Medieval English Literature

by W. P. Ker

Of hertès hele and dedly woundès cure;

Through me men goon unto the welle of Grace,

There grene and lusty May shal ever endure;

This is the way to all good aventure;

Be glad, thou reader, and thy sorrow offcaste!

All open am I; passe in and hy thee faste!

And, as for composition, the poem carries out to the full what the author intends; the digressions and the slackness that are felt to detract from the Book of the Duchess have been avoided; the poem expresses the mind of Chaucer, both through the music of its solemn verse, and through the comic dialogue of the birds in their assembly. But this accomplished piece of work, with all its reminiscences of Dante and Boccaccio, is old French in its scheme; it is another of the allegorical dreams, and the device of the Parliament of Birds is in French older than the Romaunt of the Rose.

Chaucer is still, apparently, holding back; practising on the ground familiar to him, and gradually working into his poetry all that he can readily manage out of his Italian books. In Anelida Italian and French are separate and discordant; in the Parliament of Birds there is a harmony, but as yet Chaucer has not matched himself thoroughly against Boccaccio. When he does so, in Troilus and in the Knight’s Tale, it will be found that he is something more than a translator, and more than an adapter of minor and separable passages.

The Teseide of Boccaccio is at last after many attempts—how many, it is impossible to say—rendered into English by Chaucer, not in a translation, but with a thorough recasting of the whole story. Troilus and Criseyde is taken from another poem by Boccaccio. Troilus and the Knight’s Tale are without rivals in English for the critical keenness which has gone into them. Shakespeare has the same skill in dealing with his materials, in choosing and rejecting, but Shakespeare was never matched, as Chaucer was in these works, against an author of his own class, an author, too, who had all the advantages of long training. The interest—the historical interest at any rate—of Chaucer’s dealings with Boccaccio is that it was an encounter between an Englishman whose education had been chiefly French, and an Italian who had begun upon the ways of the new learning. To put it bluntly, it was the Middle Ages against the Renaissance; and the Englishman won on the Italian ground and under the Italian rules. Chaucer judged more truly than Boccaccio what the story of Palamon and Arcite was worth; the story of Troilus took shape in his imagination with incomparably more strength and substance. In both cases he takes what he thinks fit; he learned from Boccaccio, or perhaps it would be truer to say he found out for himself in reading Boccaccio what was the value of right proportion in narrative. He refused altogether to be led away as Boccaccio was by the formal classical ideal of epic poetry—the ‘receipt to make an epic poem’ which prescribed as necessary all the things employed in the construction of the Aeneid. Boccaccio is the first modern author who writes an epic in twelve books; and one of his books is taken up with funeral games, because Virgil in the Aeneid had imitated the funeral games in Homer. In the time of Pope this was still a respectable tradition. Chaucer is not tempted; he keeps to what is essential, and in the proportions of his story and his conception of the narrative unities he is saner than all the Renaissance.

One of the finest passages in English criticism of poetry is Dryden’s estimate of Chaucer in the Preface to the Fables. Chaucer is taken by Dryden, in the year 1700, as an example of that sincerity and truth to Nature which makes the essence of classical poetry. In this classical quality, Dryden thinks that Ovid is far inferior to Chaucer. Dryden makes allowance for Chaucer’s old-fashioned language, and he did not fully understand the beauty of Chaucer’s verse, but still he judges him as a modern writer with respect to his imagination; to no modern writer does he give higher praise than to Chaucer.