Chaucer and His Times

by Grace E. Hadow

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

A whelp that fauned me as I stood,
That hadde y-followed, and coude no good,
Hit com and creep to me as lowe,
Right as hit hadde me y-knowe,
Hild doun his heed and joyned his eres
And leyde al smothe doun his heres;

or notices with tender amusement the

many squirelles, that sete
Ful hye upon the trees, and ete,
And in hir maner made festes.

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

I saw hir daunce so comlily
Carole and singe so swetely,
Laughe and pleye so womanly,
And loke so debonairly,
So goodly speke and so frendly,
That certes I trow that evermore
Nas seyn so blisful a tresore
·····
Therewith hir liste so wel to live,
That dulnesse was of hir a-drad.

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

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

And trouthe of metre I sette also a-syde;
For of that art I hadde as tho no guyde
Me to reduce when I went a-wronge:
I toke none hede nouther of shorte nor longe.

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