that, in the education of children, parents should be careful not to treat them too soon as men; if one takes them to merry-makings before time, they become "to sone rype and bold, ... which is ful perilous." He expresses himself very freely about great captains, each of whom would have been called "an outlawe or a theef" had they done less harm.[548] This last idea is put forth in a few lines of a humour so truly English that it is impossible not to think of Swift and Fielding; and, indeed, Fielding can the more appropriately be named here as he has devoted all his novel of "Jonathan Wild the Great" to the expounding of exactly the same thesis.
Finally, we owe to this same common sense of Chaucer's a thing more remarkable yet: namely, that with his knowledge of Latin and of French, and living in a circle where those two languages were in great favour, he wrote solely in English. His prose, like his verse, his "Treatise on the Astrolabe" like his tales, are in English. He belongs to the English nation, and that is why he writes in that language; a reason of that sort is sufficient for him: "Suffyse to thee thise trewe conclusiouns in English, as wel as suffyseth to thise noble clerkes Grekes thise same conclusiouns in Greek, and to Arabians in Arabik, and to Jewes in Ebrew, and to the Latin folk in Latin." Chaucer, then, will make use of plain English, "naked wordes in English"; he will employ the national language, the king's English—"the king that is lord of this langage."[549] And he will use it, as in truth he did, to express exactly his thoughts and not to embellish them; he hates travesty, he worships truth; he wants words and things to be in the closest possible relation:
The wordes mote be cosin to the dede.[550]
The same wisdom is again the cause why Chaucer does not spend himself in vain efforts to attempt impossible reforms, and to go against the current. It has been made a subject of reproach to him in our day; and some, from love of the Saxon past, have been indignant at the number of French words Chaucer uses; why did he not go back to the origins of the language? But Chaucer was not one of those who, as Milton says, think "to pound up the crows by shutting their park gates;" he employed the national tongue, as it existed in his day; the proportion of French words is not greater with him than with the mass of his contemporaries. The words he made use of were living and fruitful, since they are still alive, they and their families; the proportion of those that have disappeared is wonderfully small, seeing the time that has elapsed. As to the Anglo-Saxons, he retained, as did the nation, but without being aware of it, something of their grave and powerful genius; it is not his fault if he ignored these ancestors; every one in his day ignored them, even such thinkers as Langland, in whom lived again with most force the spirit of the ancient Germanic race. The tradition was broken; in the literary past one went back to the Conquest, and thence without transition to "thise olde gentil Britons." In his enumeration of celebrated bards, Chaucer gives a place to Orpheus, to Orion, and to the "Bret Glascurion"; but no author of any "Beowulf" is named by him. Shakespeare, in the same manner, will derive inspiration from the national past; he will go back to the time of the Roses, to the time of the Plantagenets, to the time of Magna Charta, and, passing over the Anglo-Saxon period, he will take from the Britons the stories of Lear and of Cymbeline.
The brilliancy with which Chaucer used this new tongue, the instant fame of his works, the clear proof afforded by his writings that English could fit the highest and the lowest themes, assured to that idiom its definitive place among the great literary languages. English still had, in Chaucer's day, a tendency to resolve itself into dialects; as, in the time of the Conquest, the kingdom had still a tendency to resolve itself into sub-kingdoms. Chaucer knew this, and was concerned about it; he was anxious about those differences of tongue, of orthography, and of vocabulary; he did all in his power to regularise these discordances; he had set ideas on the subject; and, what was rare in those days, the whims of copyists made him shudder. Nothing shows better the faith he had in the English tongue, as a literary language, than his reiterated injunctions to the readers and scribes who shall read his poems aloud or copy them. He experiences already, concerning his work, the anxieties of the poets of the Renaissance:
And for ther is so greet diversitee
In English, and in writyng of our tonge,
So preye I God, that noon miswryte thee,
Ne thee mysmetre for defaute of tonge,
And red wher-so thou be, or elles songe,
That thou be understonde I God beseche![551]
Chaucer himself looked over the transcriptions done from his original manuscripts by his amanuensis Adam; he corrected with minute care every fault; he calls down all manner of woe upon the "scriveyn's" head, if, copying once more "Boece" or "Troilus," he leaves as many errors again.[552] We seem to hear Ronsard himself addressing his supplications to the reader: "I implore of you one thing only, reader, to pronounce well my verses and suit your voice to their passion ... and I implore you again, where you will see this sign: (!) to raise your voice a little, to give grace to what you read."[553]
Chaucer's efforts were not exercised in vain; they assisted the work of concentration. After him, the dialects lost their importance; the one he used, the East Midland dialect, has since become the language of the nation.
His verse, too, is the verse of the new literature, formed by a compromise between the old and the new prosody. Alliteration, which is not yet dead, and which is still used in his time, he does not like; its jingle seems to him ridiculous:
I can nat geste—run, ram, ruf—by lettre.[554]