Chaucer | Page 4

CHAUCER.
CHAPTER 1.
CHAUCER'S TIMES.
The biography of Geoffrey Chaucer is no longer a mixture of unsifted
facts, and of more or less hazardous conjectures. Many and wide as are
the gaps in our knowledge concerning the course of his outer life, and
doubtful as many important passages of it remain--in vexatious contrast
with the certainty of other relatively insignificant data--we have at least
become aware of the foundations on which alone a trustworthy account
of it can be built. These foundations consist partly of a meagre though
gradually increasing array of external evidence, chiefly to be found in
public documents,--in the Royal Wardrobe Book, the Issue Rolls of the
Exchequer, the Customs Rolls, and suchlike records--partly of the
conclusions which may be drawn with confidence from the internal
evidence of the poet's own indisputably genuine works, together with a
few references to him in the writings of his contemporaries or
immediate successors. Which of his works are to be accepted as
genuine, necessarily forms the subject of an antecedent enquiry, such as
cannot with any degree of safety be conducted except on principles far
from infallible with regard to all the instances to which they have been
applied, but now accepted by the large majority of competent scholars.
Thus, by a process which is in truth dulness and dryness itself except to
patient endeavour stimulated by the enthusiasm of special literary
research, a limited number of results has been safely established, and
others have at all events been placed beyond reasonable doubt. Around
a third series of conclusions or conjectures the tempest of controversy
still rages; and even now it needs a wary step to pass without fruitless
deviations through a maze of assumptions consecrated by their
longevity, or commended to sympathy by the fervour of personal

conviction.
A single instance must suffice to indicate both the difficulty and the
significance of many of those questions of Chaucerian biography which,
whether interesting or not in themselves, have to be determined before
Chaucer's life can be written. They are not "all and some" mere
antiquarians' puzzles, of interest only to those who have leisure and
inclination for microscopic enquiries. So with the point immediately in
view. It has been said with much force that Tyrwhitt, whose services to
the study of Chaucer remain uneclipsed by those of any other scholar,
would have composed a quite different biography of the poet, had he
not been confounded by the formerly (and here and there still) accepted
date of Chaucer's birth, the year 1328. For the correctness of this date
Tyrwhitt "supposed" the poet's tombstone in Westminster Abbey to be
the voucher; but the slab placed on a pillar near his grave (it is said at
the desire of Caxton), appears to have merely borne a Latin inscription
without any dates; and the marble monument erected in its stead "in the
name of the Muses" by Nicolas Brigham in 1556, while giving October
25th, 1400, as the day of Chaucer's death, makes no mention either of
the date of his birth or of the number of years to which he attained, and,
indeed, promises no more information than it gives. That Chaucer's
contemporary, the poet Gower, should have referred to him in the year
1392 as "now in his days old," is at best a very vague sort of testimony,
more especially as it is by mere conjecture that the year of Gower's
own birth is placed as far back as 1320. Still less weight can be
attached to the circumstance that another poet, Occleve, who clearly
regarded himself as the disciple of one by many years his senior, in
accordance with the common phraseology of his (and, indeed, of other)
times, spoke of the older writer as his "father" and "father reverent." In
a coloured portrait carefully painted from memory by Occleve on the
margin of a manuscript, Chaucer is represented with grey hair and
beard; but this could not of itself be taken to contradict the supposition
that he died about the age of sixty. And Leland's assertion that Chaucer
attained to old age self- evidently rests on tradition only; for Leland
was born more than a century after Chaucer died. Nothing occurring in
any of Chaucer's own works of undisputed genuineness throws any real
light on the subject. His poem, the "House of Fame," has been

variously dated; but at any period of his manhood he might have said,
as he says there, that he was "too old" to learn astronomy, and preferred
to take his science on faith. In the curious lines called "L'Envoy de
Chaucer a Scogan," the poet, while blaming his friend for his want of
perseverance in a love-suit, classes himself among "them that be hoar
and round of shape," and speaks of himself and his Muse as