A Gentleman

by Maurice Francis Egan

In spite of the ordinary text-book of literature, the serious student discovers that Dryden is a poet and prose-writer of the first rank, that Newman is the greatest thinker and stylist of modern times, that no dramatic writer of the last two centuries has come so near Shakspere as Aubrey de Vere, and that Coventry Patmore’s prose is delightful. If all the students of literature that read “A Gentleman” have not discovered these things for themselves, let them take up any one of these writers seriously, perseveringly, and contradict me if they think I am wrong.

Matthew Arnold showed long ago that, if the basis of English literature was Saxon, its curves, its form, its symmetry, its beauty, were derived from the qualities of that other race which the Saxons drove out. Similarly, if the author of that Saxon epic, the “Beowulf,” if Cædmon and the Venerable Bede uttered high thoughts, it was reserved for Chaucer to wed high thoughts to a form borrowed from the French and Italians. Chaucer saved the English language from remaining a collection of inadequate dialects. The Teutonic element supplied his strength; the Celtic element his lightness and elegance. Now this Chaucer was a very humble and devout Catholic. “Ah! but he pointed out abuses—he was the Lollard, enlightened by the morning-star of the Reformation,” the text-books of English literature have been saying for many years. “See what he insinuates about the levity of his pilgrims to Canterbury!” All of which has nothing to do with his firm faith in the Catholic Church.

Chaucer was inspired by the intensely Christian Dante and the exquisite Petrarch, but, unfortunately, he took too much from another master-the greatest master of Italian prose, Boccaccio. When I use the word Christian, I mean Catholic—the words are interchangeable; and Dante is the most Christian of all poets.

But Boccaccio was a Christian; he had faith; he could be serious; he loved Dante; his collection of stories, which no man is justified in reading, unless it is for their Italian style, has attracted every English poet of narrative verse, from Chaucer to Tennyson; and yet, though these stories have moments of pathos and elevation, they are full of the fetid breath of paganism. A pope suppressed them; but their style saved them—for art was a passion in Italy—and they were revived, somewhat expurgated. In his old age he lamented the effects of his early book.

The occasional coarseness in Chaucer we owe to the manners of the times; for the English, far behind the Italians, were just awakening from semi-barbarism. Dante had crystallized the Italian language long before Chaucer was born. Italy had produced the precursor of Dante, St. Francis of Assisi, and a host of other great men, whose fame that of St. Francis and Dante dimmed by comparison, long before the magnificent English language came out of chaos. The few lapses in morality in Chaucer are due both to the influence of Boccaccio and to the paganism latent in a people who were gradually becoming fully converted. But the power of Christianity protected Chaucer; the teaching of the Church was part of his very life, and nothing could be more pathetic, more honest than his plea for pardon. The Church had taught him to love chastity; if he sinned in word, he sinned against light. The Church gave him the safeguards for his genius; the dross he gathered from the earthiness around him. Of the latter, there is little enough.

Chaucer was born in 1340; Dante in 1265; and Dante helped to create the English poet. Italy was the home of the greatest and noblest men of all the world, and these men had revived pagan art in order to baptize it and make it a child of Christ. Chaucer has suffered more than any other poet at the hands of the text-book makers, who have conspired for over three hundred years against the truth. We have been made to see him through a false medium. We have been told that he was in revolt against the religion which he loved as his life. He loved the Mother of God with a childlike fervor; a modern Presbyterian would have been as much of a heretic to him as a Moslem; he was as loyal a child of the Church as ever lived, and to regard him as anything else is to stamp one as of that old and ignorant school of Philistines which all cultivated Americans have learned to detest.

The best book for the study of this poet is Cowden Clarke’s “Riches of Chaucer” (London: Crosby, Lockwood & Co.), the knowledge of which I owe to the kindness of Mr. Aubrey de Vere. And his works will repay study; Mr. Cowden Clarke arranged them so that they can be read with ease and, after a short time, with pleasure. To see Chaucer through anybody’s eyes is to see him through a darkened glass. Why should not we, so much nearer to him than any of the commentators who have assumed to explain him to us, take possession of him? He should not be an alien to us; the form of the inkhorn he held has changed; but the rosary that fell from his fingers was the same as our rosary.

English literature began with Chaucer. He loved God and he loved humanity; he could laugh like a child because he had the faith of a child. His strength lay in his faith; and, as faith weakened, English poets looked back more and more regretfully at the “merrie” meads sprinkled with the daisies he loved. He is as cheerful as Sir Thomas More; as gay, yet as sympathetic with human pleasure and pain, as the Dominican monks whom he loved. If he jibed at abuses—if he saw that luxury and avarice were beginning to creep into monasteries and palaces—he knew well that the remedy lay in greater union with Rome. Like Francis of Assisi, he was a poet, but a poet who loved even the defects of humanity, and who preferred to laugh at them rather than to reform them. Unlike Francis of Assisi, he was not a saint. He was intensely interested in the world around him; he was of it and in it; and he belongs doubly to us—the Alma Redemptoris, one of his favorite hymns, which he mentions in “Tale of the Prioress,” we hear at vespers as he heard it. The faith in which he died in 1400 is our faith to-day.

In no age have been the written masterpieces of genius within such easy reach of all readers. But it is true that older people, living at a time when books were dearer and libraries fewer than they are now, read better books; not more books, but better books. Probably in those days people amused themselves less outside their own homes. Some tell us that the tone of thought was more solid and serious. At any rate, the English classics had more influence on the American reader fifty years ago than they have to-day. The time had its drawbacks, to be sure. An old gentleman often told me of a visit to a Pennsylvania farm in the thirties, when the man of the house gave him, as a precious thing, a copy of The Catholic Herald two years old! Now the paper of yesterday seems almost a century old; then the paper of last year was new.

Unhappily, the book of last year suffers the same fate as the paper of yesterday. The best way to counteract this unhappy condition of affairs is to clasp a good book to one with “hoops of steel” when such a book is found.