with refinement of torture,-one in a barrel, another hung by an iron chain round his waist. The temporal wealth of the clergy had been attacked, and therewith the whole English constitution; and the great establishment above crushed out with its whole weight the assailants from below. Darkly, in silence, while in the Wars of the Roses the nobles were destroying each other, the commoners went on working and living, separating themselves from the official Church, maintaining their liberties, amassing their wealth,' but not going beyond. Like a vast rock which underlies the soil, yet crops up here and there at distant intervals, they barely exhibit themselves. No great poetical or religious work displays them to the light. They sang; but their ballads, first ignored, then transformed, reach us only in a late edition. They prayed; but beyond one or two indifferent poems, their incomplete and repressed doctrine bore no fruit. One may well see from the verse, tone, and drift of their ballads, that they are capable of the finest poetic originality, but their poetry is in the hands of yeomen and harpers. We perceive, by the precocity and energy of their religious protests, that they are capable of the most severe and impassioned creeds; but their faith remains hidden in the shop-parlours of a few obscure sectaries. Neither their faith nor their poetry has been able to attain its end or issue. The Renaissance and the Reformation, those, two national outbreaks, are still far off; and the literature of the period retains to the end, like the highest ranks of English society, almost the perfect stamp of its French origin and its foreign models. 1 Commines, v. ch. 19 and 20: ‘In my opinion, of all kingdoms of the world of which I have any knowledge, where the public weal is best observed, and least violence is exercised on the people, and where no buildings are overthrown or demolished in war, England is the best; and the ruin and misfortune falls on them who wage the war. . . . The kingdom of England has this advantage beyond other nations, that the people and the country are not destroyed or burnt, nor the buildings demolished; and ill-fortune falls on men of war, and especially on the nobles.' ... See the ballads of Chevy Chase, The Nut-Brown Maid, etc. Many of them are admirable little dramas, t CHAPTER III. The New Tongue. 1 Chancer-His education-His political and social life-Wherein his talent was serviceable-He paints the second feudal society. II. How the middle age degenerated-Decline of the serious element in manners, books, and works of art-Need of excitement—Analogies of architecture and literature. III. Wherein Chaucer belongs to the middle age-Romantic and ornamental poems -Le Roman de la Rose-Troilus and Cressida-Canterbury Tales-Order of description and events-The House of Fame-Fantastic dreams and visions -Love poems-Troilus and Cressida Exaggerated development of love in the middle age-Why the mind took this path-Mystic love—The Flower and the Leaf-Sensual love-Troilus and Cressida. IV. Wherein Chaucer is French-Satirical and jovial poems-Canterbury TalesThe Wife of Bath and marriage-The mendicant friar and religion—Buffoonery, waggery, and coarseness in the middle age. ▼. Wherein Chaucer was English and original-Idea of character and individual -Van Eyck and Chaucer contemporary-Prologue to Canterbury TalesPortraits of the franklin, monk, miller, citizen, knight, squire, prioress, the good clerk-Connection of events and characters-General idea-Importance of the same-Chaucer a precursor of the Reformation-He halts by the way-Delays and Childishness-Causes of this feebleness-His prose, and scholastic notion-How he is isolated in his age. ▼. Connection of philosophy and poetry-How general notions failed under the scholastic philosophy-Why poetry failed-Comparison of civilisation and decadence in the middle age, and in Spain-Extinction of the English literature-Translators-Rhyming chronicles-Didactic poets -Compilers of moralities-Gower-Occleve-Lydgate-Analogy of taste in costumes, buildings, and literature-Sad notion of fate, and human misery-Hawes-Barclay-Skelton-Elements of the Reformation and of the Renaissance. A L MID so many barren endeavours, throughout the long impotenc of Norman literature, which was content to copy, and of Saxon literature, which bore no fruit, a definite language was nevertheles attained, and there was room for a great writer. Geoffrey Chauce appeared, a man of mark, inventive though a disciple, original thoug translator, who by his genius, education, and life, was enabled know and to depict a whole world, but above all to satisfy the chivalri world and the splendid courts which shone upon the heights. He belonged to it, though learned and versed in all branches of scholastic knowledge; and he took such part in it, that his life from end to end was that of a man of the world, and a man of action. We find him alternately in King Edward's army, in the king's train, husband of a queen's maid of honour, a pensioner, a placeholder, a deputy in Farliament, a knight, founder of a family which was hereafter to become allied to royalty. Moreover, he was in the king's council, brother-inlaw of the Duke of Lancaster, employed more than once in open embassies or secret missions at Florence, Genoa, Milan, Flanders, commissioner in France for the marriage of the Prince of Wales, high up and low down in the political ladder, disgraced, restored to place. This experience of business, travel, war, the court, was not like a book education. He was at the court of Edward III., the most splendid in Europe, amidst tourneys, grand entrances, displays; he took part in the pomps of France and Milan; conversed with Petrarch, perhaps with Boccacio and Froissart; was actor in, and spectator of, the finest and most tragical of dramas. In these few words, what ceremonies and processions are implied! what pageantry of armour, caparisoned horses, bedecked ladies! what display of gallant and lordly manners! what a varied and brilliant world, well suited to occupy the mind and eyes of a poet! Like Froissart, better than he, Chaucer could depict the character of the nobles, their mode of life, their amours, even other things, and please them by his portraiture. II. Two notions raised the middle age above the chaos of barbarism: one religious, which had fashioned the gigantic cathedrals, and swept the masses from their native soil to hurl them upon the Holy Land; the other secular, which had built feudal fortresses, and set the man of courage armed, upon his feet, within his own domain: the one had produced the adventurous hero, the other the mystical monk; the one to wit, the belief in God, the other the belief in self. Both, running to excess, had degenerated by expenditure of force: the one hac' exalted independence into rebellion, the other had changed piety into enthusiasm: the first made man unfit for civil life, the second drew him back from natural life: the one, sanctioning disorder, dissolved society; the other, enthroning irrationality, perverted intelligence. Chivalry had need to be repressed before issuing in brigandage; devotion restrained before inducing slavery. Turbulent feudalism grew feeble, like oppressive theocracy; and the two great master passions, deprived of their sap and lopped of their stem, gave place by their weakness to the monotony of habit and the taste for worldliness, which shot forth in their stead and flourished under their name. 1 Born between 1328 and 1345, died in 1400. Insensibly, the serious element declined, in books as in manners, in works of art as in books. Architecture, instead of being the handmaid of faith, became the slave of phantasy. It was exaggerated, confined to mere decoration, sacrificing general effect to detail, shot up its steeples to unreasonable heights, festooned its churches with canopies, pinnacles, trefoiled arches, open-worked galleries. Its whole aim was continually to climb higher, to clothe the sacred edifice with a gaudy bedizenment, as if it were a bride on the wedding morning" Before this marvellous lacework, what emotion could one feel but a pleased astonishment? What becomes of Christian sentiment before such scenic ornamentations? In like manner literature seta itself to play. In the eighteenth century, the second age of absolute monarchy, we saw on one side garlanded top-knots and cupolas, on the other pretty vers de société, courtly and sprightly tales, taking the place of severe beauty-lines and noble writings. Even so in the fourteenth century, the second age of feudalism, they had on one side the stone fretwork and slender efflorescence of aerial forms, and on the other finical verses and diverting stories, taking the place of the old grand architecture and the old simple literature. It is no longer the cverflowing of a true sentiment which produces them, but the craving for excitement. Consider Chaucer, his subjects, and how he selects them. He goes far and wide to discover them, to Italy, France, to the popular legends, the ancient classics. His readers need diversity, and his business is to 'provide fine tales:' it was in those days the poet's business. The lords at table have finished dinner, the minstrels come and sing, the brightness of the torches falls on the velvet and ermine, on the fantastic figures, the oddities, the elaborate embroidery of their long garments; then the poet arrives, presents his manuscript, richly illuminated, bound in crimson violet, embellished with silver clasps and bosses, roses of gold:' they ask him for his subject, and he answers 'Love.' III. In fact, it is the most agreeable subject, fittest to make the evening hours flow sweetly, amid the spiced goblets and the burning perfumes. Chaucer translated first that great storehouse of gallantry, the Roman de la Rose. There is no pleasanter entertainment. It is about a rose which the lover wished to pluck: the pictures of the May months, the groves, the flowery earth, the green hedgerows, abound and display their bloom. Then come portraits of the smiling ladies, Richesse, Fraunchise, Gaiety, and by way of contrast, two sad characters, Daunger and Travail, all crowding, and minutely described, with detail of features, clothing, attitude; they walk about, as in a piece of 1 Renan, De l'Art au Moyen Age. 'See Froissart, his life with the Count of Foix and with King Richard II tapestry, amid landscapes, dances, castles, with allegorical groups, in lively sparkling colours, displayed, contrasted, ever renewed and varied so as to entertain the sight. For an evil has arisen, unknown to serious ages ennui: novelty and brilliancy followed by novelty and brilliancy are necessary to withstand it; and Chaucer, like Boccacio and Froissart, enters into the struggle with all his heart. He borrows from Boccacio his history of Palamon and Arcite, from Lollius his history of Troilus and Cressida, and re-arranges them. How the two young Theban knights, Arcite and Palamon, both fall in love with the beautiful Emily, and how Arcite, victorious in tourney, falls and dies, bequeathing Emily to his rival; how the fire Trojan knight Troïlus wins the favours of Cressida, and how Cressida abandons him for Diomedes-these are still tales in verse, tales of love. A little long they may be; all the writings of this age, French, or imitated from French, are born of too prodigal minds; but how they glide along! A winding stream, which flows smoothly on level sand, and glitters now and again in the sun, is the only image we can find. The characters speak too much, but then they speak so well! Even when they dispute, we like to listen, their anger and offences are so wholly based on a happy overflow of unbroken converse. Remember Froissart, how slaughters, assassinations, plagues, the butcheries of the Jacquerie, the whole chaos of human misery, is forgotten in his fine uniform humour, so that the furious and raving figures seem but ornaments and choice embroiderings to relieve the train of shaded and coloured silk which forms the groundwork of his narrative! But, in particular, a multitude of descriptions spread their gilding over all. Chaucer leads you among arms, palaces, temples, and halts before each scene. Here: "The statue of Venus glorious for to see Was naked fleting in the large see, Further on, the temple of Mars: First on the wall was peinted a forest, Of stubbes and sharp and hidous to behold; 1 Knight's Tale, ii. p. 59, v. 1957-1964. |