Chaucer to the Renaissance

CHAUCER TO THE RENAISSANCE The age of Chaucer is of peculiar interest to the student of literature, not only because of its brilliance and productiveness but also because of its apparent promise for the future. In this, as in other aspects, Chaucer (c. 1340-1400) is its most notable literary figure. Beginning as a student and imitator of the best French poetry of his day, he was for a time, like most of his French contemporaries, little more than a skilful maker of elegant verses. Even at this time, to be sure, he was not without close and loving observation of the living creatures of the real world, and his verses of ten bring us flowers dewy and fragrant and fresh of colour as they grew in the fields and gardens about London, and birds that had learned their music in the woods ; but his poetry was still not easily distinguishable from that of the "courtly makers" of France. While he was still striving to master the technique of this pretty art of trifling, he became acquainted with the new poetry of Italy. It is true that much of this new poetry moved, like that of France, among the artificialities of an unreal world of romance, but it was of wider range, of fuller tone, of far greater emotional intensity, and, at its best, was the fabric, not of elegant ingenuity, but of creative human passion,—in Dante, indeed, a wonderful visionary structure in which love and hate, and pity and terror, and the forms and countenances of men were more vivid and real than in the world of real men and real passions. Less powerful and intense than the work of Dante, but more suggestive of new methods of description, narration and characterization were the choral poems of Boccaccio, whose La Teseide and Il Filostrato not only furnished to Chaucer the mate rials for a new type of romance, but effected an entire transforma tion of his aims and artistic technique.

The Progress of Chaucer.

This transformation was effected not so much through the mere superiority of the Italian models to the French as through the stimulus which the differences be tween the two gave to his reflections upon the processes and technique of composition, for Chaucer was not a careless, happy go-lucky poet of divine endowment, but a conscious, reflective artist, seeking not merely for fine words and fine sentiments, but for the proper arrangement of events, the significant exponent of character, the right tone, and even the appropriate background and atmosphere—as may be seen, for example, in the transfigura tions he wrought in the Pardoner's Tale. It is therefore in the latest and most original of the Canterbury Tales that his art is most admirable, most distinguished by technical excellences. In these we find so many admirable qualities that we almost forget that he had any defects. His diction is a model of picturesqueness, of simplicity, of dignity and of perfect adaptation to his theme ; his versification is not only correct but musical and varied, and shows a progressive tendency towards freer and more complex melodies ; his best tales are not mere repetitions of the ancient stories they retell, but new creations, transformed by his own imaginative realization of them, full of figures having the dimen sions and the vivacity of real life, acting on adequate motives, and moving in an atmosphere and against a background appro priate to their characters and their actions. In the tales of the Pardoner, the Franklin, the Summoner, the Squire, he is no less notable as a consummate artist than as a poet.

Chaucer, however, was not the only writer of his day remark able for mastery of technique. Gower, indeed, though a man of much learning and intelligence, was neither a poet of the first rank nor an artist. Despite the admirable qualities of clearness, order and occasional picturesqueness which distinguish his work, he lacked the ability which great poets have of making their words mean more than they say, and of stirring the emotions even beyond the bounds of this enhanced meaning; and there is not, perhaps, in all his voluminous work in English, French and Latin, any indication that he regarded composition as an art requiring consideration or any care beyond that of conforming to the chosen rhythm and finding suitable rhymes.

Other Poets of Genius.

There were others more richly endowed as poets and more finely developed as artists. There was the beginner of the Piers Plowman cycle, the author of the Pro logue and first eight passus of the A-text, a man of clear and profound observation, a poet whose imagination brought bef ore him with distinctness and reality visual images of the motley individuals and masses of men of whom he wrote, an artist who knew how to organize and direct the figures of his dream-world, the movement of his ever-unfolding vision. There was the remark able successor of this man, the author of the B-text, an almost pro phetic figure, a great poetic idealist, and, helpless though he often was in the direction of his thought, an absolute master of images and words that seize upon the heart and haunt the memory. Be sides these, an unknown writer in the west midlands had, in Gawayne and the Grene Knight, transformed the mediaeval romance into a thing of speed and colour, of vitality and mystery, no less remarkable for its fluent definiteness of form than for the delights of hall-feast and hunt, the graceful comedy of temptation, and the lonely ride of the doomed Gawayne through the silence of the forest and the deep snow. In the same region, by its author's power of visual imagination, the Biblical paraphrase, so often a mere humdrum narrative, had been transformed, in Patience, into a narrative so detailed and vivid that the reader is almost ready to believe that the author himself, rather than Jonah, went down into the sea in the belly of the great fish. And there also, by some strange chance, blossomed, with perhaps only a local and temporary fragrance until its rediscovery in the 19th century, that delicate flower of mystical aspiration, Pearl, a wonder of elaborate art as well as of touching sentiment.

All these writings are great, not only relatively, but absolutely. There is not one of them which would not, if written in our own time, immediately mark its author as a man of very unusual ability. But the point of special concern to us at the present moment is not so much that they show remarkable poetic power, as that they possess technical merits of a very high order. And we are accustomed to believe that, although genius is a purely personal and incommunicable element, technical gains are a com mon possession; that after Marlowe had developed the technique of blank verse, this technique was available for all ; that after Pope had mastered the heroic couplet and Gray the ode, and Poe the short story, all men could write couplets and odes and short stories of technical correctness ; that, as Tennyson puts it, "All can grow the flower now, For all have got the seed." But this was singularly untrue of the technical gains made by Chaucer and his great contemporaries. Pearl and Patience were apparently unknown to the 15th century, but Gawayne and Piers Plowman and Chaucer's works were known and were influential in one way or another throughout the century, Gawayne called into existence a large number of romances dealing with the same hero or with somewhat similar situations, some of them written in verse suggested by the remarkable verse of their model, but the resemblance, even in versification, is only superficial. Piers Plow man gave rise to satirical allegories written in the alliterative long line and furnished the figures and the machinery for many satires in other metres, but the technical excellence of the first Piers Plowman poem was soon buried for centuries under the tremendous social significance of itself and its successors. And Chaucer, in spite of the fact that he was praised and imitated by many writers and definitely claimed as master by more than one, not only transmitted to them scarcely any of the technical conquests he had made, but seems also to have been almost without success in creating any change in the taste of the public that read his poems so eagerly, any demand for better literature than had been written by his predecessors.

Lydgate, Hoccleve and Hawes.

Wide and lasting Chaucer's influence undoubtedly was. Not only was all the poetry of writers who pretended to cultivation and refinement, throughout the century, in England and Scotland, either directly or indirectly imitative of his work, but even the humblest productions of unpretentious writers show at times traces of his influence. Scotland was fortunate in having writers of greater ability than England had (see SCOTLAND: Literature) . In England the three chief followers of Chaucer known to us by name are Lydgate, Hoccleve (see OCCLEVE) and Hawes. Because of their praise of Chaucer and their supposed personal relations to him, Lydgate and Hoccleve are almost inseparable in modern discussions, but century readers and writers appear not to have associated them very closely. Hoccleve was not as prolific as Lydgate, but it is difficult to understand why his work, which compares favour ably in quality with Lydgate's, attracted so much less attention. The title of his greatest poem, De regimine principum, may have repelled readers who were not princely born, though they would have found the work full of the moral and prudential maxims and illustrative anecdotes so dear to them; but his attack upon Sir John Oldcastle as a heretic ought to have been decidedly to the taste of the orthodox upper classes, while his lamentations over his misspent youth, his tales and some of his minor poems might have interested any one. Of a less vigorous spirit than Lydgate, he was, in his mild way, more humorous and more original. Also despite his sense of personal loss in Chaucer's death and his care to transmit to posterity the likeness of his beloved master, he seems to have been less slavish than Lydgate in imitating him. His memory is full of Chaucer's phrases, he writes in verse-forms hallowed by the master's use, and he tries to give to his lines the movement of Chaucer's decasyllables, but he is comparatively free from the influence of those early allegorical works of the master which produced the dreary imitations of the i 5th century.

Lydgate's productivity was enormous—how great no man can say, for, as was the case with Chaucer also, his fame caused many masterless poems to be ascribed to him, but, after making all necessary deductions, the amount of verse that has come down to us from him is astonishing. Here it may suffice to say that his translations are predominantly epic (140,000 lines), and his original compositions predominantly allegorical love poems or didactic poems. If there is anything duller than a dull epic it is a dull allegory, and Lydgate has achieved both. This is not to deny the existence of good passages in his epics and ingenuity in his allegories, but there is no pervading, persistent life in either. His epics, like almost all the narrative verse of the time, whether epic, legend, versified chronicle or metrical romance, seem designed merely to satisfy the desire of 15th century readers for information, the craving for facts—true or fictitious—the same craving that made possible the poems on alchemy, on hunting, on manners and morals, on the duties of parish priests, on the seven liberal arts. His allegories, like most allegories of the age, are ingenious rearrangements of old figures and old machinery; they are full of what had once been imagina tion but had become merely memory assisted by cleverness. The great fault of all his work, as of nearly all the literature of the age, is that it is merely a more or less skilful manipulation of what the author had somewhere read or heard, and not a faithful tran script of the author's own peculiar sense or conception of what he had seen or heard or read. Style, to be sure, was a thing that Lydgate and his fellows tried to supply, and some of them sup plied it abundantly according to their lights. But style meant to them external decoration, classical allusions, personifications, an inverted or even dislocated order of words, and "ornate diction." Stephen Hawes, with his allegorical treatise on the seven liberal sciences, came later than these men, only to write worse. He was a disciple of Lydgate rather than of Chaucer, and is not only lacking in the vigour and sensitiveness which Lydgate sometimes displays, but exaggerates the defects of his master. If it be a merit to have conceived the pursuit of knowledge under the form of the efforts of a knight to win the hand of his lady, it is almost the sole merit to which Hawes can lay claim. Two or three good situations, an episode of low comedy, and the epitaph of the Knight with its famous final couplet, exhaust the list of his credits. The efforts that have been made to trace through Hawes the line of Spenser's spiritual ancestry seem not well advised.

The Failure of Chaucer's Imitators.

It is obvious that the fundamental lack of all these men was imaginative power, poetic ability. But even recognizing that the followers of Chaucer were not men of genius, it seems strange that their imitation of Chaucer was what it was. They not only entirely failed to see what his merits as an artist were and how greatly superior his mature work is to his earlier in point of technique ; they even preferred the earlier and imitated it almost exclusively. Furthermore, his mastery of verse seemed to them to consist solely in writing verses of approximately four or five stresses and arranging them in couplets or in stanzas of seven or eight lines. Their preference for the early allegorical work can be explained by their lack of taste and critical discernment and by the great vogue of allegorical writing in England and France. Men who are just beginning to think about the distinction between literature and ordinary writ ing usually feel that it consists in making literary expression differ as widely as possible from simple direct speech. For this reason some sort of artificial diction is developed and some artificial word order devised. Allegory is used as an elegant method of avoiding unpoetical plainness, and as an easy means of substitut ing logic for imagination. The failure to reproduce in some degree at least the melody and smoothness of Chaucer's decasyllabic verse, and the particular form which that failure took in Lydgate, are to be explained by the fact that Lydgate and his fellows never knew how Chaucer's verse sounded when properly read. We know that a misunderstanding of Chaucer's verse existed from the r6th century to the time of Thomas Tyrwhitt ; it seems clear that it began even earlier, in Chaucer's own lifetime.

There are several poems of the i5th century which were long ascribed to Chaucer. Among them are :—the Complaint of the Black Knight, or Complaint of a Lover's Life, now known to be Lydgate's ; the Mother of God, now ascribed to Hoccleve ; the Cuckoo and the Nightingale, by Clanvowe ; La Belle Dame sans merci, a translation from the French of Alain Chartier by Richard Ros ; Chaucer's Dream, or the Isle of Ladies; the Assembly of Ladies; the Flower and the Leaf ; and the Court of Love. The two poems of Lydgate and Hoccleve are as good as Chaucer's poorest work. The Assembly of Ladies and the Flower and the Leaf are perhaps better than the Book of the Duchess, but not so good as the Parliament of Fowls. The Flower and the Leaf, it will be re membered, was very dear to John Keats, who, like all his contem poraries, regarded it as Chaucer's. An additional interest attaches to both it and the Assembly of Ladies, from the fact that the author may have been a woman. These poems, like the Court of Love, are thoroughly conventional in material, all the figures and poetical machinery may be found in dozens of other poems in England and France, as Prof. Neilson has shown for the Court of Love and Marsh for the Flower and the Leaf ; but there are a freshness of spirit and a love of beauty in them that are not common; the conventional birds and flowers are there, but they seem, like those of Chaucer's Legend, to have some touch of life, and the conventional companies of ladies and gentlemen ride and talk and walk with natural grace and ease. The Court of Love is usually ascribed to a very late date, as late even as the middle of the 16th century. If this is correct, it is a notable instance of the persistence of a Chaucerian influence.

Whatever may be true of the authorship of the Assembly of Ladies and the Flower and the Leaf, there were women writers in England in the middle ages. Juliana of Norwich wrote her Revelations of Divine Love before 1400. The much discussed Dame Juliana Berners, the supposed compiler of the treatise on hunting in the Book of St. Albans, may be mythical, though there is no reason why a woman should not have written such a book; and a shadowy figure that disappears entirely in the sunlight is the supposed authoress of the Nut Brown Maid, for if language is capable of definite meaning, the last stanza declares unequivocally that the poem is the work of a man. But there is a poem warning young women against entering a nunnery which may be by a woman, and there is an interesting entry among the records of New Romney for 1463-64, "Paid to Agnes Forde for the play of the Interlude of our Lord's Passion, 6s. 8d.," which is apparently the earliest mention of a woman dramatist in Eng land. Finally, Margaret, countess of Richmond, the mother of Henry VII., not only aided scholars and encouraged writers, but herself translated the (spurious) fourth book of St. Thomas a Kempis's Imitatio Christi. Another Margaret, the duchess of Burgundy, it will be remembered, encouraged Caxton in his trans lation and printing. Women seem, indeed, to have been especially lovers of books and patrons of writers, and Skelton, if we may believe his Garland of Laurel, was surrounded by a bevy of ladies comparable to a modern literary club.

Songs, Carols and Ballads.

The most original and powerful poetry of the 15th century was composed in popular forms for the ear of the common people and was apparently written with out conscious artistic purpose. Three classes of productions deserve special attention—songs and carols, popular ballads and certain dramatic compositions. The songs and carols belong to a species which may have existed in England before the Norman Conquest, but which certainly was greatly modified by the musi cal and lyric forms of France. The best of them are the direct and simple if not entirely artless expressions of personal emotion, and even when they contain, as they sometimes do, the de scription of a person, a situation, or an event, they deal with these things so subjectively, confine themselves so closely to the rendering of the emotional effect upon the singer, that they lose none of their directness or simplicity. Some of them deal with secular subjects, some with religious, and some are curious and delightful blendings of religious worship and aspiration with earthly tenderness for the embodiments of helpless infancy and protecting motherhood which gave Christianity so much of its power over the affections and imagination of the middle ages. Even those which begin as mere expressions of joy in the Yule tide eating and drinking and merriment catch at moments hints of higher joys, of finer emotions, and lift singer and hearer above the noise and stir of earth.

The lyrics which describe a situation form a logical, if not a real transition to those which narrate an episode or an event. The most famous of the latter, the Nut Brown Maid, has often been called a ballad, and "lyrical ballad" it is in the sense estab lished by Coleridge and Wordsworth, but its affinities are rather with the song or carol than with the f olk-ballad, and, like Henry son's charming Robin and Malkin, it is certainly the work of a man of culture and of conscious artistic purpose and methods. Unaccompanied, as it is, by any other work of the same author, this poem, with its remarkable technical merits, is an even more astonishing literary phenomenon than the famous single sonnet of Blanco White.

The folk-ballad, like the song or carol, belongs in some form to immemorial antiquity. It can hardly be doubted that in some of the folk-ballads of the 15th century are preserved not only traditions of dateless antiquity, but formal elements and technical processes that actually are derived from communal song and dance. By the 15th century, however, communal habits and processes of composition had ceased, and the traditional elements, formulae and technique had become merely conventional aids and guides for the individual singer. Ancient as they were, con ventional as, in a sense, they also were, they exercised none of the deadening, benumbing influence of ordinary conventions. At their best moments the best ballads have an almost incomparable power, and to a people sick, as we are, of the ordinary, the usual, the very trivialities and impertinences of the ballads only help to define and emphasize these best moments. In histories of English literature the ballads have been so commonly discussed in con nection with their rediscovery in the i8th century, that we are apt to forget that some of the very best were demonstrably com posed in the i 5th and that many others of uncertain date probably belong to the same time.

Along with the genuine ballads dealing with a recent event or a traditional theme there were ballads in which earlier romances are retold in ballad style. This was doubtless inevitable in view of the increasing epic tendency of the ballad and the interest still felt in metrical romances, but it should not mislead us into re garding the genuine folk-ballad as an out-growth of the metrical romance.

Besides the ordinary epic or narrative ballad, the i 5th century produced ballads in dramatic form, or, perhaps it were better to say, dramatized some of its epic ballads. How commonly this was done we do not know, but the scanty records of the period indicate that it was a widespread custom, though only three plays of this character (all concerning Robin Hood) have come down to us. These plays had, however, no further inde pendent development, but merely furnished elements of incident and atmosphere to later plays of a more highly organized type. With these ballad plays may also be mentioned the Christmas plays (usually of St. George) and the sword-dance plays, which also flourished in the i 5th century, but survive for us only as obscure elements in the masques and plays of Ben Jonson and in such modern rustic performances as Thomas Hardy has so charmingly described in The Return of the Native. For the con tribution made by the i 5th century to dramatic literature, the reader may be referred to the article DRAMA.

The Lack of Good Prose.

Not much good prose was written in the 15th century. It is doubtful if any one thought of prose as a possible medium of artistic expression. Chaucer apparently did not, in spite of the comparative excellence of his Preface to the Astrolabe and his occasional noteworthy successes with the difficulties of the philosophy of Boethius; Wycliffe is usually clumsy; and the translators of Mandeville, though they often give us passages of great charm, obviously were plain men who merely translated as best they could. There was, however, a comparatively large amount of prose written in the 15th century, mainly for religious or educational purposes, dealing with the same sorts of subjects that were dealt with in verse, and in some cases not distinguishable from the verse by any feature but the absence of rhyme. The vast body of this we must neglect; only five writers need be named : John Capgrave, Reginald Pecock, Sir John Fortescue, Caxton and Malory. Capgrave, the com piler of the first chronicle in English prose since the Conquest, wrote by preference in Latin; his English is a condescension to those who could not read Latin and has the qualities which belong to the talk of an earnest and sincere man of commonplace ability. Pecock and Fortescue are more important. Pecock (c. 146o) was a man of singularly acute and logical mind. He prided himself upon his dialectic skill and his faculty for discovering arguments that had been overlooked by others. His writings, therefore—or at least the Repressor—are excellent in general structure and arrangement, his ideas are presented clearly and simply, with few digressions or excrescences, and his sentences, though sometimes too long, are more like modern prose than any others before the age of Elizabeth. His style is lightened by fre quent figures of speech, mostly illustrative, and really illustrative, of his ideas, while his intellectual ingenuity cannot fail to interest even those whom his prejudices and preconceptions repel. Fortescue, like Capgrave, wrote by preference in Latin, and, like Pecock, was philosophical and controversial. But his principal English work, the Difference between an Absolute and a Limited Monarchy, differs from Pecock's in being rather a pleading than a logical argument, and the geniality and glowing patriotism of its author give it a far greater human interest.

Caxton and Malory.

No new era in literary composition was marked by the activity of William Caxton as translator and publisher, though the printing-press has, of course, changed fundamentally the problem of the dissemination and preservation of culture, and thereby ultimately affected literary production profoundly. But neither Caxton nor the writers whose works he printed produced anything new in form or spirit. His publications range over the whole field of 15th century literature, and no doubt he tried, as his quaint prefaces indicate, to direct the public taste to what was best among the works of the past, as when he printed and reprinted the Canterbury Tales, but among all his numerous publications not one is the herald of a new era. The only book of permanent interest as literature which he introduced to the world was the Morte d'Arthur of Sir Thomas Malory, and this is a compilation from older romances (see ARTHURIAN LEGEND). It is, to be sure, the one book of permanent literary significance produced in England in the 15th century; it glows with the warmth and beauty of the old knight's conception of chivalry and his love for the great deeds and great men of the visionary past, and it continually allures the reader by its fresh and vivid diction and by a syntax which, though sometimes faulty, has almost always a certain naive charm.

Whatever may have been the effect of the wars and the growth of industrial life in England in withdrawing men of the best abilities from the pursuit of literature, neither these causes nor any other interfered with the activity of writers of lesser powers. The amount of writing is really astonishing, as is also its range. More than 30o separate works (exclusive of the large number still ascribed to Lydgate and of the 7o printed by Caxton) have been made accessible by the Early English Text Society and other public or private presses, and it seems probable that an equal number remains as yet unpublished. No list of these writings can be given here, but it may not be unprofitable to indicate the range of interests by noting the classes of writing represented. The classification is necessarily rough, as some writings belong to more than one type. We may note, first, love poems, allegorical and unallegorical, narrative, didactic, lyrical and quasi-lyrical; poems autobiographical and exculpatory; poems of eulogy and appeal for aid; tales of entertainment or instruction, in prose and in verse ; histories ancient and modern, and brief accounts of recent historical events, in prose and in verse ; prose romances and metrical romances; legends and lives of saints, in prose and in verse ; poems and prose works of religious meditation, devotion and controversy; treatises of religious instruction, in prose and in verse; ethical and philosophical treatises, and ethical and pru dential treatises ; treatises of government, of political economy, of foreign travel, of hygiene, of surgery, of alchemy, of heraldry, of hunting and hawking and fishing, of farming, of good manners, and of cooking and carving. Prosaic and intended merely to serve practical uses as many of these were, verse is the medium of expression as often as prose. Besides this large amount and variety of English compositions, it must be remembered that much was also written in Latin, and that Latin and French works of this and other centuries were read by the educated classes.

Although the intellectual and spiritual movement which we call the Italian Renaissance was not unknown in England in the 14th and 15th centuries, it is not strange that it exercised no perceptible influence upon English literature, except in the case of Chaucer. Chaucer was the only English man of letters before the i6th century who knew Italian literature. The Italians who visited England and the Englishmen who visited Italy were interested, not in literature, but in scholarship. Such studies as were pursued by Free, Grey, Flemming, Tilly, Gunthorpe and others who went to Italy, made them better grammarians and rhetoricians, and no doubt gave them a freer, wider outlook, but upon their return to England they became immediately absorbed in administrative cares, which left them little leisure for literary composition, even if they had had any inclination to write. They prepared the way, however, for the leaders of the great intellec tual awakening which began in England with Linacre, Colet, More and their fellows, and which finally culminated in the age of Spenser, Bacon, Shakespeare, Jonson, Gilbert, Harvey and Harriott.

When the middle ages ceased in England it is impossible to say definitely. Long after the new learning and culture of the Renaissance had been introduced there, long after classical and Italian models were eagerly chosen and followed, the epic and lyric models of the middle ages were admired and imitated, and the ancient forms of the drama lived side by side with the new until the time of Shakespeare himself. John Skelton, although according to Erasmus "unum Britannicarum literarum lumen ac decus," and although possessing great originality and vigour both in diction and in versification when attacking his enemies or in dulging in playful rhyming, was not only a great admirer of Lydgate, but equalled even the worst of his predecessors in aureate pedantries of diction, in complicated impossibilities of syntax, and in meaningless inversions of word-order whenever he wished to write elegant and dignified literature. And not a little of the absurd diction of the middle of the i6th century is merely a continuation of the bad ideals and practices of the refined writers of the 15th.

In fine, the i 5th century has, apart from its vigorous, though sometimes coarse, popular productions, little that can interest the lover of literature. Although, however, in the quality of its literary output it is decidedly inferior to the 14th century, the amount and the wide range of its productions indicate the gradual extension of the habit of reading to classes of society that were previously unlettered ; and this was of great importance for the future of English literature, just as the innumerable dramatic performances throughout England were important in developing audiences for Marlowe and Shakespeare and Beaumont and Fletcher.

For bibliography see vol. ii. of the Cambridge History of Literature (Igog) ; and Brandl's Geschichte der mittelenglischen Literatur (re printed from Paul's Grundriss der germanischen Philologie) . Inter esting general discussions may be found in the larger histories of English Literature, such as Ten Brink's, Jusserand's, and (a little more antiquated) Courthope's and Morley's. (J. M. MA.)