Halleck's New English Literature. Reuben Post Halleck
"His eyes twinkled in his heed aright,
As doon the sterres in the frosty night."
Our eyes and ears distinctly perceive the jolly Monk, as he canters along:—
"And, whan he rood, men might his brydel here
Ginglen in a whistling wind as clere,
And eek as loude as dooth the chapel-belle."
II. Chaucer's pervasive, sympathetic humor is especially characteristic. We can see him looking with twinkling eyes at the Miller, "tolling thrice"; at the Monk, "full fat and in good point," hunting with his greyhounds, "swift as fowl in flight," or smiling before a fat roast swan; at the Squire, keeping the nightingale company; at the Doctor, prescribing the rules of astrology. The Nun feels a touch of his humor:—
"Ful wel she song the service divyne,
Entuned in hir nose ful semely."
Of the lawyer, he says:—
"No-wher so bisy a man as he ther nas,
And yet he semed bisier than he was."
Sometimes Chaucer's humor is so delicate as to be lost on those who are not quick-witted. Lowell instances the case of the Friar, who, "before setting himself softly down, drives away the cat," and adds what is true only of those who have acute understanding: "We know, without need of more words, that he has chosen the snuggest corner."
His humor is often a graceful cloak for his serious philosophy of existence. The humor in the Prologue does not impair its worth to the student of fourteenth-century life.
III. Although Chaucer's humor and excellence in lighter vein are such marked characteristics, we must not forget his serious qualities; for he has the Saxon seriousness as well as the Norman airiness. As he looks over the struggling world, he says with a sympathetic heart:—
"Infinite been the sorwes and the teres
Of olde folk, and folk of tendre yeres."[35]
In like vein, we have:—
"This world nis but a thurghfare ful of wo,
And we ben pilgrimes, passinge to and fro;
Deeth is an ende of every worldly sore."[36]
"Her nis non hoom, her nis but wildernesse.
Forthe, pylgrime, forthe! forthe, beste out of thi stal!
Knowe thi contree, look up, thank God of al!"[37]
The finest character in the company is that of the Parish Priest, who attends to his flock like a good Samaritan:—
"But Cristes lore, and his apostles twelve,
He taughte, and first he folwed it him-selve."
IV. The largeness of his view of human nature is remarkable. Some poets, either intentionally or unintentionally, paint one type of men accurately and distort all the rest. Chaucer impartially portrays the highest as well as the lowest, and the honest man as well as the hypocrite. The pictures of the roguish Friar and the self-denying Parish Priest, the Oxford Scholar and the Miller, the Physician and the Shipman, are painted with equal fidelity to life. In the breadth and kindliness of his view of life, Chaucer is a worthy predecessor of Shakespeare. Dryden's verdict on Chaucer's poetry is: "Here is God's plenty."
V. His love of nature is noteworthy for that early age. Such lines as these manifest something more than a desire for rhetorical effect in speaking of nature's phenomena:—
"Now welcom somer, with thy sonne softe,
That hast this wintres weders over-shake,
And driven awey the longe nightes blake[38]!"[39]
His affection for the daisy has for five hundred years caused many other people to look with fonder eyes upon that flower.
VI. He stands in the front rank of those who have attempted to tell stories in melodious verse. Lowell justly says: "One of the world's three or four great story-tellers, he was also one of the best versifiers that ever made English trip and sing with a gayety that seems careless, but where every foot beats time to the tune of the thought."
[Illustration: MORRIS DANCERS.From a Manuscript of Chaucer's Time.]
VII. He is the first great English author to feel the influence of the Renaissance, which did not until long afterward culminate in England. Gower has his lover hear tales from a confessor in cloistered quiet. Chaucer takes his Pilgrims out for jolly holidays in the April sunshine. He shows the spirit of the Renaissance in his joy in varied life, in his desire for knowledge of all classes of men as well as of books, in his humor, and in his general reaching out into new fields. He makes us feel that he lives in a merrier England, where both the Morris dancer and the Pilgrim may show their joy in life.
What Chaucer did for the English Language.—Before Chaucer's works, English was, as we have seen, a language of dialects. He wrote in the Midland dialect, and aided in making that the language of England. Lounsbury says of Chaucer's influence: "No really national language could exist until a literature had been created which would be admired and studied by all who could read, and taken as a model by all who could write. It was only a man of genius that could lift up one of these dialects into a preëminence over the rest, or could ever give to the scattered forces existing in any one of them the unity and vigor of life. This was the work that Chaucer did." For this reason he deserves to be called our first modern English poet. At first sight, his works look far harder to read than they really are, because the spelling has changed so much since Chaucer's day.
SUMMARY
The period from the Norman Conquest to 1400 is remarkable (1) for bringing into England French influence and closer contact with the continent; (2) for the development of (a) a more centralized government, (b) the feudal system and chivalry, (c) better civil courts of justice and a more representative government, Magna Charta being one of the steps in this direction; (3) for the influence of religion, the coming of the friars, the erection of unsurpassed Gothic cathedrals; (4) for the struggles of the peasants to escape their bondage, for a striking decline in the relative importance of the armored knight, and for Wycliffe's movement for a religious reformation.
This period is also specially important because it gave to England a new language of greater flexibility and power. The old inflections, genders, formative prefixes, and capability of making self-explaining compounds were for the most part lost. To supply the places of lost words and to express those new ideas which came with the broader experiences of an emancipated, progressive nation, many new words were adopted from the French and the Latin. When the time for literature came, Chaucer found ready for his pen the strongest, sincerest, and most flexible language that ever expressed a poet's thought.
In tracing the development of the literature of this period, we have noted (1) the metrical romances; (2) Geoffrey of Monmouth's (Latin) History of the Kings of Britain, and Layamon's Brut, with their stories of Lear, Cymbeline and King Arthur; (3) the Ormulum, a metrical paraphrase of those parts of the Gospels used in church service; (4) the Ancren Riwle, remarkable for its natural eloquent prose and its noble ethics, as well as for showing the development of the language; (5) the lyrical poetry, beginning to be redolent of the odor of the blossom and resonant with the song of the bird; (6) the Handlyng Synne, in which we stand on the threshold of modern English; (7) Mandeville's Travels, with its entertaining stories; (8) Wycliffe's monumental translation of the Bible and vigorous religious prose pamphlets; (9) Piers Plowman, with its pictures of homely life, its intense desire for higher ideals and for the reformation of social and religious life; (10) Gower's Confessio Amantis, a collection of tales about love; and (11) Chaucer's poetry, which stands in the front rank for the number of vivid pictures of contemporary life, for humor, love of nature, melody, and capacity for story-telling.
REFERENCES FOR FURTHER STUDY
HISTORICAL