Alfred William Pollard

“ His own age delighted in stories, and he gave it the stories it demanded invested with a humanity, a grace and strength which place him among the world’s greatest narrative poets, and which bring the England of his own day, with all the colour and warmth of life, wonderfully near to all his readers. ”

“ The practical identity of Chaucer’s language with that of Gower shows that both merely used the best English of their day with the care and slightly conservative tendency which befitted poets. Chaucer’s service to the English language lies in his decisive success having made it impossible for any later English poet to attain fame, as Gower had done, by writing alternatively in Latin and French. The claim which should be made for him is that, at least as regards poetry, he proved that English was “sufficient.” ”

“ He had done his duty manfully for the saints “of other holinesse” in Cecyle, Grisilde and Constance, whom he was forbidden by the rules of the game to clothe with complete flesh and blood. In this great love-story there were no such restrictions, and the characters which Boccaccio’s treatment left thin and conventional became in Chaucer’s hands convincingly human. No other English poem is so instinct with the glory and tragedy of youth, and in the details of the story Chaucer’s gifts of vivid colouring, of humour and pity, are all at their highest. ”

“ An unfortunate theory that the reference in the Legende of Good Women to “al the love of Palamon and Arcyte” is to a hypothetical poem in seven-line stanzas on this theme, which Chaucer is imagined, when he came to plan the Canterbury Tales, to have suppressed in favour of a new version in heroic couplets, has obscured the close connexion in temper and power between what we know as the “Knight’s Tale” and the Troilus. ”

“ To borrow his own phrase, his “Englysh was insufficient” to reproduce such difficult Latin. The translation is often barely intelligible without the original, and it is only here and there that it flows with any ease or rhythm.
If Chaucer felt this himself he must have been speedily consoled by achieving in Troilus and Criseyde his greatest artistic triumph. Warned by his failure in Anelida and Arcyte, he was content this time to take his plot unaltered from the Filostrato, and to follow Boccaccio step by step through the poem. ”

“ Five London burgesses are described in a group, and a Nun and Priest [3] are mentioned as in attendance on the Prioress. Each of these, with Chaucer himself making the twenty-ninth, was pledged to tell two tales, but including one second attempt and a tale told by the Yeoman of a Canon, who overtakes the pilgrims on the road, we have only twenty finished stories, two unfinished and two interrupted ones. As in the case of the Legende of Good Women, our loss is not so much that of the additional stories as of the completed framework. ”

“ While he thus experimented with the metre of the Divina Commedia, he made his first attempt to use the material provided by Boccaccio’s Teseide in another fragment of great interest, that of Quene Anelida and Fals Arcyte. More than a third of this is taken up with another, and quite successful, metrical experiment in Anelida’s “compleynt,” but in the introduction of Anelida herself Chaucer made the first of his three unsuccessful efforts to construct a plot for an important poem out of his own head, and the fragment which begins so well breaks off abruptly at line 357. ”

“ The development of his genius has been attractively summed up as comprised in three stages, French, Italian and English, and there is a rough approximation to the truth in this formula, since his earliest poems are translated from the French or based on French models, and the two great works of his middle period are borrowed from the Italian, while his latest stories have no such obvious and direct originals and in their humour and freedom anticipate the typically English temper of Henry Fielding. ”

“ Recent discoveries have shown, however, that (besides obligations to Machault) some of the touches about the daisy and the controversy between the partisans of the Flower and of the Leaf are snatches from poems by his friends Froissart and Deschamps, which Chaucer takes up and returns to them with pretty compliments, and that he was indebted to Froissart for some of the framework of his poem. [2] Both of the two versions of the Prologue to the Legende are charming, and some of the tales, notably that of Cleopatra, rank with Chaucer’s best work. ”

“ He had very little sheer singing power, and though there are fine lines in his short poems, witness the famous “Flee fro the prees and dwell with soothfastnesse,” they lack the sustained concentration of great work. From the drama, again, Chaucer was cut off, and it is idle to argue from the innumerable dramatic touches in his poems and his gift of characterization as to what he might have done had he lived two centuries later. ”

“ In 1868 the foundation of the Chaucer Society, with Dr Furnivall as its director and chief worker, and Henry Bradshaw as a leading spirit, led to the publication of a six-text edition of the Canterbury Tales, and the consequent discovery that a manuscript belonging to the Earl of Ellesmere, though undoubtedly “edited,” contained the best available text. ”

“ Henry IV.’s promise of an additional pension was doubtless elicited by the Compleynt to his Purs, in the envoy to which Chaucer addresses him as the “conquerour of Brutes Works. Albioun.” Thus within the last year of his life the poet was still writing. ”

“ In July 1389, after John of Gaunt had returned to England, and the king had taken the government into his own hands, Chaucer was appointed clerk of the works at various royal palaces at a salary of two shillings a day, or over £31 a year, worth upwards of £500 present value. ”

“ Meanwhile, in connexion (as is reasonably believed) with the betrothal or marriage of Anne of Bohemia to Richard II. (i.e. about 1381–1382) , Chaucer had brought to a successful completion the Parlement of Foules, a charming sketch of 699 lines, in which the other birds, on Saint Valentine’s day, counsel the “Formel Egle” on her choice of a mate. ”