Albion (22 page)

The enduring magic of the legends of the Knights of the Round Table: “Sir Galahad, Sir Bors and Sir Percival,” romantic ninteenth-century painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and “Gawain,” dramatic twentieth-century opera by Harrison Birtwistle, in which a severed head continues to sing.

He was writing no more than the truth, however, when he remarked that the new science came “out of olde bokes.” He will sometimes signal his source material in manifest ways.

The remenant of the tale if ye wol heere Redeth Ovyde, and ther ye may it leere

is the advice given by the Wife of Bath.
The House of Fame
makes reference to no less than nineteen books or authors within its 2,158 lines.
The Book of
the Duchess
alludes to Ovid, Macrobius, Livy, Dares, Phrygius, the
Romance
of the Rose
and the Bible; in order to assert its authority it must name its authorities. Chaucer, more than any other European poet of the period, employed this device. When one critic describes “his slightly ridiculous pedantry and bookish exaggeration,”
³
he is in fact alluding to an English characteristic which has been maintained by many writers over several centuries.

But of course the influence of earlier written work upon Chaucer runs deeper than any overt reference, since the act of translation was the single most important aspect of his art; in this, if in no other, respect he manifests a quintessentially English genius. It has been suggested that he wrote French verse before he began composition in English but, even if this hypothesis is dismissed, it serves to emphasize the fact that Chaucer was educated in a trilingual court where the principal literary vernacular was still French. It is perhaps not surprising, therefore, that his first full-scale enterprise in English,
The Book of the Duchess
, is an adaptation of various French “dits” or stories. His general French affiliations are numerous and extensive, and in fact Eustache Deschamps remarked in particular upon Chaucer’s great merit as a “grant translateur” of the French tongue into English. Certainly one of his earliest exercises was the translation of the
Roman de la Rose
which converted a whole range of European sensibility into English; his abiding preoccupation rests precisely here, in his diligent efforts to accommodate continental styles and models within the vernacular. And, until the nineteenth century, this was an enterprise which all English poets wished to share. The process of adaptation and assimilation is instinctive.

Chaucer had read Deschamps himself, but he had also studied Machaut and Froissart; he read French translations of Ovid and Boccaccio, while various other sources have been located for elements of
The Canterbury Tales
as well as
Troilus and Criseyde
. The essential matter lies, however, in Chaucer’s wish to incorporate the fluency and seemliness of French verse within his own vernacular; Middle English was in any case an absorbent medium and had incorporated a great number of French words, but Chaucer’s purpose was to elevate that mixed and various speech into a literature. His debt to Italy, to Dante and Boccaccio in particular, then became of paramount importance; it was Dante who, after all, had single-handedly created an Italian vernacular poetry to rival that of Latin and Greek. Boccaccio declared that before Dante “there was none who . . . had the feeling or the courage to make it the instrument of any matter dealt with by the rules of art. But he showed by the effect that every lofty matter may be treated in it; and made our vernacular glorious above every other.” This was precisely the intent and ambition of Chaucer himself—to create an English literature or, rather, to create out of English a literature. Far from being baffled or defeated by the essentially hybrid nature of the language, with elements of Latin, French, Norse and Anglo-Saxon all compounded, he decided to exploit and celebrate its variety. It did not have the purity of Italian, or the grace of French, or the unchanging sonority of Latin; but, rather, it possessed all these attributes together with many more. When Chaucer first experimented with Dante’s
terza rima
in English it was a way of proving, both to himself and to his audience, that the language was already capable of masterly expression.

At the close of
Troilus and Criseyde
, which itself is supposed to derive ultimately from Boccaccio’s
Il Filostrato
, Chaucer appends a verse which demonstrates his literary ambition:

Go, litel bok, go, litel myn tragedye . . . And kis the steppes where as thow seest pace Virgile, Ovide, Omer, Lucan, and Stace

Virgil, Ovid, Homer, Lucan and Statius were the classical authors most celebrated and most widely read in the medieval world, and Chaucer is placing himself in their company. But there is also another context. Three of the great European poets—Jean de Meun, Dante and Boccaccio—had also composed such self-regarding tributes associating themselves with Homer, Ovid, Virgil, Horace, Tibullus and others; so, in imitating their device, Chaucer is also representing himself as part of a European literary tradition. Here, then, is the importance of Chaucer to the English imagination. He was the first poet self-consciously to create the idea of an English literature worthy to rival that of the classical past. He also implicitly establishes himself at the beginning of that tradition, and so all subsequent myths of source and origin spring from him.

In the same poem Chaucer prays that God send him the power to write a “comedye” as well as a “tragedye,” but then addresses his “litel bok” with the words “But subgit be to all poesye.” It is interesting, perhaps, that
The OxfordEnglish Dictionary
believes this to be the first occasion on which tragedy and comedy appear as English words. Chaucer may have derived “comedye” from Dante’s Divina Commedia but, whatever the exact provenance, the status of his remarks is clear; it is worth re-emphasising the fact that he was fashioning the idea of literature out of English itself. In his own arduous and continual practice he had learned its capacity, or its capaciousness, and in a preface to his prose treatise on the astrolabe he places his trust in “trewe conclusions in English, as well as sufficith to these noble clerkes Grekes these same conclusiouns in Grek, and to Arabiens in Arabik, and to Jewes in Ebrew, and to Latyn folk in Latyn.” The English language is therefore placed upon the same level as Greek, Latin and Hebrew as a medium for truths both sacred and profane.

His resourcefulness is far-reaching, too, since in order to create the idea of an English literature he was obliged to celebrate the native propensities of the language; we might even say that the largeness of his aim was such that the language spoke through him. It had steadily been speeding up, with the alliterative line in particular moving in a much freer and more fluid cadence, but Chaucer expanded its range so successfully that it gained infinitely more freedom and elasticity. He invented the decasyllabic couplet, otherwise known as the “heroic couplet,” but more significantly he treated the various forms of verse with a fluency that brought them closer to the native intonations of speech. From this derive later critical remarks about his “sweet numbers” and “smoothly flowing diction”; it elucidates those comments upon his employment of a “rhythmical tradition” and a “native tradition” so successfully that the rhythm of native speech is attached to his own music. The pattern is one of variety and purposefulness, heterogeneity within the cadences of significant form.

The variety is itself exemplary. His greatest if most incomplete achievement,
The Canterbury Tales
, is a consummation and celebration of all previous English literature. Its “general prologue,” and twenty-four separate tales, cover every form from sermon to farce, from saint’s life to animal fable, from heroic adventure to full-scale parody. Its twenty-eight characters (including Chaucer himself ) furnish an assembly of fourteenth-century people in a medley of occupations and professions.
The Divine Comedy
has come to earth;
The Romance of the Rose
has been humanised. Chaucer’s is an inclusive art, in other words. He understands and reflects every aspect of human society, spiritual and natural. That is why his characters are at once fully naturalistic and archetypal. He creates stories as well as allegories. The Wife of Bath is both a realistic fourteenth-century woman, in a period when women were often very powerful, and a compendium of medieval attitudes towards her sex.

The Canterbury Tales
is, then, a conflation of narratives written in different styles and upon different themes; the metrical changes are extraordinary and even within the boundaries of one narrative the language is mixed and various. The appearance is one of perpetual novelty, like the surface of a swiftly running stream, mixed with elements of wonder and surprise. This in no way mitigates the central truth that Chaucer would not have considered himself an “original” writer in any modern sense. The fact that he borrowed themes, stories and characters from a variety of sources is testimony to his deep traditionalism; yet he was obliged to invigorate and intensify this familiar material with such arts of rhetoric as variation and display. He creates the impression of diversity, of “newness,” as a way of reaching an audience which itself desired novelty and surprise. The demand is noticed by Chaucer himself in
The Canterbury Tales
—“Diverse folke diversely they seyde . . . Diverse men diverse thinges seyden . . . Diverse men diversely hym told . . . Diverse folk diversely they demed.”

Hence the extraordinary interaction in his verse between French and Latinate idioms, between the low English of the fabliau and the aureate diction of the saints’ tales. Chaucer is constantly employing new words, but often uses them once only so that the process is one of continuous novelty. He employs another device, too, whereby he can align ancient and modern. He will juxtapose old stories with new framing devices, so that a preface or prologue can set an unfamiliar context for a familiar tale. Thus “there is no paradox in the fact that Chaucer invents so few stories yet is so inventive a story teller.”
⁴
To be thoroughly traditional yet novel: this was the great demand, and was Chaucer’s great achievement. By bringing together these various sources and conflicting styles, Chaucer established a literature and helped to stabilize a language capable of accommodating it.

It has been argued that in the process he created the idea of England and the notion of “Englishness”—that the characters of
The Canterbury Tales
prefigure those of Fielding or of Smollett and that the poet’s humour is itself a profoundly native affair. At a later stage in this volume we will be discussing the nature of a specifically London vision, but the argument may be anticipated by quoting some of Chaucer’s words on his native city. He is said to have celebrated “the citye of London that is to me so dere and sweete, on which I was forth growen; and more kindly love have I to that place than to any other in yerth.” The notion of Chaucer’s “Englishness” must also be set beside his attachment to a more local territory. He was born in the parish of St. Martin in the Vintry; although he travelled throughout Europe in the course of his official duties, he returned to his dwelling above the city gate at Aldgate. It has often been said that, the more local and locally identifiable a writer, the more universal may be his or her vision. But what are we to make of the vision of Chaucer’s Englishness? His diversity and variety are in this context significant, particularly in his ability to mingle pathos and parody, tragedy and irony. Another London visionary, Charles Dickens, called the mixed style “streaky well-cured bacon,” and it has become a defining characteristic of the English imagination. The fellowship of the pilgrimage itself provides a variety of characters and humours, the miller and the knight, the parson and the pardoner, all of them adding to the image of a disparate nation. Where in Boccaccio only the aristocrats speak, in Chaucer the voices of the servants and the churls can plainly be heard. The romantic tale of Palamon and Arcite, spoken by the knight, is followed by the miller’s tale of lechery and buffoonery: