Medieval English Literature

by W. P. Ker

This truth to Nature, in virtue of which Chaucer is a classic, will be found to be limited in some of his works by conventions which are not always easy to understand. Among these should not be reckoned the dream allegory. For though it may appear strange at first that Chaucer should have gone back to this in so late a work as the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women, yet it does not prevent him from speaking his mind either in earlier or later poems. In the Book of the Duchess, the Parliament of Birds, the Prologue to the Legend, one feels that Chaucer is dealing with life, and saying what he really thinks, in spite of the conventions. The Hous of Fame, which is a dream poem, might almost have been written for a wager, to show that he could bring in everything traditional, everything most common in the old artificial poetry, and yet be original and fresh through it all. But there are some stories—the Clerk’s Tale, and the Franklin’s Tale—in which he uses conventions of another sort and is partially disabled by them. These are stories of a kind much favoured in the Middle Ages, turning each upon one single obligation which, for the time, is regarded as if it were the only rule of conduct. The patience of Griselda is absolute; nothing must be allowed to interfere with it, and there is no other moral in the story. It is one of the frequent medieval examples in which the author can only think of one thing at a time. On working out this theme, Chaucer is really tried as severely as his heroine, and his patience is more extraordinary, because if there is anything certain about him it is that his mind is never satisfied with any one single aspect of any matter. Yet here he carries the story through to the end, though when it is finished he writes an epilogue which is a criticism on the strained morality of the piece. The plot of the Franklin’s Tale is another of the favourite medieval type, where the ‘point of honour’, the obligation of a vow, is treated in the same uncompromising way; Chaucer is here confined to a problem under strict rules, a drama of difficulties without character.

In the Legend of Good Women he is limited in a different way, and not so severely. He has to tell ‘the Saints’ Lives of Cupid’—the Legends of the Heroines who have been martyrs for love; and as in the Legend of the Saints of the Church, the same motives are repeated, the trials of loyalty, the grief and pity. The Legend was left unfinished, apparently because Chaucer was tired. Yet it is not certain that he repented of his plan, or that the plan was wrong. There may possibly have been in this work something of the formalism which is common in Renaissance art, the ambition to build up a structure in many compartments, each compartment resembling all the others in the character of the subject and its general lines. But the stories are distinct, and all are beautiful—the legends of Cleopatra Queen and Martyr, of Thisbe and Ariadne, and the rest. Another poem which may be compared with the Legend of Good Women is the Monk’s Tale—an early work to which Chaucer made later additions—his book of the Falls of Princes. The Canterbury pilgrims find it too depressing, and in their criticism of the Monk’s tragedies Chaucer may possibly have been thinking also of his unfinished Legend of Good Women. But what has been said of the Legend may be repeated about the Monk’s Tale; there is the same kind of pathos in all the chapters, but they are all varied. One of the tragedies is the most considerable thing which Chaucer took from Dante; the story of Ugolino in the Inferno, ‘Hugelyn Erle of Pise’.

It is uncertain whether Chaucer knew the Decameron of Boccaccio, but the art of his comic stories is very like that of the Italian, to whom he owed so much in other ways. It is the art of comic imagination, using a perfect style which does not need to be compared with the unsophisticated old French ribaldry of the fabliaux to be appreciated, though a comparison of that sort will show how far the Middle Ages had been left behind by Boccaccio and Chaucer. Among the interludes in the Canterbury Tales there are two especially, the monologues of the Wife of Bath and the Pardoner, where Chaucer has discovered one of the most successful forms of comic poetry, and the Canon’s Yeoman’s prologue may be reckoned as a third along with them, though there, and also in the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale, the humour is of a peculiar sort, with less character in it, and more satire—like the curious learned satire of which Ben Jonson was fond. It is remarkable that the tales told by the Wife of Bath and the Pardoner are both in a different tone from their discourses about themselves.

Without Troilus and Criseyde the works of Chaucer would be an immense variety—romance and sentiment, humour and observation, expressed in poetical language that has never been equalled for truth and liveliness. But it is only in Troilus that Chaucer uses his full powers together in harmony. All the world, it might be said, is reflected in the various poems of Chaucer; Troilus is the one poem which brings it all into a single picture. In the history of English poetry it is the close of the Middle Ages.

NOTE ON BOOKS

For the language: Anglo-Saxon can be learned in Sweet’s Primer and Reader (Clarendon Press). Sweet’s First Middle English Primer gives extracts from the Ancren Riwle and the Ormulum, with separate grammars for the two dialects. But it is generally most convenient to learn the language of Chaucer before attempting the earlier books. Morris and Skeat’s Specimens of Early English (two volumes, Clarendon Press) range from the end of the English Chronicle (1153) to Chaucer; valuable for literary history as well as philology. The nature of the language is explained in Henry Bradley’s Making of English (Clarendon Press), and in Wyld’s Study of the Mother Tongue (Murray).

The following books should be noted: Stopford Brooke, Early English Literature (Macmillan); Schofield, English Literature from the Norman Conquest to Chaucer (Macmillan); Jusserand, Literary History of the English People (Fisher Unwin); Chambers’ Cyclopædia of English Literature, I; Ten Brink, Early English Literature (Bell); Saintsbury, History of English Prosody, I (Macmillan); Courthope, History of English Poetry, I and II (Macmillan).

Full bibliographies are provided in the Cambridge History of English Literature.

The bearings of early French upon English poetry are illustrated in Saintsbury’s Flourishing of Romance and Rise of Allegory (Blackwood). Much of the common medieval tendencies may be learned from the earlier part of Robertson’s German Literature (Blackwood), and Gaspary’s Italian Literature, translated by Oelsner (Bell). Some topics have been already discussed by the present author in other works: Epic and Romance (Macmillan); The Dark Ages (Blackwood); Essays on Medieval Literature (Macmillan).

The history of medieval drama in England, for which there was no room in this book, is clearly given in Pollard’s Miracle Plays, Moralities and Interludes (Clarendon Press).