LECTURE VCHAUCER

LECTURE VCHAUCER(Tuesday Evening, January 23, 1855)V

(Tuesday Evening, January 23, 1855)

V

It is always a piece of good fortune to be the earliest acknowledged poet of any country. We prize the first poems as we do snowdrops, not only for their own intrinsic beauty, but even more for that force of heart and instinct of sunshine in them which brings them up, where grass is brown and trees are bare, the outposts and forlorn hopes of spring. There never comes anything again like afirstsensation, and those who love Chaucer, though they may have learned late to do it, cannot help imaginatively antedating their delight, and giving him that place in the calendar of their personal experience which belongs to him in the order of our poetic history.

And the feeling is a true one, for although intensity be the great characteristic of all genius, and the power of the poet is measured by his ability to renew the charm of freshness in what is outworn and habitual, yet there is something in Chaucer which gives him a personal property in the epithet“vernal,” and makes him seem always to go hand in hand with May.

In our New England especially, where Mayday is a mere superstition and the Maypole a poor half-hardy exotic which shivers in an east wind almost as sharp as Endicott’s axe,—where frozen children, in unseasonable muslin, celebrate the floral games with nosegays from the milliner’s, and winter reels back, like shattered Lear, bringing the dead spring in his arms, her budding breast and wan dilustered cheeks all overblown with the drifts and frosty streaks of his white beard,—where even Chanticleer, whose sap mounts earliest in that dawn of the year, stands dumb beneath the dripping eaves of his harem, with his melancholy tail at half-mast,—one has only to take down a volume of Chaucer, and forthwith he can scarce step without crushing a daisy, and the sunshine flickers on small new leaves that throb thick with song of merle and mavis. A breath of spring blows out of the opening lines of the “Canterbury Tales” that seems to lift the hair upon our brow:

When that Aprile with his showers sooteThe drought of March hath pierced to the roote,And bathed every vein in that licourOf whose virtue engendered is the flour;When Zephirus eke with his sweet breathEnspired hath in every holt and heathThe tender croppes; and the younge sunHath in the Ram half of his course yrun;And little fowles maken melodie,That slepen all the night with open eye,So nature pricketh them in their courages.

When that Aprile with his showers sooteThe drought of March hath pierced to the roote,And bathed every vein in that licourOf whose virtue engendered is the flour;When Zephirus eke with his sweet breathEnspired hath in every holt and heathThe tender croppes; and the younge sunHath in the Ram half of his course yrun;And little fowles maken melodie,That slepen all the night with open eye,So nature pricketh them in their courages.

When that Aprile with his showers sooteThe drought of March hath pierced to the roote,And bathed every vein in that licourOf whose virtue engendered is the flour;When Zephirus eke with his sweet breathEnspired hath in every holt and heathThe tender croppes; and the younge sunHath in the Ram half of his course yrun;And little fowles maken melodie,That slepen all the night with open eye,So nature pricketh them in their courages.

When that Aprile with his showers soote

The drought of March hath pierced to the roote,

And bathed every vein in that licour

Of whose virtue engendered is the flour;

When Zephirus eke with his sweet breath

Enspired hath in every holt and heath

The tender croppes; and the younge sun

Hath in the Ram half of his course yrun;

And little fowles maken melodie,

That slepen all the night with open eye,

So nature pricketh them in their courages.

Even Shakspeare, who comes after everybody has done his best and seems to say, “Here, let me take hold a minute and show you how to do it,” could not mend that. With Chaucer, the sun seems never to have run that other half of his course in the Ram, but to have stood still there and made one long spring-day of his life.

Chaucer was probably born in 1328, seven years after the death of Dante, and he certainly died in 1400, having lived consequently seventy-two years. Of his family we know nothing. He was educated either at Oxford or Cambridge, or at neither of these famous universities. He was, perhaps, a student at the Inner Temple, on the books of which a certain phantasmagoric Mr. Buckley had read a record that “Geoffrey Chaucer was fined two shillings for beating a Franciscan friar in Fleet street.”

In the thirty-ninth year of his age he received from Edward III a pension of twenty marks(equal to $1000 now), and afterwards a grant of a pitcher of wine daily, and the custody of a ward which gave £104 a year, and two places in the customs. In the last year of Edward III he was one of three envoys sent to France to negotiate a marriage between the Prince of Wales and a daughter of the French King. Richard II confirmed his pension of twenty marks, and granted him another of like amount instead of the daily wine.

Chaucer married Philippa Pycard or De la Roet, sister of Katherine Swynford, the third wife of John of Gaunt. By this connection he is supposed to have become a favorer of Wycliffe’s doctrines, and was in some way concerned in the insurrection of John of Northampton, which seems to have had for its object some religious reform. He was forced to fly into Holland, and is said to have made his peace at last by betraying his companions. I think one’s historical comfort is not disturbed by refusing to credit this story, especially as it stains the fame of a great poet, and, if character may ever be judged from writings, a good man. We may grant that he broke the Franciscan friar’s head in Fleet street, if it were only for the alliteration, but let us doubt that he ever broke his faith. It is very doubtful whether he was such stuff as martyrs are made of. Plump men, though nature would seemto have marked them as more combustible, seldom go to the stake, but rather your lean fellows, who can feel a fine satisfaction in not burning well to spite the Philistines.

At this period of his life Chaucer is thought to have been in straitened circumstances, but a new pension and a yearly pipe of wine were granted him by Richard II, and on the accession of Henry IV these were confirmed, with a further pension of forty marks. These he only lived a year to enjoy, dying October 25, 1400.

The most poetical event in Chaucer’s life the critics have, of course, endeavored to take away from us. This is his meeting with Petrarch, to which he alludes in the prologue to the Clerk’s “Tale of Griseldis.” There is no reason for doubting this that I am able to discover, except that it is so pleasing to think of, and that Chaucer affirms it. Chaucer’s embassy to Italy was in 1373, the last year of Petrarch’s life, and it was in this very year that Petrarch first read the “Decameron.” In his letter to Boccaccio he says: “The touching story of Griseldis has been ever since laid up in my memory that I may relate it in my conversations with my friends.” We are forced to believe so many things that ought never to have happened that the heart ought to be allowed to recompense itself by receiving as fact,without too close a scrutiny of the evidence, whatever deserved to take place so truly as this did. Reckoning back, then, by the finer astronomy of our poetic instinct, we find that a conjunction of these two stars of song did undoubtedly occur in that far-off heaven of the Past.

On the whole, we may consider the life of Chaucer as one of the happiest, and also the most fortunate, that ever fell to the lot of poets. In the course of it he must have been brought into relation with all ranks of men. He had been a student of books, of manners, and of countries. In his description of the Clerk of Oxford, in which there is good ground for thinking that he alludes to some of his own characteristics, he says:

For him was liefer have at his bed’s headA twenty books clothed in black or red,Of Aristotle and his philosophy,Than robes rich, or fiddle or psaltery.But albeit that he was a philosopher,Yet had he but a little gold in coffer;Of study took he the most care and heed,Not a word spake he more than there was need;And that was said in form and reverence,And short and quick, and full of high sentence;Sounding in moral virtue was his speech,And gladly would he learn, and gladly teach.

For him was liefer have at his bed’s headA twenty books clothed in black or red,Of Aristotle and his philosophy,Than robes rich, or fiddle or psaltery.But albeit that he was a philosopher,Yet had he but a little gold in coffer;Of study took he the most care and heed,Not a word spake he more than there was need;And that was said in form and reverence,And short and quick, and full of high sentence;Sounding in moral virtue was his speech,And gladly would he learn, and gladly teach.

For him was liefer have at his bed’s headA twenty books clothed in black or red,Of Aristotle and his philosophy,Than robes rich, or fiddle or psaltery.But albeit that he was a philosopher,Yet had he but a little gold in coffer;Of study took he the most care and heed,Not a word spake he more than there was need;And that was said in form and reverence,And short and quick, and full of high sentence;Sounding in moral virtue was his speech,And gladly would he learn, and gladly teach.

For him was liefer have at his bed’s head

A twenty books clothed in black or red,

Of Aristotle and his philosophy,

Than robes rich, or fiddle or psaltery.

But albeit that he was a philosopher,

Yet had he but a little gold in coffer;

Of study took he the most care and heed,

Not a word spake he more than there was need;

And that was said in form and reverence,

And short and quick, and full of high sentence;

Sounding in moral virtue was his speech,

And gladly would he learn, and gladly teach.

What a pleasant, companionable nature the last verse testifies to. The portrait of Chaucer, too, is perhaps more agreeable than that of any other English poet. The downcast, meditative eyes, the rich mouth, and the beautiful broad brow drooping with the weight of thought, and yet with an eternal youth and freshness shining out of it as from the morning forehead of a boy, are all remarkable, and their harmony with each other in a placid tenderness not less so.

Chaucer’s beginnings as an author were translations from the French and Italian. Imitations they should rather be called, for he puthimselfinto them, and the mixture made a new poem. He helped himself without scruple from every quarter. And, indeed, there is nothing more clear than that the great poets are not sudden prodigies, but slow results. Just as an oak profits by the foregone lives of immemorial vegetable races, so we may be sure that the genius of every remembered poet drew the forces that built it up from the decay of a whole forest of forgotten ones. And in proportion as the genius is vigorous and original will its indebtedness be; will it strike its roots deeper into the past and into remoter fields in search of the virtue that must sustain it.

Accordingly, Chaucer, like Shakspeare, inventedalmost nothing. Wherever he found anything directed to Geoffrey Chaucer he took it and made the most of it. Indeed, the works of the great poets teach us to hold invention somewhat cheap. The Provençal rhymers did the best to invent things that nobody ever thought of before, and they succeeded in producing what nobody ever thought of again. He must be a very great poet indeed who can afford to say anything new.

In the great poets I think there is always a flavor of race or country which gives them a peculiar nearness to those of the same blood, and where the face of the individual nature is most marked, it will be found that the type of family is also most deeply stamped. It is remarkable that Chaucer, who probably spoke French as often and as familiarly as English, who levied his contributions upon Norman, Italian, and Latin writers, should yet have become (with an exception) the most truly English of our poets.

In endeavoring to point out what seem to be the peculiar characteristics of Chaucer, I think we shall find one of the chief to be this—that he is the first poet who has looked to nature as a motive of conscious emotion. Accordingly, his descriptions are always simple and addressed to the eye rather than to the mind, or to the fancy rather than to the imagination.Very often he is satisfied with giving a list of flowers with no epithet, or one expressive of color or perfume only.

Mr. Lowell here read a number of passages from the “Assembly of Fowls” and other poems of Chaucer, with an extract from Spenser.

Now I observe that all Chaucer’s epithets are primary, or such as give birth to the feeling; and all Shakspeare’s secondary, or such as the feeling gives birth to. In truth, Shakspeare’s imagination is always dramatic, even in his narrative poems, and it was so abundant that the mere overflow of it has colored the very well-springs of the English language, and especially of English poetry. On Chaucer, nature seems to have always smiled (except in winter, which he cordially hated), and no rumor of man’s fall appears to have reached the trees and birds and flowers. Nature has taken to thinking lately, and a moral jumps up out of a blossom, like a jack-in-a-box.

Another characteristic which we find in all the poems where Chaucer speaks in his own person is a sentiment ofseclusion. He always dreams of walking in a park or a garden walled-in on every side. It is not narrowness but privacy that he delights in, and a certain feeling of generous limitation. In this his poems are the antithesis ofMilton’s, which always give a feeling of great spaces.

In description it would be hard to find Chaucer’s superior. His style is distinguished always by an energetic simplicity, which is a combination exceedingly rare. It was apparently natural to him. But when he is describing anything that he loves, here is an inexpressible tenderness, as if his eyes filled with tears. His narrative flows on like one of our inland rivers, sometimes hastening a little, and in its eddies seeming to run sunshine; sometimes lingering smoothly, while here and there a beautiful quiet thought, a pure feeling, a golden-hearted verse opens as quietly as a water-lily, and makes no ripple. In modern times the desire for startling expression is so strong that people hardly think a thought is good for anything unless it goes off with apoplike a gingerbeer cork.

In Chaucer’s pathetic passages (and they are many), the presence ofpityis a thing to be noticed—and the more so as he is the best pathetic story-teller among the English, and, except Dante, among the modern poets. Chaucer, when he comes to the sorrow of his story, seems to croon over the thoughts, and soothe them, and handle them with a pleasant compassionateness, as a child treats a wounded bird which he cannot make up his heartto let go, and yet fears to close his fingers too firmly upon.

Mr. Lowell, in illustration, read from the “Man of Law’s Tale,” and other of the poems.

What I have said of Chaucer’s pathos is equally true of his humor. It neverinvades a story, butpervades it. It circulates through all his comic tales like lively blood, and never puddles on the surface any unhealthy spots of extravasation. And this I take to be the highest merit of narrative—diffusion without diffuseness.

I have not spoken yet of Chaucer’s greatest work, the “Canterbury Tales.” He has been greatly commended for his skill in the painting of character, and, indeed, nothing too good can be said of him in this respect. But I think it is too much the fashion to consider Chaucer as one of those Flemish painters who are called realists because they never painted the reality, but only thematerial. It is true that Chaucer is as minute in his costume as if he were illuminating a missal. Nothing escapes him—the cut of the beard, the color of the jerkin, the rustiness of the sword. He could not help this, his eye for the picturesque is so quick and sure. But in drawing the character it is quite otherwise. Here his style is large and free, and he emphasizes, but not too strongly, those points only which areessential, and which give variety to his picture without any loss to the keeping. For he did not forget that he was painting history and not a portrait. If his character of the good parson (which still stands not only unmatched but unapproached by the many later attempts at the same thing) seem an exception, it is yet in truth a confirmation of what I have said. For, in this case, for the very sake ofkeeping, it was necessary to be more full and careful, because thegoodparson alone must balance the friar, the pardoner, and all the other clerical personages who are almost unmixedly evil. Justice is always a leading quality in great minds, and by this single figure on one side and the group on the other Chaucer satirizes the Church, as it can only be satirized, by showing that it contrasts with that true religion with which it should be identical. And was there ever anything so happy as Chaucer’s satire! Commonly satire is unhappy, but Chaucer’s is positively more kindly than the panegyric of some poets.

In calling ChaucergenialI chose the word with forethought. This geniality made it impossible that his satire should be intellectual. The satire of the intellect deals with the outside only, trying the thing satirized by a rigid standard. But it results from Chaucer’s genial temperament that justicein him is so equipoised by love that it becomes mercy, which is the point of rest between absolute law and human frailty. Therefore Chaucer, properly speaking, is not a satirist but a humorist; in other words, his satire is imaginative, and thus, in perfect subordination to narrative (though not to dramatic) art, he makes his characters satirize themselves. I suppose that no humorist ever makes anybody so thoroughly an object of satire as himself—but then one always satirizes himself kindly because he sees all sides. Falstaff is an example of this. Now this is just the character of imaginative or humorous satire, that the humorist enters his subject, assumes his consciousness, and works wholly from within. Accordingly when Chaucer makes his Frere or Pardoner expose all his own knaveries, we feel not as if he said, “See what a precious scamp this fellow is,” but “This is the waywepoor devils play fantastic tricks before high heaven.” The butt of the humorist is Man (including himself and us); the butt of the satirist is always individual man. The humorist sayswe; the moralist and satirist,thou. Here is the strength of the great imaginative satirist of modern times, Mr. Thackeray.

In satire, the antithesis of Chaucer is Pope; as a painter of life and manners, Crabbe, who had greatpowers of observation without imagination. Therefore what is simplicity in Chaucer is poverty in Crabbe.

Chaucer is the first great poet who held up a mirror to contemporary life in its objectivity, and for the mere sake of its picturesqueness—that is, he is the first great poet who has treated To-day as if it were as good as Yesterday. Dante wrote life also, but it was his own life, and what is more, his own interior life. All his characters are represented in their relation tothat. But Chaucer reflected life in its large sense—the life ofmen, from the knight to the ploughman. Thus it is that he always quietly and naturally rises above the Conventional into the Universal. And so his great poem lives forever in that perennial contemporaneousness which is the great privilege of genius. Thus the man of genius has a double immortality—in heaven and on earth at the same time; and this is what makes it good tobea genius at all, that their beauty and their goodness live after them, and every generation of men can say of them—They areourfriends also.

I know not how to sum up what we feel about Chaucer except by saying, what would have pleased him most, that welovehim. I would write on thefirst page of his volume the inscription which he puts over the gate in his “Assembly of Fowls”:

Through me men go into the blissful placeOf the heart’s heal, and deadly woundes cure;Through me men go into the welle of Grace,Where green and lusty May shall ever endure.This is the way to all good aventure;Be glad thou reader, and thy sorrow offcast.All open am I, pass in, and hye thee fast.

Through me men go into the blissful placeOf the heart’s heal, and deadly woundes cure;Through me men go into the welle of Grace,Where green and lusty May shall ever endure.This is the way to all good aventure;Be glad thou reader, and thy sorrow offcast.All open am I, pass in, and hye thee fast.

Through me men go into the blissful placeOf the heart’s heal, and deadly woundes cure;Through me men go into the welle of Grace,Where green and lusty May shall ever endure.This is the way to all good aventure;Be glad thou reader, and thy sorrow offcast.All open am I, pass in, and hye thee fast.

Through me men go into the blissful place

Of the heart’s heal, and deadly woundes cure;

Through me men go into the welle of Grace,

Where green and lusty May shall ever endure.

This is the way to all good aventure;

Be glad thou reader, and thy sorrow offcast.

All open am I, pass in, and hye thee fast.

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