Albion (20 page)

“Longways Dance” by Thomas Rowlandson

CHAPTER 21

Fathers and Sons

William Caxton was
the first to call Chaucer “the worshipful father” of “our englissh,” who is then celebrated as “first auctor.” Dryden in turn described him as “the Father of
English
poetry
” who fructified the “Mother-Tongue,” and from this union issued “the various manners and Humours (as we now call them) of the whole
English
Na
tion”; there emerged “God ’s Plenty,” in other words, and Dryden continued the familial metaphor by remarking that “we have our Fore-Fathers and Grand-Dames all before us.” The sexual element of this linguistic commingling is emphasised by Matthew Arnold’s delight in Chaucer’s “free . . . licentious dealing with language.” The perception is compounded in the fifteenth century by the poet Thomas Hoccleve’s lament that upon the death of Chaucer “al this lond it smertith,” as if he were some kind of mythical father whose demise created a waste land.

There are many suggestive details here. The mingling of poet and language, father and mother, is seen as a potent sexual act which has mythical associations; it is a mystery indeed since, with the inseminating power of the poet, language gives birth to language. It is the source and womb of itself, with the poet only as temporary agent or begetter. This deeply held metaphor may in part be responsible for the “sexist” interpretation of literary history, where the author is implicitly deemed to be male. The idea of the father is important in another English context, however, since the familial or domestic sensibility is a very powerful one in national literature; it may have its origins in the Anglo-Saxon image of the lighted hall or in the Chaucerian vision of a collocation of pilgrims, but the idea of a close-knit community (generally withstanding the depredations of a cold and hostile natural world) is central to the English imagination. We have traced it back to
Beowulf
and beyond.

Chaucer
was a Londoner,
the son of a vintner or wine-merchant; he was born in a grand house in Thames Street at some time between 1340 and 1345, grew up in the streets of London and has in fact become typically associated with them—or, rather, with the men and women of the fourteenth century whom he loved so much that they will live forever in his verse. Yet he was not a “man of the people” in any modern sense. He came from a wealthy oligarchy of city merchants, and spent all his life in royal or administrative service. He was closely associated with the family and “affinity” of John of Gaunt, and as a result retained a number of highly lucrative sinecures. He was the poet of the court, too, with his verses being distributed among the nobility. It has also been argued that he found another audience for his poetry among the wealthy city merchants and their families.

He was sent on diplomatic business to both France and Italy but, despite his involvement in affairs of state, he rarely alludes to contemporary events in his published work. There is only one reference to the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, for example, but the absence of comment upon such events is only to be expected in his bookish and aureate art. It was courtly poetry in every sense; it was crowded with minute and realistic detail, suffused with emotional symbolism, concerned with individual portraiture, and filled with classical learning. The courtly sensibility of the period was at once bejewelled and highly emotive; it is embodied in the sad if majestic reign of Richard II, who, in 1400, died of starvation after his enforced abdication. It was the year in which Chaucer himself died.

Yet of course there is also great humour in the poetry of Chaucer; it is the comedy of a shrewd and practical man of affairs who mocks pretension, false learning and false sentiment and who also delights in the low “humour” of the fabliau. His is the comedy of the mystery plays raised to a much higher and more sophisticated level. G. K. Chesterton considered it extraordinary “that Chaucer should have been so unmistakably English almost before the existence of England”; but it is perhaps not so surprising in a poet whose personal modesty and broadness of feeling, whose respect for tradition and inventive diversity, make him indeed the fountain of English poetry.

The
metaphor of language
as a spring, or stream, is equally important to the critical understanding of Chaucer’s work. Any discussion of his poetry will notice its prolonged and fluent cadences, which can be termed its musicality; the images attendant upon it, however, have interesting fluctuations. One of the earliest references appears in a poem by Chaucer’s contemporary Eustache Deschamps, who writes of Chaucer’s “fontaine” from which he desires “avoir un buvraige”; Chaucer provides “la doys,” or stream, which will refresh him in Gaul. Lydgate, lamenting Chaucer’s death, announces that

The welle is drie, with the lycoure swete

and then again regrets the absence of those

golde dewe dropes of speche and eloquence

In a climate of rain and mist, the immediate metaphors are those of streams, and wells, and dew. Spenser considered himself to be the successor of Chaucer and prayed:

But if on me some little drops would flowe, Of that the spring was in his learned hedde

It is as if the English language were indeed a course of flowing water. In
The
Faerie Queene
Chaucer is depicted as the “well of English vndefiled” and the “pure well head of Poesie.” “Well” itself is an Old English word, so that the idea of a spring issuing from the deep earth is also a metaphor for the presence of the ancient language.

Dryden described Chaucer as “a perpetual Fountain” so that the stream is always fresh and ever renewed; implicitly Dryden is placing himself within the same movement, and declares that “I found I had a Soul congenial to his.” This suggestion of broad continuity appears in Dryden’s preface to
Fables
Ancient and Modern,
in which his own translations of Chaucer into “modern
English
” are gathered; in that same place he states that “
Spenser
more than once insinuates, that the Soul of
Chaucer
was transfus’d into his body; and that he was begotten by him Two Hundred years after his Decease.
Milton
has acknowledged to me that
Spenser
was his original . . .” So the image of the well, or fountain, or stream, has remarkable connotations, not the least of which is a doctrine concerning the transmigration of souls. Dryden continues with a remark, on the subject of translation, that “Another Poet, in another Age, may take the same liberty with my Writings”; Dryden places himself within the stream or, as Hazlitt has put it, “water from a crystal spring.”

To this may be added the recognition of the springs hidden within Chaucer’s poetry, as, for example, when William Empson notes in
Troilus and
Criseyde the presence of “a stream . . . cleansing and refreshing.”
¹
There is another stream, too, which is to be found within what Matthew Arnold termed “the liquid diction, the fluid movement” of Chaucer’s line; we may imagine the cadence flowing through Spenser, Milton and Dryden. It is a form of English music. It is also a matter of what was termed “sweetness,” as of sweet water, and is implicit in Wordsworth’s reverie of laughing with Chaucer by the mill-stream of Trumpington near Cambridge. It is implicit in the first line of
The Canterbury Tales,
“Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote,” although the music is lent a deeper resonance in the first line of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land when April becomes “the cruellest month” whose showers produce only the disturbed movement of memory.

The natural metaphors applied to Chaucer’s verse are in one sense incongruous, since the poet’s own language is a literary compound of different sources and heterogeneous borrowings. It is as if his successors, and indeed his contemporaries, wished to naturalize the artificial process of becoming English; they heard the music, too, but wanted to claim it as a native melody, indigenous as the stream which issues from the rocks. Chaucer’s poetry, however, is elaborately and deliberately rhetorical with all the devices of
exclamatio,interrogatio
and
interpretatio
. By his own account the narrator of the poems is a bookish and reticent creature, half in love with words and old literature, who seems to advance or represent the claims of learning over experience. In
The Book of the Duchess
the narrator, suffering from insomnia, asks for “a book . . . To rede and drive the night away”; it was a “romaunce . . . in olde tyme,” but eventually he sleeps and dreams. On awaking he finds the old romance still in his hands, and decides then to put his own dream “in ryme.” So literature is here the beginning and end of the process, aroused by a book and manifested in a book. In
The House of Fame
the classical myths and stories take on emblematic and pictorial form as if they were manuscript illuminations. The opening of
The Parliament of Fowls
reveals “a bok . . . write with lettres olde” which acts as a commentary upon Cicero’s
Somnium
Scipionis
; once more words and dreams are thoroughly intermingled, as if only in sleep could the narrator speak freely. But again this is a device to disguise all of Chaucer’s calculation and consideration, so that the words might somehow seem to be natural or inspired. Once more it represents a desire to naturalise—to ground, in almost a literal sense—a highly complex and various language. The English predilection for dreams has already been discussed, and it is perhaps appropriate that Chaucer “is the first European writer to use this formula.”
²

This emphasis upon books or literature is of vital significance to Chaucer in more than one sense, however, since like all English writers of the period he relies upon borrowings and adaptations in order to forge an English sensibility. In his prologue to
The Legend of Good Women
he declares that “On bokes for to rede I me delyte,” with the further argument that

And yf that olde bokes were aweye, Yloren were of remembraunce the keye

“Remembraunce” here is the term for historical memory, in the sense that Chaucer’s own histories of “good women” such as Dido or Thisbe are made up out of other histories; just as language springs out of language in the perpetual stream or fountain of words, so books spring out of other books. In
The Parliament of Fowls
he puts this mysterious arrangement thus:

For out of olde feldes, as men seyth, Cometh al this newe corn from yer to yere, And out of olde bokes, in good feyth, Cometh al this newe science that men lere

“Science” here has its original meaning of the state of knowing itself, so that the parameters of knowledge and understanding are fashioned by the learning of old books. This may not be an immediately familiar or even intelligible concept, but it is of the utmost importance in any understanding of the medieval imagination and, in particular, of the peculiarly English genius of Chaucer’s work. It can be said that knowledge, or truth, was a collective and communal enterprise; the individual author might enlarge or increase the store, but the principal act was not of creation but of assimilation and reinvention. Rhetoric was the means of reordering, in delightful or graceful form, already available materials and themes. The truth lay in authority, not in individual fabrication; hence Chaucer’s reticence and parodic portrayal of himself as silent and preoccupied. “For evere upon the ground,” the Host of the Canterbury pilgrims complains, “I se thee stare.” Chaucer’s narrator is “domb as any ston” because his inability or unwillingness to speak is a token of his incapacity. Of course this is also a rhetorical device, disguising his novelty and inventiveness, but it does illuminate the essential truth of Chaucer’s art; it is comprised of borrowed materials, and his genius lay in his ability to reorder and juxtapose already existing parts of poetic invention. He built a new dwelling out of old stones, and his talent for synthesis was matched only by his powers of assimilation. This will help to explain what have been called the encyclopaedic tendencies of his work, by which means he will supply lists of exempla within the course of a narrative poem or will simply copy out highly orthodox material as in his sermon upon penitence which ends
The Canterbury Tales
. An event or an adventure will be briefly narrated, as the preface to a fervent litany of sources and authorities; poetry becomes a means of adducing learning. He will write
A Treatise on
the Astrolabe
, or translate the
Consolation of Philosophy
by Boethius, with the same attention as that which he gives to the vivid portrayal of the Wife of Bath; they are all intrinsic parts of his literary endeavour to refurbish “science” and human scholarship. No one exercise is to be preferred to another, because they all pertain to the arts of rhetoric. He considered himself to be part of a tradition, although it was his destiny fundamentally to alter the nature of that tradition.