Lectures on English poets

by James Russell Lowell

And gladly would he learn, and gladly teach.

What a pleasant, companionable nature the last verse testifies to. The portrait of Chaucer, too, is perhaps more agreeable than that of any other English poet. The downcast, meditative eyes, the rich mouth, and the beautiful broad brow drooping with the weight of thought, and yet with an eternal youth and freshness shining out of it as from the morning forehead of a boy, are all remarkable, and their harmony with each other in a placid tenderness not less so.

Chaucer’s beginnings as an author were translations from the French and Italian. Imitations they should rather be called, for he put himself into them, and the mixture made a new poem. He helped himself without scruple from every quarter. And, indeed, there is nothing more clear than that the great poets are not sudden prodigies, but slow results. Just as an oak profits by the foregone lives of immemorial vegetable races, so we may be sure that the genius of every remembered poet drew the forces that built it up from the decay of a whole forest of forgotten ones. And in proportion as the genius is vigorous and original will its indebtedness be; will it strike its roots deeper into the past and into remoter fields in search of the virtue that must sustain it.

Accordingly, Chaucer, like Shakspeare, invented almost nothing. Wherever he found anything directed to Geoffrey Chaucer he took it and made the most of it. Indeed, the works of the great poets teach us to hold invention somewhat cheap. The Provençal rhymers did the best to invent things that nobody ever thought of before, and they succeeded in producing what nobody ever thought of again. He must be a very great poet indeed who can afford to say anything new.

In the great poets I think there is always a flavor of race or country which gives them a peculiar nearness to those of the same blood, and where the face of the individual nature is most marked, it will be found that the type of family is also most deeply stamped. It is remarkable that Chaucer, who probably spoke French as often and as familiarly as English, who levied his contributions upon Norman, Italian, and Latin writers, should yet have become (with an exception) the most truly English of our poets.

In endeavoring to point out what seem to be the peculiar characteristics of Chaucer, I think we shall find one of the chief to be this—that he is the first poet who has looked to nature as a motive of conscious emotion. Accordingly, his descriptions are always simple and addressed to the eye rather than to the mind, or to the fancy rather than to the imagination. Very often he is satisfied with giving a list of flowers with no epithet, or one expressive of color or perfume only.

Mr. Lowell here read a number of passages from the “Assembly of Fowls” and other poems of Chaucer, with an extract from Spenser.

Now I observe that all Chaucer’s epithets are primary, or such as give birth to the feeling; and all Shakspeare’s secondary, or such as the feeling gives birth to. In truth, Shakspeare’s imagination is always dramatic, even in his narrative poems, and it was so abundant that the mere overflow of it has colored the very well-springs of the English language, and especially of English poetry. On Chaucer, nature seems to have always smiled (except in winter, which he cordially hated), and no rumor of man’s fall appears to have reached the trees and birds and flowers. Nature has taken to thinking lately, and a moral jumps up out of a blossom, like a jack-in-a-box.

Another characteristic which we find in all the poems where Chaucer speaks in his own person is a sentiment of seclusion. He always dreams of walking in a park or a garden walled-in on every side. It is not narrowness but privacy that he delights in, and a certain feeling of generous limitation. In this his poems are the antithesis of Milton’s, which always give a feeling of great spaces.

In description it would be hard to find Chaucer’s superior. His style is distinguished always by an energetic simplicity, which is a combination exceedingly rare. It was apparently natural to him. But when he is describing anything that he loves, here is an inexpressible tenderness, as if his eyes filled with tears. His narrative flows on like one of our inland rivers, sometimes hastening a little, and in its eddies seeming to run sunshine; sometimes lingering smoothly, while here and there a beautiful quiet thought, a pure feeling, a golden-hearted verse opens as quietly as a water-lily, and makes no ripple. In modern times the desire for startling expression is so strong that people hardly think a thought is good for anything unless it goes off with a pop like a gingerbeer cork.