Chapter X: Poetic Achievement in Vernacular (1)

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.

A. LYRIC AND EPIC

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.

B. EXPERIMENT AND CONVENTION IN ROMANCE

1. Romance in Latin and in Vernacular

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.

2. Walter Map and Marie

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_.

3. Chrétien de Troyes

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:

Then went the lady far aback,
And long she stood ere that she spake

(3983-3984).

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_.

4. Conventional Composition

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.

C. THE POETIC COMPOSITION OF THE _DIVINA COMMEDIA_

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.

Now were my eyes fixed again on the face
of my lady, and my mind with them,
and from every other thought were removed.

And she smiled not; but “Were I to smile”,
she began, “thou wouldst fare
as Semele when she turned to ashes;

For my beauty, which up the stair
of the eternal palace kindleth more and more,
as thou hast seen, the higher it ascends,

Were it not tempered, is so radiant
that thy mortal power at its flash
would be foliage shriveled by thunderbolt.”

III. xxi. 1.

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.

D. THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL VERSE NARRATIVE IN CHAUCER

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.

1. Poetic Conventions in the Earlier Poems

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,

A whelp that fauned me as I stood,
That hadde y-folowed, and coude no good.
Hit com and creep to me as lowe,
Right as hit hadde me y-knowe,
Hild doun his heed and joyned his eres,
And leyde al smothe doun his heres.

389-394.[26]

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_.

2. Poetic Innovation in _Troilus and Criseyde_

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,

... fond two othere ladyes sete and she
Withinne a paved parlour; and they three
Herden a mayden reden hem the geste
Of the Sege of Thebes whyl hem leste.

Quod Pandarus, “Madame, god you see,
With al your book and al the companye.”
“Ey! uncle myn, welcome ywis”, quod she;
And up she roos and by the hond in hye
She took him faste, and seyde, “This night thrye—
To goode mote it turne—of yow I mette.”
And with that word she doun on bench him sette.

II. 81-91.

The dialogue is more than realistic; it gives leads for the story.

Quod tho Criseyde, “Lat me som wight calle.”
“Ey! God forbede that it sholde falle”,
Quod Pandarus, “that ye swich foly wroughte!
They mighte deme thing they never er thoughte.”

III. 760-763.

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.”

With this he stente and caste adoun the heed;
And she bigan to breste awepe anoon.

II. 407-408.

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.

“But for al that ever I may deserve,
Refuse it nought,” quod he, and hent hir faste,
And in hir bosom the lettre doun he thraste,

And seyde hir, “now cast it away anoon,
That folk may seen and gauren on us tweye.”
Quod she, “I can abyde til they be goon.”
And gan to smyle, and seyde him, “eem, I preye,
Swich answere as yow list yourself purveye;
For trewely I nil no lettre wryte.”
“No? than wol I,” quod he, “so ye endyte.”

Therwith she lough, and seyde, “go we dyne.”

II. 1153-1163.

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.

3. Criticism of the _Poetriæ_

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]

Thise olde gentil Britons in hir dayes
Of diverse adventures maden layes
Rymeyed in hir firste Briton tonge,
Which layes with hir instruments they songe,
Or elles redden hem for hir plesaunce;
And oon of hem have I in remembraunce,
Which I shal seyn with good wil as I can.
But, sires, bycause I am a burel man,
At my biginning first I yow biseche
Have me excused of my rude speche.
I lerned never rethoryk certayn;
Thing that I speke, it moot be bare and pleyn.
I sleep never on the mount of Pernaso,
Ne lerned Marcus Tullius Cithero.
Colours ne knowe I none, withouten drede,
But swiche colours as growen in the mede,
Or elles swiche as men dye or peynte.
Colours of rethoryk ben to me queynte.
My spirit feleth noght of swich matere;
But if yow list, my tale shul ye here.

_Franklin’s Prologue_, F. 709-728.

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.

Fraunceys Petrark, the laureat poete,
Highte this clerk, whos rethoryke swete
Enlumined al Itaille of poetrye.

_Clerk’s Prologue_, E. 31.

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.

Your termes, your colours, and your figures,
Kepe hem in stoor til so be ye endyte
Heigh style, as whan that men to kinges write.

_Clerk’s Prologue_, E. 16.

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.