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By Root 2886 0

Boccaccio and Petrarch, to each of whom, but especially the second, he was indebted. Even when not abroad he kept in touch with the Continent by virtue of his splendid job as controller of the customs on wool, hides and skins at the port of London. A series of major poems followed, with Boccaccio as his model and supplier of ideas. But Chaucer was entirely his own man and very much an Englishman. Indeed, he was an important Englishman, becoming clerk of the King’s Works and thus in charge of the fabric of the Tower of London, Westminster Palace and eight other royal houses, as well as being justice of the peace and MP for Kent. He thus fitted into the developing Renaissance pattern of the courtly man of affairs who practiced the art of poetry.

He also shared the Renaissance fascination with the individual human being, as opposed to the archetype or mere category. The individual dominates his masterpiece, The Canterbury Tales, which he wrote between 1386, when he went into semiretirement in Kent, and his death in 1400. The work has no precise model, for Chaucer had not read The Decameron, and the framework of a Canterbury pilgrimage to the famous shrine of St. Thomas à Becket, with each of a brilliantly varied company telling a tale, is entirely Chaucer’s. More important is the vivid directness with which Chaucer brings out character, both in describing his pilgrims and within the tales they tell. It is the literary equivalent of the formulation of the laws of perspective and foreshortening by the artists of Florence. These men and women jump out from the pages, and live on in the memory, in ways that not even Dante could contrive. There is genius here of an inexplicable kind: Chaucer is one of the four English writers—the other three being Shakespeare, Dickens and Kipling—whose extraordinary ability to peer into the minds of diverse human creatures defies rational explanation and can only be attributed to a mysterious daemon. It is odd that English literature should have suddenly exploded with such a magician.

But then, that is the nature of culture. We can give all kinds of satisfying explanations of why and when the Renaissance occurred and how it transmitted itself. But there is no explaining Dante, no explaining Chaucer. Genius suddenly comes to life, and speaks out of a vacuum. Then it is silent, equally mysteriously. The trends continue and intensify, but genius is lacking. Chaucer had no successor of anything approaching similar stature. There is no major poet in fifteenthcentury English literature. But the page is not blank. Quite the contrary: there was much solid progress in creating the infrastructure of scholarship and letters. Henry V, greatest of the Plantagenet monarchs and conqueror of France, died young in 1422. His son, Henry VI, was one year old, and the regency fell to his uncle, Humphrey, duke of Gloucester. Duke Humphrey was a poor ruler, and thus began the weakness and misjudgments that led to the loss of France and the Wars of the Roses. But he was the first English patron of Renaissance learning. He collected the Greek and Latin classics, including most of Aristotle and Plato, in fine manuscripts and beautifully illustrated editions of modern masters, including Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio. He bequeathed them all to Oxford University, where they became the nucleus of the future Bodleian Library—indeed, “Duke Humphrey” is still the physical and antiquarian core of the entire institution. In Chaucer’s time, William of Wykeham, bishop of Winchester, had begun the process of translating England’s newfound wealth, based mainly on wool, into scholarly stones, with his twin foundations of Winchester College and New College, Oxford. Henry VI, a hopeless king but a pious and generous man, continued it with Eton College and King’s College, Cambridge. Other colleges followed in stately procession, including All Souls at Oxford, which was to become the English equivalent of the Collège de France, and St. John’s, Cambridge, which from the start specialized in studies dear to Renaissance man.

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