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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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