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twg_000012921300 | he had access to the Court and belonged to it. He dressed in the fashion, and spent seven shillings for a short cloak or paltock, shoes, and a pair of red and black breeches. In he took part in the expedition to France, led by the king. It seemed as if it must be a death-blow to the French: the | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921301 | disaster of Poictiers was not yet repaired; the Jacquerie had just taken place, as well as the Parisian riots and the betrayal and death of Marcel; the king of France was a prisoner in London, and the kingdom had for its leader a youth of twenty-two, frail, learned, pious, unskilled in war. It looked as though one had but to | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921302 | take; but once more the saying of Froissart was verified; in the fragile breast of the dauphin beat the heart of a great citizen, and the event proved that the kingdom was not "so discomfited but that one always found therein some one against whom to fight." The campaign was a happy one neither for Edward nor for Chaucer. The | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921303 | king of England met with nothing but failures: he failed before Reims, failed before Paris, and was only too pleased to sign the treaty of Brtigny. Chaucer was taken by the French,[] and his fate would not have been an enviable one if the king had not paid his ransom. Edward gave sixteen pounds to recover his daughter-in-law's page. Everything | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921304 | has its value: the same Edward had spent fifty pounds over a horse called Bayard, and seventy for another called Labryt, which was dapple-grey. After his return Chaucer was attached to the person of Edward in the capacity of valet of the chamber, "valettus camer regis"; this is exactly the title that Molire was later to honour in his turn. | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921305 | His functions consisted in making the royal bed, holding torches, and carrying messages. A little later he was squire, _armiger_, _scutifer_, and as such served the prince at table, and rode after him in his journeys.[] His duties do not seem to have absorbed all his thoughts, for he found time to read many books, to write many poems, to | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921306 | be madly enamoured of a lovely unknown person who did not respond to his passion,[] to marry "Domicella" or "Damoiselle" Philippa, attached to the service of the queen, then to the service of Constance, second wife of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster--without ceasing however, because he could not, as he assures us, do otherwise, still to love his unknown | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921307 | beauty.[] He reads, he loves, he writes, he is a poet. We do not know whom he loved, but we know what he read and what he wrote at that time. He read the works which were in fashion in the elegant society he lived among: romances of chivalry, love-songs, allegorical poems, from "Roland" and "Tristan" to the "Roman de | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921308 | la Rose." Poets, even the greatest, rarely show their originality at twenty, and Chaucer was no exception to the rule; he imitated the writings best liked by those around him, which, at the Court of the king, were mostly French books. However it might be with the nation, the princes had remained French; the French language was their native tongue; | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921309 | the beautiful books, richly illustrated, that they kept to divert themselves with on dull days, in their "withdrawing-room," or "chambre de retrait," were French books, of which the subject for the most part was love. In this respect there was, even at that time, no difference between the north and the south. Froissart stays at Orthez, in , with Monseigneur | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921310 | Gaston Phbus de Foix; and at Eltham, at the Court of Richard II. in . In each case he uses exactly the same endeavours to please: both personages are men of the same kind, having the same ideal in life, imbued with the same notions, and representing the same civilisation. He finds them both speaking French very well; Gaston "talked | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921311 | to me, not in his own Gascon, but in fair and good French"; Richard, too, "full well spoke and read French." The historian was duly recommended to each of them, but he relied especially, to make himself welcome, on a present he had brought, the same in both cases, a French manuscript containing amorous poems, which manuscript "the Comte de | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921312 | Foix saw full willingly; and every night, after his supper, I read to him from it. But in reading none durst speak nor say a word; for he wanted me to be well heard." He takes the same precautions when he goes to England, where he had not been seen for a quarter of a century, and where he scarcely | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921313 | knew any one now: "And I had beforehand caused to be written, engrossed and illuminated and collected, all the amorous and moral treatises that, in the lapse of thirty-four years, I had, by the grace of God and of Love, made and compiled." He waits a favourable opportunity, and one day when the councils on the affairs of State are | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921314 | ended, "desired the king to see the book that I had brought him. Then he saw it in his chamber, for all prepared I had it; I put it for him upon his bed. He opened it and looked inside, and it pleased him greatly: and please him well it might, for it was illuminated, written and ornamented and covered | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921315 | in scarlet velvet, with ten silver nails gilded with gold, and golden roses in the middle, and with two great clasps gilded and richly worked in the middle with golden roses. "Then the king asked me of what it treated, and I told him: of Love. "With this answer he was much rejoiced, and looked inside in several places, and | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921316 | read therein, for he spoke and read French full well; and then had it taken by one of his knights, whom he called Sir Richard Credon, and carried into his withdrawing-room, and treated me better and better."[] Long before this last journey of the illustrious chronicler, Chaucer was familiar with his poems, and he was acquainted, as most men around | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921317 | him were, with those of his French contemporaries: Deguileville, Machault, Des Champs, and later Granson.[] He sings like them of love, of spring, of the field-daisy[]; he had read with passionate admiration the poem, composed in the preceding century, which was most liked of all the literature of the time, the "Roman de la Rose." This famous poem was then | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921318 | at the height of a reputation which was to last until after the Renaissance. The faults which deter us from it contributed to its popularity as much as did its merits; digressions, disquisitions, and sermons did not inspire the terror they do now; twenty-three thousand lines of moralisation, psychological analysis, abstract dissertations, delivered by personified abstractions, did not weary the | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921319 | young imagination of the ancestors. The form is allegorical: the rose is the maiden whom the lover desires to conquer: this form, which fell later into disfavour, delighted the readers of the fourteenth century for whom it was an additional pleasure to unriddle these easy enigmas. The Church had helped to bring allegories into vogue; commentators had early explained the | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921320 | New Testament by the Old, one being an allegory of the other: the adventure of Jonah and the whale was an allegory of the resurrection; the Bestiaries were series of allegories; the litanies of the Virgin lists of symbols. The methods of pious authors were adopted by worldly ones; Love had his religion, his allegories, his litanies, not to speak | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921321 | of his paradise, his hell, and his ten commandments. He had a whole celestial court of personified abstractions, composed of those tenuous and transparent beings who welcome or repel the lover in the garden of the Rose. It was a new religion, this worship of woman, unknown to the ancients; Ovid no longer sufficed, imitators could not help altering his | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921322 | aim and ideal; the new cult required a gospel; that gospel was the "Roman de la Rose."[] The discrepancies in the not shock the generality of readers; art at that time was full of contrasts, and life of contradictions, and the thing was so usual that it went unnoticed. Saints prayed on the threshold of churches, and gargoyles laughed at | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921323 | the saints. Guillaume de Lorris built the porch of his cathedral of Love, and placed in the niches tall, long figures of pure and noble mien. Jean de Meun, forty years later, continued the edifice, and was not sparing of gargoyles, mocking, grotesque, and indecent. Thence followed interminable discussions, some holding for Guillaume, others for Jean, some rejecting the whole | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921324 | romance, others, the most numerous, accepting it all. These dissensions added still more to the fame of the work, and it was so popular that there exist more than two hundred manuscripts of it.[] The wise biographer of the wise king Charles V., Christina of Pisan, protested in the name of insulted women: "To you who have beautiful daughters, and | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921325 | desire well to introduce them to honest life, give to them, give the Romaunt of the Rose, to learn how to discern good from evil; what do I say, but evil from good! And of what utility, nor what does it profit listeners to hear such horrible things?" The author "never had acquaintance nor association with an honourable or virtuous | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921326 | woman"; he has known none save those of "dissolute and evil life," and has taken all the others to be according to that pattern.[] The illustrious Gerson, in the fifteenth century, did the romance the honour of refuting it by a treatise according to rule; but the poem was none the less translated into Latin, Flemish, and English, printed a | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921327 | number of times at the Renaissance and rejuvenated and edited by Marot. There were several English translations, and one of them was the work of our young "Valettus camer regis." This translation by Chaucer is lost,[] but we are aware not only that it existed, but even that it was celebrated; its merit was known in France, and Des Champs, | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921328 | in sending his works to Chaucer,[] congratulates him, above all things, on having "planted the rose-tree" in "the isle of giants," the "angelic land," "Angleterre," and on being there the god of worldly loves: Tu es d'amours mondains dieux on Albie Et de la Rose en la terre Anglique ... En bon angls le livre translatas. This authority in matters | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921329 | of love which Des Champs ascribes to his English brother-author, is real. Chaucer composed then a quantity of amorous poems, in the French style, for himself, for others, to while away the time, to allay his sorrows. Of them said Gower: The lande fulfylled is over all. Most of them are lost; but we know, from contemporaneous allusions, that they | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921330 | swarmed, and from himself that he wrote "many an ympne" to the God of love, "balades, roundels, virelayes," bokes, songes, dytees, In ryme, or elles in cadence, each and all "in reverence of Love."[] A few poems, however, of that early period, have reached us. They are, amongst others, his "Compleynte unto Pite"-- Pite, that I have sought so yore | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921331 | ago With herte sore, and ful of besy peyne ... --a rough sketch of a subject that Sidney was to take up later and bring to perfection, and his "Book of the Duchesse," composed on the occasion of the death of Blanche of Lancaster, wife of John of Gaunt. The occasion is sad, but the setting is exquisite, for Chaucer | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921332 | wishes to raise to the Duchess who has disappeared a lasting monument, that shall prolong her memory, an elegant one, graceful as herself, where her portrait, traced by a friendly hand, shall recall the charms of a beauty that each morning renewed. So lovable was she, and so full of accomplishment, That she was lyk to torche bright, That every | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921333 | man may take of light Ynogh, and hit hath never the lesse.[] Already the descriptions have a freshness that no contemporaries equal, and show a care for truth and a gift of observation not often found in the innumerable poems in dream-form left to us by the writers of the fourteenth century. Tormented by his thoughts and deprived of sleep, | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921334 | the poet has a book brought to him to while away the hours of night, one of those books that he loved all his life, where "clerkes hadde in olde tyme" rhymed stories of long ago. The tale, "a wonder thing" though it was, puts him to sleep, and it seems to him that it is morning. The sun rises | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921335 | in a pure sky; the birds sing on the tiled roof, the light floods the room, which is all painted according to the taste of the Plantagenets. On the walls is represented "al the Romaunce of the Rose"; the window-glass offers to view the history of Troy; coloured rays fall on the bed; outside, the welken was so fair, Blew, | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921336 | bright, clere was the air ... Ne in al the welken was a cloude. A hunt goes by, 'tis the hunt of the Emperor Octavian; the young man mounts and rides after it under those great trees, "so huge of strengthe, so ful of leves," beloved of the English, amid meadows thick studded with flowers, As thogh the erthe envye | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921337 | wolde To be gayer than the heven. A little dog draws near; his movements are observed and noted with an accuracy that the Landseers of to-day could scarcely excel. The dog would like to be well received, and afraid of being beaten, he creeps up and darts suddenly away: Hit com and creep to me as lowe, Right as hit | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921338 | hadde me y-knowe, Hild doun his heed and joyned his eres, And leyde al smothe down his heres. I wolde han caught hit, and anoon Hit fledde and was fro me goon. In a glade apart was a knight clothed in black, John of Lancaster. Chaucer does not endeavour to console him; he knows the only assuagement for such sorrows, | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921339 | and leads him on to speak of the dead. John recalls her grace and gentleness, and praises qualities which carry us back to a time very far from our own. She was not one of those women who, to try their lovers, send them to Wallachia, Prussia, Tartary, Egypt, or Turkey: She ne used no suche knakkes smale.[] From these | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921340 | "knakkes smale" we may judge what the others must have been. They discourse thus a long while; the clock strikes noon, and the poet awakes, his head on the book which had put him to sleep. II. In the summer of Chaucer left London and repaired to the Continent for the service of the king; this was the first of | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921341 | his diplomatic missions, which succeeded each other rapidly during the ensuing ten years. The period of the Middle Ages was not a period of _nuances_; that _nuance_ which distinguishes an ambassador from a messenger was held as insignificant, and escaped observation; the two functions formed but one. "You," said Eustache Des Champs, "you, ambassador and messenger, who go about the | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921342 | world to do your duty at the Courts of great princes, your journeys are not short ones!... Don't be in such a hurry; your plea must be submitted to council before an answer can be returned: just wait a little more, my good friend; ... we must talk of the matter with the chancellor and some others.... Time passes and | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921343 | all turns out wrong."[] Precedents are a great thing in diplomacy; here we find a time-honoured one. Recourse was often had to men of letters, for these mixed functions, and they were filled by the most illustrious writers of the century, Boccaccio in Italy, Chaucer in England, Des Champs in France. The latter, whose career much resembles Chaucer's, has traced | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921344 | the most lamentable pictures of the life led by an "ambassador and messenger" on the highways of Europe: Bohemia, Poland, Hungary; in these regions the king's service caused him to journey. His horse is half dead, and "sits on his knees"[]; the inhabitants have the incivility to speak only their own language, so that one cannot even order one's dinner; | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921345 | you must needs take what is served: "'Tis ill eating to another's appetite."[] The lodging is worse: "No one may lie by himself, but two by two in a dark room, or oftener three by three, in one bed, haphazard." One may well regret sweet France, "where each one has for his money what he chooses to ask for, and | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921346 | at reasonable price: room to himself, fire, sleep, repose, bed, white pillow, and scented sheets."[] Happily for Chaucer, it was in Flanders, France, and Italy that he negotiated for Edward and Richard. In December, , he traverses all France, and goes to Genoa to treat with the doge of commercial matters; then he repairs to Florence, and having thus passed | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921347 | a whole winter far from the London fogs (which already existed in the Middle Ages), he returns to England in the summer of . In a new mission is entrusted to him, this time a secret one, the secret has been well kept to this day; more missions in and . "On Trinity Sunday," , says Froissart, "passed away from | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921348 | this world the flower of England's chivalry, my lord Edward of England, Prince of Wales and Aquitaine, in the palace of Westminster by London, and was embalmed and put into a leaden chest." After the obsequies, "the king of England made his children recognise ... the young _damoisel_ Richard to be king after his death." He sends delegates to Bruges | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921349 | to treat of the marriage of his heir, aged ten, with "Madame Marie, daughter of the king of France"; in February other ambassadors are appointed on both sides: "Towards Lent, a secret treaty was made between the two kings for their party to be at Montreuil-on-sea. Thus were sent to Calais, by the English, Messire Guichard d'Angle, Richard Stury, and | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921350 | Geoffrey Chaucer."[] The negotiation failed, but the poet's services seem nevertheless to have been appreciated, for in the following year he is again on the highways. He negotiates in France, in company with the same Sir Guichard, now become earl of Huntingdon; and again in Italy, where he has to treat with his compatriot Hawkwood,[] who led, in the most | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921351 | agreeable manner possible, the life of a condottiere for the benefit of the Pope, and of any republic that paid him well. These journeys to Italy had a considerable influence on Chaucer's mind. Already in that privileged land the Renaissance was beginning. Italy had, in that century, three of her greatest poets: the one whom Virgil had conducted to the | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921352 | abode of "the doomed race" was dead; but the other two, Petrarch and Boccaccio, still lived, secluded, in the abode which was to be their last on earth, one at Arqua, near Padua, the other in the little fortified village of Certaldo, near Florence. In art, it is the century of Giotto, Orcagna, and Andrew of Pisa. Chaucer saw, all | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921353 | fresh still in their glowing colours, frescoes that time has long faded. Those old things were then young, and what seems to us the first steps of an art, uncertain yet in its tread, seemed to contemporaries the supreme effort of the audacious, who represented the new times. Chaucer's own testimony is proof to us that he saw, heard, and | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921354 | learnt as much as possible; that he went as far as he could, letting himself be guided by "adventure, that is the moder of tydinges." He arrived without any preconceived ideas, curious to know what occupied men's minds, as attentive as on the threshold of his "Hous of Fame": For certeynly, he that me made To comen hider, seyde me, | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921355 | I shulde bothe here et see, In this place wonder thinges ... For yit peraventure, I may lere Some good ther-on, or sumwhat here, That leef me were, or that I wente.[] He was thus able to see with his own eyes the admirable activity, owing to which rose throughout Italy monuments wherein all kinds of contradictory aspirations mingled, and | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921356 | which are nevertheless so harmonious in their _ensemble_, monuments of which Giotto's campanile is the type, wherein we still recognise the Middle Ages, even while we foresee the Renaissance--with Gothic windows and a general aspect which is classic, where the sentiment of realism and everyday life is combined with veneration for antique art, where Apelles is represented painting a triptych | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921357 | of Gothic shape. Pisa had already, at that day, its leaning tower, its cathedral, its baptistery, the exterior ornamentation of which had just been changed, its Campo Santo, the paintings of which were not finished, and were not yet attributed to Orcagna. Along the walls of the cemetery he could examine that first collection of antiques which inspired the Tuscan | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921358 | artists, the sarcophagus, with the story of Phdra and Hippolytus, which Nicholas of Pisa took for his model. He could see at Pistoja the pulpit carved by William of Pisa, with the magnificent nude torso of a woman, imitated from the antique. At Florence the Palazzo Vecchio, which was not yet called thus, was finished; so were the Bargello, Santa-Croce, | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921359 | Santa-Maria-Novella. Or-San-Michele was being built; the Loggia of the Lansquenets was scarcely begun; the baptistery had as yet only one of its famous doors of bronze; the cathedral disappeared under scaffoldings; the workmen were busy with the nave and the apse. Giotto's campanile had been finished by his pupil Gaddi, the Ponte Vecchio, which did not deserve that name any | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921360 | better than the palace, had been rebuilt by the same Gaddi, and along the causeway which continued it, through clusters of cypress and olive trees, the road led up to San Miniato, all resplendent with its marbles, its mosaics, and its paintings. On other ranges of hills, amid more cypress and more olive trees, by the side of Roman ruins, | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921361 | arose the church of Fiesole, and half-way to Florence waved in the sunlight the thick foliage overshadowing the villa which, during the great plague had sheltered the young men and the ladies of the "Decameron." The movement was a general one. Each town strove to emulate its neighbour, not only on the battlefields, which were a very frequent trysting-place, but | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921362 | in artistic progress; paintings, mosaics, carvings, shone in all the palaces and churches of every city; the activity was extreme. Giotto, who had his studio, his "botega," in Florence, worked also at Assisi, Rome, and Padua. Sienna was covering the walls of her public palace with frescoes, some figures of which resemble the paintings at Pompeii.[] An antique statue found | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921363 | within her territory was provoking universal admiration, and was erected on the Gaa fountain by the municipality; but the Middle Ages did not lose their rights, and, the republic having suffered reverses, the statue fell into disgrace. The god became nothing more than an idol; the marble was shattered and carried off, to be treacherously interred in the territory of | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921364 | Florence.[] The taste for collections was spreading; the commerce of antiquities flourished in Northern Italy. Petrarch bought medals, and numbered among his artistic treasures a Madonna of Giotto, "whose beauty," he says in his will, "escaped the ignorant and enraptured the masters of the art."[] This brightening of the land was the result of concurring wills, nor did it pass | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921365 | unobserved even then; towns enjoyed their masterpieces, and, like young women, "se miraient en leur beaut." Contemporaries did not leave to posterity the care of crowning the great poets of the time. Italy, the mother of art, wished the laurel to encircle the brow of the living, not to be simply the ornament of a tomb. Rome had crowned, in | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921366 | , him who, "cleansing the fount of Helicon from slime and marshy rushes, had restored to the water its pristine limpidity, who had opened Castalia's grotto, obstructed by a network of wild boughs, and destroyed the briers in the laurel grove": the illustrious Francis Petrarch.[] Though somewhat tardy, the honour was no less great for Dante: public lectures on the | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921367 | "Divine Comedy" were instituted in Florence, and the lecturer was Boccaccio.[] It was impossible that a mind, from infancy friendly to art and books, should not be struck by this general expansion; the charm of this literary springtime was too penetrating for Chaucer not to feel it; he followed a movement so conformable to his tastes, and we have a | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921368 | proof of it. Before his journeys he was ignorant of Italian literature; now he knows Italian, and has read the great classic authors of the Tuscan land: Boccaccio, Petrarch, and Dante. The remembrance of their works haunts him; the "Roman de la Rose" ceases to be his main literary ideal. He was acquainted with the old classics before his missions; | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921369 | but the tone in which he speaks of them now has changed; to-day it is a tone of veneration; one should kiss their "steppes." He expresses himself about them as Petrarch did; it seems, so great is the resemblance, as if we found in his verses an echo of the conversations they very likely had together by Padua in .[] | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921370 | In the intervals between his missions Chaucer would return to London, where administrative functions had been entrusted to him. For twelve years, dating from , he was comptroller of the customs, and during the ten first years he was obliged, according to his oath, to write the accounts and to draw up the rolls of the receipts with his own | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921371 | hand: "Ye shall swere that ... ye shall write the rolles by your owne hande demesned."[] To have an idea of the work this implies, one should see, at the Record Office, the immense sheets of parchment fastened together, one after the other, which constitute these rolls.[] After having himself been present at the weighing and verifying of the merchandise, | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921372 | Chaucer entered the name of the owner, the quality and quantity of the produce taxed, and the amount to be collected: endless "rekeninges!" Defrauders were fined; one, John Kent, of London, having tried to smuggle some wools to Dordrecht, the poet, poet though he was, discovered the offence; the wools were confiscated and sold, and Chaucer received seventy-one pounds four | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921373 | shillings and sixpence on the amount of the fine John Kent had to pay. Chaucer lived now in one of the towers under which opened the gates of London. The municipality had granted him lodgings in the Aldgate tower[]; his friend the philosopher and logician, Ralph Strode, lived in the same way in rooms above "Aldrichgate"[]; both were to quit | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921374 | the place at any moment if the defence of the town rendered it necessary. Chaucer lived there twelve years, from to . There, his labour ended, he would come home and begin his _other life_, his poet's life, reading, thinking, remembering. Then all he had known in Italy would return to his memory, campaniles, azure frescoes, olive groves, sonnets of | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921375 | Petrarch, poems of Dante, tales of Boccaccio; he had brought back wherewithal to move and to enliven "merry England" herself. Once more in his tower, whither he returned without speaking to any one, "domb," he says, "as any stoon," the everyday world was done with; his neighbours were to him as though they had lived at the ends of earth[]; | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921376 | his real neighbours were Dante and Virgil. He wrote during this period, and chiefly in his tower of Aldgate, the "Lyf of Seinte Cecile," ; the "Compleynt of Mars," ; a translation of Boethius in prose; the "Parlement of Foules;" "Troilus and Criseyde," ; the "Hous of Fame," -; the "Legend of Good Women," .[] In all these works the | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921377 | ideal is principally an Italian and Latin one; but, at the same time, we see some beginning of the Chaucer of the last period, who, having moved round the world of letters, will cease to look abroad, and, after the manner of his own nation, dropping in a large measure foreign elements, will show himself above all and mainly an | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921378 | Englishman. At this time, however, he is as yet under the charm of Southern art and of ancient models; he does not weary of invoking and depicting the gods of Olympus. Nudity, which the image-makers of cathedrals had inflicted as a chastisement on the damned, scandalises him no more than it did the painters of Italy. He sees Venus, "untressed," | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921379 | reclining on her couch, "a bed of golde," clothed in transparent draperies, Right with a subtil kerchef of Valence, Ther was no thikker cloth of no defence; or with less draperies still: I saw Beautee withouten any atyr[]; or again: Naked fleting in a see; her brows circled with a "rose-garlond white and reed."[] He calls her to his aid: | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921380 | Now faire blisful, O Cipris, So be my favour at this tyme! And ye, me to endyte and ryme Helpeth, that on Parnaso dwelle By Elicon the clere welle.[] His "Compleynt of Anelida" is dedicated to Thou ferse god of armes, Mars the rede, and to Polymnia: Be favourable eek, thou Polymnia, On Parnaso that, with thy sustres glade, By | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921381 | Elicon, not fer from Cirrea, Singest with vois memorial in the shade, Under the laurer which that may not fade.[] Old books of antiquity possess for him, as they did for the learned men of the Renaissance, or for Petrarch, who cherished a manuscript of Homer without being able to decipher it, a character almost divine: For out of olde | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921382 | feldes, as men seith, Cometh al this newe corn fro yeer to yere; And out of olde bokes, in good feith, Cometh al this newe science that men lere.[] Poggio or Poliziano could not have spoken in more feeling words. Glory and honour, Virgil Mantuan, Be to thy name![] exclaims he elsewhere. "Go, my book," he says to his "Troilus | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921383 | and Criseyde," And kis the steppes, wher-as thou seest pace Virgile, Ovyde, Omer, Lucan, Stace.[] Withal strange discrepancies occur: none can escape entirely the influence of his own time. With Chaucer the goddess of love is also a saint, "Seint Venus"; her temple is likewise a church: "This noble temple ... this chirche." Before penetrating into its precincts, the poet | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921384 | appeals to Christ: "O Crist," thought I, "that art in blisse, Fro fantom and illusioun Me save!" and with devocioun Myn yen to the heven I caste.[] This medley was inevitable; to do better would have been to excel the Italians, and Dante himself, who places the Erinnyes within the circles of his Christian hell, or Giotto, who made Apelles | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921385 | paint a triptych. As for the Italians, Chaucer borrows from them, sometimes a line, an idea, a comparison, sometimes long passages very closely translated, or again the plot or the general inspiration of his tales. In the "Lyf of Seinte Cecile" a passage (lines -) is borrowed from Dante's "Paradiso." The same poet is quoted in the "Parlement of Foules," | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921386 | where we find a paraphrase of the famous "Per me si va"[]; another passage is imitated from the "Teseide" of Boccaccio; "Anelida and Arcite" contains several stanzas taken from the same original; "Troilus and Criseyde" is an adaptation of Boccaccio's "Filostrato"; Chaucer introduces into it a sonnet of Petrarch[]; the idea of the "Legend of Good Women" is borrowed from | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921387 | the "De claris Mulieribus" of Boccaccio. Dante's journeys to the spirit-world served as models for the "Hous of Fame," where the English poet is borne off by an eagle of golden hue. In it Dante is mentioned together with the classic authors of antiquity. Read: On Virgil, or on Claudian, Or Daunte.[] The eagle is not an invention of Chaucer's; | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921388 | it had already appeared in the "Purgatorio."[] Notwithstanding the quantity of reminiscences of ancient or Italian authors that recur at every page; notwithstanding the story of neas related wholly from Virgil, the first lines being translated word for word[]; notwithstanding incessant allusions and quotations, the "Hous of Fame"[] is one of the first poems in which Chaucer shows forth clearly | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921389 | his own personality. Already we see manifested that gift for familiar dialogue which is carried so far in "Troilus and Criseyde," and already appears that sound and kindly judgment with which the poet will view the things of life in his "Canterbury Tales." Evil does not prevent his seeing good; the sadness he has known does not make him rebel | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921390 | against fate; he has suffered and forgiven; joys dwell in his memory rather than sorrows; despite his moments of melancholy, his turn of mind makes him an optimist at heart, an optimist like La Fontaine and Addison, whose names often recur to the memory in reading Chaucer. His philosophy resembles the "bon-homme" La Fontaine's; and several passages in the "Hous | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921391 | of Fame" are like some of Addison's essays.[] He is modern, too, in the part he allots to his own self, a self which, far from being odious ("le moi est hassable," Pascal said), is, on the contrary, charming; he relates the long vigils in his tower, where he spends his nights in writing, or at other times seated before | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921392 | a book, which he reads until his eyes are dim in his "hermyte's" solitude. The eagle, come from heaven to be his guide, bears him off where his fancy had already flown, above the clouds, beyond the spheres, to the temple of Fame, built upon an ice mountain. Illustrious names graven in the sparkling rock melt in the sun, and | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921393 | are already almost illegible. The temple itself is built in the Gothic style of the period, all bristling with "niches, pinnacles, and statues," and ... ful eek of windowes As flakes falle in grete snowes.[] There are those rustling crowds in which Chaucer loved to mix at times, whose murmurs soothed his thoughts, musicians, harpists, jugglers, minstrels, tellers of tales | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921394 | full "of weping and of game," magicians, sorcerers and prophets, curious specimens of humanity. Within the temple, the statues of his literary gods, who sang of the Trojan war: Homer, Dares, and also the Englishman Geoffrey of Monmouth, "English Gaufride," and with them, Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, Claudian, and Statius. At the command of Fame, the names of the heroes are | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921395 | borne by the wind to the four corners of the world; a burst of music celebrates the deeds of the warriors: For in fight and blood-shedinge Is used gladly clarioninge.[] Various companies flock to obtain glory; the poet does not forget the group, already formed in his day, of the braggarts who boast of their vices: We ben shrewes, every | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921396 | wight, And han delyt in wikkednes, As gode folk han in goodnes; And joye to be knowen shrewes ... Wherfor we preyen yow, a-rowe, That our fame swich be-knowe In alle thing right as it is.[] As pressing as any, they urgently claim a bad reputation, a favour which the goddess graciously grants them. Elsewhere we are transported into the | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921397 | house of news, noisy and surging as the public square of an Italian city on a day when "something" has happened. People throng, and crush, and trample each other to see, although there is nothing to see: Chaucer describes from nature. There are assembled numbers of messengers, travellers, pilgrims, sailors, each bearing his bag, full of news, full of lies: | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921398 | "Nost not thou That is betid, lo, late or now?" --"No," quod the other, "tel me what." And than he tolde him this and that, And swoor ther-to that hit was sooth-- "Thus hath he seyd"--and "thus he dooth"-- "Thus shal hit be"--"Thus herde I seye"-- "That shal be found"--"That dar I leye."[] Truth and falsehood, closely united, form an | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921399 | inseparable body, and fly away together. The least little nothing, whispered in secret in a friend's ear, grows and grows, as in La Fontaine's fable: As fyr is wont to quikke and go, From a sparke spronge amis, Til al a citee brent up is.[] III. Heretofore Chaucer has composed poems of brightest hue, chiefly devoted to love, "balades, roundels, | 60 | gutenberg |
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