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Rhetorical Balance in Chaucer's Poetry
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 December 2021
Extract
Modern criticism has renounced the notion that Chaucer is naïf, whether as man or poet. It has not, however, been so ready to acknowledge him, especially in respect to style, a fully conscious artist. “Splendour and artifice of style,” says Legouis, “whether the latter be personal or conventional, were unknown to Chaucer,—the wiles of rhetoric are absent.” Splendour of style, I agree, is rare in Chaucer, but not artifice. It is the object of this paper to point out that certain “wiles of rhetoric,” conventional and personal, were familiar to Chaucer. The particular artifice of balance, indeed, appears in Chaucer's poetry to such an extent and is used with such increasing effect that I am obliged to dissent from the statement of a second modern critic that Chaucer's sentences are “free from any studied balance or antithesis.”
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References
* The present study began as an investigation of certain rhetorical usages in Chaucer's poetry with a view to their possible bearing on the history of the ten-syllable closed couplet in English poetry. Of the investigation of “classic” devices in the poetry of Chaucer and of any definite connection between Chaucer's closed couplet and the elegiac distich, time has permitted only the first step, a study of the device of balance in Chaucer's poetry.
1 G. L. Kittredge, Chaucer and his Poetry, 1925, p. 45.
2 Emile Legouis, Geoffrey Chaucer, N. Y., 1913, p. 191.
3 R. K. Root, The Poetry of Chaucer, Boston, 1922, p. 41.
4 Preface prefixed to the Fables, Dryden's Works ed. Scott and Saintsbury, Edinburgh, 1885, XI, 232.
5 E. G. Sandras, Étude sur Chaucer, Paris, 1859, pp. 289–294; Skeat, Oxf. Chaucer, I, 464–494; G. L. Kittredge, “Chaucer and Froissart,” Eng. Stud., XXVI, 321–36, “Guillaume de Machaut and the Book of the Duchesse,” PMLA, 30:1–24; J. L. Lowes, “The Prologue to the L. G. W. as related to the French Marguerite Poems and the Filostrato,” PMLA, XIX, 593–638, cf. also PMLA, XX, 749 ff.
6 ιEuvres de Guillaume de Machaut, Paris, 1921, vol. III. In the 2848 lines of the “Dit de la Fontaine Amoureuse” the writer has found thirty passages characterized by balance of the aesthetic type. Examples are:
Mais plusieurs sont, c'est chose voire,
Qu'on doit bien servir et mau croire;
Servir, pour faire son devoir,
Croire, qu'il veulent décevoir (vv. 185–88)
and
Sans toy biens ne me puet venir;
Sans toy ne me puis resjolr;
Faire me pues vivre et morir
Et avoir joie (vv. 2236–38).
7 ιEuvres, Vol. II. Repetition of the same word at the beginning of successive lines is marked in the Dit du Lyon. More than a dozen passages in its 2000 lines use this device; between lines 551 and 581, forinstance, fifteen begin with “Comment.”
8 Eustache Deschamps, ιEuvres Completes, II, 208–209. Similar passages are frequent in Deschamps. In Balade CXLVII, six of the ten lines of one stanza begin with “Par.” In CXLEX, also in ten line stanzas, the first stanza has five lines beginning with “Par”; the second, six. In Balade CXCLX., after four lines contrasting “l'un” with “l'autre,” we find
L'un a son estât s'attant,
Le fort au foible se dresse,
Le pere contre l'enfant,
Le maisné a la mainnesse,
the passage closing with
Ly uns rit, ly autres pleure.
9 ιEuvres de Froissart, ed. Scheler, Bruxelles, 1870, I, 3–48. Additional passages from the Parady s d'A mour are:
Quel chose a sage dame à faire
De fol homme qui son afaire
Descuevre et monstre çà et là?
Dame d'onnour onquest n'ama
Fol homme en outrecuiderie (vv. 763–7).
Se tu me crois, tu es garis;
Se tu en fauls, tu es peris (vv. 799–800).
Se je fai bien, si m'en payés,
Se je fai mal, si m'assayés (vv. 1591–2).
10 PMLA, XXX: 11; Skeat, Oxf. Ch., I, 479.
11 PMLA, XXX:9.
12 Mod. Phil. VII: 466.
13 PMLA, XXX: 11.
14 Skeat, I, 59–60.
15 For the French text see Skeat, I, 261–71.
16 Skeat, V, 403.
17 Rossetti, pp. 15–16; Skeat, II, 464.
18 Ephes. IV, 5–6; cf. Skeat, V, 408.
19 Rom. XIII, 12, cf. Skeat, V, 412.
20 Alfons Kissner says of Il Filoslrato, “Hier is der Style gemessen, uberall gleichmassig elegant, glatt und gefeilt” (Chaucer in seinen Beziehungen zur italienischen Literatur, Bonn, 1867, p. 54).
21 Twenty-one passages have been traced to Ovid.
22 H. of F. v. 712.
23 L. G. W. v. 1721. See also John Koch, “Chaucer's Belesenheit in den romischen Klassikern,” Eng. Stud., LVII, 83 ff. T. R. Lounsbury, Studies in Chaucer, vol. II
24 Th. Zielniski, Philologus, LXIV (1905), 16.
25 Domenico Comparetti, Vergil in the Middle Ages, Lond. 1895, p. 35, n. 5: “The best instance of the care devoted by these poets (of the Augustan age) to the study of rhetoric is furnished by the Heroides of Ovid.”
26 To the writer's surprise, no study of the rhetorical devices of antithesis and parallelism in Ovid's work has been found. An exhaustive study of the whole matter of Ovid's influence on English poetry remains to be made.
27 Skeat, Oxf. Ch., III, xxxviii.
28 It is interesting to note, incidentally, that a similar substitution occurs in Douglas' translation of the Aeneid (Works of Gavin Douglas, ed. John Small, 1874, vol. II.):
“This was the foremast day of hir glaidnes,
And first morow of hir wofull distres.“
The Fourt Book of Eneados, vv. 31–32
Douglas uses the same phraseology in the heading to this section:
“Qu hou that the Quene to hunteyn raid at morow,
And the first day of hyr joy and sorrow.“
29 In the balanced passages assembled by the writer from Chaucer's poetry, parallelism alone occurs in 151 passages, antithesis alone in 276; parallelism with antithesis in 120.
30 James Reniy, Aeneidea, Dublin, 1889, II, 745–751.
31 T. and C., III, 1744–8.
32 Cf. Skeat, Oxf. Ch., I, 508. See for same idea, The Compleynt unto Pite, 99–100, and Compleynt to his Lady, 47–49.
33 C. T. Prol., A741–2; Mane. T., H 207–8.
34 Tatlock, Devel. and Chronol. of Chaucer's Works, p. 202.
35 Skeat, Oxf. Ch., V, 295; Koeppel, Archiv, 84:414 (1890), n. 2; Migne, Patrol Lat., XXIII, col. 229.
36 Skeat (Oxf. Ch. V, 298) says Chaucer was probably thinking of a passage in Theophrastus referring, however, to the accomplishments of the wooers rather than of the women wooed.
Alius forma, alius ingenio, alius facetus, alius
liberalitate sollicitât (Migne, Patrol. Lat., XXIII, col. 277).
Lowes (Mod. Phil. VIII, 313) thinks that Chaucer's “shift in emphasis from the means by which the lady's virtue is assailed to the reasons why she is desired” is due to Deschamps' lines (Le Miroir de Mariage, ιEuvres completes LX, 56):
Ly uns des chapeaulx ly defait,
L'autre robes, l'autre joyaulx,
L'un fait joustes, festes, cembeaux
Pour son amour, pour son gent corps;
L'autre lui envoie dehors
Chancons, lettres, et rondelez,
Et dit que de sens n'a pareille,
S'est de beauté la nonpareille.
37 De Civitate Dei, Bk. XI Chap. XVIII; Tr. John Healey, Edinburgh, 1909. I, 327.
38 Lounsbury, Studies in Chaucer, II, 297.
39 E. K. Rand, Ovid and his Influence, pp. 126–7.
40 Fansler, p. 149.
41 Skeat, Oxf. Ch. III, 397. Cf. Originals and Analogues, Chauc. Soc, pp. 85 ff.
42 Fabliaux and Contes des Poètes Francois des XI–XV Siecles, Meon, Paris, 1808, III, 238 ff.
43 Cf. Skeat II, 466 and V, 206, who suggests resemblance to “Ofte rap reweþ?” (Proverbs of Hendyng, v. 256).
44 Skeat compares “Ase fele þedes ase fele þewes” (Proverbs of Hendyng, v, 29).
45 William Caxton, Prohemye to the Second Ed. of Canterbury Tales, as reprinted by Greg, PMLA, XXXLX, 739.