Note. This chapter indicates the poetic animating certain typical or outstanding literary developments in the vernaculars. Its intention is both historical review in this single aspect and suggestion of further study. Since it is thus selective and suggestive, not attempting the impossible appraisal of vernacular poetic as a whole, it offers no general list of references. Particular references will be found in place.
Lyric, earliest medieval poetic achievement in Latin, shows full development in the vernaculars. On this the widest Latin influence was of course the hymns. The most distinct and conspicuous vernacular poetic, that of the Provençal troubadours, is mainly a minute and elaborate stanza technic. The fame of troubadour virtuosity gave vogue in other vernaculars to metrical skill. This is its historical significance in the development of medieval lyric. Lyric in any time, however, has a short history. As in Greece, so again and again, having perfected its diction and its metric, it comes to its own and abides. For more than any other form of poetic it is timeless; not ancient, nor medieval, nor modern, but perennial.
Germanic epic,[1] surviving as a strong influence in medieval English romance, persisted as a distinct poetic among the Scandinavians. In remote Iceland they developed an elaborate technic of verse epic, and later a distinct art of prose epic. Not even the troubadour poetic in the south is more detailed and elaborate than the epic doctrine of the Skáldskaparmál.[2] No medieval stories have more force of narrative directness than the prose sagas; and few have as much. In narrative stripped and stark the chief medieval author, perhaps, is Snorri Sturlasson. But in spite of Viking travels the Old Norse poetic of verse and of prose remained apart from medieval habit. Bounded by its own civilization, it was so little appropriated in the general medieval development of narrative that its recovery in modern times was as startling as that of the Etruscan sculpture at Perugia.
French epic, flowering later than Germanic, is already in the eleventh century tinged with romance. The French chansons de geste reflect a society distinctly feudal; their communal sense is of a larger community; and they constitute a first chapter in European vernacular poetic. Epic still in characterization and in the youthful zest of their combats against odds, they are swayed by new literary currents. The physical environment is less sharply detailed than in Germanic epic, perhaps because a kindlier nature was more taken for granted. A sharper difference is in style. They have none of that Germanic conventional elaboration which made epic diction a language apart. Much simpler,[3] they are also more diffuse, in both respects nearer to common speech. The movement in detail is of ten-syllable verses gathered into irregular stanzas (laisses) by assonance. A more significant distinction is the habit of narrative. Roland presents substantially the same situation as Maldon. In Anglo-Saxon it is focused by concentration; in French it is approached as the culmination of a series. Habitually French epic is more extended and fluent, expansive not descriptively but historically, running through more events in a single composition. Whereas Anglo-Saxon epic typically selects and intensifies a crisis, French epic tells the whole story.
Medieval story-tellers in turning to the vernacular found wider opportunity. The Latin poetic that they all studied in school, practised in historia, fabula, argumentum, and at greater length in saint’s legend, was too much absorbed in descriptive elaboration to teach them much of narrative. Outside the cloister, at the regular stations of the pilgrimage routes, waited audiences of increasing size and diversity; and the development of feudalism established the castle hall as a social center. The development of vernacular narrative answered with the more social art of romance. The narrative future was increasingly for the vernacular. Meantime Latin narrative continued not only for its more special audience, but in various interplay. Exempla, sketched or summed in Latin, were preached in vernacular. An ugly old legend of folklore, moralized in Latin for an exemplum, Chaucer gave back to the wider audience in the exquisite art of his Prioress. Romances and legends of saints interpenetrated. The complicated development of the Grail legend must be followed in both Latin and vernacular. Nevertheless poetic was beckoned into new narrative paths mainly by the wider appeal through the vernacular.
Something, of course, was carried over from the poetriæ,[4] oftenest the conventional lore of style. By contrast we are made the more sharply aware of the escape and adventure of individual bent and native inspiration. Aucassin et Nicolete has another appeal by another method. Its style, in spite of occasional conformity, is not in the tradition of the poetriæ. Chrétien, though conforming more, draws his psychology rather from observation of social habits and even of individual character than from the classified lore of appropriateness to type. Dante not only commits the most serious enterprise of medieval poetic to the vernacular; he utterly ignores the Latin school lore. At the end of the middle age, the Renaissance already tinging his thought, Chaucer passes through a whole course of Latin conventions, adapting critically as he goes, and ranges beyond.
In the twelfth century Walter Map’s Latin notebook De nugis Curialium[5] shows both the persistence of old forms and the stirring of new in rendering new material. Some of his stories are clearly oriental. Historical anecdotes and exempla, often given in mere lucid summary, occasionally indicate narrative composition.[6] He tries a story in the way of Ovid, or again in the Petronian way of the “Matron of Ephesus.” Two longer tales show not only a firmer conciseness, a sharper vividness, but what is more significant, grasp of narrative movement. The Friendship of Sadius and Galo (III. ii)[7] and Sceva and Ollo (IV. xvi) are enlivened in scene and furthered in plot by dialogue. Both are carried through progressively to an issue. The former skilfully combines the Orestes-Pylades motive of friendship with the Joseph-Zuleika motive of the scorned queen. The latter turns the cynicism of its oriental source to brisk social satire. Here in Latin are narrative experiments full of promise. Looking over Walter’s shoulder, we can divine a new literary stir.
More suggestive of response to a new interest of his audience is the abundance of Celtic folklore. There are banshees, wandering dead, a nicker, a pact with a demon. King Herla (I. xi), like Rip Van Winkle, stays too long in fairyland. The fairy mistress appears four times. Once (II. xi) the old tale is hardly more than notes. In Edric the Wild (II. xii) the moonlight dance (chorea feminarum) keeps its ancient spell. Meridiana (IV. xi) associates a different and longer version quite disconcertingly with the great Gerbert. Though none of these brings the tale to the sequence of Sadius and Galo, we feel an artist at work. Some of these shorter tales may be Latin summaries, like the exempla of the collections, for telling in French. Whether he worked out his narrative art in the vernacular we do not know. Though some critics have inferred for him a considerable part in the development of the Grail legend, the only surviving work that is certainly his is this artist’s sketch-book.
There are fewer suggestions of narrative experiment in the contemporary French lais of Marie.[8] Her Yonec is satisfied with the rapid summary of Latin tradition. Her charming Honeysuckle is an episode of the Tristram story. Iseult, finding a peeled wand by her way through the wood, knew that Tristram was near. As much lyric as narrative, such episodic poems suggest what the lai may have been in its earliest use of Celtic fairy adventure. Lanval and Eliduc handle with more narrative progress what we now call a situation. Another rendering of the former situation, the anonymous Graalent, shows by contrast Marie’s discernment either in choosing a version narratively superior or in herself reshaping. Generally her art is less of composition than of style. Her habit with a situation is not the fluent onwardness of Aucassin et Nicolete,[9] nor the intensive and progressive sequence of the later Chastelaine de Vergi.[10] The technic of the latter, though distinctly realized in the middle age, remained exceptional. It receives little attention even in the Decameron; and it stands out among the Canterbury Tales.
A romance of five or six thousand lines, but still selective, was developed by Chrétien de Troyes.[11] His Erec tells the tale which Lady Charlotte Guest translated in her Mabinogion as Geraint the Son of Erbin from a later Welsh version. Enid is stricken with shame that Geraint’s love of her should run to ignoble fondness. Her lament, overheard and mistaken by Geraint, rouses his jealous pride to prove her long and cruelly. This moment the Welsh writer sees in its setting.
And one morning in the summer time they were upon their couch, and Geraint lay upon the edge of it. And Enid was without sleep in the apartment, which had windows of glass. And the sun shone upon the couch. And the clothes had slipped from off his arms and his breast, and he was asleep. Then she gazed upon the marvellous beauty of his appearance, and she said, “Alas! and am I the cause that these arms and this breast have lost their glory and the warlike fame which they once so richly enjoyed?” And as she said this, the tears dropped from her eyes, and they fell upon his breast.[12]
At such a point the Welsh writer’s abundance of description is not merely pretty; it is fitting. What he thus dwells upon until we must feel it because we can see it, is an important moment in the story. But in general he blurs his story by spending equal elaboration on what is quite subordinate, or even irrelevant. His incidents claim attention equally in succession; Chrétien’s are lengthened or shortened with a sense of their narrative values. For Chrétien, relying less on the traditional picturesque description, has the better narrative. Using descriptive detail less for itself, he uses it more to bring out character or give to important moments salience. Instead of merely accumulating adventures and telling each for what it is worth by itself, as is the habit of the longer romances, he has selective art enough to bring out those that will keep attention on the conquest of the proud, selfish devotion of the husband by the nobler devotion of the wife. And at the end he impresses the significance of the whole course of adventures, the meaning of the story as a whole. He discerns, though he does not always achieve, the narrative force of unified progress.
How far the art of such romances was studied in the middle age appears again on comparison of the fourteenth-century Ywain and Gawain with its original, Chrétien’s Chevalier au Lion. The Englishman, without losing anything of the plot, reduces the length one-third by compressing, modifying, or even omitting Chrétien’s detail. And since Chrétien’s detail is not merely added for richness, but spent to bring out character or mood, a change here is a change in the total effect, a shifting of interest from the persons to the events. Thus to Chrétien the central situation is this. A widow forced to marry again, as medieval widows were if they had property, accepts the slayer of her husband. How would she feel? Might she not, from making a virtue of necessity, come to love her second husband if he were young and brave? If, tiring of her riches and ease, he would be off to his wars again, would she forgive him for breaking his promise to return on a day? And might he not then, learning from the loss of her to value her truly, devote himself to winning her back by proving his better manhood? The situation is almost the reverse of that in Erec. Such questions of character and feeling lead Chrétien to dwell upon the scenes between Ywain and Alundyne, and even to comment satirically now and then on their mental attitudes. Most of this the English translator omits.
But that the omissions were deliberate appears in his throwing emphasis upon what directly furthers the movement of the story. What makes a story quick and strong he understands so well that he even quickens and varies Chrétien’s pace by turning some of the indirect discourse into direct dialogue. Nor was he insensible to Chrétien’s suggestions of character or mood. At the final revelation, where Chrétien says simply that Alundyne started (la dame tresaut), he renders:
This is exactly in Chrétien’s habitual manner. Rendering with discernment and spirit, then, keeping the plan and transitions that hold the tale together, he bends the story in the direction of his own interest and skill. He too knows something of narrative art. His simpler, more onward version throws into relief Chrétien’s superiority not only in delicacy of verse and style, but in those ampler and finer suggestions of character which bring out of a situation its deeper narrative values.
The increasing audience for romance invited much mere retelling, many versions inartistic or even unintelligent. But the scientific study of sources, while it defines the diffusion of current tales and carries their history back to folklore and myth, should not blur the history of medieval narrative art. In the midst of almost impersonal transmission were both artistic experiment and artistic achievement. Chrétien de Troyes and a few others have survived by name. Nameless, but no less convincing, is the narrative art of Aucassin et Nicolete, of the Chastelaine de Vergi, of Gawain and the Green Knight.
Generally the artist is less clear, the impersonal processes of transmission and the conventions of telling clearer, in the long romances. Adventure, when fairyland was no longer new, was sometimes supplied by mere aggregation. Love, presented mainly as wooing, crystallized into the code of amour courtois. Chivalry, a motive even more clearly ideal, could be no less presented as a code. Adventure, love, chivalry, established as the three habitual motives of romance, were readily combined in stock forms. Better artists vitalized them by characterization; but since romance can be composed acceptably without characterization, its journeywork, medieval or modern, tends to content itself with types. The hero is “a very perfect gentle knight”; and his action consists in having many adventures. The heroine is a beautiful young lady, and needs no action at all. Both may be described at length without being individualized. Even on these terms, much as they have always amused satirists, romance may have charm of style and some of the perennial appeal of youth. But it has no properly narrative vigor. Its composition tends so easily to repeat that the stock adventures can be assigned as well to one knight as to another.
In fact, the middle age saw adventures transferred from one hero to another who had meantime become more popular. Thus Gawain, coming straight out of fairyland, gradually lost more and more of his glory; and the process is one of the ways in which there grew up cycles of romance. The longer Lancelot stories are aggregations of many separate adventures. One of the best remembered feats in Malory’s compilation is the three-days’ tournament. Not only is this told of other knights in other romances; it is found also by itself, as in the tale of Ipomedon. Some medieval rewriter added it to his Lancelot; and there it stayed. The Lancelot story was further swelled by adventures formerly ascribed to Gawain, who had already lost some of his feats to Percival. Even the winning of the Grail quest, which had early been transferred from Gawain to Percival, went to Lancelot’s son Galahad. Finally the Lancelot aggregation was attached to the cycle of Arthur.
Whether or not it was attached to one of the cycles, a conventional long romance could thus aggregate. Bevis of Hampton or Guy of Warwick might be longer or shorter without the slightest narrative difference. It is long because it is interminable. Even in better hands the medieval long romance prevails part by part, as it was read. It was not composed as a single narrative. Such singleness as the middle age cultivated in romance must be sought in the parts considered as separate stories, and will be found oftener in the shorter romances that remained by themselves. For lack of it the most conventional long romances become series of typical descriptions. The typical hero, typically equipped without and within, has one typical encounter after another.
The difference between such aggregative transmission and narrative progress can be discerned among the many versions of the Grail. A magic talisman from folklore had been transmuted by the popular emotion focused at Corpus Christi;[13] but it became a narrative goal only for those with art enough to conceive the great quest as something more than a series of adventures. Meeting an earlier form of it in his Balin and Balan, Malory brought it into no distinct relation to that tragedy. Its recurrence in his later books is similarly unharmonized and inconclusive. Wolfram von Eschenbach, also using more than one version, had focused his Parzival sufficiently to give a long romance some movement onward.
The solitary eminence of Dante is a perpetual reminder of the limits of any lore of poetic. As for medieval lore, its approach to the Divina Commedia is hopelessly short. The ultimate reason, of course, for its inadequacy is that the greatest poetic achievement of the middle age is far more than medieval. It is for all time even more clearly than the Œdipus Rex or the Æneid or Othello; and like them it derives its greatness from something beyond poetic.
Nevertheless it is also medieval and also a great achievement of poetic composition. So to consider it is to discern both more of its greatness and more of medieval habit. In the current medieval lore the main lack is seen by contrast to be in the larger movement of composition. Medieval poetic carries us so short a distance toward the Divina Commedia because it is preoccupied with style. Vergil is currently cited and quoted, but usually as an exemplar of the three styles.[14] Medieval romances carried nationalism back to Troy for centuries without discerning the larger art of the Æneid in composition. For Dante Vergil was guide not only in a deeper sense, but also in poetic.
This makes clearer why Dante turned his back on current lore. He knew that lore, not only the elaborate technic of the troubadours, but the Latin poetria. His ignoring of it is tantamount to an arraignment of its cardinal weakness. It had too little technic for his main poetic concern, the movement of the whole. It had too much schoolmasterly fiddling with words to carry orchestration beyond a few conventional modes. No one can study the history of poetic without finding this deficiency exceptional only in degree. In kind it is historic. Here, again and again, appears the gap between pedagogically formulated poetic and poetry.
In Dante’s style the medieval poetria is not merely outdistanced; it is repudiated. Matthieu de Vendôme, Geoffroi de Vinsauf, John the Englishman, might have tolerated figures of wrestlers and dogs in hell, but hardly broth, cooks, oxen, and swine. They would have challenged bellows in purgatory; they would have been shocked at rooks and a fish-pool in heaven. The decorative descriptions of a rhetoricated poetic seem nowhere else quite so futile as beside Dante’s figures of precise geography.
As seems beetling Carisenda, when a cloud goes over it so as to make it hang the other way, so seemed Antæus to me as I stood watching to see him bend. I. xxxi. 136.[15]
As that stream which has its own path first from Monte Veso toward the east on the left coast of Apennine, which is called Acquaqueta above before it descends to its low bed, and at Forlì has lost that name, reëchoes there over San Benedetto from the alp, because its fall has a single leap where for a thousand should be room, so down an abrupt bank we heard resounding that turbid water. I. xvi. 94.
As for Paolo and Francesca, Ugolino, and a hundred other passages, with those single lines that enrich memory,[16] no better praise can be compassed than Matthew Arnold’s word “touchstones.” They tell us, better than any definition, what poetry is. But the mere historical significance of Dante’s luminous precision is its vindication of that true theory of poetic diction which was formulated in the De sublimitate.[17] The essential character of poetic style is not dilation, which belongs to rhetoric; it is sublimation. Dante’s extraordinary conciseness, austere, ascetic, is never bare; it is surcharged. For style too, as well as for composition, he must have discerned that ancient critic’s fine distinction: rhetoric and poetic must never be confused; but at high temperatures they can be welded together.
Poetry conveyed vision oftener, perhaps, in the middle age than in any other period. Piers Plowman and Pearl carry on in the next century a persistent medieval preoccupation. The Divina Commedia, fulfilling this aspiration, reveals man’s need, his quest, his attainment, of vision. “Blessed are the pure in heart; for they shall see God.” Purity remains negative to those who have no desire to see God. But Dante answers those for whom it is positive and constructive.
Ye other few, who have lifted up your necks betimes to the bread of angels, by which men live here, but with which none cometh away sated. III. ii. 10.
The poetry of this “concreate and perpetual thirst” (III. ii. 19) animates for all time a whole cosmogony antiquated merely as science, and communicates the great philosophy of the middle age to the heart. The Divina Commedia achieved the high quest of the Grail romances. It is the vision poem.
The heaven of Dante’s vision transcends time and space.
And I was with him; but of my mounting I was no more aware than is a man, ere his first thought, aware that it is coming. Beatrice is she who thus discloses from good to better so instantly that her act has no extent in time. III. x. 34.
Brother, thy high desire shall be fulfilled in the last sphere, where all the rest are fulfilled, and mine.... For it is not in space, nor hath it poles, and our ladder attains even so far. III. xxii. 61.
But it is not reserved for rapt contemplatives.
Of the seraphim he who is most rapt, Moses, Samuel, or that John whom thou choosest to take, nay, even Mary has not a seat in another heaven than these spirits who but now appeared to thee; nor have they to their being more or fewer years; but all make beauteous the first circle, and have sweet life differently as they feel more or less the eternal breath. III. iv. 28.
For the Divina Commedia ranges beyond the lyric exaltation of the individual poet. It is suffused with social sense, as constantly aware as the Piers Plowman of the “fair field full of folk,” of the world of striving men and women. Its vision begins with society gone bad and frustrating itself; it arrives at society perfectly realized as immediate intercommunion and interaction. So the Church, the heavenly society, recurs constantly in communal echoes of hymns and canticles: Ave, Agnus Dei, Benedictus qui venit, Salve Regina. In the same spirit Cynewulf had composed his Christ upon the seven great antiphons of Advent.[18] Familiar gospels are recalled. Most frequent echoes, as of symbols most suggestive of common human experience, are of the Psalms.[19] The artistic harmony is based upon the medieval conception of social history as the redemption of mankind.
The word allegory has come to suggest vagueness, or conventionalization, or fancy. None of these has any place in the Divina Commedia. Allegorical, indeed, it may be called in a sense large enough to include Piers Plowman, the Faerie Queene, and the Pilgrim’s Progress; but no other allegory is so large in scope, so consistent and complete in composition. For such details as the sacred chariot, the eagle, wolf, and dragon (II. xxxii) we search the carved capitals and the windows; but including all these and ranging beyond them is the constant interpretation of the whole sensible, transitory world as typical of the eternal. Ephemeral matters, politics, even quarrels and grudges (I. xvi. 73), are interpreted permanently. The intensely specific realism is made constantly to serve idealization. Human life is revealed sub specie æternitatis.
For life beyond is seen as the prolongation of the line that we give to life here and now. Its motive power throughout is love radiating from God and leading men back to him. The disturbance of life is sin. The horror of the Inferno is of sin as perversion. The warpings of life there tormenting Italians or ancients are typical to the fearsome degree of revealing our own. Thus the course of the Divina Commedia is of ideas and principles of action so embodied as to lead emotion on. What is familiar in lyric is here carried through a whole conception of life. Theology is translated through vision into emotion and will, as if lyric were carried through into drama.
Thus the persons are typical, not merely as wearing recognizable costumes and uttering appropriate sentiments, but more intensely as acting in our drama. The thieves transformed into serpents, which in turn absorb them (I. xxv), are thus akin artistically to the sculpture of medieval capitals. They are not pictorial imitation of the other arts, as are the conventional descriptive pauses of the Roman de la Rose and the poetriæ; for they are narrated. There is no ecphrasis.[20] The method is never static. The speaking flames move.
As a little cloud ascends, so moved each flame along the throat of the chasm, none showing its theft, each stealing away a sinner. I. xxvi. 39.
Such narrative progress in detail is integral with the progress of the total symbolism toward culmination. The famous ascent in Paradise moves both in and by itself and with the movement of the whole.
In method, as in degree, this is the individual achievement of a great poet; in kind the symbolism is characteristically medieval. For in detail and in total conception the Divina Commedia starts not with the individual event or person, not with Beatrice Portinari,[21] but with the idea. Whether Dante recalls a youthful love is a question so subordinate as to be artistically immaterial. He has not sublimated earthly passion into heavenly. His conception is heavenly from the beginning, and progressively throughout. He carries a single, controlling idea forward imaginatively, stage by stage. Each stage is vivid with intensely specific realism; but this realism, as that of the carved capitals, is neither the object nor the occasion; it is only the imaginative means to impress the idea. The idea is constant; it is beginning and end. The final vision is not transformation; it is conclusion.
Such grasp of poetic movement doubtless owed much to Vergil. Dante’s homage to the “courteous soul of Mantua” (I. ii. 58) is more than conventional tribute.
Art thou then that Vergil and that spring which spreads so large a stream of speech?... O poet’s honor and light, may the long zeal avail me and the great love which made me search thy volume. Thou art my master and my author, thou alone he from whom I took the fair style that hath brought me honor. I. i. 79.[22]
The larger narrative movement of the Æneid, which quite escaped the average medieval romancer, was not lost on so great a composer. Of all the ancient art available in his time this alone could give him that instruction. But if the Æneid inspired him with its poetic scope and reach, and gave him a sense of the poetic energy of onwardness, it did not prescribe his method. The Divina Commedia is not an imitation of the Æneid. Its movement is both different and more compelling.
For the movement of the Divina Commedia is at once logical and imaginative, an extraordinary fusion of rhetoric and poetic. The first canto closes with a forecast of the whole progress.
Lead me where thou hast said, that I may see the gate of St. Peter. I. i. 134.
Throughout, the progress is so reasoned that it can be mapped and briefed. None the less the Divina Commedia is a great exemplar of poetic movement. It arrives not at a demonstration, but at a catharsis. Its conception, at once constant and widening, is carried forward imaginatively. We move not from proposition to proposition, but from scene to scene. The Faerie Queene, no less imaginative in detail, has none of this force of imaginative composition. The Christ in the earliest middle age, the Pearl in the latest, have far less scope. The Divina Commedia reveals the whole capacity of medieval symbolism by sustained poetic movement.
So sustained a movement has no time for the conventional descriptive pause. In spite of the abundance of its illustrations, the Divina Commedia is never merely pictorial.[23] Nor is the steady movement monotonous. The transitions are beautifully various. Purgatorio does not repeat the plan of Inferno; and it has more interaction. As the action advances through Purgatorio into Paradiso, there is increasing exposition of ideas. There is even the Gothic variety that enlivens the cathedrals. The grotesque devils of the twenty-second canto of Inferno are brothers to those on the capitals of Vézelay. At the other pole of sentiment, the eleventh canto of Purgatorio opens with a poetic amplification of the Paternoster. The fifth canto of Paradiso is Justinian’s summary of the history of Rome. But the variety is never merely picturesque. Never merely aggregative, the variations of the Divina Commedia are more like those of Bourges than like those of Chartres. They are still more like the variations in a symphony.
The logical order fused with this poetic movement is: Inferno, the punishment of self-enslavement; Purgatorio, the progress of self-mastery; Paradiso, the rapture of self-expression. From perversion and frustration we pass through discipline to the liberation of personality.
Then said my lady, “Let out the heat of thy desire, so that thy utterance bear the print of the press within; not that our knowledge may increase by thy speaking, but that thou mayst learn how to tell thy thirst, that drink be given thee.” III. xvii. 7.
It is through this liberation of personality that the human drama becomes divine. “I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.” For the Divina Commedia is far more than a vindication of free will; it is a vision of the progressive freeing of the will. After the terrible revelation of hell as self-enslavement, free will is asserted from purgatory as essential to divine justice.
Ye who are living refer every occasion only up to heaven, as if all moved of itself by necessity. Were it so, in you would be destroyed free will; and it would not be justice to have joy for good, mourning for evil. II. xvi. 67.
But this liberty is not innate merely as are the physical impulses. God’s gift of free will is a progressive energizing of man’s struggle to will higher and higher till he attains perfect freedom.
Now in order that to this [will] every other may be reunited, innate in you is the virtue that giveth counsel,[24] and ought to guard the threshold of assent. This is the principle whence is derived the scheme of desert in you according as it collects and winnows good loves and guilty. Those whose scheme of life went to the foundation became aware of this innate liberty, and so left ethics to the world. III. xviii. 61.
So developed by the mutual response of God and man, free will becomes the greatest gift (“lo maggior don,” III. v. 19). Heaven is the final release and achievement of personality.
The culmination is quite beyond what is usually meant by self-satisfaction. As personality can be progressively released and achieved only through giving, so the self-expressive joy of Paradiso contributes to the common joy. It is simultaneously giving and receiving, utterance and response. No longer, as the poet of Pearl discerned again in the parable of the laborers, is giving and receiving frustrated by competition. Immediately every joy is the joy of all, every expression of personality is a gift and a response, in the creative activity of love.
As in a fish-pond that is still and clear the fishes draw to what so comes from without that they deem it their food, so saw I more than a thousand radiances draw toward us, and in each was heard: “Lo! one who will increase our loves.” III. v. 100.
I saw more radiances, living and conquering, make of us a center and of themselves a corona, sweeter in voice than lucent to behold. III. x. 64.
The amazing figures in which this triumph is symbolized sum up also Dante’s poetic: vividness of charged simplicity in expression carried forward in a composition of progressive movement.
No other single work of medieval art conveys so much of the middle age; for no other concedes so little to medieval convention. The centuries of St. Bernard, Adam of St. Victor, and St. Thomas Aquinas, of Chrétien and the Roman de la Rose, of Vézelay and Bourges, like other centuries, had their artistic conventions. These, as too often in other centuries, seemed to the makers of manuals to comprise the theory of art. Such theory needs both correction and expansion from great artists.
Chaucer, more clearly than most poets, shows the whole artistic progress from expert verse translation through convention accepted and convention modified to creation. From the Roman de la Rose through his study of Boccaccio to the Canterbury Tales his work comprehends in itself much of the history of medieval poetic. He was ahead of his time; that is, he was artist enough to feel new currents of thought and new ventures in expression, to bend toward these the received modes, and finally to enlarge the scope and perfect the technic of medieval narrative. The Renaissance movement, which he was quick to feel in Italy, he could not communicate to England. It had to be brought again, and in different ways. But the art of narrative, most popular of medieval arts, he led from accepted poetic habits in new directions and to new achievements. Consummate metrist, he knew what to do in English with the richer couplet, the more fluent stanza, of Boccaccio. Composition in the larger sense he learned more slowly. The road is long from the leisurely conventions of the Book of the Duchesse to the intensity of the Pardoner and the sustained poetic progress of the Troilus and Criseyde. All the more clearly he illuminates the significance of previous experiments by revealing what was vital in their technic. For since he was a studious artist, and even a critic, as well as a genius, his career epitomizes the progress of medieval verse narrative. Medieval poetic may fairly be said to end with his death in 1400.
The first part of the Roman de la Rose, Chaucer’s literary point of departure, represents the conventions and the mood of the fashionable fiction of courtly love. Its allegory is simple personification carried out by costume and attitude, less by speech and action, appropriate to type. It is less narrative than descriptive. Relying mainly on style, it has so little vigor of composition that in spite of its great medieval vogue it has been long dead. Chaucer’s translation shows no small command of diction and of verse. Though the French octosyllabic and the English line of four stresses differed less then than later, translation had much to teach a bilingual poet not only reading, but constantly hearing and speaking two rhythms. It made him early aware both of the difference between the two and of the directions of development for the English of his choice. He has already found variations to evade the tendency of this short couplet toward jingling monotony; and still more verse control is evident in his catching one of the chief charms of the original, its easy fluency.
His own Book of the Duchesse uses the same magazine of courtly love: rehearsal of a tale of Ovid, May-morning dream-vision, “love’s servant” in “complaint,” praise of the lady, tapestry description, couplet of facile fluency. How much poetry could still be conveyed through these symbols he showed later in the pageant prologue to the Legend of Good Women. Kittredge[25] finds the conventional dream manipulated in the Book of the Duchesse to give some sense of actual dreaming. Every attentive reader has been relieved by the realism of the half-grown, unbroken dog,
The touch of individualizing stands out, indeed, because most of the description is conventionally generalized and decorative; but it may be significant as forecasting Chaucer’s later use of gesture, and as a means of transition. There is an attempt at variety in the punctuation of the long praise of the lady by dialogue; and the closing dialogue is really rapid. An expert metrist in conventional modes, with originality enough for pleasing variations—we can hardly read more of Chaucer into the Book of the Duchesse. The Ovidian thin lucidity of narrative, the usual aggregation, the involution, above all the stalling for description, show that he was not yet giving his mind to narrative composition.
He was spurred to explore narrative by the timely stimulus of Italy. First of English artists to learn there, he was among the most responsive. The Parlement of Foules shows immediate artistic development and promises more. The verse is enriched. The five-stress line, so near the beginning of its long English history, is realized not only for variety, but for flexibility to the mood of speech. Most of its typical variations, shift of cæsura, syncope, doubling of the unstress as in anapest or dactyl, close on stress or on unstress, are here. Though there is not yet that narrative fluency which makes the verse constantly further the story, there is narrative stanza. Stanza, of course, was no innovation. Such set lyric forms as balade and rondel, which were to hold their popularity into the sixteenth century, were exploring the technic of refrain. Linking refrain, used simply in verse narrative,[27] was carried in Pearl to intricate harmonies. In French and in English, stanza was an assured technic. But its narrative development owes much to Chaucer. His adaptation of the Italian stanza in the Parlement of Foules opened the way toward that technical mastery which is one of the characteristic achievements of his narrative.
The Parlement of Foules shows development thus in detail. The total composition, the movement of the whole, is still to seek. Here again are conventional allegory, this time mainly from Alain de Lille,[28] rehearsal from the medieval treasury, dream-vision, decorative description, without any narrative progress. But the allegory is vivified as in Piers Plowman. The classes are differentiated by the lively speech of their representatives. The interaction, though elementary, is more than mere débat. There is even approach to individual character in distinguishing the second tercel from the first. In these modifications there is promise[29] of a still more characteristic achievement, the interludes of the Canterbury Tales.
The narrative stanza of Troilus and Criseyde is a technical triumph. Even the rich harmonies of The Faerie Queene hardly dispute its eminence; for they are adjusted rather to description. Chaucer’s stanza is narrative in sure and fluent onwardness. It so furthers the movement of the story as rarely to invite separate attention, so deftly merges with the other means of narrative suggestion that its values transpire not from quoting this stanza or that, but from reading on and on. No other verse narrative is more satisfying to read aloud. The subtle harmonies of Pearl are adapted to lyric reflection. The easy movement of Childe Harold pauses again and again on picturesqueness. A fairer comparison is Byron’s triumph of fluency, Don Juan. Those stanzas have the same achievement of onwardness where Byron gives himself to the story. Chaucer’s story, deeper, more consistent, more progressive, is always his main concern. His distinction is in making his stanza constantly serve this.
For Troilus and Criseyde carries verse narrative beyond Boccaccio’s scope and beyond his own habit.[30] Perhaps the challenge of the Filostrato was the more provocative because he already suspected the ways of romance. Here was the perennial situation of romance with a new emphasis. Passion, so little realized in French, was presented convincingly; and the lover’s complaint was not the conventional tribute of devotion, but the anguish of disillusionment. Passion, then, left dust and ashes. The French literary lover had been forever wooing a literary goddess; the Italian lover, smitten with the beauty of flesh and blood, won it easily, held it in ecstasy, and could not recover from its loss. As if divining here something truer, which yet was not the whole truth, Chaucer planned one of the few great love-stories. What the romances generally left out of Tristram and Iseult, what only the best of them saw in Lancelot and Guenevere as motive, was the effect of illicit love on character. Passion, stronger than amour courtois, was it stronger than the whole social code? And what then? Chaucer lived to present love in other aspects and in other ways; but first Boccaccio’s story moved him to carry the passion of the noble and beautiful through to its bitter end. He composed not at all a French romance, not the lyric Italian story, but a verse narrative at once so realistic and so dramatic that we naturally call it a novel.
Amour courtois, both conventional and feeble as plot, he relegated to the setting as one of the fictions of high society. Troilus languishes appropriately and writes a complaint. Cressid keeps a proper distance. Pandarus makes allowance for moonshine. What Chrétien had found surely appealing in social romance, the habit of society itself, is appropriated as amply as in Gawain and the Green Knight. Medieval rendering of all stories in contemporary terms is here carried into realism. Pandarus, visiting Criseyde,