Chaucer Geoffrey - Geoffrey Chaucer

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 Chaucers 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 criticamateur both as lover and as unprofessionaland 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 critics 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 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 Chaucers 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.

In the development from amateur to professional we see some of the paradoxes of twentieth-century culture. The more professional criticism at its best may be, because more specialised, more learned and penetrating, less simply a reflection of current predispositions. Furthermore, the great increase of education and the now fully accepted study of vernacular literature as a university discipline and a desirable educational tool in schools, have ensured that a higher proportion of the population of Great Britain has at least had a brush with Chaucer at school, and have made professional criticism possible by providing jobs. On the other hand, the prestige and quality of general literary culture have declined in society as a whole relative to other interests, notably science and sport, while modern literary culture itself appears to be going through a phase of hostility to traditional virtues and to intellect.

Strangely enough, a recognition of the specialised and thus fragmented culture of the latter part of the twentieth century may bring us a clearer understanding of some characteristics of Chaucers literary culture, fragmented in a different way, than could the heroic attempt of Neoclassicism and Romanticism to establish at least a secondary, unified, Nature of sweetness and light; but that is a story beyond the scope of this volume. Its complex development is only just beginning to show in the work of Empson, Lewis and others in the early 1930s. In general, the comments collected together in the present volume, from 1837 to 1933, are essentially those of the nineteenth century. They deploy the legacy of Neoclassical criticism with its Romantic extensions, qualifications and compensations, not fundamentally changing that inheritance, but, so to say, spending it. It seems now finished, and has given excellent value. The volume of criticism in that hundred years is roughly equal to that of the preceding nearly five hundred, though of course each volume is the product of selection. A similarly proportional selection from the last fifty years would no doubt equal or exceed the quantity of all the previous centuries criticism put together.