Chaucer and His Times

by Grace E. Hadow

has become part of the Chaucerian critic’s stock in trade, and is as apt and as well-known as Dryden’s phrase which speaks of Chaucer as “a perpetual fountain of good sense.” Book III, canto xxv of the Faerie Queene contains a paraphrase of some of the lines on true love in the Frankleyns Tale, and Book IV boldly promises to continue the story of

Couragious Cambell, and stout Triamond,
With Canacee and Cambine linckt in lovely bond.

Whether the Spenserian stanza is a modification of the rhyme royal or of the stanza used by Boccaccio and Ariosto it is impossible to say—all three are obviously related to each other—but in view of Spenser’s admiration for Chaucer, and his deliberate attempt to use “Chaucerisms,” it is at least probable that in this respect the Faerie Queene owes a debt to Troilus and Criseyde. In Mother Hubbard’s Tale and Colin Clouts come home again, Spenser is frankly, though unsuccessfully, imitating Chaucer’s style. William Browne, the poet of Tavistock, also showed his admiration for Chaucer by an attempt to imitate him in his Shepheard’s Pipe, a series of eclogues modelled partly on the Shepherd’s Calendar and partly on the Canterbury Tales. In the concluding lines of the first eclogue, which contains the story of Jonathas, Browne confesses his indebtedness to Occleve:—

Scholler unto Tityrus
Tityrus the bravest swaine
Ever lived on plaine ...

thus using for Chaucer the name bestowed on him by Spenser.

During the seventeenth century Chaucer’s fame seems to have suffered a temporary eclipse. Between 1602 and 1687 not a single edition of his works appeared, and the edition of 1687 is in reality no more than a re-issue of Speght’s. The poets hardly mention his name. Milton does indeed make a reference to the Squieres Tale, but his works show no trace of Chaucer’s influence. Towards the end of the century, however, there was a revival of interest. Dryden tells us that Mr. Cowley declared he had no taste of him, but my lord of Leicester, on the other hand, was so warm an admirer of the Canterbury Tales that he thought it “little less than profanation and sacrilege” to modernise their language, and not until his death did Dryden venture to turn into modern English the tales of the Knight, the Nun’s Priest, and the Wife of Bath, and the character of the poor Parson in the Prologue. The wigs and ruffles of the seventeenth century, however, suit but ill the sturdy figure of the fourteenth-century poet. We stand aghast before Dryden’s Arcite, who, in the throes of death, exclaims:—

No language can express the smallest part
Of what I feel, and suffer in my heart,
······
How I have loved; excuse my faltering tongue:
My spirit’s feeble, and my pains are strong.
This I may say, I only grieve to die,
Because I lose my charming Emily.

It is an excellent specimen of the poetry of 1699, but it is not Chaucer.

Dryden is, indeed, far more eighteenth than seventeenth century in feeling, and while the authors of the eighteenth century are too really great not to appreciate true poetry wherever they see it, their own taste leads them to the erection of “neat Modern buildings” rather than to the admiration of “an ancient majestick piece of Gothick Architecture,” and all attempts to combine the two must necessarily be foredoomed to failure. Pope paraphrases the Hous of Fame; Prior writes Two Imitations of Chaucer, viz. Susanah and the Two Elders, and Earl Robert’s Mice; Gay writes a comedy on the Wife of Bath, with Chaucer himself for hero; the Rev. Thomas Warton, who, as professor of poetry at Oxford, ought to have known better, writes an elegy on the death of Pope in an extraordinary jargon which he apparently considers Chaucerian English. (See Miss Spurgeon’s Chaucer devant la Critique, pp. 62-75.) But while these, and numerous other works of the same kind, prove that Chaucer was widely read at the time, they afford no evidence at all of his having any direct influence upon the general development of eighteenth-century poetry. His place as an English classic is firmly established, but centuries have passed since he wrote, and the point of view of the men of the new age differs too widely from that of their forefathers for any imitation to be possible, except by way of a conscious experiment. The most amazing of all modernisations was that of 1841. Richard Hengist Horne, inspired, if we may believe his own words, by no less a person than Wordsworth, hit on the most unfortunate idea of issuing Chaucer’s poems in two volumes done into modern English by a sort of joint-stock company of contemporary poets. Wordsworth himself, Leigh Hunt, Miss Barrett, Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, Bulwer-Lytton and the Cowden Clarkes, were to be among the contributors. Landor showed his usual common-sense by refusing to take any part in it, and his letter to Horne on the subject is worth quoting: “Indeed I do admire him (Chaucer), or rather, love him.... Pardon me if I say that I would rather see Chaucer quite alone, in the dew of his sunny morning, than with twenty clever gentlefolks about him, arranging his shoestrings and buttoning his doublet. I like even his language. I will have no hand in breaking his dun but rich-painted glass to put in (if clearer) much thinner panes.” It is comforting to reflect that the first volume proved a failure, and the second never saw the light.

Fortunately the labours of such scholars as Professor Skeat and Dr. Furnivall have saved us from all fear of being left in future to the tender mercies of the moderniser. However great may be the changes that are to pass over our language, however strange the tongue of fourteenth-century England may sound in the ears of our descendants, Chaucer’s English has been preserved once for all, and never again can we lose the key to his world of harmony and delight.