Geoffrey Chaucer

John Norton-Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000681376
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Medieval & Early Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Originally published in 1974. This book discusses those aspects of Chaucer's art which are concerned with the problem of specific form. These aspects have been concentrated on by the author for Chaucer's major poems and some of his so-called minor poems in separate chapters. It offers a critical evaluation of some specific literary achievements of one of the most important authors of the medieval period. The author extensively compares Chaucer's poetic technique to contemporary French poets and preceding poetic structure.

Chapter One

The Book of the Duchess

At the close of the first of the Duino Elegies Rilke casts in the form of a question a symbolism which unites the themes of love, death and poetry. In meditating upon some special quality perhaps bestowed on us through the realization of our transitoriness, the poet inquires:¹

Ist die Sage umsonst, dass einst in der Klage um Linos/wagende erste Musik dürre Erstarrung durchdrang,/dass erst im erschrockenen Raum, dem ein beinah göttlicher Jüngling/plötzlich für immer enttrat, das Leere in jene/Schwingung geriet, die uns jetzt hinreisst und trösset und hilft.

Is the story in vain, how once in the mourning for Linos, venturing earliest music pierced barren numbness, and how, in the horrified space an almost deified youth suddenly quitted for ever, emptiness first felt the vibration that now charms us and comforts and helps?

Recent criticism of Chaucer’s perhaps earliest datable poem seems to answer this question almost as if by magic. At the touch of a Robert-sonian wand (manufactured in Princeton, blessed by a long-deceased bishop) the ‘dead with their nightingales and psalms’ vanish—and with a reassurance as wise as a dove and innocent as a serpent a Christian apotheosis appears (in one guise or another). Blanche of Lancaster (once tenderly described by Froissart as ‘jone et ioelie … Gaie … frische, esbatans, Douce simple, d’umble samblance) sheds her celebrated mortality and appears to us in her true and final nature: the Bride of Christ, the Church, the Blessed Virgin—even Christ himself. The démodé French concealed references to the Honour of Richmond give way to the ‘white walles’ of the New Jerusalem. From this modern Hill of Contemplation how far we seem from the mental and physical torment of a protracted eight years’ insomnia. If only we had known that ‘eight years’ was really a covert reference to the mystical number of completed spiritual perfection we might have guessed that whatever anxiety the poet Chaucer was passing through found rapid resolution in an allegory resembling a Beatific Vision. As a reigning Merton Professor once exclaimed (in another context): ‘This is mighty reassuring.’

1 Lines 91ff. The translation is that of J. B. Leishman (New York, 1939).

In a more recent attempt to return to an older, less sacramental account of the poem, Dr Wimsatt,² lost in tracing and retracing the French poems from which Chaucer extensively borrowed, never reached any conclusions about the meaning and form of Chaucer’s dream. The nearly autonomous comparative method created by Kittredge proves as unenlightening as the Exegete’s Benediction. At the end of Dr Wimsatt’s vision from Chapel Hill occurs a daunting enumeration of every conceivable Old French source for nearly three-quarters of Chaucer’s composition. One is left with the impression that Chaucer’s early art amounts to either the failed Gothic experiment beloved of Professor Muscatine or the Veritable mosaic of poetic quotation’ dear to another, alien, generation. No doubt the Wimsattian lists would have interested poets brought up on Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s Poetria Nova, just as Virgil’s borrowings from Homeric poems fascinated Macrobius. Certainly, Froissart (who would have recognized his own words in the opening lines of the Book of the Duchess) would not have been dismayed. For Froissart the historian was to write in the preface to his own Chronicles: ‘It is said that all buildings are wrought of diverse stones.’ If we retain this architectural image in the spirit of the Poetria Nova (in lines which Chaucer translated word for word in his Troilus):³

Si quis habet fundare domum, non currit ad actum

Impetuosa manus; intrinseca linea cordis

Praemetitur opus, seriemque sub ordine

certo Interior praescribit homo, totamque figurat

Ante manus cordis quam corporis; et status ejus

Est prius archetypus quam sensilis...

The hand that seeks a proper house to raise

Turns to the task with care; the measured line

Of th’inmost heart lays out the work to do,

The order is prescribed by the inner man,

The mind sees all before one stone is laid,

Prepares an archetype …

2 Chaucer and the French Love Poets, Durham, North Carolina (1968).

3 Cf. J. A. W. Bennett, The Parlement of Foules, p. 5. And cf. Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum Doctrinale IV.93, ‘De Maturitate’, where this passage is quoted verbatim.

—if we keep in mind Geoffrey’s analogy, then a genuine concern of literary criticism ought to lie in some statement about the archetypus —the unifying nature of the creative intuition which both generated and completed a specific verbal work of art.

Of the social and historical generation of the poetic impulse, little concrete remains to us at this remove. The arid fragments collected in the Chaucer Life-Records do not advance us further than Holzknecht’s puzzled musings in the 1920s. The important rubric (which confirms Chaucer’s testimony to authorship) in the Bodley MS. Fairfax 16 cannot be wholly relied on. It is not in Stow’s hand (pace Baugh and Robinson); this anonymous sixteenth-century note reflects John Shirley’s wording and Shirley’s peculiar spelling of Chaucer’s surname. It may well have been copied from the manuscript copy (now lost) which Thynne had access to. If so, we should make certain reservations —for Shirley’s testimony no matter how reliable as regards Lydgate rests largely on hearsay as far as Chaucer is concerned. ‘Made by Geffrey Chawcyer at ye request of ye duke of Lancastar: pitiously Complaynynge the deathe of ye sayd dutchesse/blanche/’ in addition to correctly asserting authorship, makes two further statements, one supposititious, the other demonstrably wrong. ‘At ye request of ye duke of Lancastar’ has led nearly all critics (including Clemen⁴ and Lawlor⁵) to image the relationship as that of client and patron—and where the poet provides some kind of ostensible ‘consolation’ for his putative patron. Now, if we compare the acknowledged roles of patron and poet in the instances of Gower, Hoccleve or Lydgate, we find a situation and relationship not very different from that depicted by Shakespeare in his Timon of Athens—or Maria Edgeworth’s great novel for that matter. As for Chaucer, overt reference to living persons reveals a predilection for equal relations intimately communicated between friends who are equal in regard. With the possible exception of the envoi to the so-called Complaint of Venus, addresses to social ‘superiors’ are strictly limited to business matters. Chaucer’s habitual manner (as author or poet-figure) maintains a bland indifference to, and independence from, the usage of clientship. If such relationships existed he neither advertised them nor sought profit from them. I venture that if we knew more about Chaucer’s actual relationship with John of Gaunt we would be no nearer an understanding of the genesis of the poem—or the dream-poet’s actual attitude to what may lie behind the image of a fictionalized duke of Lancaster. The second, connected, assumption, that of the presence of a ‘pattern of consolation’ (in Professor Lawlor’s phrase), is equally remarkable. Poetic consolations are so few in the Middle Ages that to hint at a traditional treatment amounts to literary deception (it leaves Professor Curtius almost tongue-tied, if that can be imagined). Prose consolationes, usually of the epistolary kind, are more numerous—and nearly all seem to glance at Pliny and Seneca for their inspiration. What emerges from a reading of these no doubt well-intentioned exhortations is that every attempt (couched in whatever admixtures of art and tact) to approach nearer and ever nearer to the moment of sympathetic and articulate sharing in the personal grief opens instead a vast and uncrossable distance between the writer and the recipient. No amount of apology, modesty or intelligent indirection can conceal the embarrassing failure of the impulse—or the isolation of all concerned—recipient, writer and reader. An objective, presumptuous gulf yawns which the gestures of art are powerless to enchant— and often the gestures of love or friendship in real life only succeed if words are omitted. Quintilian wisely keeps silent on this area of human experience as a possible subject for rhetorical stratagems. If Death may be imagined as the Great Leveller, Grief soon emerges as the unapproachable despot of that revolution. In spite of the logic of Professor Lawlor, the notion of a poet-dreamer coming at last to understand the meaning of death (rather than the grieving knight) remains at best an engaging sophistry. The words and events of the poem contradict the critic at every turn of the argument. The poetic relevance of the moral concerns of the two Jugement poems of Guillaume de Machaut evaporates—once you have read Machaut. Further, there is no ‘pattern’ much less ‘consolation’ (in the accepted sense ofthat word) in the poem at all. To take this cleansing a stage further, much criticism of the poem may be said to fail because it habitually attaches to our literary experience descriptive terminology acquired elsewhere—and often quite legitimately. Thus, ‘elegy’, ‘consolation, ‘panegyric’, ‘Old French love-vision’, ‘dream-allegory’, ‘Christian allegory’—all have played their part in rendering Chaucer’s achievement more misguidedly familiar or ‘conventional’ than the poem may have appeared to an audience available at the end of the 1360s or beginning of the 1370s. Dr Wimsatt is vaguely aware of this as he remorselessly ploughs on through the works of Chaucer’s French contemporaries in search of some points of more than local similarity. His chief impression of French verse at the time is undeniable: that Froissart, Machaut and Granson achieved a certain concentration of charm and poetic elaboration through the expanding of certain episodes present in Guillaume de Lorris’s and Jean de Meun’s Roman de la Rose; but that these later poets achieved their effect at the expense of the economy and emphasis of narrative continuity. The fourteenth-century French longer poem thus becomes more diffuse, more episodic and more various in its allegorical or figurative mode of reference: realism, imaginative passages, set topoi and songs all interrupt narrative and description which have ‘allegorical’ and sometimes ‘philosophical’ implications. Dr Wimsatt, unlike Professor Muscatine, is not certain of the relevance of all this heterogeneity to Chaucer. The simple answer is, that it hasn’t any. Chaucerian eclecticism has another object in view.

4 Chaucer’s Early Poetry, pp. 23ff.

5 ‘The Pattern of Consolation in the Book of the Duchess’, Speculum 31 (1956), pp. 635ff.

We need not turn to Li Regret de Guillaume (the only French ‘elegy’ cast in a dream formulation) to account for Chaucer’s decision to adapt a dream-vision form for the accommodation of the subject of the death of Blanche of Lancaster. Jean de la Mote’s poem bears no relation to Chaucer’s poem—nor to his more fastidious and more ranging meditation. We...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• General Preface
• Author’s Note
• Abbreviations
• 1 The Book of the Duchess
• 2 The Complaint: Venus, Pity and Mars
• 3 The House of Fame
• 4 The Legend of Good Women
• 5 The Canterbury Tales
• 6 The Book of Troilus
• 7 The Envoi a Scogan and the Envoi a Bukton
• Appendix: Moderatio, Moderation and Measure
• Select Bibliography
• Index