Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 5.djvu/463

Rh CHAUCER 451 officially becoming in the poet-narrator ; but Mr Furnivall is so convinced that the poet s sickness was a real love- sickness, and that he was not then married to the queen s demoiselle Philippa Chaucer, that he accounts for this lady s name by supposing her to have been Chaucer s cousin. A similar inelasticity of conjecture appears in the grounds on which certain of the works commonly attributed to Chaucer are rejected as spurious. The Testament of Love, the Assembly of Ladies, and the Lamentation of Mary Magdalene bear no internal marks of being Chaucer s, and are now universally rejected ; but of late some commentators have adopted a test of genuineness which would deprive us of several works which are in no respect unworthy of Chaucer s genius. It is known from Chaucer s own state ment in the undisputed Legend of Good Women that he translated the Roman de la Rose, but Mr Bradshaw refuses to believe that the extant translation, of which we have only one 15th century manuscript, can be his, becauss its rhymes do not conform to a rhyme-test which Chaucer observed in works which are undoubtedly his. The extant Romance of the Rose admits the adverbial ly to rhyme with the adjectival or infinitival ye, and it cannot be Chaucer s because y is never allowed to rhyme with ye in the House of Fame and the Canterbury Tales. For the same reason no other of any shadow of validity has yet been adduced the Court of Love, which Mr Swinburne calls &quot; that most beautiful of young poems,&quot; and the Flower and the Leaf, which Dryden and Hazlitt have praised and quoted as a choice example of the poet s genius, have also been pronounced to be spurious. We cannot give up such poems unless more urgent reasons are advanced for their confiscation. They cannot be set aside as spurious so long as their variation from the rhyming rule, which the com mentators have shown much ingenuity in detecting, can be explained in any reasonable way. There is no getting over the plain question which every one asks when first told that they are not Chaucer s. If they are not his, who else could have written them 1 Is it conceivable that the name of the writer of such works could have been utterly un known in his own generation, or if known could have been by accident or design so completely suppressed 1 If he deliberately tried to palm them off as Chaucer s upon the transcribers, would not this rule of rhyme have been precisely the sort of mechanical likeness which he would have tried to preserve ? The Court of Love we have special reasons for declining to give up. It might be argued that, though the Flower and the Leaf bears internal marks of being Chaucer s, although its picturesque richness, its tender atmosphere, and the soft fall of its words are like his, yet it is easy to grow the plant once you have the seed, and it may be the work of an imitator. The Flower and the Leaf professes to be written by a lady, and there may have been at the court some wonderful lady capable of it, although it passed in the monkish scriptorium as Chaucer s. But there is some external evidence for the authenticity of the Court of Love, which also contains traces of Chaucer s most inimitable quality, his humour. Mr Minto has put forward some minor considerations for believing this to be Chaucer s (Characteristics of English Poets, p. 22), but the strongest fact in its favour is that the Court of Love was imitated by James I. of Scotland in the King s Quhair, and that in paying the customary compliment to his poetical masters, he mentions no names but Lydgate and Gower, who were clearly incapable of writing the poem, and Chaucer. James s captivity in England began five years after Chaucer s death, and it is simply inconceiv able that he could have attributed the Court of Love to Chaucer in ignorance, and without having heard a whisper of its real authorship. If, indeed, this rhyme-test were absolute, we should have to treat these other considerations as inexplicable difficulties and submit. But when we remark that all the poems in which y ye rhymes occur are earlier works of Chaucer s, if they are his at all, bearing the touch of his hand but wanting the sustained strength of his mature workmanship, and when we remember that the y ye rhyme was the common practice of his predeces sors, a very simple explanation of the rhyme difficulty becomes apparent. Chaucer adhered to the practice of his predecessors till he felt strong enough to impose upon himself a restriction of his own devising. At what periods of his life Chaucer wrote his poetry, we have no means of ascertaining. There are no manuscripts of any of his works that can be referred to his own time; the earliest of them in existence are not supposed to have been written till several years after his death. The only one of his works of which the date is fixed by an external circumstance is the Book of tJie Duchess; if, as is taken for granted, this was written to commemorate the death of the wife of his patron John of Gaunt, its date is 1369. Chaucer, if born in 13-40, would then have been twenty- nine, and there is none of his extant works, except the translation of the Romance of the Rose, and the Dream (which we hold to be Chaucer s, though its authenticity is not worth contending for), which can be confidently assigned to an earlier period. Philogenet, in the Court of Love, professes to be eighteen, but this is not the slightest reason for concluding that Chaucer was that age when he wrote it. The Book of the Duchess is certainly not very mature work for a poet of twenty-nine, and it is probable that Chaucer did not cultivate the art, as he certainly did net develop the faculty, till comparatively late in life. The translation of the Romance of the Rose is to all appearance the earliest of his surviving compositions. If we may judge from his evident acquaintance with dry studies, and his capacity for hard business work, the vintner s son received a scholastic training in the trivium and quadrivium which then formed the higher education. If he had been nurtured on troubadour love from his youth up, it is exceedingly unlikely that he would afterwards have been able to apply himself to less fascinating labours. His study of mathematics and astronomy in his old age for the benefit of &quot;little Lewis, his son,&quot; looks like a return such as we often see in age to the studies of youth. But, indeed, he can hardly be said ever to have lost his interest in such studies, for in his theory of sound in the House of Fame and his description of alchemical processes in the Canon s Yeoman s Prologue he shows a genuine scholar s interest in the dry details of learning. His knowledge of the Trouvere and Troubadour poetry, from which his genius received its impulse, probably began with his introduc tion, however that was brought about, to court society. He was about seventeen at the date of the first mention of his name as attached to the household of Princa Lionel. It is permissible to conjecture that he had French poets to beguile his captivity in France a few years afterwards. Professor Ten Brink divides Chaucer s work into three periods : a period of French influence, lasting up to 1372-3, the date of his visit to Italy ; after that a period of Italian influence, lasting up to 1387, the supposed date of his House of Fame ; finally, a period of mature strength and originality, in which he pursued the bent of his own genius. Not much is gained by this division into strict periods. It is obvious enough that, in the House of Fame, the Legend of Good Women, and the general plan of the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer strikes out more unmistakably a path for himself, and exhibits a raaturer power, a more masterly freedom of movement than in his earlier works, but there profitable division ends, To erect a period of Italian influence, implying that at any time the stimulus