Boccaccio took up this story, from the Latin version of the Tale of Troy, the Historia Trojana of Guido. His Filostrato is written on a different plan from the Teseide; it is one of his best works. He did not make it into an epic poem; the Filostrato, Boccaccio's Troilus and Cressida, is a romance, differing from the older French romantic form not in the design of the story, but in the new poetical diction in which it is composed, and its new poetical ideas. There is no false classicism in it, as there is in his Palamon and Arcita; it is a novel of his own time, a story of the Decameron, only written at greater length, and in verse. Chaucer, the "great translator," took Boccaccio's poem and treated it in his own way, not as he had dealt with the Teseide. The Teseide, because there was some romantic improbability in the story, he made into a romance. The story of Troilus he saw was strong enough to bear a stronger handling, and instead of leaving it a romance, graceful and superficial as it is in Boccaccio, he deepened it and filled it with such dramatic imagination and such variety of life as had never been attained before his time by any romancer; and the result is a piece of work that leaves all romantic convention behind. The Filostrato of Boccaccio is a story of light love, not much more substantial, except in its new poetical language, than the story of Flamenca. In Chaucer the passion of Troilus is something different from the sentiment of romance; the changing mind of Cressida is represented with an understanding of the subtlety and the tragic meaning of that life which is "Time's fool." Pandarus is the other element. In Boccaccio he is a personage of the same order as Troilus and Cressida; they all might have come out of the Garden of the Decameron, and there is little to choose between them. Chaucer sets him up with a character and a philosophy of his own, to represent the world outside of romance. The Comic Genius claims a share in the tragedy, and the tragedy makes room for him, because the tragic personages, "Tragic Comedians" as they are, can bear the strain of the contrast. The selection of personages and motives is made in another way in the romantic schools, but this poem of Chaucer's is not romance. It is the fulfilment of the prophecy of Socrates, just before Aristophanes and the tragic poet had to be put to bed at the end of the Symposium, that the best author of tragedy is the best author of comedy also. It is the freedom of the imagination, beyond all the limits of partial and conventional forms.
NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS
APPENDIX
Note A ([p. 133])
Rhetoric of the Western and Northern Alliterative Poems
Any page of the Anglo-Saxon poets, and of the "Elder Edda," will show the difference between the "continuous" and the "discrete"—the Western and the Northern—modes of the alliterative verse. It may be convenient to select some passages here for reference.
(1) As an example of the Western style ("the sense variously drawn out from one verse to another"), the speech of the "old warrior" stirring up vengeance for King Froda (Beowulf, l. 2041 sq.; see above, [p. 70]):—