Chaucer was a middle-class Englishman, Boccaccio a middle-class Italian. They both wrote in languages that were scarcely older than themselves, in languages that were rather popular than learned. They were both in a sense mediators between the classical culture and their own people. There the resemblance ends, and their personal characters begin to seal the impressions they made on their respective literatures. They represent two quite distinct advances in the art of story-telling, the one in material, the other in technique. In both of them there is a personal honesty of workmanship that makes their work their own. The names of the trouveurs are lost, or, at least, not connected with what they did. They were workers on a general theme, and counted no more in the production of the whole than the thousand men who chiselled out each his piece of carving round the arches of Notre Dame. They were the tools of their nations. Chaucer and Boccaccio were men whose workmanship had its special marks, its private personality. They were artists in their own right and not artisans.
GEOFFREY CHAUCER
Chaucer.
Chaucer's was a fairly simple nature. He seems to have taken to Renaissance fashions just as he took to Renaissance learning, without in the least disturbing the solid Englishness of his foundation. He married a Damsell Philippa without letting his marriage interfere with an ideal and unrequited passion like that of Petrarch for Laura. He had Jean de Meung's own reverence for the classics. 'Go litel book, go litel my tragedie,' he says in 'Troilus and Criseyd,
'And kiss the steppes, wher-as thou seest pace
Virgil, Ovyde, Omer, Lucan, and Stace.'
And yet few men have about them less of a classical savour. He may well have liked 'at his beddes heed
'Twenty bokes clad in blak or reed,