A Literary History of the English People Part 29

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,[473] who led, in the most 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 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 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 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, 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.[474]

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 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 cla.s.sic, where the sentiment of realism and everyday life is combined with veneration for antique art, where Apelles is represented painting a triptych 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 artists, the sarcophagus, with the story of Phaedra 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, 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 better than the palace, had been rebuilt by the same Gaddi, and along the causeway which continued it, through cl.u.s.ters 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, 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 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 a.s.sisi, Rome, and Padua. Sienna was covering the walls of her public palace with frescoes, some figures of which resemble the paintings at Pompeii.[475] An antique statue found within her territory was provoking universal admiration, and was erected on the Gaa fountain by the munic.i.p.ality; but the Middle Ages did not lose their rights, and, the republic having suffered reverses, the statue fell into disgrace.

The G.o.d became nothing more than an idol; the marble was shattered and carried off, to be treacherously interred in the territory of Florence.[476]

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."[477] This brightening of the land was the result of concurring wills, nor did it pa.s.s un.o.bserved even then; towns enjoyed their masterpieces, and, like young women, "se miraient en leur beaute."

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 1341, 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 ill.u.s.trious Francis Petrarch.[478] Though somewhat tardy, the honour was no less great for Dante: public lectures on the "Divine Comedy" were inst.i.tuted in Florence, and the lecturer was Boccaccio.[479]

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 proof of it. Before his journeys he was ignorant of Italian literature; now he knows Italian, and has read the great cla.s.sic 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 cla.s.sics before his missions; 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 1373.[480]

In the intervals between his missions Chaucer would return to London, where administrative functions had been entrusted to him. For twelve years, dating from 1374, 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 hand: "Ye shall swere that ... ye shall write the rolles by your owne hande demesned."[481] 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 const.i.tute these rolls.[482] After having himself been present at the weighing and verifying of the merchandise, Chaucer entered the name of the owner, the quality and quant.i.ty 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 s.h.i.+llings 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 munic.i.p.ality had granted him lodgings in the Aldgate tower[483]; his friend the philosopher and logician, Ralph Strode, lived in the same way in rooms above "Aldrichgate"[484]; both were to quit the place at any moment if the defence of the town rendered it necessary.

Chaucer lived there twelve years, from 1374 to 1386. 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 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[485]; his real neighbours were Dante and Virgil.

He wrote during this period, and chiefly in his tower of Aldgate, the "Lyf of Seinte Cecile," 1373; the "Compleynt of Mars," 1380; a translation of Boethius in prose; the "Parlement of Foules;" "Troilus and Criseyde," 1382; the "Hous of Fame," 1383-4; the "Legend of Good Women," 1385.[486] In all these works the ideal is princ.i.p.ally 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 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 G.o.ds of Olympus. Nudity, which the image-makers of cathedrals had inflicted as a chastis.e.m.e.nt on the d.a.m.ned, scandalises him no more than it did the painters of Italy. He sees Venus, "untressed," 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[487];

or again:

Naked fleting in a see;

her brows circled with a "rose-garlond white and reed."[488] He calls her to his aid:

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.[489]

His "Compleynt of Anelida" is dedicated to

Thou ferse G.o.d of armes, Mars the rede,

and to Polymnia:

Be favourable eek, thou Polymnia, On Parnaso that, with thy sustres glade, By Elicon, not fer from Cirrea, Singest with vois memorial in the shade, Under the laurer which that may not fade.[490]

Old books of antiquity possess for him, as they did for the learned men of the Renaissance, or for Petrarch, who cherished a ma.n.u.script of Homer without being able to decipher it, a character almost divine:

For out of olde 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.[491]

Poggio or Poliziano could not have spoken in more feeling words.

Glory and honour, Virgil Mantuan, Be to thy name![492]

exclaims he elsewhere. "Go, my book," he says to his "Troilus and Criseyde,"

And kis the steppes, wher-as thou seest pace Virgile, Ovyde, Omer, Lucan, Stace.[493]

Withal strange discrepancies occur: none can escape entirely the influence of his own time. With Chaucer the G.o.ddess of love is also a saint, "Seint Venus"; her temple is likewise a church: "This n.o.ble temple ... this chirche." Before penetrating into its precincts, the poet 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.[494]

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 h.e.l.l, or Giotto, who made Apelles paint a triptych.

As for the Italians, Chaucer borrows from them, sometimes a line, an idea, a comparison, sometimes long pa.s.sages very closely translated, or again the plot or the general inspiration of his tales. In the "Lyf of Seinte Cecile" a pa.s.sage (lines 36-51) is borrowed from Dante's "Paradiso." The same poet is quoted in the "Parlement of Foules," where we find a paraphrase of the famous "Per me si va"[495]; another pa.s.sage 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[496]; the idea of the "Legend of Good Women" is borrowed from 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 cla.s.sic authors of antiquity.

Read:

On Virgil, or on Claudian, Or Daunte.[497]

The eagle is not an invention of Chaucer's; it had already appeared in the "Purgatorio."[498]

Notwithstanding the quant.i.ty of reminiscences of ancient or Italian authors that recur at every page; notwithstanding the story of aeneas related wholly from Virgil, the first lines being translated word for word[499]; notwithstanding incessant allusions and quotations, the "Hous of Fame"[500] is one of the first poems in which Chaucer shows forth clearly 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 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 pa.s.sages in the "Hous of Fame" are like some of Addison's essays.[501]

He is modern, too, in the part he allots to his own self, a self which, far from being odious ("le moi est ha.s.sable," 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 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. Ill.u.s.trious names graven in the sparkling rock melt in the sun, and 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.[502]

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 full "of weping and of game," magicians, sorcerers and prophets, curious specimens of humanity. Within the temple, the statues of his literary G.o.ds, 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 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.[503]

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: