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GEOFFREY CHAUCER: THE CRITICAL HERITAGE VOLUME 2, 1837–1933 THE CRITICAL HERITAGE SERIES General Editor: B.C.Southam The Critical Heritage series collects together a large body of criticism on major figures in literature. Each volume presents the contemporary responses to a particular writer, enabling the student to follow the formation of critical attitudes to the writer’s work and its place within a literary tradition. The carefully selected sources range from landmark essays in the history of criticism to fragments of contemporary opinion and little published documentary material, such as letters and diaries. Significant pieces of criticism from later periods are also included in order to demonstrate fluctuations in reputation following the writer’s death. GEOFFREY CHAUCER VOLUME 2, 1837–1933 THE CRITICAL HERITAGE Edited by DEREK BREWER London and New York First Published in 1978 This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004. Compilation, introduction, notes and index © 1978 Derek Brewer All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any lectronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data ISBN 0-203-19623-6 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-19626-0 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-415-13399-8 (Print Edition) General Editor’s Preface The reception given to a writer by his contemporaries and near-contemporaries is evidence of considerable value to the student of literature. On one side we learn a great deal about the state of criticism at large and in particular about the development of critical attitudes towards a single writer; at the same time, through private comments in letters, journals or marginalia, we gain an insight upon the tastes and literary thought of individual readers of the period. Evidence of this kind helps us to understand the writer’s historical situation, the nature of his immediate reading-public, and his response to these pressures. The separate volumes in the Critical Heritage Series present a record of this early criticism. Clearly, for many of the highly productive and lengthily reviewed nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers, there exists an enormous body of material; and in these cases the volume editors have made a selection of the most important views, significant for their intrinsic critical worth or for their representative quality—perhaps even registering incomprehension! For earlier writers, notably pre-eighteenth century, the materials are much scarcer and the historical period has been extended, sometimes far beyond the writer’s lifetime, in order to show the inception and growth of critical views which were initially slow to appear. In each volume the documents are headed by an Introduction, discussing the material assembled and relating the early stages of the author’s reception to what we have come to identify as the critical tradition. The volumes will make available much material which would otherwise be difficult of access and it is hoped that the modern reader will be thereby helped towards an informed understanding of the ways in which literature has been read and judged. B.C.S. For Helena Contents INTRODUCTION 1 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 24 THE PRINCIPAL EDITIONS OF CHAUCER’S ‘WORKS’ UP TO 1933 27 Comments 1 RALPH WALDO EMERSON, The identity of all minds, 1837, 1849 (1850), 1856 33 2 RICHARD HENGIST HORNE, Translations, 1841 36 3 HENRY DAVID THOREAU, Homely, innocent, childish Chaucer, 1843 (1849) 50 4 ‘CHRISTOPHER NORTH’ (John Wilson), The allegory of love, 1845 58 5 SIR NICHOLAS HARRIS NICOLAS, A Life founded on documentary evidence, 1845 66 6 JOHN HENRY LEIGH HUNT, Geniality, singing, 1846, 1855 70 7 JAMES LORIMER, Chaucer is our Goethe, 1849 88 8 WILLIAM WATKISS LLOYD, Chaucer’s irony, 1856 99 9 JOHN RUSKIN, Fimesis and other matters, 1856, 1865, 1870, 1873, 1876 102 10 WALTER BAGEHOT, A healthy sagacious man of the world with a symmetrical mind, 1858 108 11 UNKNOWN, Story, situation and beauty, 1859 110 12 FRANCIS JAMES CHILD, Final -e, 1863 (1869) 122 13 WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR, Creatures like ourselves, 1863 123 14 ALEXANDER SMITH, Chaucer the English Conservative, 1863 125 15 FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE, Cordial affection for men and for nature, 1865 126 16 ‘MATTHEW BROWNE’ (William Brightly Rands), Chaucer the Laodicean, 1869 128 17 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL, Sincere, tender, humane, 1870 (1871) 131 18 STOPFORD A.BROOKE, Natural beauty, 1871 149 19 FREDERICK JAMES FURNIVALL, Work at Chaucer, 1873 167 20 JOHN WESLEY HALES, Pity and irony, 1873 178 21 WILLIAM MINTO, The spirit of chivalry, 1876 180 22 WILLIAM CYPLES, Incredible sentimentality, and the old Contents wonder of sex, 1877 188 23 ADOLPHUS WILLIAM WARD, Dramatist and novelist, 1879 208 24 MATTHEW ARNOLD, Chaucer lacks seriousness, 1880 216 25 GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS, Chaucer’s scanning, 1880, 1881 220 26 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE, The middle class, 1880, 1886 222 27 WILLIAM MORRIS, Gentleman and happy child, 1888 226 28 THOMAS RAYNSFORD LOUNSBURY, Chaucer avoids dull English seriousness, 1891 227 29 WILLIAM PATON KER, The commonplace transformed, 1895 233 30 F.J.SNELL, Chaucer is the most irresponsible of men, 1901 260 31 SIR WALTER RALEIGH, Irony and simple good English, 1905 (1926) 262 32 W.M.HART, Realism, unity and comic poetic justice, 1908 268 33 GEORGE SAINTSBURY, Chaucer’s humour, 1908 280 34 JOHN WILLIAM MACKAIL, Daylight and romance, 1909 285 35 WILLIAM WITHERLE LAWRENCE, To show it as it was, 1911 299 36 GEORGE LYMAN KITTREDGE, A connected human comedy, 1912 305 37 EZRA POUND, Chaucer should be on every man’s shelf, 1914, 1918, 1927, 1934, 329 38 HARRIET MONROE, Chaucer and Langland, 1915 334 39 JOHN S.P.TATLOCK, Chaucer the Laodicean, 1916 337 40 ALDOUS HUXLEY, In love with the inevitably material, 1920 354 41 CAROLINE F.E.SPURGEON, Critics of Chaucer judge themselves not him, 1925 367 42 VIRGINIA WOOLF, The morality of the novel, 1925 377 43 JOHN MATTHEWS MANLY, From art to nature, 1926 384 44 MARIO PRAZ, Chaucer the merchantman, 1927 403 45 THOMAS FREDERICK TOUT, A prudent courtier, 1929 430 46 WILLIAM EMPSON, The ambiguity of Chaucer, 1930 442 47 JOHN LIVINGSTONE LOWES, A powerfully associative memory, 1930 452 48 CLIVE STAPLES LEWIS, What Chaucer really did to ‘Il Filostrato’, 1932 468 49 GILBERT KEITH CHESTERTON, Never a less typical poet, 1933 486 50 THOMAS STEARNS ELIOT, Is Chaucer less serious than Words-worth? 1933 489 51 ALFRED EDWARD HOUSMAN, Sensitive fidelity to nature, 1933 491 52 ROSEMOND TUVE. Chaucer and the seasons, 1933 493 INDEX 499 viii Introduction I The present volume takes up the criticism of Chaucer at the moment when a new accent of ultimately great importance begins to be heard: that of American, more strictly, US, criticism. The first comment is that of Emerson, who immediately strikes a fresh and characteristic note, though there is no sharp break with the preceding tradition. The last comment in this second volume is also by a scholar from the USA. It is taken from the first work of the learned and sympathetic Rosemond Tuve, heralding a new age of professionalism, a new recognition of the intellectual, artistic and social range of Chaucer’s poetry. Her contribution is notably more powerful, and more specialised, than that of her distinguished older contemporaries of that same year, though it maintains something of their gracefulness. The year 1933 was chosen as the terminus ad quem for critical comment because that year seemed to mark the decisive point of change in the balance between the amateur and professional criticism of Chaucer. It marks the point of overlap between the long tradition of the amateur critic— amateur both as lover and as unprofessional—and the beginning of the professional, even scientific criticism in which the concept of the love of an author would too often appear ludicrous. About the early 1930s, too, and doubtless not accidentally, becomes more visible the beginning of the break-up of the long and honourable traditions of Neoclassical and Romantic criticism which were so closely connected with the critic’s status of gentleman-amateur. From the middle 1930s onwards, the professional criticism of Chaucer by salaried academics, not gentlemen (which had of course begun in a small way in the nineteenth century), now dominates. This is not to deny a professional competence, where it is needed, to the 1 2 Introduction great figures in Chaucer criticism whose work fills the latter pages of this volume: but their work retains an air of almost innocent pleasure in and zest for literature, a certain elegance of style, an appeal to the educated ‘common reader’, which, though not entirely lost in more recent years, are hardly marked characteristics of the modern ‘Chaucer industry’. The overlapping of the amateur and the professional in the work that appears in the latter pages of the present volume produced the best criticism we have, which can and should be read not only in historical perspective but for its direct illumination of Chaucer’s quality and its own learning and humanity. It may be remarked, however, that the twentieth-century comments collected here do not often derive from the general periodicals, written for non-specialist readers, which provide the main source of comment in the nineteenth century. The contributions of Huxley, Virginia Woolf, and Praz were indeed published in general literary periodicals, but they are in a minority, and most of the extracts are drawn from specialist journals or similar sources, though they are far less technical in tone, and of much broader appeal, than such writings would normally be today.

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