CHARACTERISTICS OF ENGLISH POETS. CHAPTER I. GEOFFREY CHAUCER. (1340-1400.) I. HIS LIFE, CHARACTER, AND WORKS. To regard Chaucer as the first genial day in the spring of English poetry, is to take, perhaps, a somewhat insular view of his position. On a more comprehensive view, it would appear more apposite to call him a fine day, if not the last fine day, in the autumn of mediæval European poetry. He may be described as the father of English poetry—the first great poet that used the English language; but it is more instructive to look upon him as the English son and heir of a great family of French and Italian poets. He was the great English master in a poetic movement that originated in the south of Europe, among the provinces of the Langue d'Oc, which had been going on with brilliant energy for more than two centuries before his birth, and had produced among its masterpieces the 'Romance of the Rose,' and the poetry of Dante and Petrarch. How the Troubadours came by their poetry is not, and perhaps cannot be, sufficiently ascertained. Probably great A significance ought to be attached to the fact that the south of France and the east coast of Spain received a large infusion of Greek blood from the Phocæan colonists of Massilia (now Marseilles) and their offshoots. These Greek colonists were something more than a handful of adventurous settlers, such as might be absorbed in a community without appreciably affecting its character. Their chief city, Massilia, soon after its foundation, became one of the most prosperous and powerful communities on the coasts of the Mediterranean, the successful rival of Carthage, the independent ally of Rome, and, under the early emperors, the chief dispenser of liberal education to the young rulers of the world. It may well have been that, in these representatives of her race, taken from the home of lyric poetry-the region of Alcæus and Sappho-ancient Greece left to western Europe a more precious bequest, a bequest that gave a more vital impulse to modern literature than all the fragments of her art. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the various provinces speaking the Langue d'Oc, and especially Provence, were in a high state of commercial prosperity and political freedom. We may therefore, in the absence of certain knowledge, venture to speculate that, when the Provençals, having achieved the material basis for a great literary outburst, came in contact with Arabian poetry through the Moors, the artistic tendency of the Greek quickened with irrepressible life, and throwing itself into the metrical forms that had given it the awakening stimulus, blossomed and bore fruit with voluptuous luxuriance. But whatever may have been the origin of Provençal poetry-however the Troubadours caught their happy art, found it, or came by it-they certainly are the poetic fathers of the Trouvères and the early Italian poets; and through them the grandfathers of our own Chaucer. Although the Trouvères of the north of France received their impulse from the Troubadours of the south, they were not simply imitators and translators, rendering the productions of the Langue d'Oc into the Langue d'Oil. The bent of their genius was no less decidedly epic than the bent of the Troubadours was lyric. They poured out of fertile imaginations hundreds of chivalrous, amorous, and ludicrous tales. Their subjects were the marvellous exploits of heroes-notably Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, and Charlemagne and his Paladins,-and the passions and adventures, serious and comical, of inamoratos in every condition of life. The authors of this literature were as numerous as the authors of novels in the nineteenth century, and their fame was no less ephemeral. The most celebrated single production of the Trouvères was the 'Romance of the Rose,' written by Guillaume de Lorris in the beginning of the thirteenth century. The historians of French literature regard this as the first great embodiment of their national genius. It professes to be the record of a dream. The dreamer walks out on a May morning through exquisite scenery, enters an enclosed garden that comes in sight, and meets with many adventures in the endeavour to get possession of a beautiful rose, receiving help and hindrance from various inmates of the garden. The rose is symbolical of female beauty, and the inmates of the garden are personified abstractions of the various powers, feelings, and circumstances-Courtesy, Courage, Shame, Suspicion, Slander, Previous Ties, &c.-that further or retard the lover's success. When Brunetto Latini, the tutor of Dante, went to Paris in 1260, this so-called "Romance" was the theme of endless comment, criticism, and imitation. In planning his 'Tesoretto,' Brunetto adopted the fashionable form: lost his way in a forest, found himself in the presence of Dame Nature, received from her much eloquent information, and roamed on till he met with the four Cardinal Virtues, attended by several fair Minor Moralities. Dante also used the machinery of forest, dream, and benevolent conductor. through the region of his dream. Towards the end of the thirteenth century, the work of Guillaume de Lorris received fresh celebrity from its continuation by Jean de Meun, surnamed Clopinel. Guillaume had left off before the rose was attained, and Jean continued the pursuit, though in a very different spirit. Guillaume was a man of refined senti |