Hitherto we have known scarcely anything about the lives, and usually have not even known the names, of the writers in English verse and prose. About

The Morning Star of Song who made
His music heard below,

about Geoffrey Chaucer, we know more than we do of Shakespeare.

Chaucer is the earliest English poet who is still read for human pleasure, as well as by specialists in the studies of literature, language, and prosody. A few of his lines are part of the common stock of familiar quotations. Coming between two periods of literary twilight—the second saddened rather than cheered by notes more like those of the owl than of the lark and nightingale,—Chaucer is himself the sun of England during the age of the glory and decline of the Plantagenets. His "Canterbury Tales" show us the world in which he lived, or at least part of that world; his pilgrims are personages in that glorious pageant which Froissart painted—kings, ladies, nobles and knights in steel, or in velvet and cloth of gold; tournaments glitter in all the colours and devices of the heralds—while the horizon is dim with the smoke of burning towns and villages.

It is not really possible to say what conditions produce great poets: they may arise in times of peace or war; in times quiet or revolutionary; at prosperous Courts or in the clay-built cottages of peasants. At least Chaucer lived a long time in an age eagerly astir, lived through the light cast by the great victories of Edward III,—Crécy and Poitiers,—the years when London knew two[Pg 79] captive Kings, John of France and David of Scotland; the years when Edward turned away from the all-but conquered Scotland to fight the France which he could not conquer. Chaucer knew the Court triumphant, and the Court overshadowed by the discredited old age of Edward III, the fatal malady of the Black Prince, the troubles of the minority of Richard II, and the peasant rising of Wat Tyler. He had his part in the patronage of that art-loving King, by character and fate more resembling a Stuart than a Plantagenet; and he was in friendly relations with the rising House of Lancaster. He marked the dawn of the religious and social revolution in the doctrines of Wyclif and of the Lollards, the hatred of the rich and noble, the scorn of priests and monks and friars. He felt the poetic influences of France and Italy, and, if not in Italy, certainly in France, had poetic friends. He bore arms in France: in Italy and France he fulfilled diplomatic duties; at home he held a courtly place; he sat in Parliament; he was a complete man of the world and of affairs, as well as a man of learning and of letters. He was always of open, kind, and cheerful humour; still, when nicknamed "Old Grizzle" by his friends, dipping a white beard contentedly in the Gascon wine; still "not without the lyre," not a deserter of the Muse. His portrait, as Old Grizzle, white-bearded and white-haired, a rosary in his hand, shows a face refined, kindly, and humane.

The father of the poet, John Chaucer, was a citizen of London, a prosperous vintner, or wine-merchant. The date of the poet\'s birth is unknown, that he died an old man in 1400 is certain. His birth year was for long given as 1328, when his father was scarcely 16, and was unmarried. The date 1328 for the poet\'s birth must be wrong, and the year 1340 is uncertain. In a trial of 1386, to decide whether the Scropes or Grosvenors had the better right to blazon the famous "Bend Or," Chaucer was described as "of the age of forty years and more, having borne arms for twenty-seven years". "And more" is vague, we cannot be certain that it means "just over forty years of age," though that (as far as I have observed) is the usual meaning in old records of ages of witnesses. In some cases, on the other hand, they are given most incorrectly. Chaucer\'s own[Pg 80] remarks about his "eld" in late poems, tell us little; at 40 Thackeray wrote of himself as if he "lay in Methusalem\'s cradle".

As, in 1386, Chaucer had borne arms for twenty-seven years, that takes us back to 1359, when he went, under the standard of Lionel, Duke of Clarence, on a far from triumphant expedition of Edward III against France. He is unlikely, at that date (1359) to have been under 15 years of age; he may have been born as late as 1343, or anywhere between 1340 and 1343. The household accounts of the wife of the Duke of Clarence prove that Chaucer was a member of her household, and, in 1357, she, and Chaucer, were staying with John of Gaunt, at Hatfield, in Yorkshire.

In the campaign of 1359, when Chaucer bore arms, Edward III failed to take Rheims and Paris: he wasted the country vainly, and made peace, at Bretigny, in 1360. Somewhere and somehow Chaucer was taken prisoner by the French, whether in a skirmish, or while foraging, or when visiting his lady, or absorbed in a book, or meditating the Muse, and contending with the difficulties of rhyme. His captors thought that there was money in his case, or they would have knocked him on the head. There was money. Edward III paid, sixteen pounds, whether as the whole or as part of his ransom (1 March, 1360). The sum (equivalent to our ￡200) was not then insignificant for a youth not of noble birth, though, in 1368, an Esquire.

Account books show Chaucer (1367) as a valet of the Royal chamber, like Molière (and Shakespeare!) in France during the time of war in 1369; salaried by the King; a married man; pensioned by John of Gaunt in 1374, and receiving a daily pitcher of wine, commuted for money in 1378. In 1372-1373, he went on a mission to Genoa and Florence. Whether he then met the famous poet Petrarch or not, is uncertain: in his "Clerk\'s Tale," the Clerk says that he met Petrarch; it does not follow that Chaucer was so fortunate. In 1374 he got a good place in the Custom House, in the wool department, and, 1375-1376, had valuable gifts from the King. In 1377 he went on a mission to Flanders, and on another to France. Froissart the delightful[Pg 81] chronicler mentions him in this connexion. In the following year he went on a mission to Visconti in Milan, and to the celebrated English commander of mercenaries, Sir John Hawkwood.

His experiences made Chaucer equally fit to sing of "the Court, the camp, the grove": his various posts in the Civil Service brought him acquainted with merchant-men, architects, all sorts and conditions of men. In 1386 he sat in Parliament for a division of Kent. Parliament made an attack on the Court, and Chaucer lost his offices, which he had for some time performed by deputy. Later he received valuable appointments, but by 1398 he needed and obtained royal protection from his creditors; probably he was never a frugal man, he was not in the best circumstances towards the end of his life, but neither Richard II or Henry IV let Old Grizzle starve. Henry was no sooner on the throne (30 September, 1399) than (3 October) he gave the poet a pension of forty marks and ratified a pension given by the ill-fated Richard five years previously. If Chaucer\'s wife, Philippa, was the sister of Catherine, mistress and (1396) wife of John of Gaunt, father of Henry IV, the poet had a friend in the Lancastrian party. But the fact is uncertain, unimportant, and a great cause of the spilling of ink. Chaucer died on 25 October, 1400.

We only know, as regards Chaucer\'s children, that he had a little boy, Lewis, whom, in his prose work on the astrolabe, he addresses in a style that makes us love him. He gives him, at his earnest prayer, an astrolabe and writes for him, in English, a little treatise on its use, "for Latin can\'st thou but small, my little son". The poet, the friend of that less charming minstrel, "moral Gower," left a fragrant memory.

When we open Chaucer\'s works at the Prologue to the "Canterbury Tales," usually placed in the forefront, and when we remember the wilderness of long romances through which we have wandered, the happy change of scene, the return to actual human life, is surprising.

Chaucer is by no means free from the blemishes of "middle English" literature. If he is not to be called prolix in his narratives, "when his eye is on the object"—the main object,—he is none the less profuse in digressions. His mastery of verse was not[Pg 82] born fully armed; he had to acquire it by effort, by experiment; he had to feel his way. An unusually large number of his poems are unfinished: some he seems to have abandoned, like the "Legend of Good Women," because he felt that he was on the wrong path; that his task was no longer pleasant to himself, and therefore certainly could not give pleasure to his readers. He was, at first, eager to impart information, as the early scops conceived it their duty to do. Gathering his materials from all sources, Latin, French, and Italian, he, in "The Book of the Duchess" (about 1369), makes the bereaved husband not only allude to many classical tales of sorrow, but actually give his authorities for each case; "And so seyth Dares Frights," or "Aurora telleth so". Even the old habit of preaching at great length, the habit of edifying, clung to Chaucer. He was a man of the world, the last man to risk martyrdom for any advanced theological ideas which he might be inclined to entertain; and not the first to suppose that any set of opinions contained the absolute truth. In his day a fierce attack was made against the wealth of the Church and the luxury into which many members of the Regulars, of the various monkish Orders, had fallen. The curse of a parson was no longer so much feared as it had been. The exhibition of saintly relics for money, the arrival of pardons "hot from Rome," could safely be derided. The friars had been the butts of the French authors of fabliaux, tales of coarse popular humour, for two centuries.

Such censures were not heterodox, they did not assail matters of faith, and the satire of Chaucer is always as good-humoured as it is humorous. To him the Pardoner and Summonour of the "Canterbury Tales," and the rest of the riff-raff of the Church are amusing knaves: he has Shakespeare\'s smiling tolerance for such a rogue as Parolles. He is earnestly sympathetic in his famous portrait of the good and gentle parish priest, a man of "true religion and undefiled," a man of "the Order of St. James," like the ladies in the "Ancren Riwle".

It were much more pleasant, perhaps more profitable, to linger over and lovingly enumerate the charms of Chaucer at his best, than to trace him through his early experiments to such masterpieces[Pg 83] as the blending of old Greek romance and manners with the manners and romance of chivalry in "The Knight\'s Tale," and in "Troilus and Criseyde". But it is customary to trace the "making" of Chaucer, not only through his experiences of Court, and camp, and grove, and city, but through his literary work. It is certain that in youth he translated that great popular French poem, the "Roman de la Rose," for he says so in his prologue to his "Legend of Good Women". The French poem was begun by Guillaume de Lorris about a century before the birth of Chaucer, as an allegory on the refinements of the doctrine of Love, as taught in the Courts of Love. Guillaume says that he has the warrant of Macrobius, in his "Dream of Scipio," for supposing that dreams are not wholly to be neglected: so he dreams, of course in May, of how the birds sang, and how he walked beside that very stream which the author of "Pearl" borrowed, and converted into the River that sunders the living and the dead. He encounters allegorical works of art, representative of all things evil, outside the walls of a beautiful garden, within which are Love and all things good. The ideas have a sweet vernal freshness, on their first presentation, but by repetition become as artificial as those of the "Carte du Tendre," the map of Love\'s land which amused the "Précieuses," the affected literary ladies, in the youth of Molière (1650-1660). The dreamer desires a lovely Rose, watched by a squire "Bel Accueil" (Fair Welcome) and the adventures, and fables from Ovid, are of a kind so taking to mediaeval readers that henceforth every poet had his May dream, birds, river, Love, Venus, allegorical personages, and the rest of the "machinery". De Lorris left the lover in despair, but Jean de Meung continued the poem at enormous length, and in a spirit far from chivalrous: he introduced every kind of new heresy against the feudal ideals, and so began a controversy in which Gerson, who lived to befriend the cause of Jeanne d\'Arc (1429) took up his pen in defence of Christianity and chastity.

This "Roman de la Rose," or much of it, Chaucer assuredly did translate, but on the question as to whether the "Romaunt of the Rose," printed in his works, is wholly, or only in part, or is not at all from his hand, scholars dispute endlessly. It is not[Pg 84] possible, here, to follow the mazes of the dispute, which turns on the quality of the work, the closeness or laxity of the translation in various parts, the presence or absence of traces of the northern dialect (Chaucer wrote Midland English), the correctness or incorrectness of the rhymes, and other details. The opinion that the first 1700 lines or so are Chaucer\'s, that his manuscript was defective, that the later portions, some 6000 lines, were filled up from manuscripts by other hands, is not certain, but is not improbable. Many other views are defended.

Early Poems.

Though we do not often know the dates of Chaucer\'s poems, the development of his genius can be traced with much probability. Roughly speaking, in his first period he is mainly inspired by French influences; in his second are added Italian influences; he was always reading such Latin authors as he could procure; he was suppling his style by experiments in French measures demanding much search for rhymes; and finally, in the "Canterbury Tales," his best work is purely English in character, though he still introduces translations from other languages when it suits his purpose.

The Dethe of the Duchesse.

is of 1369-1370, for it deplores the decease of Blanche, wife of John of Gaunt (Lancaster), and the lady departed this life in 1369. Here Chaucer works in accordance with the usual formula of the "Roman de la Rose". He begins with a dream, but his sleep is a respite in a period of eight years of insomnia, described so pitifully that the passage seems autobiographical. He cannot tell, he says why he is unable to sleep,

I hold? hit be a siknesse
That I have suffred this eight yere.

Perhaps his nerves were shattered by the circumstances of his capture and durance in 1360, for prisoners of war were treated with great cruelty, placed in holes under heavy stones, or locked up in wooden cages.

Unable to sleep, Chaucer has Ovid\'s story of Ceyx and Alcyone[Pg 85] read to him. He says elsewhere that in youth he made a poem on this tale; now he probably utilized his old material in the poem on the Duchess. In the Ceyx tale, Alcyone prays to Juno for the grace of sleep and dream, and Chaucer, humorous always, vows that he will even risk the heresy of presenting gifts to heathen gods, Morpheus and Juno, if they will give him slumber. His prayer is heard, and this prologue is by far the best part of "The Dethe of Blanche the Duchesse". It is personal, it is touching, and the story is charmingly told.

In his sleep comes the usual dream of the chamber decorated with works of mythological art (a stock feature, as in the "Roman de la Rose"), there is a hunting scene, with French terms of venery, and then Chaucer meets a mourner, John of Gaunt, whose long plaint and narration of similar sorrows in fable, with due reference to authorities, is prolix and pedantic, to a modern taste.

This piece is in rhymed octosyllabic couplets.

Other Early Poems.

"The Compleynte unto Pite" (Pity) is the earliest of Chaucer\'s poems in "Rhyme Royal" (so called, some think, because James I of Scotland used it much later in "The King\'s Quhair," a far-fetched guess). The poet seeks Pity, and finds her dead; he adds the petition which he meant to have presented to her, that of a despairing lover. The ideas are hackneyed, and the piece is a mere exercise. The metre, later much used by Chaucer in narrative runs thus:—

This is to seyne, I wol be youres ever;
Though ye me slee by Crueltee, your fo,
Algate my spirit shal never dissever
Fro your servyse, for any peyne or we.
Sith ye be deed,—alias! that hit is so!—
Thus for your deth I may wel wepe and pleyne
With herte sore and fill of besy peyne.

The "A.B.C." is a hymn of prayer to Our Lady, each stanza beginning with each successive letter of the alphabet. It is an exercise in translation from a French original; the stanzas are shorter than in the French.

[Pg 86]

"The Compleynte of Mars" tells of the wooing of a mediaeval Mars and Venus, interrupted by Apollo "with torche in honde"; the original source of the story is the song of the Ph?acian minstrel in the "Odyssey," but that is humorous, while Chaucer is sympathetic; Mars asks poets not to make game of his passion,

take hit noght a-game.

The Ph?acian singer did "take it a-game".

"A Compleynte to his Lady" is of the conventional kind, and an exercise in metres.

"Anelida and Arcite" is also scholar\'s work, but the scholar has now learned Italian, during his Italian mission of 1372; has read and in places translates the "Teseide" of Boccaccio, which he often utilized. He had also Statius, a late Latin poet, and other models, or he dealt in his own inventions. As in the "Knight\'s Tale," Theseus returns from conquered Scythia, with his bride, Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons, and her sister, Emily, the heroine of the "Knight\'s Tale". The unpopular tyrant, Creon, is ruling in Thebes, where Anelida loves Arcite, who is a true lover, in the "Knight\'s Tale," but here "double in love," a follower of Lamech, in Genesis, the first man who loved two ladies at once. His second love holds him tightly "up by the bridle," so Anelida despairs, expressing her woe in a kind of ode, strophe and anti-strophe, in stanzas of eight, and next of nine lines, with complicated rhymes, finally with rhymes in the middle as well as at the end of each line. The poem, more interesting than the previous experiments, and not without passion, is unfinished: ends abruptly.

"The Parlement of Fowls" appears to be a kind of Laureate\'s Ode on the marriage (January, 1382) of Richard II with Anne of Bohemia, who previously had two other wooers, a Prince of Bavaria, and the Margrave of Meissen. When the Birds hold their Parliament, the Formel Eagle represents Anne, Richard is the Royal Tercel Eagle, the two other tercels are the German wooers. Chaucer was always a most literary poet, and was still an adaptive poet. As he must begin with a dream, he versifies the contents of Cicero\'s "Dream of Scipio": he takes a little from Dante, a little from Claudian, the whole Pageant of Birds he borrows from Alain Delille\'s[Pg 87] "Plaint of Nature," greatly improving on it, while, in the debate of the birds on St. Valentine\'s Day, as to which tercel shall win the formel tercel, he gives way to his own sense of humour. The verses are vers de société, designed not for our taste, but for that of the society of his time. Chaucer himself perceived the tediousness of the love-pleading of the tercels: like the Host in the "Canterbury Tales," when bored by Sir Thopas and the Monk\'s tragedies, the jury of birds cry to be released,

The noise of foules for to ben delivered
So loude rong, "have doon and let us wende!"

In giving their verdicts the Goose is remote from sentiment, saying to the unsuccessful wooer,

But she wol love him, lat him love another!

The turtle-dove blushes, and gives her word for immortal hopeless love. The poem, in the seven line stanza, ends with a rondel, confessedly translated from the French, and the poet wakens from his dream and returns to his dear books, on the look-out for new material. He has shown his mastery of style, and his knowledge, but he has not yet "come to his kingdom".

Troilus and Criseyde.

Not to linger over other minor pieces, we may say that, in "Troilus and Criseyde," Chaucer does come to his kingdom, and proves himself a Master, granting the taste and conditions of his age, while, in many beautiful passages, he attains to what is good for universal taste, to what is universally human.

The subject is an episode in the mediaeval legend of the Siege of Troy, as it was embellished on the lines of the pseudo-Dares and the pseudo-Dictys, by Beno?t de Sainte-Maure, then by Guido de Colonna, and then by Boccaccio in the "Filostrato". The last gives Chaucer his starting-point; out of 8239 lines, 2583 are reckoned to be translated from Boccaccio, while there are borrowings from Petrarch, and much moralizing is rendered out of the prose of Bo?thius, whom King Alfred translated into Anglo-Saxon, and Chaucer into the prose of his own time. Chaucer uses his materials as he pleases, greatly expanding, transposing, and[Pg 88] omitting. Almost all his own is the character of Pandarus, who, in Homer, is merely notable for having broken a solemn truce by wounding Menelaus with an arrow. Boccaccio made him a young cousin of Criseyde, who, in the mediaeval legend, stays shamefaced in Troy, while her father, Calchas, deserts to the Greeks. Troilus, scarcely mentioned by Homer, is the brother, and in battle almost the equal of H............