Although we have nothing important dating from before his thirtieth year, we know from Chaucer’s own words that he wrote many “Balades, Roundels, and Virelays” which are now lost; or, as he puts it in his last rueful Retractation, “many a song and many a lecherous lay.” These were no doubt fugitive pieces, often written for different friends or patrons, and put abroad in their names. Besides these, we know that he translated certain religious works, including the famous “Misery of Human Life” of Pope Innocent the Third. Piety and Profanity, prayers and curses, jostle each other in Chaucer’s early life as in the society round him: we may think of his own Shipman, thoroughly orthodox after his simple fashion, but silencing the too Puritanical parson with a rattling oath at close range, and proceeding to “clynken so mery a belle” that we feel a sort of treachery in pausing to wonder how such a festive tale could be brought forth for a company of pilgrims as a pill to purge heterodoxy!
The first of his early poems which we can date with any certainty is also the best worth dating. This is the “Dethe of Blaunche the Duchesse,” in memory of John of Gaunt’s first wife, who died in September, 1369. The poem is obviously immature and unequal, but full of delightful passages, fresh to us even where the critics trace them to some obvious French source. Such, for instance, is the beginning of his dream, where he describes the inevitable May morning—inevitable in medieval verse, but here and there, when he or his fellow-poets are in their happiest mood, as fresh again as Nature herself, who is never tired of harping on the same old themes of sunshine and blue sky and fresh air. He wakes at dawn to hear the birds singing their matins at his eaves; his bedroom walls are painted with scenes from the “Romance of the Rose,” and broad sunlight streams through the storied glass upon his bed. He throws open the casement: “blue, bright, clear was the air, nor in all the welkin was one cloud.” A bugle rings out; he hears the trampling of horse and hounds; the Emperor Octavian’s hunt is afoot—or, in plainer prose, King Edward the Third’s. The poet joins them; a puppy comes up fawning, starting away, fawning again, until it has led him apart from the rest.
| It came and crept to me as low | |
| Right as it haddë me y-knowe, | |
| Held down his head and joined his ears, | |
| And laid all smoothë down his hairs. | |
| I would have caught it, and anon | |
| It fled, and was from me gone; | |
| And I him followed, and it forth went | |
| Down by a flowery greenë went | [glade |
| Full thick of grass, full soft and sweet | |
| With flowerës fele, fair under feet. | [many |
Here he finds a young knight all in black, mourning by himself. A little unobtrusive sympathy unlocks the young man’s heart. She was “my hap, my heal, and all my bliss;” “and goodë fairë White she hight.” The first meeting had been as sudden as that of Dante and Beatrice: a medieval garden-party—“the fairest companye of ladies, that ever man with eye had seen together in one place,” and one among them who “was like none of all the rout,” but who outshone the rest as the sun outshines moon and stars—
| For every hair upon her head, Sooth to say, it was not red; Nor neither yellow nor brown it was, Me thoughte most like gold it was. |
Her eyes shone with such simple enjoyment of life that “fools” were apt to read a special welcome in her glance, to their bitter disappointment in course of time. She disdained the “knakkes smale,” the little coquettish tricks of certain other ladies, who send their lovers half round the world, and give them but cold cheer on their return. The rest of the personal description is more commonplace, and (however faithful to medieval precedent) a little too like some modern sportsman’s enumeration of his horse’s points. The course of true love did not run too smoothly here. On the knight’s first proposal, “she saidë ‘nay!’ all utterly.” But “another year,” when she had learned to know him better, she took him to her mercy, and they lived full many a year in bliss, only broken now by her death. The poem, which had rather dragged at the beginning, here ends abruptly, as though Chaucer had tired of it. He has no effectual comfort to offer in such a sorrow; the hunt breaks in upon their dialogue; King and courtiers ride off to a long white-walled castle on a hill, where a bell rings the hour of noon and wakes the poet from his dream.
When we have reckoned up all Chaucer’s debts to his predecessors in this poem—and they are many—there is ample proof left of his own originality. Moreover, we cannot too often remind ourselves that the idea of copyright, either legal or moral, is modern. In the scarcity of books which reigned before the days of printing, the poet who “conveyed” most might well be the greatest benefactor to mankind. The educated public, so far as such a body then existed, rather encouraged than reprobated the practice of borrowing; and the poet, like the modern schoolboy versifier, was applauded for his skill in weaving classical tags into his own work. Chaucer differed from his predecessors, and most of his successors, less in the amount which he borrowed than in the extraordinary vitality and originality which he infused into the older work. If we had only these fragments of his early works, we should still understand how Deschamps praises him as “King of worldly love in Albion”; we should still feel something of that charm of language which earned the poet his popularity at Court and his promotion to important offices.
It is well known that medieval society had not developed the minute sub-divisions of labour which have often been pushed to excess in modern times. The architect was simply a master-mason; the barber was equally ready to try his hand on your beard or on a malignant tumour; the King might choose for his minister a frankly incapable personal favourite, or send out his most gorgeously accoutred knights on a reconnaissance which would have been infinitely better carried out by a trained scout. Similarly, the poets of the 14th century were very frequently sent abroad as ambassadors; Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio had already set Chaucer this example, which his friend Eustache Deschamps was soon to follow. The choice implied, no doubt, a subtle tribute to the power of rhetoric, under which category poetry was often classed. The rarity of book-learning did not indeed give the scholar a higher value in general society than he commands nowadays, or bring more grist to his mill; he and his horse were commonly lean enough, and his only worldly treasures were his score of books at his bed’s head. But the medieval mind, which persistently invested lunatics with the highest prophetic qualities, seems to have had an equally touching faith in poetic clairvoyance at times when common sense was at fault, and to have called upon a Dante or a Chaucer just as, in similar emergencies, it called upon particular saints whose intercession was least invoked in everyday life. Much, of course, is to be explained by the fact that formal and elaborate public speeches were as necessary as spectacular display on these embassies; but, even so, we may wonder that the Ravennati ever entrusted an embassy to Dante, who is recorded to have been so violent a political partisan that he was capable of throwing stones even at women in the excitement of discussion. Chaucer, however, had neither the qualities nor the defects of such headlong fanaticism; and from the frequency with which he was employed we may infer that he showed real talents for diplomacy.
His first employment of the kind was in 1370, when, a year after he had taken part in a second French campaign, he was “abroad in the King’s service” during the summer. Whither he went is uncertain, probably to the Netherlands or Northern France, since his absence was brief. In 1371 and 1372 he regularly received his pension with his own hands (as the still extant household accounts of Edward III. show), until November of the latter year, when he “was joined in a commission with James Pronam and John de Mari, citizens of Genoa, to treat with the Duke, citizens, and merchants of Genoa, for the purpose of choosing some port in England where the Genoese might form a commercial establishment.”[44] This journey lasted about a year, and Chaucer received for his expenses 138 marks, or about £1400 modern value. The roll which records these payments mentions that Chaucer’s business had taken him to Florence as well as Genoa; and here, as so often happens in history, a stray word recorded in the driest of business documents opens out a vista of things in themselves most romantic.
Of all that makes the traveller’s joy in modern Italy, the greater part was already there for Chaucer to see, with much more that he saw and that we never shall. The sky, the air, and the landscape were practically the same, except for denser forests, and, no doubt, fewer lemon and orange trees. The traveller, it is true, was less at leisure to observe some of these things, and less inclined to find God’s hand in the mountains or the sea. Chaucer is so far a man of his time as to show no delight in the sterner moods of Nature; we find in his works none of that true love of mountain scenery which comes out in the “Pearl” and in early Scottish poetry; and when he has to speak of Custance’s sea-voyages, he expedites them as briefly and baldly as though they had been so many business journeys by rail. Deschamps, and the anonymous English poet of fifty years later, show us how little cause a man had to love even the Channel passage in the rough little boats of those days, “a perilous horse to ride,” indeed; rude and bustling sea-folk, plentiful tributes to Neptune, scant elbow room—