CHAUCER 



137 



which liis sister wan admitted at Harking, for whom 

 lii- father wrote some ten years later a treatise on 

 tin- Astrolahe. I'.ut the whole matter of Chin; 

 marrii'd life i- iiiM.lv. <! in much obscurity. It i- in 

 c\ iilriii-c that when he was certainly married IM- 

 > peak- of himself seseral times us one unblessed 

 witli love's favour; nor can these expressions I.e 

 e\|il.-iincil away as being dramatic and not auto- 

 biographical. The picture he draws of himself in 

 the H<is>- <>f f-'iniii; a poem undoubtedly written 

 after his marriage, is assuredly that of a forlorn 

 bachelor. On the whole, we believe him to have 

 man ii-.l at tout 1360, and that for some reason or 

 other not at present discovered, if ever to be, his 

 married life was disturbed and unhappy. 



In the year 1369 Chaucer comes certainly before 

 us as a poet, with his Death of Blanche the Duchess. 

 This is not probably his first writing; but it is 

 highly important, because the date of it is exactly 

 fixed *t>y the subject. It laments the death of the 

 Lady Blanche, the first wife of John of (Jaunt, which 

 took place in September 1369. It is in many ways 

 a crude composition, and a sufficient proof that 

 Chaucer's art was, like that of many of the greatest 

 masters, not precocious but of slow growth. But 

 even so it illustrates his great gift of style, and 

 gives satisfactory promise of his future excellence. 



The following years of Chaucer's life exhibit him 

 to us both as a much-employed man of business 

 and as a rapidly developing man of letters. In 

 1370 he went abroad on the king's service ; in 

 1372-73 on a royal mission to Italy to Genoa, Pisa, 

 Florence ; in 1376, abroad, it is not known where ; 

 in 1377, to Flanders and to France ; in 1378, to 

 Italy again. Thus he seems to have been highly 

 valued as a commissioner and a diplomatist. Mean- 

 while in 1374 he was appointed Comptroller of the 

 Customs and Subsidy of Wools, Skins, and Tanned 

 Hides in the port of London ; in 1382, Comptroller 

 of the Petty Customs ; and in 1385 he was allowed 

 to nominate a permanent deputy a most important 

 concession, as by the terms of his appointment he 

 was, like his predecessors, to write the rolls of his 

 office with his own hand and to be continually 

 present. Nor were other marks of royal and of 

 ducal favour wanting. In 1374, on St George's 

 day, the kinjj granted him a pitcher of wine daily, 

 to "be received in the port of London from the hands 

 of the king's butler. In the same year John of 

 Gaunt conferred on him a pension of 10 for life for 

 the good service rendered by him and his wife 

 Philippa to the duke, to his consort (the duke's 

 second wife, Constance, daughter of Peter the 

 Cruel, married in 1371 ), and to his mother the 

 queen. In 1375 he received from the crown the 

 custody of the lands and person of Edmond Staple- 

 gate of Kent, which brought him in 104 (well over 

 1000 of our money), and the custody of some pro- 

 perty at Soles, also in Kent. In 1386 he was elected 

 a knight of the shire for Kent. These were Chaucer's 

 most prosperous years in an income-making sense. 



To turn to his literary work during these years, 

 the following writings certainly l>elong to the period 

 between 1369 and 1387 i.e. between the composition 

 of The Book of the Duchess, and that of the Pro- 

 logue to The Canterbury Tales and were probahlv 

 produced in the order in which they are here named : 

 The Assembly of Fowls, The House of Fame, Troilus 

 and Cressida, and The Legend of Good Women ; 

 and besides these in unascertained order the Tale 

 of Griselda (afterwards assigned to one of the 

 Canterbury pilgrims the Clerk), the Tale of Con- 

 stance ( afterwards assigned to the Man of Law ), the 

 Legend of the Martyred Christian Boy ( afterwards 

 assigned to the Prioress), the Legend of Saint 

 Cecilia (afterwards assigned to the Second Nun), 

 and the Story of Palamon and Arcite in its first 

 shape (afterwards rewritten and assigned to the 



Knight ). None of these pieces represent* the poet's 

 genius in all its fullness or it* maturity ; they ex- 

 hihit its gradual expansion and growth. As we see 

 < 'h;iii<-cr in these he is not yet completely master of 

 himself, or wholly satisfied with the instruments at 

 his eonmiand e.g. with the metrical forms then 

 current around him. By far the most iin|Hirtant 

 influence acting upon him during this middle period 

 of his literary life was the influence of Italy ; and 

 in this respect his going to Genoa in 1372, as 

 already mentioned, had an importance other than 

 commercial or political. That was a journey that 

 made an epoch in his artistic development. It 

 introduced him to poetry in its noblest medieval 

 shape, and in one of the noblest shapes it has ever 

 assumed in any age. Chaucer seems to have felt 

 deeply the greatness of Dante. He appreciated 

 worthily the works of Petrarch and Boccaccio ; but 

 to the credit of his judgment, it was Dante that 

 most profoundly impressed him. The Assembly of 

 Fowls and The House of Fame largely reflect this 

 impression, the latter so closely that Lydgate, 

 as Professor Skeat points out, speaks of it as 

 'Daunt in English.' Much of his subject-matter 

 he derived from his great Italian contemporaries, 

 especially from Boccaccio. Thus the Reeve's Tale, 

 the Franklin's, and the Shipman's are all ' to be 

 found in the Decameron ; Troilus and Cressida is to 

 a considerable extent a translation of Boccaccio's 

 Filostrato ; and the story of Palamon and Arcite 

 is based upon that poet's Teseide. The tale of 

 Griselda is taken from a Latin letter of Petrarch's, 

 to whom Chaucer acknowledges his obligation 

 in the Clerk's Prologue. Oddly enough, he never 

 mentions Boccaccio. In one passage in Troilus 

 and Cressida he would seem to denote him by the 

 name of Lollius; but certainly in another, when 

 he speaks of ' mine author called Lollius,' he de- 

 notes Petrarch, for he proceeds to give a version 

 of one of Petrarch's sonnets. Dante he mentions 

 by name several times. With both Petrarch and 

 Boccaccio it is probable that he was personally 

 acquainted. Boccaccio was living at or near Flor- 

 ence when Chaucer was there in 1372, and Petrarch 

 near Padua, only some 120 miles away. Certainly 

 what is said in the Clerk's Prologue points to an 

 actual meeting with Petrarch. 



However this may be, the influence of the Italian 

 poets on Chaucer is beyond Question. Nor is it to 

 be measured by what he oorrowed in the way 

 of plot or incident or expression. It was far 

 profounder than such debts might suggest. It 

 recreated him as an artist, giving him a new 

 and loftier conception of artistic form and beauty. 

 This regeneration is soon visible in the improve- 

 ment of his style in its growing dignity and 

 shapeliness. It is strikingly indicated by his 

 metrical progress. The old four-accented couplet 

 seems to nim ' light and lewd ; ' he needs some- 

 thing weightier and statelier. He does not .satisfy 

 this need by importing the favourite Italian metres. 

 The sonnet form does not appear in any extant 

 work of his, though conceivably he may have 

 attempted it. The terza rima he does seem to 

 have essayed, as Professor Skeat has been the 

 first to notice ; but he did not take to it, or it 

 to him. What he did was to imitate not the letter 

 but the spirit of the Italian masters. And in 

 the heroic heptastich, and presently in the heroic 

 couplet, he found metrical forms that satisfied the 

 highest ideal. The crowning work of the middle 

 period of his life is certainly Troilus and Cressida 

 a work in which the abundant wealth of his genius 

 is lavishly displayed. Probably about the year 

 1384, when his official duties were so considerably 

 lightened, Chaucer, now a complete master of the 

 poetic craft, began to seek for some great subject. 

 The first selection he made proved unsatisfactory ; 



