Table of Contents
Chaucer's Contribution to English Language and Literature
Father of verse! who immortal
song
First taught the Muse to speak
the English tongue
Chaucer was in many respects a
pioneer, the first realist, the first humorist, the first narrative artist the
first great character-painter, and the first great metrical artist in English
literature. Further, he has been credited not only with the "fatherhood"
of English poetry but has also been hailed as the father of English drama
before the drama was born, and the father of English novels before the novel was
born. He is not only the first English poet but a great poet in his own
right.
Contribution to Language
Chaucer found his English a
dialect and left it a language. Chaucer found the English language brick and
left it marble. When he started his literary career, English speech, and
still less, the English of writing was confusingly fluid and unsettled. The
English language was divided into a number of dialects which were employed in
different parts of the country.
The four of them vastly more
prominent than the others were: The Southern, The Midland, The Northern or
Northumbrian and The Kentish. Out of these four, the Midland dialect, which was
spoken in London and its surrounding area, was the simplest in grammar and
syntax.
Moreover, it was the one
patronised by the aristocratic and literary circles of the country. Chaucer
employed in his work the East Midland dialect, and by casting the enormous
weight of his genius balance decided once and for all which dialect was going to be
the standard literary language of the whole of the country for all times to
come.
It is certain that if Chaucer had
adopted some other dialect the emergence of the standard language of literature
would have been considerably delayed. All the great writers of England
succeeding Chaucer are masters of the language of which Chaucer is, before
them, the great master.
Not only was Chaucer's selection
of one dialect out of the four a happy one, but so was his selection of one of
the three languages which were reigning supreme in England at that time-Latin,
French, and English. In fact, Latin and French were more fashionable than the poor
"vernacular" English. Latin was considered "the universal
language" and was patronised at the expense of English by the Church as
well as the learned.
French was the language of the court and was used for keeping the accounts of the royal household till as late as 1365. Chaucer chose English which was a despised language, and as the legendary king did to the beggar maid, raised her from the dust, draped her in royal robes, and conducted her coronation. That queen is ruling even now.
Contribution to Versification
Chaucer's contribution to English
versification is no less striking than to the English language. He sounded the death knell of the Saxon alliterative measure and firmly established the modern
one. Chaucer may be designated as the father of modern English versification.
In The Canterbury Tales, he mostly uses lines of ten syllables each (with
generally five accents), and the lines run into couplets; that is, each couple
of lines has its end-syllables rhyming with each other.
For example:
His eyes twinkled in his heed aright,
As doon the sterres in the frosty
night.
Not only this, Chaucer seems to be the first Englishman who realised and brought out the latent music of his language. "To read Chaucer's verse is like listening to a clear stream, in a meadow full of sunshine, rippling over its bed of pebbles." The following is the tribute of a worthy successor of his:
The morning star of song, who made
His music heard below,
Don Chaucer, the first warbler, whose sweet breath
Preluded those melodious bursts that",
The spacious times of great Elizabeth
With sounds that echo still
He made English a pliant and
vigorous medium of poetic utterance. His astonishingly easy mastery of the
language is indeed remarkable. With one step the writings of Chaucer carry us
into a new era in which the language appears endowed with ease, dignity, and
copiousness of expression and clothed in the hues of the imagination.
The Content of Poetry
Chaucer was a pioneer in the poetic field also. Not only the form of poetry, but its content, too, is highly indebted to him. He not only gave English poetry a new dress but also a new body and a new soul. His major contribution towards the content of poetry is in his strict adherence to realism. His Prologue to the Canterbury Tales embodies a new effort in the history of literature, as it strictly deals with real men, manners, and life.
The Prologue holds a mirror to the life of Chaucer's age and shows its manners and morals completely. He effectively replaces the shadowy delineations of the old romantic and allegorical school with vivid and pulsating pictures of contemporary life. Chaucer does not forget the universal beneath the particular, the dateless beneath the dated. The portraits of the pilgrims in the Prologue constitute not only an epitome of the society of fourteenth-century England but the epitome of human nature in all climes and all ages. They are all with us today, though some of them have changed their names. The knight now commands a line regiment, the squire is in the guards, the shipman was a rum runner while prohibition lasted and is active now in the black market and so on.
His Geniality, Tolerance, Humour, and Freshness
Chaucer's tone as a poet is wonderfully instinctive with geniality, tolerance, humour, and freshness. In spite of his awareness of the corruption and unrest in the society of his age, Chaucer is never upset or upsetting. No one can read Chaucer without feeling that it is good to be alive in this world however imperfect may it be in numerous respects. He is a chronic optimist. He is never harsh, rancorous, bitter, or indignant, and never falls out with his fellow men for their failings. The great English humorists like Shakespeare and Fielding share with Chaucer the same broad human sympathy that he first introduced into literature.
Contribution to the Novel
The novel is one of the latest
courses in the banquet of English literature. But in his narrative skill, his
gift of vivid characterization, his aptitude for plot construction and his
inventive skill Chaucer appear as a worthy precursor of the race of novelists
who come centuries afterwards. His Tales are replete with intense human
interest, and though he borrows his materials from numerous sundry sources, his
narrative skill is all his own. His narration is lively and direct if we make an exception for the numerous digressions and philosophical and
pseudo-philosophical animadversions having little to do with the tales proper,
introduced after the contemporary fashion.
It is difficult to find him flagging or growing dull and monotonous. Chaucer's Prologue to The Canterbury Tales has been rightly called "the prologue to modern fiction." It has characters if not plot, and vivid characterization is one of the primary jobs of a novelist. According to Meredith "A novel should be a summary of actual life." So is, indeed, the Prologue. Several of the tales, too, are novels in miniature and hold the attention of the reader from the beginning to the end.
Contribution to the Drama
Chaucer wrote at a time when
secular drama had not been born. His works have some dramatic elements which
are altogether missing in the poetry before him. His mode of characterisation
in the Prologue to The Canterbury Tales is, no doubt, static or descriptive,
but in the tales proper it is dynamic or dramatic.
There the characters reveal themselves, without the intervention of the author, through what they say and what they do. Even the tales they narrate, in most cases, are in keeping with their respective characters, avocations, temperaments, etc. If the drama had been known in Chaucer's time as a branch of living literature, he might have attained as high an excellence in comedy as any English or Continental writer.
We can conclude the discussion with the words of David Daiches, ‘With Chaucer the English language and English literature grew at a bound to full maturity. No other Middle English writer has his skill, his range, his complexity, his large humane outlook. His followers lack both his technical brilliance and his breadth of vision, leaving him the one undisputed master in Medieval English Literature.
Well said:
The morning star of song who made,
His music heard below,
Don Chaucer, the first warbler, whose sweet breath,
Preluded those melodious bursts that fill,
The spacious times of Great Elizabeth,
With sounds that echo still
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