Chapter 2 CHAUCER'S WORKS

When Chaucer began to write, English literature was at a low ebb. The Norman Conquest had practically killed the old alliterative poetry, and the passion and mysticism of Old English epic and lament had given way to the prim didacticism of interminable homilies in verse, or the jog-trot respectability of rhymed chronicles.

"For a long time before and after 1100," says Professor Ker, "there is a great scarcity of English production," and the more ambitious attempts at verse which appeared in the twelfth, thirteenth, and early fourteenth centuries, are entirely lacking in the charm and dignity of pre-Conquest poetry. "The verse of Layamon's Brut is unsteady, never to be trusted, changing its pace without warning in a most uncomfortable way." Nor as a rule is the matter greatly superior to the manner. Such interest as is possessed by the majority of the poems of this period (apart from the definitely historical or philological point of view) arises largely from the unconscious na?veté and simplicity of their authors. What hard heart could refuse to be touched by the difficulties which that saintly hermit Richard Rolle of Hampole had evidently experienced in distinguishing the sex of a baby, or to share in the triumph with which he suggests a solution of the difficulty:-

For unethes[29] is a child born fully

That it ne beginnes to yowle and cry;

And by that cry men may know then

Whether it be man or woman,

For when it is born it cries swa;[30]

If it be man it says "a, a."

That the first letter is of the nam(e)

Of our fore-father Adam.

And if the child a woman be,

When it is born it says "e, e,"

E is the first letter and the hede[31]

Of the name of Eve that began our dede.[32]

But delightful as this is, it is not poetry. In the middle of the fourteenth century come the notable exceptions of Sir Gawayne, The Pearl, and Piers Plowman, but by this time we are already drawing near the era of Chaucer himself. His poor Parson dismisses the popular alliterative verse of the day contemptuously enough:-

I can nat geste-rum, ram, ruf-by lettre-

but perhaps his strictures must not be taken too seriously, as he goes on to say:-

Ne, God wot, rym holde I but litel bettre-

a sentiment with which we can hardly imagine Chaucer to have been in sympathy. As a matter of fact, the lyric verse which lightens up the three hundred years from the Conquest to Chaucer, has a daintiness and grace which show that the poetic sense of England was by no means dead. Sumer is icumen in, Lenten is come with love to toune, Of one that is so fair and bright, and numberless other songs with which recent anthologies have made everyone familiar are sufficient evidence of this. But these are chance flowers blossoming haphazard beside the dusty highway.

One well-beaten track, it is true, does lead us through green glades and meadows enamelled with eye-pleasing flowers to the mysterious depths of enchanted forests haunted by fell enchanters and baleful dragons, but the metrical romances are for the most part more or less direct translations from French originals, and show little that is distinctively English, beyond a tendency to cut the sentiment and come to the story.[33]

To French influence also we owe the development of satire. Old Norse and Icelandic poetry abound in instances of dry humour, but the Anglo-Saxon idea of repartee seems-if we may judge by pre-Conquest literature-to have consisted chiefly in such grim jests as baking the head of your enemy's son in a pie and inviting the father to dinner. Tenderness, passion, imagination, are to be found in such poems as Beowulf, the Husband's Lament, Judith, but it is not until French wit flashes across English seriousness that we travel to the Land of Cokaygne, where

There are rivers great and fine

Of oil, of milk, honey, and wine.

Water serveth there for nothing

Save to look at, and for washing:

or listen to Hendyng's shrewd comments on human nature:-

Many a man saith, were he rich,

There shoulde none be me y-lyche[34]

To be good and free;

But when he hath ought bygeten[35]

All the freedom is forgeten

And laid under knee.

"He is free of his horse, that never had one,"

Quoth Hendyng.

The prose of the period is still less inspiring than the poetry. Not even Chaucer discovered that prose-writing is an art. Works of any importance were written in Latin, and such English prose as there was, consisted in sermons, lives of the saints, etc. Now and then some author happens upon a telling phrase or an apt illustration, but such instances are few and obviously accidental. French influence was too strong for native literature to put forth any very vigorous shoots of its own, and attempts to force homilies, scientific treatises, and historical records into French rhyme forms led to the production of such dreary works as the Cursor Mundi or Layamon's Brut.

By the fourteenth century, however, Normans and Saxons had long since begun to amalgamate, and the Hundred Years' War did much to foster the spirit of patriotism, and thus weld together the conflicting elements of which the nation was composed. Different dialects prevailed in different parts of the country, but they were at least varieties of English, and English was the language of the people as a whole. French, whether of Paris or of Stratford atte Bowe, was learned as a foreign tongue, although as late as the end of the fourteenth century we still find Gower writing indifferently in Latin, French, and English. It needed only that there should arise an author great enough to establish some one dialect-or combination of dialects-as standard English, and this creation of language from dialect, we owe-among other things-in large measure to Chaucer.

London was already the centre of English trade and industry, and the circumstances of its position, which brought its inhabitants into contact with both Northerners and Southerners, made its dialect particularly suitable for the standard language of the country. Chaucer, as we have seen, was London born and bred, and wrote naturally in the "cokeneye" dialect, thus helping to establish it as the common speech. The modern reader who turns over the pages of the Ayenbite of Inwit or the Ancren Riwle finds himself confronted by what is practically a foreign tongue; it is excusable if he finds even Piers Plowman baffling in places, and has difficulty in construing such passages as:-

He was pale as a pelet, in the palsye he semed,

And clothed in a caurimaury, I couthe it nou?te discreue;

In kirtel and kourteley, and a knyf bi his syde;

Of a freres frokke were te forsleues,[36]

but Chaucer's English, full as it may be of old and decayed terms, presents few serious difficulties to any ordinary intelligence. We may have to look up a word here and there in the glossary, or find ourselves puzzled by some astronomical or chemical terms, but these are merely by the way, and Chaucer fairly lays claim to the title of Father, not only of English poetry, but of modern English.

In metre his work is no less remarkable. Professor Skeat, in his introduction to the Oxford edition of Chaucer's works, gives a list of no less than thirteen metres which he introduced into English poetry, consisting for the most part of modifications and alterations of French and Italian models.

The so-called Chaucerian stanza consists of seven lines of iambic verse rhyming ababbcc-e. g.:

?mōng th?se chīldr?n wās ? wīdw??s sōn?

? līt?l clērge?n, sēv?n yēēr ?f āg?,

Th?t dāy by? dāy t? scōl?? wās h?s wōn?,

?nd ēēk ?lsō, wh?r-ās h? sāūgh th' ?māg?

?f Crīst?s mōd?r, hādde?h? īn ?sāg?

?s hīm w?s tāūght, t? knēle?adōūn and sēy?

H?s āvé? Mārie,??s hē g?th b? th? wēy?.

It is a modification of a form used by Boccaccio, and was itself possibly used by Spenser as the basis of his peculiar stanza. Chaucer employs it very largely for narrative purposes, preventing it from becoming monotonous by varying the place of the c?sura, and freely adding or suppressing weak syllables when he so desires. Mr. A. W. Pollard, in his article on Chaucer in the Encyclop?dia Britannica, declares that the English poet borrowed both his stanza and his decasyllabic line from Guillaume de Machault. The point of the whole matter, however, lies, not in whether Chaucer was indebted to French or Italian sources for his metres, but in the fact that he revealed the latent possibilities of English as a poetic medium.

It is usual to divide Chaucer's life into three periods, and to speak of him as successively under French, Italian, and English influence, and although, as Professor Ker has pointed out, this method is open to some objections, it brings out certain critical points of interest and is worth adhering to for the sake of clearness.

French, as we have seen, had long been the dominant influence in English literature. To French erotic poetry we owe the elaborate code of duties owed by husband to wife and lover to mistress, and the whole artificial convention which prescribed unhappy love affairs and revelled in the minute analysis of over-strained emotion. "In poetry and life," says Ten Brink, "fashion required an educated young man, especially one in the service of the court, to fall in love at the earliest opportunity, and, if possible, hopelessly." We have already seen Chaucer obeying this convention in the Book of the Duchesse and the Parlement of Foules, and to these may be added the Compleinte unto Pitè, the Compleint to his Lady, Merciles Beaute, To Rosemounde, Against Women Unconstant, An Amorous Compleint, and Book I, stanza 3 of Troilus and Criseyde. The poet protests so much that it is difficult to believe that he is describing anything more than a lover bewailing his unhappy lot (in the French fashion). Evidently French love-poetry appealed strongly to his imagination, for one of his earliest works is a translation of the famous Romance of the Rose. This long, allegorical poem (the original consists of over 22,000 lines), falls into two parts. The first, by Guillaume de Lorris, describes the search of the ideal lover for the mystic rose. The hero is admitted by the portress Idleness into a fair garden of flowers, where he finds Sir Mirth, Lady Courtesy, Dame Gladness, and many another gallant and debonair knight and lady. In this garden is the enchanted Well of Love, in whose depths the lover beholds the image of the Rose. He tries to seize it, and finds that a hard struggle lies before him ere he can hope to win the prize of love. Lorris left the poem unfinished, and the second part was added by Jean le Meung, a cynic with no very high opinion of women or of love. He introduces a sceptical friend who has a long conversation with the lover in which he points out with extreme clearness the drawbacks of marriage and the frailties of women.

The English version of the poem consists of three fragments, A, B, and C (it is only 7,696 lines in all), and scholars are divided in opinion as to how much of the translation is actually by Chaucer himself. Professor Saintsbury, in the Cambridge History of Literature considers that Chaucer is probably the author of A, possibly the author of B, and probably not the author of C. He must, however, have been known as the translator of the later part, for in the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women (written about 1385), the god of love scolds the poet severely on the ground,-

Thou hast translated the Romauns of the Rose

That is an hereyse ageyns my lawe.

Another early work is the A.B.C., a hymn in honour of the Virgin, modelled upon a similar poem by Guillaume de Deguileville. Deguileville was well known as a devotional writer at the time, and according to Speght Chaucer's paraphrase was written "at the request of Blanch Duchesse of Lancaster, as a praier for her priuat vse, being a woman in her religion very deuout." There is, however, no evidence of this, and Ten Brink believes that the A.B.C. dates from a later period when the poet was passing through a phase of deep religious feeling. Whatever the facts about this particular poem may be, it is interesting to notice that even in these early days Chaucer combined some of the qualities of a satirist with those of an idealist.

His first great original work was produced in 1369, when John of Gaunt's beautiful and charming young wife died. The Book of the Duchesse makes no pretence to originality of treatment. The poet, after a conventional lament over the conventional hard-heartedness of his mistress, falls into a conventional slumber in the course of which he has a conventional dream that he is following a conventional hunt in a conventional forest. Here he meets a handsome young man

Of the age of four and twenty yeer

·····

And he was clothed al in blakke.

The young man is complaining to himself most piteously:-

Hit was gret wonder that nature

Might suffre(n) any creature

To have swich sorwe and be not deed.

The poet is touched by his sorrow, and since they have evidently lost the hunt, he begs the mourner to tell him of "his sorwes smerte." This opens the way for a long, rambling lament, full of allusions to classical mythology. So involved is it, that the poet finds some difficulty in grasping the point, and cuts into a description of the lady's charms with a puzzled,-

Sir ... wher is she now?

The brief answer-

I have lost more than thou wenest

·····

She is deed-

strikes a note of tragedy which is beyond the scope of the youthful poet as yet, and the elegy ends abruptly with

Is that your los? by god hit is routhe.[37]

The scheme of the poem is simple, the idea is borrowed from French laments, and whole passages are translated from de Machault's Le Dit de la Fontaine Amoureuse and Remède de la Fortune, but through all the stiffness and conventionality, all the obvious immaturity, there flash unmistakable signs of vigorous and original genius. Every poet of the day finds himself wandering in a forest, but Chaucer alone meets

A whelp that fauned me as I stood,

That hadde y-followed, and coude no good,

Hit com and creep to me as lowe,

Right as hit hadde me y-knowe,

Hild doun his heed and joyned his eres

And leyde al smothe doun his heres;

or notices with tender amusement the

many squirelles, that sete

Ful hye upon the trees, and ete,

And in hir maner made festes.

The praises of many fair ladies were sung by troubadour and minstrel, but it would be hard to find another heroine possessed of the gaiety and vigour and charm of Blanche:-

I saw hir daunce so comlily

Carole and singe so swetely,

Laughe and pleye so womanly,

And loke so debonairly,

So goodly speke and so frendly,

That certes I trow that evermore

Nas seyn so blisful a tresore

·····

Therewith hir liste so wel to live,

That dulnesse was of hir a-drad.

Already Chaucer shows that truth to life, that impatience of artificiality which are to become two of his most striking characteristics.

A number of experiments in verse follow. Chaucer had a habit of rough-casting a poem, then leaving it for some time, and eventually using it in a more or less modified form in some later work. The story of Ceys and Alcioun, which forms part of the introduction to the Book of the Duchesse, originally appears to have been written as a separate poem, and between 1369 and 1379 we find no fewer than seven works, in prose and poetry, which were afterwards embodied in the Canterbury Tales: the Lyf of St. Cecyle (afterwards used for the Second Nonnes Tale); parts of the Monkes Tale; the greater part of the Clerkes Tale; Palamon and Arcite (which forms the basis of the Knightes Tale); the Tale of Melibeus; the Persones Tale; and the Man of Lawe's Tale. In addition to these come the Compleint to his Lady; An Amorous Compleint; Womanly Noblesse; Compleint unto Pitè; Anelida and Arcite (containing ten stanzas from Palamon); Of the Wretched Engendring of Mankind (a prose translation of Innocent III's De Miseria Human? Conditionis, of which the title alone remains, though fragments of it are used in the Man of Lawe's Tale); a translation of Bo?thius's Consolations of Philosophy; the Complaint of Mars; Troilus and Criseyde; Wordes to Adam Scriveyn; The Former Age; Fortune. Apart from Troilus and Criseyde and the poems afterwards used in the Canterbury Tales, none of these works are of any great importance in themselves, but in them we see a steady development in technical skill. The verse of the Book of the Duchesse is easy and flowing but not distinguished. The Compleint unto Pitè shows a freedom and boldness in the use of the French seven-lined stanza which marks a new departure in English versification. Chaucer tries his hand at roundels and balades, at narrative poetry and love laments, and the result is that he attains a suppleness and melody unknown to his predecessors and unfortunately ignored by his immediate successors. The music of his verse is not the least of his contributions to a literature, whose exponents could placidly remark

And trouthe of metre I sette also a-syde;

For of that art I hadde as tho no guyde

Me to reduce when I went a-wronge:

I toke none hede nouther of shorte nor longe.

Lydgate did not begin to write until after Chaucer's death, but the lines quoted above from the Troy Book exactly express the point of view of the majority of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century poets.

In 1372, as we have seen, Chaucer went to Italy, and the influence of Italian poetry upon him can hardly be exaggerated. Professor Ten Brink believes that the influence of Dante was largely responsible for a sudden quickening and deepening of religious feeling in Chaucer, and he attributes the A.B.C., the Lyf of St. Cecyle, and the translation of the De Miseria Human? Conditionis to this period. Whether he is right or wrong in this respect (and Professor Skeat dates both the A.B.C. and the Lyf of St. Cecyle before the Italian journey) there can be no question as to Chaucer's profound admiration for the author of the Divina Commedia. The Inuocacio ad Mariam which prefaces the Second Nonnes Tale is drawn from the concluding canto of the Paradiso, the most striking of all the Monk's tales

Of him that stood in greet prosperitee

And is y-fallen out of heigh degree

Into miserie, and endeth wrecchedly,

is that of Count Hugo of Pisa, which is drawn direct from Canto XXXIII of the Inferno, and it is impossible not to feel that the intense reverence for things holy which underlay all Chaucer's shrewdness and humour, may have been due-at least in part-to the influence of one of the greatest of all religious poets. Of Petrarch he speaks with admiration in the preface to the tale which he borrows from him, but except for a translation of the eighty-eighth sonnet which is inserted in Book I of Troilus and Criseyde, under the heading Cantus Troili, there is little evidence of any direct influence. From Boccaccio he borrowed freely, with a royal bettering in the borrowing. Troilus and Criseyde is taken bodily from the Filostrato, though with numerous additions, omissions, alterations, and adaptations: the Knightes Tale is condensed from the twelve books of the Teseide: the idea of the Canterbury Tales is taken from that of the Decamerone, though with the very significant difference that whereas Boccaccio's story-tellers are all drawn from one class and are shut off from intercourse with the outer world, Chaucer's range from knight to miller, from aristocratic prioress to bourgeois wife of Bath, and the fact of their being on a pilgrimage affords opportunity for incident on the way and for the introduction of fresh characters, thus giving scope for far greater variety and keeping far more closely in touch with actual life.

Between 1377 and 1382 he translated Bo?thius's De Consolatione Philosophi?, a work which evidently produced a deep impression upon him.

In 1382 Chaucer produced another topical poem. So far he had addressed himself to John of Gaunt-for whom not only the Book of the Duchesse, but the scandalous Compleint of Mars is said to have been written; now he addresses King Richard, and after the fashion of the day clothes in allegorical compliment the story of his wooing of Anne of Bohemia, who had twice before been engaged to other suitors. The wedding festivities lasted over February 14, when St. Valentine marries every year,

The lyric lark, and the grave whispering dove,

The sparrow that neglects his life for love,

The household bird with the red stomacher;

and the opportunity was too good a one to be lost. Chaucer saluted his king and queen in the Parlement of Foules, which though partially based on the fabliau of Hucline and Eglantine and containing passages from Dante and Boccaccio, is in all essentials a thoroughly original work. The poet, as usual, falls asleep and has a dream. He is taken by Scipio Africanus (he had just been reading the Somnium Scipionis), to the gate of a park which he is told none but the servants of Love may enter. Although he himself is but dull and has lost the taste of love he is permitted to see what passes in order that he may describe it, and is led into a beautiful garden in which many fair ladies, such as Beautee and Jolyte, are disporting themselves under the eye of Cupid. A number of women are dancing round a temple of brass, before whose door

Dame Pees sat with a curteyn in hir hond.

A long description of the temple and its occupants (Venus, Bacchus, Ceres, etc.) follows, and the poet then passes once more into the open air where

... in a launde[38] upon a hille of floures

he finds the "noble goddesse Nature," who has sent for every bird to come and choose its mate in honour of St. Valentine. Upon her hand she holds

A formel[39] egle, of shap the gentileste[40]

That ever she among hir werkes fonde.

Nature calls upon the royal eagle to make first choice, and he,

With hed enclyned and with ful humble chere,

at once chooses the bird upon her hand. Before the formel eagle has summoned up sufficient courage to give her answer,

Another tercel egle spak anoon,

Of lower kinde, and seyde, "that shal not be;

I love hir bet than ye do, by seynt John."

And hardly has he finished when a third eagle puts forward his claim. The various birds are called upon for their advice, and after a great deal of chattering and confusion, Nature finally decrees that the choice is to lie with the formel eagle herself. She modestly begs for a year's respite in which to make up her mind, and the parliament is adjourned.

But first were chosen foules for to singe

As yeer by yere was always hir usaunce

To singe a roundel at hir departinge

To do Nature honour and pleasunce,

and the whole ends with the charming roundel:-

Now welcom somer with thy sonne softe.

The poem has a freshness and tenderness which its conventional setting cannot conceal, and the humour of the conversation among the worm-foul, water-foul, and seed-foul, must have been even more delightful than it is to-day if-as has been suggested-the "fool cukkow," "the waker goos," "the popinjay, ful of delicacy," and the rest were easily recognisable portraits of contemporary courtiers.

The Parlement of Foules was followed by the Hous of Fame. Here again Chaucer makes use of the conventional stock-in-trade of medieval poets.

We have the dream, the strings of proper names drawn from Ovid and Virgil and the Bible, the constant moralisations, the temple to which the dreamer is guided, the use of allegory and symbol, all of which are common property. The influence of Dante is evident, and shows itself in detail as well as in the conception of the whole. The method of beginning each book with an invocation, the exact marking of the date on which the poem was begun, the steep rock, the description of the house of Rumour, and numerous other points are borrowed direct from the Divina Commedia, while there is no need to emphasise the obvious resemblance between the general plan of Dante's great poem and the Hous of Fame. Professor Skeat even goes so far as to suggest that Lydgate is referring to the Hous of Fame when he speaks of a poem of Chaucer's as "Dant in English."

The poem is divided into three books. Book I opens with a discussion of dreams in general, what causes them and what weight should be attached to them:-

Why that is an avisioun

And this a revelacioun.

This is followed by an invocation to the god of sleep, and then comes the vision itself. The poet falls asleep on the tenth day of December, and dreams that he is in a temple of glass. On a tablet on the wall is engraved the history of "daun Eneas," and its recital occupies almost the whole of the book. When the poet has "seyen al this sighte" he passes out of the temple and finds himself in a desert place:-

Withouten toun, or hous, or tree

Or bush, or gras, or cred[41] lond.

·····

Ne I no maner creature

That is y-formed by nature

Ne saw.

Terrified by the strangeness and loneliness of the place, he casts his eyes towards heaven, praying to be saved,

Fro fantom and illusion,

and as he looks upwards he becomes aware of a wonderful eagle with feathers of gold, flying towards him. Book II opens with further remarks on dreams, and a declaration that no one, not even Isaiah or Scipio or Nebuchadnezzar, ever had such a dream as this. The story then continues. The eagle swoops down upon the poet and catches him up in "his grimme pawes stronge,"-

Me caryinge in his clawes starke

As lightly as I were a larke.

Dazed and astonished, Chaucer almost loses consciousness, till he is recalled to life by the eagle, with "mannes voice," bidding him

... Awak

And be not so a-gast for shame!

and adding in a well-meant attempt to cheer him up,-

... Seynte Marie!

Thou art noyous for to carie.[42]

He is then told that as a reward for his long and faithful service of Cupid-

Withoute guerdon ever yit,

Jove has decreed that he is to be taken to the House of Fame:-

To do thee som disport and game,

In som recompensacioun

Of labour and devocioun.

In Fame's palace he will hear more wonders in two hours than there are grains of corn in a granary, for every sound made upon earth,-

Thogh hit were pyped of a mouse,

rises up there, multiplied and increased. Having concluded a learned disquisition on the properties of air, water, and sound-which he explains, he has kindly simplified in order to bring it within the grasp of a "lewed[43] man"-the eagle bears the poet through the stars and past all manner of "eyrish bestes" until they reach the House of Fame. Here Chaucer is set upon his feet-much to his relief-and is told to enter; he is further warned that every sound which rises from earth may be not only heard but seen, since it takes the form of whatever made it. Book III opens with an invocation to Apollo. The poet then climbs the steep rock of ice on which the palace stands, noticing as he passes the names of famous men cut in the ice and rapidly thawing away in the sun. At the summit is a wonderful castle of beryl stone, and all round it crowd

... alle maner of minstrales

And gestiours,[44] that tellen tales

Bothe of weping and of game,

Of al that longeth unto Fame.

Amongst these are all the famous harpers and singers of old days, and close by stand

... hem that maken blody soun

In trumpe, beme[45] and clarioun.

A curiously carved gate gives admission to the castle, and entering, Chaucer finds a large number of knights-at-arms pouring out of a great hall. The hall itself is

plated half a fote thikke

Of gold ...

and set with precious stones. Here the Lady Fame sits on a throne, her feet resting on earth and her head touching the heavens. The nine Muses sing her praises eternally, and on either side of her are pillars on which stand the historian Josephus and the poets Statius, Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, and Claudian:-

The halle was al ful y-wis,

Of hem that writen olde gestes,

As ben on trees rokes nestes.

Suddenly a great noise is heard, and there bursts into the hall a multitude of people of every race and every condition come to prefer their requests to Fame. Some beg

"That thou graunte us now good fame,

And lete our werkes han that name;

In ful recompensacioun

Of good werk, give us good renoun;"

others said

"Mercy, lady dere!

To telle certain, as hit is,

We han don neither that ne this

But ydel al our lyf y-be.

But, natheles, yit preye we,

That we mowe han so good a fame

And greet renoun and knowen name,

As they that han don nobel gestes ..."

others-

"But certeyn they were wonder fewe,"

cried

"Certes, lady brighte,

We han don wel with al our mighte;

But we ne kepen have no fame.

Hyd our werkes and our name,

For goddes love! for certes we

Han certeyn doon hit for bountee

And for no maner other thing."

Their requests are granted or refused with absolute capriciousness. Fame is attended by Eolus, who according to her direction blows a black trumpet called Sclaunder (Slander) or a golden clarion called Clere Laude (Clear Praise), and these trumpets are used as the whim takes her. Evil men have good fame, and good men are slandered, or on the other hand, both receive their deserts without any reason except Fame's good pleasure. As Chaucer stands watching the endless procession, a man approaches him and asks if he too has come to receive fame. The poet hastily protests against any such desire, and explains that he has come for-

Tydinges, other this or that

Of love, or swiche thinges glade.

The stranger bids him follow him to another place, and leads him to

An hous, that domus Dedali,

That Laborintus cleped is.

It is made of sticks and twigs and continually spins round and round:-

And ther-out com so greet a noise

That, had it stonden upon Oise,

Men mighte hit han herd esely

To Rome, I trowe sikerly.

·····

And on the roof men may yit seen

A thousand holes, and wel mo,

To leten wel the soun out go.

This is the house of Rumour, to which come tidings

Of werre, of pees, of mariages,

Of reste, of labour of viages,[46]

Of abood[47] of deeth, of lyfe,

Of love, of hate, accorde, of stryfe, etc.

Here Chaucer meets the eagle again, who tells him that he is once more prepared to become his guide, and without more ado seizes him "bitweene his toon" and puts him in through the window. The house is full of people all busy whispering in each other's ears:-

Whan oon had herd a thing, y-wis,

He com forth to another wight,

And gan him tellen, anoon-right,

The same that to him was told,

Or hit a furlong-way was old,

But gan somwhat for to eche

To this tyding in this speche

More than hit ever was.

And nat so sone departed nas

That he fro him, that he ne mette

With the thridde; and or he lette

Any stounde,[48] he tolde him als;

Were the tyding sooth or fals,

Yit wolde he telle hit natheless.

Out of the windows fly lies and truths, jostling each other, and Fame decides which shall prevail. Shipmen and pilgrims, pardoners and messengers, crowd into the house with boxes crammed with marvellous stories. In one corner of the great hall men are telling love stories, the poet goes to listen to these. Here, just when the climax appears to be in sight, the poem breaks off in the middle of a sentence. Remarkable as it is, full of humour and shrewd observation, and with signs of Chaucer's genius for narrative, it is not in his most characteristic vein. Troilus and Criseyde had already given promise of genius of a very different order, and it is possible that Chaucer himself grew weary of the smooth monotony of his own verse, and felt within him a growing impulse to produce something more human and more vivid. The Hous of Fame is an almost perfect example of a type of poem whose popularity was to continue undiminished for another century and more. It was imitated again and again, and a comparison between it and such works as Lydgate's Temple of Glas is sufficient to show the difference between genius and talent even when genius in working with not wholly congenial material. If Chaucer's reputation rested upon the Book of the Duchesse, the Parlement of Foules, the Hous of Fame, and the Legend of Good Women, a few scholars would know and appreciate his work, and anthologies would probably make the majority of readers acquainted with a few carefully-chosen extracts, but he would have done little or nothing to break down the literary conventions of his day. It would need a keen eye to discern in these the dawn of a new era, without the light thrown upon them by Troilus and Criseyde and the Canterbury Tales.

The Legend of Good Women is said by Lydgate to have been written at the Queen's request. The general plan is taken from Boccaccio's De Claris Mulieribus, and Chaucer also translates freely from the Heroides and the Metamorphoses of Ovid. The interest of the poem lies in the Prologue, which consists of nearly six hundred lines, and of which there are two distinct versions. The poet describes how in the spring he goes out into the fields to worship the daisy, and he gives a long and poetical description of this "emperice and flour of floures alle." That night he sleeps in a little arbour in his garden, and in a dream he sees the god of love leading by the hand a queen clothed in green and gold and of surpassing beauty. Here follows a ballad in her praise. A rout of ladies now appears, and they all kneel down and sing the praise of their queen. The poet kneels among them, but presently the god of love catches sight of him and declares that he is a traitor and heretic for he has translated the Romance of the Rose-

That is an heresye ageyns my lawe,

and has also written of the fickleness of Cressida-

Why noldest thou as wel han seyd goodnesse

Of women, as thou hast seyd wikkednesse?

The queen, who is none other than Alcestis, intercedes for him, reminding the irate god that the poet is also the author of the Book of the Duchesse, the Parlement of Foules, the story of Palamon and Arcite, to say nothing of

"... many an ympne for your haly-dayes."[49]

and the Lyf of St. Cecyle. She therefore begs that he may be forgiven, and in token of true contrition he shall spend the most part of his time

In making of a glorious Legende

Of Gode Women, maidenes and wyves,

That weren trewe in lovinge al hir lyves.

The legends which follow are the result of this command, and the definition of virtue given above accounts for the inclusion of such "good women" as Cleopatra and Medea. The plan of the poem necessarily involved sameness of treatment. Chaucer grew tired of his heroines, and of the twenty legends which he seems to have planned, only nine were written. The stories of Cleopatra, Thisbe, Dido, Hypsipyle and Medea, Lucretia, Ariadne, Philomela, Phyllis, and Hypermnestra, are strung together somewhat perfunctorily. As the names show, they are all drawn from Latin authors, but with the usual freedom of a medieval translator Chaucer does not hesitate to alter the originals to suit his purpose. He wishes to show the torments and constancy of love's martyrs, and without scruple he blackens the characters of Jason and ?neas and Theseus, in order to bring out the virtues of Medea, Dido, and Ariadne. The legends show little of the humour and freshness of Chaucer's other poems. Occasionally a description of the lover's passion recalls some similar passage in Troilus and Criseyde, and the mere fact that the interest centres in emotion rather than action is in itself of importance, but Hercules, in the legend of Hypsipyle, is a poor substitute for Pandarus, and the perpetual recurrence of the love motif tends to weaken its effect. The two versions of the Prologue show many interesting points of difference. Mention has already been made of the supposed intervention of the Queen, through which Chaucer obtained permission to appoint a deputy to assist him in his office work. It is supposed that this incident must have occurred after the writing of the first prologue and before the writing of the second, for while the whole poem is written in Queen Anne's honour, the second prologue contains numerous passages expressing the poet's gratitude and affection, which are not found in the first. She is

... of alle floures flour,

Fulfilled of al vertu and honour.

······

She is the clernesse and the verray light

That in this derke worlde me wynt and ledeth,

······

For as the sonne wol the fyr disteyne[50]

So passeth al my lady sovereyne,

That is so good, so fair, so debonaire;

I prey to god that ever falle hir faire!

Another striking change in the second version is the omission of certain too explicit lines in which the poet had dared to set forth the duties of kings towards their subjects. Part of this wise advice still remains, but evidently Chaucer found it dangerous to call Richard's attention to the necessity for hearing his people's petitions and complaints, and the later version contents itself with a more general statement that kings should

... nat be lyk tiraunts of Lumbardye

That han no reward but at tirannye.

It is also noteworthy that several words which appear in their older form in the first version are modernised in the second (e. g. in the first line sythes becomes tymes), so that it is possible to see the language in actual process of development.

Chaucer's last and greatest work, the Canterbury Tales, was begun in 1386-though as has been shown, certain isolated tales, or rough sketches for tales, were already in existence-and the composition continued till 1389, when it-like so many of his other poems-was left unfinished. A number of fugitive pieces and lyrics also date from about this time, as does the prose Treatise on the Astrolabe written for his little son, Lewis.

The popularity of Chaucer's poetry is shown not only by repeated references to him as master and teacher, made by his immediate successors, but by the entire Chaucer apocrypha which soon sprang into being. Some genuine works of his-such as the Book of the Lion (this very probably was no more than a translation of Machault's Le Dit du Lion), have been lost, but to make up for this a number of poems have been attributed to him, some of which were not written until years after his death. Subjoined is a list of the more important of these, with the names of the real authors in cases where scholars have succeeded in tracing them.

The Testament of Love. Thomas Usk (d. 1386).

La Belle Dame sans Merci. Sir R. Ros (fifteenth century).

The Cuckoo and the Nightingale (sometimes called The Book of Cupid God of Love). Sir Thomas Clanvowe.

The Flower and the Leaf; The Assembly of Ladies. Considered by some scholars to be the work of the same hand. Both purport to be written by a woman.

The Court of Love.

The Second Merchant's Tale, or The Tale of Beryn (containing a preliminary account of the Pardoner's adventures in Canterbury).

The Complaint of the Black Knight. Lydgate.

The Tale of Gamelyn. This poem is included among the MSS. of the Canterbury Tales. Professor Ten Brink suggests that Chaucer may have intended to work it up into the Yeoman's tale.

The Letter of Cupid. Occleve.

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