The Age of Chaucer

 From A Short History of English Literature, 2nd ed., by Robert Barnard (Blackwell, 1994).

 

1. THE AGE OF CHAUCER

England in the mid-fourteenth century, the England in which Chaucer, Langland and the author of Gawain grew up, was to all appearances a country cresting a wave of success. In Edward III it had a glamorous, efficient king, and one who appreciated the value of the outward show of monarchy—pageantry, honours, patronage. His court was a centre of culture and chivalry renowned over Europe. With the French monarchy relatively weak, England was losing its status as a dim little off-shore island and attaining the rank of European power. Its seamen were forging links  all over Europe an North Africa; its merchants were prospering, forming the beginnings of a solid middle-class. It was a confident, exuberant age. The king had just founded the greatest order of English chivalry, the Order of the Garter, basing it on a celebrated act of chivalry performed by the king towards the Countess of Salisbury. 

The reality was rather different—just as the reality behind the garter incident was rather different (according to one account the Countess was wife of the king's best friend, and he raped her). The Black Death of 1348, and subsequent plagues only slightly less terrible, had undermined the whole basis of feudal society, and the Peasant's revolt of 1381 and the civil wars of the next century were evidence of the decline and ultimate collapse of the traditional medieval class structure. Edward's French wars in pursuit of a dubious claim to the French crown over-stretched English resources and proved a chimera which was to delude English kings and impoverish their country for a century. Edward's England, then, was a glorious structure built on dangerously flimsy foundations—a thriving, exciting, fluid age, which finds brilliant expression in the work of its greatest poet. 

Geoffrey Chaucer (?1340-1400) is the first English writer whom we today can read with anything like ease and he is one who sepaks with particular directness to the modern reader. He was a servant of the court and on occasion its emissary abroad, yet he was born into the middle class which was then so rapidly consolidating its position. Thus his contacts ranged from the highest to the lowest in this changing, threatened, feudal society, and with his extraordinary appetite for all manifestations of human aspiration and human folly he was abrle to capture the essence of fourteenth-century life in a way no contemporary in Britain or on the Continent, could rival.

The plan of Chaucer's last and greatest work, The Canterbury Tales, was not original: to gather together a heterogenous collection of people and have them tell a series of stories—moral stories, romantic stories, bawdy stories, fables. It is Chaucer's genius for characterization and his feeling for social relationships, for the personal, moral and class tensions between people, that give his work a warmth and depth that other similar medieval collections lack. The people on his pilgrimage are described in the masterly 'General Prologue.' they frequently sepak for themseves in the prologues to the 'Tales,' they reveal—often unconsciously—further aspects of their natures in their choice of tale and manner of telling it, and in the conversations, disputes and fights that occur between the tales we get a further sense of medieval humanity at its most unzipped and outrageous.

The pictures of the pilgrims in the 'General Prologue' are little masterpieces of characterization in which what seems at first sight to be a mere accumulation of detail, often quite haphazard, turns out on closer reading to be full of sly innuendo and subtle juxtapositions. If the Prioress wears a brooch with the inscription Amor Vincit Omnia (Love Conquers All), is it love of God or of man that is referred to? What exactly does it mean when we are told that the Shipman, if he took prisoners by sea, 'by water he sent them home to every land'? (It means he threw them into the water to drown). What precisely does Chaucer mean to imply when he says that the Wife of Bath (for whom the pilgrimage was a combination of package tour and husband-hunt) was very good at 'wandering by the way'? Two lines, placed together, will illuminate a character and his profession. The excellence of the Cook's creamed chicken is placed next to a description of the foul ulcer on his shin; the description of the worldly monk as a fine prelate comes next to a description of his gourmet taste in food; in the portrait of the Wife of Bath we get this: 

She was a worthy woman all her live:

Husbands at chruche door she hadde five...

Sometimes these characters speak with a naturalness or an intensity that like a trumpet brings down the walls of the centuries between us and them. 'Alas, alas, that ever love was sin!' cries the Wife of Bath—who apart from the five husbands has enjoyed 'other company in youth',' so she clearly hasn't been unduly inhibited. 'Let Austin have his swink to him reserved!' ('Let Saint Augustine do his own bl— work!' expostulates the Monk, when he is reminded that the founder of his religious order included hard work among the daily tasks of the monks. 

In the tales these people tell, too, we have a wonderful picture of all sides of medieval life, but there is also that tang of modernity that makes our heart stop as we relize our kinship with them. The Pardoner tells his story of the riotous group of young men who decide to seek out and kill Death—and we recognize the teenage rowdies in our own streets. The Nun's Priest tells an animal fable about a about a chicken run—about Chauntecleer who with his six wives, his parade of learning, and his overwhelming conceit is the perfect male chauvinist cock—and even in these days we recognize pale shadows of his type. The bawdy tales of the Miller and the Reeve are funny today precisely because of the swift, economical, humane delineation of characters we can recognize: the story of someone getting branded on the bare behind may be funny on first reading, but it is only funny on second reading if you are interested in the man behind the behind.

Every sort of story is here, and every technique of story-telling in its most modern form. The Wife of Bath's Prologue (longer and better than her actual Tale) tells in shameless detail how she gained mastery over one after another of her husbands, and one gropes towards Joyce's Molly Bloom for comparisons; the Reeve's Tale tells a story of complicated changings of bed-partners which reminds us of nothing so much as a modern French farce. At one point in the Nun's Priest's Tale Chauntecleer, who has dreamed he has been seized by a fox, launches into an enormously long disquisition on the theory of dreams, their meaning in history and literature, intended to put down his silly wives who have pooh-poohed the prophetic significance of his dream. so long and rambling is it that we are about to say how medieval and dated this all is when suddenly Chauntecleer end his lecture and is so puffed up with his learning and his debating victory over his wives that he forgets the point of the whole thing, jumps down into the hen-run—and is seized by a fox. The long disquisition has been an example of Chaucer's mastery of one of the gifts of a great story-teller—that of timing.

The Canterbury Tales were unfinished at Chaucer's death. The greatest long poem he completed was the slightly earlier Troilus and Criseyde, a superb re-working of one of the most popular medieval accretions to the legends of Troy. The framework is superficially a courtly love stroy—of how prince Troilus courts the lovely widow Criseyde, how she is ent to join her father in the Grecian camp, and is there unfaithful to him. But Chaucer's treatment of this simple story is wholly modern in tone, particularly in its treatment of the central characters. Criseyde is the first depiction in depth of a woman in our literature, and still one of the finest. She is a widow, contentedin her solitude and independence: 

I am myn owne woman, wll at ease...

Shal noon housbonde seyn to me 'checkmate!'

For whither they ben full of jealousye,

Or masterful, or loven noveltye.    (novelty)

Chaucer's sympathy with Criseyde shows itself in the way he meticulously dtails the considerations that drive her into Troilus's arms: since her father's defection to the Greeks she is alone in a hostile city; flattered by the attentions of a Prince, she feels the stars are ordaining that she fall to him; she is pestered by her cousin Pandarus, who acts as pimp for his friend Troilus. From being the prototype of the faithless woman, as she is in much of medieval literature, Chaucer transforms Criseyde into the tragic symbol of war's efffects on human relationships and fates.

The unknown author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, writing at around the same time as Chaucer, seems at first sight more remote from the present-day reader: his alliterative verse-form was old-fashioned even in his own day; his dialect, that of North-West England, is much more difficult for us; and his subject-matter does not immediately call on us to claim kinship with medieval man, as Chaucer's does in his best tales. Sir Gawain is a story of King Arthur's knights, but the courtly romance is married to archetypal folk myths and to religion: the knights are challenged at Christmas by a green knight—who is beheaded, yet speaks on and issues a challenge for the succeeding Christmas. But there is in fact nothing primitive in this stroy-teller's art: behind the odd mixture of the courtly, the Christian and the mythic is a delicate morality about man's duty—as knight, as lover, as Christian. By involving Sir Gawain in a supernatural challenge the author nullifies mny of his attributes as a perfect knight; and when he has him sexually tempted by his host's wife he involves him in delicate questions of conscience concerning his duty as knight and his duty to his host—questions that can be resolved only by marrying courtly and Christian codes. Through both these plot elements he succeeded in relating the idealized world of Arthur with the real world he knew. If Gawain demands more of us, as readers, than Chaucer does, we are ultimately convinced we are in the presence of as great an artist. This feeling is augmented by the other poems probably by him bound into the same single surviving manuscript—particularly Pearl, a lament for the loss of his daughter that goes some way towards negativing Barbara Tuchman's judgment that medieval man was uninterested in children, and that 'emotion in relation to them rarely appears in art or literature'.

The other major work of the age of Chaucer, The Vision of Piers Plowman, is also written in the alliterative verse style of Gawain, but it displays a very different kind of mind. Its author—William Langland—is a name to us only, but he is usually conjectured to be a rural priest, and one agonized by the social abuses of his time. Using the framework of a dream—a favourite medieval device—the poem covers a wide spectrum from social satire to religious allegory, as the author puts foward his notion of what a truly Christian community would be, and how sadly far the England he knows falls short of it. His hatred of pride, greed and ostentation, his almost 'nonconformist' conscience, ally him with later writers in the puritan tradition such as the Milton of Lycidas and John Bunyan. And like Bunyan he retained his popularity with ordinary readers long after his own time—at least until the Elizabethan age. 

After his inexplicably rich harvest of literary genius in the fifteeenth century is a sad, barren period. The splendour of Edward's court gave way to popular discontent, factional strife and the desolating futility of the Wars of the Roses, with two factions of noble thugs disputing a crown that increasingly seemed not worth the winning. In England, in spite of the establishment of Caxton's printing press, literary activity was at its lowest ebb—at best imitative, uncertain of aim, fleeing from the disagreable present into nostalgia. Even Sir Thomas Malory's Morte D'Arthur—a collection and retelling of the early French and English legends of King Arthur—while a superb example of the potential of English prose, nevertheless at times seems enervated and lacking in conviction, as if the knightly ideal the author was celebrating seemed even to himself remote and impossible in a country torn apart by its own nobility.

The richest poetic harvest was late in the century in Scotland. This kingdom, enjoying unusual stability under a succession of talented Stuart kings, produced several poets of consequence, notably Robert Henryson (?1430-?1506) and William Dunbar (?1460-1513). Henryson's Testament of Cresseid is a sort of sequel to Chaucer's poem in which the faithless Cressid contracts leprosy. Its dialect (and perhaps its subject) will always prevent its enjoying the wide popularity of Chaucer's poem, yet it can be mentioned in the same breath without bathos, which is more than can be said of most fifteenth-century poems inspired by Chaucer. And Dunbar's famous 'Lament for the Makaris' (or poets), with its haunting, disturbing refrain Timor mortis conturbat me (I am troubled by the fear of death) may be taken as a requiem for a sad, confused, barren century:

The state of man does change and vary

Now sound, now sick, now blyth, now sary     (sorry)

Now dansand merry, now like to die;

        Timor mortis conturbat me...

He takis the knichtis in to field 

Enarmit under helm and shield, 

Victor he is at all mellie         (battles)

        Timor mortis conturbat me.

 

 

Piers Plowman (In Our Time)

 

—oOo—

 

 

(...)

The 'Pearl' Poet

From A Literary History of England (ed. A. C. Baugh), ch. XIV, "The Alliterative Revival", by Kemp Malone and A. C. Baugh.



In the last few chapters—on the romance, the religious omnibus, the lyric, and the writings of the mystics—we have become increasingly aware of the intense literary activity that marks the whole fourteenth century, and activity that reaches its culmination for most readers today in the great narrative poetry of Chaucer. It is an activity that extends from one end of England to the other, an activity in which London and the court participate to no overwhelming extent but rather share along with many other sections of the country. The widespread distribution of the ferment that was at work is indicated perhaps nowhere more plainly than in the emergence about 1350 of the Old English alliterative tradition after it had lain hidden for nearly two hundred years.

Alliterative verse

Roughly between the years 1350 and 1400 there appeared a score of poems, ranging from a few hundred lines to several thousand, in a metre which had clearly evolved in an unbroken development from the old four-beat alliterative measure of Beowulf and Cynewulf. It is not an antiquarian revival, but the reappearance of a metrical pattern which has undergone considerable change. The line has become in most cases the unit of thought, and the alliteration is therefore not so much structural as decorative. With some poets hunting the letter becomes a passion, and the alliteration falls on three syllables in a half-line or is carried through several consecutive lines. Verse of this sort was obviously associated in Chaucer's mind with the north, as is indicated by the well-known words of the Parson:

But trusteth well, I am a Southern man,
I can not geste—rum, ram, ruf—by lettre.

And most of the poems in the alliterative revival belong to the north and to the northwest Midlands. While one of the most important—Piers Plowman—has its origin in the west Midlands, we may think of the alliterative revival as occurring in the north and more particularly the northwest of England.

Three of the earliest poems in the revival, Alexander A, Alexander B, and William of Palerne, have already been discussed in the chapters on the romance. There we have likewise treated other later romances in alliterative verse, such as The Wars of Alexander, The Destruction of Troy, the Morte Arthure, and the religious romance The Destruction of Jerusalem. It is not practicable to include them again here, where as part of the alliterative movement they would be fully entitled to a place. (NOTE 1)  We shall have to be content with this brief reference, and confine ourselves in this and the following chapter to the other classes of alliterative poetry. In the present chapter we shall treat the works of the Pearl poet and one or two poems in some ways related to his. In the chapter which follows we shall consider a group of poems concerned with social and ethical questions, of which the most important is the great social document Piers Plowman.

NOTE 1: See above, pp. 182 ff. On the later alliterative movement in Scotland see Sir William Craigie, "The Scottish Alliterative Poems," Proc. Brit. Acad. xxviii (1942): 217-236.

The Pearl Poet

Of the many unique manuscripts gathered together in the seventeenth century by the famous antiquary Sir Robert Cotton, among which are the Beowulf codex, the two texts of Layamon's Brut, the Ludus Coventriae and others less famous, one is a modest quarto volume known as Nero A. X. (NOTE 2). The contents consist of four alliterative poems in a hand of the end of the fourteenth century. Acoompanying the text are twelve illustrations of quite crude workmanship depicing episodes in some of the poems. None of the texts is accompanied by any title, but they have been named, in the order of their occurrence in the manuscript, the Pearl, Purity (or Cleanness), Patience, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

NOTE 2. It is reproduced in facsimile in EETS, 162 [Early English Text Society series].

The Pearl (NOTE 3) is not only first in the manuscript but shares with the Gawain the first place in the interest of modern readers. In a hundred stanzas of twelve lines each (NOTE 4), ingeniously linked in groups of five by repetition and a refrain, the poet tells how a lovely pearl, smooth and white, slipped from his hands into the grass and was lost in the ground. In his grief he often visits the spot which covers his pearl, and one August day, lulled by the fragance of herbs and flowers, he falls asleep on the little mound. There as he slumbers he dreams that he is in another world, a world of crystal cliffs, bright woods, and strands pebbled with precious stones. Such sights make him forget his grief, and he wanders about in sheer delight. Finally he comes upon a stream, clear and sparkling, beyond which he thinks must be Paradise. It is backed by a crystal cliff, at the foot of which sits a child—

A gracious maiden full debonaire;
Glistening white was her robe:
I knew her well; I had seen her before.

NOTE 3. Edited by Richard Morris (2ed, 1869; EETS, I). Sir Israel Gollancz (1891; 1921) and Charles C. Osgood (1906; Belles-Lettres Ser.). A translation is included in Gollancz's edition, and there are modern renderings by G. G. Coulton (1907), Osgood (1907), Sophe Jewett (1908), and Stanley P. Chase (1932).

NOTE 4. The rime scheme is abababab bcbc. There are 101 stanzas, but one is considered spurious or was canceled by the author.

The longer he looks at her the better he knows her. He has an impulse to call her, but seeing her in so strange a place deters him. She is spotless, and her dress is trimmed profusely with pearls. She wears a crown, from beneath which her hair falls loosely on her shoulders. No tongue could fittingly describe the sight:

So clean was it and clear and pure,
That precious pearl where it was set.

Thus arrayed she comes down to the brink. She was nearer to me, he says, than aunt or niece. Finally she speaks to him and he then addresses her:

O Pearl, quoth I, in pearls bedight,
Art thou my pearl that I have 'plain'd,
Regretted when all alone at night?
Much longing for thee have I restrained
Since into the grass thou didst from me glide.

Grown in stature and in wisdom, she reveals to him her life as spouse of the Heavenly Bridegroom. The dreamer's pearl was not lost when it was put in a coffer so comely as is this gracious garden. Along with thousands of others she shares a most happy lot. When the poet objects that she did nothing to deserve so great a reward, since she "lived not two years in our land" and knew neither her Paternoster nor Creed, she enters upon an elaborate discourse on the part played by merit and grace in salvation and the equality of the saved before God (NOTE 5), illustrating her views at length by biblical parables. The poet is finally granted a view of her abode—the New Jerusalem—vividly adapted from the Apocalypse. His effort in trying to cross the stream and reach the heavenly city wakens him from his dream, and he rises from the mound on which he had slumbered, filled with a new spiritual strength.

NOTE 5. The orthodoxy of the poet's views was questioned by Carleton F. Brown, "The Author of The Pearl Considered in the Light of His Theological Opinions," PMLA, XIX (1904), 115-53, and defended by James Sledd, MLN, LV (1940), 381. While his attitude toward grace has been shown to be good doctrine, equality of reward appears to be stressed beyond medieval orthodoxy.

The Allegory

This beautiful and seemingly transparent allegory has been interpreted in various ways and has led to considerable controversy. The traditional view sees in the poem an elegy in which the poet grieves for the death of a two-year-old daughter and is consoled by her in a vision of a common medieval type. This view was challenged by Schofield in 1904, who denied the autobiographical interpretation and suggested that the poet was merely upholding the virtue of purity under the symbolism of a pearl, with appropriate personification (NOTE 6). While his view has not found much favor (NOTE 7) his example has led others to attempt new explanations and various modifications of the original interpretation. The Pearl has been taken as symbolizing the Eucharist (NOTE 8) and more recently as recording a state of "spiritual dryness" experienced by the poet and not unknown to religious and to mystics (NOTE 9). Still others have sought to reconcile the elegiacal and symbolical interpretations (NOTE 10). There is symbolism, to be sure, in incidental ways in the poem, and the problems of divine grace and the equality of heavenly rewards constitute the major theme for discussion, but there are too many features which are meaningless on any other assumption than that the poet mourns the loss of a real child (NOTE 11). The poem treats certain aspects of salvation in the framework of a personal elegy, employing the medieval conventions of vision and debate.

NOTE 6. W. H. Schofield, "The Nature and Fabric of The Pearl," PMLA, xix (1904). 154-215; "Symbolism, Allegory, and Autobiography in The Pearl," PMLA, xxiv (1909). 585-675.

NOTE 7. Schofield's interpretation was opposed by Coulton in MLR, ii (1907). 39-43.

NOTE 8. R. M. Garrett, The Pearl—An Interpretation (Seattle, 1918; Univ. of Wash. Pub. in English, (Vol. iv., No. 1).

NOTE 9. Sister M. Madeleva, Pearl: A Study in Spiritual Dryness (1925).

NOTE 10. Jefferson B. Fletcher, "The Allegory of the Pearl," JEGP, xx (1921). 1-21., and René Wellek, "The Pearl: An Interpretation of the Middle-English Poem," Studies in English (Charles Univ., Prague), iv (1933). 1-33. Both these papers stress the complex character of the symbolism.

NOTE 11. For an attempt to identify the child, see Oscar Cargill and Margaret Schlauch, "The Pearl and Its Jeweler," PMLA, xliii (1928), 105-123.

A personal elegy

Viewed as a personal elegy the Pearl is a poem of deep feeling, the poet's grief yielding gradually to resignation and spiritual reconciliation. In its sensuous beauty, its artistic restraint, its skilful manipulation of a complex and difficult metrical pattern, and its imaginatively beautiful descriptions of the garden, the pearl-maiden, and the New Jerusalem, it is in its best parts unsurpassed by anything in Middle English poetry.

Purity

In two respects Purity (NOTE 12), the second poem in the manuscript, resembles the Pearl—in its preoccupation with an ethical question and in its predilection for extended paraphrases of biblical incident. For here we have a discourse on purity, showing how impossible it is for one who is unclean to approach God's pure presence, and enforcing the point by the parable of the man without a wedding garment. This and other episodes such as the fall of Lucifer and the Expulsion from Paradise are merely preliminary, however, to the main purpose, which is to tell the stories of the Flood, the Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and the profanation of the holy vessels in Belshazzar's Feast. The homiletic purpose is plain, and at the end the poet not only reminds us that "upon thrynne wyses" he has showed the sorrow that uncleanness causes our Lord but he closes with a prayer for grace. The stories are vividly told, but the poem suffers by comparison with the Pearl through the lack of any framework or artistic motivation.

NOTE 12.  Edited by Richard Morris (2ed., 1869; EETS, i)., Robert J. Menner (1920; Yale Stud. in English, 61), and Sir Israel Gollancz (1921).

Patience
 
This is also true of its companion piece, Patience (NOTE 13), which devotes all but the first sixty of its 531 lines to the story of Jonah and the whale. But concentration upon a single subjet gives greater unity to the piece, and the poet has allowed his imagination freer rein in embellishing his theme. He shows us the activity in getting under sail, describes vividly the storm at sea, pictures with realistic detail the slimy insides of the whale, and reports dramatically Jonah's conversations with God. God's rebuke of Jonah for his impatience leads the poet to his closing reflection. He who is too hasty in tearing his clothes will often sit sewing them up. Even poverty must be borne with patience, which "is a noble point, though it displease oft." In both Purity and Patience the poet's principal indebtedness is to the Bible, and the Pearl not only draws its parables from the same source but derives its description of the New Jerusalem from the Apocalypse. Other sources in Tertullian, an eclogue of Boccaccio, and even the Book of the Knight of La Tour Landry have been suggested but with the possible exception of Boccaccio's eclogue, must be described as very doubtful. The poet refers once to Jean de Meun and his part of the Roman de la Rose, and he has drawn scattered details in Purity from Mandeville's Travels in their French form. But while the author of these poems was apparently well read, we have not been very successful in tracking down the sources of his inspiration outside of the Scriptures.

NOTE 13.  Edited by Richard Morris (as above), Hartley Bateson (Manchester, 191; 2ed., 1918), and Israel Gollancz (1913).

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

There seems to be no reason to doubt that the three poems the Pearl, Purity, and Patience are the work of one man. The fourth poem in the transcript is of such a different kind that if it were not found in association with the others we might well hesitate to attribute it to the same authorship, in spite of obvious stylistic resemblances (NOTE 14). Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (NOTE 15) is a courtly romance, the finest Arthurian romance in English. Though it exemplifies the knightly virtues of courage and truth, it is in no sense a story told to enforce a moral. It is quite in the spirit of French romance, told for its own sake.

NOTE 14. Apart from the stylistic features common to all four poems, there are noteworthy parallels between Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Purity. It should be remembered, however, that the romance also shows many striking parallels in phrases and lines with the Wars of Alexander.

NOTE 15. There are older editions by Sir Frederic Madden for the Bannatyne Club (1839) and Richard Morris (1864; EETS, 4); revised by I. Gollancz (1897 and 1912), but the romance is best studied in the edition of J. R. R. Tolkien and E. V. Gordon (1925) or the new edition of Sir Israel Gollancz with introductory essays by Mabel Day and Mary S. Serjeantson (1940; EETS, 210). Modern renderings by Jessie L. Weston (1898), often reprinted, T. H. Banks (1929), G. H. Gerould (1934), etc. are available separately or in anthologies.

Subject Matter and Treatment

 The plot itself is so well known as to need no retelling. The main adventure is the challenge, which Gawain accepts of an exchange of blows with the Green Knight, in which he beheads the challenger but must submit to the same hazard a year later. With this is combined the adventure at Bertilak's castle, in which Gawain is tempted on three successive mornings by his host's wife and in which his only fault is concealing the magic girdle which she gives him. Both of these stories are found separately either in Celtic or in Old French romances (NOTE 16). They are first found combined in the English poem (NOTE 17), and whether we owe the combination to the English poet or to his source we must grant that it was a happy inspiration which tied the three temptations to the three blows offered Gawain at the Green Chapel and made the wound received from the third blow the result of his concealing the girdle. Accepting the supernatural as a prerogative of medieval story, we have a skilfully contrived plot (NOTE 18), a feature always worthy of remark in medieval romance. But it is only one, and that perhaps the least, of the qualities which give this remarkable poem its high place among English romances. From the beginning almost to the end it proceeds by a succession of scenes and situations full of color and movement and vivid detail. We begin with the New Year's feast, the guests exchanging greetings and gifts, the maidens laughing and making mirth till it is time to eat, then washing and seating themselves at tables. Just as the music ceases and the first course has been served the Gren Knight enters. He is fully described—stature, appearance, dress, armor, horse, trappings—as he rides straight up to the daïs. And so it goes from episode to episode like a succession of tapestries or medieval illuminations. The descriptions of the seasons as they mark the passing of the year and bring Gawain to the time when he must set out to keep his pledge are no mere literary exercises, and the hunting scenes have all the excitement and lifelikeness of first-hand experience or observation. Striking, too, is the poet's mastery of dialogue, always easy and natural, but particularly skilful in the extended conversations between Gawain and the lady of the castle, as she seeks an opening and he adroitly evades and parries each thrust. Finally, one should remark the dexterous way in which the poet keeps the various actions moving forward simultaneously, passing from the dalliance of the lady to the husband's adventures in the chase and back again to the bed chamber until all parties are brought together naturally at the end of the day. But there is no end of things to exclaim over and we can only hint at the enjoyment to be had from reading and rereading this fine romance (NOTE 19).

NOTE 16. The fullest study of the sources of the romance is George L. Kittredge, A Study of Gawain and the Green Knight (Cambridge, Mass., 1916). The challenge or beheading game is found in an episode inown as The Champion's Bargain which closes the Irish romance (at least as old as the eleventh century) of Fled Bricrend, or Bricriu's Feast. From there it passed into French where it was embodied independently into four separate romances (the Livre de Caradoc, incorporated in the first continuation of Chrétien's Perceval, the short thirteenth-century romance La Mule sanz Frain, the prose Grail romance known as the Perlesvaus in which the adventure is attributed to Lancelot, and another thirteenth-century romance entitled Gawain et Humbaut in which the ending has been completely changed). Parallels to the temptation motif are not so close, but in one form or another it is found in the Old French Ider, in the late English Carl of Carlisle, and elsewhere.

NOTE 17. There are many theories accounting for this combination. Kittredge believed that Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was based on a lost French romance in which the adventures were combined. J. R. Hulbert, "Syr Gawayn and the Grene Knygt," MP, XIII (1915-16). 433-462, 689-730, believes they were originally joined in a Fairy Mistress story as the conditions which the hero must fulfill. Else von Schaubert, "Der englische Ursprung von Syr Gawayn and the Grene Knygt," ESt, LVII (1923). 330-446, maintains that they were first combined by the English poet. This is also the view of Miss Day in the essay noted above. O. Löhmann, Die Sage von Gawain und dem grünen Ritter (Königsberg, 1938), likewise believes in the English origin of the romance, but argues that a Fairy Mistress story has been changed into a test of the hero.

NOTE 18. The idea that Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is connected in some way with the Order of the Garter is most fully advocated in Isaac Jackson, "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight considered as a 'Garter' Poem," Anglia, XXXVII (1913). 393-423, and opposed by J. R. Hulbert in the article already referred to (MP. XIII, especially pp. 710 ff.).

NOTE 19. In the absence of any objective evidence for determining the order of composition it has seemed best to treat the poems in the order in which they occur in the manuscript. Patience and Purity probably belong together, and since Purity has a number of parallels with the Gawain, it probably stands closer to the latter. On artistic grounds the Pearl and Gawain should follow the homiletic pieces, though this is not a safe criterion for pieces unlike in kind. One could argue for an order which would put the Gawain first, followed by the Pearl, the bereavement in which led the poet to the moral concerns of Purity and Patience. Such an order would have the advantage of putting Patience after Purity, to which it is superior in structure and unity.

The Author

All that we know about the author of these four poems is what can be cautiously inferred from his work, and all attempts to identify him with Huchown, Strode, or any other individual have failed. The dialect of the manuscript, which there is no reason to think differs essentially from that of the author, would indicate that he belonged to the northwest Midlands, probably south Lancashire, and this general locality is supported by the landscape and local allusions in the poems. He need not have been a priest in spite of his preoccupation with theological and moral questions, though a position as chaplain in some nobleman's household would make such an interest natural and account for his familiarity with the ways of courtly life. Naturally, however, such knowledge could be otherwise accounted for. His vocabulary contains a large French element which might result from his social status or his acquaintance with French literature. This was certainly considerable. He impresses us as a man of cosmopolitan taste whose horizon was not bounded by the limits of a provincial neighborhood. That he was at once observant and imaginative is apparent. His literary activity coincides roughly with the earlier part of Chaucer's career, and in the absence of more precise information we cannot do better than to date his work c. 1375.

St Erkenwald

Various other alliterative poems have from time to time been atrributed to the Pearl poet. Among them the one that has found most supporters is St. Erkenwald (NOTE 20), which attributes to the Old English bishop of this name a miracle not otherwise recorded. When St. Paul's in London was being rebuilt a tomb was uncovered in which was the body of a pagan judge. Since he had always been just in his awards, his body and clothing were still as fresh as at the time of his death. At Erkenwald's bidding the corpse reveals its identity, whereupon the bishop's tears fall on the body, constituting baptism and releasing the soul. Bodily decay at once sets in. The story is told in 352 clear and straightforward verses, but the present writer at least cannot accept the attribution to the Pearl poet.

NOTE 20. Edited by Horstmann, Altengliche Legenden (1881), Gollancz (1922), and Henry L. Savage (1926; Yale Stud. in English, 72).

Pistel of Swete Susan

Associated with the poems previously discussed is a short piece of twenty-eight tail-rime stanzas, each with thirteen alliterative lines, called the Pistel of Swete Susan (NOTE 21). It tells the story of Susanna and the Elders from the thirteenth chapter of Daniel (in the Vulgate), with the description of the garden embellished with details drawn from the Roman de la Rose. It is told simply and effectively, at times with the deft touches of an artist. When Susanna, allowed to speak to her husband, has avowed her innocence and fidelity to him,

Thei toke the feteres of hire feete,
And evere he kyssed that swete;
"In other world schal we mete."
     Seide he no mare. (lines 257-60)

A passage in Wyntoun's Orygynale Cronykil (c. 1420) asserts that the author was Huchown of the Awle Ryale (Royal Court), who is there credited also with the Gret Gest off Arthure and the Awyntyre off Gawane (NOTE 22). The attribution cannot be accepted, but the passage has led some to believe that Huchown was not only the Pearl poet but the author of most of the poems in the alliterative revival (NOTE 23).  Naturally such extravagant claims have not met with much favor. While the six poems discussed in the present chapter are linked together by certain features of subject matter and treatment it seems best to hold to the conservative view which limites the work of the Pearl poet to the poems preserved in the famous Cotton manuscript.

NOTE 21. Edited by Hans Köster, Huchown's Pistel of Swete Susan (Strassburg, 1895; Quellen und Forschungen, LXXVI).

NOTE 22.

He made the Gret Gest off Arthure
And the Awyntyre off Gawane
The Pystill als off Swete Swsane....

The Gret Gest off Arthure is believed to be the alliterative Morte Arthure, presumably in its fuller form (see ch. X, above). The Awyntyre off Gawane is identified by those who believe Huchown to be the Pearl poet with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, by others with the Awyntyrs of Arthur (see p. 190, note 22).

NOTE 23. George Neilson, 'Huchown of the Awle Ryale', the Alliterative Poet (Glasgow, 1902), who argues that Huchown is to be identified with the "gude Sir Hew of Eglintoun" mentioned by Dunbar in his Lament for the Makaris. In spite of the extravagance of his thesis Neilson's book contains much interesting matter.

John Gower (NIVEL AVANZADO)

ROUND ABOUT CHAUCER: JOHN GOWER

From Legouis and Cazamian's History of English Literature (1937)

Chaucer to the Renascence. 1. Round about Chaucer: 7) The Dialect of the East Midlands of King's English. John Gower. 

However important literary production, in the dialects we have reviewed, may have been, no one of them triumphed over the others. Victory fell to the speech of the east midlands, the district of London and the two universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and that in which the king had his residence. For this reason that language has been called the King's English. Its pre-eminence was established once for all in the end of the fourteenth century.

Although to-day this victory seems quite natural, since social forces were already making London the political and social centre, the universities the intellectual centre of the nation, the dialect of the east midlands was perhaps, when it was on the very eve of becoming English like none other, the poorest, the most completely disinherited of literature. Since Anglo-Saxon times, almost all English poetry had been produced apart from it. It could boast of hardly a poem besides the romance of Havelock and Robert Manning's Handlyng Sinne.  Reflection shows that the fact is not astonishing, for it was in the neighbourhood of the court and the universities that the English language was most degraded and existed most precariously, that it was always subordinate either to Latin or to French or rather Anglo-Norman. King, nobles, and clerks despised it. French, long the only tongue of those ouside the vulgar herd, had its natural stronghold in this district, and was more tenacious of life here than elsewhere. Men better endowed than their fellows avoided the common language or had recourse to it only for practical ends. Their literary ambitions did not find scope in a tongue which was so meanly prized.

The case of John Gower (1) is very representative of prevalent conditions. He used Latin and French in turn, and reached the point of writing in English only late, probably under the influence of Chaucer's success. The date of his birth is unknown. Was he, as was long believed, some ten years older than Chaucer, or was his junior? He died eight years after him, in 1408, and was probably his exact contemporary. The works of the two poets grew side by side, and, although Gower is not without merit of his own, he is chiefly valuable because he serves to measure the greatness of his rival.

He was a Kentish man, but this origin had only a slight effect on his language, which is hardly at all different from that of London and the court. He was a gentleman, possibly a clerk who did not take major orders. He was well read, and his library, if the word may be used, seems to have contained much the same French and Latin books as Chaucer's.

Undoubtedly he was once young for he wrote love ballades in English-French, ballades which lack fire but are not without a certain grace. This was a lover on the courtly model, seeking in vain to touch an unfeeling heart:

En le douls temps ma fortune est amière
Le mois de Maij sest en yverne mué;
Lurtie truis si jeo la Rose quière
Vous êtes franche et jeo suis fort lié. (2)

 (Ballade XXXVII.)

The third line at least needs translation—

I find the nettle when I look for the rose—

for its language is not Parisian. He is aware of the fact and excuses himself for it:

Et si je n'ai du français la faconde
Pardonnez-moi que je de ce fors voie, (3)
Je suis Anglais; si quiers par telle voie (4)
Être excusé. . . .

The very rhythm of his French verse tends to be Anglicized, to beat time to the iambic measure. In spite of his effort after correctness, Gower proves better than any one else how artificial was this uprooted language, at once learned and corrupt. He reminds us of Chaucer's Prioress:

And Frensch she spak ful faire and fetysly
After the scole of Stratford atte Bowe,
For Frensch of Paris was to hire unknowe.

Gower is the last in date of the Anglo-Norman poets. He deserves to rank among them less by a few little love-pieces than by his long poem or rather his long sermon in verse which is called Speculum Meditantis, or Miroir de l'Homme, and has recently been rediscovered. It is a sermon against the immorality of the age, and it justifies Chaucer's epithet of 'moral Gower' which was to cling to his friend's name for ever. This clerk, concerned especially to note and display the vices of his generation, was indeed much more a moralist than a poet. He is without a trace of that joy in life and pleasure and observing it which are so vivid in Chaucer. He compares what he sees with his ideal, that of a pious clerk and a student, finds all abominable, and condemns unreservedly.

Thus it was with his most remarkable work, Vox Clamantis, which was inspired by the Peasant's Rising of 1381 and which he elected to write in Latin. It is a very substantial poem written by a member of the wealthy class, by a frightened landlord whose misfortune it was to live in Kent, the county in which the formidable rebellion broke out. Gower's terror gives these verse a strength and emphasis which are lacking in his other work.

The rising under Wat Tyler and Jack Straw began near Gower's land, and more than one of his tenants was doubtless among the rebels. It was during the first years of the minority of Richard II. The impoverishment of the Treasury, the levy of new subsidies for an unfortunate war, and the insolence of the farmers of the taxes had provoked popular anger and rebellion. Several tax-collectors were put to death, and after them lawyers, courtiers, and partisans of the real regent, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster. The number of the rebels increased. One hundred thousand men marched on London, demanding the abolition of serfdom and the reduction of rents. A true social revolution had been let loose in the country, and for a moment the insurgents were masters of London, where they sacked the palaces of the Archbishop of Canterbury and John of Gaunt. They destroyed but they did not steal: they even hanged a man in their own ranks for theft. Then the king rode out to meet them, and Wat Tyler, while in parley with him, was slain by the mayor. The king procured the dispersal of the rebels by promising redress of their grievances, then revoked his promise, and the rising was ended by cruel repressive measures.

Gower, now in his fifties, was haunted by this rebellion as by a nightmare. His interests were all on the side of the landlords. He had no sympathy with the popular cause, yet considered the ills of society to be the outcome of social vices which were ruining the state. His alarms and his grievances are voiced in the Latin distichs of Vox Clamantis. 

The poet first has a vision of a crowd of members of the populace changed into wild beasts and uncurbed by reason—asses, fierce as lions, who will bear no more burdens, oxen who refuse to draw the plough, dows who bark at huntsmen, cats who have reverted to wildness. A jay, who stands for Wat Tyler, harangues them, to the sound of 'Down with honour! Perish the law!' and at the tail of their company John Ball, an excommunicate priest, preaches on the text: 

When Adam delved and Eve span,
Who was then the gentleman?

The swarming mass of people lays Troynovant, or London, waste. Its strength is broken by the death of the jay, but the ship of the state is still adrift and puts in at the island of Disorder. Then a voice from heaven advises Gower to write down what he has seen in his nightmare. 

The rest of his poem contains his waking thoughts and is entirely didactic. The misfortunes of the age spring from the general corruption. There are three classes of society, the clerks, the warriors, otherwise knights and nobles, and the third estate, namely the villeins and labourers, the traders and the lawyers. All are riddled with vice. The court is a meeting-place for everything abominable. 

The poem ends with a prayer to the young king, Richard II, to bring virtue back to the court, and with an appeal to all men to mend their ways, remembering how short is earthly life. Gower declares his love for his cournty: he has wished, he says, that men should hear not only what he himself feels to be true, but also the voice of the people which is often the voice of God. 

It is a great pity that this work, into which Gower has put the best of himself, his utmost sincerity of thought, vehemence of satire, and depths of narrow but coherent morality, should have received the dress of a dead language, while on the one occasion when he used the speech of his country he worked against the grain of his temperament and talent, and wrote an entirely artificial poem.

For he did finally make up his mind to write in English, perhaps incited by the growing reputation of Chaucer, who had already produced most of his works and was soon to begin The Canterbury Tales. It was about 1383 or 1384 that Gower composed his single English poem, his Confessio Amantis, an immense compilation of stories extending to forty thousand octosyllabic lines. He tells us he did it at the bidding of King Richard, who charged him that 'some newe thing I shuldë boke,' and thus he excuses his use of the vulgar tongue:

And for that fewë men endite
In oure Enslisshe, I thenkë make
A bok for King Richardës sake.

He has the credit of having sought, a little before Chaucer, a thread on which to string some hundred stories. The idea was not quite new: it had been exemplified in the Speculum Historiale of Vincent de Beauvais, the Gesta Romanorum, and the Sept Sages, to which the Decameron would have to be added, were it not clearly unknown to Gower as to Chaucer. The idea was a happy one, but how awkwardly Gower executed it!

He tells us with a sigh that he is going to sing of love, rather than follow his own taste and write a moral book. Love is the last subject he would choose for himself, but something must be conceded to the reader who prefers amusement to wisdom:

For thilkë cause, if that ye rede,
I wolde go the middel wey
And write a boke betwene the twey,
Somwhat of lust, somwhat of lore.

I happens that Venus, who has little fondness for him, advises him one day in May to make his confession to her priest Genius.  The obedient poet goes to the confessional and asks Genius to question him, point by point, thus sounding his conscience in the article of love. Genius consents, but declares that, in order that the confession may be complete, he will be obliged, in the course of the examination, to speak of the different vices. He will explain each of them by means of a story, so that the lover may know whether or not he have the same guilt on his conscience. When the confession has ended, Venus mocks this superannuated lover, who decides to withdraw. 

The device allows the seven deadly sins, subdivided into many secondary sins, to defile thorugh seven books. Genius has received a complete scholastic education, but he ceases to excel when he endeavours to adapt his examples to his precepts. To illustrate hypocrisy he tells the tale of the deceiving Trojan Horse. To show that murder, an effect of anger, is to be condemned, he relates the story of Pyramus and Thisbe: Pyramus kills himself out of despair, which is anger, when he believes that Thisbe has been the lion's victim, and the moral is that nothing should be done in a hurry. The proof that carelessness is injurious to love is found in the story of Phaeton, who drove his father's chariot carelessly, freezing and burning the earth by turns, so that Phebus caused him, as a punishment, to fall from the chariot and be drowned.

The connection of these stories with the morality of love is so absurd that, after praising Gower for attempting a unified plan, we are tempted to regret that he did not write his little stories haphazard, without trying to give them a frame. For as a a narrator he is abundant and clear, and since he has read much, he has had no difficulty in finding curious and sometimes attractive studies among his books. Several of his tales recur in Chaucer, who sometimes preceded and sometimes followed him in selecting them. Once or twice Gower was inspired by a better original than Chaucer, as when he took the story of the Knight Florent which corresponds to the tale of the Wife of Bath.

This is as much as can be claimed for Gower. An almost immeasurable distance separates him from Chaucer. He is doing penance when he obliges himself to treat of love, undertaking a task so ungrateful and so contrary to his nature that he could have discharged it well only with the help of the sense of humour he lacked deplorably. Like him, Chaucer posed as despised by Venus and ill-used by Cupid, but—not to speak of his unrivalled and unfailing power to awaken sympathy for lovers—his confession of impotence is delightful because it is wrapped in humour. In Gower, there are, or seem to be, velleities of humour, but they are invariably abortive. There is too much reality in the awkwardness with which this poet resigns himself to his distasteful subject. Once and again, a sigh excapes him because he cannot return to the moral teaching natural to him, and these regrets are the sincerest part of his poem. He is indeed, as Chaucer said, 'moral Gower', and it is unfortunate that he ever forsook his role. Venus was right when she told him:

And tarie thou mi court nomore
but go ther vertu moral dwelleth,
Where ben thi bokes, as men telleth,
Which of long time thou hast write.

And we are grateful to Gower for having made the goddess own Chaucer for her true disciple and poet. 

Of dites and songës glad
The which he for my sakë made
The land fulfilled is over al.

Gower, learned, industrious, and copious, is the typical average poet of his century. His writings are what Chaucer's might have been without Chaucer's genius.

Notes

(1). Complete edition in four volumes of his work, ed. by G. C. Macaulay (Clarendon Press, 1899-1902); Confessio Amantis, ed. by Henry Morley (1899).

(2) In the sweet season, my fate is bitter
     The month of May has changed into winter
      I find the nettle when I look for the rose;
     You are free whereas I am fast bound.

(3) I go astray.

(4) And therefore I beg.

 

 

 

 

 

Geoffrey Chaucer: The Founder of Our Language

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