Chaucer and His England

by G. G. Coulton

“Bestow the boat, boatswain, anon, That our pilgrims may play thereon; For some are like to cough and groan ... This meanëwhile the pilgrims lie And have their bowlës fast them by And cry after hot Malvoisie ... Some laid their bookës on their knee, And read so long they might not see:— ‘Alas! mine head will cleave in three!’”[45]

Worse passages still were matters of common history; Froissart tells us how Hervé de Léon “took the sea [at Southampton] to the intent to arrive at Harfleur; but a storm took him on the sea which endured fifteen days, and lost his horse, which were cast into the sea, and Sir Hervé of Léon was so sore troubled that he had never health after.” King John of France, a few years later, took eleven days to cross the Channel,[46] and Edward III. had one passage so painful that he was reduced to explain it by the arts of “necromancers and wizards.” Moreover, nearly all Chaucer’s embassies came during those evil years after our naval defeat of 1372, when our fleets no longer held the Channel, and the seas swarmed with French privateers. Nor were the mountains less hated by the traveller, or less dangerous in reality, with their rude horse-tracks and ruder mountain-folk, half herdsmen, half brigands. First there were the Alps to be crossed, and then, from Genoa to Florence, “the most desolate, the most solitary way that lies between Lerici and Turbia.”[47] But, after all these difficulties, Italy showed herself as hospitable as the approaches had been inhospitable:

“Il fait bien bon demeurer Au doux château de Pavie.”[48]

We must not forget these more material enjoyments, for they figure largely among the impressions of a still greater man, in whose intellectual life the journey to Italy marks at least as definite an epoch; not the least delightful passages of Goethe’s Italienische Reise are those which describe his delight in seeing the oranges grow, or the strange fish brought out of the sea.

For Goethe, the soul of Italy was in its pagan antiquity; but Chaucer found there a living art and living literature, the noblest in the then world. The great semicircle of houses standing upon projecting arches round the harbour of Genoa, which survived to be drawn by Ruskin in their decay, would at once strike a noble note of contrast to the familiar wooden dwellings built over Thames shingle at home; everywhere he would find greater buildings and brighter colours than in our northern air. The pale ghosts of frescoes which we study so regretfully were then in their first freshness, with thousands more which have long since disappeared. Wherever he went, the cities were already building, or had newly built, the finest of the Gothic structures which adorn them still; and Chaucer must have passed through Pisa and Florence like a new Æneas among the rising glories of Carthage. A whole population of great artists vied with each other in every department of human skill—

“Qualis apes aestate nova per florea rura Exercet sub sole labor—”

Giotto and Andrea Pisano were not long dead; their pupils were carrying on the great traditions; and splendid schools of sculpture and painting flourished, especially in those districts through which our poet’s business led him. Still greater was the intellectual superiority of Italy. To find an English layman even approaching in learning to Dante, or a circle of English students comparable to that of Petrarch and Boccaccio, we must go forward nearly two centuries, to Sir Thomas More and the eve of the Reformation. Moreover, the stimulus of Dante’s literary personality was even greater than the example of his learning. On the one hand, he summed up much of what was greatest in the thought of the Middle Ages; on the other, he heralded modern freedom of thought by his intense individualism and the frankness with which he asserted his own personal convictions. More significant even than the startling freedom with which Dante wielded the keys of heaven and hell is the fundamental independence of his whole scheme of thought. When he set the confessedly adulterous Cunizza among the blessed, and cast down so many popes to hell, he was only following with unusual boldness a fairly common medieval precedent. But in taking as his chief guides through the mysteries of religion a pagan poet, a philosopher semi-pagan at the best, and a Florentine lady whom he had loved on earth—in this choice, and in his corresponding independence of expression, he gave an impetus to free thought far beyond what he himself can have intended. Virgil’s parting speech at the end of the “Purgatorio,” “Henceforward take thine own will for thy guide.... I make thee King and High Priest over thyself,” conveyed a licence of which others availed themselves more liberally than the man who first uttered it. Dante does indeed work out the problem of life for himself, but he does so with the conclusions of St. Bernard and Hugh of St. Victor, St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Bonaventura, always before his eyes. Others after him followed his liberty of thought without starting from the same initial attachment to the great theologians of the past; and, though Petrarch and Boccaccio lived and died as orthodox Roman Catholics, yet their appeal to the literature of antiquity had already begun the secular and even semi-pagan intellectual movement which goes by the name of the Renaissance. In short, the Italian intellect of the 14th century afforded a striking example of the law that an outburst of mysticism always provokes an equally marked phase of free thought; enthusiasm may give the first impulse, but cannot altogether control the direction of the movement when it has once begun. It will be seen later on that Chaucer was no stranger to the religious difficulties of his age. The ferment of Italian free thought seems (as Professor ten Brink has remarked) to have worked effectually upon a mind which “was going through an intense religious crisis.”[49] Dante’s mysticism may well have carried Chaucer off his feet for a time; we probably owe to this, as well as to his regret for much that had been wasted in his youth, the religious poems which are among the earliest extant from his pen. “Chaucer’s A. B. C.,” a rapturous hymn to the Virgin, strikes, from its very first line, a note of fervour far beyond its French original; few utterances of medieval devotion approach more perilously near to Mariolatry than this—“Almighty and all-merciable Queen”! Another poem of the same period is the “Life of St. Cecilia,” with its repentant prologue, its hymn to the Virgin translated from Dante, and its fervent prayer for help against temptation—

Now help, thou meek and blissful fairë maid
Me flemëd wretch in this desert of gall;	[banished
Think on the woman Canaanee, that said
That whelpës eaten some of the crumbës all
That from their lordës table been y-fall;
And though that I, unworthy son of Eve
Be sinful, yet accept now my believe....
And of thy light my soul in prison light,
That troubled is by the contagion
Of my body, and also by the weight
Of earthly lust, and false affection:
O haven of refuge, O salvation
Of them that be in sorrow and in distress
Now help, for to my work I will me dress.[50]

But much as Chaucer translated bodily from Dante in different poems, and mighty as is the impulse which he owns to having received from him, the great Florentine’s style impressed him more deeply than his thought. In matter, Chaucer is far more akin to Petrarch and Boccaccio, from whom he also borrowed even more freely. But in style he owes most to Dante, as Dante himself owes to Virgil. We may clearly trace this influence in Chaucer’s later concentration and perfection of form; in the pains which he took to bend his verse to every mood, and in the skilful blending of comedy and tragedy which enabled Chaucer so far to outdo Petrarch and Boccaccio in the tales which he borrowed from them. Much of this was, no doubt, natural to him; but neither England nor France could fully have developed it. His two Italian journeys made him a changed man, an artist in a sense in which the word can be used of no English poet before him, and of none after him until the 16th century brought English men of letters again into close communion with Italian poetry.

Did Chaucer make the personal acquaintance, on this first Italian journey, of Petrarch and Boccaccio, who were beyond dispute the two greatest living men of letters in Europe besides himself? His own words in the prologue of the “Clerk’s Tale” would seem to testify to personal intercourse with the former; and most biographers have assumed that it is not only the fictitious Clerk, but the real poet, who confesses to have learned the story of Griselda straight from Petrarch. The latter, as we know from his own letters, was in the height of his enthusiasm about the tale, which he had just translated into Latin from the “Decameron” during the very year of Chaucer’s visit; and M. Jusserand justly points out that the English poet’s fame was already great enough in France to give him a ready passport to a man so interested in every form of literature, and with such close French connections, as Petrarch. The meeting has been strongly doubted, partly on the ground that whereas the Clerk learned the tale from Petrarch “at Padua,” the aged poet was in fact during Chaucer’s Italian journey at Arquà, a village sixteen miles off in the Euganean hills. It has, however, been conclusively proved that the ravages of war had driven Petrarch down from his village into the fortified town of Padua, where he lived in security during by far the greater part, at any rate, of this year; so that this very indication of Padua, which had been hastily assumed as a proof of Chaucer’s ignorance, does in fact show that he possessed such accurate and unexpected information of Petrarch’s whereabouts as might, of itself, have suggested a suspicion of personal intercourse.[51] This is admirably illustrated by the story of Chaucer’s relations with the other great Italian, Boccaccio. Since Chaucer certainly went to Florence, and probably left only a few weeks, or even a few days, before Boccaccio’s first lecture there on Dante; since, again, he copies or translates from Boccaccio even more than from Petrarch, it has been naturally suggested that the two must have met. But here we find a curious difficulty. Great as are Chaucer’s literary obligations to the author of the “Decameron,” he not only never mentions him by name, but, on those occasions where he quotes directly and professes to acknowledge his authority, he invariably gives some other name than Boccaccio’s.[52] It is, of course, barely conceivable that the two men met and quarrelled, and that Chaucer, while claiming the right of “conveying” from Boccaccio as much as he pleased, not only deliberately avoided giving the devil his due, but still more deliberately set up other false names which he decked out with Boccaccio’s true feathers. But such a theory, which should surely be our last resort in any case, contradicts all that we know of Chaucer’s character. Almost equally improbable is the suggestion that, without any grudge against Boccaccio, Chaucer simply found it convenient to hide the amount of his indebtedness to him. Here again (quite apart from the assumed littleness for which we find no other evidence in Chaucer) we see that in Dante’s and Petrarch’s cases he proclaims his debt with the most commendable frankness. The third theory, and on the whole the most probable, is that Chaucer translated from Italian books which, so far as he was concerned, were anonymous or pseudonymous. Medieval manuscripts were quite commonly written without anything like the modern title-page; and, even when the author’s name was recorded on the first page, the frequent loss of that sheet by use left the book nameless, and at the mercy of any possessor who chose to deck it with a title after his own fancy.[53] Therefore it is not impossible that Chaucer, who trod the streets of Boccaccio’s Florence, and saw the very trees on the slopes of Fiesole under which the lovers of the “Decameron” had sat, and missed by a few weeks at most the bodily presence of the poet, may have translated whole books of his without ever realizing their true authorship. In those days of difficult communication, no ignorance was impossible. In 1371 the King’s Ministers imagined that England contained 40,000 parishes, while in fact there were less than 9000. Chroniclers, otherwise well informed, assure us that the Black Death killed more people in towns like London and Norwich than had ever lived in them. Bishop Grandisson of Exeter, one of the most remarkable prelates of the 14th century, imagined Ireland to be a more populous country than England. It is perfectly possible, therefore, that Chaucer and Boccaccio, who were in every way so close to each other during these twelve months of 1372-3, were yet fated to remain strangers to each other; and this lends all the more force to the fact that Chaucer knew Petrarch to have spent the year at Padua, and not at his own home.