Born in London(?), 1340(?). Page in household of Duke of Clarence, 1357. Took part in King’s expedition into France, 1359; taken prisoner in Brittany. Was “Valettus” to the King in 1361. Pension of 20 marks granted him by King, June, 1367; Yoeman of King’s Chamber at that time. Abroad again, 1369 and 1370. To Italy on Commission respecting commercial treaty, Dec. 1372 to autumn of 1373. Married, 1374(?). Grant of daily pitcher of wine (afterward commuted to second pension of 20 marks), 23 April, 1374. Comptroller of Customs, 8 June, 1374. Pension of £10 granted him by Duke of Lancaster, 13 June, 1374. Two custodianships, 1375. On secret service with Sir John Burley, 1376; with Sir Thomas Percy in Flanders, 1377; in France and Italy, 1378 and 1379. Second Comptrollership of Customs, 1382. Knight of the Shire for Kent, 1386. Deprived of Comptrollerships, 1386. “Canterbury Tales” probably written, 1387 to 1393. Financial difficulties; sold pensions, May, 1388. Appointed Clerk of King’s Works, 1389; superseded, 1391. Probably Forester of North Petherton Park, Somersetshire, 1391–98. Grant of £20 a year for life from King Richard II., 1394; of 40 marks from King Henry IV., 1399. Took lease of house in Westminster, Christmas Eve, 1399. Died 25 Oct. 1400. Buried in Westminster Abbey. Works: “Assembly of Fowls,” first printed, 1478; “Canterbury Tales,” first printed by Caxton, 1478(?), by Pynson, 1493(?), by Wynken de Worde, 1498; “Troilus and Cressida,” first printed (anon.), 1482(?); “The House (or “Book”) of Fame,” first printed by Caxton, 1486(?); Chaucer’s translation of Boethius’ “De Consolatione Philosophiæ,” first printed, 1490(?). Collected Works: earliest, 1532, 1542, etc.; latest (Kelmscott Press), 1896.

  Of his collected works that of 1532 was edited by Thynne, 1561 by Stowe, 1598 by Speight, 1721 by Urry, and the most important that of Skeat 1894–97, 6 vols. The first important edition of the “Canterbury Tales” is Tyrwhitt, 1775–78. The first important biography, but unreliable, is by Godwin 1803–04.

Personal

  He was buried in the Abbey of Westminster, before the chapel of St. Bennet; by whose sepulchre is written on a tablet hanging on a pillar, his epitaph made by a poet laureate.

  I dobte whether Chaucer were of the temple or noe, unless yt were towardes his latter tyme, for he was an olde manne, as appereth by Gower in Confessione Amantis in the XVI yere of R. 2: when Gower wroote that Booke. And yt is most certeyne to be gathered by cyrcumstances of Recordes, that the lawyers were not in the temple vntill towardes the latter parte of the reygne of kinge Edwarde the thirde; at whiche tyme Chaucer was a grave manne, holden in greate credyt, and employed in embassye, so that me thinkethe he sholde not be of that howse; and yet, yf he then were, I sholde iudge yt strange that he sholde violate the rules of peace and gravytye yn those yeares.

  Dunnington Castle, neer Newbury, was his; a noble seate and strong castle, which was held by the King (Charles I^st) (who governour?) but since dismanteled. Memorandum:—neer this castle was an oake, under which Sir Jeofrey was wont to sitt, called Chaucer’s-oake, which was cutt downe by … tempore Caroli I^mi; and so it was, that … was called into the starre chamber, and was fined for it…. Judge Richardson harangued against him long, and like an orator, had topiques from the Druides, etc. This information I had from … an able attorney that was at the hearing. His picture is at his old howse at Woodstock (neer the parke-gate), a foot high, halfe way: has passed from proprietor to proprietor.

  April 28. Note out of Sir Fra. Kinnaston, of Oatly, in Salop, his Comments on Chaucer’s Troilus and Cressida. For Chaucer’s personage, it appears by an excellent piece of him limmed, by the life, of Thomas Occlive, his schollar, and now remaining as a high-prized jewell in the hands of my honoured friend sir Thomas Cotton, kt. and bart. that Chaucer was a man of an even stature, neither too high nor too low, his complection sanguine, his face fleshie but pale, his forehead broad but comely, smooth and even. His eyes rather little than great, cast most part downward, with a grave aspect. His lipps plump and ruddy, and both of an equal thickness, the hair on the upper being thin and short, of a wheat colour; on his chin two thin forked tuffs. His cheeks of like colour, with the rest of his face being either shaved, or wanting hair. All which considered, together with his witt and education in the court, and his favour among great ladys, one of whose women he married, it was his modesty made him speaks of his unlikeliness to be a lover.

  As to his temper he had a mixture of the gay, the modest and the grave. His reading was deep and extensive, his judgment sound and discerning; he was communicative of his knowledge, and ready to correct or pass over the faults of his contemporary writers. He knew how to judge of and excuse the slips of weaker capacities, and pitied rather than exposed the ignorance of that age. In one word, he was a great scholar, a pleasant wit, a candid critic, a sociable companion, a stedfast friend, a great philosopher, a temperate economist, and a pious Christian.

  Was buried before the Chapel of St. Bennet, where his stone of broad gray marble, as I take it, was not long since remaining: but was taken up when Mr. Dryden’s monument was erected and sawn to mend the pavement.

  Geoffrey Chaucer, one of the greatest, as well as most ancient, of the English Poets, is said by some writers to have been a native of Berkshire, by others of Oxfordshire, but by others, with much greater probability, of London. He was descended from a good family, and born in the year 1328. His first studies were in the University of Cambridge, where he wrote his Court of Love. He removed from Cambridge to complete his studies at Oxford, where after a considerable stay, he became, says Leland, “an acute Logician, a smooth rhetorician, a pleasant poet, a grave philosopher, an ingenious mathematician, and a holy divine.” He then travelled into France, Holland, and other countries, and on his return entered himself in the Inner Temple, where he studied the municipal Laws of England. But he had not long followed that study before his singular accomplishments were discovered at Court, whither he next made his approaches. He mixed in the political troubles of the times, during the latter part of the reign of Edward III. and in those of Richard II. and Henry IV. in the two former of which he enjoyed various confidential situations. He died at London, October 25th, 1400, in the 72d year of his age, and was interred in Westminster Abbey.

  It is in one of the royal MSS. of this poem in the British Museum that Occleve has left a drawing of Chaucer: according to which, Chaucer’s portraiture was made on his monument, in the chapel of Saint Blase in Westminster-abbey, by the benefaction of Nicholas Brigham, in the year 1556. And from this drawing, in 1598, John Speed procured the print of Chaucer prefixed to Speght’s edition of his works; which has been since copied in a most finished engraving by Vertue. Yet it must be remembered, that the same drawing occurs in an Harleian MSS. written about Occleve’s age, and in another of the Cottonian department. Occleve himself mentions this drawing in his “Consolatio Servilis.” It exactly resembles the curious picture on board of our venerable bard, preserved in the Bodleian gallery at Oxford. I have a very old picture of Chaucer on board, much like Occleve’s, formerly kept in Chaucer’s house, a quadrangular stone-mansion, at Woodstock in Oxfordshire; which commanded a prospect of the ancient magnificent royal palace, and of many beautiful scenes in the adjacent park: and whose last remains, chiefly consisting of what was called Chaucer’s bed-chamber, with an old carved oaken roof, evidently original, were demolished about fifteen years ago.

  Through all the works of Chaucer there reigns a cheerfulness, a manly hilarity, which makes it almost impossible to doubt a correspondent habit of feeling in the author himself.

  For the well-known portrait of Chaucer we are indebted to an old MS. of the Canterbury Tales, belonging to the fifteenth century, which is at present in the possession of the Marquis of Stafford. This MS., at the commencement of the tale of Melibœus, represents the poet riding on horseback, in a vest or gipoun of dark velvet, with a bonnet of the same colour, with gilt anelace, or dagger, black boots, and with the trappings of his horse partially gilt. In the part of the tale of Melibœus in which the poet pourtrays himself, he hints that he was rather corpulent, and was in the habit of looking down on the ground. He also gives a similar portrait of himself in the Prologue to the “Rime of Sire Thopas.” But, notwithstanding this tendency to be corpulent, his appearance conveys the impression of great delicacy. He seems to have been short of stature. His countenance, calm and composed as it was, appears to have been expressive of a high degree of naïve humour. The character and temperament of Chaucer are clearly and beautifully set forth in his own works. He was cheerful, kind, open and serene to the last moments of his life, and gained the affections of all with whom he came in contact; his social habits were formed by the various circumstances and spheres in which he had lived and moved. He was naturally social, and even convivial, and, like many other poets, he paid little regard to his financial means; hence we find him involved in difficulties at times, when, considering his ample income, we should have least expected it. But, notwithstanding this carelessness about his own affairs, Chaucer was, in the highest degree, strict and punctual in the performance of all his official duties.

  The figure, which is half-length, has a back-ground of green tapestry. He is represented with grey hair and beard, which is biforked; he wears a dark-coloured dress and hood; his right hand is extended, and in his left he holds a string of beads. From his vest a black case is suspended, which appears to contain a knife, or possibly a “penner,” or pen-case. The expression of the countenance is intelligent; but the fire of the eye seems quenched, and evident marks of advance age appear on the countenance.

  Chaucer’s face is to his writings the best preface and commentary; it is contented-looking, like one familiar with pleasant thoughts, shy and self-contained somewhat, as if he preferred his own company to the noisy and rude companionship of his fellows; and the outlines are bland, fleshy, voluptuous, as of one who had a keen relish for the pleasures that leave no bitter traces. Tears and mental trouble, and the agonies of doubt, you cannot think of in connexion with it; laughter is sheathed in it, the light of a smile is diffused over it.

  His visible figure, at all events, stands plainly before us—a large head, a little body, but with broad shoulders, and small extremities. His physical energy must have been enormous—in terms of physiology, he must have had large viscera—to support the incessant and varied labour of his life.

  The window is placed immediately over the tomb where Chaucer’s dust reposes. It was designed by Waller, and executed by Baillie and Mayer, last year, in London…. At the base are pictures of the pilgrims setting out from London, and their arrival at Canterbury. Above are two medallions, representing Chaucer receiving his commission in 1372, from Edward III., to the Doge of Genoa, and his reception by the latter. At the apex is represented, allegorically, as two ladies, one in white, the other in green, “The Floure and the Leafe.” “As they which honour the Flower, a thing fading with every blast, are such as look for beauty and worldly pleasure; but they that honour the Leaf, which abideth with the root, notwithstanding the winter storms, are they which follow virtue and during qualities, without regard to worldly respects.” In the spandrels and traceries are heraldries, and portraits of Edward III., and Philippa, Gower, and John of Gaunt, Wycliffe and Strode—Chaucer’s contemporaries. They are fringed with the arms of England, France, Hainault, Lancaster, Castile, and Leon. At the bottom is written “Geoffrey Chaucer, died A.D. 1400.”… There is a still, religious light about the window, which may well denote the quiet beauty with which the sacred stream of thought flows ever through the ages, shining above the mouldering monuments of kings, luminous after their strifes and ambitions are forgotten. Little did King Edward III. dream that in the end he might be chiefly remembered as the monarch who recognized Chaucer!

  If character may be devined from works, he was a good man, genial, sincere, hearty, temperate of mind, more wise, perhaps, for this world than the next, but thoroughly humane, and friendly with God and men. I know not how to sum up what we feel about him better than by saying (what would have pleased most one who was indifferent to fame) that we love him more even than we admire.

  With this guide every reader can work out the succession of the Tales for himself, and mix them in proper order with the Minor Poems…. He will then see Chaucer, not only outwardly as he was in the flesh—page, soldier, squire, diplomatist, Custom-house officer, Member of Parliament, then a suppliant for protection and favour, a beggar for money; but inwardly as he was in the spirit—clear of all nonsense of Courts of Love, &c.—gentle and loving, early timid and in despair, sharing others’ sorrow, and, by comforting them, losing part of his own; yet long dwelling on the sadness of forsaken love, seeking the “consolation of philosophy,” watching the stars, praying to the “Mother of God;” studying books, and, more still, woman’s nature; his eye open to all the beauties of the world around him, his ear to the “heavenly harmony” of birds’ song; at length becoming the most gracious and tender spirit, the sweetest singer, the best pourtrayer, the most pathetic, and withal the most genial and humourful healthy-souled man that England had ever seen. Still, after 500 years, he is bright and fresh as the glad light green of the May he so much loved; he is still second only to Shakespeare in England, and fourth only to him and Dante and Homer in the world. When will our Victorian time love and honour him as it should? Surely, of all our poets he is the one to come home to us most.

  We must be careful about filling in details of his inner history from supposed autobiographical references in his poems. Chaucer’s biographers too often take the poet literally, ignoring his ironic humour and his conventional artistic pretences. They argue from one or two jests at his wife’s expense, of a kind that might be made by the most affectionate of husbands, provided there was no real ground for them, that his wife was a shrew and his married life far from happy. They accept as matter of fact to be gravely discussed the poet’s statement in the opening of the “Book of the Duchess,” which serves happily as part of the artistic setting of that poem, that he has been unable to sleep night or day for eight years. This confession of a long and hopeless love-passion is taken with such unhesitating faith, that it is set against and allowed to overbear otherwise plain documentary evidence of the date of Chaucer’s marriage to one of the “damoiselles” of the Queen’s Chamber. But why take such conventional artistic pretences literally?… There is every indication in his works that he was not an eager, excitable man; moody and uncertain. On the contrary, he would seem to have been tranquil and leisurely, with his wits in easy command; patient, not self-assertive, yet with sufficient backbone to defy Fortune when the worst came to the worst. Such, at least, he appears in his works, and such, from his diplomatic success, we may presume him to have been in actual business; though we should err greatly if in every case we concluded that the diplomatist with the pen has equanimity enough to be diplomatic with the tongue. In his works, at least, he displays the most artful and oven-tempered courtesy. We see him with easy smile deferentially protesting ignorance of the flowers of rhetoric; throwing the blame of disagreeable things in his story on some author that he professes to follow; dismissing knotty inquisitions as too difficult for his humble wit; evading tedious or irrelevant narrations by referring the reader to Homer, or “Dares,” or “Dyte.”

  For the present at least Chaucer’s married life is involved in obscurity. That it was not a success there are many indications; but the causes of its unhappiness have not hitherto been discovered—are, perhaps, undiscoverable.

  Geoffrey Chaucer is said to have lived not only at Woodstock but also at Donington Castle in Leicestershire, where there used to be an old oak, called Chaucer’s Oak. But these traditions, so far as they have any foundation, probably should be referred to his son Thomas, born about the year 1367. Thomas Chaucer succeeded his father in the office of forester of North Petherton…. Thomas Chaucer married, early in life, a daughter of Sir John Burghersh, with whom he acquired large estates in Oxfordshire and other counties, including the manor of Ewelme in Oxfordshire. He received grants both from Richard II., to whom he was made chief butler, and from John of Gaunt; and he was advanced by Henry IV., from whose queen he received the manor of Woodstock, in February, 1411. He sat for Oxfordshire in several parliaments, and was chosen Speaker in 1407, and again in 1410, 1411, and 1414. He served in France at the battle of Agincourt, furnishing twelve men-at-arms and thirty-seven archers. He died very rich, at Ewelme, in November, 1434, leaving a daughter Alice, born about 1404, whose third husband, by whom only she had children, was William de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk. Their eldest son John married the sister of King Edward IV.; and the eldest son of that marriage, John de la Pole, created Earl of Lincoln, was declared by Richard III. heir-apparent in the event of the death of the Prince of Wales without issue. John de la Pole was killed at the battle of Stoke in 1487, and he died childless. Thus the last of Chaucer’s race was the great-great-grandson of the poet, one who stood so near the throne that, through him, Chaucer might have been forefather to a line of English kings.

  The life of Chaucer is a field that blossoms luxuriantly with conjectures, and it is asking a good deal of him who enters it to abstain from plucking occasionally one of its flowers…. To read a life of Chaucer cannot by any possibility be so tedious as to write one; but it approaches dangerously near. While he lived he was regarded by his contemporaries as the chief poet of Britain. Men admired him, men imitated him; they strove to reproduce in their own work the manner and spirit of the master they loved. They were never weary of celebrating his praises, and the tributes paid to his greatness are couched in language of warmest eulogy and sometimes of fairly affectionate devotion. The one thing they neglected to do entirely was to give an account of his life, and even of the most insignificant detail belonging to it or connected with it. No contemporary writer has preserved for us a single anecdote. No contemporary chronicle contains a single saying or reports a single fact. The appreciation which gladly recognized Chaucer as standing at the head of all living English poets never, to our knowledge, inspired a solitary disciple to place upon record the slightest particular in the story of his career. His superiority remained unchallenged during the century that followed his death. Yet no account of him on even the most insignificant scale was even attempted till after he had been in his grave almost a hundred and fifty years. Nothing could show more pointedly how alien was the spirit of the past to that of the present…. The biography of Chaucer is built upon doubts and thrives upon perplexities. Without these there would be exceedingly little to say. Uncertainty begins with the date of his birth, it hovers over most of his career, and adds to the length of the narrative as inevitably as it detracts from its interest. About some of the facts the evidence is conflicting; about others that cannot be questioned there is conflict of opinion as to their interpretation. In consequence, he who sets out to gain a knowledge of the poet’s life enters at once into an arena of controversy, and of controversy that can usually never be carried to a satisfactory conclusion because of the absence of satisfactory data. For this very reason the discussion is apt to be as exciting to the disputant as it is dull to the reader.

  Poet’s Corner is the name given to the eastern angle of the South Transept, from the tombs and honorary monuments of Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and several of our greatest poets. Tomb of Geoffrey Chaucer, the father of English poetry (d. 1400); erected in 1555, by Nicholas Brigham, a scholar of Oxford, and himself a poet; Chaucer was originally buried in this spot, Brigham removing his bones to a more honourable tomb. A portrait of Chaucer originally ornamented the back of the tomb. Its loss was in part supplied in the painted glass window above the tomb, erected in 1868, in which are medallions of Chaucer and Gower and scenes from Chaucer’s poems.

  Chaucer was thus, at various times of his life, a courtier, soldier, diplomatist, and man of business, and it was mainly by hard work done in these various capacities that he earned his living, though in his old age the fact that he was a great poet may have won for him rather more consideration than kings always show to their worn-out servants. Probably no other poet of equal rank has ever led so active and varied a life, and it is because we find Chaucer in his poems so shrewd a man of the world, so astonishingly observant, and so good a judge of character, that we take an interest in finding out how he obtained his experience. When we come to examine his writings we shall find that the double life he was obliged to lead had one bad effect: it caused him to leave many of his poems unfinished. If we may take a passage in his “Hous of Fame” (Bk. ii, ll. 139–152) quite literally, he must often have been in danger of over-work, though the absolutely healthy tone of his poems forbids us to think that he ever fell a victim to it.

  As the exact date still remains uncertain, I can only say that we must place it between 1330 and 1340. The reader can incline to whichever end of the decade best pleases him. I merely record my opinion, for what it is worth, that “shortly before 1340” fits in best with all the facts…. I believe his wife’s death to have been a serious loss to him in one respect at least. Most of his early works are reasonably free from coarseness; whereas such Tales as those of the Miller, the Reeve, the Shipman, the Merchant, and the Prologue to the Wife’s Tale, can hardly be defended. All these may confidently be dated after the year 1387.

  Here he sat to Brown for the head of Chaucer in the very large picture—now in the museum of Sydney, Australia—of Chaucer reading to the Court of Edward 3 the Legend of Custance. The head was painted in one night, 11 P.M. to 4 A.M., and was never afterwards touched upon. This is recognizably like Chaucer, and is also a very fair portrait of Rossetti.

Romaunt of the Rose, 1360–65?

  Thou art in Albion the god of worldly love; and into good English thou didst translate the book of the Rose.

  This poem is esteemed by the French the most valuable piece of their old poetry. It is far beyond the rude efforts of all their preceding romancers; and they have nothing equal to it before the reign of Francis I., who died in the year 1547.

  His translation of the decidedly uninteresting allegory known as the “Romaunt of the Rose,” is no doubt the production of his earlier years, as we infer from the language and from the mode of versification, which he copied from the original, and which was also adopted by Gower in his English poems. The translation, however, attracted some notice even on the Continent, for the somewhat common-place French poet, Eustace Deschamps, flattered by seeing his soft-sounding French translated into rough Saxon, felt himself called upon to laud “the great translator, the noble Geoffrey Chaucer,” in a composition of many strophes. Happily the poet did not long continue to occupy himself with such subordinate labours.

  No verse so flowing and harmonious as this, no diction at once so clear, correct, and expressive, had, it is probable, adorned and brought out the capabilities of his native tongue when Chaucer began to write.

  Chaucer knew his countrymen well, and did not care to give them more than 3,629 out of the 17,930 verses of Jean de Meung. He omits the democracy as well as the seductive indecency of his original; and in both cases he doubtless followed the lead of his personal taste, as well as of his literary judgment. He had been brought up at court, and was by training in harmony with the loyal aristocratic feeling of his day; and he was, moreover, in all probability, a Lollard, or at least a sympathiser with the Lollards, having married the sister of John of Gaunt’s second wife, and being, we may presume, no little influenced by the opinions of that staunch patron of the religious purists. But indeed his genius was cast in a different mould from that of Jean de Meung, who was natural philosopher first, and romancist afterwards. Chaucer, like Guillaume de Lorris, was before all a romancist; and it is therefore perfectly natural that he should have reproduced the latter’s verses with the greatest zest and completeness.

  It has already been said that Chaucer translated the “Romaunt,” and that a version has been current under his name for centuries. There is only one MS. of this translation, in the Hunterian Museum at Glasgow, so that we have no means of comparing texts, and thus settling the difficult questions that have been raised about it. As it stands, the poem contains various features which, in the opinion of the most advanced school of Chaucerian criticism, mark it out as being not Chaucer’s; the principal difficulty being connected with the rhymes, some of which seem to be irreconcilable with Chaucer’s principles of pronunciation. The question cannot be properly discussed here, but in deference to what seems to be the balance of opinion we quote the “Romaunt” under the head of “Poems attributed to Chaucer.”

  In spite of occasional variation in the character of the version, the work, as a whole, bears its own overwhelming testimony as to its having come but from one hand. To arrive at any other conclusion, one must fix his eyes so closely upon certain points of detail that he loses sight both of other details and of the general view. The arguments that have been adduced for a dual authorship are so far from convincing that they cannot even be called specious.

  We are compelled to admit the disagreeable fact that Chaucer’s imitation of the famous French poem is lost to us. Of the numerous losses which we mourn in mediæval English literature, this is one of those which cause us the most pain. At the stage of development which the poet had attained at this time, he must have translated this peculiar work in a manner peculiarly his own. We may assume that he softened if not eliminated the incongruity in treatment and tone existing between the two parts; that he perhaps imparted to Guillaume de Lorris’s poem some of the biting satire of his successor, and that he certainly condensed and poetically enriched the poem of Jean de Meung, and rendered it closer to the style of his predecessor.

  The result of the discussion seems clear. The affirmative evidence brought forward by Mr. Lounsbury, when reduced to its lowest terms, we have found to be entirely consistent with the belief that the translation is not by Chaucer, but by an imitator. The negative evidence, on the other hand, from dialect, grammar, and metre, if it does not show conclusively that Chaucer and the translator were two persons, still creates the strongest kind of probability in favor of that supposition. We must therefore be allowed to prefer the theory that is in accordance with all the facts to the theory that is strongly opposed to the most significant of them, and to believe that the “Romaunt” is not Chaucer’s with the possible exception of the first seventeen hundred lines.

  The supremacy of Chaucer is in nothing more clearly seen than in the fact that for more than a century after his death he was the sole source of inspiration for the poets…. It was Chaucer the student of the “Roman de la Rose,” not Chaucer the poet of his fellow-men, nor even Chaucer the student of Italian literature, after whom the younger versifiers stumbled.

  Chaucer’s translation of the “Romaunt of the Rose” is not remarkable only as making a landmark in the refinement of our versification. It marks with equal significance the rise of a new spirit in English poetry, the importation of thoughts and themes from the Continent, announcing the approach of the Renaissance.

  Whoever wrote it, the translation is well worthy to take a place beside Chaucer’s best work; and it is difficult to understand how this comes to be the only surviving work of a poet who was such a master of English verse and had such power of reproducing with added skilful touches of his own Jehan de Meung’s “Roman de la Rose.”

Book of the Dutchess, 1369–70?

  The charm of this poem, notwithstanding all the artificialities with which it is overlaid, lies in its simplicity and truth to nature. A real human being is here brought before us instead of a vague abstraction; and the glow of life is on the page, though it has to tell of death and mourning. Chaucer is finding his strength by dipping into the true spring of poetic inspiration; and in his dreams he is awaking to the real capabilities of his genius. Though he is still uncertain of himself and dependent on others, it seems not too much to say that already in this “Book of the Duchess” he is in some measure an original poet.

  Artistically considered, the work, though not without beauty, is juvenile and crude. It is conventional in form, awkward in arrangement, inadequate in expression. There is scarcely anything specially Chaucerian in it.

  A multitude of ideas and images, which were very common in French literature since the “Romance of the Rose,” appear here for the first time in an English dress—such as reminiscences from classical antiquity or even from the Old Testament, long spun-out allegories, witty and uncouth touches from the wisdom of the mediæval schoolmen. However much the mind may be distracted by all this learning, parenthetically introduced, we nevertheless frequently hear the voice of real passion from the strange figure, and in some passages of the knight’s discourse—as in his invectives against Fortune, or in his complaints, given in antithetic form—the student of Shakspere is reminded of the great bard’s earlier works, especially Romeo and Juliet.

  The poem has many of the faults of an early effort. Its many learned references, its long-spun allegories, its philosophical platitudes, all tend to destroy the effect aimed at. But a real power of characterisation, and the germs at least of the poet’s later dramatic power, are evident. Though the speeches are too long and too full of digressions, the dialogue between the poet and the unknown knight is well conceived, but the retarded crisis intended to come as a surprise fails of its effect, because too long postponed.

  A distinguished English scholar has been moved to undertake Chaucer’s defence against the strictures passed on this poem by a French critic; he finds it graceful and pathetic. I confess that it seems to me few readers, who judge the composition apart from Chaucer’s prestige, are likely to share his opinion. The design … is singularly barren of genuine invention. Simple as it is, the action is clumsily conducted, for the knight acquaints the reader from the first with his lady’s death, thus spoiling what might have been a dramatic climax, if the fact had been withheld till after the recital of all her amiable qualities. Nor is the crudeness of the general conception relieved by any remarkable beauties of detail. The story serves to piece together a certain number of “purple patches,” taken from various poems which the author has read and admired; but these do not seem to be in any way necessarily connected with the central thought. It would, in fact, be as exacting to look for pathos in a poem of this order, as in Spenser’s “Astrophel,” or in the pastoral elegies described in the 30th number of the “Guardian.” The mourning is of that conventional kind which is prescribed for a conventional class of poetry, and, owing to a certain lack of skill, the composition fails to attain a high place even in that lowly sphere.

The Complaint of Mars, 1380?

  Thus eondithe here this Complaynt, whiche some men sayne was made by my lady of York, doughter to the kyng of Spaygne, and my lord Huntingdon, some tyme Duc of Excestre.

  There is no firm ground of historical truth in a note that professes only to report what “some men say.”

  According to the tradition established in the reign of Henry VI. by a disciple and copier of Chaucer, Mars represented John Holland, third son of Thomas, Earl of Kent, afterwards Earl of Huntingdon and Duke of Exeter; and the Venus of the poem was Isabella, Countess of Edmund, Earl of Cambridge, who was made Duke of York in 1386. John of Gaunt was doubly related to this Venus—Isabella, who is reported by a chronicler as being “mulier mollis et delicata,” and towards the close of her life “satis pœnitens et conversa.” She was the younger sister of his wife, Constance of Castile, and her husband Edmund was his own younger brother. Mars (Holland) also came after a time into family relationship with Chaucer’s patron, by marrying Elizabeth, the divorced Countess of Pembroke, who was a daughter of Blanche and John of Gaunt. The whole atmosphere in this affair is not at all refreshing. John of Gaunt may have followed, with a malicious pleasure, the progress of the adulterous connection between John Holland and the Countess of Cambridge; and when at length a kind of catastrophe supervened, he shook with laughter, and Chaucer had to write out the story for him in flowing rhymes.

  Whatever one may think of the poem as a poem, it—perhaps more than the treatise on the Astrolabe itself—makes clear that even though Chaucer says of “retrograd,” “combust” and “aspecte infortunat:” “theise ben obseruaunces of iudicial matiere & rytes of paiens, in which my spirit ne hath no feith, ne no knowyng of hir horoscopum,” he is hardly open to the charge of ignorance, usually brought by astrologers against those who have no faith.

Translation of Boethius, 1380–83?

  Chaucer did not English Boethius second-hand, through any early French version, as some have supposed, but made his translation with the Latin original before him.

  When we come to consider the style and manner in which Chaucer has executed his self-imposed task, we must first of all make some allowance for the difference between the scholarship of his age and of our own. One great difference is obvious, though constantly lost sight of, viz. that the teaching in those days was almost entirely oral, and that the student had to depend upon his memory to an extent which would now be regarded by many as extremely inconvenient. Suppose that, in reading Boethius, Chaucer comes across the phrase “ueluti quidam clauus atque gubernaculum” (Bk. iii. pr. 12, note to l. 55), and does not remember the sense of clauus; what is to be done? It is quite certain, though this again is frequently lost sight of, that he had no access to a convenient and well-arranged Latin Dictionary, but only to such imperfect glossaries as were then in use. Almost the only resource, unless he had at hand a friend more learned than himself, was to guess. He guesses accordingly; and, taking clauus to mean much the same thing as clauis, puts down in his translation: “and he is as a keye and a stere.” Some mistakes of this character were almost inevitable; and it must not greatly surprise us to be told, that the “inaccuracy and infelicity” of Chaucer’s translation “is not that of an inexperienced Latin scholar, but rather of one who was no Latin scholar at all,” as Mr. Stewart says in his Essay, p. 226. It is useful to bear this in mind, because a similar lack of accuracy is characteristic of Chaucer’s other works also; and we must not always infer that emendation is necessary, when we find in his text some curious error.

  Chaucer could not translate a work like Boethius’ “Consolation” without being profoundly influenced by the thought, if indeed interest in the thought did not occasion the translation. The interest and influence are visible in two ways. First, in modifying Chaucer’s conceptions of love—in substituting for the chivalrous notion expounded in his earlier works the more philosophic idea of love as a chain binding earth and sea, as a universal, all-pervading bond of union. Secondly, in inducing a sort of scepticism. How is it possible to reconcile the freedom of the human will with the fact of Divine providence? The problem is insoluble, and so Chaucer found it.

Parliament of Foules, 1382?

  Here foloweth the Assemble of foules veray pleasaunt and compendyous to rede or here compyled by the preclared and famous Clerke Geffray Chaucer.

  The general conception had … about it nothing novel; but, as regards the main incident from which Chaucer’s poem takes its name, no particular resemblance has ever yet been discovered between it and any other production which has been described. In this respect it was probably a pure creation of his own, and perhaps alluded, in a covert way, to some event of which we now know nothing. At the same time, “The Parlament of Foules” is, to a certain extent, penetrated with the atmosphere of the books with which the poet was familiar. Not only are direct references made to them, but numerous passages show the traces of remote suggestion, if not of actual imitation. But it was never an atmosphere of the kind that hid from the poet his insight into life, or dulled in the slightest his sympathy with nature. Chaucer read much in old books, as he often tells us; but he thoroughly assimilated what he read, and it became all his own. What he borrowed he gave again to the world in a new, and often in a more striking form.

  There are no signs of an unripe intellect about the poem. It is full of the freshness and life which always remained such distinguishing characteristics of Chaucer…. This charming little poem may almost be taken as a type of the excellencies of Chaucer. It shows us his love of nature, his vivacity, his humour. Like all that he has written, it reflects faithfully the spirit of his age, and breathes the very atmosphere of chivalry.

  His early poetry scans far better than it reads. Proof abounds upon every page that he is bent rather upon making out his scheme of feet than delivering himself of his thought in a normal way. In the “Parlament of Foules” it is not easy to determine at sight where the emphasis belongs. There is dull, monotonic dispersion of stress, which comes from the meter and not the sense, and there are forced accents,—not less than three in the first stanza, and two of these upon rhyme words.

  Though so many ideas are borrowed, they are worked into the texture of the poem with much skill; the allegory is extremely ingenious; and the descriptions of the birds and of their conversation are given with the vivacity of a fancy evidently delighted with the humours of the Bestiary.

Troilus and Cresside, 1380–83?

  (Qd. Loue). I shall tell thee this lesson to learne: myne owne true seruaunt, the noble Phylosophicall Poete in English, whych euermore him busieth and trauaileth right sore my name to encrease, wherfore all that willen me good, owe to doe hym worship and reuerence both; truely his better ne his pere, in schoole of my rules cud I neuer find: He (qd. she) in a treatise that he made of my seruant Troylus, hath this matter touched, and at the full this question assoiled. Certainly his noble sayings can I not amend: in goodnesse of gentle manliche speech, wythout any manner of nicetie of stafieres imagination, in wit and in good reason of sentence, he passeth all other makers.

  Chaucer, undoubtedly did excellently in hys “Troylus and Cresseid;” of whom, truly I know not, whether to mervaile more, either that he in that mistie time, could see so clearely, or that wee in this cleare age, walke so stumblingly after him.

  Perhaps the most beautiful narrative poem of considerable length in the English language.

  Perhaps the most interesting and subtle of all Chaucer’s portraits of women is the Cressida in the romance of “Troilus and Cressida.” Womanly, attractive, well-meaning, she is the kind of woman we meet every day, and who every day makes shipwreck of men’s lives. Not that Chaucer points any officious morals at her; he knows her worthlessness, but he feels her charm, as Troilus felt it, as we feel it. When in her fickleness and frailty she falls, he recognises that it lies in the nature of things, and leaves posterity to be her judge. Only we feel an implied reproach of Cressida in the respect and tenderness with which he treats the honest passion of Troilus. It is with Chaucer as with Thackeray, at least he believes in the entire good faith and unselfish passion of his hero. Troilus loves as Clive loved, as Harry Esmond loved, as Mr. Arthur Pendennis never loved after he left his teens. It is this thorough and delicate comprehension of this love of Troilus that makes Chaucer’s romance one of the most natural and poignant, and—but that it ends badly—most delightful of love stories. And to write truthfully and sympathetically of love is to secure readers in all ages. “Yongë fresshë loveres, he and she,” may if they care see their own faces in this quaint fourteenth-century “Love’s Mirror,” and find them very little altered.

  Despite occasional prolixity and a few artistic flaws “Troilus and Cressida” is perhaps the most beautiful poem of its kind in the English language.

  Chaucer wrote one romance which more than “The Canterbury Tales” contains the spirit of our modern novel. This is the “Troylus and Criseyde.”… No work in character drawing superior to some of that in this poem was ever done by Chaucer…. This slowness in the development of English prose narrative is not altogether to be wondered at. Force of example is strong; and this is what made the “Troylus and Criseyde” a metrical romance—the last, as it was the best—rather than, as it might naturally have been, the first of English romances in prose. This was an accident in form. What is more remarkable is the fact that Chaucer had no immediate successor in the field of realistic art, in prose or poetry; that he marked not only the climax, but the culmination of this new movement in English literature.

  In “Troilus and Criseyde” we find another Chaucer, far more complete and powerful; he surpasses now even the Italians whom he had taken for his models, and writes the first great poem of renewed English literature…. In “Troilus and Criseyde” the Celt’s ready wit, gift of repartee, and sense of the dramatic; the care for the form and ordering of a narrative, dear to the Latin races; the Norman’s faculty of observation, are allied to the emotion and tenderness of the Saxon. This fusion had been brought about slowly, when however the time came, its realisation was complete all at once, almost sudden. Yesterday authors of English tongue could only lisp; to-day, no longer content to talk, they sing.

  The dramatist’s conception of Cressida’s character necessarily limits the function of her uncle, and the Pandarus of Shakspere is of far less importance in the development of the plot than his namesake in Chaucer’s poem. It is difficult to see why some critics should speak of the later Pandarus as a more finished type than the earlier. We find in him not a trace of the fascination, the high-bred polish, the stores of humour and worldly wisdom which distinguish Chaucer’s masterly portrait. We see instead a cringing hanger-on of the court and of great houses, whose conversational stock-in-trade consists of honeyed, scented phrases, and gossip of the boudoir. Chaucer’s Pandarus has a real affection for his friend, and takes care that his affairs of the heart shall be kept a secret from the world. But in the play he is simply a busybody, who revels in holding the threads of a fashionable intrigue, and who is at trouble, by sly looks and hints, to make it plain to outsiders that he knows more than he cares to speak of.

  The poem in which medieval romance passes out of itself into the form of the modern novel. What Cervantes and what Fielding did was done first by Chaucer; and this was the invention of a kind of story in which life might be represented no longer in a conventional or abstract manner, or with sentiment and pathos instead of drama, but with characters adapting themselves to different circumstances, no longer obviously breathed upon by the master of the show to convey his own ideas, but moving freely and talking like men and women. The romance of the Middle Ages comes to an end, in one of the branches of the family tree, by the production of a romance that has all the freedom of epic, that comprehends all good and evil, and excludes nothing as common or unclean which can be made in any way to strengthen the impression of life and variety.

The Hous of Fame, 1883–84

  J. fynde nomore of this werke to fore sayd / For as fer as I can vnnderstōde / This noble man Gefferey Chaucer fynysshyd at the sayd conclusion of the metyng of lesying and sothsawe / where as yet they ben chekked and maye not departe / whyche werke as me semeth is craftyly made / and dygne to be wreton & knowen / For he towchyth in it ryght grete wysdom & subtyll vnderstondying / And so in alle hys werkys he excellyth in myn oppynyon alle other wryters in our Englyssh / For he wrytteth no voyde wordes / but alle hys mater is ful of hye and quycke sentence / to whom ought to be gyuen laude and preysyng for hys noble makyng and wrytyng / For of hym alle other haue borrowed syth and taken / in alle theyr wel sayeing and wrytyng / And I humbly beseche & praye yow / emonge your prayers to remembre hys soule / on whyche and on alle crysten soulis I beseche almyghty god to haue mercy Amen.

  This poem contains great strokes of Gothic imagination, yet bordering often on the most ideal and capricious extravagance…. Pope has imitated this piece, with his usual elegance of diction and harmony of versification. But in the mean time, he has not only misrepresented the story, but marred the character of the poem. He has endeavoured to correct its extravagancies, by new refinements and additions of another cast: but he did not consider, that extravagancies are essential to a poem of such a structure, and even constitute its beauties. An attempt to unite order and exactness of imagery with a subject formed on principles so professedly romantic and anomalous, is like giving Corinthian pillars to a Gothic palace. When I read Pope’s elegant imitation of this piece, I think I am walking among the modern monuments unsuitably placed in Westminster-abbey.

  If Chaucer was indebted to any of the Italian poets for the idea of his “House of Fame,” it was to Petrarca, who in his “Trionfo della Fama” has introduced many of the most eminent characters of ancient times. It must however be observed, that the poem of Petrarca is extremely simple and inartificial, and consists only in supposing that the most celebrated men of ancient Greece and Rome pass in review before him; whilst that of Chaucer is the work of a powerful imagination, abounding with beautiful and lively descriptions, and forming a connected and consistent whole…. Pope’s “Temple of Fame” is one of the noblest, though earliest, productions of the author, displaying a fertile invention and an uncommon grandeur and facility of style. It is confessedly founded on Chaucer’s “House of Fame;” but the design is greatly altered and improved, and many of the thoughts and descriptions are entirely his own; yet such is the coincidence and happy union of the work with its prototype, that it is almost impossible to distinguish those portions for which he is indebted to Chaucer from those of his own invention.

  The “House of Fame,” in homeliness of style, and lameness of versification, falls below almost all the poems of Chaucer, while, in grandeur of scenes and images, it rises above them. In this latter respect, as in the unearthliness of the whole subject, it may be compared to the Commedia of Dante: and the bold and rough sketches which it contains are sometimes not much unlike those of the Italian poet. The “House of Fame” itself, placed on an almost inaccessible rock of ice, is an image of this nature, at once extravagant and sublime.

  The criticism of so strange a composition is hardly to be attempted. It shows a bold and free spirit of invention, and some great and poetical conceiving. The wilful, now just, now perverse, dispensing of fame, belongs to a mind that has meditated upon the human world. The poem is one of the smaller number, which seems hitherto to stand free from the suspicion of having been taken from other poets.

  In none of his other poems has Chaucer displayed such an extent of knowledge, or drawn his images from such a variety of sources. The Arabic system of numeration, then lately introduced into Europe, the explosion of gunpowder, and the theory of sound, may be mentioned as examples of the topics of illustration and disquisition in which he abounds. His intimate acquaintance with classical authors is exhibited in the felicitous judgments he pronounces on their writings.

  “The Palice of Honour,” for example, is far more densely crowded with historical imagery than “The House of Fame,” but in vividness of representation it is not even distantly to be compared to Chaucer’s poem. With quick, subtle strokes, Chaucer brings a scene or a character so distinctly before our imagination that it hardly ever fades from it, while Douglas’s personages are almost all shadowy phantasms, voces et praeterea nihil.

  No other of his poems has such a personal character as this one, which marks the climax of one species of art in middle English poetry. The allegory grows here so immediately out of the fundamental idea of the work that it remains perfectly transparent, notwithstanding the minutely detailed execution; for the inner truth of what is presented forces itself upon the reader, and never allows the impression of caprice to occur. How ingeniously soever the whole is designed and completed, we feel that there is here more than a mere play of wit; that a full and profound individuality has listened to its own promptings and spoken out its dominating sentiments and views, and was led by a sort of necessity in the choice of the form of expression.

  It is needless to say that this Poem is genuine, as Chaucer himself claims it twice over; once in his Prologue to the Legend of Good Women, I. 417, and again by the insertion in the poem itself of the name Geffrey…. The authorities for the text are few and poor; hence it is hardly possible to produce a thoroughly satisfactory text. There are three MSS. of the fifteenth century, viz. F. (Fairfax MS. 16, in the Bodleian Library); B. (MS. Bodley, 638, in the same); P. (MS. Pepys 2006, in Magdalene College, Cambridge). The last of these is imperfect, ending at l. 1843. There are two early printed editions of some value, viz. Cx. (Caxton’s edition, undated); and Th. (Thynne’s edition, 1532). None of the later editions are of much value, except the critical edition by Hans Willert (Berlin, 1883).

  The nature of Chaucer’s debt is clear; it is in no sense literary copying, but is a more or less distinct recollection of an oral tale, heard perhaps in boyhood. When we consider the evident love for folk-lore which characterized Shakspere’s youth, it seems inconceivable that Chaucer was not familiar as a boy with the multitudes of folk-tales rife in early days. Wherever an imaginative mind was free from monastic bonds, it must have met with great quantities of such material; Chaucer, as one of the first great authors thoroughly so emancipated, may well show traces of such knowledge, outgrown perhaps, but undestroyed.

  Manuscripts of this poem were, probably, even in our printer’s time, difficult to obtain. The copy used by him was certainly very imperfect. Many lines are altogether omitted, and in the last page Caxton was evidently in a great strait, for his copy was deficient 66 lines, probably occupying one leaf in the original. We know from his own writings the great reverence in which our printer held the “noble poete,” and we can imagine his consternation when the choice had to be made, either to follow his copy and print nonsense, from the break of idea caused by the deficient verses, or to step into Chaucer’s shoes and supply the missing links from his own brain. He chose the latter course, and thus instead of the original 66 lines, we have two of the printer’s own, which enable the reader to reach the end of the poem without a break-down.

  The “House of Fame” is introspective. In it Chaucer reviews his life and his aims, and the work affords evidence of some discontent. Apart from books and dreams, the world is a dismal waste. From what is said later it is plain that, under this similitude, he alludes to the dry ciphering which occupied him in his official post. At the date of the composition of the poem he had just come back from a pilgrimage, from mingling with his kind; and, fresh from the delights of society, he seems to have asked himself, with reference to his wearisome toil and fine-spun ideal world, “What profit?” Chaucer, moreover, had not been happy in love, and it is for that reason that the walls of the Temple of Venus are glum with the story of Æneas, and more particularly with Dido’s martyrdom. The poet needed distraction.

Legende of Good Women, 1384–85

  Part of the “Legende of Good Women” is of great excellence and value. The prologue is to be classed with Chaucer’s best writings.

  The “Legend of Good Women,” besides the general interest of all Chaucer’s verse, besides its own intrinsic attraction (for the “good women” are the most hapless and blameless of Ovid’s Heroides), and the remembrance of its suggestion of what is perhaps, all things considered, the most perfect example of Tennyson’s verse, has the additional charm of presenting to us Chaucer’s first experiment in the heroic couplet, the main pillar, with blank verse, of later English poetry, and the medium of his own greatest work.

  In the “Legende” it is the Prologue, in its two drafts, which gives him his opportunity. Of the nine stories of loving women which he had patience to complete, only the first three (those of Cleopatra, Thisbe, and Dido) are in any way worthy of him.

  The chief significance of the poem lies in this—that, whilst its contents may be deemed in a certain sense reactionary, its outward form marks another stage in the direction of the “Canterbury Tales.” The “Legende of Goode Women” is, in fact, the first example in English of a connected series of short versified tales in decasyllabic couplet.

  For charming and not too prolix description, for a land where the beautiful creatures of one’s dreams move in an ideal landscape, we find not the like of the prologue of the “Legende” until the “Faerie Queene.”… The poem is a well-nigh perfect example of its artificial, if charming, class. Many will prefer its sweetness and quiet humor to the brilliancy and wit of “The Rape of the Lock.” It is equally a classic of occasional poetry.

A Treatise on the Astrolabe, 1391

  When I happenyd to look upon the conclusions of the “Astrolabie” compiled by Geffray Chaucer and founde the same corrupte and false in so many and sondrie places that I doubted whether the rudeness of the worke were not a greater sclander to the authour than trouble and offense to the readers, I dyd not a lytell mervell if a book should come oute of his handes so imperfect and indigest whose other workes weare not onely rekoned for the best that ever weare set forthe in oure english tonge, but also weare taken for a manifest argument of his singular witte and generalitie in all kindes of knowledge. However be it when I called to remembrance that in his prohem he promised to sette forthe this worke in five partes, whereof weare never extante but those two first partes onely, it made me to believe that either the work was never fynisshed of the authour, or els to have ben corrupted sens by some other meanes, or what other thynge might be the cause thereof, I wiste not.

  In some respects, the most interesting of Chaucer’s works—inasmuch as it brings us into familiar and almost domestic communion with his individual self, while he describes to his “lytel sonne,” with delightful simplicity and in the most inartificial language, the sort of scientific knowledge which in those early days, even more than at present, was considered necessary to a gentleman’s education…. When the period at which Chaucer wrote is taken into consideration, and that after all he was but an amateur astronomer, his general correctness is something admirable.

  The existing MSS. of the “Astrolabe” are still numerous. I have been successful in finding no less than twenty-two…. It is remarkable that, although many printed editions of the treatise have appeared, no first-class MS. has ever hitherto come under the notice of any one of the various editors.

  Ripeness of scholarship, certainty of style, clearness of judgment; all these come out clearly in this later work…. There is little of that uncertainty which characterises the “Boece,” and no infelicities of idiom or mistakes in construing the Latin.

Canterbury Tales, 1387?–1393?

  O ye so noble and worthy Princes and Princesses, or estates or degrees, whatever ye be, that have disposition or pleasure to read or hear the stories of old times passed, to keep you from idleness and sloth, in eschewing other follies that might be cause of more harm following, vouchsafe, I beseech you, to find your occupation in the reading here of the Tales of Canterbury, which he compiled in this book following, first founded, imagined, and made, both for disport and learning of all those that be gentle of birth or of conditions, by the laureal and most famous poet that ever was before him in the embellishing of our rude mother’s English tongue, called Chaucer a Gaufrede, of whose soul, God, for his mercy, have pity of his grace. Amen.

  Whiche book I have dylygently oversen, and duly examyned to the ende that it be made accordyng unto his owne makyng; for I fynde many of the sayd bookes, whiche wryters have abrydgyd it, and many thynges left out, and in some places have sette certayn versys that he never made ne sette in hys booke; of whyche bookes so incorrecte was one broughte to me vi. yere passyd, whiche I supposed had ben veray true and correcte, and accordyng to the same I dyde do emprynte a certayn nomber of them, whyche anon were solde to many and dyverse gentyl men, of whom one gentylman cam to me, and sayd that this book was not according in many places unto the book that Gefferey Chaucer had made. To whom I answered, that I had made it accordyng to my copye, and by me was nothyng added ne mynushyd. Thenne he sayd, he knewe a book whyche hys fader had and meche lovyd, that was very trewe, and accordyng unto his owen first book by hym made; and sayd more, yf I wold emprynte it agayn, he wold gete me the same book for a copye. How be it he wyst well that hys fader wold not gladly departe fro it. To whom I said, in caas that he coude gete me suche a book, trewe and correcte, yet I woid ones endevoyre me to emprynte it agayn, for to satisfy the auctour, where as tofore by ygnoraunce I erryd in the hurtyng and dyffamyng his book in dyverce places, in setting in somme thynges that he never sayd he made, and leving out many thynges that he made, whyche ben requysite to be sette in it. And thus we fyll at accord, and he full gentylly gate of hys fader the said book, and delyvered it to me, by whiche I have corrected my book, as heere after alle alonge by the ayde of almighty God shal folowe, whom I humbly beseche, &c.

  The Canterbury tales were Chaucers owne invention as I suppose, and where he sheweth more the naturall of his pleasant wit, then in any other of his workes, his similitudes, comparisons and all other descriptions are such as can not be amended. His meetre Heroicall of “Troilus” and “Cresseid” is very grave and stately, keeping the staffe of seven, and the verse of ten, his other verses of the Canterbury tales be but riding ryme, neverthelesse very well becomming the matter of that pleasaunt pilgrimage in which every mans part is playd with much decency.

  It is a blabb: but not every man’s blabb, that casteth a sheepes-eye out of a Calves-head; but a blabb with judgement; but a blabb, that can make excrements blush, and teach Chawcer to retell a Canterbury Tale.

  He must have been a man of a most wonderful comprehensive nature, because, as it has been truly observed of him, he has taken into the compass of his “Canterbury Tales” the various manners and humours (as we now call them) of the whole English nation, in his age. Not a single character has escaped him. All his pilgrims are severally distinguished from each other; and not only in their inclinations, but in their very physiognomies and persons. Baptista Porta could not have described their natures better, than by the marks which the poet gives them. The matter and manner of their tales, and of their telling, are so suited to their different educations, humours, and callings, that each of them would be improper in any other mouth. Even the grave and serious characters are distinguished by their several sorts of gravity: their discourses are such as belong to their age, their calling, and their breeding; such as are becoming of them, and of them only.

  I hold Mr. Dryden to have been the first who put the merit of Chaucer into its full and true light by turning some of the Canterbury Tales into our language, as it is now refined, or rather as he himself refined it.

  The general plan of “The Canterbury Tales” may be learned in a great measure from the Prologue, which Chaucer himself has prefixed to them. He supposes there, that a company of Pilgrims going to Canterbury assemble at an Inn in Southwark, and agree, that, for their common amusement on the road, each of them shall tell at least one Tale in going to Canterbury, and another in coming back from thence; and that he, who shall tell the best Tales, shall be treated by the rest with a supper upon their return to the same Inn. This is shortly the Fable. The Characters of the Pilgrims are as various as, at that time, coud be found in the several departments of middle life; that is, in fact, as various as coud, with any probability, be brought together, so as to form one company; the highest and the lowest ranks of society being necessarily excluded. It appears, further, that the design of Chaucer was not barely to recite the Tales told by the Pilgrims, but also to describe their journey, And all the remenant of their pilgrimage (ver. 726); including, probably, their adventures at Canterbury as well as upon the road. If we add, that the Tales, besides being nicely adapted to the Characters of their respective Relaters, were intended to be connected together by suitable introductions; and interspersed with diverting episodes; and that the greatest part of them was to have been executed in Verse; we shall have a tolerable idea of the extent and difficulty of the whole undertaking: and admiring, as we must, the vigor of that genius, which in an advanced age coud begin so vast a work, we shall rather lament than be surprised that it has been been left imperfect.

  After the dramas of Shakespear, there is no production of man that displays more various and vigorous talent than the “Canterbury Tales.” Splendour of narrative, richness of fancy, pathetic simplicity of incident and feeling, a powerful style in delineating character and manners, and an animated vein of comic humour, each takes its turn in this wonderful performance, and each in turn appears to be that in which the author was most qualified to excel.

  The characters of Chaucer’s Pilgrims are the characters which compose all ages and nations. As one age falls another rises, different to mortal sight, but to immortals only the same; for we see the same characters repeated again and again, in animals, vegetables and minerals, and in men. Nothing new occurs in identical existence; accident ever varies, substance can never suffer change or decay. Of Chaucer’s characters, as described in his “Canterbury Tales,” some of the names or titles are altered by time, but the characters themselves for ever remain unaltered; and, consequently, they are the physiognomies or lineaments of universal human life, beyond which nature never steps. Names alter, things never alter. I have known multitudes of those who would have been monks in the age of monkery, who in this deistical age are Deists. As Newton numbered the stars, and as Linnæus numbered the plants, so Chaucer numbered the classes of men…. It is necessary here to speak of Chaucer’s own character, that I may set certain mistaken critics right in their conception of the humour and fun that occur on the journey. Chaucer is himself the great poetical observer of men, who in every age is born to record and eternise its acts. This he does as a master, as a father and superior, who looks down on their little follies, from the Emperor to the Miller, sometimes with severity, oftener with joke and sport…. Chaucer’s characters live age after age. Every age is a Canterbury Pilgrimage; we all pass on, each sustaining one or other of these characters; nor can a child be born who is not one of these characters of Chaucer…. The reader will observe that Chaucer makes every one of his characters perfect in his kind; every one is an Antique Statue, the image of a class, and not of an imperfect individual.

  What an intimate scene of English life in the fourteenth century do we enjoy in those tales, beyond what history displays by glimpses, through the stormy atmosphere of her scenes, or the antiquary can discover by the cold light of his researches! Our ancestors are restored to us, not as phantoms from the field of battle, or the scaffold, but in the full enjoyment of their social existence. After four hundred years have closed over the mirthful features which formed the living originals of the poet’s descriptions, his pages impress the fancy with the momentary credence that they are still alive; as if Time had rebuilt his ruins, and were reacting the lost scenes of existence.

  Among his more elevated compositions, the Knight’s Tale is abundantly sufficient to immortalize Chaucer, since it would be difficult to find anywhere a story better conducted, or told with more animation and strength of fancy.

  The story of the Cock and the Fox, in the “Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” is allowed by all judges to be the most admirable fable (in the narration) that ever was written.

  The metre of five accents, with couplet-rhyme, may have got its earliest name of “riding rhyme” from the mounted pilgrims of the Canterbury Tales. It was long used for light and trifling subjects; and by the critics of the sixteenth century was very unfavourably contrasted with the stately ballet-stave.

  In Canterbury, also, the pilgrim’s inn is said to have continued to the present time, no longer, indeed, existing as an inn, but divided into a number of private tenements in High-street. The old inn mentioned by Chaucer was called the Checkers. It stands in High-street, at the corner of the lane leading to the Cathedral, just below the parade, on the left-hand side going into Canterbury. Its situation was just that which was most convenient for the pilgrims to Thomas à Becket’s tomb. It was a very large inn, as was necessary for the enormous resort of votaries to the shrine of this pugnacious saint. It is now divided into several houses, and has been modernized externally, having no longer a trace of having been an inn. The way to the court-yard is through a narrow doorway passage, and around the court you see the only evidences of its antiquity, remains of carved wood-work, now whitewashed over.

  The world has rightly considered the “Canterbury Tales” as the work by which Chaucer is to be judged. In truth, common renown forgets all the rest; and it is by the “Canterbury Tales” only that he can properly be said to be known to his countrymen. Here it is that he appears as possessing the versatility of poetical power which ranges from the sublime, through the romantic and the pathetic, to the rudest mirth—choosing subjects the most various, and treating all alike adequately. Here he discovers himself as the shrewd and curious observer, and close painter of manners. Here he writes as one surveying the world of man with enlarged and philosophical intuition, weighing good and evil in even scale. Here, more than in any other, he is master of his matter, disposing it at his discretion, and not carried away with or mastered by it. Here he is master, too, of his English, thriftily culling the fit word, not effusing a too exuberant stream of description. Here he has acquired his own art and his own style of versification, which is here to be studied accordingly.

  The Harleian manuscript, No. 7334, is by far the best manuscript of Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales” that I have yet examined, in regard both to antiquity and correctness. The hand-writing is one which would at first sight be taken by an experienced scholar for that of the latter part of the fourteenth century, and it must have been written within a few years after 1400, and therefore soon after Chaucer’s death and the publication of the “Canterbury Tales.” Its language has very little, if any, appearance of local dialect; and the text is in general extremely good, the variations from Tyrwhitt being usually for the better. Tyrwhitt appears not to have made much use of this manuscript, and he has not even classed it among those to which most credit is due.

  His method of proceeding in “The Canterbury Tales” is the most effective that could be devised for transmitting to subsequent ages an accurate expression of the social and moral development of his own. He never generalizes—he never falls into disquisitions—he never draws conclusions. He avoids all modes of treatment that might afterwards become wearisome or unintelligible: and, descending into the common life of the day, he shows us, as it were, the spirit of transition in actual operation amongst the different classes of the people, modifying their customs and opinions, drawing out into full play the salient points of the national character, and colouring even individual peculiarities to the most trivial details, which, in this aspect, acquire a special historical value. The humanity he thus imparts to his subjects invests them with a permanent interest, which neither the lapse of time, nor the revolutions of language, can impair or render obsolete; and the instruction which, in another shape, would become dry and heavy, is here made to assume the most attractive forms.

  The design of this poem is one of the happiest thoughts that ever housed itself in a poet’s heart.

  These opening lines give the colour to Chaucer’s whole work; it is in every sense the spring of English poetry; through every line we seem to feel the freshness and vigour of that early morning start—as the merry cavalcade winds its way over the hills and forests of Surrey or of Kent. Never was the scene and atmosphere of a poem more appropriate to its contents, more naturally sustained and felt through all its parts.

  This is not only his greatest work, but it towers above all else that he has written, like some palace or cathedral ascending with its broad and lofty dimensions from among the common buildings of a city. His genius is another thing here altogether from what it is in his other writings. Elsewhere he seems at work only for the day that is passing over him; here, for all time…. Among ourselves at least, if we except Shakspeare, no other poet has yet arisen to rival the author of the “Canterbury Tales” in the entire assemblage of his various powers. Spenser’s is a more aerial, Milton’s a loftier, song; but neither possesses the wonderful combination of contrasted and almost opposite characteristics which we have in Chaucer:—the sportive fancy, painting and gilding everything, with the keen, observant, matter-of-fact spirit that looks through whatever it glances at; the soaring and creative imagination, with the homely sagacity, and healthy relish for all the realities of things; the unrivalled tenderness and pathos, with the quaintest humor and the most exuberant merriment; the wisdom at once and the wit; the all that is best, in short, both in poetry and in prose, at the same time.

  In its own way, and within its own limits, it is the most wonderful thing in the language. The people we read about are as real as the people we brush clothes with in the street,—nay, much more real, for we not only see their faces, and the fashion and texture of their garments, we know also what they think, how they express themselves, and with what eyes they look out on the world. Chaucer’s art in this prologue is simple perfection. He indulges in no irrelevant description; he airs no fine sentiments; he takes no special pains as to style or poetic ornament; but every careless touch tells,—every sly line reveals character; the description of each man’s horse-furniture and array reads like a memoir. The nun’s pretty oath bewrays her. We see the bold, well-favoured countenance of the Wife of Bath beneath her hat, as “broad as a buckler or a targe;” and the horse of the clerk, “as lean as is a rake,” tells tales of his master’s cheer. Our modern dress is worthless as an indication of the character, or even of the social rank, of the wearer; in the olden time it was significent of personal tastes and appetites, of profession, and condition of life generally…. Chaucer’s range is wide as that of Shakspeare—if we omit that side of Shakspeare’s mind which confronts the other world, and out of which Hamlet sprang and his men and women are even more real, and more easily matched in the living and breathing world.

  Though the character of Griselda is not the original creation of Chaucer, he has filled up the outline with such a wealth of detail, and worked into it such beauty of colouring and expression—meekness, gentleness, tenderness, and piety—resignation, fortitude, and long-suffering—that he may well claim Griselda as his own. Whoever compares the heroine of Chaucer with that of Boccaccio in the original, notwithstanding all the beauty of the Italian narrative, will at once understand this.

  I know of nothing that may be compared with the prologue to the “Canterbury Tales,” and with that to the story of the “Chanon’s Yeoman” before Chaucer. Characters and portraits from real life had never been drawn with such discrimination, or with such variety, never with such bold precision of outline, and with such a lively sense of the picturesque. His Parson is still unmatched, though Dryden and Goldsmith have both tried their hands in emulation of him. And the humor also in its suavity, its perpetual presence and its shy unobtrusiveness, is something wholly new in literature. For anything that deserves to be called like it in English we must wait for Henry Fielding.

  One of the most undeniable social features of the time, showing their half-barbaric cast, was that sensuality of language which is the cheap dye of vulgar wit. The taint of it is especially strong in Chaucer, frequently quite overpowering the poetic aroma. One wonders what evil beast has strayed among these flowers. I confess to a certain shame in speaking of Chaucer to the healthy and pure, so far is he from wholesome companionship. As mirrored in the “Canterbury Tales,” English speech was at once gross and licentious…. Closely allied to this sportive vein of Chaucer is his vulgarity. He has the sensual vulgarity of grossness, up to, or very nearly up to, his times. Yet it is not the sin, the filth, but the fun of the thing that he is after; and so manifest is this, that we laugh away in part our irritation and shame. We feel that we have been caught, yet so fairly caught, that we are unwilling to be angry…. With Chaucer, vulgarity lay under the broad heavens, an offensive fact indeed, but one with which he had no more to do than another. He chose to laugh, others might run away and hide, if they pleased. So much perhaps may be fairly said in extenuation; yet these low, sensual features remain, a thing of bad significance. One needs to know the moral constitution of the recipient, or he may breathe pestilence in this atmosphere. If one goes to Chaucer for pleasure, he eats honey from the carcase of a lion; while he feeds one sense, he may have occasion to close others. Yet with all we acquit him of the lasciviousness of later periods.

  No poetry was ever more human than Chaucer’s; none ever came more frankly and genially home to men than his “Canterbury Tales.”… It is the first time in English poetry that we are brought face to face, not with characters or allegories or reminiscences of the past, but with living and breathing men, men distinct in temper and sentiment, as in face or costume or mode of speech; and with this distinctness of each maintained throughout the story by a thousand shades of expression and action. It is the first time, too, that we meet with the dramatic power which not only creates each character, but combines it with its fellows; which not only adjusts each tale or jest to the temper of the person who utters it, but fuses all into a poetic unity. It is life in its largeness, its variety, its complexity, which surrounds us in the “Canterbury Tales.” In some of the stories, indeed, which were composed, no doubt, at an earlier time, there is the tedium of the old romance or the pedantry of the schoolman; but, taken as a whole, the poem is the work not of a man of letters, but of a man of action. Chaucer has received his training from war, courts, business, travel—a training not of books, but of life. And it is life that he loves—the delicacy of its sentiment, the breadth of its farce, its laughter and its tears, the tenderness of its Griseldas, or the Smollett-like adventures of the miller and the clerks. It is this largeness of heart, this wide tolerance, which enables him to reflect man for us as none but Shakespeare has ever reflected him, and to do this with a pathos, a shrewd sense, and kindly humor, a freshness and joyousness of feeling, that even Shakespeare has not surpassed.

  A charming freshness forms the atmosphere of all his work; he is perpetually new.

  Has there been any man since St. John so lovable as “the Persoune”? or any sermon since that on the Mount so keenly analytical, so pathetic, so deep, so pitiful, so charitable, so brotherly, so pure, so manly, so faithful, so hopeful, so sprightly, so terrible, so childlike, so winning, so utterly loving, as “The Persoune’s Tale?”

  Can we not see Madame Eglantine as plain as if she stood before us in broad day, with her grey eyes, her little, soft, red mouth, her fair forehead, and her dainty ways when she sits at the table.

  In seeking to trace the origin and progress of the English novel as it is now written, we must record the first appearance of its special characteristics in the works of Chaucer. Here are first to be seen real human beings, endowed with human virtues and subject to human frailities; here fictitious characters are first represented amid the homely scenes of daily life; here they first become living realities whose nature and dispositions every one may understand, and with whose thoughts every one may sympathize.

  As writer of tales, as “narrative poet,” Chaucer is without a peer in English Literature. His reticence, in that garrulous age, is sublime.

  There is Chaucer’s strength in the dramatic liveliness with which this story is told within short compass; and the four persons of it, are vividly painted and characterised by master-touches. The first source of its plot is unknown. Doubtless it was a variation of one of the numberless rough jesting tales of his day, that sin greatly against our modern notions of propriety. The old husband, beguiled and betrayed by a young wife, is a time-honoured figure in story. Breaches of marriage duty, worse than that of the carpenter’s wife and his lodger, are made in our day the theme of plays and tales in which the conventional proprieties are observed, though true morality is outraged, and sin is plated with false sentiment. The churl’s tale of the Miller does nothing of this. There is no moral evil in the part of it which most shocks the modern notion of propriety. It only tells, with a bygone outspokenness, of coarse behaviour; and, be it observed, makes this proceed in such a way from Alison and the clerk Nicholas, who would be the triumphant hero and heroine of an immoral tale, that though the Miller, who tells the tale, must not play moralist, theirs is the conduct which excites disgust, and we feel that the discipline of the hot coulter is not more than Nicholas deserves. Young girls in our own day read stories and see plays at which they do not blush, as they should, and would, if the coarse mind of the fascinating heroine were made to declare itself as Alison’s does in the Miller’s tale, and if for the interesting hero there were an avenging Absalon at the end to strike at the root of lust with a hot coulter.

  The Knight’s tale, in particular, naturally attracted the attention of the dramatists of the Elizabethan age, who were always on the lookout for suitable material. Upon it was founded an early play called “Palemon and Arcite” that has not come down. It was the work of Richard Edwards, and was produced in 1566 at Oxford University before Queen Elizabeth. A play with this title is also recorded by Henslowe under the year 1594 as having been acted four times. From the same tale also was avowedly taken the drama called “The Two Noble Kinsmen,” which, when first printed in 1634, had on its title-page as authors the names of Shakspeare and Fletcher. Whether either had anything to do with it is still a debated question; but the tribute paid to Chaucer in the prologue furnishes important evidence as to the estimation in which the early poet continued to be held.

  As the Wife of Bath herself unrolls her own picture with a flippant ease and a delightful mixture of ingenuousness and confidential impudence not without wit, and begins with the greatest indignation to quote the sayings of learned woman-haters, the comic effect of her story and descriptions is raised to the highest pitch, and the satire loses very much of its bitterness, but nothing whatever of its pungency. We can almost hear, and see bodily before us, the well-to-do middle class Englishwoman, in her heavy and somewhat gaudy garments, her scarlet stockings, her red cheeks, her saucy looks, her sensual mouth, her quick, energetic movements, her glib tongue and penetrating voice; and what she relates becomes to us as vivid as if we had ourselves beheld the individual incidents.

  If men should have suddenly to choose the one English poem which should survive, all others to be at once destroyed; a very large number of voices would doubtless be raised in favor of the “Canterbury Tales.” And if the nineteenth-century reader can spare time but for one book of all written in English before the Elizabethan age, he may take the same immortal work, sure of finding himself better instructed than if he had read all the others and left that out.

  Perhaps the best short narrative poem in the language.

  The “Tale of Melibeus” makes one doubt whether the change between the tenth century and the fourteenth was not for the worse. There are curious inanities in old, popular, edifying books, like the Dialogues of Gregory. But the “Tale of Melibeus” is beyond rivalry for its enjoyment of the rankest commonplaces. There is glow and unction about its mediocrity; the intolerable arguments of Dame Prudence are a masterpiece, as though written in an orgy and enthusiasm of flatness and insipidity. Why it was selected by Chaucer for translation is mysterious enough. Yet the monstrous virtue of Dame Prudence has affinities with some of the untruths in the “Canterbury Tales”—with Griselda, with the point of honour in the “Franklin’s Tale;” after all, it is only an exaggeration of what is well known in all medieval literature: it is not a new element. It is hard to forgive, especially when one thinks that it was to this the innocent Sir Thopas was sacrificed. In one sense, however, the “Tale of Melibeus” displays the foundation of all Chaucer’s works. The peculiarity of Chaucer is that with all his progress in his art he kept close to the general sense of his age, and had always, in some corner of his being, the average mind of the fourteenth century. To that part of him belong all his prose works. The “Tale of Melibeus” is representative of the ideas and tastes of millions of good souls. Being representative, it could not be alien from Chaucer.

  Herein the wise, shrewd, and humorous author, with the forked beard, face of kindly cunning, portly frame, and genial ways—albeit silent and devoted to his books—displayed a power of insight into human character, and a knowledge of the human heart, which have been surpassed, in all our literature, by one man alone, and that the greatest writer of the world. The joyous freedom of his song is full as pleasant to the modern reader as it can have been to those who hailed it with delight five-hundred years ago.

  The number of words now obsolete in the Prologue to the “Canterbury Tales” is unusually high, and for this reason it should not be read the first among Chaucer’s poems; nevertheless it usually is read first, and is so well known that little need here be said of it. For keen observation and vivid presentment this gallery of character-sketches has never been surpassed. The portraits, we should note, are all such as one traveller might draw of another. There is no attempt to show that the best of the pilgrims had their weak points, and the worst their good ones. For the best Chaucer has hearty admiration, for the worst a boundless tolerance, which yet only thinly cloaks the keenest satire. One and all he views from his holiday standpoint, building up his descriptions with such notes as he would naturally gather as he rode along with them on his pilgrimage—notes of dress, of speech and manner, of their talk about themselves and their doings—until we can see his fellow-pilgrims as clearly as if we, too, had mounted our rouncies and ridden along with them.

  The unrivalled array of poetic qualities, both of feeling and expression, which it presents to us, the grace and gaiety of the poet, his humour and pathos, his dramatic force of portraiture, the catholicity of his sympathies, never to be again approached in literature till the coming of Shakespeare, his fine broad artistic treatment of the human figure, the dewy freshness of his landscape studies, and the clear sunny atmosphere through which he looks out alike upon Nature and upon man—it is these things which have raised the Father of English Poetry to the rank of one of the great poets of the world. It is in virtue of such things that that train of pilgrims which left Southwark for the shrine of St. Thomas of Canterbury, on a certain day of April in or about the year 1383, remains so real to us, that the student still labours to fix the precise date of its departure and the time and places of its halts. It is for such reasons that these shadows of the poet’s fancy are shadows more enduring than their substance, and that knight and squire, clerk and franklin, reeve and miller, pardoner and sompnour, priorness and nun, and wife much widowed, move still, and will ever move, before us across the great imaginative panorama of the past, joyous and immortal as a Bacchic procession on a frieze of Phidias.

  The idea of joining together a series of Tales by means of fitting them into a common frame-work is a very old one, and doubtless originated in the East. There is an English collection of this character known as “The Seven Sages,” of which various versions have come down to us. The earliest of these, as published in the second volume of Weber’s Metrical Romances, has been dated about 1320; and is, at any rate, older than any of Chaucer’s poems. Another collection, of a similar character, and likewise of Eastern origin, is a Latin work by Petrus Alphonsus, a converted Spanish Jew, entitled De Clericali Disciplina. See Dunlop’s History of Fiction, chap. vii. From one of these Chaucer may have taken the general idea of arranging his tales in a connected series; and we must not forget that his Legend of Good Women, which was the immediate forerunner of his greater work, is likewise, practically, a collection of Tales, though sadly lacking in variety, as he discovered for himself in the course of writing it. It is highly improbable that he was indebted for the idea to Boccaccio’s Decamerone, as has been sometimes hastily suggested; since we might, in that case, have expected that he would also have drawn from that collection the plot of some one of his tales; which is not found to be the case. The Clerk’s Tale occurs, indeed, in the Decamerone; but we know it to have been borrowed from Petrarch’s Latin version of it. The Franklin’s Tale has some resemblance to another tale in the same collection, but was evidently not taken from it directly, and the same is true in other cases; so that we are quite justified in supposing that Chaucer was wholly unacquainted, at first hand, with Boccaccio’s work.

  So the new England has its Froissart, who is going to tell feats of arms and love stories glowing with colour, and take us hither and thither, through highways and byways, giving ear to every tale, observing, noting, relating? This young country has Froissart and better than Froissart. The pictures are as vivid and as clear, but two great differences distinguish the ones from the others: humour and sympathy. Already we find humour well developed in Chaucer; his sly jests penetrate deeper than French jests; he does not go so far as to wound, but he does more than merely prick skin-deep; and in so doing, he laughs silently to himself…. Moreover, Chaucer sympathises; he has a quivering heart that tears move, and that all sufferings touch, those of the poor and those of princes. The rôle of the people, so marked in English literature, affirms itself here, from the first moment.

  The “Knight’s Tale” is a complete and perfect version of a medieval romance, worked out with all the resources of Chaucer’s literary study and reflexion; tested and considered and corrected in every possible way.

  It was largely due to his wide relationship with, and his active participation in, civil and state affairs, as stimulating and determining agencies, that Chaucer’s poetical genius gave us, in “The Canterbury Tales,” and in the Prologue thereto, a better idea of what manner of people lived in England in the fourteenth century than do all the histories of that period which have been written. And he did this without in the least transgressing the legitimate limits of his art, and because he did not transgress them. With a poet’s impressibility, and a poet’s eye for the characteristic, the picturesque, and the essential, he delineated for all time the features of the society around him.

  Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales,” first edition, (12). J. West (1773), £47, 15s.—George III. J. Ratcliffe (1776), £6. White Knights supplementary sale (1820), £31, 10s.—T. Payne, (imperfect); not recorded by Blades. The highest price recorded by Blades is £300, given by Mr. Huth at Lilly’s sale, 1861. In 1896 two copies (both imperfect) were sold for over £1000; Mrs. Corbet’s (Barlaston Hall), wanting nineteen leaves, £1020; R. E. Saunders (wanting only two leaves, a few wormed, lower margins in Melibeus mended), £1880. Earl of Ashburnham (1897), £720—Pickering & Chatto (imperfect, also some leaves from a shorter copy).

Rejected Poems

  It must suffice to say here that most of the later editions, since the publication of Tyrwhitt’s remarks on the subject, reject many of these additional pieces, but still unadvisedly admit the poems entitled “The Court of Love,” “The Complaint of the Black Knight,” “Chaucer’s Dream,” “The Flower and the Leaf,” and “The Cuckoo and the Nightingale.” Of these, the “Complaint of the Black Knight” is now known to be by Lydgate; “The Flower and the Leaf” cannot be earlier than 1450, and was probably written, as it purports to be, by a lady; whilst “The Court of Love” can hardly be earlier than 1500, and “Chaucer’s Dream” (so called) is of still later date. Nothing but a complete ignorance of the history of the English language can connect these fifteenth-century and sixteenth-century poems with Chaucer. The only poem, in the above set, which can possibly be as old as the fourteenth-century, is “The Cuckoo and the Nightingale.” There is no evidence of any kind to connect it with Chaucer; and Professor Lounsbury decisively rejects it, on the internal evidence. It admits a few rimes such as Chaucer nowhere employs.

Testament of Love, c. 1387

  Chaucer seems to have been a right Wicklevian, or else there never was any; and that, all his works almost, if they be thoroughly advised, will testify (albeit it be done in mirth and covertly), and especially the latter end of his third book of the Testament of Love; for there purely he toucheth the highest matter, that is, the Communion; wherein, except a man be altogether blind, he may espy him at the full.

  It is probable that the lapse of a single generation would have blotted out from the memory of his countrymen these censures upon the father of English poetry. Who now appears as his accuser? Chaucer: Chaucer only. We have no evidence but what we draw from this production, that he was ever concerned in the turmoils of the city, that he was an exile, a prisoner in the Tower, and that he was finally led by resentment or by terror to the dishonourable act of impeaching his confederates. Little did the poet think, when he sat down to write this laborious apology for his conduct, that he was hereby perpetuating an imputation, which without his interference Time was preparing to blot out for ever from the records of memory, while his poetical compositions were destined to render him dear to the lovers of the muse as long as the English language shall endure. How feeble and erroneous are the calculations of the wisest of mankind!

  We are thankful that Chaucer’s shoulders are finally discharged of that weary load, “The Testament of Love.”

  The Testament of Love was greatly relied upon by Godwin and others. They thence inferred that Chaucer was mixed up with the dispute as to the appointment of John of Northampton to the mayoralty of London in 1382; that he was imprisoned; that he fled to Zealand; that he was in exile for two years; that, on his return, he was sent to the Tower for three years, and not released till 1389; with more rubbish of the same sort. However, it so happens that Chaucer did not write this piece.

  I have lately made a curious discovery as to the Testament of Love. The first paragraph begins with a large capital M; the second with a large capital A; and so on. By putting together all the letters thus pointed out, we at once have an acrostic, forming a complete sentence. The sentence is—MARGARET OF VIRTW, HAVE MERCI ON TSKNVI. Of course the last word is expressed as an anagram, which I decipher as KITSVN, i. e. Kitsun, the author’s name. The whole piece is clearly addressed to a lady named Margaret, and contains frequent reference to the virtues of pearls, which were supposed to possess healing powers. Even if “Kitsun” is not the right reading, we learn something; for it is quite clear that TSKNVI cannot possibly represent the name of Chaucer.

The Cuckoo and the Nightingale

  I cannot believe that it was written by Chaucer.

The Flower and the Leaf, c. 1450

  The various picturesque occurrences, the romantick vein, throughout the poem, are surely in no respect unworthy the pen of Chaucer.

  There is, in the whole scenery and objects of the poem, an air of wonder and sweetness; an easy and surprising transition that is truly magical.

  One of the brightest dreams that poet ever fashioned out of shadowy imaginings, is the allegory, “The Flower and the Leaf,” with its beautiful moral, and an exuberance of fancy seldom met with out of the region of early poetry.

  It must be regarded as among the most truly original, as it certainly is one of the finest, of Chaucer productions.

  A beautifully-tinted dream.

  I hold, therefore, that Chaucer’s authorship of “The Flower and the Leaf” cannot yet be regarded as a settled question. Each reader may incline as freely as he will to one opinion or the other. Let him be positive in his own mind, if he will, but he must not turn his positive opinion into a dogma, and call all men heretics whose opinions face another way.

  Although not equal to Chaucer’s work in power, yet there is a tender refinement of feeling, a chivalrous note in this poem, which is less frequent in the great writer than one might wish.

Court of Love, c. 1500

  I am induced by the internal evidence to consider it as one of Chaucer’s genuine productions.

  At the age of eighteen, and while yet a student in the university of Cambridge, Chaucer produced a poem, entitled the “Court of Love,” consisting, as it has come down to us, of 1443 lines, but which could not originally have consisted of fewer than two thousand. This poem was first committed to the press by John Stow, the well-known compiler of the Chronicle of England, in an edition he gave of the works of Chaucer in the year 1561. No manuscript of it is known to exist. It is impossible however to entertain a rational doubt of its authenticity. The manner in which it is written is precisely the manner of Chaucer, and it is conspicuously superior to the composition of any other English poet, from the dawn of our language to Sackville earl of Dorset, whose poetical career commenced from about the time when Stow’s edition of Chaucer made its appearance.

  As an early production, it presents, as may be anticipated, little attraction with regard to plot, variety of incident, or vigour of description: upon these points, indeed, it is positively defective; but it otherwise lays claim to eminent merits, and these will be found in an agreeably humourous delineation of manners and peculiarities of custom.

  Now I am not particularly concerned to stand up for the “Court of Love” as Chaucer’s, for the simple reason that my business is with his character as a poet; and it seems to me so thoroughly Chaucerian in spirit, that my impressions of the man would be the same whether it was written by him or not. In its curious mediæval doctrine on the subject of love, it is in complete harmony with the Prologue to the “Legend of Good Women,”—Cupid’s martyrology, the Lives of the Saints of Love. If not written by Chaucer, it must have been written by a very clever and observant imitator—one might even say, looking to small coincidences, a deliberate and dexterous forger. The great difficulty in the way of not assigning the “Court of Love” or the “Flower and the Leaf” to Chaucer is this, that between him and Surrey there is no English poem half so good, and that it is next to incredible that the name of any poet capable of such work should have perished. If Chaucer did not write it, who did? This, I take it, is the feeling of everybody who still thinks it possible that Chaucer may have been the author. That the grammatical differences, which are doubtless very striking, should have been introduced by a transcriber, seems to them more likely on the whole than that a nameless poet, in an age whose known poets never rise anywhere near such a level, should have produced works that have received enthusiastic admiration from such judges as Dryden and Mr. Swinburne.

  Apart from the natural influence of the literature read in its own time, the “Court of Love” is an original poem, into which its author put the breath of his own life. Its allegory is no servile copy of other men’s inventions, and it stops short of the prolixity usual in the refinements of the school from which it came. The verse has its own music, joyous, firm, elastic. A smooth measure—marred for us now sometimes by bad copying, and often by bad reading—was the common property of all the rhyming of the fourteenth century. But here, as in Chaucer’s undoubted verse, there is a rhythm of health in the beat of the music. The rhyming is unstrained, the clear stream of thought falls naturally into song, of which the cadences are not less felt to be an impulse of Heaven’s gift ministering to man’s health and pleasure, than the wind’s tree-music, or the rush and rattle of the waves. Here, too, as in the “Canterbury Tales,” there is a practical, good-humoured simplicity of thought, that is as the salt which seasons healthy sentiment and keeps the rot out.

  “The Court of Love” must be a composition considerably later in date than “The Temple of Glass.” A complete master of his metrical instrument, the author is also far superior to Lydgate in fancy and invention: he knows how to construct a poetical action, and how to make a proper use of the machinery of personification. He is, however, working on precisely the same conventional theme; and the peculiarly interesting feature in his poem is, that the advance in literary and allegorical skill is accompanied by a distinct decline in the delicacy of chivalrous manners.

  In the present state of our knowledge of the history of the English language, any notion of attributing “The Court of Love” to Chaucer is worse than untenable; for it is wholly disgraceful. Everything points to a very late date, and tends to exclude it, not only from the fourteenth, but even from the fifteenth century. At the same time, it will readily be granted that the poem abounds with Chaucerian words and phrases to an extent that almost surpasses even the poems of Lydgate. The versification is smooth, and the poem, as a whole, is pleasing. I have nothing to say against it, when considered on its own merits.

General

  O Socrates, full of philosophy, Seneca in morals, and English in practice, great Ovid in thy poetry, brief in speech, wise in eloquence, most lofty eagle, who by thy philosophy dost illumine the kingdom of Aeneas, the Island of the Giants (those Brutus slew), and who hast sown the flowers and planted the rose-bush for those who are ignorant of the tongue of Pandrasus, great translator, noble Geoffrey Chaucer.

  Our Englyshe Homer.

  Sometimes he turned into the speech of his native land works composed carefully, ornately and eloquently in the French tongue. Sometimes he translated Latin verse into English, but with learning, with skill, with harmony. Sometimes he committed to writings destined to survive many original things which equalled the happiest success of the Latins. Sometimes he strove with all his power to instruct the reader, and again took pains as sedulously to give him pleasure. Nor did he cease from his labors until he had carried our language to that height of purity, of eloquence, of conciseness and beauty, that it can justly be reckoned among the thoroughly polished languages of the world.

  Diligence also must be used in keeping truly the order of time; and describing lively, both the site of places and nature of persons, not only for the outward shape of the body, but also for the inward disposition of the mind, as Thucydides doth in many places very trimly, and Homer every where, and that always most excellently, which observation is chiefly to be marked in him; and our Chaucer doth the same, very praiseworthily: mark him well and confer him with any other that writeth in our time in their proudest tongue whosoever list.

  Wittie Chaucer satte in a chaire of gold couered with roses, writying prose and risme, accompanied with the spirites of many kynges, knightes, and faire ladies, whom he pleasauntly besprinkeled with the sweete water of the welle, consecrated vnto the muses, ecleped Aganippe, and, as the heauenly spirite, commended his deare Brigham for the worthy entōbynging of his bones, worthie of memorie, in the long slepyng chamber of moste famous kinges. Euen so in tragedie he bewailed the sodaine resurrection of many a noble man before their time, in spoilyng of epitaphes, wherby many haue loste their inheritaunce.

  Our father Chaucer hath vsed the same libertie in feete and measures that the Latinists do vse: and who so euer do peruse and well consider his workes, he shall finde that although his lines are not alwayes of one selfe same number of Syllables, yet beyng redde by one that hath vnderstanding, the longest verse and that which hath most Syllables in it, will fall (to the eare) correspondent vnto that whiche hath fewest sillables in it: and like wise that whiche hath in it fewest syllables, shalbe founde yet to consist of woordes that haue suche naturall sounde, as may seeme equall in length to a verse which hath many moe sillables of lighter accentes.

  Chawcer, who for that excellent fame which hee obtayned in his Poetry, was alwayes accounted the God of English Poets (such a tytle for honours sake hath beene giuen him) was next after, if not equall in time to Gower, and hath left many workes, both for delight and profitable knowledge, farre exceeding any other that as yet euer since hys time directed theyr studies that way. Though the manner of hys stile may seeme blunte and course to many fine English eares at these dayes, yet in trueth, if it be equally pondered, and with good iudgment aduised, and confirmed with the time wherein he wrote, a man shall perceiue thereby euen a true picture or perfect shape of a right Poet. He by his delightsome vayne, so gulled the eares of men with his deuises, that, although corruption bare such sway in most matters, that learning and truth might skant bee admitted to shewe it selfe, yet without controllment, myght hee gyrde at the vices and abuses of all states, and gawle with very sharpe and eger inuentions, which he did so learnedly and pleasantly, that none therefore would call him into question. For such was his bolde spyrit, that what enormities he saw in any, he would not spare to pay them home, eyther in playne words, or els in some prety and pleasant couert, that the simplest might espy him.

  But of them all particularly this is myne opinion, that Chaucer with Gower, Lidgat, and Harding for their antiquitie ought to haue the first place and Chaucer as the most renowmed of them all, for the much learming appeareth to be in him aboue any of the rest. And though many of his bookes be but bare translations out of the Latin and French, yet are they wel handled, as his bookes of “Troilus” and “Creffeid,” and the Romant of the Rose, whereof he translated but one halfe, the deuice was Iohn de Mehunes a French Poet.

  Art, like yong grasse in the spring of Chaucers florishing, was glad to peepe vp through any slime of corruption, to be beholding to she car’d not whome for apparaile, trauailing in those colde countries.

  According to Chawcers English, there can be little adling, without much gabbing, that is, small getting, without great lying, and cogging.

O, that I could old Gefferies Muse awake.

  The God of English poets.

  You must be contented to gyve me leave in discharge of the duetye and love whiche I beare to Chaucer, (whome I suppose I have as great intereste to adorne withe my smale skyll as anye other hath, in regarde that the laborious care of my father made hym most acceptable to the worlde in correctinge and augmentinge his woorkes).

  For his verses, although, in divers places, they seem to us to stand of unequal measures, yet a skilful reader, who can scan them in their nature, shall find it otherwise. And if a verse, here and there, fall out a syllable shorter or longer than another, I rather aret it to the negligence and rape of Adam Scrivener, (that I may speake as Chaucer doth,) than to any unconning or oversight in the author.

  Some few ages after came Geoffrey Chaucer, who writing his poesies in English, is of some called the first illuminator of the English tongue: of their opinion I am not (though I reverence Chaucer as an excellent poet for his time). He was indeed a great mingler of English with French, unto which language, belike for that he was descended of French, or rather Walloon, race, he carried a great affection.

  Although the style for the antiquity may distaste you, yet as under a bitter and rough rind there lieth a delicate kernel of conceit and sweet invention.

  So wise as our Chaucer is esteemed.

  He was the prince of English poets…. He was a great refiner and illuminer of our English tongue; and, if he left it so bad, how much worse did he find it!

  A Comment upon the Two Tales of our ancient, renowned, and ever-living poet, Sir Jeffray Chaucer, Knight, who for his rich fancy, pregnant invention, and present composure deserved the countenance of a prince and his laureat honor.

  The poet Chaucer set the worst example, who by bringing whole shoals of French words into our language, which was but too much adulterated before, through the effects of the Norman Conquest, deprived it almost wholly of its native grace and splendour, laying on paint over its pure complexion, and, for a beautiful face, substituted a downright mask.

  They who attempted verse in English down to Chaucer’s time made an heavy pudder, and are always miserably put to it for a word to clink; which commonly falls so awkward and unexpectedly, as dropping from the clouds by some machine or miracle. Chaucer found an Herculean labour on his hands, and did perform to admiration. He seized all Provençal, French, or Latin that came in his way, gives them a new garb and livery, and mingles them amongst our English: turns out English gouty or superannuated, to place in their room the foreigners fit for service, trained and accustomed to poetical discipline.

  As he is the father of English poetry, so I hold him in the same degree of veneration as the Grecians held Homer, or the Romans Virgil. He is a perpetual fountain of good sense; learned in all sciences; and, therefore, speaks properly on all subjects. As he knew what to say, so he knows also when to leave off; a continence which is practised by few writers, and scarcely by any of the ancients, excepting Virgil and Horace…. Chaucer followed nature everywhere, but was never so bold to go beyond her…. The verse of Chaucer, I confess, is not harmonious to us; but it is like the eloquence of one whom Tacitus commends, it was auribus istius temporis accommodata. They who lived with him, and some time after him, thought it musical; and it continues so, even in our judgment, if compared with the numbers of Lidgate and Gower, his contemporaries:—there is the rude sweetness of a Scotch tune in it, which is natural and pleasing, though not perfect. It is true, I cannot go so far as he who published the last edition of him; for he would make us believe the fault is in our ears, and that there were really ten syllables in a verse where we find but nine: but this opinion is not worth confuting; it is so gross and obvious an error, that common sense (which is a rule in everything but matters of faith and revelation) must convince the reader, that equality of numbers, in every verse which we call heroic, was either not known, or not always practised, in Chaucer’s age. It were an easy matter to produce some thousands of his verses, which are lame for want of half a foot, and sometimes a whole one, and which no pronunciation can make otherwise. We can only say, that he lived in the infancy of our poetry, and that nothing is brought to perfection at the first…. Chaucer, I confess, is a rough diamond, and must first be polished, ere he shines. I deny not likewise, that, living in our early days of poetry, he writes not always of a piece; but sometimes mingles trivial things with those of greater moment. Sometimes also, though not often, he runs riot, like Ovid, and knows not when he has said enough.

  I read Chaucer still with as much pleasure as almost any of our poets. He is a master of manners, of description, and the first tale-teller in the true enlivened natural way.

  I might now write to you in the language of Chaucer or Spenser, and assert that I wrote English, because it was English in their days; but I should be a most affected puppy if I did so, and you would not understand three words of my letter.

  Chaucer is regarded rather as an old, than a good poet. We look upon his poems as venerable relics, not as beautiful compositions; as pieces better calculated to gratify the antiquarian than the critic. He abounds not only in strokes of humour, which is commonly supposed to be his sole talent, but of pathos, and sublimity, not unworthy a more refined age. His old manners, his romantic arguments, his wildness of painting, his simplicity and antiquity of expression, transport us into some fairy region, and are all highly pleasing to the imagination. It is true that his uncouth and unfamiliar language disgusts and deters many readers; but the principal reason of his being so little known, and so seldom taken in hand, is the convenient opportunity of reading him with pleasure and facility in modern imitations.

  The first of our versifiers who wrote poetically. He does not, however, appear to have deserved all the praise he has received, or all the censure he has suffered. Dryden, who, mistaking genius for learning, in confidence of his abilities, ventured to write of what he had not examined, ascribes to Chaucer the first refinement of our numbers, the first production of easy and natural rhymes, and the improvement of our language, by words borrowed from the more polished languages of the continent. Skinner contrarily blames him in harsh terms for having vitiated his native speech by whole cartloads of foreign words. But he that reads the works of Gower will find smooth numbers and easy rhymes, of which Chaucer is supposed to be the inventor, and the French words, whether good or bad, of which Chaucer is charged as the importer. Some innovations he might probably make, like others, in the infancy of our poetry, which the paucity of books does allow us to discover with particular exactness; but the works of Gower and Lydgate sufficiently evince that his diction was in general like that of his contemporaries; and some improvements he undoubtedly made by the various dispositions of the rhymes, and by the mixture of different numbers, in which he seems to have been happy and judicious.

  From what has been said I think we may fairly conclude, that the English language must have imbibed a strong tincture of the French, long before the age of Chaucer, and consequently that he ought not to be charged as the importer of words and phrases, which he only used after the example of his predecessors and in common with his contemporaries. This was the real fact, and is capable of being demonstrated to any one, who will take the trouble of comparing the writings of Chaucer with those of Robert of Gloucester and Robert of Brunne, who both lived before him, and with those of Sir John Mandeville and Wicliff, who lived at the same time with him…. The great number of verses, sounding complete even to our ears, which is to be found in all the least corrected copies of his works, authorises us to conclude, that he was not ignorant of the laws of metre. Upon this conclusion it is impossible not to ground a strong presumption, that he intended to observe the same laws in the many other verses which seem to us irregular; and if this was really his intention, what reason can be assigned sufficient to account for his having failed so grossly and repeatedly, as is generally supposed, in an operation, which every Balladmonger in our days, man, woman, or child, is known to perform with the most unerring exactness, and without any extraordinary fatigue?

  In elevation and elegance, in harmony and perspicuity of versification, he surpasses his predecessors in an infinite proportion: that his genius was universal, and adapted to themes of unbounded variety: that his merit was not less in painting familiar manners with humour and propriety, than in moving the passions, and in representing the beautiful or the grand objects of nature with grace and sublimity. In a word, that he appeared with all the lustre and dignity of a true poet, in an age which compelled him to struggle with a barbarous language, and a national want of taste; and when to write verses at all, was regarded as a singular qualification…. I consider Chaucer as a genial day in an English spring.

  I am, too, though a Goth, so modern a Goth that I hate the black letter, and I love Chaucer better in Dryden and Baskerville, than in his own language and dress.

  Chaucer’s versification, wherever his genuine text is preserved, was uniformly correct; although the harmony of his lines has in many instances been obliterated by the changes that have taken place in the mode of accenting our language.

  The venerable father of English poetry had in his time penned “many a song and many a lecherous lay,” of which we have infinitely more reason to regret the loss, than he had in his old-age to repent the composition.

  Chaucer, notwithstanding the praises bestowed on him, I think obscene and contemptible:—he owes his celebrity merely to his antiquity, which he does not deserve so well as Pierce Plowman, or Thomas of Erceldoune.

  For variety of power has no competitor except Shakspeare.

  In the passages where Chaucer dramatises the manners of his day, or carries the voice of nature to the heart, or exhibits his characters and incidents as if passing in living motion before us, he produces an interest which neither the little feebleness that even here intermingle themselves, nor their unpruned prolixity, can destroy; but beyond these, he, like Gower, is dull, unmeaning now, and unreadable. Few poets have written so much, which so few desire to peruse or attempt to disturb.

  In the fourteenth century Chaucer’s verse is not unlike our homely rhymesters of the sixteenth century in Germany.

  My admiration for him is very ardent. His poetry seems to me so healthy, so vigorous, so much in the thought, and so little in the expression; his powers are so various, so pliable, ranging at will from the thrilling pathos of Griselda to the wild fancy of “Cambuscan bold.”… Setting Milton and Shakspeare aside, I am not sure that I don’t prefer him to almost any writer in the circle of English poetry. I speak, of course, of his best works, and not of his poems en masse; but two or three of his “Canterbury Tales,” and some select passages from his other productions, are worth all that the age of Queen Anne, our Augustan age as it has been called, ever produced.

  I cannot, in my own taste, go completely along with the eulogies that some have bestowed upon Chaucer, who seems to me to have wanted grandeur, where he is original, both in conception and in language. But in vivacity of imagination and ease of expression, he is above all poets of the middle time, and comparable perhaps to the greatest of those who have followed. He invented, or rather introduced from France, and employed with facility the regular iambic couplet; and though it was not to be expected that he should perceive the capacities latent in that measure, his versification, to which he accommodated a very licentious and arbitrary pronunciation, is uniform and harmonious.

  His poetry resembles the root just springing from the ground rather than the full-blown flower. His muse is no “babbling gossip of the air,” fluent and redundant; but, like a stammerer, or a dumb person, that has just found the use of speech, crowds many things together with eager haste, with anxious pauses, and fond repetitions, to prevent mistake. His words point as an index to the objects, like the eye or finger. There were none of the common-places of poetic diction in our author’s time, no reflected lights of fancy, no borrowed roseate tints; he was obliged to inspect things for himself, to look narrowly, and almost to handle the object, as in the obscurity of morning we partly see and partly grope our way; so that his descriptions have a sort of tangible character belonging to them, and produce the effect of sculpture on the mind. Chaucer had an equal eye for truth of nature and discrimination of character; and his interest in what he saw gave new distinctness and force to his power of observation. The picturesque and the dramatic are in him closely blended together, and hardly distinguishable; for he principally describes external appearances as indicating character, as symbols of internal sentiment.

  In what terms some speak of him! while I confess I find him unreadable.

  I would rather read Chaucer than Ariosto.

  He is famed rather as the animated painter of character, and manners, and external nature, than the poet of love and sentiment; and yet no writer, Shakespeare always excepted, (and perhaps Spenser) contains so many beautiful and tender passages relating to, or inspired by, women.

  It is idle at this day to say any thing of the moral influence of Chaucer: we might as well enlarge upon the absurdity of the Koran.

  I take unceasing delight in Chaucer. His manly cheerfulness is especially delicious to me in my old age. How exquisitely tender he is, and yet how perfectly free from the least touch of sickly melancholy or morbid drooping! The sympathy of the poet with the subjects of his poetry is particularly remarkable in Shakspere and Chaucer; but what the first effects by a strong act of imagination and mental metamorphosis, the last does without any effort, merely by the inborn kindly joyousness of his nature. How well we seem to know Chaucer! How absolutely nothing do we know of Shakspere!

  The line of English poets begins with him, as that of English kings with William the Conqueror; and if the change introduced by him was not so great, his title is better. Kings there were before the conquest, and of great and glorious memory too; but the poets before Chaucer are like the heroes before Agamemnon; even of those whose works have escaped oblivion, the names of most have perished. Father Chaucer, throwing off all trammels, simplified our verse. Nature had given him the ear and the eye and the imagination of a poet; and his diction was such as that of all great poets has ever been, and ever will be, in all countries,—neither cramped by pedantic rules, vitiated by prevailing fashions, nor raised on stilts, nor drooping for want of strength, but rising and falling with the subject, and always suited to it.

  The English language of Chaucer is far from possessing the polish of old French, which already attains some degree of perfection in this minor species of literature. Nevertheless, the idiom of the Anglo-Saxon poet, a heterogeneous medley of various dialects, has become the stock of modern English.

  That Chaucer was a master of English versification no one, that reads him with due care and attention, can well doubt. There are many passages in his works, which, from the agreement of MSS. and the absence of all those peculiarities of structure that leave matter for doubt, have, in all probability, come down to us as Chaucer wrote them—and in these the versification is as exquisite as the poetry. It needs not the somewhat suspicious apology of Dryden. I am not one of those who assert, that Chaucer has always “ten syllables in a verse, where we find but nine;” but I am as far from believing, that “he lived in the infancy of our poetry,” because the scheme of his metre somewhat differs from our own. As far as we have the means of judging, it was not only “auribus istius temporis accommodata,” but fulfilled every requisite that modern criticism has laid down, as either essential to the science, or conducive to the beauty of a versification.

  Chaucer excels in pathos, in humor, in satire, character, and description. His graphic faculty, and healthy sense of the material, strongly ally him to the painter; and perhaps a better idea could not be given of his universality than by saying that he was at once the Italian and the Flemish painter of his time, and exhibited the pure expression of Raphael, the devotional intensity of Domenechino, the color and corporeal fire of Titian, the manners of Hogarth, and the homely domesticities of Ostade and Teniers! His faults are coarseness, which was that of his age; and, in some of his poems, tediousness, which is to be attributed to the same cause.

  The herculean labor of Chaucer was the creation of a new style. In this he was as fortunate as he was likewise unhappy. He mingled, with the native rudeness of our English, words of Provençal fancy, and some of French and of Latin growth. He banished the superannuated and the uncouth, and softened the churlish nature of our hard Anglo-Saxon; but the poet had nearly endangered the novel diction when his artificial pedantry assumed what he called “the ornate style” in “the Romaunt of the Rose” and in his “Troilus and Cressida.” This “ornate style” introduced sesquipedalian Latinisms, words of immense dimensions, that could not hide their vacuity of thought. Chaucer seems deserted by his genius when “the ornate style” betrays his pangs and his anxiety…. Are the works of our great poet to be consigned to the literary dungeon of the antiquary’s closet? I fear that there is more than one obstruction which intervenes between the poet’s name, which will never die, and the poet’s works, which will never be read.

  Now, what was the character of Chaucer’s diction? A great delusion exists on that point. Some ninety or one hundred words that are now obsolete, certainly not many more, vein the whole surface of Chaucer; and thus a primâ facie impression is conveyed that Chaucer is difficult to understand, whereas a very slight practice familiarises his language.

  Had Chaucer’s poems been written in Greek or Hebrew, they would have been a thousand times better known…. Our position is, that Chaucer was a most harmonious and melodious poet, and that he was a perfect master of the various forms of versification in which he wrote; that the principle on which his rhythm is founded fuses and subjects within itself all the minor details of metre; that this principle, though it has been understood only by the few, and never systematically explained, is, more or less, inseparable from the composition of an harmonious versification in the English language; and that he, the first man, if not unrivalled in the varied music of his verse, has scarcely been surpassed by any succeeding poet…. Of the occasional deficiencies or “lameness” in his verse, of which Chaucer has been accused, it is hoped that little need now be said. In the first place, we are to allow for his quantities, so far as we know them, or can feasibly conjecture what they were. In the second place, we are to give to a great poet who has accomplished so much harmony which is manifest, due credit for many instances where we are unable to perceive it, from our deficiency of knowledge. Thirdly, we are to allow for the errors of copyists, of whose ungodly pens Chaucer shows himself to be in much dread,—in his address to Adam Scrivener, his amanuensis, and on other occasions. It might be suggested, fifthly, that something should be allowed for the unsettled condition of the English language at his time, and that it was accounted an accomplishment for a man to be able even to write his own name. But this consideration I do not care to dwell upon in the case of one who shows such mastery.

  He was made for an early poet, and the metaphors of dawn and spring doubly become him…. He is a king and inherits the earth, and expands his great soul smilingly to embrace his great heritage. Nothing is too high for him to touch with a thought, nothing too low to dower with an affection. As a complete creature cognate of life and death, he cries upon God,—as a sympathetic creature he singles out a daisy from the universe (“si douce est la marguerite,”) to lie down by half a summer’s day and bless it for fellowship. His senses are open and delicate, like a young child’s—his sensibilities capacious of supersensual relations, like an experienced thinker’s. Child-like, too, his tears and smiles lie at the edge of his eyes, and he is one proof more among the many, that the deepest pathos and the quickest gayeties hide together in the same nature. He is too wakeful and curious to lose the stirring of a leaf, yet not too wide awake to see visions of green and white ladies between the branches; and a fair house of fame and a noble court of love are built and holden in the winking of his eyelash…. Not one of the “Queen Anne’s men,” measuring out tuneful breath upon their fingers, like ribbons for topnots, did know the art of versification as the old rude Chaucer knew it. Call him rude for the picturesqueness of the epithet; but his verse has, at least, as much regularity in the sense of true art, and more manifestly in proportion to our increasing acquaintance with his dialect and pronunciation, as can be discovered or dreamed in the French school.

  It may be safely asserted that very few poets in any modern language are more exquisitely and uniformly musical than Chaucer.

  What strikes us most, however, and remains with us longest after reading his poetry, is the natural and spirited tone that prevails over every other. In this he is like Chaucer, who wrote in the latter part of the same century. Indeed, the resemblance between the two poets is remarkable in some other particulars. Both often sought their materials in the Northern French poetry; both have that mixture of devotion and a licentious immorality, much of which belonged to their age, but some of it to their personal characters; and both show a wide knowledge of human nature, and a great happiness in sketching the details of individual manners. The original temper of each made him satirical and humorous; and each, in his own country, became the founder of some of the forms of its popular poetry, introducing new metres and combinations, and carrying them out in a versification which, though generally rude and irregular, is often flowing and nervous, and always natural. The Archpriest has not, indeed, the tenderness, the elevation, or the general power of Chaucer; but his genius has a compass, and his verse a skill and success, that show him to be more nearly akin to the great English master than will be believed, except by those who have carefully read the works of both.

  The influence of Chaucer is conspicuous in all our early literature; and, more recently, not only Pope and Dryden have been beholden to him, but, in the whole society of English writers, a large unacknowledged debt is easily traced. One is charmed with the opulence which feeds so many pensioners. But Chaucer is a huge borrower. Chaucer, it seems, drew continually, through Lydgate and Caxton, from Guido di Colonna, whose Latin romance of the Trojan war was in turn a compilation from Dares Phrygius, Ovid and Statius. Then Petrarch, Boccaccio and the Provençal poets, are his benefactors: the Romaunt of the Rose is only judicious translation from William of Lorris and John of Meun: Troilus and Creseide, from Lollius of Urbino: The Cock and the Fox, from the Lais of Marie: The House of Fame, from the French or Italian: and poor Gower he uses as if he were only a brick-kiln or stone-quarry, out of which to build his house. He steals by this apology,—that what he takes has no worth where he finds it, and the greatest where he leaves it.

  Indeed I do admire him, or rather love him. In my opinion, he is fairly worth a score or two of Spensers. He had a knowledge of human nature, and not of doll-making and fantoccini dressing…. Pardon me if I say I would rather see Chaucer quite alone, in the dew of his sunny morning, than with twenty clever gentlefolks about him, arranging his shoestrings and buttoning his doublet. I like even his language. I will have no hand in breaking his dun but rich-painted glass, to put in (if clearer) much thinner panes.

  If any man or woman will not take the trifling trouble which is necessary to understand Chaucer’s antique orthography, let them be ignorant. The last “Minerva” novel will prove metal more attractive to such painstaking “students of English Literature.”

… rich as Chaucer’s speech.

  On every page and every line of his writings, a reminiscence of our trouvères betrays itself, sometimes veiled, sometimes apparent.

  Compared with his productions, all that precedes is barbarism. But what is much more remarkable is that very little of what has followed in the space of nearly five centuries that has elapsed since he lived and wrote is worthy of being compared with what he has left us. He is in our English poetry almost what Homer is in that of Greece, and Dante in that of Italy,—at least in his own sphere still the greatest light.

  From this Babylonish confusion of speech, the influence and example of Chaucer did more to rescue his native tongue than any other single cause; and if we compare his dialect with that of any writer of an earlier date, we shall find that in compass, flexibility, expressiveness, grace, and all the higher qualities of poetical diction, he gave it at once the utmost perfection which the materials at his hand would admit of…. In the hands of Chaucer, the English language advanced, at one bound, to that superiority over the French which it has ever since maintained, as a medium of the expression of poetical imagery and thought…. Chaucer, in fine, was a genuine product of the union of Saxon and Norman genius, and the first well-characterized specimen of the intellectual results of a combination, which has given to the world a literature so splendid, and a history so noble…. May fairly be said to be not only the earliest dramatic genius of modern Europe, but to have been a dramatist before that which is technically known as the existing drama was invented.

  Chaucer is admitted on all hands to be a great poet, but, by the general public at least, he is not frequently read. He is like a cardinal virtue, a good deal talked about, a good deal praised, honoured by a vast amount of distant admiration, but with little practical acquaintance. And for this there are many and obvious reasons. He is an ancient, and the rich old mahogany is neglected for the new and glittering veneer. He is occasionally gross; often tedious and obscure; he frequently leaves a couple of lovers to cite the opinions of Greek and Roman authors; and practice and patience are required to melt the frost of his orthography, and let his music flow freely. In the conduct of his stories he is garrulous, homely, and slow-paced. He wrote in a leisurely world, when there was plenty of time for writing and reading; long before the advent of the printer’s devil or of Mr. Mudie. There is little of the lyrical element in him. He does not dazzle by sentences. He is not quotable. He does not shine in extracts so much as in entire poems. There is a pleasant equality about his writing: he advances through a story at an even pace, glancing round him on everything with curious, humorous eyes, and having his say about everything. He is the prince of story-tellers, and however much he may move others, he is not moved himself. His mood is so kindly that he seems always to have written after dinner, or after hearing good news—that he had received from the king another grant of wine, for instance—and he discourses of love and lovers’ raptures, and the disappointments of life, half sportively, half sadly, like one who has passed through all, felt the sweetness and the bitterness of it, and been able to strike a balance.

  Chaucer is the genuine specimen of an English poet—a type of the best who were to come after him; with cordial affection for men and for nature; often tempted to coarseness, often yielding to his baser nature in his desire to enter into all the different experiences of men; apt through this desire, and through his hatred of what was insincere, to say many things of which he had need to repent, and of which he did repent; but never losing his loyalty to what was pure, his reverence for what was divine.

  The essential quality of Chaucer is the deep, penetrating, Dantean intensity of his single conceptions, which go right to the heart of the objects conceived, so that there is an absolute contact of thought and thing without any interval.

  He is as superior to the ordinary historian as a troop of soldiers is to a regiment of wax-works.

  His verse is full of buoyancy; its very art is easy, the wind is not freer, it is a south-west air with a rhythm in it, and a masterly skill in the pauses…. His poetry is penetrated with the social spirit. He loves the haunts of men, the places where they dwell, the episodes of mutual need that bring and keep them together; meat and drink; industry and play; the uprisings and downsittings, the incomings and outgoings of men and women.

  Chaucer’s “well of English undefiled” is very pleasant and wholesome drinking; but pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, and “auxiliary” verbs aside, it is a mixture in which Normanized, Gallicized Latin is mingled in large proportion with a base of degraded Anglo-Saxon.

  Chaucer must be studied in order to be read: but when Chaucer has been studied so as to be easily followed, he confronts you with the dawn of a brilliant day—dewy, fresh, transparent, and invigorating. He gives you the Odyssey of the English poetry, and reveals the springtime of English life.

  There is a pervading wholesomeness in the writings of this man,—a vernal property that soothes and refreshes in a way of which no other has ever found the secret…. It is good to retreat now and then beyond earshot of the introspective confidences of modern literature, and to lose ourselves in the gracious worldliness of Chaucer. Here was a healthy and hearty man, so genuine that he need not ask whether he were genuine or no, so sincere as quite to forget his own sincerity, so truly pious that he could be happy in the best world that God chose to make, so humane that he loved even the foibles of his kind…. There is no touch of cynicism in all he wrote…. 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…. He reconciled, in the harmony of his verse, the English bluntness with the dignity and elegance of the less homely Southern speech…. 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 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…. There is something in him of the disinterestedness that made the Greeks masters in art. His phrase 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 inadvertantly away, and all the while, like the princess in the story, lets fall a pearl at every other word.

  There is no majesty, no stately march of numbers, in his poetry, still less is there of fire, rapidity, or conciseness.

  He is like a precocious and poetical child, who mingles in his love-dreams quotations from his prayer-book and recollections of his alphabet. Even in the “Canterbury Tales” he repeats himself, unfolds artless developments, forgets to concentrate his passion or his idea. He begins a jest, and scarcely ends it. He dilutes a bright colouring in a monotonous stanza. His voice is like that of a boy breaking into manhood. At first a manly and firm accent is maintained, then a shrill sweet sound shows that his growth is not finished, and that his strength is subject to weakness.

  His range, is extremely limited, but within the limits his landscape is exquisitely fresh, natural, and true in spite of its being conventional. The fact is, though the elements of the scenery were ready made, the composition of them gave great scope to originality, and Chaucer being a man of unique individuality, could not adopt the landscape even of those poems which he translated without making alterations; and being an Englishman, could not write about the May morning without introducing its English peculiarities. Moreover, the delightful and simple familiarity of the poet with the meadows, brooks, and birds, and his love of them, has the effect of making every common aspect of nature new; the May morning is transfigured by his enjoyment of it; the grass of the field is seen as those in Paradise beheld it; the dew lies on our heart as we go forth with the poet in the dawning, and the wind blows past our ear like the music of an old song heard in the days of childhood. Half this power lies in the sweet simplicity of the words and in the pleasant flowing of the metre.

  There can be no better testimony to the true greatness of the old poet than that half a thousand years after the age in which he wrote he is held in higher estimation than ever; that, whatever intermissions of his popularity there may have been in times that cared nothing for, as they knew little of, the great Romantic School to which he belonged, and that were wholly incapable of understanding the very language in which he expressed and transcribed his genius, he this day speaks with increasing force and power. Through all the obsoletenesses of his language, and all the lets and impediments to a full enjoyment of his melody caused by our ignorance of fourteenth-century English, through all the conventional and social differences which separate his time from ours, we yet recognize a profoundly human soul, with a marvellous power of speech. We are discovering that he is not only a great poet, but one of our greatest. It is not too much to say that the better acquaintance with Chaucer’s transcendent merits is gradually establishing the conviction that not one among all poets, deserves so well as he the second place.

  That tenderest, brightest, most humourful sweet soul, of all the great poets of the world, whom a thousand Englishmen out of every thousand and one are content to pass by with a shrug and a sneer: “How can one find time to read a man who makes ‘poore’ two syllables? Life is not long enough for that.”

  It is not on Nature as a great whole, much less as an abstraction, that his thought usually dwells. It is the outer world in its most concrete forms and objects, with which he delights to interweave his poetry—the homely scenes of South England, the oaks and other forest trees, the green meadows, quiet fields, and comfortable farms, as well as the great castles where the nobles dwelt. One associates him with the green lanes and downs of Surrey and Kent, their natural copsewoods and undulating greenery. I know not that the habitual forms of English landscape, those which are most rural and most unchanged, have ever since found a truer poet, one who so brings before the mind the scene and the spirit of it uncolored by any intervention of his own thought or sentiment.

  It is unlikely that his personality will ever become more fully known than it is at present; nor is there anything in respect of which we seem to see so clearly into his inner nature as with regard to these twin predilections, to which he remains true in all his works and in all his moods. While the study of books was his chief passion, nature was his chief joy and solace; while, his genius enabled him to transfuse what he read in the former, what came home to him in the latter was akin to that genius itself…. There is nothing that can fairly be called rugged in the verse of Chaucer…. Our first great English poet was also our first English love-poet, properly so called…. In his poetry there is life…. The legacy which Chaucer left to our literature was to fructify in the hands of a long succession of heirs; and it may be said, with little fear of contradiction, that at no time has his fame been fresher and his influence upon our poets—and upon our painters as well as our poets—more perceptible than at the present day.

  Chaucer is not one of the great classics. His poetry transcends and effaces, easily and without effort, all the romance-poetry of Catholic Christendom; it transcends and effaces all the English poetry contemporary with it, it transcends and effaces all the English poetry subsequent to it down to the age of Elizabeth. Of such avail is poetic truth of substance, in its natural and necessary union with poetic truth of style. And yet, I say, Chaucer is not one of the great classics. He has not their accent…. However we may account for its absence, something is wanting, then, to the poetry of Chaucer, which poetry must have before it can be placed in the glorious class of the best. And there is no doubt what that something is. It is the σπονδαιότης, the high and excellent seriousness, which Aristotle assigns as one of the grand virtues of poetry. The substance of Chaucer’s poetry, his view of things and his criticism of life, has largeness, freedom, shrewdness, benignity; but it has not this high seriousness. Homer’s criticism of life has it, Dante’s has it, Shakespeare’s has it. It is this chiefly which gives to our spirits what they can rest upon; and with the increasing demands of our modern ages upon poetry, this virtue of giving us what we can rest upon will be more and more highly esteemed. A voice from the slums of Paris, fifty or sixty years after Chaucer, the voice of poor Villon out of his life of riot and crime, has at its happy moments (as, for instance, in the last stanza of “La Belle Heaulmière”) more of this important poetic virtue of seriousness than all the productions of Chaucer. But its apparition in Villon, and in men like Villon, is fitful; the greatness of the great poets, the power of their criticism of life, is that their virtue is sustained. To our praise, therefore, of Chaucer as a poet there must be this limitation; he lacks the high seriousness of the great classics, and therewith an important part of their virtue. Still, the main fact for us to bear in mind about Chaucer is his sterling value according to that real estimate which we firmly adopt for all poets. He has poetic truth of substance, though he has not high poetic seriousness, and corresponding to his truth of substance he has an exquisite virtue of style and manner. With him is born our real poetry.

  Let us Shakspere-worshippers not forget that Chaucer lived two centuries earlier than Shakspere, and had to deal with a crude poetic language which Shakspere found a magnificent song-instrument, all in tune and ready to his hand. Let us not forget that Shakspere is first poet and Chaucer second poet, and that these two repose alone, apart, far, far above any spot where later climbers have sunk to rest. And this adjuration is here made with a particular and unequivocal solemnity, because of the conviction that we expressed in the outset of this subject, that the estimate of these two poets which would have them like enough to be father and son, involves deeper matter than mere criticism.

  The two greatest English poets, Chaucer and Shakespeare…. Nobody who has read Chaucer through, or who has fairly read through only the Canterbury Tales, can look upon Chaucer as an animal poet. No man before Shakespeare dwelt as Chaucer dwelt upon the beauty of a perfect womanhood, the daisy was for him its emblem, with its supposed power to heal inward bruises, its modest beauty, its heart of gold, and its white crown of innocence. He is not less deeply because unaffectedly religious. His absolute kindliness made part of his perception of the highest truth, and it increased greatly the power of his teaching.

  Chaucer imported so many “wagonfuls” of French words into our language, that he was nicknamed “The French Brewer.”

  He was the Father of English Versification as he was the Father of English Poetry. Five centuries have passed since he created it, and it remains to-day as he left it. Nothing has been taken from it, and nothing added to it, except the mighty line which Surrey was the first to use in English Verse. He gave us the seven-line stanza, so admirable for narrative purposes, and he gave us the heroic couplet…. A great poet by virtue of his natural gifts, he was the greatest of narrative poets by virtue of his knowledge of mankind. His range was large, and his sympathies quick. Idealist and realist, nothing was too high or too low for his pencil,—nothing too tragic or too comic. His art was conscious and profound. His details never degenerated into the catalogue manner of the metrical romances, for though abundant, they were always subordinated to the main effect. He attained Style. The general impression left by his poetry is, that it was sung when the world was fresher and fairer than it is now, when man was younger, and healthier, and happier, when the sun was brighter and the moon clearer, when the Spring was longer, the daisies thicker, and the lark sang endlessly at the gate of heaven,—a world of childhood, and innocence, and love,—the Golden Age.

  If he resembles Shakespeare in his cheerfulness, and power of describing character and telling a story, he resembles Wordsworth in his freedom from mere “poetic phraseology.”

  Chaucer is a pre-Raphaelite. There is a particularity in every scene, and it was shrewdly guessed by Pope that each was a copy of some original. Each garden is one in which he has walked; each flower is a primrose or a columbine.

  There has been of late years a striking revival of popularity in the case of Barbour’s great contemporary Chaucer. Let us hope that your countryman may have a similar fortune. But we cannot easily rank any one with Chaucer. For variety, for power of description, for touching, tender appeals to the feelings, for genuine though sometimes rather coarse fun, and for delineation of character, he occupies a place in the world of poetry such as few can aspire to.

  Is always of the fourteenth century; he understood man, individually, well enough, but when he tries to describe man collectively, man in some other age, he is still only mediæval. He has only got the mediæval standpoint.

  It is through no lack of love and reverence for the name of Chaucer that I must question his right, though the first narrative poet of England, to stand on that account beside her first dramatic, her first epic, or her first lyric poet. But, being certainly unprepared to admit his equality with Shakespeare, with Milton, and with Shelley, I would reduce Mr. Rossetti’s mystic four to the old sacred number of three.

  I have spoken of Chaucer’s humor, and hinted at its occasional coarseness, referring briefly to the over-crowding of that age; to the absence of night-dresses; to the fact that, even in highly respectable houses, many grown-up people of different sexes occupied one sleeping room; and to the consequences, as reflected in ordinary sentiment and speech at this common familiarity with the baser functions of animal being. I merely suggest the apology. The question is not a nice one, and I do not care to pursue it. The best that can be said for Chaucer is that his coarseness is his worst offense; there is no double entendre, no nasty hint, no unclean innuendo. His liberties are like the unconscious exposure of an infant rolling on the carpet.

  Chaucer might be styled, although living in a rude age, the poet of the affections,—few writers having ever excelled him for his animated portraits, as well as for beautiful passages relating to or inspired by woman.

  Æschylus flattered neither archon nor mob; Chaucer is almost as frank as Burns.

  Great poet as he was, there is nothing of the prophet about him—the mens divinior is absent. With Dante and Petrarch he justly ranks in what has been called the triumvirate of the mediæval poets; but his work shows no sign whatever of their patriotic passion, none of their interest in statesmanship and politics: to take a phrase from the Commedia, he cannot discern even the tower of the heavenly City. Thus, although Chaucer heads magnificently the long list of our poets, and has never wanted some of the honour which was paid to Homer in his own land, yet I think he must be regarded as essentially retrospective; nay, in a certain sense, if I may venture on the word, superficial. In his brilliant criticism of the humours of his day, in his freshness and lucidity of style, in the movement of his narrative, he is modern. But in the choice of subjects, in the general matter of his tale, in the feelings with which he seems to look upon life, he scarcely rises above the showy court-atmosphere of Edward’s reign. It is less the dawn of modern ways in thought and literature which we see in him, than the gorgeous sunset of chivalry:—his poetry reflects the earlier rays of the Italian Renaissance, but its massive substance is essentially mediæval…. He is among our greatest poets; but no other among them keeps so steadily to the mere average level—one might almost hint, the bourgeois level, of his time, as Chaucer; he is of his age, not above it.

  How did he manage in his old age to keep such perfect youth and heartiness? One never feels as if he were old. The heart springs up and sings in every line. His gayety is irrepressible. The world is always young to him. His humor is so sly and sharp; his pathos so tender and refined; his gladness so pulsing and contagious; his romance so chivalrous; his sympathies so large; that he carries one away with him at his “own sweet will.” Yet I hear many persons say they cannot read him. His quaint spelling disturbs them, and they find his verses halting and unfinished…. I know no poet whose verse is to me more charming, more full of exquisite cadence and variety. He prided himself on the exactness of his feet and measure. One must know, to be sure, how to read and accent it—but that is learned with so little trouble; and when one has caught the inflections, the rhythm is beautiful. Besides, its very quaintness lends it a certain charm to me. How terribly he loses in Dryden’s transcripts! all the soul and heart is gone.

  Editions of the poems of Chaucer, in whole or in part, are coming out constantly in England, in Germany, and in America. It is well within bounds to say that he has been more read and studied during the past twenty years than during the previous two hundred. If this indicated nothing else, it shows the existence of a large class to whom Chaucer is something more than a name. A generation which could scarcely be spoken of as knowing him at all has been supplanted by a generation with which he is becoming a familiar and favorite author…. I am not claiming for Chaucer that he is one of the few supremest poets of the race. His station is near them, but he is not of them. Yet, whatever may be the rank we accord him among the writers of the world’s chief literatures, the position he holds in his own literature is one that can no longer be shaken by criticism or disturbed by denial. Time has set its final seal upon the verdict of his own age, and the refusal to acknowledge his greatness has now no effect upon the opinion we have of the poet himself, but upon our opinion of those who are unable to appreciate his poetry. To one alone among the writers of our own literature is he inferior. Nor even by him has he been surpassed in every way. There are characteristics in which he has no superior, and, it may be right to add, in which he has no equal…. There is one particular in which his merits in reference to the literature are simply transcendent. He overcame its natural tendencies to a dull seriousness which could sometimes be wrought into vigorous invective, but had little power to fuse the spiritual element of poetry with the purely intellectual. Into the stolid English nature, which may be earnest, but evinces an almost irresistable inclination toward heaviness, he brought a lightness, a grace, a delicacy of fancy, a refined sportiveness even upon the most unrefined themes, which had never been known before save on the most infinitesimal scale, and has not been known too much since. Nor is this the only distinctive characteristic in which Chaucer excels. There is no other English author so absolutely free, not merely from effort, but from the remotest suggestion of effort. Shakspeare mounts far higher; yet with him there are times when we seem to hear the flapping of the wings, to be vaguely conscious that he is lashing his imagination to put forth increased exertions. But in Chaucer no slightest trace of strain is to be detected.

  There has certainly never been an English poet so far in advance of his times, and whose loss to poetry was therefore so absolutely irreparable, as Chaucer.

  Chaucer’s verse to us is now as veritably dialect as to that old time it was the chastest English; and even then his materials were essentially dialect when his song was at best pitch.

  To-day Chaucer has more readers and more lovers than at any previous time…. As an artist, a master of his craft, Chaucer has no superior, not Shakspere himself. The wonderful music in which a great thought finds expression in inevitable words came to him but seldom; but for sustained beauty, for continuous charm, his verse has never been surpassed. Alone among English poets he possesses the art of narration in its perfection. Save in one or two early poems he is never for a moment dull, and he never cloys his readers with excess of sweetness. We feel that he is the most direct of story-tellers, and yet his narrative is never bald or thin; he has always ready at hand a touch of philosophy, a stroke of humour, or a vivid description, with which to keep up our interest and attention. The humour has never been surpassed for quaintness and subtlety. When can we be sure that we have exhausted it, or that beneath some seemingly simple phrase there is not waiting us a quiet jest? The vivid colour of his descriptions illumine Chaucer’s pages with the brightness of a mediæval manuscript. But of this most human, most lovable of English poets, it is idle, indeed, to try to summarise the just meed of praise.

  It is hard to conceive a poet who had steeped his soul in the joy of the dawn, confining himself to the car of Phœbus or the rosy fingers of Aurora. Yet Chaucer does not describe such moments in the natural method, nor is he drawn to them. No; the early morning, when matters are settled, when we are sure of a number of hours of good, steady daylight, is the time he loves. Even when the idea of motion would seem to be inherent in the object described, he evades it. His delight in the fresh country is summed up in his love for his favorite “briddes.” Allusions to them are constant in his poems; but for all that he gives of their airiness and lightness, these winged spirits of the breeze incarnate might just as well be little birds of wood. They sit on branches and converse politely; they do not fly, they simply change their position; one is sure that they would settle with a thud. Never once, so far as I know, does Chaucer note the characteristic flight of a bird…. The inevitable progression of years leaves no mark even on the outward man. Helen returns to the home she had left thirty years before, still calm in eternal beauty; Palamon and Arcite, an indefinite number of “years or tweye” having elapsed, fight for Emelye with all the ardor of youth. Neither is there any change of the inner nature. Circumstances may storm and rage and batter; extremes of fortune succeed each other with startling rapidity; death threatens, love encircles, power crowns,—yet the hero remains throughout passive and unmoved; as he was in the beginning, so he emerges at the end. Griselda the girl receives with meek brow and folded hands the summons to wed her feudal lord; with meek brow and folded hands Griselda the matron welcomes her husband’s bride. Years have passed by, filled with strange and bitter experience; but they have not affected her,—she remains a constant quantity.

  After all is said and done, we, with our average life of three-score years and ten, are the heirs of all the poetry of all the ages. We must do our best in our allotted time, and Chaucer is but one of the poets. He did not write for specialists in his own age, and his main value for succeeding ages resides, not in his vocabulary, nor in his inflections, nor in his indebtedness to foreign originals, nor in the metrical uniformities or anomalies that may be discovered in his poems: but in his poetry. Other things are accidental; his poetry is essential. Other interests—historical, philological, antiquarian—must be recognized; but the poetical, or (let us say) the spiritual, interest stands first and far ahead of all others.

  I may fairly class Chaucer among my passions, for I read him with that sort of personal attachment I had for Cervantes, who resembled him in a certain sweet and cheery humanity. But I do not allege this as the reason, for I had the same feeling for Pope, who was not like either of them. Kissing goes by favor, in literature as in life, and one cannot quite account for one’s passions in either; what is certain is, I liked Chaucer and I did not like Spenser; possibly there was an affinity between reader and poet, but if there was I should be at a loss to name it, unless it was the liking for reality, and the sense of mother earth in human life…. Compared with the meaner poets the greater are the cleaner, and Chaucer was probably safer than any other English poet of his time, but I am not going to pretend that there are not things in Chaucer which one would be the better for not reading; and so far as these words of mine shall be taken for counsel, I am not willing that they should unqualifiedly praise him…. I loved my Chaucer too well, I hope, not to get some good from the best in him; and my reading of criticism had taught me how and where to look for the best, and to know it when I had found it.

  If Langland may be regarded in some respects as the Nævius of English poetry, Chaucer is certainly its Ennius…. Ennius taught his countrymen how to refine their native genius by the use of Greek forms; Chaucer succeeded in expanding the vigorous but limited range of the Anglo-Saxon imagination, by bringing it into touch with the life and art of continental Europe. In the poetical models which he imported from France, and in the poetical themes suggested to him by Italy, he found a medium for reflecting the English conception of the manners and fashions of chivalry. But by his instinctive sympathy with that deeper and more enduring movement, afterwards known as the Renaissance, he may also be said to have invented a national mode of thought, which imparted a character of its own to the whole course of English poetry…. It is certain that Chaucer was the first Englishman to write metrical stories for their own sake…. Looking back over this survey of Chaucer’s poetical progress, we find scarcely one of his works in which we are not called upon to admire the presence of a powerful and penetrating genius. When the language came into his hands it was rude and inharmonious, inadequate to express either the complex ideas of philosophy or the finer shades of character; when he left it it had been endowed with a copious vocabulary, refined syntax, musical numbers; it was fitted to become the vehicle of a noble literature.

  In 1500 his popularity was at its height. During the latter part of the sixteenth century it began to decline. From that date till the end of William III.’s reign—in spite of the influence which he undoubtedly exercised over Spenser, and in spite of the respectful allusions to him in Sidney, Puttenham, Drayton, and Milton—his fame had become rather a tradition than a reality. In the following age the good-natured tolerance of Dryden was succeeded by the contempt of Addison and the supercilious patronage of Pope. Between 1700 and 1782 nothing seemed more probable than that the writings of the first of England’s narrative poets would live chiefly in the memory of antiquarians. In little more than half a century afterwards we find him placed, with Shakspeare and Milton, on the highest pinnacle of poetic renown.

  In many ways he was still in bondage to the mediæval, and wholly uncritical, tradition. One classic, we may almost say, was as good to him as another. He seems to have placed Ovid on a line with Virgil; and the company in his House of Fame is undeniably mixed. His judgments have the healthy instinct of the consummate artist. They do not show, as those of his master, Petrarch, unquestionably do, the discrimination and the tact of the born critic.

  The sweetness, the wholesomeness, the kindliness, the sincerity, the humor, and the humanity of Chaucer can hardly be overpraised.

  It is known now that to all intents and purposes the heroic couplet had been brought to a high degree of perfection by Chaucer about 250 years before Waller had written a line.

  Chaueer was to him a kindred spirit, as a lover of nature and as a word-painter of character: and he enjoyed reading him aloud more than any poet except Shakespeare and Milton.

  Chaucer continues to be one of the great masters of verse in the literature, Dryden’s monstrous chatter about the progress of English verse to the contrary notwithstanding…. In the use of the rhyming couplet, Chaucer surpasses immeasurably both Dryden and Pope. His thought is not so paddocked therein. In his hands, it is not the “rocking horse,” as Keats characterizes it, which it is in the hands of Dryden and Pope…. His sensitiveness as to melody did not allow him to run into a mechanical uniformity.

  The prosody of Chaucer’s later and more elaborate works is not, as was so long supposed, an arbitrary or a loose one. Even Dryden knew no better than to discover in the verse of the “Canterbury Tales” “a rude sweetness of a Scotch tune;” it is obvious that he was quite unable to scan it. It was, on the contrary, not merely not “rude,” but an artistic product of the utmost delicacy and niceness, a product which borrowed something from the old national measure, but was mainly an introduction into English of the fixed prosodies of the French and the Italians, the former for octosyllabic, the latter for decasyllabic verse. The rules of both, but especially the latter, are set, and of easy comprehension; to learn to read Chaucer with a fit appreciation of the liquid sweetness of his versification is as easy an accomplishment as to learn to scan classical French verse, or easier. But it must be remembered that, in its polished art, it was a skill fully known only to its founder, and that, with Chaucer’s death, the power to read his verses as he wrote them seems immediately to have begun to disappear. Chaucer gave English poetry an admirable prosody, but it was too fine a gift to be appreciated by those for whom it was created.

  The notion of Chaucer as having flooded the language with French words in contradistinction to the sound Saxon vocabulary of his contemporary Langland died hard, and perhaps simulates life even yet; but its obstinacy in surviving is merely Partridgean.

  Chaucer’s philosophy is of a sane, practical mind. Nature is delightful, but it is the quiet, reposeful nature of southern England. That the sea or the storms or any exhibition of great force attracted or excited his imagination I can nowhere find. Men and women are entertaining. His idea of virtue is temperance, courage, fidelity to comrades. He hates a cheat or a coward. He has a great deal of tolerance for the faults of others, because men are so interesting to him that he can forgive a good deal of vulgarity for the sake of the unadulterated human nature it illustrates. He detests a hypocrite, especially one who trades in virtue or religion; but it seems to be with an artistic quite as much as an ethical hatred that he regards hypocrisy. He makes his villians physically repulsive, and dangerous only to dupes of little discernment. The profound selfishness and cruelty of Iago covered with an exterior of soldier-like frankness is beyond his horizon. He does not scrutinize moral phenomena very closely, nor does the misery of men condemned to a life of hopeless toil oppress his imagination.