Chaucer's Psychologizing of Virgil's Dido

CRITICISM CHAUCER'S PSYCHOLOGIZING OF VIRGIL'S DIDO Raymond P. Tripp, Jr. From Truth and Nature shall we widely stray, Where Virgil, not where Fancy, leads the way? The Village It is my understanding, œncerning the deeper meaning of Chaucer's poetry, that he rejects much of medieval reality and takes to a psychological view of life and man. I find in his poetry an original amalgam of definiteness —about the what and how of things—and a very modern vagueness, an awareness of and a capacity to use ambiguity. Much of what seems perplexingly ironic, strangely orthodox, or otherwise difficult to harmonize in his poetry answers to this view. His early poetry in particular I regard as a poetry of rejection. Orthodoxy he puts aside in The Book of the Duchess;1 conventionalized love in The Parliament of Fowls; and teleological order in The House of Fame. He thus sets aside much of medieval belief, it seems to me, because his intellect demanded, on the one hand, an empirical truth, and his new sense of person, on the other, could not tolerate a return to the collective morality of orthodoxy. In The Canterbury Tales Chaucer turns directly to human nature humanistically conceived. Personality, a child of intellect, was required to satisfy his new sense of reality.2 His move into pathedy* that is, into the drama of human emotions, became inevitable once he had withdrawn his faith from the medieval model, that is, emptied his faith, such as it was, of its literalness . Conventional allegory requires a structured, vital, and autonomous order, a meaningful world designed by God. Once this fails, allegory retreats further into man, into drama.* It becomes, then, a structured correspondence , not between a theology and the world, but between human actions and their assumed significance. From an even further intellectualized position of the drama of the absurd, such assumed significance itself becomes as artificial as did earlier allegory to the first rationalism. Chaucer's 1AIl references are from The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson, 2nd ed. (Boston, 1961). I use orthodoxy here to mean sincere compliance to external doctrine. 2H. R. Patch, "The Subjects of Chaucer's Poetry," Franciplegius, Medieval and Linguistic Studies in Honor of Francis Peabody Magoun, Ir. (New York, 1965), pp. 255264 , approaches this view. 3John Nist's term from "The Art of Chaucer: Pathedy," Tennessee Studies m Language and Literature, XI ( 1966), 1-10. *E. T. Schell and I. J. D. Shuchter in the introduction of their book English Morality Phys and Interludes (New York, 1969) p. xvi, acknowledge this tendency, citing E. C. York, "Dramatic Form in Late Medieval English Narrative," MLN, LXXII (1957), 535-536. 52RMMLA BulletinJune 1970 transformation of Virgil's Dido anticipates his development away from medieval conventions toward modem, psychological people. I have called this essential development psychologizing, a term difficult to clarify in its representing a style of consciousness, equipped with its own logic and view of the world. "For investigations of this sort," as Lounsbury put it, "the personal equation becomes a factor of supreme importance."5 C.S. Lewis, discussing the semantic diminution of god-like genius into the merely human talent, says: To understand this process fully would be to grasp that great movement of internalization , and that consequent aggrandisement of man and dessication of the outer universe, in which the psychological history of the West has so largely consisted.6 Regardless which substantive is preferred, in Chaucer one meets a deep and difficult-to-name condition marked by a peculiar fascination with intellect and the emotionally potentiated world it produces. Lewis gives literary expression to what others,7 upon other grounds, have likewise concluded in less elegant, philosophical language. Before rationalism , scientism, or before the general de-animation and de-sacralization of nature and the universe, or later, the triumph of method; before, in other words, intellect became the sole means of valid knowledge—before all this, men's consciousness was radically different from what it has been since the seventeenth century or, as I hope to demonstrate, even earlier. And it seems unreasonable to expect literature, especially, to escape the universal efficacy of man's larger moods...