Medieval English Literature

by W. P. Ker

Chaucer here has been caught escaping from the Garden of the Rose; he has heard outside the stronger music of the new Italian epic poetry, but the old devotion is for the time too strong, and he falls back. His return is not exactly failure, because the complaint of Anelida, which is in many respects old-fashioned, a kind of poetry very near exhaustion, is also one of the most elaborate things ever composed by Chaucer, such a proof of his skill in verse as he never gives elsewhere.

The Teseide kept him from sleeping, and his later progress cannot be understood apart from this epic of Boccaccio. When Chaucer read the Italian poets, he found them working with a new conception of the art of poetry, and particularly a fresh comprehension of the Ancients. The classical Renaissance has begun.

The influence of the Latin poets had been strong all through the Middle Ages. In its lowest degree it helped the medieval poets to find matter for their stories; the French Roman d’Eneas is the work that shows this best, because it is a version of the greatest Latin poem, and can be easily compared with its original, so as to find out what is understood and what is missed or travestied; how far the scope of the Aeneid is different from the old French order of romance.

But neither here nor generally elsewhere is the debt limited to the matter of the stories. The sentiment, the pathos, the eloquence of medieval French poetry is derived from Virgil and Ovid. The Latin poets are the originals of medieval romance, far beyond what can be reckoned by any comparison of plots and incidents. And the medieval poets in their turn are the ancestors of the Renaissance and show the way to modern poetry.

But the old French poets, though they did much for the classical education of Europe, were inattentive to many things in classical poetry which the Italians were the first to understand, even before the revival of Greek, and which they appropriated for modern verse in time for Chaucer to be interested in what they were doing. Shortly, they understood what was meant by composition, proportion, the narrative unities; they appreciated the style of Latin poetry as the French did not; in poetical ornament they learned from Virgil something more spiritual and more imaginative than the French had known, and for which the term ‘ornament’ is hardly good enough; it is found in the similes of Dante, and after him in Chaucer.

This is one of the most difficult and one of the most interesting parts of literary history—the culmination and the end of the Middle Ages, in which the principles of medieval poetry are partly justified and partly refuted. As seen in the work of Chaucer, the effect of this new age and the Italian poetry was partly the stronger and richer poetical language and (an obvious sign of this strengthening) the similes such as were used by the classical authors. But far more than this, a change was made in the whole manner of devising and shaping a story. This change was suggested by the Italian poets; it fell in with the change in Chaucer’s own mind and with the independent growth of his strength. What he learned as a critic from study he used as an artist at the time when his imaginative power was quickest and most fertile. Yet before his journey to Italy, and apparently before he had learnt any Italian, he had already gone some way to meet the new poetry, without knowing it.

His earlier narrative poems, afterwards used for the tales of the Second Nun, the Clerk of Oxford and the Man of Law, have at least one quality in which they agree both with the Italians and with Chaucer’s maturest work. The verse is stately, strong, heroic in more senses than one. Chaucer’s employment of the ten-syllable line in the seven-line stanza for narrative was his own discovery. The decasyllabic line was an old measure; so was the seven-line stanza, both in Provençal and French. But the stanza had been generally restricted to lyric poetry, as in Chaucer’s Complaint to Pity. It was a favourite stanza for ballades. French poetry discouraged the stanza in narrative verse; the common form for narrative of all sorts, and for preaching and satire as well, was the short couplet—the verse of the Roman de Troie, the Roman de Renart, the Roman de la Rose, the verse of the Book of the Duchess and the Hous of Fame. When Chaucer used the longer verse in his Life of St. Cecilia and the other earlier tales, it is probable that he was following a common English opinion and taste, which tended against the universal dominion of the short couplet. ‘Short verse’ was never put out of use or favour, never insulted or condemned. But the English seem to have felt that it was not enough; they wanted more varieties. They had the alliterative verse, and, again, the use of the rime couée—Sir Thopas verse—was certainly due to a wish for variety. The long verse of Robert of Gloucester was another possibility, frequently taken. After Chaucer’s time, and seemingly independent of him, there were, in the fifteenth century, still more varieties in use among the minstrels. There was a general feeling among poets of all degrees that the short couplet (with no disrespect to it) was not the only and was not the most powerful of instruments. The technical originality of Chaucer was, first, that he learned the secret of the ten-syllable line, and later that he used it for regular narrative and made it the proper heroic verse in English. The most remarkable thing in this discovery is that Chaucer began to conform to the Italian rule before he knew anything about it. Not only are his single lines much nearer to the Italian rhythm than the French. This is curious, but it is not exceptional; it is what happens generally when the French decasyllable is imitated in one of the Teutonic languages, and Gower, who knew no Italian, or at any rate shows no sign of attending to Italian poetry, writes his occasional decasyllabic lines in the same way as Chaucer. But besides this mode of the single verse Chaucer agrees with the Italian practice in using stanzas for long narrative poetry; here he seems to have been led instinctively, or at least without any conscious imitation, to agree with the poet whom he was to follow still further, when once Boccaccio came in sight. This coincidence of taste in metre was one thing that must have struck Chaucer as soon as he opened an Italian book. Dante and Boccaccio used the same type of line as Chaucer had taken for many poems before ever he learned Italian; while the octave stanzas of Boccaccio’s epic—the common verse, before that, of the Italian minstrels in their romances—must have seemed to Chaucer remarkably like his own stanza in the Life of St. Cecilia or the story of Constance.

This explains how it was that Chaucer, with all his admiration for Italian poetry, never, except in one small instance, tries to copy any Italian verse. He did not copy the Italian line because he had the same line already from another source; and he did not copy Boccaccio’s octave stanza because he had already another stanza quite as good, if not better, in the same kind. One need not consider long, what is also very very probable, that Chaucer felt the danger of too great attraction to those wonderful new models; he would learn what he could (so he seems to have thought to himself), but he would not give up what he had already gained without them. Possibly the odd change of key, the relapse from Italian to French style in Anelida, might be explained as Chaucer’s reaction against the too overpowering influence of the new Italian school. ‘Here is this brand-new epic starting out to conquer all the world; no question but that it is triumphant, glorious, successful; and we cannot escape; but before we join in the procession, and it is too late to draw back, suppose we draw back now—into the old garden—to try once more what may be made of the old French kind of music’. So possibly we might translate into ruder terms what seems to be the artistic movement in this remarkable failure by Chaucer.

Chaucer spent a long time thinking over the Italian poetry which he had learned, and he made different attempts to turn it to profit in English before he succeeded. One of his first complete poems after his Italian studies had begun is as significant as Anelida both with respect to the difficulties that he found and also to the enduring influence of the French school. In the Parliament of Birds, his style as far as it can be tested in single passages seems to have learned everything there was to be learned—

Through me men goon into the blisful place