CHAPTER VII CHAUCER IF Langland may be regarded in some respects as the Nævius of English poetry, Chaucer is certainly its Ennius. From Spenser to Wordsworth the long line of our poets have recognised him as their founder, and with perfect justice, inasmuch as he was the first to impose on the early incivility of the English tongue the rules of harmony and proportion. In his hands the metrical sentence began to assume variety, balance, and modulation. He showed what sweet combinations of sound might be produced within the measured limits of the rhymed stanza; he was the first to make use of the heroic couplet. Ennius taught his countrymen how to refine their native genius by the use of Greek forms; Chaucer succeeded in expanding the vigorous but limited range of the AngloSaxon imagination, by bringing it into touch with the life and art of continental Europe. In the poetical models which he imported from France, and in the poetical themes suggested to him by Italy, he found a medium for reflecting the English conception of the manners and fashions of chivalry. But by his instinctive sympathy with that deeper and more enduring movement, afterwards known as the Renaissance, he may also be said to have invented a national mode of thought, which imparted a character of its own to the whole course of English poetry. Almost everything known of the life of Geoffrey Chaucer is derived from official records, and has as much human interest as might be expected from such a source. 1 The son of John Chaucer, a citizen of London, he was born, probably in that city, between 1330 and 1340, and seems to have been received at an early age into the household of the Countess of Ulster, wife of Lionel of Clarence. He served in the expedition to France in 1359 which terminated in the Peace of Bretigny; and, having been taken prisoner in a skirmish, was ransomed in March 1360, after about two months' imprisonment. In 1367 his name appears as a member of the royal household, where he is described as being dilectus valettus noster, and as the recipient from the king of twenty marks a year, that is to say of about £140 according to present value. Two years later he is found again campaigning in France. He must have been by this time recognised as a man of abilities and accomplishments, for in the ten years following he was frequently employed on important diplomatic missions. In 1373 he paid his first visit to Italy, having been appointed one of the commissioners for negotiating with Genoa respecting the establishment of a factory for commerce on the English coast; and, if we are to take his own statement literally, he must at this period have made the acquaintance of Petrarch. For his services on that occasion he was liberally rewarded by the king. The next year he received from the king the grant of a pitcher of wine daily in the port of London, an allowance that was afterwards commuted for the yearly payment of twenty marks, besides which he was granted by the city authorities the lease of a house above the city gate of Aldgate on condition of his keeping it in good repair. He was also in this year made comptroller of the customs, and in 1375 he obtained from the king the wardship of the lands of Edmond Staplegate, a rich minor in the county of Kent, as well as the less valuable wardship of the heir of William de Soles in the same county. All these bounties are signs of the high favour in which he was held, and further proof of confidence was given in 1377 when he was twice employed on diplomatic missions, first to Flanders, and afterwards to France, for the purpose of negotiating a peace. Soon after the accession of Richard II. he was again sent to France to arrange a marriage between the king and a French princess, but the negotiations led to no result. Later in the year 1378 he went to Italy to treat with Barnabo Visconti and Sir John Hawkwood regarding the king's expedition of war. In 1385 he was allowed some relaxation in his official business by appointing a deputy to act as comptroller of the wool quay; and in 1386 he was elected as a knight of the shire for the county of Kent. Closely associated with the interests of John of Gaunt, he shared his patron's disfavour with the Parliament, being deprived in December of this year of all his appointments. In 1389, however, fortune again smiled upon him, and he was appointed clerk of the king's works in the Palace of Westminster and other places, an extremely lucrative post. He was so unfortunate in the next year as to be twice robbed in the same day of the king's money, first at Westminster and afterwards near Hatcham, in Surrey; but he was relieved of the obligation of making good the loss. From 1392 to 1398, when Richard II. was governing the country by himself, Chaucer seems to have been out of employment; and in the latter year he was apparently in distress, for he was sued for debt, and failed to appear (non est inventus); while soon afterwards the records show him humbly petitioning the king, in the name of charity, for a hogshead of wine, which was granted him. The accession of Henry Bolingbroke, son of his old patron, in 1399, put an end to his distresses; his pension was doubled; but as his name does not appear in the official records after 1400, it may be assumed that death did not allow him to enjoy the fruits of recovered prosperity for more than a year. Chaucer was married. His wife's Christian name was Philippa, and though her surname is not known, it would appear to be not improbable that she was a lady in the household of the Countess of Ulster, who is entered in the accounts as "Philippa Pan," ie. Panetaria, or superintendent of the pantry. She received in 1372 a pension from John of Gaunt for services rendered to his second wife Constance of Castile, and she apparently died in the year 1387. From the reflections on the married state made in the "Wife of Bath's Tale" and elsewhere in his works, it has been inferred that Chaucer's domestic life was not a happy one. The inference is not absolutely necessary, for satires upon marriage had become one of the commonplaces of poetry since the example set in the Romance of the Rose; but some colour is given to it by a passage in the House of Fame, which it seems difficult to interpret in any other sense than as a personal allusion.1 Though these details furnish no key to the personal character and genius of Chaucer, they illustrate what is perhaps the most essential feature in his work. Before him all the chief poets who had used the Anglo-Saxon or the early English language, Cædmon, Cynewulf, Layamon, the author of the Cursor Mundi, Robert of Brunne, Langland himself, had been clergymen, and had therefore composed their poems in a clerical spirit. Chaucer was a layman, and though his mind had evidently been trained in the encyclopædic course prescribed by the Church, his ideas were enlarged and corrected by the education of political experience. He served the king in the court, in the battle-field, and in diplomatic and civil employments, and in these capacities he acquired that varied knowledge of the world, the full fruits of which are seen in the noble design of the Canterbury Tales. His learning was as wide as his social experience. Not only was he versed in the French poetry, fashionable at the French and English courts, but he had read the masterpieces of Italian prose and poetry, and besides having studied many of the theological and philosophical works of the mediæval doctors of the Church, he was an ardent admirer of Cicero, Virgil, Ovid, Statius, and Boethius. His knowledge of astronomy, as it was then understood, was exact, and he had evidently pushed his inquiries some distance into alchemy. His in fact was The courtier's, soldier's, scholar's tongue, sword, eye, and no man could have been better equipped, socially and intellectually, for the foundation of a new literature. But before considering him as a poet, it is of importance to determine the list of his works that may be regarded as undoubtedly genuine. Upon this point we have in the first place his own testimony. In his Legend of Good Women he makes Alcestis plead on his behalf, as follows: He made the boke that hight the House of Fame, And al the love of Palamon and Arcite Of Thebes, thogh the storye is knowen lyte ; He hath in prose translated Boece, And made the Lyfe also of Saynte Cecile. In the Prologue to the "Man of Lawe's Tale" he further says, that in his youth he wrote the story of Ceis and Alcyone, an obvious allusion to the tale on this subject inserted in the Book of the Duchess. Besides the poems enumerated in the passage just cited, the God of Love, in the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women, accuses him of having translated the Romaunt of the Rose and Troilus and Cressida. As the Legend was clearly written before the publication of the Canterbury Tales, the list of the poet's authentic works that it contains cannot be regarded as exhaustive. But from himself we learn nothing more, nor is any further information afforded by the catalogue of his writings furnished in the Fall of Princes by Lydgate, who merely repeats in other words the substance of what is said in the Prologue to the Legend. John Shirley, however, an enthusiastic admirer of Chaucer, who died in 1456, aged ninety, leaving a MS. copy of the poet's works, includes in it, besides the poems avowed by Chaucer, the Complaynt unto Pite, Queen Annelida and False Arcite, the Complaynt of Mars and Venus, |