illustrated portrait of English poet and author Geoffrey Chaucer

Geoffrey Chaucer

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English Literature

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SOURCE: "English Literature," in The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson: 1833-1836, Vol. I, edited by Stephen E. Whicher and Robert E. Spiller, Harvard University Press, 1959, pp. 205-88.

[Emerson, an influential literary figure and philosopher during the nineteenth century, founded the American Transcendental movement. In the following excerpt from a lecture delivered in 1835, he places Chaucer in the English literary tradition, praising him for his delightful and authentic literary portraits.]

Geoffrey Chaucer in the unanimous opinion of scholars is the earliest classical English writer. He first gave vogue to many Provençal words by using them in his elegant and popular poems, and by far the greater part of his vocabulary is with little alteration in use at this day. He introduced several metres which from his time have been popular forms of poetic composition until ours. Moreover he either is the author or the translator of many images and fables and thoughts which have been the common property of poets ever since; and more or less exist in the common speech of men so that the reader of Chaucer finds little in his page that is wholly new. He is struck everywhere with likeness to familiar verses or tales; for, he is in the armoury of English literature. 'Tis as if he were carried back into the generation before the last, and should see the likeness of all his friends in their grand-fathers….

The poems of Chaucer have great merits of their own. They are the compositions of a man of the world who has much knowledge both of books and of men. They exhibit strong sense, humor, pathos, and a dear love of nature. He is a man of strong and kindly genius possessing all his faculties in that balance and symmetry neither too little nor too much which constitute an individual a sort of Universal Man and fit him to take up into himself without egotism all the wit and character of his age and to stand for his age before posterity. He possesses many of the highest gifts of genius and those too whose value is most intelligible to all men. The milk of human kindness flows always in his veins. The hilarity of good sense joined with the best health and temper never forsakes him. He possesses that clear insight into life which ever and anon perceives under the play of the thousand interests and follies and caprices of man the adamantine framework of Nature on which all the decoration and activity of life is hung.

He possesses the most authentic property of genius, that of sympathy with his subjects so that he describes every object with a delight in the thing itself. It has been observed that it does not argue genius that a man can write well on himself, or on topics connected with his personal relations. It is the capital deduction from Lord Byron that his poems have but one subject: himself. It is the burden of society, that very few men have sufficient strength of mind to speak of any truth or sentiment and hardly even of facts and persons clean of any reference to themselves and their personal history. But the wise man and much more the true Poet quits himself and throws his spirit into whatever he contemplates and enjoys the making it speak that it would say. This power belonged to Chaucer.

With these endowments he writes though often playfully yet always as a sincere man who has an earnest meaning to express and nowise (at least in those poems on which his fame is founded) as an idle and irresponsible rhymer. He acknowledges in House of Fame that he prefers "sentence," that is, sense, to skill of numbers. He would make

But he felt and maintained the dignity of the laurel and restored it in England to its honor.

No one can read Chaucer in his grave compositions without being struck with his consciousness of his poetic duties. He never writes with timidity. He speaks like one who knows the law, and has a right to be heard. He is a philanthropist, a moralist, a reformer. He lashes the vices of the clergy. He wrote a poem of stern counsel to King Richard. He exposes the foibles and tricks of all pretenders in science [and] the professions, and his prophetic wisdom is found on the side of good sense and humanity.

I do not feel that I have closed the enumeration of the gifts of Chaucer until it is added as a cause of his permanent fame in spite of the obsoleteness of his style (now 500 years old) that his virtues and genius are singularly agreeable to the English mind; that in him they find their prominent tastes and prejudices. He has the English sincerity and homeliness and humor, and his Canterbury Tales are invaluable as a picture of the domestic manners of the fourteenth century. Shakespeare and Milton are not more intrinsically national poets than is Chaucer. He has therefore contributed not a little to deepen and fix in the character of his countrymen those habits and sentiments which inspired his early song.

The humor with which the English race is so deeply tinged, which constitutes the genius of so many of their writers, as, of the author of Hudibras, Smollett, Fielding, Swift, and Sterne, and which the English maintain to be inseparable from genius, effervesces in every page of Chaucer. The prologue to the Canterbury Tales is full of it. A pleasing specimen of it is the alarm in the farmyard in the 'Fable of the Cock and the Fox."

[A historical feature in the English race is] the respect for women, for want of which trait the ancient Greeks and Romans as well as the Oriental nations in all ages have never attained the highest point of Civilization. A severe morality is essential to high civilization and to the moral education of man it needs that the relation between the sexes should be established on a purely virtuous footing. It is the consequence of the unnatural condition of woman in the East that even life to a woman is reckoned a calamity. "When a daughter is born," says the Chinese Sheking, "she creeps on the ground: she is clothed with a wrapper: she plays with a tile: she is incapable of evil or of good." Our venerable English bard fully shared this generous attribute of his nation. I suppose nothing will mr than his thorough acquaintance with the female character. He does indeed know its weakness and its vice and has not shunned to show them. I am sorry for it. Well he had observed all those traits that in rarely endowed women command a veneration scarcely to be distinguished from worship. The whole mystery of humility, of love, of purity, and of faith, in woman, and how they make a woman unearthly and divine, he well knew, and has painted better than any other in Griselda and Blanche. The story of Griselda in the Canterbury Tales, is, I suppose the most pathetic poem in the language. And the Book of the Duchess, though the introduction be long and tedious, seems to me a beautiful portraiture of true love. All the sentiment is manly, honorable, and tender. I admire the description of Blanche who knew so well how to live

That dulness was of her adrad
She n'as too sober nor too glad
In all thinges more measure
Had never I trowe creature:

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