Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/432

Rh 412 ENGLISH LITERATI! HE [EARLY ENGLISH. mannerism of the French, poets is also present in. the Court of Love and the House of Fame, compositions which probably belong to Chaucer s middle life. Even in the Legende of Goode Women, a work of his later years, many passages, particularly the beautiful lines rehearsing his annual worship of the daisy, are significant of the degree in which his mind was still imbued with the grace ful and fanciful conceptions of the French poets. But the sunny south produced in that age other poets beside the French, poets the force and melody of whose writings caused the glory of Lorris and Machault to wax pale in comparison. Chaucer must have become acquainted with Boccaccio at an early age, for in the Assembly of Fo ides, written when he was only twenty-four or twenty -five, several stanzas are translated from the description, in the Thrseide of the Italian poet, of the garden of Queen Nature. With Petrarch he is believed on reasonable grounds to have become acquainted during his visit to Italy in 1373; the charming allusion to the &quot; laureat poete,&quot; in the prologue to the &quot; Clerke s Tale,&quot; is familiar to every reader. Datite, whom he calls the grete poete of Itaille,&quot; supplied him with a vision in the &quot; House of Fame,&quot; and with the materials of one of the tragedies in the &quot; Monke s Tale. : the story of Count Ugolino. But it was to Boccaccio that his obligations were the largest; from his FilostraloliQ translated, though with many additions and alterations, his Troylits and Cryseyde; the &quot; Knighte s Tale &quot; is in the main a translation of the Theseide, and two or three other Canter bury Tales are more or less close renderings of stories in the Decameron. Italian was then in a far more advanced stage, one better suited for literary purposes, than English ; and it must be set down as undoubtedly due to his Italian studies that in Chaucer s hands our language, which seventy years before had appeared as a barbarous dialect in the mouth of Robert of Gloucester, and, even as used by . Langland, CLaucer s contemporary, is harsh and crabbed, was proved to be rich in sweetness and harmony, no less than in force. Canter- After all, had Chaucer done no more than has been bury already indicated, though he would have deserved credit for polishing and regularizing the language, and would have left models of style for later ages to imitate, he would not have earned the praise of a great and immortal poet. In this category, however, he is definitively placed, in virtue of the original portions of the Canterbury Tales. Not only is the Prologue the work of a great literary artist, drawing from nature with an incomparable force, sureness, and freedom of hand, but the whole series of linking passages, besides many of the tales, which, though the materials are old, are transfigured by the treatment they receive, attest the presence of a masterly intellect and an unfailing imagination. He &quot; saw life thoroughly and saw it whole ; &quot; his somewhat keen and caustic temper opened his eyes to the tricks of hypocrites and pretenders, which his manly straightforwardness made him expose without ceremony; on the other hand, the noble and really superior cast of his character placed him in full sympathy with those who in heroic self-denial were following under his eyes the counsels of perfection. Over against the portraits of Monk, Friar, and Pardoner in the Prologue, may be set the legend of Sainte Cecile, the &quot; Man of Lawe s Tale,&quot; and the exquisite opening stanzas of the &quot;Prioress s Tale.&quot; In that peculiar combination of great force of handling with grace and versatility, on which the availability and effect of poetic genius so largely depend, Chaucer may be placed in a trio with Shakespeare and Pope, and no fourth name in English literature can, from this point of view, he raised to their level. Gower. Coming to speak of Gower after Chaucer, we descend, as we now clearly see, through an enormous interval ; but this distance was not so apparent to their contemporaries and immediate successors. &quot; Ancient Gower &quot; was a favourite with Richard II., and was also prudent enough to pay his court betimes to the young Duke of Lancaster, soon to be Henry IV. His Confessio Atnantis is coloured by all the profanity and much of the cynicism which belong to Jean de Meuug s portion of the Human de la.. Rose. It may be observed, in passing, that the Roman was the product of a kind of minor renaissance, or revival of ancient learning. The Somnium Sdpionis of Macrobius gave the dream-form, and Ovid s Ars Amandi supplied an abundant store of amatory details. From this last, and from others of his poems, the counsels and warnings to lovers, with which the Roman, the Confessio Amantis, and many another popular poem of that day was stocked, were, partly by suggestion, partly by direct translation, derived. That the Ars Amandi should come to spread so wide an influence was a fact of no good omen to the morals of Europe. Refinement, even when little more than external, seems to exercise an invincible attraction on the human mind. The wit and suppleness of the Greek intellect, the polished luxury of the Roman empire, dazzled more and more the semi-cultivated society of Europe, and created a paganizing fashion, of which the moral results were often deplorable. Numbers even of ecclesiastics were carried away ; bishops prided themselves on their elegant symposia; abbots, &quot; purple as their wines,&quot; thumbed Anacreon instead of their breviaries ; and in spite of Savonarola and other reformers from within, no effectual check appeared for these evils till it was supplied by the rude blasts of the Reformation. Dan Lydgate, the monk of Bury, was a loyal admirer and Lyd follower of Chaucer ; and if the practice of poetry could make a perfect poet, he should stand, in virtue of his innumerable compositions, among those of the highest rank. But the language, already rich and various, but unsettled in form and deficient in precedents, escaped out of his control ; to bend and tame it effectually while in such a condition required the strength of an intellectual giant, such as Chaucer was, but Lydgate certainly was not. We know that Chaucer took the greatest pains with his metre &quot; So praye I to God, that none miswrite tliee, Ne tliee mysmetre for dcfaut of tonge :&quot; but Lydgate, though, to recommend his mediocre thoughts, he should have takeu much greater pains, took in fact much less. Perhaps some crude theory of poetic inspira tion misled him, as it misleads poets of our own day, whose roughness and obscurity yield as unsatisfactory results as Lydgate s roughness and mediocrity. The materials for his more important productions were chiefly French and Latin works of his own day, or not much earlier in date. Thus his Falla of Princes is from a French metrical version of Boccaccio s Latin prose work, De Casibus Illustrium Virorum, and his Troy-book is founded on the Historia Trojana of Guido di Colonna, a Sicilian jurist of the 13th century. Lydgate s admiration for Chaucer was undoubtedly sincere, and he probably attempted to imitate the best points of Chaucer s style. If yet to a great extent he failed, this was perhaps due, not merely to the carelessness to which we have before adverted, but also to the influence of the barbarous writers of alliterative verse, whose activity at this period we described in the early part of this section. Alliterative rhythm is accentual, heroic rhythm is syllabic. An alliterative verse may have a varying number of syllables, but must have four accents; an heroic verse may have a varying number of accents, but must contain ten, or at most eleven, syllables. Of course the variation in either case is confined within certain limits, and the rules themselves are not without exceptions ;