Their tint, reflection, flame, their tuft, their pearl, – Begs for a ruddy glow to pierce the dark,- which thro' my throat climbs to the blue, Is such a call from everything that feels Neglected in a dim and murky void, Deprived of sunlight for some unknown crime, A cry of cold, of fear, of weariness From everything made helpless by the Night The rose that shivers in the dark, alone; The grain, longing to dry its wetness for the mill; From mud that wants to dry itself to earth 'Tis such a grand appeal from all the land, Aching to feel its wheat or barley grow; From flowering trees desirous of more flowers; From grapes that long to tinge their green with brown; From trembling bridge that wants a passenger And wants the shadows of the birds and twigs Softly to dance once more upon its planks; From all that fain would sing, quit mourning, live, Do service, be a threshold, be a bank, A good warm bench, a stone rejoiced to heat A leaning hand or little prowling ant In short, a universal call for day PHEASANT (His words are madness!) — Thou dost make the dawn? CHANTICLEER Which opens flowers and eyes, windows and souls! That is the truth. My voice evokes the day. A murky sunrise means my song was bad. The severest test of Chanticleer's constancy is reserved for the end of the play. The Hen Pheasant, jealous of her lover's devotion to the sun, tries to rid him of his illusion. Hiding the east from him at dawn, she distracts his attention until daybreak; then, showing him the light, she tauntingly cries : "Thou seest the sun can rise without thy help!" But in the face of evidence the Cock, after a moment of despair, renews his faith. Even tho' his individual ministry be not indispensable as he had thought, he is still a collaborator in some vast, mysterious mission destined to produce, in the vague future, greater good than he had ever before conceived. CHANTICLEER The herald I of a remoter sun! My cries, piercing Night's veil, inflict on her But if I crow, precise and loud, and if, Long after me, in years to come, a Cock PHEASANT But when? CHANTICLEER Some day! WHAT IS CHAUCER'S HOUS OF FAME? JOHN M. MANLY One of the strangest facts in literary criticism is that, after more than forty years of intense and occasionally even feverish activity on the part of students of Chaucer, the question heading this article is still a legitimate question. If the poem were a brief and much-mutilated fragment containing part of a single episode, the present state of criticism would be intelligible and excusable. But of this poem we have nearly all that was written or planned by the author. Though incomplete, the extant copy contains 2158 lines, and it obviously can never have been intended to contain much more, for at the beginning of the third book the author distinctly speaks of that book as the last.1 A disproportionate treatment of certain features doubtless prolonged this book beyond the author's original plan (it now contains 1068 lines); but the incidents and episodes of his plan were obviously such in character and number that at the beginning of this third book, he thought of them as forming a single division of his poem. We have, therefore, in the extant version nearly all that he intended to write. Moreover, we have, as an indication of the meaning of the poem, the title given by the author himself. And we have, in the words of the eagle to the author, a positive and definite statement not only of the main features of the narrative as far as it is preserved to us, but also of the principal incident of the unwritten portion. Why, then, are not the purpose and meaning of the poem clear and well recognized? Several reasons may be suggested. In the first place, much of the study devoted to this poem has been concerned, not with the interpretation of the author's meaning, but with the discovery of the sources of his materials. What suggested the temple? and the figures on the walls? and the treeless desert? Did the eagle come from Ovid, or from Dante, or from folklore? Whence came the ice-capped mountain and the revolving house? Correct answers to these questions would be interesting; if rightly used, they might be important; but they could hardly, in any event, contribute largely to the interpretation of the poem, for an author's meaning depends, not upon where he got his materials, but upon what use he makes of them. 1 This litel laste book (iii, 3). 2 We may be quite sure that there was to be no long account of the journey back to earth, as some suppose. This would certainly, in Chaucer's plan, have called for another book. Another obscuring cause was furnished centuries ago by an inarticulate and unintelligible line of John Lydgate's. The line is the second in the following stanza of The Falls of Princes: He wrote also full many a day agone Dant in English, him-selfe doth so expresse, The pitous story of Ceix and Alcion: And the death also of Blaunche the duches: And notably [he] did his businesse By great auise his wittes to dispose, To translate the Romaynt of the Rose.1 We have no evidence that Lydgate had any information about Chaucer except what he derived from his writings, and we know that he was not an Italian scholar, but Skeat thought that he must have meant the Hous of Fame, and Rambeau attempted to show that that poem was in fact written as a counterpart to the Divina Commedia. Despite slight superficial resemblances of form and numerous insignificant reminiscences of Dante's great and serious poem in this light-hearted jeu d'esprit, Rambeau's theory is now generally discredited, though traces of its influence are discernible in some of the latest discussions of the poem. Less specific than Rambeau's theory, but no less obstructive to the proper understanding of the poem, has been the general tendency to interpret it allegorically and to assign to it an important autobiographical significance. The details of this, as displayed by Sandras, ten Brink, Rambeau, Willert, Garrett, Snell, Brandl, and Koch, are too well known to need recital, and the latest expressions of this view, that by Brandl2 and that by Koch,3 have been discussed and refuted by Imelmann. But Imelmann himself is unable to get entirely away from the allegorical interpretation. That students of Chaucer should persist in interpreting him allegorically is strange. As a matter of fact, his work is singularly free from allegory in the strict sense of the term. The mere presence of nonhuman actors, whether animal, or mythological, or even personified abstractions, does not create allegory; for this there must be symbolism of action or of character. To be sure, the term "allegory" is used loosely to describe compositions in which there is no symbolism; but confusion of critical thinking is likely to arise from this abuse of the term. The Roman de la Rose, Everyman, Hawes's Pastime of Pleasure, Spenser's Faerie Queene, Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, are properly called allegories, because in them the author presents the action symbolically, that is, by means of an entirely different sort of action. But a debate between two girls concerning their lovers is not allegory, even if birds take sides and 1 Quoted from Skeat, Works of G. Chaucer, I, 23. 2 Sitzungsber. d. kgl. preuss. Akad., philos.-hist. Classe, 1908, XXXV, 732 f. & Englische Studien, XLI, 113–121. 4 Englische Studien, XLV, 397–431. |