although, as Professor Ker has pointed out, this method is open to some objections, it brings out certain critical points of interest and is worth adhering to for the sake of clearness.

French, as we have seen, had long been the dominant influence in English literature. To French erotic poetry we owe the elaborate code of duties owed by husband to wife and lover to mistress, and the whole artificial convention which prescribed unhappy love affairs and revelled in the minute analysis of over-strained emotion. “In poetry and life,” says Ten Brink, “fashion required an educated young man, especially one in the service of the court, to fall in love at the earliest opportunity, and, if possible, hopelessly.” We have already seen Chaucer obeying this convention in the Book of the Duchesse and the Parlement of Foules, and to these may be added the Compleinte unto Pitè, the Compleint to his Lady, Merciles Beaute, To Rosemounde, Against Women Unconstant, An Amorous Compleint, and Book I, stanza 3 of Troilus and Criseyde. The poet protests so much that it is difficult to believe that he is describing anything more than a lover bewailing his unhappy lot (in the French fashion). Evidently French love-poetry appealed strongly to his imagination, for one of his earliest works is a translation of the famous Romance of the Rose. This long, allegorical poem (the original consists of over 22,000 lines), falls into two parts. The first, by Guillaume de Lorris, describes the search of the ideal lover for the mystic rose. The hero is admitted by the portress Idleness into a fair garden of flowers, where he finds Sir Mirth, Lady Courtesy, Dame Gladness, and many another gallant and debonair knight and lady. In this garden is the enchanted Well of Love, in whose depths the lover beholds the image of the Rose. He tries to seize it, and finds that a hard struggle lies before him ere he can hope to win the prize of love. Lorris left the poem unfinished, and the second part was added by Jean le Meung, a cynic with no very high opinion of women or of love. He introduces a sceptical friend who has a long conversation with the lover in which he points out with extreme clearness the drawbacks of marriage and the frailties of women.

The English version of the poem consists of three fragments, A, B, and C (it is only 7,696 lines in all), and scholars are divided in opinion as to how much of the translation is actually by Chaucer himself. Professor Saintsbury, in the Cambridge History of Literature considers that Chaucer is probably the author of A, possibly the author of B, and probably not the author of C. He must, however, have been known as the translator of the later part, for in the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women (written about 1385), the god of love scolds the poet severely on the ground,—

Thou hast translated the Romauns of the Rose
That is an hereyse ageyns my lawe.

Another early work is the A.B.C., a hymn in honour of the Virgin, modelled upon a similar poem by Guillaume de Deguileville. Deguileville was well known as a devotional writer at the time, and according to Speght Chaucer’s paraphrase was written “at the request of Blanch Duchesse of Lancaster, as a praier for her priuat vse, being a woman in her religion very deuout.” There is, however, no evidence of this, and Ten Brink believes that the A.B.C. dates from a later period when the poet was passing through a phase of deep religious feeling. Whatever the facts about this particular poem may be, it is interesting to notice that even in these early days Chaucer combined some of the qualities of a satirist with those of an idealist.

His first great original work was produced in 1369, when John of Gaunt’s beautiful and charming young wife died. The Book of the Duchesse makes no pretence to originality of treatment. The poet, after a conventional lament over the conventional hard-heartedness of his mistress, falls into a conventional slumber in the course of which he has a conventional dream that he is following a conventional hunt in a conventional forest. Here he meets a handsome young man

Of the age of four and twenty yeer
·····
And he was clothed al in blakke.

The young man is complaining to himself most piteously:—

Hit was gret wonder that nature
Might suffre(n) any creature
To have swich sorwe and be not deed.

The poet is touched by his sorrow, and since they have evidently lost the hunt, he begs the mourner to tell him of “his sorwes smerte.” This opens the way for a long, rambling lament, full of allusions to classical mythology. So involved is it, that the poet finds some difficulty in grasping the point, and cuts into a description of the lady’s charms with a puzzled,—

Sir ... wher is she now?

The brief answer—

I have lost more than thou wenest
·····
She is deed—

strikes a note of tragedy which is beyond the scope of the youthful poet as yet, and the elegy ends abruptly with

Is that your los? by god hit is routhe.[37]

The scheme of the poem is simple, the idea is borrowed from French laments, and whole passages are translated from de Machault’s Le Dit de la Fontaine Amoureuse and Remède de la Fortune, but through all the stiffness and conventionality, all the obvious immaturity, there flash unmistakable signs of vigorous and original genius. Every poet of the day finds himself wandering in a forest, but Chaucer alone meets

A whelp that fauned me as I stood,
That hadde y-followed, and coude no good,
Hit com and creep to me as lowe,
Right as hit hadde me y-knowe,
Hild doun his heed and joyned his eres
And leyde al smothe doun his heres;

or notices with tender amusement the

many squirelles, that sete
Ful hye upon the trees, and ete,
And in hir maner made festes.

The praises of many fair ladies were sung by troubadour and minstrel, but it would be hard to find another heroine possessed of the gaiety and vigour and charm of Blanche:—

I saw hir daunce so comlily
Carole and singe so swetely,
Laughe and pleye so womanly,
And loke so debonairly,
So goodly speke and so frendly,
That certes I trow that evermore
Nas seyn so blisful a tresore
·····
Therewith hir liste so wel to live,
That dulnesse was of hir a-drad.

Already Chaucer shows that truth to life, that impatience of artificiality which are to become two of his most striking characteristics.

A number of experiments in verse follow. Chaucer had a habit of rough-casting a poem, then leaving it for some time, and eventually using it in a more or less modified form in some later work. The story of Ceys and Alcioun, which forms part of the introduction to the Book of the