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VIII THE ENGLISH TRADITION: CHAUCER AND MILTON I N spite of its geographical isolation across the misty waters of the Channel, England has not been lacking in feeling for the classical tradition. It is nevertheless necessary to understand just how paradoxical this feeling is. Drenched with showers and soot, pushing with his umbrella couchant through driving rain past bleak grey houses, the Englishman, morose, disciplined, classified, with his eighty religions and one sauce, stands at the opposite remove from the inquisitive crowds that throng the sunlit squares ofthe Mediterranean. But he has grasped something of the classical heritage. Like the Romans, he has civilized-and given his language to-a world. Like the Greeks, he has leapt in imagination from the fall of an apple to the wheeling of the planets. The typical expression of his selfconfidence has been, like that of the Athenians, in the theatre. With Aeneas, he has understood the deadly cost of empire. The classical tradition as it has flourished in England is a peculiarly complex study.l There have been the overt imitations, but to concentrate attention on them is to exclude some of the greatest of the English writers, and, worse, to suggest that their greatness is divorced from the classical tradition. The elevation ofEnglish to an independent status in the syllabus has confounded matters still further. Now the "classical" elements in English literature are explained in terms of the "unclassical."2 This can only lead to confused literary history, in which generalization is substituted for precision, especially where that demands the exact reading of the Alexandrian code. Chaucer and Milton are examples of the European, classical epic I Cf. R. M. Ogilvie, Latin and Greek: A History of the Influence of the Classics on English Lifefrom 1600-1918 (Hamden, Conn. 1964). 2 "It is almost entirely irrelevant to adduce Latin or Greek epics, or Aristotelian principles, in order to examine the structure of either Paradise Lost or Paradise Regained": L. A. Cormican in A Guide to English Literature 3. From Donne to Marvell, ed. Boris Ford (London 1956), p. 181. Classical Influences on English Poetry by J. A. K. Thomson (London 1951) had been so vague as to justify this kind of remark. 339 340 The English Tradition tradition which it serves no purpose to isolate. All that can happen is that Chaucer is praised for being other than he is, and Milton altogether misunderstood. If we remember the tradition as we have sought to establish it in these pages, we shall be able to unite the two poets with the living tree from which they sprang. I In what sense is the Canterbury Tales a classical epic? It is something with which the author of the comic/ironic Hecale, and the author of the elegiac Aetia, treated as a quarry for epic material already by Apollonius, would have been perfectly at home. A series ofnarratives, some in verse and some in prose, drawn from the most diverse sources, comic in intent but exhibiting serious knowledge of men and their passions, is tied loosely together to form an embroidered panorama of fourteenth-century England, with its characteristic strengths and weaknesses.3 The interest which the poem still awakens· suggests that the author's Ovidian wit is based on a perennial insight into the human condition. A critic interested, like Matthew of Vendome, in seriousness, or in that automatic application of Virgil's Wheel which was still common in sixteenth-century Renaissance criticism,5 would have been discomfited . Could he have approved instead of the manner displayed in Piers Plowman? This noble poem however is far from being the historical epic which is the normal alternative to the Callimachean style. The shifting identity of Piers is shared by him with the shifting identities of the Aeneid, both in debt to carnival metamorphosis. The mysticism, the concern for personal salvation, are other elements which prevent us from viewing Langland as a disciple of John of Virgil, or his ancient counterparts, the Telchines. The deadness of that kind of historical epic is seen in its total irrelevance to fourteenthcentury English literature. Yet who would doubt that we know a great deal about the feel of fourteenth-century England from its poetry? Who could believe that a versified history of the period would be more revealing than the Canterbury Tales, especially if that history had been falsified to flatter the great? , Donald R. Howard, The Idea of the Canterbury Tales (Berkeley and Los Angeles 1976) is particularly...

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