BOOKS.

CHAUCER'S ENGLAND.*

Tuts is a masterly book on a great subject, and we feel confident that those who are the most familiar with Chaucer will the most heartily assent to our estimate of Mr. Matthew Browne's attractive

P As was intimated in a recent issue of this journal,

ag " Matthew Browne" is only a name assumed by our author, so

that in fact the present work, like various other of the same writer's contributions to our literature, is as good as anonytnous. For our own parts, we will not be forward to remove the disguise, and, indeed, in very many cases we should as a rule prefer the anonymous to the onomatous mode of addressing the public. If a publicist makes a personal attack on a contemporary, or if he has special personal experience which peculiarly fits him to speak with authority on a given subject, we should hold-the anonymous utterance to be, in the one case, to say the least, perilously fraught with temptations to reckless assertion, and in the other, to imply some latent disregard for the intrinsic claims of a momentous question. The present reviewer has long been of opinion that when the theme which a writer discusses belongs to the region of pure art, or speculative criticism, lie is more likely to be disengaged from all merely personal considerations, more likely to be dominated by his subject and lose himself in it by withholding his name. The anonymous author is at liberty to refer continually to an ideal standard—to what is strictly impersonal—and then, as in the well-known instances of the Natural history of Enthusiasm and Ecce Homo, he may have the special gratification of witnessing the impression which his speculations by themselves create upon the public mind, unalloyed by any suspicion that his readers are influenced either by prejudice against himself or prepossession in his favour. To be heard without being seen, to be but a voice crying in the wilderness, is doubtless very fascinating to a certain type of mind; and so long as this able critic chooses to retain his pseudonym, and watch the reception given to his essayings without throwing his own shadow on the page, by all means let him indulge his humour.

But while Mr. Browne veils his personality proper from his readers, the hidden man of him is of very sufficient and substantial quality. He has been most happy in the selection of Chaucer for his subject, and we cannot but think that the poet himself has found in Mr. Browne his most genial, sympathizing, and intelligent expositor. We are not speaking at random. We have at hand rather considerable means for enabling us to form a just judgment of the respective merits of those who have laboured heartily in the Chaucerian field. Speght, the laudatory but quite uncritical Urry, the scholarly Tyrwhitt, the fanciful though always forceful Godwin, Sir Harris Nicolas, the late Robert Bell, John Saunders, a. certain North British reviewer, and the uniformly accurate Thomas Wright, have all deserved well at the hands of the lovers of Chaucer by their respective editions or investigations ; and to all of them (with the exception, probably, of the North British reviewer), Mr. Browne would be the first to acknowledge his obligations. But whatever lie has read,—and he has read immensely on this special subject,—he has made so entirely his own, that his work is entitled to the merit of being entirely original. We made ourselves students of Chaucer, and to our own thinking at least graduated in the genuine old English gentleman's writings Years ago ; but we feel ourselves only the more indebted to Mr. Browne for his racy and suggestive volumes. his book &es in every page. There is not a dull or common-place sentence to be found in Chaucer's England ; and sometimes, in a foot-note, our author throws out a hint which indicates at once a very comprehensive survey of human interests and fine moral discrimination. Let us take the following as an illustrative example. Mr. Browne, in his chapter entitled " Town and Country," gives us not a little picturesque and historically valuable information. Ile riots, we Might say, in his familiarity with old English life and modes of feeling, while he presents to us, in contrast with the modern Wordsworthian habit of subterf using into the aspects of nature a divine significance, the old domesticated sense of relation to the outer world which characterized our ancestors five centuries ago. Alter quoting a charming passage from the tale of the Doctor of Physic on " Nature " as God's " Vicar-General," who was ordained by the " former principal " to form and paint all earthly creatures according to her list, our author says, " A mind trained in the modern school. may possibly read into what Chaucer here writes a meaning, or a suggestion which Chaucer himself had not." And then ho adds, in a foot-note :— "The practice is far too common in criticism of all kinds, including criticism of the Bible. I wish those who indulge in it would think, among other things, of the harm they do to themselves, since every not of insincerity tends permanently to cloud the mind. Tho error I am condemning is often defended on the ground that the prophet and the pout are the subjects of an inspiration, and do not always know the whole meaning of their own words. And this is true, but itis not an excuse which fits the case. The question, what do certain words rover? is quite distinct from the question, what did the writer of them moan ?"

A paragraph like this supplies a strong temptation to write a lay sermon on the ethics of interpretation, but we must resist it, and tags on to other matters more specially pertinent to Chaucer.

Mr. Browne's book consists, in form, of a series of essays, which touch upon almost every phase of English life in the great epoch during which Chaucer lived and sang. The essays themselves are eighteen in number, and have, each of them, a title which, without being sensational, is frequently quaint, and always whets the curiosity. First of all and naturally collies " The Poet of the Canterbury Tales," then " The Story of the Pilgrims," followed by such conpanions as " The Gay Science," " Merry England," "Motley," "Mediaeval Nielitanisin " "Food, House, Dress, and Minor Morals," ',Familiarities of Faith," " Wonder, Knowledge, Belief, and Criticism," and " Under Shadow the Church." We may further mention that to each essay is prefixed a pictorial illustration, which at once adds to the outer attractions of the book, and also furnishes, so to speak, the text on which Mr. Browne discourses, and always with equal versatility, gracefulness, insight, and self possessio n .

Geoffrey Chaucer, take him for all in all, was our first modern English gentleman. He is English to his heart's core. The city of London, in which, as he tells us, if "The Testament of Love" be his, he was " forth growen," was to him most dear and sweet ; and readers who did not know the fact before, will learn from Mr. Matthew Browne how applicable to London the epithet " sweet" was in Chaucer's time :—London, with its fragrant hayfields, its strawberry gardens, its shining 11 saffron hills," its luxuriant vineyards, its broad fair river, its delectable wells, its motley crowds of warrior, priest, friar, lawyer, country gentleman, shopman, ploughman, cook, 'preutice boy, with pale-faced nuns, aldermen's wives, and buxom widows, like " the good wyfo of Bathe," all in varied and characteristic attire. Endlessly dear to him was our English tongue. He chose it as the instrument of his own masterful utterances both in prose and verse, and over and over we find him giving expression to his affection for the Saxon vernacular. In nothing is his prophetic and truly patriotic character more conspicuous than in his attachment to the English language. What Luther did for the Germans by his translation of the Bible, Chaucer, in conjunction with his great contemporary, Wycliffe, achieved for our mother language. A Norman by descent, he is wholly Saxon in all his sympathies, and by the might of his genius he made our common speech ready for his great successor, and our greatest writer, Shakespeare, found the instrument of British language ready for use. The great merit of Chaucer is that ho so largely fashioned it, and made it meet for song. No doubt, we had endless English verses before Chaucer ; but he gave us, in the deepest sense of the phrase, English poetry. We owe to him our iambic heroic measure, and measures of various kinds besides ho employs with wonderful case. To give a single example of the thorough modernness of Chaucer's way of treating things, let us quote a charming passage of his prose. It occurs in the opening paragraph of his treatise on the " Astrolabye," which lie wrote in his sixty-third year, A.1). 1391, for the special edification of one of his children : "Lytel Louys, my sonno, I perceve well by cortono ovydencos thyne abylyte to !erne Scyonces, touching nombros and proportions, and also well consydere I thy hesye prayer in especial to leave the trotyso of the Astrolabye [a mathematical instrument, says Urry, for ascertaining the height of the sun and stars]. This treatyse, divided in live parts, wit ishewe the wonder-lightt rules and nakid words in Enylishe, for Latino ne canst thou nat yet, but small, my lytol senile."

It was not only the speech of Englishmen, as we have implied, that was dear to Chaucer. He " took all England up." But he did this in a quiet poet's way. Ile lived in a time of what we may call world-shaking events—a time of great battles, wide-wasting epidemics, of phenomena, in a word, so startling, that Wycliffe drew from them the augury that the last phials were being

poured out on the Church and the earth. None of these things, however, touched with fearful foreboding the heart and brain of Chaucer. Ho fought in the French wars,—be was, indeed, made a prisoner by the French. He knew how the terrible desolations of the Black Death, among other results, introduced into the ranks of the clergy a crowd of ignorant and wholly unworthy men. He knew all about \Vat the Tiler from Deptford and the Scotch wars too. He was perfectly familiar with the scandal of the rival Infallibilities, who kept thundering everlasting damnation against each other and their respective followings ; and he must have heard that at Avignon, in the terrible words of Petrarch, Christ was sold for lust and gold. Clearly a mere theologian must have fancied that the end literally of all things was at hand. But Chaucer was a genial and healthful poet. He continued young in his own heart. He felt that England was young. Was not her language growing under his own hands? Was not England's vitality pregnant with still larger results than had yet been witnessed in her brief history ? Was Providence about to slay the mother and her unborn infant? Were not all things (as he tells us in the great poem the Knight's Tale) linked by a chain of love around the throne of Jove ; and was this England, in its present seething condition, to be the lame and impotent conclusion of a great world-drama ? Why, was not the "Alchemist Canon," while labouring in the fires in search for the philosopher's stone, a mediator of some grand secrets of which the world was yet to be heir ? Would not the " poor person of a tonne" be the herald of a day in which the Christianity of Christ would be revealed to Englishmen disassociated from all pagan rites and dogmatism ? Did not the heterogeneous gathering of pilgrims on the road to Canterbury prophesy a day for England when all men should be equal in the presence of England's law, because all were really embraced in that " Gospel of our suete Lorde Jesu Christe " which England had adopted as her common faith ? Chaucer unmistakably thought so, and accordingly he did two things. He gave the classical past to his contemporaries, and in full assurance of faith that a great future lay in store for his country, he sate down and painted his own age for the delight and instruction of posterity. There is not a feature of the English landscape, scarcely a specimen of English natural history, or a characteristic habit of English manners which he has not photographed, and so made an everlasting possession to his countrymen. Thus it was, that while WycliFe was announcing the world's immediate doom, Chaucer was busy in telling to later generations what Englishmen thought and did, how they prayed, fasted, feasted, went on pilgrimage, loved, fought, and died in his own day.

English out and out as we have said he is, the many-sidedness of Chaucer claims special note. All classes of Englishmen meet together in his pilgrims. The ploughman is there with his image of " Christopher " on his breast ; and here we must note that in in this feature Chaucer showed himself fully alive to the profound influence of the popular legends of his day. Three figures were eminently prominent in the consciousness of the middle ages—Faust, the Wandering Jew, and Christopher; and in signalizing the ploughman as carrying the image of St. Christopher, Chaucer only proclaimed how truly he divined the latent characteristic of all-enduring national life, that is, the willingness of the strong to support the weak. But side by side with the ploughman, are the knight, the squire, the lawyer, the doctor, the friar, the merchant, the cook, and the miller. England is to Chaucer a sacred unity ; and his prophetic function will have had the crown put upon it when all men in England shall recognize, not merely the worth of the Saxon priest Becket, who fought against the Normans, but shall confess Jesus Christ, the elder brother of all humanity, to be the Divine One at whose shrine in the holy of holies in the human heart all knees must bow.

Chaucer's plan of a pilgrimage to Canterbury was not carried out. At the Tabard Inn in Southwark 31 pilgrims in all assembled on the great night which he has made immortal, and, according to the programme of Harry Bailey, the landlord, each pilgrim was to tell two stories on the road to Canterbury and two on returning. We should thus have had altogether 124 different tales, but our poet has not completed his original scheme. Indeed, in a prosaic mood, we wonder how even one story could ever have been listened to by a company on horseback. Evidently, Chaucer felt the dramatic elements of the pilgrimage, but did not care to work them out. He indulges in a kind of illusion at starting, to half impose ou his readers, and then, while occasionally keeping up the original conception, be is contented, in the main, to let each story make its own impression, heedless of its consistency with his promised intention. Altogether, his poems, and specially his Canterbury Tales, rank,

as we must think, next to Shakespeare and Milton, highest in our poetical literature. Their range, their familiarity with all subjects, secular, philosophic, and divine ; their childlike delight in nature, their sweetness, their pathos, their humour, their lifelike portraitures of men and women, their individuality, which makes the poet so personally dear to us all constitute the writings of Chaucer a treasure quite unique in our literature. He sees, and says all that he sees. The theology of the predestinarian divine Bradwardine, the philosophic utterances of Cicero, Aristotle, and Boethius, whom he translated, are all at his finger-ends. He has preserved as in amber the common proverbs of his day, such as " All is not gold that glitters," " Burnt bairns dread the fire," " Murder will out," " Make a virtue of necessity," and numberless others. Doubtless, as Mr. Browne affirms, he is truly " nuditttrian," but he never gloats over evil. He shows his age such as it was,—the worst of it as represented by such unmitigated blackguards as the Summoner (or Sompnour), and the best of it as imaged by Griselda, Constance, the Frankleyn, the Ploughman, and his brother the Poor Parson, and if he is at times a coarse moralist, he is always, as Wordsworth said, a great one.

He combined in himself no end of attributes. He was royal page, soldier, custom-house officer, commissioner to foreign parts, member of Parliament, and poet, all in one. His genius was, like Walter Scott's, only equalled by his common sense ; and after repeated studies of his life, we feel, with Coleridge, that the most superficial words ever uttered about poets were those of Horace, in which he speaks of them as an " irritable race." Poetasters, or small politicians, who have narrow vision and no faith in the gradual development of all that is good, are irritable. But the true poet, filled with the light of heaven, sees the good within the evil, and thus can calmly wait for its advent. Of this calibre were Shakespeare, and Spenser, and Chaucer.

We must leave much unsaid, but must not leave unuttered how much of purest enjoyment this entirely delightful book of Matthew Browne has afforded us. Mr. Browne is so tangential, so " viewy," so skylarking in his occasional tendencies, that we must congratulate him on the method, wisdom, and Chaucerian wit of this book. He makes, no doubt, a serious onslaught on Dante, but it is not so damnatory as was that of Savage Lauder.