Chaucer in the Twentieth Century

Chaucer rn the Twentieth Century E. Talbot Donaldson Indiana University ICANNOT EXPRESS to you what a great privilege it is fot me to have been made the first coxswain of the Paul G. Ruggiers Skulling Society. I wish I were able to bark sharp commands steering you off in new directions, but I don't know any. In any case from what I have heard of the discussions here you seem to be off to a good start in your own directions-every which way-even though some of you can't keep time to a five-beat line. The one thing that it is safe to say about Chaucer in the twentieth century is that he is in the first century in which he has been fully appreciated and understood. The fifteenth century's appreciation of him took the form of adulation for the sugared rhetoric that dripped like honey from hismellifluous tongue. The sixteenth century continued that approbation but decongested the image by relieving it of some of its excess sweetness in declaring him a well of English undefiled. The seventeenth century took his poems seriously enough to steal from them, as Shakespeare did, to translate one of them into Latin, as Francis Kinaston at least partially did, to regret the incompleteness of one of them, as Milton did, or to rectify its incompleteness, as John Lane did (one would have to say that while the seventeenth century had grown up to Troilus, it had failed to outgrow The Squire's Tale). The eighteenth, in which I unchronologically include Dryden, admired him not only as a perpetual fountain of good sense, but also as a producer of ribaldries which heads of houses recited by heart in the intervals when they were not quoting beastly Skelton. In the nineteenth century Chaucer enjoyed more solemn appreciation, for he had written The Prioress' Tale so well that Wordsworth, in his translation of it, had to add only one line to make it perfect-a line which he subsequently congratulated Chaucer for 7 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER having composed; and on the basis of the same tale Matthew Arnold gravely martyred Chaucer by soldering him to virginity. Furnivall and Skeat I shall arbitrarily place in the twentieth century. For, as I have said, it was the twentieth century in which Chaucer came to be appreciated and understood in all his wonderful variety. Here was a poet whom all recognized as the author of the first psychological novel in English, a most exact and just observer of the human psyche, who, however, did not intend to "delineate character in a psychological sense but to call attention to abstractions which may manifest themselves in human thought and action." Here was a Dreiserian realist who wrote about the people he knew and described them as they were, warts, bad breath, skin ulcers and all-though all of these details are, of course, purely symbolic and iconographic and not realistic at all. Here was a great secular poet who, though orthodox and respectful of religion, placed the scene of some of his most serious works in non-Christian contexts and the scene ofhis comic works in milieus which by their very nature exclude serious thought; yet he managed to do both of these things in such a way as to permit virtually every line to be taken as a proper subject for patristic exegesis. Here was a poet who could create a Kni·ght who is at the same time a perfect representative of medieval chivalric ideals and a kind of proleptic Don Quixote living a life whose raison d'etre had long since disappeared, a man whose tale is either a solemn exploration in the Boethian mode ofthe workings of Fortune or an inept parody ofa courtly romance, or both; a Wife ofBath who is both "a high and gallant symbol ofhumanity" according to one overwrought critic, and, according to a number of others, a deplorable monstrosity who in her approach-or approaches-to matrimony defiles all that is sacred to human life; a Prioress who expresses popular religious attitudes most tenderly and lovingly in a tale that reeks ofvengeance, hatred, a11d blood...