This

said that the poem in which he is most indebted to an Italian poet, Troilus and Criseyde, is also that in which he is most independent. He has not translated Boccaccio; he has discovered in the Italian poet the secret of his harmonious composition, and he turns this to his own account in a way of his own invention. Chaucer's Troilus is a very different thing from Boccaccio's Filostrato, and the difference is made by that original humour and that faculty of drawing upon his own experience in virtue of which the Prologue to The Canterbury Tales has kept its freshness for five centuries. Prologue produces a startling effect by contrast with such early pieces as The Complaint to Pity, and has been very naturally considered as the effect of a strong original inclination for comic or satiric poetry finding its own mode of expression, and throwing off all authority of masters and precepts. This view requires to be modified by one consideration at least, namely, that Chaucer at the time when he was working hardest to appropriate the lessons of Boccaccio-in his Troilus-was also writing original comic poetry for the same poem, without any help from anyone, and with no less success than in the Prologue, though the Prologue is better known.

Summary of influences.

Thus Chaucer's poetry represents, among other things, the old courtly medieval tradition, the chivalrous love-poetry which was already rather old-fashioned, but still had some beauty of its own; also, and much more fully, the Italian discoveries of the fourteenth century, the first successful attempts to form a modern literature on classical lines; while over and above all this, there is Chaucer's own faculty as a poet gradually disengaging itself from all contemporary fashions and coming out clear and distinct from the medieval traditions. In the case of few writers is the increase of power so clearly recognisable or the alteration of poetical ambition so easily traced in the successive manners of working. At the same time Chaucer is always ready to fall back into his earlier ways of thinking, and to the end of his life he shows a tolerance almost incredible for everything, however commonplace, touching the subjects in which he has once been interested.

Chaucer.

§ 2. Geoffrey Chaucer was born, probably about the year 1340, the son of John Chaucer, a citizen of London and a wine merchant, who appears to have had some connection with the Court. He spent some time in Life of his youth in the service of Elizabeth, Countess of Ulster, wife of Lionel, Duke of Clarence, the third son of Edward III. In 1359 he was in the wars in France, and was taken prisoner: his ransom was made up on March 1, 1360, the king contributing £16. He appears to have entered the king's service shortly after as a Yeoman of the King's Chamber, becoming in due time esquire. In 1367 he was still yeoman

Whether

-valettus-in receipt of a salary of twenty marks. he was at that time married is uncertain: Philippa Chaucer received a pension in 1366 as one of the Damsels of the Queen's Chamber, and Philippa Chaucer is found mentioned as Geoffrey's wife in 1374. In 1369 Chaucer wrote The Book of the Duchess, a poem in memory of Blanche of Lancaster, wife of John of Gaunt. In the same year he was in France taking part in the war there. In the year 1370 he was employed in diplomatic business abroad, and in the end of 1372 he was sent on his first mission to Italy to make an agreement with Genoa as to a Genoese trading factory in England. He visited Florence, and possibly also may have gone to Padua and met Petrarch there. In 1374 the king granted him a pitcher of wine daily; this grant was afterwards commuted for a pension of twenty marks. Later, in 1374, Chaucer was appointed Comptroller of the Customs and Subsidy of Wools, Skins and Tanned Hides in the Port of London; he was at this time in possession of a house over the gate of Aldgate. He continued to be employed in diplomatic affairs, going to Flanders, and again to France in 1377. This was the year of Edward III's death, an event which did not make any change in Chaucer's fortunes. In 1378 he went to Italy a second time, taking part in an embassy to Bernabò Visconti, lord of Milan, and Sir John Hawkwood, the great mercenary captain of that time in Italy. Chaucer on this occasion named John Gower as one of his representatives in his absence. Chaucer's studies of Italian literature are of course connected with his travels in Italy. For some years after this his prosperity increased: in 1382 he was made Comptroller of the Petty Customs of the Port of London, in addition to his previous office; in 1386 he went to Parliament as one of the knights of the shire for Kent. In this year, however, he began to suffer reverses, principally owing to the fall of his patron, John of Gaunt; he lost both his places in the Customs, and was obliged to realise his pensions for ready money. In 1389 things improved again on John of Gaunt's return to power: Chaucer was made Clerk of the King's Works at the Palace of Westminster, the Tower of London, various royal manors and lodges, and the mews at Charing Cross. He lost these appointments, however, in 1391. The king was persuaded to come to his assistance in 1394, and a new pension was granted to Chaucer for life. After the deposition of Richard II (1399), the new king, Henry IV, may have recognised that Chaucer had some claim upon him as an old follower of the House of Lancaster: at any rate he granted him a further pension of forty marks. Chaucer died in the following year (October 25, 1400) in a house of which he had just taken a lease, in Westminster. He is buried in the Abbey.

83. Of the works of Chaucer probably one of the earliest was his translation of The Romaunt of the Rose, which is spoken of

in the Prologue to The Legend of Good Women. The extant translation, generally ascribed to Chaucer, is really three

separate fragments, not all by one author, and "Romaunt

of the Rose."

possibly in no part at all the work of Chaucer. If any of it is his, the first fragment (ll. 1-1705) has the best claim. But whatever view may be taken of these problems, The Romaunt of the Rose is still to be considered the original of very much in Chaucer's own poetry, even in his later years when he had come under other powerful influences. The Romaunt of the Rose is a kind of encyclopedia of all the theory of chivalrous or courtly love as it was understood in the Middle Ages; it also contains, besides its doctrine, examples of all the most favoured methods of exposition and illustration in the school to which it belonged. Hence, in so far as Chaucer attached himself to the tradition of court poetry, he was obliged to pay respect to this book, and to regard it as a kind of authoritative treatise and a standard by which the ideas and the devices of his poetry were to be tested. The Roman de la Rose is the work of two authors. Guillaume de Lorris left it unfinished about the year 1230; Jean Clopinel of Meung-sur-Loire took it up about forty years later and continued it. This continuation The French original. is made up of a great variety of matters, many of them not agreeing at all well with the beginning. It is on account of this part of the work, and its satirical dispraise of women, that Chaucer incurs reproof in the vision at the beginning of his Legend. It is the first part, the work of Guillaume de Lorris (about four thousand lines), that most fully represents the spirit of medieval amatory poetry, as it came to be understood by Chaucer. The poem was written more than a hundred years after the conventions of chivalrous love-poetry were first established by the lyrical poets of Provence, from whom the lyrical poets of other countriesFrance, Germany and Italy-learned their manners of thinking and composing. It is not lyrical but narrative; an allegory of the vicissitudes of sentiment in a gentle lover. It closes one period in medieval poetry; the first period of courtly lyric poetry comes to an end in this didactic statement of all the ideas that had inspired the earlier poets of Provence, and their imitators. It also became a source of lyric poetry for later generations, in other schools, c.g. for the French poets of the fourteenth century, who were Chaucer's principal authorities at first, Machault, Deschamps, and Froissart. After Chaucer its influence is still to be traced for a long time in English poetry. All the Chaucerian poets made Its influence on allegoriuse of its commonplaces-the dream at the be- cal poetry. ginning, the May morning, the long descriptions of works of art, of sculpture or painting, the allegorical or mythological processions and pageants, the vague and dreamy sentiment, the language of devotion.

This kind of poetry is not always easy to appreciate, but without reference to its origins in The Romaunt of the Rose it is hopelessly unintelligible.

The Complaint to Pity is one of Chaucer's early poems, written under the influence of the French school, or schools, of

"The Complaint to Pity."

The Romaunt of the Rose, and of the fourteenthcentury poets who followed the same tradition, with variations. It is written in a stanza common at the time in France-derived originally from Provence-the seven-line stanza, commonly called rhyme royal, but known at one time, from Chaucer's use of it, as Troilus rhyme. The Complaint is one of the best of Chaucer's poems in the old manner, when he was still content to repeat the old ideas and mode of expression, without any substantial addition from his own invention. Another poem of about the same time is Chaucer's A B C, a poem in honour of our Lady, with a verse for each letter, translated from the French of Guillaume de Deguileville. Besides, Chaucer is known, from the passage in the Legend already referred to, to have written three books now lost, The Book of the Lion (taken from Machault), The Wretched Engendring of Mankind, from Pope Innocent III, and Origenes upon the Maudelayne, a translation of a homily on St. Mary Magdalen ascribed to Origen. In The Book of the Duchess (1369–70) Chaucer is still dependent, in the main, on his French models, but with some original improvements on their teaching. The poem "The Book of is a court poem, an elegy for the death of a noble (1369-70). lady, with the praise of her beauty and excellence. It opens conventionally the poet reads a book, and falls asleep, and dreams in harmony with his reading, and finds himself wandering, like the lover of the rose, in a fair forest over flowery meads. There he meets the black knight mourning for his lady, and the theme of the poem is then worked out. The defects of the poem are obvious; it is not well proportioned, it makes use of conventional devices that scarcely seem worth the room they occupy. But at the same time the truth of the sentiment in the fine passage in praise of the Lady Blanche is not impaired by the conventionalities of the poem; and even the conventionalities themselves are used in an original way.

the Duchess"

In putting together The Canterbury Tales Chaucer used some of his earlier writings. The Second Nun's Tale is the Use of early Life of Saint Cecilia, which is mentioned in the writings in Prologue to The Legend of Good Women. This "The Canter is written in the same stanza as the Complaint; bury Tales." it was included among The Canterbury Tales without revision. The Clerk's Tale, the story of Griselda, was probably written soon after the first Italian journey. The clerk is made to describe how he learned the story at Padua from Francis Petrarch, and, in fact, it is translated from

The

Petrarch's Latin version of Boccaccio's Italian story. story of Constance (the Man of Law's Tale) was probably written about the same time. The Monk's Tale was plainly not composed expressly for The Canterbury Tales; it is an independent unfinished work on a favourite conventional theme, the "Falls of Princes," suggested to Chaucer by one of Boccaccio's systematic works in Latin prose, De Casibus Virorum Illustrium. The subject was taken up, after Chaucer, by Lydgate in his rhyming version of "Bochas," and still later by the authors of The Mirror for Magistrates. Chaucer's "tragedies," as he calls his stories of Lucifer, Samson, Hercules, and other mighty persons, are written in an eight-line stanza taken from the French, and already used by him in his translation of Deguileville's religious poem. The tragedies were probably not all written at the same time; one of them, the tragedy of "the Earl Hugelyn of Pise," is the most considerable of Chaucer's renderings from Dante (Inferno, xxxiii.), and one of the finest and most impressive of his shorter pieces.

The Complaint of Mars is the most artificial and conventional of all Chaucer's poems; a mythological allegory, full of learning, but without much interest, except in the skilful use of commonplaces, and of the poetical rhetoric of the French

school.

The early poems of Chaucer deal with many subjects. They are, however, limited in their range as compared with the later poems. Chaucer made no rash ventures Early narrain his early years. His experiments are all cautious tive poems. and gradual. Thus his first narrative poems-St. Cecilia, Griselda, Constance-follow closely both the order of events and the sentiment of their originals. Chaucer must have known that the patience of Griselda was in danger of becoming monotonous; the story is one of those moral tales that insist on one particular virtue without any relief or qualification. He added to the story an ironical Envoy or epilogue, in which some allowance is made for other possible views of the question. He must have known also that the story of Constance, as he found it in his French original, was incoherent and faulty in construction. Yet he does not change the plan, does not cut out any of the unnecessary repetitions that spoil the structure of the tale. He accepts the awkward arrangement in this history, as he accepts the moral of the story of Griselda. His poetical genius shows itself in his style of translation, in the pathetic sentiment with which he invests his subject, and in additional illustrations. His Italian studies have not yet begun to affect the construction of his larger poems: their plan is prescribed for them by the plan of the original work which Chaucer happens to take up for translation. În details the Italian influence may be clearly observed. Thus the simile in the Man of Law's Tale-one of the most vivid in Chaucer-of the man led to execution, whose