Browning and His Century

by Helen A. Clarke

Look, for instance, at the father of English poetry, Chaucer, how he ransacked French, Italian and Latin literature for his subject-matter, most conscientiously carrying out his own saying, that

“Out of olde feldys as men sey
Comyth all this newe corn from yere to yere,
And out of olde books in good fey
Cometh all this new science that men alere.”

How external a way he had of working over old materials, especially in his earlier work, is well illustrated in “The Parliament of Fowls,” which he opens by relating the dream of Scipio, originally contained in Cicero’s treatise on the “Republic,” and preserved by Macrobius. This dream, which tells how Africanus appears to Scipio, and carries him up among the stars of the night, shows him Carthage, and prophesies to him of his future greatness, tells him of the blissful immortal life that is in store for those who have served their country, points out to him the brilliant celestial fires, and how insignificant the earth is in comparison with them, and opens his ears to the wondrous harmony of the spheres—this dream is as far removed from the main argument of the poem as anything well could be a contest between three falcons for the hand of a formel. The bringing together of such diverse elements presents no difficulties to the childlike stage of literary development that depends upon surface analogies for the linking together of its thoughts. Just as talking about his ancestor, the great Scipio Africanus, with the old King Masinissa caused Scipio to dream of him, so reading about this dream caused Chaucer, who has to close his book and go to bed for want of a light, to dream of Scipio Africanus also, who “was come and stood right at his bedis syde.”

Africanus then plays the part of conductor to Chaucer in a manner suggestive not only of his relations to Scipio, but of Virgil’s relation to Dante, and brings him to the great gateway and through it into the garden of love. The description is of the temple of Venus in Boccaccio’s “La Teseide.” There Nature and the “Fowls” are introduced and described, and at last the point is reached. Nature proclaims that it is St. Valentine’s day, and all the fowls may choose them mates. The royal falcon is given first choice, and chooses the lovely formel that sits upon Nature’s hand. Two other ardent falcons declare their devotion to the same fowl, and Nature, when the formel declares that she will serve neither Venus nor Cupid and asks a respite for a year, decides that the three shall serve their lady another year—a pretty allegory supposed to refer to the wooing of Blanche of Lancaster by John of Gaunt.

The main argument of this poem, when it finally is reached by artificially welding together rich links borrowed from other poets, is one of the few examples in Chaucer of subject-matter derived direct from a real event, but the putting of it in an allegorical form at once lays him under obligations to his poetic predecessors, not only on Anglo-Saxon soil, but in France and Italy.

His most important contributions as an inventor are, of course, his descriptions of the Canterbury Pilgrims, which are the pure outcome of a keen observation of men and women at first hand. So lifelike are they that in them he has made the England of the fourteenth century live again. But how small a proportion of the bulk of the “Canterbury Tales” is contained in these glimpses of English life and manners. It is but the framework upon which luxuriate vines of fancy transplanted from many another garden, and even in its place resembling, if not borrowed from, Boccaccio.

The thoroughly human instincts of the poet assert themselves, however, in the choice of the tales which he puts into the mouths of his pilgrims. He allows a place to the crudities and even the vulgarities of common stories as well as to culture-lore. The magic of the East, the love tales of Italy, the wisdom of philosophers, the common stories of the people, all give up their wealth to his gentle touch. With a keen sense of propriety he, with few exceptions, gives each one of his pilgrims a tale suited in its general tendency to the character of its narrator, and in the critical chatter of the pilgrims about the tales, reflects not only his own tastes, but that of the times, the opinions expressed frequently being most uncomplimentary in their tenor.

In fine, the life of reality and the life of books is spread out before Chaucer, and his observation of both is keen and interested; and this it is which makes him much more than the “great translator” that Eustace Les Champs called him, and settles the nature of the “subtle thing” called spirit contributed by the individuality of the poet to his subject-matter. He brings everything within the reach of human sympathy, because his way of putting a story into his own words is sympathetic. He was a combination of the story-teller, the scholar, the poet, and the critic. As a scholar he brings in learned allusions that are entirely extraneous to the action in hand; as the story-teller, he takes delight in the tales that both the poet and the people have told; as the poet, his imagination dresses up a story with a fresh environment, often anachronous, and sometimes he alters the moral tone of the characters. Cressida is an interesting example of this. But instead of the characters suggesting by their own action and speech all the needed moral, Chaucer himself appears ever at hand to analyze and criticise and moralize, though he does it so delightfully that one hesitates to call him didactic. The result of all this is that the external form and the underlying essence of his subject-matter are not completely fused. We often see a sort of guileless working of the machinery of art, yet it is true, no doubt, though perhaps not to the extent insisted on by Morley, that he has something of the Shakespearian quality which enables him to show men as they really are, “wholly developed as if from within, not as described from without by an imperfect and prejudiced observer.”

In his great work, Spenser is no less dependent upon sources for his inspiration, but there is a marked difference in his use of them. Although his range of observation is much narrower than Chaucer’s, hardly extending at all into the realm of actual human effort, yet he makes an advance in so far as his powers of redistribution are much greater than Chaucer’s.

The various knights of the “Fairy Queen” and their exploits are not modeled directly upon any previous stories, but they are made up of incidents similar to those found scattered all through classic lore; and as his inspirations were drawn in most cases directly from the fountain-head of story in the Greek writers—instead of as they filtered through the Latin, Italian, and French, with the inevitable accretions that result from migrations,—and from the comparatively unalloyed Arthurian legends, there is a clearer reflection in them of the cosmic elements that shine through both the Greek and Arthurian originals than is found in Chaucer.