Medieval English Literature

by W. P. Ker

What maner man dar now holde up his heed?

To whom shall any sorwful herte calle,

Now Crueltee hath cast to sleen us alle

In ydel hope, folk redelees of peyne?

Sith she is deed, to whom shul we compleyne

If this sort of verse had not been written, English poetry would have missed one of the graces of medieval art—a grace which at this day it is easy to despise. It is not despicable, but neither is it the kind of beauty with which a strong imagination can be content, or indeed any mind whatsoever, apart from such a tradition as that of the old ‘courtly makers’. And it is worth remembering that not every one of the courtly makers restricted himself to this thin, fine abstract melody. Eustache Deschamps, for example, amused himself with humorous verse as well; and for Froissart his ballades and virelais were only a game, an occasional relief from the memoirs in which he was telling the story of his time. Chaucer in fact did very little in the French style of abstract sentiment. The longest of his early poems, The Book of the Duchess, has much of this quality in it, but this does not make the poem. The Book of the Duchess is not abstract. It uses the traditional manner—dream, mythology, and all—but it has other substance in it, and that is the character of the Duchess Blanche herself, and the grief for her death. Chaucer is here dealing with real life, and the conventional aids to poetry are left behind.

How necessary it was to get beyond this French school is shown by the later history of the French school itself. There was no one like Chaucer in France; except perhaps Froissart, who certainly had plenty of real life in his memoirs. But Froissart’s Chronicles were in prose, and did nothing to cure the inanition of French poetry, which went on getting worse and worse, so that even a poetic genius like Villon suffered from it, having no examples to guide him except the thin ballades and rondeaux on the hackneyed themes. R. L. Stevenson’s account of Charles d’Orleans and his poetry will show well enough what sort of work it was which was abandoned by Chaucer, and which in the century after Chaucer was still the most favoured kind in France.

It should not be forgotten that Chaucer, though he went far beyond such poetry as that of his French masters and of his own Complaint to Pity, never turned against it. He escaped out of the allegorical garden of the Rose, but with no resentment or ingratitude. He never depreciates the old school. He must have criticized it—to find it unsatisfying is to criticize it, implicitly at any rate; but he never uses a word of blame or a sentence of parody. In his later writings he takes up the devices of the Rose again; not only in the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women, but also, though less obviously, in the Squire’s Tale, where the sentiment is quite in harmony with the old French mode.

Chaucer wrote no such essay on poetry as Dante de Vulgari Eloquentia; not even such a practical handbook of versification as was written by his friend Eustache Deschamps. But his writings, like Shakespeare’s, have many passages referring to the literary art—the processes of the workshop—and a comparison of his poems with the originals which suggested them will often bring out what was consciously in his mind as he reflected on his work—as he calculated and altered, to suit the purpose which he had before him.

Chaucer is one of the greatest of literary artists, and one of the finest; so it is peculiarly interesting to make out what he thought of different poetical kinds and forms which came in his way through his reading or his own practice. For this object—i.e. to bring out Chaucer’s aims and the way in which he criticized his own poetry—the most valuable evidence is given by the poem of Anelida and the False Arcite. This is not only an unfinished poem—Chaucer left many things unfinished—it is a poem which changes its purpose as it goes on, which is written under two different and discordant influences, and which could not possibly be made harmonious without total reconstruction from the beginning. It was written after Chaucer had gone some way in his reading of the Italian poets, and the opening part is copied from the Teseide of Boccaccio, which is also the original of the Knight’s Tale. Now it was principally through Boccaccio’s example that Chaucer learned how to break away from the French school. Yet here in this poem of Anelida, starting with imitation of Boccaccio, Chaucer goes back to the French manner, and works out a theme of the French school—and then drops it, in the middle of a sentence. He was distracted at that time, it is clear, between two opposite kinds of poetry. His Anelida is experimental work; in it we can see how he was changing his mind, and what difficulty he had with the new problems that were offered to him in his Italian books. He found in Italian a stronger kind of narrative than he had been accustomed to, outside of the Latin poets; a new kind of ambition, an attempt to rival the classical authors in a modern language. The Teseide (the Theseid) of Boccaccio is a modern epic poem in twelve books, meant by its author to be strong and solid and full; Chaucer in Anelida begins to translate and adapt this heroic poem—and then he turns away from the wars of Theseus to a story of disappointed love; further, he leaves the narrative style and composes for Anelida the most elaborate of all his lyric poems, the most extreme contrast to the heavy epic manner in which his poem is begun. The lyrical complaint of Anelida is the perfection of everything that had been tried in the French school—a fine unsubstantial beauty so thin and clear that it is hardly comprehensible at first, and never in agreement with the forcible narrative verse at the beginning of the poem.