Medieval English Literature

by W. P. Ker

When it is said that an English period came to succeed the Italian in Chaucer’s life, the real meaning of this is that Chaucer was all the time working for independence, and that, as he goes on, his original genius strengthens and he takes more and more of real life into his view. But there is no one period in which he casts off his foreign masters and strikes out absolutely for himself. Some of his greatest imaginative work, and the most original, is done in his adaptation of the story of Troilus from an Italian poem of Boccaccio.

Chaucer represents a number of common medieval tastes, and many of these had to be kept under control in his poetry. One can see him again and again tempted to indulge himself, and sometimes yielding, but generally securing his freedom and lifting his verse above the ordinary traditional ways. He has the educational bent very strongly. That is shown in his prose works. He is interested in popular philosophy and popular science; he translates ‘Boece’, the Consolation of Philosophy, and compiles the Treatise on the Astrolabe for ‘little Lewis my son’. The tale of Melibeus which Chaucer tells in his own person among the Canterbury pilgrims is a translation of a moral work which had an extraordinary reputation not very easy to understand or appreciate now Chaucer took it up no doubt because it had been recommended by authors of good standing: he translates it from the French version by Jean de Meung. The Parson’s Tale is an adaptation from the French, and represents the common form of good sermon literature. Chaucer thus shared the tastes and the aptitudes of the good ordinary man of letters. He was under no compulsion to do hack work; he wrote those things because he was fond of study and teaching, like the Clerk of Oxford in the Canterbury Tales. The learning shown in his poems is not pretence; it came into his poems because he had it in his mind. How his wit could play with his science is shown in the Hous of Fame, where the eagle is allowed to give a popular lecture on acoustics, but is prevented from going on to astronomy. Chaucer dissembles his interest in that subject because he knows that popular science ought not to interfere too much with the proper business of poetry; he also, being a humorist, sees the comic aspect of his own didactic tastes; he sees the comic opposition between the teacher anxious to go on explaining and the listener not so ready to take in more. There is another passage, in Troilus, where good literary advice is given (rather in the style of Polonius) against irrelevant scientific illustrations. In a love-letter you must not allow your work for the schools to appear too obviously—

Ne jompre eek no discordant thing y-fere,

As thus, to usen termes of physik.

This may be fairly interpreted as Chaucer talking to himself. He knew that he was inclined to this sort of irrelevance and very apt to drag in ‘termes of physik’, fragments of natural philosophy, where they were out of place.

This was one of the things, one of the common medieval temptations, from which he had to escape if he was to be a master in the art of poetry. How real the danger was can be seen in the works of some of the Chaucerians, e.g. in Henryson’s Orpheus, and in Gawain Douglas’s Palace of Honour.

Boethius is a teacher of a different sort from Melibeus, and the poet need not be afraid of him. Boethius, the master of Dante, the disciple of Plato, is one of the medieval authors who are not disqualified in any century; with him Chaucer does not require to be on his guard. The Consolation of Philosophy may help the poet even in the highest reach of his imagination; so Boethius is remembered by Chaucer, as he is by Dante, when he has to deal solemnly with the condition of men on earth. This is not one of the common medieval vanities from which Chaucer has to escape.

Far more dangerous and more attractive than any pedantry of the schools was the traditional convention of the allegorical poets, the Rose and all the attendants of the Rose. This was a danger that Chaucer could not avoid; indeed it was his chief poetical task, at first, to enter this dreamland and to come out of it with the spoils of the garden, which could not be won except by a dreamer and by full subjection to all the enchantments of the place. It was part of Chaucer’s poetic vocation to comprehend and to make his own the whole spirit and language of the Roman de la Rose and also of the French poets who had followed, in the century between. The Complaint to Pity shows how he succeeded in this; also the Complaint of Mars and the poem called the Complaint of Venus, which is a translation from Oton de Granson, ‘the floure of hem that maken in France’. Chaucer had to do this, and then he had to escape. This sort of fancy work, a kind of musical sentiment with a mythology of personified abstract qualities, is the least substantial of all things—thought and argument, imagery and utterance, all are of the finest and most impalpable.

Thus am I slayn sith that Pité is deed:

Allas the day! that ever hit shulde falle!