Now welcom, somer, with thy sonne softe,
That bath this wintres weders overshake
And driven awey the longe nyghtes blake.

A few "balades," all assignable to a fairly late date in his career, have a heavier and more laboured movement than his average verse, but they contain some of his noblest lines. The following is a stanza from his Balade de Bon Conseyl :

That thee is sent, receyve in buxumnesse,

The wrastling for this worlde axeth a fal.
Here nis non hoom, here nis but wildernesse :
Forth, pilgrim, forth! Forth, beste, out of thy stal!
Know thy contree, look up, thank God of al;
Hold the hye wey, and lat thy gost thee lede :
And trouthe shal delivere, hit is no drede.

Since the early love-poems are lost we lack an essential witness, but on the evidence extant it seems unlikely that Chaucer at any time possessed either the technique or the temper of a lyrist. He introduces personal touches into many of his poems, sometimes charming, sometimes humorous; he philosophizes also on human affairs and the mysteries of existence, but these touches are incidental. He is always

primarily a poet who has a tale to tell, and is bent on telling it in the best possible "/

manner.

The Question of Invention.-But while Chaucer is primarily a story-teller, it seems equally clear that he had very little gift for what may be called the strategy of a plot. For the tactics of story-telling, the successful working out in detail of a borrowed central idea, he developed a real genius. But he had none of the amazing gift which enabled Scott, for instance, to plot story after story with hardly a suggestion save such hints as his own instinct set him to look for. The gift was rare in his day, witness the monotony of incident and the repetition in the romances, and the tendency of their writers to rehandle and extend old themes in place of devising new ones. We have twofold evidence that Chaucer did not possess it, firstly in the existence of either direct originals or analogues for almost all his stories, secondly in the survival of three poems, all of them begun when his powers were nearly or quite at their height, which he was apparently unable to complete. Before writing of "al the love of Palamon and Arcyte" in the tale assigned to the Knight in the Canterbury series, he tried to invent a variation of it in which Arcyte from the outset should forfeit the reader's sympathy by his falseness to a certain fair Anelida, and abandoned the attempt after occupying 357 lines in a very badly proportioned opening. In the House of Fame, after a wasteful prologue epitomizing the story of Troy from Virgil's Eneid, he imagines Jupiter to have sent an eagle to carry him through the air to the temple of the goddess, launches himself on a poem of description and moral comment, and then breaks off apparently for lack of a climax.

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point out these facts is to delimit, not to depreciate. "If the works of the great poets," says Lowell," teach anything, it is to hold mere invention somewhat cheap. It is not the finding of a thing, but the making something out of it after it is found, that is of consequence. Accordingly Chaucer, like Shakespeare, invented almost nothing. Whenever he found anything directed to Geoffrey Chaucer, he took it and made the most of it. It was not the subject treated, but himself, that was the new thing."

Work demanded by Court Occasions. As a court poet Chaucer was bound to handle some themes for which no exact model could be found: John of Gaunt's

wife died; Richard II. was contracted to be married; Richard's queen, so we are told, had procured the poet some relief from his official work, and had to be thanked. For each occasion a poem full of charm was produced, but the slightness of these poems and the use in each case of conventional forms are further proofs of the limits of Chaucer's invention as regards plot and matter. In the Death of Blanche the Duchess there is a finely written prologue on the poet's own lack of sleep and on dreams, introducing the story of Ceyx and Alcyone from Ovid; then he dreams and sees himself wandering on a May morning in a forest, where he meets a mourning knight whom he questions with a perverse blindness as to the cause of his sorrow. In the Parliament of Fowls the machinery of the dream occupies nearly half the poem, and then we have three eagles pressing their love-suits, the opinions of the other birds, and the indeterminate ending which seems to have been the rule in these argumentative poems and in this case is supposed to fit in with a delay in the marriage of Anne of Bohemia (who had previously been courted by two other princely suitors) with Richard II. After the rather laboured prologue it is all very charming and very slight, and the charm and the slightness seem to go together. Yet once more, in the prologue to the Legend of Good Women, which, though both in form and substance a prologue, is also a delightful original poem, we have again a conventional beginning leading up to a dream in which the poet sees himself upbraided by Cupid for his traitorous writings, and interceded for by Alcestis, Love's queen, who yet sets him by way of penance to write year

by year a story of some faithful woman, to which the god adds a charge for a Nothing could be more gracefully told than this

final legend of Alcestis herself. little scene, which has enough movement and colour in it to form the prelude to a masque.

Thus each of these ventures is a success up to a point, yet the fact remains that in the three most original poems which Chaucer produced, we have the dream basis used each time (and again in the House of Fame), and then a little song and some talk, and that is all. The man who out of his own head could produce no more of a story than we have in these three completed poems, and who lays his foundations so badly in the three uncompleted ones, might be reckoned a fine poet on other grounds, but as a story-teller, if this were all of his work still extant, we should be bound to judge him ineffective, or only capable of pretty trifles. And yet in the end Chaucer is one of our greatest storytellers. How did he achieve his success?

The Apprenticeship of Translation. Chaucer is a striking instance of a poet who persevered in hard work until he

Prologue, page 1, of Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales." (British Museum,)

became a master of his craft. At the outset he was handicapped, not only by his lack of originality and constructive power, but by having to feel his way in the use of words-his "English," he tells us more than once, was "insufficient." He set to work as a translator, trying from time to time, as we have seen, to use his materials in original combinations, and finding himself driven again to keep his

hand on some clue provided for him in French, Latin, or Italian. But from the very first he possessed two great gifts, music and the ability to describe whatever he could see; and we soon find him abridging and selecting from his materials, enriching them now with philosophy, now with humour, and humanizing and making more dramatic the plots he borrowed, till at the last we feel that it is only the merest thread that he wants to guide him, and with that provided he can re-tell the story in his own way and his own words, and can tell it incomparably better than his authorities.

Music and Descriptive Power in Chaucer's Early Work. The first metre which Chaucer mastered was the octosyllabic couplet, which he probably learnt to use by translating the Roman de la Rose. By 1369, when he made his first attempt at rearranging materials mainly borrowed, in the Death of Blanche the Duchess, he could already do what he liked with it. Consider the freedom in these half-dozen lines with their two monosyllabic and one trisyllabic first feet and the rise and fall of the verse:

Thus in this wyse

Soche a tempest gan to ryse

That brak hir mast and made it falle

And clefte hir ship, and dreinte hem alle,

That never was founden, as it telles,

Bord, ne man, ne nothing elles :

Right thus this King Seys loste his lyf.

Chaucer is translating, but he visualizes the scene for himself and writes with absolute freedom. What descriptive power again is shown, on a slightly larger scale, in the thirty-nine lines (153-91) in which Juno's messenger goes to wake the god of sleep!

Abridgment and Selection.-One of Chaucer's earliest essays in translation was the Life of St. Cecile, which is assigned in the Canterbury Tales to the Second Nun. For more than half his version he translates closely, only eking out his seven-line stanzas (imitated from the French of Machault) with little tags to help the rhymes. He even gives four stanzas to the amazing etymologies of Cecilia's name propounded by his author, Jacobus de Voragine. Then he gets tired of his Latin and finishes the story rapidly and vividly. So in the tale of Constance (from the Anglo-Norman of Trivet), when Constance is to make her second unlucky marriage he exclaims:

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Me list nat of the chaff, ne of the stree
Maken so long a tale as of the corn.

What sholde I tellen of the roialtee

At mariage, or which cours goth biforn,

Who bloweth in the trumpe or in an horn?

The fruyt of every tale is for to seye

They ete and drynke and daunce and synge and pleye.

There are many such explicit refusals of the opportunities for prolixity which the romancers so cheerfully embraced, and on a larger scale we should appreciate the sound instinct which turned the Teseide into al the love of Palamon and Arcyte," omitting the war with the Amazons, and giving the story a unity and compactness not found in the original.

Enrichment. While Chaucer recognized the value of swiftness in telling a story, he was no less alive to that of ornament. In the Knight's Tale he shortens the descriptions of three temples of Mars, Venus, and Diana, in which Arcite, Palamon, and Emily make their several prayers, but he does not cut them out. Moreover, to make his poems appeal not only to the lovers of a fine story but to more thoughtful listeners and readers, he adds ethical and philosophical passages from Latin, French, and Italian sources, more especially the De Consolatione Philosophia of Boethius. The moralizing is mostly very good in itself and good also as artistic relief. Now and again Chaucer goes astray in these additions, as in the 98-line "Complaint" of Dorigen (taken from St. Jerome's treatise Contra Jovinianum) with which he overloads the otherwise perfectly told Franklin's Tale. But nearly always he hits his mark.

Dramatic Power in Romance. In romance Chaucer's two great successes are his Troilus and Criseyde (based on Boccaccio's Filostrato) and the Knight's Tale of Palamon and Arcite (based on the same poet's Teseide). In the Troilus he translates less than half of the 5,704 lines of his original and adds twice as much of his own, lengthening the whole poem to 8,246 lines, in 1,178 seven-line stanzas. The length injures the poem, but it is due not to mere prolixity, but to the sheer joy of the poet, who has at last been given a subject worthy of his powers. He had got his plot outlined for him, and he fills it in at his own discretion, ornamenting it from his reading in Dante, Petrarch, and Boethius, and investing Criseyde with a pathos, and Pandarus with a humour and worldly wisdom, of which there is little trace in his original. In transforming the Teseide into "al the love of Palamon and Arcyte" Chaucer kept a tighter hand on himself, using only some 770 of Boccaccio's lines, and completing the poem in 2,050 lines, or less than a quarter of the 9,054 of the Italian. The tale is thus a model of condensation, but Chaucer did much more for it than this. He wins sympathy for Palamon by making him see Emily before his cousin and emphasizing his single-mindedness in love, as contrasted with Arcite's desire for victory in arms. He gives fire to the story by making the two cousins quarrel fiercely over their respective claims to Emily's love while they are still in prison, and heightens and quickens every detail of their rivalry. From the escape of Palamon from prison to the arrangement for the tournament every touch is dramatic, and every touch is Chaucer's improvement on a much tamer original.

Realization of Character and Action.-In his rehandling of Boccaccio's two poems (2,352)