Chapter 10

“Eld the hoarThat was in the vauntward,And bare the banner before death,”—

and he softens to a sweetness of sympathy beyond Chaucer when he speaks of the poor or tells us that Mercy is “sib of all sinful”; but to compare “Piers Ploughman” with the “Canterbury Tales” is to compare sermon with song.

Let us put a bit of Langland’s satire beside one of Chaucer’s. Some people in search of Truth meet a pilgrim and ask him whence he comes. He gives a long list of holy places, appealing for proof to the relics on his hat:—

“‘I have walked full wide in wet and in dryAnd sought saints for my soul’s health.’‘Know’st thou ever a relic that is called Truth?Couldst thou show us the way where that wight dwelleth?’‘Nay, so God help me,’ said the man then,‘I saw never palmer with staff nor with scripAsk after him ever till now in this place.’”

This is a good hit, and the poet is satisfied; but, in what I am going to quote from Chaucer, everything becomes picture, over which lies broad and warm the sunshine of humorous fancy.

“In oldë dayës of the King ArtourOf which that Britouns speken gret honour,All was this lond fulfilled of fayerie:The elf-queen with her joly compaignieDancëd ful oft in many a grenë mede:This was the old opinion as I rede;I speke of many hundrid yer ago:But now can no man see none elvës mo,For now the gretë charite and prayëresOf lymytours and other holy freresThat sechen every lond and every streem,As thick as motis in the sonnëbeam,Blessyng halles, chambres, kichenës, and boures,Citees and burghës, castels hihe and toures,Thorpës and bernes, shepnes and dayeries,This makith that ther ben no fayeries.For ther as wont to walken was an elfThere walkith none but the lymytour himself,In undermelës and in morwenynges.And sayth his matyns and his holy thinges,As he goth in his lymytatioun.Wommen may now go saufly up and doun;In every bush or under every treThere is none other incubus but he,And he ne wol doon hem no dishonóur.”

How cunningly the contrast is suggested here between the Elf-queen’s jolly company and the unsocial limiters, thick as motes in the sunbeam, yet each walking by himself! And with what an air of innocent unconsciousness is the deadly thrust of the last verse given, with its contemptuous emphasis on thehethat seems so well-meaning! Even Shakespeare, who seems to come in after everybody has done his best with a “Let me take hold a minute and show you how to do it,” could not have bettered this.

“Piers Ploughman” is the best example I know of what is called popular poetry,—of compositions, that is, which contain all the simpler elements of poetry, but still in solution, not crystallized around any thread of artistic purpose. In it appears at her best the Anglo-Saxon Muse, a first cousin of Poor Richard, full of proverbial wisdom, who always brings her knitting in her pocket, and seems most at home in the chimney-corner. It is genial; it plants itself firmly on human nature with its rights and wrongs; it has a surly honesty, prefers the downright to the gracious, and conceives of speech as a tool rather than a musical instrument. If we should seek for a single word that would define it most precisely, we should not choose simplicity, but homeliness. There is more or less of this in all early poetry, to be sure; but I think it especially proper to English poets, and to the most English among them, like Cowper, Crabbe, and one is tempted to add Wordsworth,—where he forgets Coleridge’s private lectures. In reading such poets as Langland, also, we are not to forget a certain charm of distance in the very language they use, making it unhackneyed without being alien. As it is the chief function of the poet to make the familiar novel, these fortunate early risers of literature, who gather phrases with the dew still on them, have their poetry done for them, as it were, by their vocabulary. But in Chaucer, as in all great poets, the language gets its charm from him. The force and sweetness of his genius kneaded more kindly together the Latin and Teutonic elements of our mother tongue, and made something better than either. The necessity of writing poetry, and not mere verse, made him a reformer whether he would or no; and the instinct of his finer ear was a guide such as none before him or contemporary with him, nor indeed any that came after him, till Spenser, could command. Gower had no notion of the uses of rhyme except as a kind of crease at the end of every eighth syllable, where the verse was to be folded over again into another layer. He says, for example,

“This maiden Canacee was hight,Both in the day and eke by night,”

as if people commonly changed their names at dark. And he could not even contrive to say this without the clumsy pleonasm ofbothandeke. Chaucer was put to no such shifts of piecing out his metre with loose-woven bits of baser stuff. He himself says, in the “Man of Law’s Tale,”—

“Me lists not of the chaff nor of the strawTo make so long a tale as of the corn.”

One of the world’s three or four great story-tellers, he was also one of the best versifiers that ever made English trip and sing with a gayety that seems careless, but where every foot beats time to the tune of the thought. By the skilful arrangement of his pauses he evaded themonotony of the couplet, and gave to the rhymed pentameter, which he made our heroic measure, something of the architectural repose of blank verse. He found our language lumpish, stiff, unwilling, too apt to speak Saxonly in grouty monosyllables; he left it enriched with the longer measure of the Italian and Provençal poets. He reconciled, in the harmony of his verse, the English bluntness with the dignity and elegance of the less homely Southern speech. Though he did not and could not create our language (for he who writes to be read does not write for linguisters), yet it is true that he first made it easy, and to that extent modern, so that Spenser, two hundred years later, studied his method and called him master. He first wroteEnglish; and it was a feeling of this, I suspect, that made it fashionable in Elizabeth’s day to “talk pure Chaucer.” Already we find in his works verses that might pass without question in Milton or even Wordsworth, so mainly unchanged have the language of poetry and the movement of verse remained from his day to our own.

“Thou PolymniaOn Pérnaso, that, with[16]thy sisters glade,By Helicon, not far from Cirrea,Singest with voice memorial in the shade,Under the laurel which that may not fade.”“And downward from a hill under a bentThere stood the temple of Mars omnipotentWrought all of burned steel, of which th’ entréeWas long and strait and ghastly for to see:The northern light in at the doorës shoneFor window in the wall ne was there noneThrough which men mighten any light discerne;The dore was all of adamant eterne.”

“Thou PolymniaOn Pérnaso, that, with[16]thy sisters glade,By Helicon, not far from Cirrea,Singest with voice memorial in the shade,Under the laurel which that may not fade.”

“And downward from a hill under a bentThere stood the temple of Mars omnipotentWrought all of burned steel, of which th’ entréeWas long and strait and ghastly for to see:The northern light in at the doorës shoneFor window in the wall ne was there noneThrough which men mighten any light discerne;The dore was all of adamant eterne.”

And here are some lines that would not seem out of place in the “Paradise of Dainty Devises”:—

“Hide, Absolom, thy giltë [gilded] tresses clear,Esther lay thou thy meekness all adown.. . . . .Make of your wifehood no comparison;Hide ye your beauties Ysoude and Elaine,My lady cometh, that all this may distain.”

When I remember Chaucer’s malediction upon his scrivener, and consider that by far the larger proportion of his verses (allowing always for change of pronunciation) are perfectly accordant with our present accentual system, I cannot believe that he ever wrote an imperfect line. His ear would never have tolerated the verses of nine syllables, with a strong accent on the first, attributed to him by Mr. Skeate and Mr. Morris. Such verses seem to me simply impossible in the pentameter iambic as Chaucer wrote it. A great deal of misapprehension would be avoided in discussing English metres, if it were only understood that quantity in Latin and quantity in English mean very different things. Perhaps the best quantitative verses in our language (better even than Coleridge’s) are to be found in Mother Goose, composed by nurses wholly by ear and beating time as they danced the baby on their knee. I suspect Chaucer and Shakespeare would be surprised into a smile by the learned arguments which supply their halting verses with every kind of excuse except that of being readable. When verses were written to be chanted, more license could be allowed, for the ear tolerates the widest deviations from habitual accent in words that are sung.Segnius irritant demissa per aurem.To some extent the same thing is true of anapæstic and other tripping measures, but we cannot admit it in marching tunes like those of Chaucer. He wrote for the eye more than for the voice, as poets had begun to do long before.[17]Someloose talk of Coleridge, loose in spite of its affectation of scientific precision, about “retardations” and the like, has misled many honest persons into believing that they can make good verse out of bad prose. Coleridge himself, from natural fineness of ear, was the best metrist among modern English poets, and, read with proper allowances, his remarks upon versification are always instructive to whoever is not rhythm-deaf. But one has no patience with the dyspondæuses, the pæon primuses, and what not, with which he darkens verses that are to be explained only by the contemporary habits of pronunciation. Till after the time of Shakespeare we must always bear in mind that it is not a language of books but of living speech that we have to deal with. Of this language Coleridge had little knowledge, except what could be acquired through the ends of his fingers as they lazily turned the leaves of his haphazard reading. If his eye was caught by a single passage that gave him a chance to theorize he did not look farther. Speaking of Massinger, for example, he says, “When a speech is interrupted, or one of the characters speaks aside, the last syllable of the former speech and first of the succeeding Massinger counts for one, because both are supposed to be spoken at the same moment.

‘And felt the sweetnessof’t‘Howher mouth runs over.’”

Now fifty instances may be cited from Massinger whichtell against this fanciful notion, for one that seems, and only seems, in its favor. Any one tolerably familiar with the dramatists knows that in the passage quoted by Coleridge, thehowbeing emphatic, “how her” was pronouncedhow’r. He tells us that “Massinger is fond of the anapæst in the first and third foot, as:—

‘Tŏ yoŭr mōre | thăn mās|cŭlinĕ rēa|sŏn thāt | cŏmmānds ’ĕm ||.’

Likewise of the second pæon (⌣—⌣⌣) in the first foot, followed by four trochees (—⌣), as:—

‘Sŏ grēēdĭly̆ | lōng fōr, | knōw theĭr | tītĭll|ātiŏns.’”

In truth, he was no fonder of them than his brother dramatists who, like him, wrote for the voice by the ear. “To your” is still one syllable in ordinary speech, and “masculine” and “greedily” were and are dissyllables or trisyllables according to their place in the verse. Coleridge was making pedantry of a very simple matter. Yet he has said with perfect truth of Chaucer’s verse, “Let a few plain rules be given for sounding the final è of syllables, and for expressing the terminations of such words asocëanandnatiön, &c., as dissyllables,—or let the syllables to be sounded in such cases be marked by a competent metrist. This simple expedient would, with a very few trifling exceptions, where the errors are inveterate, enable any one to feel the perfect smoothness and harmony of Chaucer’s verse.” But let us keep widely clear of Latin and Greek terms of prosody! It is also more important here than even with the dramatists of Shakespeare’s time to remember that we have to do with a language caught more from the ear than from books. The best school for learning to understand Chaucer’s elisions, compressions, slurrings-over and runnings-together of syllables is to listen to the habitual speech of rustics with whom language is still plastic to meaning, and hurries or prolongs itself accordingly. Here is a contraction frequent in Chaucer, and still common in New England:—

“But me were lever than [lever ’n] all this town, quod he.”

Let one example suffice for many. To Coleridge’s rules another should be added by a wise editor; and that is to restore the finalnin the infinitive and third person plural of verbs, and in such other cases as can be justified by the authority of Chaucer himself. Surely his ear could never have endured the sing-song of such verses as

“I couthetellefor a gowne-cloth,”

“Than ye to me schuld brekeyouretrouthe.”

Chaucer’s measure is so uniform (making due allowances) that words should be transposed or even omitted where the verse manifestly demands it,—and with copyists so long and dull of ear this is often the case. Sometimes they leave out a needful word:—

“But er [the] thunder stynte, there cometh rain,”“When [that] we ben yflattered and ypraised,”“Tak [ye] him for the greatest gentleman.”

Sometimes they thrust in a word or words that hobble the verse:—

“She trowed he were yfel in [some] maladie,”“Ye faren like a man [that] had lost his wit,”“Then have I got of you the maystrie, quod she,”(Then have I got the maystery, quod she,)“And quod the jugë [also] thou must lose thy head.”

Sometimes they give a wrong word identical in meaning:—

“And therwithal he knew [couthë] mo proverbes.”

Sometimes they change the true order of the words:—

“Therefore no woman of clerkës is [is of clerkës] praised”“His felaw lo, here he stont [stont he] hool on live.”“He that covèteth is a porë wightFor he wold have that is not in his might;But he that nought hath ne coveteth nought to have.”

Here the “but” of the third verse belongs at the head of the first, and we get rid of the anomaly of “coveteth” differently accented within two lines. Nearly all the seemingly unmetrical verses may be righted in this way. I find a good example of this in the last stanza of “Troilus and Creseide.” As it stands, we read,—

“Thou one, two, and three, eterne on liveThat raignast aie in three, two and one.”

It is plain that we should read “oneandtwo” in the first verse, and “threeandtwo” in the second. Remembering, then, that Chaucer was here translating Dante, I turned (after making the correction) to the original, and found as I expected

“Quell’ unoedue e tre che sempre viveE regna sempre in treedue ed uno.” (Par. xiv. 28, 29.)

In the stanza before this we have,—

“To thee and to the philosophicallstrode,To vouchsafe [vouchësafe] there need is, to correct”;

and further on,—

“With all mine herte’ of mercy ever I prayAnd to the Lord aright thus I speake and say,”

where we must either strike out the second “I” or put it after “speake.”

One often finds such changes made by ear justified by the readings in other texts, and we cannot but hope that the Chaucer Society will give us the means of at last settling upon a version which shall make the poems of one of the most fluent of metrists at least readable. Let anyone compare the “Franklin’s Tale” in the Aldine edition[18]with the text given by Wright, and he will find both sense and metre clear themselves up in a surprising way. A careful collation of texts, by the way, confirms one’s confidence in Tyrwhitt’s good taste and thoroughness.

A writer in the “Proceedings of the Philological Society” has lately undertaken to prove that Chaucer did not sound the final or mediale, and throws us back on the old theory that he wrote “riding-rime,” that is, verse to the eye and not the ear. This he attempts to do by showing that the Anglo-Norman poets themselves did not sound thee, or, at any rate, were not uniform in so doing. It should seem a sufficient answer to this merely to ask whence modern French poetry derived its rules of pronunciation so like those of Chaucer, so different from those of prose. But it is not enough to prove that some of the Anglo-Norman rhymers were bad versifiers. Let us look for examples in the works of the best poet among them all, Marie de France, with whose works Chaucer was certainly familiar. What washerpractice? I open at random and find enough to overthrow the whole theory:—

“Od sa fillë[19]ke le cela—Tut li curagës li fremi—Di mei, fet-elëpar ta fei—La Dameiselël’aporta—Kar ne li sembla miëboens—La damël’aveit apelée—Et la merël’areisuna.”

But how about the elision?

“Le pali’esgardësur le lit—Et ele’est devant li alée—Bele’ amië [cf. mië, above] ne’il me celez.La dame’ ad sa fille’ amenée.”

These are all on a single page[20], and there are some tospare. How about thehiatus? On the same page I find,—

“Kar l’Ercëveskëiestoit—Pur eus beneistre’eenseiner.”

What was the practice of Wace? Again I open at random.

“N’osa remaindre’ en Normandië,Maiz, quant la guerrëfu finië,Od sou herneiz en Puille’ala—Cil de Baienës lungëment—Neil nes pout par forcëprendre—Dunc la vilëmult amendout,Prisons e preiës amenout.”[21]

Again we have the sounded finale, the elision, and thehiatus. But what possible reason is there for supposing that Chaucer would go to obscure minstrels to learn the rules of French versification? Nay, why are we to suppose that he followed them at all? In his case as in theirs, as in that of the Italians, with the works of whose two greater poets he was familiar, it was the language itself and the usages of pronunciation that guided the poet, and not arbitrary laws laid down by a synod of versemakers. Chaucer’s verse differs from that of Gower and Lydgate precisely as the verse of Spenser differs from that of Gascoigne, and for the same reason,—that he was a great poet, to whom measure was a natural vehicle. But admitting that he must have formed his style on the French poets, would he not have gone for lessons to the most famous and popular among them,—the authors of the “Roman de la Rose”? Wherever you open that poem, you find Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meung following precisely the same method,—a method not in the least arbitrary, but inherent in the material which they wrought. Theesounded or absorbed under the same conditions, the same slurring ofdiphthongs, the same occasionalhiatus, the same compression of several vowels into one sound where they immediately follow each other. Shakespeare and Milton would supply examples enough of all these practices that seem so incredible to those who write about versification without sufficient fineness of sense to feel the difference between Ben Jonson’s blank verse and Marlow’s. Some men are verse-deaf as others are color-blind,—Messrs. Malone and Guest, for example.

I try Rutebeuf in the same haphazard way, and chance brings me upon his “Pharisian.” This poem is in stanzas, the verses of the first of which have all of them masculine rhymes, those of the second feminine ones, and so on in such continual alternation to the end, as to show that it was done with intention to avoid monotony. Of feminine rhymes we find ypocrisië, famë, justicë, mesurë, yglisë. But did Rutebeuf mean so to pronounce them? I open again at the poem of theSecrestain, which is written in regular octosyllabics, and read,—

“Enviëfet homëtuer,Et si fait bonnëremuer—Envië greve’, envië blecë,Enviëconfont charitëEnvie’ ocist humilitë,—Estoit en ce païs en viëSanz orgueil ere’et sanz envië—La glorieusë, damë, chierë.”[22]

Froissart was Chaucer’s contemporary. What was his usage?

“J’avoiëfait en ce voiaigëEt je li di, ‘Ma damës’ai-jePour vous ëu maint souvenir’;Mais je ne sui pas bien hardisDe vous remonstrer, damëchierë,Par quel art ne par quel manierë,J’ai ëu ce comencëmentDe l’amourous atouchëment.’”

If we try Philippe Mouskes, a mechanical rhymer, if ever there was one, and therefore the surer not to let go the leading-strings of rule, the result is the same.

But Chaucer, it is argued, was not uniform in his practice. Would this be likely? Certainly not with those terminations (likecourtesië) which are questioned, and in diphthongs generally. Dante took precisely the same liberties.

“Faceale stelle a noiparer più radi,”“Nè fu per fantasiagiammaicompreso”“Poipiovve dentro all ‘alta fantasia,”“Soleavalor e cortesiatrovarsi,”“Che ne ’nvogliava amor e cortesia.”

Here we havefantasì’andfantasiä,cortesì’andcortesiä. Even Pope haspromiscuous,obsequious, as trisyllables,individualas a quadrisyllable, and words liketapestry,opera, indifferently as trochees or dactyls according to their place in the verse. Donne even goes so far as to make Cain a monosyllable and dissyllable in the same verse:—

“Sister and wife to Cain, Caïn that first did plough.”

The cæsural pause (a purely imaginary thing in accentual metres) may be made to balance a line like this of Donne’s,

“Are they not like | singers at doors for meat,”

but we defy any one by any trick of voice to make it supply a missing syllable in what is called our heroic measure, so mainly used by Chaucer.

Enough and far more than enough on a question about which it is as hard to be patient as about the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays. It is easy to find all manner of bad metres among these versifiers, and plenty of inconsistencies, many or most of them the fault of careless or ignorant transcribers, but whoever has readthem thoroughly, and with enough philological knowledge of cognate languages to guide him, is sure that they at least aimed at regularity, precisely as he is convinced that Raynouard’s rule about singular and plural terminations has plenty of evidence to sustain it, despite the numerous exceptions. To show what a bad versifiercouldmake out of the same language that Chaucer used, I copy one stanza from a contemporary poem.

“When Phebus fresh was in chare resplendent,In the moneth of May erly in a morning,I hard two lovers profer this argumentIn the yeere of our Lord a M. by rekening,CCCXL. and VIII. yeere following.O potent princesse conserve true lovers allAnd grant them thy region and blisse celestial.”[23]

Here is riding-rhyme, and on a very hard horse too. Can any one be insensible to the difference between such stuff as this and the measure of Chaucer? Is it possible that with him the one halting verse should be the rule, and the twenty musical ones the exception? Let us take heed to his own words:—

“And, for there is so great diversitëIn English, and in writing of our tong,So pray I God[24]that none miswritë theNe the mismetre for defaut of tong,And redde whereso thou be or ellës songThat thou be understood God I beseech.”

Yet more. Boccaccio’sottava rimais almost as regular as that of Tasso. Was Chaucer unconscious of this? It will be worth while to compare a stanza of the original with one of the translation.

“Era cortese Ettore di naturaPerò vedendo di costei il gran pianto,Ch’era più bella ch’altra creatura,Con pio parlare confortolla alquanto,Dicendo, lascia con la ria venturaTuo padre andar che tulti ha offeso tanto,E tu, sicura e lieta, senza noia,Mentre t’aggrada, con noi resta in Troia.”[25]

“Now was this Hector pitous of naturë,And saw that she was sorrowful begonAnd that she was so faire a creaturë,Of his goodnesse he gladed her anonAnd said [saidë] let your father’s treason gonForth with mischance, and ye yourself in joyDwelleth with us while [that] you list in Troy.”

If the Italian were read with the same ignorance that has wreaked itself on Chaucer, the riding-rhyme would be on its high horse in almost every line of Boccaccio’s stanza. The same might be said of many a verse in Donne’s satires. Spenser in his eclogues for February, May, and September evidently took it for granted that he had caught the measure of Chaucer, and it would be rather amusing, as well as instructive, to hear the maintainers of the hop-skip-and-jump theory of versification attempt to make the elder poet’s verses dance to the tune for which one of our greatest metrists (in his philological deafness) supposed their feet to be trained.

I will give one more example of Chaucer’s verse, again making my selection from one of his less mature works. He is speaking of Tarquin:—

“And ay the morë he was in despairThe more he coveted and thought her fair;His blinde lust was all his coveting.On morrow when the bird began to singUnto the siege he cometh full privilyAnd by himself he walketh soberlyThe imáge of her recording alway new:Thus lay her hair, and thus fresh was her hue,Thus sate, thus spake, thus span, this was her cheer,Thus fair she was, and this was her manére.All this conceit his heart hath new ytake,And as the sea, with tempest all toshake,That after, when the storm is all ago,Yet will the water quap a day or two,Right so, though that her forme were absént,The pleasance of her forme was presént.”

And this passage leads me to say a few words of Chaucer as a descriptive poet; for I think it a great mistake to attribute to him any properly dramatic power, as some have done. Even Herr Hertzberg, in his remarkably intelligent essay, is led a little astray on this point by his enthusiasm. Chaucer is a great narrative poet; and, in this species of poetry, though the author’s personality should never be obtruded, it yet unconsciously pervades the whole, and communicates an individual quality,—a kind of flavor of its own. This very quality, and it is one of the highest in its way and place, would be fatal to all dramatic force. The narrative poet is occupied with his characters as picture, with their grouping, even their costume, it may be, and he feels for and with them instead of being they for the moment, as the dramatist must always be. The story-teller must possess the situation perfectly in all its details, while the imagination of the dramatist must be possessed and mastered by it. The latter puts before us the very passion or emotion itself in its utmost intensity; the former gives them, not in their primary form, but in that derivative one which they have acquired by passing through his own mind and being modified by his reflection. The deepest pathos of the drama, like the quiet “no more but so?” with which Shakespeare tells us that Ophelia’s heart is bursting, is sudden as a stab, while in narrative it is more or less suffused with pity,—a feeling capable of prolonged sustention. This presence of the author’s own sympathy is noticeable in all Chaucer’s pathetic passages, as, for instance, in the lamentation of Constance over her child in the “Man ofLaw’s Tale.” When he comes to the sorrow of his story, he seems to croon over his thoughts, to soothe them and dwell upon them with a kind of pleased compassion, as a child treats a wounded bird which he fears to grasp too tightly, and yet cannot make up his heart wholly to let go. It is true also of his humor that it pervades his comic tales like sunshine, and never dazzles the attention by a sudden flash. Sometimes he brings it in parenthetically, and insinuates a sarcasm so slyly as almost to slip by without our notice, as where he satirizes provincialism by the cock

“Who knew by nature each ascensiönOf the equinoctial in his native town.”

Sometimes he turns round upon himself and smiles at a trip he has made into fine writing:—

“Till that the brightë sun had lost his hue,For th’ orisont had reft the sun his light,(This is as much to sayen as ‘it was night.’)”

Nay, sometimes it twinkles roguishly through his very tears, as in the

“‘Why wouldest thou be dead,’ these women cry,‘Thou haddest gold enough—and Emily?’”

that follows so close upon the profoundly tender despair of Arcite’s farewell:—

“What is this world? What asken men to have?Now with his love now in the coldë graveAlone withouten any company!”

The power of diffusion without being diffuse would seem to be the highest merit of narration, giving it that easy flow which is so delightful. Chaucer’s descriptive style is remarkable for its lowness of tone,—for that combination of energy with simplicity which is among the rarest gifts in literature. Perhaps all is said in saying that he has style at all, for that consists mainly in the absence of undue emphasis and exaggeration, in the clearuniform pitch which penetrates our interest and retains it, where mere loudness would only disturb and irritate.

Not that Chaucer cannot be intense, too, on occasion; but it is with a quiet intensity of his own, that comes in as it were by accident.

“Upon a thickë palfrey, paper-white,With saddle red embroidered with delight,Sits Dido:And she is fair as is the brightë morrowThat healeth sickë folk of nightës sorrow.Upon a courser startling as the fire,Æneas sits.”

Pandarus, looking at Troilus,

“Took up a light and found his countenanceAs for to look upon an old romance.”

With Chaucer it is always the thing itself and not the description of it that is the main object. His picturesque bits are incidental to the story, glimpsed in passing; they never stop the way. His key is so low that his high lights are never obtrusive. His imitators, like Leigh Hunt, and Keats in his “Endymion,” missing the nice gradation with which the master toned everything down, become streaky. Hogarth, who reminds one of him in the variety and natural action of his figures, is like him also in the subdued brilliancy of his coloring. When Chaucer condenses, it is because his conception is vivid. He does not need to personify Revenge, for personification is but the subterfuge of unimaginative and professional poets; but he embodies the very passion itself in a verse that makes us glance over our shoulder as if we heard a stealthy tread behind us:—

“The smiler with the knife hid under the cloak.”[26]

And yet how unlike is the operation of the imaginative faculty in him and Shakespeare! When the latter describes, his epithets imply always an impression on the moral sense (so to speak) of the person who hears or sees. The sun “flatters the mountain-tops with sovereign eye”; the bending “weeds lacquey the dull stream”; the shadow of the falcon “coucheth the fowl below”; the smoke is “helpless”; when Tarquin enters the chamber of Lucrece “the threshold grates the door to have him heard.” His outward sense is merely a window through which the metaphysical eye looks forth, and his mind passes over at once from the simple sensation to the complexmeaningof it,—feelswiththe object instead of merely feeling it. His imagination is forever dramatizing. Chaucer gives only the direct impression made on the eye or ear. He was the first great poet who really loved outward nature as the source of conscious pleasurable emotion. The Troubadour hailed the return of spring; but with him it was a piece of empty ritualism. Chaucer took a true delight in the new green of the leaves and the return of singing birds,—a delight as simple as that of Robin Hood:—

“In summer when the shaws be sheen,And leaves be large and long,It is full merry in fair forestTo hear the small birds’ song.”

He has never so much as heard of the “burthen and the mystery of all this unintelligible world.” His flowers and trees and birds have never bothered themselves with Spinoza. He himself sings more like a bird than any other poet, because it never occurred to him, as to Goethe, that he ought to do so. He pours himself out in sincere joy and thankfulness. When we compare Spenser’s imitations of him with the original passages, we feel that the delight of the later poet was more in the expression than in the thing itself. Nature with him is only good to be transfigured by art. We walk among Chaucer’s sights and sounds; we listen to Spenser’s musical reproduction of them. In the same way, the pleasure which Chaucer takes in telling his stories has in itself the effect of consummate skill, and makes us follow all the windings of his fancy with sympathetic interest. His best tales run on like one of our inland rivers, sometimes hastening a little and turning upon themselves in eddies that dimple without retarding the current; sometimes loitering smoothly, while here and there a quiet thought, a tender feeling, a pleasant image, a golden-hearted verse, opens quietly as a water-lily, to float on the surface without breaking it into ripple. The vulgar intellectual palate hankers after the titillation of foaming phrase, and thinks nothing good for much that does not go off with a pop like a champagne cork. The mellow suavity of more precious vintages seems insipid: but the taste, in proportion as it refines, learns to appreciate the indefinable flavor, too subtile for analysis. A manner has prevailed of late in which every other word seems to be underscored as in a school-girl’s letter. The poet seems intent on showing his sinew, as if the power of the slim Apollo lay in the girth of his biceps. Force for the mere sake of force ends like Milo, caught and held mockingly fast by the recoil of the log he undertook to rive. In the race of fame, there are a score capable of brilliantspurtsfor one who comes in winner after a steady pull with wind and muscle to spare. Chaucer never shows any signs of effort, and it is a main proof of his excellence that he can be so inadequately sampled by detached passages,—by single lines taken away from the connection in which they contribute to the general effect. He has that continuity of thought, that evenly prolonged power, and that delightful equanimity, which characterize the higher orders of mind. There is something in him of the disinterestedness that made the Greeks masters in art. Hisphrase is never importunate. His simplicity is that of elegance, not of poverty. The quiet unconcern with which he says his best things is peculiar to him among English poets, though Goldsmith, Addison, and Thackeray have approached it in prose. He prattles inadvertently away, and all the while, like the princess in the story, lets fall a pearl at every other word. It is such a piece of good luck to be natural! It is the good gift which the fairy godmother brings to her prime favorites in the cradle. If not genius, it is alone what makes genius amiable in the arts. If a man have it not, he will never find it, for when it is sought it is gone.

When Chaucer describes anything, it is commonly by one of those simple and obvious epithets or qualities that are so easy to miss. Is it a woman? He tells us she isfresh; that she hasgladeyes; that “every day her beauty newed”; that

Back to Index Next