Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 5.djvu/464

Rh 452 CHAUCER that Chaucer received from Italian sources was at all com parable to the stimulus he received from French sources, is most misleading. The difference between the Book of the Duchess and the House of Fame, or between the Court of Love and Troilus and Cresside is not to be explained by an influx of Italian influence ; it is part of the self-governed development, the spontaneous expansion of his own mind. As he went on writing, his powers continued to expand, and to take in materials and suggestions from all quarters open to him, French, Italian, or Latin. Comparing the Troilus, the raw material of which is taken from Boccaccio s Filostrato, with his Romance of the Rose, we can trace no change in method or in spirit fairly attributable to Italian influence. In both.translations he shows a bold independence of his originals ; they are not so much translations as adaptations. He does not imbibe the spirit of Guillaume de Lorris or Jean de Meun in the one and the spirit of Boccaccio in the other ; he boldly modifies all three to bring them into harmony with his own conceptions of love s laws, and in both his so-called translations there is the same high spirit of chivalry and the same tender worship and kindly mockery of woman. Where he chiefly shows advance of strength, apart from the mere technical workmanship, is in his grasp of character; and that is a clear development on the lines of his earlier conceptions and not a new acquisition. His Cresside. and his Pandarus were not the Cresside and Pandarus of Boccaccio ; they are regenerated by him and developed till they become figures that might have moved in his own Court of Love. He held the knightly and &quot; gentle &quot; character too high to adopt Boccaccio s conceptions. In the method also, Troilus has a close affinity with Chaucer s earlier work and his first models. Troilus pursuit of Cresside is the pursuit of the Rose over again in the concrete. The greater subtilty of the stages is due to the increased strength of the narrator s faculty. M. Sandras is in the main right as to the extent of Chaucer s obligations to French sources, although he fails to recognize the forceful individuality of the man. Chaucer was really an English trouvere, thoroughly national, English in the whole texture of his being, but a trouvere. We must not allow our conviction of his loyalty to his own English nature to blind us to the fact that he was a poet in the school of Guiilaume de Lorris ; nor on the- other hand must we allow the peculiar extent of his obliga tions to his predecessors in the school to obscure the fact that he was an original poet. M. Saudras is a special pleader for one side of the cass, and naturally presses unfairly against the other. Chaucer, writing in a different language from his masters, was at liberty to borrow from them more literally than he could have done if he had written in their language ; but though M. Sandras proves with superfluous completeness that he freely appropriated from them not merely stories and hints of stories, but narrative methods, phrases, images, maxims, reflections, not only treated their works as quarries of raw material, but adopted their architectural plans, and even made no scruple of seizing for his own purposes the stones which they had polished, still he so transmuted the borrowed plans and materials that his works are original wholes unmis takably stamped with his own individuality. Whatever he appropriated, whether ore or wrought metal, all passed through his own alembic, and his moulds were his own, though shaped according to the fashion of the school. The very affluence of Chaucer s pages, their wealth of colour, of tender and humorous incident, of worldly wisdom, is due to his peculiar relations to his predecessors, to the circum stance which enabled him to lay them so royally under tribute. He was not the architect of his own fortune, but the son and heir of a family which for generations had been accumulating wealth. Edward III. s spoliation of the French was nothing to Chaucer s, and the poet had this advantage, that his appropriations neither left the spoiled country desolate nor corrupted the spoiler. &quot; The ground-work of literary genius,&quot; Mr Matthew Arnold says, &quot; is a work of synthesis and exposition, no I of analysis and discovery ; its gift lies in the faculty of being happily inspired by a certain intellectual and spiritual atmosphere, by a certain order of ideas, when it finds itself in them, of dealing divinely with these ideas, presenting them in the most effective and attractive combinations making beautiful works with them, in short.&quot; The poet s constructive power must have materials, and ideas round which materials accumulate. The secret of the richness and enduring character of Chaucer s work is that he had a fruitful idea ready to his hand, an idea which had been flowering and bearing fruit in the minds of two centuries, which had inspired some later songs and tales, which had been illustrated, expounded, formulated by every variety of native invention and critical ingenuity. Chivalrous love had been the presiding genius, the inspiring spirit of several generations of poets and critics when Chaucer began to write. Open any of his vsorks, from the Court of Love down to the Canterbury Tales, and you find that the central idea of it is to expound this chivalrous sentiment, either directly by tracing its operation or formulating its laws, or indirectly by setting it off dramatically against its counterpart, the sentiment of the villain or churl. Gradually as years grew upon him, and his mind assumed more and more its natural attitude of descriptive impartiality, he became less a partizan of the sentiment, more inclined to view it as one amonf the varieties of human manifestation, but never to the last does he become wholly impartial. Not even in the Canterbury Tales, does he set the churl on a level with &quot; th^ gentles.&quot; Thoroughly as he enjoyed the humour of the churl, freely as his mind unbent itself to sympathize- with his unrestrained animal delights, he always remembers, when he comes forward in his own person, to- apologize for this departure from the restraints of chivalry. The very opposite of this is so often asserted about the Canterbury Tales, that it almost has a paradoxical air, although nothing can be more plain to any one who takes the trouble to read the tales observantly. It has been said to be the crowning merit of Chaucer that he ignores distinctions of caste, and that his pilgrims associate on equal terms. It should be noticed, however, in the first place, that in the Prologue, he finds it necessary to apologize for not &quot; setting folk in their degree,&quot; &quot; as that they shoulde stand ; &quot; and, iu the second place, that although he does not separate the pilgrims according to their degrees in the procession, yet he draws a very clear line of separation between them in the spirit of their behaviour. At the outset of the pilgrimage the gentles are distinctly so mentioned as taking a sort of corporate action, though in vain, to give a more decorous aspect to the pilgrimage. When the Knight tells his tale, it is loudly applauded by the* whfele company, but the poet does not record their verdict indiscriminately ; ho is careful to add, particularly by &quot; the gentles every one.&quot; And though all applauded the tale, the more vulgar and uproarious spirits were some what restive under its gravity, the host called for a merry tale, and the Pardoner eagerly stepped forward to comply with his request. But &quot; the gentles &quot; interposed, and began to cry that they must have no ribaldry ; &quot; tell us,&quot; they said, &quot; some moral tale that we may learn.&quot; And the gentles would have carried their point if the Miller, as the poet is most careful to make clear, had not been so drunk that he insisted upon telling a noble tale that he knew, and would forbear for no man. Chaucer is profuse in his apologies for introducing such a tale ; it was a churlish