almost any phase of character or incident, noble or trivial, passionate or grotesque, finds its fullest scope. Other fourteenth century writers can tell a story (though none indeed so well as he), can be tragic, pathetic, amusing; but none else of that day can bring the actual world of men and women before us with the movement of a Florentine procession-picture and with a colour and a truth of detail that anticipate the great Dutch masters of painting. To pass from the framework of other mediæval collections, even from the villa and gardens of the Decameron, to Chaucer's group of pilgrims, is to pass from convention to reality. To reality; for, as Dryden says in that Preface which shows how high he stood above the critical level of his age, in the Prologue 'we have our forefathers and great-grandames all before us, as they were in Chaucer's days; their general characters are still remaining in mankind, and even in England, though th y are called by other names than those of Monks and Friars, and Canons, and Lady Abbesses, and Nuns: for mankind is ever the same, and nothing lost out of nature, though everything is altered.' It is not enough for a poet to observe, however: what he observes must first be transformed by feeling before it can become matter for poetry. What distinguishes Chaucer is that he not only observes truly and feels keenly, but that he keeps his feeling fresh and unspoiled by his knowledge of books and of affairs. As the times went he was really learned, and he passed a varied active existence in the Court, in the London custom-house, and in foreign missions on the king's service. From his life his poetry only gained; the Knight, the Friar, the Shipman-nay, even young Troylus and Constance and 'Emilye the schene,'-are what they are by virtue of his experience of actual human beings. But it is even more notable that the study of books, in an age when study so often led to pedantry, left him as free and human as it found him; and that his joy in other men's poetry, and his wish to reproduce it for his countrymen, still gave way to the desire to render it more beautiful and more true. Translator and imitator as he was, what strikes us in his work from the very earliest date is his independence of his models. Even when he wrote the Boke of the Duchesse, at a time when he was a mere novice in literature, he could rise and did rise above his material, so that one enthusiastic Chaucerian, in his desire to repel M. Sandras' charge of 'imitation servile,' flatly refuses to believe that Chaucer ever read Machault's' Dit' at all. This indeed is too patriotic criticism; but it is certainly true to say that Chaucer worked up Machault and Ovid in this poem, as he worked up his French and Italian materials generally, so as thoroughly to subordinate them to his own purpose. The most striking instance of this free treatment of his model is, of course, his rendering of the Troylus and the Knightes Tale from Boccaccio. The story of Palamon and Arcite possessed a great fascination for Chaucer and it seems certain that he wrote it twice, in two quite distinct forms. With the carlier, in stanzas, which has perished except for what he has embodied in one or two other writings, we are not concerned; but it is open to any one to compare the Knightes Tale, in the final shape in which Chaucer's mature hand has left it to us, with the immense romantic epic of Boccaccio. Tyrwhitt's blunt commonsense long since pointed out the ethical inferiority of the Teseide; and we may point in the same way to the judgment that Chaucer has shown in stripping off episodes, in retrenching Boccaccio's mythological exuberance, in avoiding frigid personifications, and in heightening the interest of the end by the touches which he adds in his magnificent description of the Temple of Mars. In the 'Troylus' the difference between the two poets is even deeper, for it is a difference as much moral as artistic. Compare those young Florentine worldlings-for such they are-Troilo and Pandaro, with the boyish, single-minded, enthusiastic, pitiable Troylus, and his older friend who stands by to check his passionate excesses with a proverb and again a proverb, like Sancho by the side of the Knight of la Mancha; worldly experience controlling romance! Compare Griseida, that light-o'-love, that heroine of the Decameron, with the fragile, tender-hearted and remorseful Cryseyde, who yields through sheer weakness to the pleading and the sorrow of 'this sodeyn Diomede' as she has yielded to her Trojan lover! Ne me ne list this sely womman chyde Ferther than the storie wol devyse; 'Routhe' indeed, pity for inevitable sorrow, is a note of Chaucer's mind which for ever distinguishes him from Boccaccio, and marks hin out as the true forerunner of the poet of Hamlet and Othello. almost any phase of character or incident, noble or trivial, passionate or grotesque, finds its fullest scope. Other fourteenth century writers can tell a story (though none indeed so well as he), can be tragic, pathetic, amusing; but none else of that day can bring the actual world of men and women before us with the movement of a Florentine procession-picture and with a colour and a truth of detail that anticipate the great Dutch masters of painting. To pass from the framework of other medieval collections, even from the villa and gardens of the Decameron, to Chaucer's group of pilgrims, is to pass from convention to reality. To reality; for, as Dryden says in that Preface which shows how high he stood above the critical level of his age, in the Prologue 'we have our forefathers and great-grandames all before us, as they were in Chaucer's days; their general characters are still remaining in mankind, and even in England, though they are called by other names than those of Monks and Friars, and Canons, and Lady Abbesses, and Nuns: for mankind is ever the same, and nothing lost out of nature, though everything is altered.' It is not enough for a poet to observe, however: what he observes must first be transformed by feeling before it can become matter for poetry. What distinguishes Chaucer is that he not only observes truly and feels keenly, but that he keeps his feeling fresh and unspoiled by his knowledge of books and of affairs. As the times went he was really learned, and he passed a varied active existence in the Court, in the London custom-house, and in foreign missions on the king's service. From his life his poetry only gained; the Knight, the Friar, the Shipman-nay, even young Troylus and Constance and 'Emilye the schene,'-are what they are by virtue of his experience of actual human beings. But it is even more notable that the study of books, in an age when study so often led to pedantry, let him as free and human as it found him; and that his joy in other men's poetry, and his wish to reproduce it for his countrymen, still gave way to the desire to render it more beautiful and more true. Translator and imitator as he was, what strikes us in his work from the very earliest date is his independence of his models. Even when he wrote the Boke of the Duchesse, at a time when he was a mere novice in literature, he could rise and did rise above his material, so that one enthusiastic Chaucerian, in his desire to repel M. Sandras' charge of 'imitation servile,' flatly refuses to believe that Chaucer ever read Machault's 'Dit' at all. This indeed is too patriotic criticism; but it is certainly true to say that Chaucer worked up Machault and Ovid in this poem, as he worked up his French and Italian materials generally, so as thoroughly to subordinate them to his own purpose. The most striking instance of this free treatment of his model is, of course, his rendering of the Troylus and the Knightes Tale from Boccaccio. The story of Palamon and Arcite possessed a great fascination for Chaucer and it seems certain that he wrote it twice, in two quite distinct forms. With the carlier, in stanzas, which has perished except for what he has embodied in one or two other writings, we are not concerned; but it is open to any one to compare the Knightes Tale, in the final shape in which Chaucer's mature hand has left it to us, with the immense romantic epic of Boccaccio. Tyrwhitt's blunt commonsense long since pointed out the ethical inferiority of the Teseide; and we may point in the same way to the judgment that Chaucer has shown in stripping off episodes, in retrenching Boccaccio's mythological exuberance, in avoiding frigid personifications, and in heightening the interest of the end by the touches which he adds in his magnificent description of the Temple of Mars. In the 'Troylus' the difference between the two poets is even deeper, for it is a difference as much moral as artistic. Compare those young Florentine worldlings-for such they are-Troilo and Pandaro, with the boyish, single-minded, enthusiastic, pitiable Troylus, and his older friend who stands by to check his passionate excesses with a proverb and again a proverb, like Sancho by the side of the Knight of la Mancha; worldly experience controlling romance! Compare Griseida, that light-o'-love, that heroine of the Decameron, with the fragile, tender-hearted and remorseful Cryseyde, who yields through sheer weakness to the pleading and the sorrow of 'this sodeyn Diomede' as she has yielded to her Trojan lover! Ne me ne list this sely womman chyde Ferther than the storie wol devyse; 'Routhe' indeed, pity for inevitable sorrow, is a note of Chaucer's mind which for ever distinguishes him from Boccaccio, and marks hin out as the true forerunner of the poet of Hamlet and Othello. To him the world and human character are no simple things, nor are actions to be judged as the fruit of one motive alone. Who can wonder if, possessed with this new sense of the complexity of human destiny, he should sometimes have failed to render it with the clearness of an artist dealing with a simpler theme? Those critics are probably right who pronounce the Troylus inferior to the Filostrato in point of literary form; but their criticism, to be complete, should add that it is far more interesting in the history of poetry. The first of a poet's gifts is to feel; the second is to express. Chaucer possesses this second gift as abundantly as he possesses the first. The p int which contemporary and later poets almost invariably note in him is, not his power of telling a story, not his tragedy, his humour, or his character-drawing, but his language. To Lydgate he is The noble rethor poete of Britayne;' his great achievement has been Out of our tongue to avoyde all rudenesse, To Occleve he was 'the floure of eloquence,' The firste fynder of our faire langage.' Dunbar, at the end of the fifteenth century, speaks of his 'fresh enamel'd termës celical'; and long afterwards Spenser gave him the immortal epithet of 'the well of English undefiled.' Chaucer, like Dante, had the rare fortune of coming in upon an unformed language, and, so far as one man could, of forming it. He grew up among the last generation in England that used French as an official tongue. It was in 1362, when Chaucer was just entering manhood, that the session of the House of Commons was first opened with an English speech. Hence it is easy to see the hollowness of the charge, so often brought against him since Verstegan first made it, that 'he was a great mingler of English with French,' that 'he corrupted our language with French words.' Tyrwhitt long since refuted this charge; and if it wanted further refutation, we might point to Piers Plowman's Vision, the work of a poet of the people, written for the people in their own speech, but containing a greater proportion of French words than Chaucer's writings contain. And yet Chaucer is a courtier, a Londoner, perhaps partly French by extraction; above all, he is |