Chaucer and His Times

by Grace E. Hadow

In the midst of the field Douglas finds a gorgeous pavilion in which knights and ladies are feasting, while a poet relates the brave deeds of those who in the past proved “maist worthie of thair handis.” After listening to these heroic tales the company once more sets out. Beyond Damascus they reach their journey’s end. The poet is guided by a nymph to the foot of a steep mountain, at the summit of which stands the Palace of Honour. As he climbs he sees before him a dreadful abyss out of which proceed flames. His ears are filled with the sound of terrible cries; on either side lie dead bodies. These beings in torment are they who set out to pursue Honour, but “fell on sleuthfull sleip,” and so were “drownit in the loch of cair.” (It has been suggested by critics bent on finding an original for the Pilgrim’s Progress, that Bunyan found in this the idea of his “byway to Hell.”) At last he reaches the Palace, where he is shown many treasures, including Venus’ mirror, which reflects “the deidis and fatis of euerie eirdlie wicht.” Prince Honour is attended by all the virtues, and the poem ends by contrasting worldly and heavenly honour and commending virtue.

The gracious figure of Sapience, her dress gleaming with jewels, her head crowned with a diadem, is very different from any being of Lydgate’s or Occleve’s creation; already the first rays of Renaissance light are showing above the horizon, and the cold gray mists of fifteenth-century poetry are dispersing before its warmth and brilliance; but the radiance that heralds the new era is that of sunrise, flushing the world with a wonder of colour, rather than of that light of common day in which Chaucer is content to walk. In the great age to come, the Elizabethans are to show how the rapture and intoxication of beauty may be combined with the sternest realism, but in the early sixteenth century the children of the new birth walk with uncertain steps towards the dawn.

The poet who most clearly shows the growing love of beauty, and at the same time is most truly in sympathy with Chaucer, is William Dunbar. No other poet of the period has such skill in versification, such freshness and vigour, or such variety. His humour is as all-pervading as Chaucer’s. Now he addresses a daring poem to King James, slyly laughing at one of his numerous love affairs; now he writes the story of the Two Friars of Berwick, or the Treatise of the Two Married Women and the Widow, broadly comic fabliaux which might well have found a place among the Canterbury Tales. One of the wittiest of his poems is the Visitation of St. Francis, in which the poet describes how his patron saint appeared to him in a dream, bidding him wear the habit of a friar. Dunbar answers slyly that he has noticed more bishops than friars are among the saints, so perhaps it will be as well if St. Francis, to make all sure, provides him with a bishop’s robes instead, and then he is sure to go to heaven. Whereupon his visitant reveals himself in his true character and vanishes in a cloud of brimstone. Two little lyrics on James Dog, Keeper of the Queen’s wardrobe, are very characteristic. In the first, “whan that he had offendit him,” each verse ends with the refrain:—

Madame, ye have a dangerous Dog;

in the second, when the quarrel had been made up, the refrain runs:—

He is na Dog: he is a Lamb.

As Mr. Gregory Smith points out, “Dunbar is unlike Henryson in lacking the gentler and more intimate fun of their master. He is a satirist in the stronger sense; more boisterous in his fun, and showing, in his wildest frolics, an imaginative range which has no counterpart in the southern poet”; but his sincerity and virility, his boyish sense of fun, remind us of Chaucer again and again. The Reve would thoroughly have enjoyed telling the story of the flying friar of Tungland who courted disaster by using hen’s feathers. Chaucerian, too, in the truest sense, is Dunbar’s power of combining this keen sense of the ridiculous with a no less keen appreciation of beauty. The charm of his verse is incontestible, and his skill in making effective use of burdens and refrains shows an ear sensitive to music. The Thistle and the Rose, written in honour of the marriage of James IV and Margaret Tudor, borrows its idea from the Parlement of Foules, and has something of Chaucer’s tenderness and charm. Dame Nature commands all birds, beasts, and flowers to appear before her, and after some debate proceeds to crown the thistle with rubies, while the birds unite in singing the praises of the “freshe Rose of colour red and white.”

The Golden Targe, an allegorical poem of the conventional type, in which the shield of Reason proves no defence against the arrows of Beauty, contains a description of spring which Chaucer himself never equalled:—

Full angel-like the birdes sang their houres
Within their curtains green, into their boweres
Apparelled white and red with blossoms sweet;
Enamelled was the field with all coloures
The pearly dropes shook in silver showeres
While all in balm did branch and leaves flete[222]
To part from Phœbus did Aurora weep;
Her crystal tears I saw hang on the floweres
Which he for love all drank up with his heat.
·······
For mirth of May with skippes and with hoppes
The birdes sang upon the tender croppes[223]
With curious notes as Venus chapell clerkes;
The rose yong, new spreding of her knoppes[224]
War powdered bright with hevenly beriall[225] droppes
Through beames red, burning as ruby sparkes
The skyes rang for shouting of the larkes.

And in addition to all these, Dunbar writes serious religious poetry on such subjects as Love, Earthly and Divine, draws a by no means unimpressive picture of the Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins, and in his Lament for the Makaris (poets), with its haunting refrain:—