects — by Spenser. His verse, where it suits his pur- pose, 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 Assembly 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 or the preparations for the tournament and of the tournament itself in the Kiiighfs Tale, or to the thoroughly Dutch picture of a dis- turbance in a farm-yard in the Nu7t's Priesfs. The vividness with which Chaucer describes scenes and events as if he had them be- fore 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 multitudinous 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 nar- ratives with the aid of chivalrous love or religious legend, by the introduction of samples of scholastie discourse or devices of per- 1 1 o CHA UCER. sonal or general allegory. He commands, where necessary, a rhetorician's readiness of illustration, and a masque-writer's inven- tivness, as to m_achinery; he can even (in the House of Fame) conjure up an elaborate but self-consistent phantasraagory 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 assertion 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 Drj^den's condescending mixture of cen- sure 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 judg- ment, 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, hov/ever, 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 substan- tives (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 be- ginning with vowels or with the letter h. These and other variations from later usage in spelling and pronunciation — such as the occurrence of an e (sometimes sounded and some- times not) at the end of words in which it is now no longer retained, and, again, the fre- quent accentuation of many words of French origin in their last syllable, as in French, and of certain words of English origin analogously — 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 s]ieliing and pronunciation-— 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 uni- form 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 wxiting of our tongue, I pray to God 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, God 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 substitution, for the first foot of a line either of four or 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, CIIA UCKR. r 1 1 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 har- monies of Mr. Tennyson's later verse remain obscure ; so that, taken in this way, the most musical of English verse may seem as diffi- cult 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 passages the music of which cannot escape any ear, however unaccustomed it may be to his diction and versifica- tion. What is the nature of the art at whose bidding ten monosyl- lables 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 surpassing in their melancholy charm Chaucer's version of the lament of Medea when deserted by Jason — a passage which makes the reader neglectful of the Enghsh 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 literathn ; and perhaps no better example, and none more readily appreciable by a modern ear, could be given than the fourth ofthem of the harmonious effect of Chaucer's usage of slurr- ing^ referred to above : — " Why liked thee my yellow hair to see More than the boundes of mine honesty? 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 passage of his House of Fame — a ]3oem written, it should, however, be observed, in an easy-going form of verse (the hne of four accents) which in his later period Chaucer seems, with this exception, to have invariably dist'arded. 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 a 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 neces- sary 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. Ho -ne — that it is " *iseparable from a full or fair exercise of tb.e genius of our language in versification." For though this usage ]n its full freedom was gradually again lost to our poetry for a time, yet it was in a large measure recovered by Shakspeare 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 tn w ih a perhaps excessive liberality. It consists simply in shirring ov&r certain final syllab.es — not eliding them or contracting them with the syllables following upon them, but passing 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 flex- ibihty and beauty of Chaucer's versification. 112 CHAUCER. 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 assuredly possessed others, which are not usual among the poets of our nation, and which, whence- soever 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 seri- ous, 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 versifica- tion of grave historical chronicles, or in the tranquil objective repro- duction of the endless traditions of British legend. Of the popular songs belonging to the period after the Norman Conquest, the re- mains 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 Rhy7ne of Sir Thopas not- withstanding) the eJEforts 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 thir- teenth century; there is real spirit in the war-songs of Minot in the middle of the fourteenth ; and from about its beginning 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 Eng- CHAUCER. "3 lish 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 passion of love, under one or another of its aspects, does not either con- stitute 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 \\\q. Prologtie \o tht Legend of Good lVo7nent where his fair'advocate tells the God 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 you 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 quahty of gaiety and brightness, is the preference which he exhibits for treating the joyous aspects of this many-sided passion. Apart from the Lege7id of Good Women, which is specially designed to give brilliant examples of the faith- fulness of women under circumstances of trial, pain, and grief, and from two or three of the Canterbttry Tales, he dwells, with consist- ent 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 Asse?nbly 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 develops with un- mistakeable sympathy and enjoyment ; and in his hands this part of tlie poem becomes one of the most charming poetic narratives of the birth and growth of young love which our literature pos- sesses—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 passion of very gradual growth. But so full of nature is the narrative of this growth, that one is irre- sistibly 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 oi Troilus .'' — 114 CHAUCER. " 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." And is there not a touch of CJarchen in her — though with a differ- ence — when from her casement she blushingly beholds her lover riding past in triumph : " So like a man of armes and a knignt He was to see, filled full of high prowess, For both he had a body, and a might To do that thing, as well as hardiness ; And eke to see him in his gear him dress. So fresh, so young, so wieldly seemed he, It truly was a heaven him for to see. " His helm was hewn about in twenty places, That by a tissue hung his back behind ; His shield was dashed with strokes of swords and maces, In which men mighte many an arrow find That pierced had the horn and nerve and rind ; And aye the people cried : ' Here comes our joy. And, next his brother, holder up of Troy.'" Even in \}ci^vQ.xy Book of the DucJiess^ the widowed lover describes the maiden charms of his lost wife with so lively a freshness as almost to make one forget that it is a lost wife whose praises are being recorded. The vivacity and joyousness of Chaucer's poetic temperament, however, show themselves in various other ways besides his favourite manner of treating a favourite theme. They enhance the spirit of his passages of dialogue, and add force and freshness to his passages of description. They make him amusingly impa- tient of epical lengths, abrupt in his transitions, and anxious, with an anxiety usually manifested by readers rather than by writers, to come to the point, " to the great effect," as he is wont to call it. "Men," Jie says, "may overlade a ship or barge, and therefore I will skip at once to the effect, and let all the rest slip." And he unconsciously suggests a striking difference between himself and the great Elizabethan epic poet who owes so much to him, when he declines to make as long a tale of the chaff or of the straw as of the corn,and to describe all the details of a marriage-feast i-^r/iz///// ,* " The fruit of every tale is for to say : They eat and drink, and dance and sing and play." This may be the fruit ; but epic poets, from Homer downwards, have been generally in the habit of not neglecting the foliage. Spenser, in particular, has that impartial copiousness which we think it our duty to admire in the Ionic epos, but which, if the CFTA UCER. IIS truth were told, has prevented generations of Englishmen from ac- quiring an intimate personal acquaintance with the Fairy Queen. With Chaucer the danger certainly rather lay in an op])osite direc- tion. Most assuredly he can tell a story with admirable point and precision, when he wishes to do so. Perhaps no better example of his skill in this respect could be cited than the Maiiciple\ Tale, with its rapid narrative, its major and minor catastrophe, and its concise moral, ending thus : — /'" My son, beware, and be no author new / Oi tidings, wliether they be false or true ; Whereso thou comest, among higli or low, Keep well thy tongue, and think upon the crow." At the same time, his frequently recurring announcements of his desire to be brief have the effect of making his narrative appear to halt, and thus, unfortunately, defeat their own purpose. An ex- ample of this may be found in the Knighf's, Tale, a narrative poem of wliich, in contrast with its beauties, a want of evenness is one of the chief defects. It is not that the desire. to suppress redundan- -ciesisa tendency deserving anything but commendation in any writer, whether great or small ; but rather, that the art of conceal- ing art had not yet dawned upon Chaucer. And yet few writers of any time have taken a more evident pleasure in the process of literary production, and have more visibly overflowed with sym- pathy for, or antipathy against, the characters of their own creation. Great novelists of our own age have often told their readers, in prefaces to their fictions or in ^zmj"z-confidential comments upon them, of the intimacy in which they have lived with the offspring of their own brain, to them far from shadowy beings. But only the naivele of Chaucer's literary age, together Avith the vivacity of his manner of thought and writing, could place him in so close a personal relation towards the personages and the incidents of his poems. He is overcome by " pity and ruth " as he reads of suffer- ing, and his eyes "wax foul and sore" as he prepares to tell of its intiiction. He compassionates " love's servants " as if he were their own "brother dear;" and into his adaptation of the eventful story of Constance (the Maji of Law's Tale) he introduces apos- trophe upon apostrophe, to the defenceless condition of his heroine — to her relentless enemy the Sultana, and to Satan, who ever makes his instrument of women " when he will beguile " — to the drunken messenger who allowed the letter carried by him to be stolen from him — and to the treacherous Queen-mother who caused them to be stolen. Indeed, in addressing the last-named person- age, the poet seems to lose all control over himself. " O Domegild, I have no English digne Unto thy malice and thy tyranny : And therefore to the fiend I thee resign, Let him at length tell of thy treachery. Fye, mannish, fye ! — Oh nay, by God, I lie ; 11 6 CHAUCER. Fye fiendish spirit, for I dare well tell, Though thou here walk, thy spirit is in hell." At the opening of the Legend of Ariadne he bids Minos redden with shame ; and towards its close, when narrating how Theseus sailed away, leaving his true-love behind, he expresses a hope that the wind may drive the traitor "a twenty devil M^ay." Nor does this vivacity find a less amusing expression in so trifling a touch as that in the Clerk's Tale., where the domestic sent to deprive Griseldis of her boy becomes, eo iipso as it were, " this ugly ser- geant." Closely allied to Chaucer's liveliness and gaiety of disposition, and in part springing from them, are his keen sense of the ridicu. lous and the power of satire which he has at his command. Hi^ humour has many varieties, ranging from the refined and half- melancholy irony of the Hotise of Fame to the ready wit of the sagacious uncle of Cressid, the burlesque fun of the inimitable Nwi's Priesfs Tale., and the very gross salt of the Reeve., the Miller.^ Tiud. one or two others. The springs of humour often capriciously refuse to allow themselves to be discovered ; nor is the satire of which the direct intention is transparent invari- ably the most effective species of satire. Concerning, however, Chaucer's use of the power which he in so large a measure pos- sessed, viz., that of covering with ridicule the palpable vices or weaknesses of the classes or kinds of men represented by some of his character-types, one assertion may be made with tolerable safety. Whatever may have been the first stimulus and the ulti- mate scope of the wit and humour which he here expended, they are Jtot to be explained as moral indignation in disguise. And in truth Chaucer's merriment flows spontaneously from a source very near the surface ; he is so extremely diverting, because he is so extremely diverted himself. Herein, too, lies the harmlessness of Chaucer's fun. Its harm- lessness, to wit, for those who are able to read him in something like the spirit in which he wrote — never a very easy achievement with regard to any author, and one which the beginner and the young had better be advised to abstain from attempting with Chau- cer in the overflow of his more or less unrestrained moods. At all events, the excuse of gaiety of heart — the plea of that vieil esfrit Gaulois which is so often, and very rarely without need, invoked in an exculpatory capacity by modern French criticism — is the best defence ever made for -Chaucer's laughable irregularities, either by his apologists or by himself. "Men should not," he says, and says very truly, " make earnest of game." But when he audaciously defends himself against the charge of impropriety by declaring that he must tell stories in character., and coolly requests any person who may find anything in one of his tales objectionable to turn to another : — " For he shall find enough, both great and small. Of storial thing that toucheth gentleness, CHA UCER. Likewise morality and holiness ; Blame ye not me, if ye should choose amiss — " 117 we are constrained to shake our heads at the transparent sophistry of the plea, which requires no exposure. For Chaucer knew very well how to give life and colour to his page without recklessly dis- regarding bounds the neglect of which was even in his day offen- sive to many besides the '■^precious folk" of whom he half deri- sively pretends to stand in awe. In one instance he defeated his own purpose ; for the so-called Cook's Tale of Gamelyn was sub- stituted by some earlier editor for the original Cook's Tale, which has thus in its completed form become a rarity removed beyond the reach of even the most ardent of curiosity hunters. Fortu- nately, however, Chaucer spoke the truth when he said that from this point of view he had written very differently at different times ; no whiter pages remain than many of his. But the realism of Chaucer is something more than exuberant love of fun and light-hearted gaiety. He is the first great painter of character, because he is the first great observer of it among modern European writers. His power of comic observation need not be dwelt upon again, after the illustrations of it which have been incidentally furnished in these pages. More especially with regard to the manners and ways of women, which often, while seem- ing so natural to women themselves, appear so odd to male observers, Chaucer's eye was ever on the alert. But his works likewise con- tain passages displaying a penetrating insight into the minds of men, as well as a keen eye for their manners, together with a power of generalising, which, when kept within due bounds, lies at the root of the wise knowledge of humankind so admirable to us in our great essayists, from Bacon to Addison and his modern successors. How truly, for instance, in Troilus and Cressid, Chaucer observes on the enthusiastic belief of converts, the '' strongest-faithed " of men, as he understands ! And how fine, is the saying as to the suspiciousness characteristic of lewd {i. e., ignorant) people, that to things which are made more subtly " Than they can in their lewdness comprehend," they gladly give the worst interpretation which suggests itself ! How appositely the Canon's Yeoman describes the arrogance of those who are too clever bv half; "when a man has an over-great wit," he savs, "it very often chances to him to misuse it! " And with how ripe a wisdom, combined with ethics of true gentleness, the honest Franhlin, at the opening of his Tale, discourses on the uses and the beauty of long suffering : — " For one thing, sires, safely dare I say, That friends the one the other must^obey, If they will longe holde company. Love will not be constraint! by mastery. When mastery comes, the god of love anon Il8 CHAUCER. Beateth his wings — and, farewell ! he is gone. Love is a thing as any spirit free. Women desire, by nature, liberty, And not to be constrained as a thrall ; And so do men, if I the truth say shall. Look, who that is most patient in love, He is at his advantage all above. A virtue high is patience, certain. Because it vanquisheth, as clerks explain, Things to which rigour never could attain. For every word men should not chide and plain; Learn ye to suffer, or else, so may I go. Ye shall it learn, whether ye will or no. For in this world certain no wight there is Who neither doth nor saith some time amiss. Sickness or ire, or constellation, Wine, woe, or changing of complexi&n, Causeth full oft to do amiss or speak. For every wrong men may not vengeance wreak: After a time there must be temperance With every wight that knows self governance." It was by virtue of his power of observing and drawing charac* ter, above all, that Chaucer became the true predecessor of two several growths in our literature, in both of which. characterisation forms a most important element — it might perhaps be truly said, the element which surpasses all others in importance. From this point of view the dramatic poets of the Elizabethan age remain un- equalled by any other school or group of dramatists, and the Eng- lish novelists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by the representatives of any other development of prose-fiction. In the art of construction, in the invention and the arrangement of inci- dent, these dramatists and novelists may have been left behind by others ; in the creation of character they are, on the whole, without rivals in -their respective branches of literature. To the earlier at least of these growths Chaucer may be said to have pointed the way. His personages — more especially, of course, as has been seen, those who are assembled together in the Prologtie to the Canterbury Tales — are not mere phantasms of the brain, or even mere actual possibilities, but real human beings, and types true to the likeness of whole classes of men and women, or to the mould in which all human nature is cast. This is, upon the whole, the most v/onderful, as it is perhaps the most generally recognised, of Chaucer's gifts. It would not of itself have sufficed to make him a great dramatist, had the drama stood ready for him as a literary form into which to pour the inspirations of his genius, as it after- wards stood ready for our great Elizabethans. But to it were added in him that perception of a strong dramatic situation, and that power of finding the right words for it, which have determined the success of many plays, and the absence of which materially de- tracts from the completeness of the effect of others, liigh as their merits may be in other respects. How thrilling, for instance, is CHAUCER. 119 that rapid passage across the stage, as one might almost call it, of the unhappy Dorigen in the Franklin's Tale / The antece- dents of the situation, to be sure, are, as has been elsewhere sug- gested, absurd enough ; but who can fail to feel that spasm of anx- ious sympathy with which a powerful dramatic situation in itself affects us, when the wife, whom for truth's sake her husband has bidden be untrue to him, goes forth on her unholy errand of duty ? " Whither so fast ? " asks the lover : " And she made answer, half as she were? mad : ' Unto the garden, as my husl^and bade, My promise for to keep, alas ! alas ! ' " Nor, as the abbreviated prose version of the Pardoner's Tale g\xQ.n above will suffice to show, was Chaucer deficient in the art of dramatically arranging a story ; while he is not excelled by any of our non-dramatic poets in the spirit and movement of his dialogue. The Book of the DiicJiess and the House of Fame, but more espe- cially Troilus and Cressid7xxi<\ the connecting passages between some of the Canterbury Tales, may be referred to in various illustration of this. The vividness of his imagination, which conjures up, so to speak, the very personality of his characters before him, and tl:ie contagi- ous force of his pathos, which is as true and as spontaneous as his humour, complete in him the born dramatist. We can see Constance as with our own eyes, in the agony of her peril : — " Have ye not seen some time a pallid face Among a press, of him that liath been led Towards his death, where him awaits no grace, And such a colour in his face hath had, Men mighte known his face was so bested 'Mong all the other faces in that rout? So stands Constance, anc[ iooketh her about." And perhaps there is no better way of studying the general character of Chaucer's pathos than a comparison of the MonFs Tale from which this passage is taken, and the Clerk's Tale, with their origi- nals. In the former, for instance, the ]jrayer of Constance, when condemned through Domegild's guilt to be cast adrift once more on the waters, her piteous words and tenderness to her little child as it lies weeping in lier arms, and her touching leave-taking from the land of the husband wlio has condemned her — all these are Chaucer's own. So also are parts of one of the most affecting passages in the Clerk's Tale— Griseldis' farewell to her daughter. But it is as unnecessary to lay a finger upon lines and passages illus- trating Chaucer's pathos as upon odiers illustrating his humour. Thus, then, Chaucer was a born dramatist ; but fate willed it, that the branch of our literature which might probably have of all been the best suited to his genitis was not to spring into life till he and several generations after him had passed away. To be sure, during the fourteenth century the so-called miracle-plays flourished L I20 CHAUCER, abundantly in England, and were, as there is every reason to be< lieve, already largely performed by the trading-companies of Lon- don and the towns. The allusions in Chaucer to these beginnings of our English drama are, however, remarkably scanty. The Wife of Bath mentions plays of miracles among the other occasions of religious sensation haunted by her, clad in her gay scarlet gown- including vigils, processions, preachings, pilgrimages, and marriages. And the jolly parish-clerk of the Miller's 7'ale, we are informed, at times, in order to show his lightness and his skill, played " Herod on a scaffold high " — thus, by-the-bye, emulating the parish clerks of London, who are known to have been among the performers of miracles in the Middle Ages. The allusion to Pilate's voice in the Miller's Prologue, and that in the Tale to " The sorrow of Noah with his fellowship That he had ere he got his wife to ship," seem likewise dramatic reminiscences ; and the occurrence of these three allusions in a single Tale and its Prologue would incline one to think that Chaucer had recently amused himself at one of these performances. But plays are not mentioned among the entertain- ments enumerated at the opening of the Pardoner^ s Tale; and it would in any case have been unlikely that Chaucer should have paid much attention to diversions which were long chiefly " visited " by the classes with which he could have no personal connection, and even at a much later date were dissociated in men's minds from poetry and literature. Had he ever written anything remotely par- taking of the nature of a dramatic piece, it could at the most have been the words of the songs in some congratulatory royal pageant such as Lydgate probably wrote on the return of Henry V. after Agincourt ; though there is not the least reason for supposing Chau- cer to have taken so much interest in the " ridings" through the City which occupied many a morning of the idle apprentice of the Cook's Tale, Perkyn Revellour. It is, perhaps, more surprising to find Chaucer, who was a reader of several Latin poets, and who had heard of more, both Latin and Greek, show no knowledge what- ever of the ancient classical drama, with which he may accordingly be fairly concluded to have been wholly unacquainted. To one further aspect of Chaucer's realism as a poet reference has already been made ; but a final mention of it may most appro- priately conclude this sketch of his poetical characteristics. His descriptions of nature are as true as his sketches of human char- acter ; and incidental touches in him reveal his love of the one as unmistakeably as his unflagging interest in the study of the other. Even these May-morning exordia, in which he was but following a fashion — faithfully observed both by the French trouveres and by the English romances translated from their productions, and not forgotten by the author of the earlier part of the Rojnan de la Rose — always come from his hands with the freshness of natural truth. They cannot be called original in conception, and it would be diffi- CHAUCER. 121 cult to point out in them anything strikingly original in execution ; yet they cannot be included among those matter-of-course notices of morning and evening, sunrise and sunset, to wliich so many poets have accustomed us since (be it said with reverence) Homer himself. In Chaucer these passages make his page " as fresh as is the month of May." When he went forth on these April and May mornings, it was not solely with the intent of composing as roundelay or a tnarguerite ; but we may be well assured he allowed the song of the little birds, the perfume of the flowers,- and the fresh verdure of the English landscape, to sink into his very soul. For nowhere does he seem, and nowhere could he have been, more open to the influence which he received into himself, and which in his turn he exercised, and exercises upon others, than when he was in fresh contact with nature. In this influence lies the secret of his genius ; in his poetry there is life. L CHAUCER. / CHAPTER IV. EPILOGUE. The legacy which Chaucer left to our literature was to fructify in the hands of a long succession of heirs ; and it may be said, with little fear of contradiction, that at no time has his fame been fresher and his influence upon our poets — and upon our painters as well as our poets — more perceptible than at the present day. When Gower first put forth his Confessio Ama?itis, we may as- sume that Chaucer's poetical labours, of the fame of which his brother-poet declared the land to be full, had not yet been crowned by his last and greatest work. As a poet, therefore, Gower in one sense owes less to Chaucer than did many of their successors ; though, on the other hand, it may be said with truth that to Chaucer is due the fact that Gower (whose earlier productions were in French and in Latin) ever became a poet at all. The Confessia Aviajiiis is no book for all times like the Canterbury Tales ; but the conjoined names of Chaucer and Gower added strength to one another in the eyes of the generations ensuing, little anxious as these generations were to distinguish which of the pair was really the first to " garnish our English rude " with the flowers of a new poetic diction and art of verse. The Lancaster period of our history had its days of national glory as well as of national humiliation, and indisputably, as a whole, advanced the growth of the nation towards political man- hood. But it brought with it no golden summer to fulfil the promises of the spring-tide of our modern poetical literature. The two poets whose names stand forth from the barren after-season of the earlier half of the fifteenth century, were, both of them, ac- cording to their own profession, disciples of Chaucer. In truth, however, Occleve, the only nameworthy poetical writer of the reign of Henry IV., seems to have been less akin as an author to Chaucer than to Gower, while his principal poem manifestly was, in an even greater degree than the Confessio Amantis, a severely learned or, as its author terms it, unbuxom book. Lydgate, on the other hand, the famous monk of Bury, has in him something of the spirit as well as of the manner of Chaucer, under whose advice he is said to have composed one of his principal poems. Though a monk, he was no stay-at-home or do-nothing; like him of the Canterbury CHAUCER. 123 Tales^ we may suppose Lydgate to have scorned the maxim that a monk out of his cloister is like a fish out of water; and doubtless many days which he could spare from the instruction of youth at St. Edmund's Bury were spent about the London streets, of the sights and sounds of which he has left us so vivacious a record — a kind of farcical supplement to the Prologue of the Canterbury Tales. His literary career, part of which certainly belongs to the reign of Henry V., has some resemblance to Chaucer's, though it is less regular and less consistent with itself; and several of his poems bear more or less distinct traces of Chaucer's influence. The Troy-book is not founded on Troilus and Cressid, though it is derived from the sources which had fed the original of Chaucer's poem; but the 'Temple of Glass seems io have been an imitation of the House of Fame j and the Stojy of Thebes is actually intro- duced by its author as an additional Ca/iterbury Tale, and chal- lenges comparison with the rest of the series into which it asks ad- mittance. Both Occleve and Lydgate enjoyed the patronage of a prince of genius descended from the House, with whose founder Chaucer was so closely connected — Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester. Meanwhile, the sovereign of a neighbouring kingdom was in all probability himself the agent who established the influence of Chaucer as predominant in the literature of his native land. The long though honourable captivity in England of King James I. of Scotland — the best poet among kings and the best king among poets, as he has been antithetically "called — was consoled by the study of the " hymns " of his "dear masters, Chaucer and Gower," for the happiness of whose souls he prays at the close of his poem, The King''s Quair. That most charming of love-allegories, in which the Scottish king sings the story of his captivity and of his deliverance by the sweet messenger of love, not only closely imi- tates Chaucer in detail, more especially at its opening, but is per- vaded by his spirit. Many subsequent Scottish poets imitated Chaucer, and some of them loyally acknowledged their debts to him. Gawin Douglas in his Palace of Honour, and Henryson in his Testament of Cressid 2iwdi elsewhere, are followers of the South- ern master. The wise and brave Sir David Lyndsay was familiar with his writings ; and he was not only occasionally imitated, but praised with enthusiastic eloquence by William Dunbar, "that darling of the Scottish Muses," whose poetical merits Sir Walter Scott, from some points of view, can hardly be said to have exag- gerated, when declaring him to have been "justly raised to a level with Chaucer by every judge of poetry, to whom his obsolete language has not rendered him unintelligible." Dunbar knew that this Scottish language was but a form of that which, as he de- clared, Chaucer had made to " surmount every terrestrial tongue, as far as midnight is surmounted by a May morning." Meanwhile, in England, the influence of Chaucer continued to live even during the dreary interval which separates from one another two important epochs of our literary history. Now, as in the days of the Norman kings, ballads orally transmitted were the peo- 124 CHAUCER, pie's poetry ; and one of these popular ballads carried the story of Patient Gi-issel into regions where Chaucer's name was probably unknown. When, after the close of the troubled season of the Roses, our poetic literature showed the first signs of a revival, they consisted in a return to the old masters of the'fourteenth- century. The poetry of Hawes, the learned author of the crabbed Pastime of Pleasure, exhibits an undeniable continuity with that of Chaucer. Gower, and Lydgate, to which triad he devotes a chapter of pane- gyric. Hawes, however, presses into the service of his allegory not only all the Virtues and all the Vices, whom from habit we can tolerate in such productions, but also Astronomy, Geometry, Arith- metic, and the rest of the seven Daughters of Doctrine, whom we cannot, and is altogether inferior to the least of his models. It is, at the same time, to his credit that he seems painfully aware of his inability to cope with either Chaucer or Lydgate as to vigour of in- vention. There is, in truth, more of the dramatic spirit of Chaucer in Barklay's Ship of Fools, which, though essentially a translation, achieved in England the popularity of an original work ; for this poem, like the Canterbury Tales, introduces into its admirable framework a variety of lifelike sketches of character and manners — it has in it that dramatic element which is so Chaucerian a char- acteristic. But the aim of its author was didactic, which Chaucer's had never been. When with the poems of Surrey and Wyatt, and with the first attempts in the direction of the regular drama, the opening of the second great age in our literature approached, and when, about half a century afterwards, that age actually opened with an un- equalled burst of varied productivity, it would seem as if Chaucer's influence might naturally enough have passed away, or at least become obscured. Such was not, however the case, and Chaucer survived into the age of the English Renascence as an established English classic, in which capacity Caxton had honoured him by twice issuing an edition of his works from the Westminster print- ing-press. Henry VIII. 's favourite — the reckless but pithy satir- ist, Skelton — was alive to the merits of his great predecessor ; and Skelton's patron, William Thynne, a royal official, busied himself with editing Chaucer's works. The loyal servant of Queen Mary, the wise and witty John Heywood, from whose Piterludes the step is so short to the first regular English comedy, in one of these pieces freely plagiarised a passage in the Canterbury Tales. Tottel, the printer of the favourite poetic Miscellany published shortly before Queen Elizabeth's accession, included in his collec- tion the beautiful lines, cited above, called Good Coimsel of Chaucer. And when at last the EHzabethan era properly so-called began, the proof was speedily given that geniuses worthy of hold- ing fellowship with Chaucer had assimilated into their own literary growth what was congruous to it in his, just as he had assimilated to himself — not always improving, but hardly ever merely borrow- ing or taking over — much that he had found in the French trou- v^res, and in Italian poetry and prose. The first work which ca« CHAUCER. 125 be included in the great period of Elizabethan literature is the Shepherd^s Calendar, where Spenser is still in a partly imitative stage ; and it is Chaucer whom he imitates and extols in his poem, and whom his alter ego, the mysterious "£", A'.," extols in preface and notes. The longest of the passages in which reference is made by Spenser to Chaucer, under the pseudonym of Tityrus, is more especially noteworthy, both as showing the veneration of the younger for the older poet, and as testifying to the growing pop- ularity of Chaucer at the time when Spenser wrote. The same great poet's debt to his revered predecessor in the Daphnaida has been already mentioned. The Fairy Queen is the masterpiece of an original mind, and its supreme poetic quality is a lofty magnificence upon the whole foreign to Chaucer's genius ; but Spenser owed something more than his archaic forms to " Tityrus," with whose style he had erst disclaimed all ambition to match his pastoral pipe. In a well-known passage of his great epos he declares that it is through sweet infusion of the older poet's own spirit that he, the younger, follows the footing of his feet, in order so the rather to meet with his meaning. It was this, the romantic spirit proper, which Spenser sought to catch from Chaucer, but which, like all those who consciously seek after it, he transmuted into a new quality and a new power. With Spenser the change was into something mightier and loftier. He would, we cannot doubt, readily have echoed the judgment of his friend and brother-poet concerning Chaucer. " I know not," writes Sir Philip Sidney, " whether to marvel more, either that he in that misty time could see so clearly, or that we, in this clear age, walk so stumblingly after him. Yet had he," adds Sidney, with the generosity of a true critic, who is not lost in wonder at his own cleverness in discovering defects, "great wants, fit to be forgiven in so reverent an antiquity." And yet a third Elizabethan, Michael Drayton, pure of tone and high of purpose, joins his voice to those of Spenser and Sidney, hailing in the " noble Chaucer " '* . . .The first of those that ever break, Into the Muses' treasure and first spake In weighty numbers," and placing Gower, with a degree of judgment not reached by his and Chaucer's immediate successors, in his proper relation of poetic rank to his younger but greater contemporary. To these names should be added that of George Puttenham — if he was indeed the author of the grave and elaborate treatise, dedi- cated to Lord Burghley, on The Art of English Poesy. In this work mention is repeatedly made of Chaucer, " father of our English poets ;" and his learning, and "the natural of his pleasant wit," are alike judiciously commended. One of Puttenham's best qualities as a critic is that he never speaks without his book; and he comes very near to discovering Chaucer's greatest gift when noticing his excellence in prosopographia — a term which to Chaucer 126 CHAUCER. would, perhaps, have seemed to require translation. At the obsoleteness of Chaucer's own diction this critic, who writes entirely " for the better brought-up sort," is obliged to shake his learned head. Enough has been said in the preceding pages to support the opinion that among the wants which fell to the lot of Chaucer as a poet, perhaps the greatest (though Sidney would never have al- lowed this) was the want of poetic form most in harmony with his most characteristic gifts. The influence of Chaucer upon the dramatist of the Elizabethan age was probably rather indirect and general than direct and personal ; but indications or illustrations of it may be traced in a considerable number of these writers, including, perhaps, among the earhest Richard Edwards as the author of a non-extant tr2igtdy, Pala77ton and Arcite, ^.nd among the latest the author — or authors — of The two Noble Kms7nen. Besides Fletcher and Shakspeare, Greene, Nash, and Middleton, and more especially Jonson (as both poet and grammarian), were acquainted with Chaucer's writings ; so that it is perhaps rather a proof of the widespread popularity of the Canterbury Tales than the reverse that they were not largely resorted to for materials by the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists. Under Charles I. Troilus and Cressid found a translator in Sir Francis Kynaston, whom Cartwright congratulated on having made it possible " that we read Chaucer now without a dictionary." A personage, how- ever, in Cartwright's best known play, the Antiquary Moth, prefers to talk on his own account " genuine " Chaucerian English. To pursue the further traces of the influence of Chaucer through such a literary aftergrowth as the younger Fletchers, into the early poems of Milton, would be beyond the purpose of the present essay. In the treasure-house of that great poet's mind were gathered memories and associations innumerable, though the subhmest flights of his genius soared aloft into regions whither the imagination of none of our earliest poets had preceded them. On the other hand, the days have passed for attention to be spared for the treatment experienced by Chaucer in the Augustan age, to which he was a barbarian only to be tolerated if put into the court- dress of the final period of civiHsation. Still, even thus, he was not left altogether unread ; nor was he in all cases adapted without a certain measure of success. The irrepressible vigour, and the frequent felicity, of Dryden's Fables contrast advantageously with the tame evenness of the Temple of Fa7;'ie, an early effort by Pope, who had wit enough to imitate in a juvenile parody some of the grossest peculiarities of Chaucer's manner, but who would have been quite ashamed to reproduce him in a serious literary performance, without the inevitable polish and cadence of his own style of verse. Later modernisations — even of those which a band of poets in some instances singularly qualified for the task put forth in a collection pubhshed in the year i8z.it, and which, on the part of some of them at least, was the result of conscientious en- deavour — it is needless to characterise here. Slight incidental use CHAUCER. 127 has been made of some of these in this essay, the author of which would gladly have abstained from printing a single modernised phrase or word — most of all, any which he has himself been guilty of re-casting. The time cannot be far distant when even the least unsuccessful of such attempts will no longer be accepted, because no such attempts whatever will be any longer required. No Englishman or Englishwoman need go through "a very long or very laborious apprenticeship in order to" become able to read, under- stand, and enjoy what Chaucer himself wrote. But if this ap- prenticeship be too hard, then some sort of makeshift must be accepted, or antiquity must remain the " canker-worm" even of a great national poet, as Spenser said it had already in his day proved to be of Chaucer. Meanwhile, since our poetic literature has long thrown off the shackles which forced it to adhere to one particular group of models, he is not a true English poet who should remain unin- fluenced by any of the really great among his predecessors. Jf Chaucer has again, in a special sense, become the " master dear and father reverent " of some of our living poets, in a wider sense he must hold this relation to them all and to all their successors, RO long as he continues to be known and understood. As it is, there are few worthies of our literature whose names seem to awaken throughout the English-speaking world a readier sentiment of familiar regard ; and in New England, where the earliest great poet of Old England is cherished not less warmly than among our- selves, a kindly cunning has thus limned his likeness : — " An old man in a lodge within a park ; The chamber walls depicted all around With portraiture of huntsman, hawk and hound, And the hurt deer. He listeneth to the lark, Whose song comes with the sunshine through the dark Of painted glass in leaden lattice bound ; He listeneth and he laugheth at the sound, Then writeth in a book like any clerk. He is the poet of the dawn, who wrote The Canterbury Tales, and his old age Made beautiful with song ; and as I read I hear the crowing cock, I hear the note Of lark and linnet, and from every page Rise odours of ploughed field or flowery mead." GLOSSARY. Bencite — benedicite. Clepe, call. Deem, judge. Desfiiious, angry to excess. Digne, fit ; — disdainful. Frere, friar. Gentle, well-born. KeeJ), care. Languor, grief. Meinie, following, household. Meet, mate (?), measure (?). Overthwart, across. Parage, rank, degree. Press, crowd. Rede, advise, counsel. Reeve, steward, bailiff. Ruth, pity. Scall, scaS. Shapely, fit. Sithe, time. Spiced, nice, scrupulous. Targe, target, shield. Y prefix of past participle as in y-bee = bee[n). While, time; to quite his while^ to reward his pains. Wieldy, active. Wone, custom, habit. *** A dotted e should always be sounded in reading. THE END. ENOCH MORGAN'S SONS* SAPOLIO CLEANS _^ WINDOWS, MARBLE, KNIVES. POLTSDES TIN-WARE. 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Knickerbocker History of New York 20 248. The Boy at Mugby 10 The Virginians, Part I.. 20 The Virginians, Part II. 20 Erling the Bold 20 Kenelm Chillingly 20 Deep Down 20 Samuel Brohl & Co 20 Gautran 20 Bleak House, Part I 20 Bleak House, Part II... 20 What Will He Do With , It ? 2 Parts, each 20 Sketches of YoungCouples. 10 De vereux 20 Life of Webster, Part 1. 15 Life of Webster, Pt. II. 15 The Crayon Papers 20 The Caxtons, Part I 15 The Caxtons, Part 1 1... 15 . Autobiography of An- thony Troilope 20 Critical Reviews, etc 10 Lucretia 20 Peter the Whaler 20 , Last of the Barons. Pt 1. 15 Last of the Barons,Pt.II.i5 , Eastern Sketches 15 . All in a Garden Fair 20 , File No. 113 20 . The Parisians, Part I... 20 The Parisians, Part II.. 20 , Mrs. Darling's Letters. . .20 Master Humphrey's Clock 10 , Fatal Boots, etc 10 . The Alhambra 15 , The Four Georges 10 Plutarch's Lives, 5 Pts. fi. . Under the Red Flag 10 , TheHaunted House, etc. 10 . When the Ship Comes Home .....10 , One False, both Fair 20 The Mudfog Papers, etc. 10 , My Novel, 3 Parts, each.20 , Conquest of Granada. ..20 , Sketches by Boz... 20 A Christmas Carol, etc. . 15 , lone Stewart 20 . Harold, 2 Parts^ each. . . 15 Dora Thorne 20 Maid of Athens. 20 Conquest of Spain.. 10 Fitzboodle Papers, etc. 10 . Bracebridge Hall 20 . Uncommercial Travellei-.2o Roundabout Papers 20 Rossmoyne 20 . A Legend of the Rhine, etc 10 . Cox's Diary, etc 10 Beyond Pardon 20 , Somebody'sLuggage,etc.io , Godolphin 20 , Salmagundi 20 Famous Funny Fellows. 20 . Irish Sketches, etc 20 . The Battle of Life, etc... 10 , Pilgrims of the Rhine . ..15 Random Shots 20 . Men's Wives 10 Mystery of Edwin Drood.20 Reprinted Pieces 2a Astoria ....20 Novels by Eminent Handsio Companions of Columbus2o No Thoroughfare 10 Character Sketches, etc. 10 Christmas Books 20 , A Tour on the Prairies... 10 , Ballads 15 . Yellowplush Papers 10 . Life of Mahomet, Part 1. 15 Life of Mahomet, Pt. II. 15 , Sketches and Travels in London 10 i Oliver Goldsmith,Irving.20 Captain Bonneville .... 20 Golden Girls 20 . English Humorists 15 . Moorish Chronicles jo Winifred Power 20 Great HoggartyDiamond 10 Pausanias 15 . Tiie New Abelard 20 A Real Queen 20 . The Rose and the Ring.20 , Wolfeit's Roost and Mis- cellanies, by Irving 10 . Mark SeawoVth 20 . Life of Paul Jones 20 . Round the World 20 . Elbow Room 20 The Wizard's Son 25 Harry Lorrequer 20 How It All Came Round.20 Dante Rosetti's Poems. 2c The Canon's Ward 20 Lucile, by O. Meredith. 20 Every Day Cook Book.. 20 Lays of Ancient Rome . . 20 Life of Bums 20 The Young Foresters. ..20 John Bull andHis Island 20 Salt Water, by Kingston. 20 The Midshipman ....... 20 Pioctor's Poems 20 Clayton's Rangers 20 Schiller's Poems -20 Goethe's Faust 20 Goethe's Poems 20 Life of Thackeray lo Dante's Vision of Hell, Purgatory and Paradise. .20 An Interesting Case 20 Life of Byron, Nichol. . . 10 Life of Bunyan 10 Valerie's Fate 10 Grandfather Lickshingle. 20 Lays of the Scottish Ca- valiers 20 Willis' Poems 20 Tales of the French Re- volution 15 Loom and Lugger . . 20 More Leaves from a Life in the Highlands. ..... 15 Hygiene of the Brain. ..25 Berkeley the Banker 20 Homes Abroad 15 Scott's Lady of the Lake, with notes 2c Modern Christianity a ' civilized Heathenism.. . . 15 THE CELEBRATED ='=':^S=i=n=i=ra= SOHMEB Grand, Square and Upright PIANOFORTES. The demands now made b^ ^n educated musical public are so exacting that very few Pianoforte Manufacturers can produce Instruments that will stand the test which merit requires. SOHMER & CO., as Manufacturers, rank amongst these chosen few, who are acknowledged to be makers of standard instruments. In these days, when Manufacturers urge the low price of their wares rather than their superior quality as an inducement to purchase, it may not be amiss to f=i;;;gti8t that, in a Piano, quality and price are too in- sep irably joined to expect the one without the other. Every Piano ought to be judged as to the quality of its tone, its touch, and its work- manship; if any one of these is wanting in excellence, however good the others may be, the instrument will be imperfect. It is the combination of these qualities in the highest degree that constitutes the perfect Piano, and it is this combination that has given the *' SOIIMER " its honorable position wi*,h the trade and the public. Received First Prize Centennial Exhibition, Philadelphia, 1876. Received First Prize at Exhibition, Montreal, Canada, 1881 & 1882- SOHMER & CO., Manufacturers, 149-155 E. 14th St., New York.