The dialogue is more than realistic; it gives leads for the story.
Description, too, is made to serve the narrative economy. The garden setting (II. 813) combines with the song of Antigone to turn Criseyde’s mood, which is then revealed in their brief dialogue. Setting in Gawain and the Green Knight, equally distinct as social background, oftener picturesque as scenery, is less forwarding, less woven into the texture of the story. The clue to this advance in poetic is in Chaucer’s accompaniment of significant speech by significant gesture. He often indicates the stage “business.”
Finally dialogue is used to bring a scene to an issue. Stage business, scene, issue, the terms are not too dramatic for the method of the passage between Pandarus and Criseyde over the first love-letter.
The scene becomes a situation. The eleven lines are dramatic not only in presenting the situation as spoken and acted, but in developing by interaction both character and plot. Chaucer has found how to tell the whole story of illicit love progressively by revealing in speech and action not merely type, not merely situation, which had rarely been so used to its full significance, but character moving to its issue. In this larger movement, sustained and advanced by progressive characterization, Troilus and Criseyde is the great medieval love story.
The achievement of creation becomes the more conspicuous on review of what the story had been.[31] Mere unrelated episodes of the older sources, mere scattered incidents in Benoît’s huge Roman de Troie, had kindled Boccaccio’s Filostrato. Of its 5512 lines Chaucer used 2730, or about half, but carried his own story to 8239. His addition, most of the first half of his story, is devoted to the gradual yielding of Cressid. Boccaccio has no such approach because he has no such person. His story is of Troilus; and his Cressid, remaining the typical fair inconstant that he found in Benoît, falls as readily into the arms of her first lover as into those of her second. Chaucer’s Cressid is the first great character of English fiction. The characterization, delicate enough to keep her graciousness even in ruin, and to give the unashamed materialism of Pandarus engaging frankness and humor, is dynamic. It gives the story motive. Cressid is always dominant, not in having more space, but in bringing about before our eyes alike the heartbreak of Troilus and her own degradation. This is Chaucer’s achievement of narrative progress. Cressid, we say to ourselves, would yield to Diomed. But though dominated by Cressid, the movement is of all three characters interacting, of characterization advancing by stages.[32] Thus Chaucer’s refocusing is neither modification of Boccaccio’s story nor such variation as had been already achieved; it is progressive motivation toward a significant issue.
The dramatic interaction effective in Troilus and Criseyde is less continuous, though no less striking, in the Canterbury interludes. It is not drama, it remains subordinate to narrative, partly because the time for drama was not ripe, more because Chaucer knew verse narrative for his own art. The bent of his genius he followed in both experiment and study. One of his first technical achievements, the weaving of description into the action, appears not only in progressive mastery, but also as distinct theory. Here evidently he discerned as a critic the deviation and the insufficiency of the poetic that he had learned at school.[33]
Let me tell an old British tale in my own plain way; for I am unversed in ornaments of style. This is all that the Franklin’s prologue means on its surface. The connotation beneath is inviting. Are “aventures,” “layes,” “rymeyed,” “instruments” intended precisely? How much grasp they suggest of early medieval poetic is perhaps beyond our determination.[34] But the term “colours of rethoryk” occurs also in the Hous of Fame. The interlude before the Clerk’s Tale has a sarcasm of the Host against these same “colours” in the same connection. The Squire’s disclaimer has the same significant terms as the Franklin’s, and the same point as the Clerk’s reply to the Host. The satire in the Tale of the Nun’s Priest on Geoffroi de Vinsauf confirms the suspicion that in all these passages Chaucer implies specific criticism of the poetriæ.
For the language of the Franklin’s prologue, in spite of his disclaimer, is literary. Chaucer knew as well as Shakspere that he who announces “a plain, unvarnished tale” may command a better art than the rhetoric that he disclaims. It is worth while to explore, therefore, the mention of rhetoric in connection with story-telling, the conjunction of Cicero and Parnassus. As Sir Thopas parodies not only the conventional motives of romance, but also particular faults in its conventional technic, so Chaucer’s references to “colours of rethoryk,” instead of being taken as general disparagement of grandiloquence, may well be sounded for their particular significance. In any age, indeed, the man of letters contemplating the rules of his art laid down by pedagogues is moved to sarcasm; but Chaucer’s sarcasms may suggest specifically wherein the pedagogues that he knew went wide of the narrative art that he came to comprehend as artist and as critic. His reference in the Hous of Fame merely glances at “prolixitee.” The passages in the four Canterbury tales, ampler and more specific, together suggest that the application of “colours of rethoryk” to narrative is a perversion, that Cicero is out of place on Parnassus.
The notion that the citing of “Pernaso” and “Cithero” in the same breath is meant to exhibit the Franklin as “a burel man” is dispelled by literary history. Cicero as a master of style had long been invoked to teach poetry. Poetria, as conceived by the medieval manuals, is essentially elaboration of style.[35] That it is a distinct mode of composition is never even hinted. Focused on diction and devoted to elaboration, it draws upon the ancient colores until poetic is indistinguishable from rhetoric. Either, then, Chaucer is merely accepting this merger, without particular intention in his “Pernaso” and “Cithero,” or he is hinting that the very conception hinders straightforward narrative.
In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the English word rhetoric denoted style generally, whether in prose or in verse. So rhetor or rhetorien meant master of style, and was freely applied to poets. The familiar reference to Petrarch, therefore, is usually taken as general praise.
Nor should we pause over the conjunction of “rethoryke” and “poetrye,” were it not identical with that of “Cithero” and “Pernaso.” Even if this pairing, like that, merely reflects medieval habit without reflecting on it, the Clerk’s prologue as a whole is sufficiently definite. Repeating the Host’s term “heigh style,” it goes on to consider Petrarch in this aspect. The Host had been quite precise.
Whether or not “heigh style” is a misappropriation of a phrase of Petrarch’s, its implication here is both definite and significant. “As whan that men to kinges write” makes “endyte” refer unmistakably to dictamen.[36] The Host deprecates the perversion of this to the telling of a tale. His sarcasm is directed not vaguely at grandiloquence, but specifically at the application of dictamen to story-telling. To measure its significance, one must read the doctrine pervading poetria and dictamen alike. That doctrine is rhetoric; it is nothing more and nothing else.
The Clerk, taking up “heigh style,” admits that it is a hindrance in Petrarch’s descriptive opening.
What the Clerk is made to challenge here in the application of “heigh style” to a tale is the separable description. No device for dilation was more magnified in the poetriæ. More than apostrophe, contrast, and other “colours,” it was inculcated to give poetry what Chaucer’s eagle calls
Chaucer’s bête noire of “prolixitee” among these pedagogues was Geoffroi de Vinsauf; and that brings us to the familiar sarcasms of the Nun’s Priest.[38] They pursue not merely an ass, but still more a perverted poetic. Chaucer pillories Geoffrey not merely because the Nova poetria is an Ovidian nightmare, but because its constant object, alike in the rules and in the manufactured examples, is to inculcate the stalling of composition by “colours.”[39]
The separable description challenged by the Clerk is challenged also by the Squire, and in terms that confirm the significance of the Franklin’s.
The Squire’s later sarcasm is more open and more constructive. It may well sum up Chaucer’s criticism of the deviation of poetic by rhetoric.
A rhetoricated poetic, though in other mouths than Geoffrey’s it has often had a fairer sound, is always a perversion. The confusion of poetic with rhetoric has always tended to obscure the imaginative value to narrative of onward movement. The medieval pedagogues who reduced the greatness of Vergil to mastery of all “three styles” of rhetoric would doubtless have recommended embellishing the eloquences of Aucassin et Nicolete at the expense of the story, dilating the Tombeor de Notre Dame, and making the Chastelaine de Vergi static. Their conception of narrative has no room for such composition as makes the Pardoner’s Tale a fatal sequence.
Even Chaucer is too responsive to the taste of his time to abandon the accepted means of dilation. Some of his own apostrophes differ from Geoffrey’s to Friday[40] only in eloquence, not in method. But as early as the House of Fame he was critically aware of the “prolixitee” inherent in “colours of rethoryk.” The interpolated description, which he had elaborated to make the Knight’s Tale magnificent,[41] he parodied in Sir Thopas and challenged through the Clerk and the Squire. In these passages he reminds us that his achievement of narrative composition had taught him to distrust rhetoric as a means of enhancing when the tale, Pardoner’s, Squire’s, or Franklin’s, was really the thing. Further he implies general denunciation of the staleness and ineptitude of medieval rhetoric as poetic method.
Within the Canterbury frame narrative composition is widely various. The early tale of the Man of Law follows the pattern of a saint’s legend; the Clerk’s is rather iterative than progressive. In such cases Chaucer has not recomposed; he has limited his art to style. What distinction he could achieve even so is most conspicuous in the exquisite tale of the Prioress. Without crisis, without even salience of moment, with no more reshaping than the shift of focus from the horror of ancient superstition to the beauty of childlike devotion, he wrought by adjustment of tone and cadence a marvel of simplicity. The Merchant infuses into his fableau realistic suggestions of senile sexuality; but the fableaux generally, Miller’s, Reeve’s, etc., are told in their typical form for their typical values. Beast epic in the mouth of the Nun’s Priest, never livelier and seldom so rich in suggestion, is little reshaped as a story. Even the Wife of Bath tells her fairy mistress tale without originality of composition.
The artistic interest of the narrative couplet in the Knight’s Tale has been heightened by Dryden. Beneath the superficial differences which mark each verse with its time is a difference of conception. Chaucer’s time gave him easier variations; but he himself bent them narratively. The larger movement of the Knight’s Tale conveys the magnificence of princely chivalry less in action than in pageantry. Romance as story was not for Chaucer, one might say but for the tale of the Franklin. Here he shapes a plot complementary to that of Troilus and Criseyde in briefer compass, but with equal onwardness. The issue again is convincing because it is reached by distinct stages. The fourth, for instance, culminates upon the squire’s desperate triumph.
And the next begins:
The crisis upon Dorigen’s taking all to her husband, thus fulfilling her character while she flies in the face of the code of secrecy, is rendered in dialogue of sharp interaction.
No less eloquent is her reply to the squire at their meeting.
Such passages, as in Troilus and Criseyde, are narrative leads. The last leads directly to the squire’s fine renunciation; for the tale of generosity has been embodied in individuals working out its issue. Even the illusion of the rocks is lifted above magic because they were first an obsession of the anxious wife. An exemplum and a tale of marvel have been reconceived and recomposed in a moving story.
No triumph of Chaucer’s is more evident than the art of narrative swiftness in the tale of the Pardoner. Verse narrative has nothing more seizing, more breathless, more fatal. Yet even this is no greater than the art that reveals the Pardoner himself. The tale is no more triumphant than the interlude and the prologue. Rather they belong together. So the ordinary romance told by the Wife of Bath is heard amid the echoes of her brutal realism. The familiar story of the cock and the fox takes both color and shape from the Nun’s Priest. Readers opening their Canterbury Tales for the second time, or the third or the tenth, are as likely to turn to an interlude as to a tale. Even an adequate account of the poetic of every tale would fall short of the total artistic value. For the interludes play a part in a scheme more ambitious than any other medieval “framework”. Gower’s plan in the Confessio Amantis is no more than a classified series. The preface to the Decameron proposes “a hundred tales ... told in ten days by a noble company of seven ladies and three youths in the time of the late pestilence ... in the which tales appear pleasant or rude chances of love and other incidents of fortune happening as well in modern times as in ancient.” After describing the plague in Florence, the “noble company”, and the fair country house to which they withdrew for safety, Boccaccio makes each of his ten persons tell a tale each day on the same general theme. Thus he arranges ten groups of ten tales each, with charming interludes of conversation, song, and description. But only the charm of style saves the connective from monotony. The narrators are merely mouthpieces; the interludes are not used, as by Chaucer, to bring about contrast and interchange; the setting, though more attractive than the allegorical fiction of the Confessio Amantis, is merely repeated with variations. The ancient plan of The Seven Sages remains inflexible through all the versions. The king, stayed by the tale of the first sage, finds the queen in tears, and is won back by her counter-tale to reaffirm his sentence on the prince. With mere variation of the dialogue this scene is repeated six times. Instead of being always different, as in the Canterbury Tales, the interlude is always substantially the same. Not only are the tales generally alike in form, being all by the necessity of the plan exempla, but the plan itself is little more than a vehicle.
The scheme of the Canterbury Tales is at once more flexible and larger in scope. The fiction of a traveling company offers more opportunity than that of a confession, a trial, or even a house-party. But further the interludes, instead of being pauses, whether pleasant as Boccaccio’s or tedious as Gower’s, act upon the tales. They add an individualized teller in action and interaction. The parody romance of Sir Thopas gains in point by the rude interruption of the host. Revenge for this may be meant as excuse for the dulness of the following prose morality. At any rate, the host’s rueful comparison between the wife of Melibeus and his own, and the domestic comedy of Chantecler and Pertelote, suggest cues for the marvelous prologue of the Wife of Bath; and her tale opens the way for other maistrye of women in marriage.[42] Though the grouping remains conjectural because the scheme remained incomplete and the manuscripts do not agree in the order, there is no doubt that Chaucer projected a larger technic of dramatic setting. The general prologue describes each teller by summary indications of make-up, costume, and personal style, not in order to review medieval social classes, but to prepare for the various interaction of the interludes. Far from exemplifying Chaucer’s descriptive habit, it is specifically adjusted to a list of dramatis personæ.
Medieval verse narrative was recited or read aloud. Chaucer had learned early that setting need not interrupt its oral course. Making description run instead in that course, he had learned further that inanimate background is both less tractable orally and less significant narratively than the environment of men and women. Dialogue, the most oral means of liveliness, he pointed by gesture, and from mood and emotion advanced it to interaction. Finally he staged his tales by characterizing the tellers and suggesting their interplay with an audience. Though this is not often carried out so dramatically as with the Pardoner, it is evident as a narrative scheme. For the “framework” of the Canterbury Tales is human.
[1] For Anglo-Saxon epic see above, Chapter V. E.
[2] For the Prose Edda as “a textbook for apprentice poets” see A. G. Brodeur’s introduction to his translation (New York, 1916), which includes the Skáldskaparmál entire, and Gustav Necker’s introduction to his German translation (Jena, 1925, vol. 20 of the series Thule). Parts of the Skáldskaparmál are included in R. B. Anderson’s translation, The Younger Edda, Chicago, 1880.
[3] “Nulle intention littéraire, nul souci de l’effet ne gâtent l’absolue simplicité du récit. Le style, tel quel, purement déclaratif, ne s’interpose pas entre l’action et les vers.” Lanson, Histoire de la littérature française, 25.
[4] For this see Faral, Les arts poétiques du xiie et du xiiie siècle, 93-97.
[5] Edited for the Camden Society by Thomas Wright, London, 1850; reëdited by Montague Rhodes James in Anecdota Oxoniensia, Oxford, 1914; translated and edited by James, Lloyd, and Hartland, London, 1923; by Tupper and Ogle, London, 1924. See Hinton in Studies in Philology, 20: 448 (Oct., 1923).
[7] References are to the books and distinctiones into which the collection was grouped by some compiler, evidently not by Walter himself.
[8] The charm of Marie’s lais as poetry is suggested by the metrical versions of F. B. Luquiens, New York, 1911, which has a bibliography and a valuable introduction. There are several prose translations.
[9] The appendix of adventures in Aucassin et Nicolete seems to be a later addition, not part of the original composition. Among the translations, Andrew Lang’s keeps its distinction.
[10] Translation by Alice Kemp-Welch, London, 1903, with the French text.
[11] Prose translation of Erec, Cligés, Yvain, and Lancelot by W. W. Comfort, Everyman’s Library, 1914, with introduction, notes, and bibliography. The fourteenth-century English translation of Yvain (Ywain and Gawain) has been edited by G. Schleich with study of its relation to the original, Oppeln and Leipzig, 1887.
[12] Lady Charlotte Guest, The Mabinogion (1877), 162.
[13] See note 52 to Chapter VII, and Lizette A. Fisher, The Mystic vision in the Grail legend and in the Divine Comedy, New York, 1917 (Columbia University Press).
[14] Book II of Dante’s unfinished De vulgari eloquentia has several passages suggestive of the preoccupations of his time and of his own bent: “Si poesim recte consideremus: quæ nihil aliud est quam fictio rethorica musicaque composita” (III, page 393 of the Oxford 1 vol. text of the Works); “magister noster Horatius” (ibid.); “grandiosa modo vocabula sub prælato stilo digna consistere....” (VII. 395); “ornativa vero dicimus omnia polysyllaba....” (VII. 396); “tota igitur ars cantionis circa tria videtur consistere: ... cantus divisionem ... partium habitudinem ... numerum carminum et syllabarum” (IX. 397).
For the three styles, see the indexes to ARP and to this volume.
[15] The references are to book, canto, and line. I refers to Inferno; II, to Purgatorio; III, to Paradiso. The translations are adapted from the convenient and familiar edition in Temple Classics.
[16] Tanto vilmente nel eterno esilio. I. xxiii. 125.
La concreata e perpetua sete. III. ii. 19.
E la sua volontate è nostra pace. III. iii. 85.
Non fu dal vel del cor giammai disciolta. III. iii. 117.
[17] See ARP, 128.
[18] See the introduction to Cook’s edition, Boston, 1900.
[21] For the demonstration of this see Gratia Eaton Baldwin, The new Beatrice, or the virtue that counsels, New York, Columbia University Press, 1928.
Neglect of this medieval habit has hindered the interpretation of Pearl. See the study of it by Sister M. Madaleva, New York, 1925.
[22] The passage refers specifically, though not in the usual medieval terms, to Vergil’s diction. So do I. ii. 67, “la tua parola ornata”; and II. vii. 16, “O gloria de’ Latin ... per cui mostrò ciò che potea la lingua nostra.”
There are many references and allusions to specific passages; e.g., to the fourth Eclogue, often interpreted symbolically in the middle age, in II. xxii. 70; to Dido’s “Agnosco veteris vestigia flammæ” (Æn. IV. 23), in II. xxx. 48.
Justinian’s vision of Rome in III. vi may be said to carry out the idea of the Æneid in having the same Romanism.
[23] See above, page 271. The sculptured reliefs in II. x, though doubtless reminiscent, as many a medieval ecphrasis, of the wall-pictures in Dido’s palace, are exempla, not decoration.
[24] See note 21 above. I owe to this book the interpretation of Dante’s intention as the progressive freeing of the will.
[25] Chaucer and his poetry, Cambridge, 1915, page 58.
[26] A similar touch is added in the English Ywain and Gawain.
[27] Lecoy de la Marche quotes from a versified morality on the Blessed Virgin a passage exemplifying simple use of linking refrain.
Thus it is used in the stanzaic Morte Arthur.
[28] De planctu naturæ, translated by D. M. Moffat, New York, 1908 (Yale Studies in English).
[29] “We have already here some of that variety of tone, that dramatic briskness, that air of gaiety mingled with romance.” Legouis, Chaucer, 85.
[30] “From Italy, and primarily I think from Dante, came the inspiration to tell the story of Troilus in the bel stilo alto, to write in the vernacular with the dignity and elevation which mark the great ancients.” Root, The book of Troilus and Criseyde ... Princeton University Press, 1926, page xlv.
[31] For Chaucer’s sources see the critical summary in the introduction to Root’s edition (Princeton University Press, 1926) and the bibliography, pages 567-569.
[32] Price finds the movement typically dramatic: rising action with suspense and complication to the climax in Book III, peripety in the exchange of prisoners, falling action in the yielding to Diomed, conclusion on the despair and death of Troilus. PMLA 11 (1896): 307-322.
[33] For Chaucer’s knowledge of the poetriæ see J. M. Manly, Chaucer and the rhetoricians, Warton Lecture on English Poetry XVII (read June 2, 1926), printed in Proceedings of the British Academy.
The following pages on Chaucer’s criticism of the poetriæ are adapted from my Cicero on Parnassus, PMLA 42: 106-112 (March, 1927).
For the poetriæ see above, Chapter VII. B.
[34] It is advanced, however, by Tatlock’s interpretation of the evidence as suggesting rather Chaucer’s adoption of the “lay” as a literary form than his use of a particular “lay” as a source (The Scene of the Franklin’s Tale Visited, London, Chaucer Society, 1914).
Skeat notes the reminiscence of the prologue (appearing in better manuscripts as an epilogue) to the Satires of Persius.
[35] See above, Chapter VII. B.
[36] The “heigh style” in the Squire’s joke may have the same reference.
For dictamen see above, Chapter VIII.
[37] If endyteth here also refers to dictamen, Chaucer is underlining Petrarch’s rhetoric. But the word is not necessarily technical.
[38] B. 4537, seq.
[39] The reference to romance which follows the Nun’s Priest’s sarcastic dilation of truisms suggests that here too, as well as in the direct reference to Geoffrey, Chaucer was glancing at rhetorication of narrative.
Perhaps also he was thinking of Geoffrey’s dilation on the instability of “worldly joye” (277-291, Quid gaudia tanta).
[40] “O Veneris lacrimosa dies!” 375. Chaucer’s reference is at B 4531. The Pardoner’s apostrophes (C 512, 534, 551, 895) are subtly tinged, as everything else that he says, with demagogy. Those of the Nun’s Priest (B 4416, 4529), of course, are played flat. But in other places (E 2056, 2242, G 1076) Chaucer’s use of this “colour” seems conventional.
[41] The rehearsal of all the conventionally appropriate loci of description at the funeral of Arcite (A 2919-2966) sounds to modern ears impatient, if not sarcastic. But, after all, the whole long passage is the “colour” occupatio (præteritio). The shorter occupatio in the Squire’s Tale (F 63-75) suggests sarcasm less by itself than in its connection with lines 32-40 and 401-408 quoted above.
[42] See W. W. Lawrence in Modern Philology, 11: no. 2 (October, 1913), with his references to Kittredge and Tatlock; and for a summary of considerations of the order of the tales, R. K. Root, The poetry of Chaucer, 153-159.