XIX.—The Prologue to the Legend of Good Women as Related to the French Marguerite Poems, and the Filostrato

John L. Lowes

doi:10.2307/456512

XIX.—The Prologue to the Legend of Good Women as Related to the French Marguerite Poems, and the Filostrato

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020

John L. Lowes

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In 1775 Tyrwhitt, speaking of the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women, suggested that “it is possible that le dit de la fleur de lis et de la Marguerite by Guillaume de Machaut … and the Dittié de la flour de la Margherite by Froissart … might furnish us with the true key to those mystical compliments, which our poet has paid to the Daysie-flower.” This suggestion of Tyrwhitt has been echoed and reëchoed by succeeding editors and commentators, but has never been seriously put to the test. Godwin, in his Life of Chaucer, called attention to the story told in Froissart's Dittié, of the birth of the daisy from the tears shed by Herés on the grave of Cepheï, but did not connect it with the transformation of Alcestis into the daisy. Mr. Skeat, in his discussion of the Prologue in the Oxford Chaucer, pointed out three specific passages in Froissart and Machault which are more or less closely parallel with certain lines of Chaucer. Vollmer added to Mr. Skeat's observations a reference to the balade at the close of Froissart's Paradys d'Amours. Beyond similar instances to these, no examination has apparently been made of Chaucer's indebtedness, in the Prologue, to the poems referred to. Yet such an examination seems to come very near doing just what Tyrwhitt suggested it might do, besides throwing welcome light on certain other problems connected with the poem.

Type: Research Article
Information: PMLA , Volume 19 , Issue 4 , 1904 , pp. 593 - 683

DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/456512 [Opens in a new window]
Copyright: Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1904

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References

^{page 593 note 1} The Canterbury Tales of Chaucer (London, 1775), i, xxxiv-v, note. Tyrwhitt is disposing of the notion, first started by Speght—in the edition of 1602, not that of 1598—that under the name of the daisy was meant Margaret, Countess of Pembroke. See further on this identification, Urry, Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (London, 1721) [iv-v]; Warton, Hist. Eng. Poetry (London, 1774), i, 466, note k; Bell's Chaucer (London, 1855), iv, 250; Corson, Chaucer's Legend, etc. (Philadelphia, 1864), 7-8, 15.

^{page 593 note 2} Even Mr. Skeat (Oxford Chaucer, i, 36) merely says: “I agree with him [Tyrwhitt] in supposing,” c. Cf. Düring, Geoffrey Chancers Werke (Strassburg, 1883), i, 253-4; ten Brink, Studien (Münster, 1870), 158, 191; Morley, Eng. Writers (London, 1890), v, 133-4; Neilson, Court of Love (Boston, 1899), 144; Snell, The Age of Chaucer (London, 1901), 190-91; etc.

^{page 593 note 3} ii (1803), 339-40; iii (1804), 247.

^{page 593 note 4} Mr. Skeat (Oxford Chaucer, iii, xxxii) credits Sandras (Étude sur G. Chaucer, 1859, p. 58) and Bech (Anglia, v, 363) with pointing out the Herés story. For once, at least, Godwin should be given his due.

^{page 594 note 1} iii, xxxi; cf. xxxv.

^{page 594 note 2} Das mittelenglische Gedicht, The Boke of Cupide (Berlin, 1898), pp. 101-2; see also Neilson, Court of Love (1899), 79, n. 1.

^{page 594 note 3} Froissart, Chroniques (ed. Kervyn de Lettenhove, Brussels, 1870), vi, 362, 370-6, 378-87, 390, 393-6, 409-10, cf. 503-9; vii, 1-3; xvii, 400-404, 407; de Mas Latrie, Histoire de l'île de Chypre (Paris, 1852), ii, 237-245, gives full details of the itinerary; cf. Delaville le Roulx, La France en Orient au XIV^e Siècle (Paris, 1886), i, 120 ff.

^{page 594 note 4} De Mas Latrie, op. cit., 240; see Walsingham, Hist. Angl. (Rolls Series), i, 299; Knighton, Chron. (Rolls Series), ii, 118; Froissart, ed. Kervyn, vi, 381.

^{page 594 note 5} “Je ne vous poroie mies compter en un jour les nobles disners, les souppers, les festyemens et les conjoïssemens, les dons, les présens et les jeuiaux c'on fist, donna et présenta.”—Froissart, ed. Kervyn, vi, 380.

^{page 594 note 6} Froissart, Le Joli Buisson de Jonece, 348-50 (Oeuvres, ed. Scheler, ii, 11); see Chroniques, xx, 566.

^{page 595 note 1} Froissart, ed. Kervyn, vii, 1-3; xvii, 407; de Mas Latrie, op. cit., ii, 240.

^{page 595 note 2} M. L. de Mas Latrie, La Prise d'Alexandrie (Guillaume de Machault), Geneva, 1877, p. xvi; cf. Magnin in Journal des Savans, 1851, p. 406; Fétis, Biog. universelle des Musiciens (Brussels, 1837), iv, 465. The introduction of M. de Mas Latrie should be corrected, in general, by Gaston Paris’ review in the Revue historique, iv (1877), 215 ff.

^{page 595 note 3} Oeuvres de Machault, ed. Tarbé (Reims and Paris, 1849), xxviii-ix.

^{page 595 note 4} Tarbé, loc. cit.

^{page 595 note 5} Oeuvres, ed. Tarbé, p. 129.

^{page 595 note 6} Ib., 124.

^{page 595 note 7} Ib., 127. Cf. also the following:

Et quant li vens de son dous pays vente

…………………….

J'en sui plus sains (p. 126).

^{page 595 note 8} Ib., 129.

^{page 598 note 1} See, for instance, the opening lines of Machault's Dit:

J'aim une fleur qui s'uevre et qui s'encline

Vers le soleil, de jour quant il chemine;

Et quant il est couchiez soubz sa courtine

Par nuit obscure,

Elle se clost, ainsois que li jours fine.

Ses feuilles ont dessous colour sanguine,

Blanches dessous plus que gente hermine

Ne blancheur pure. (Oeuvres, 123.)

Compare, now, Froissart's Dittié, ll. 53 ff. (Oeuvres, ed. Scheler, ii, 211):

Car tout ensi que le soleil chemine

De son lever jusqu'à tant qu'il decline,

La margherite encontre lui s'encline, Comme celi

Qui moustrer voelt son bien et sa doctrine;

Car le soleil, qui en beauté l'afine,

Naturelment li est chambre et courtine,

Et le deffent contre toute bruine,

Et ses coulours de blank et de sanguine

Li paraccroist, etc.

Particularly, compare with the reference to Cyprus and Egypt in Machault (v. p. 595), the mention of Egypt dragged in by Froissart (ll. 19-21, II, 210):

Ossi chier a le préel d'un hermitte,

Mès qu’ elle y puist croistre sans opposite,

Comme elle fait les beaus gardins d'Egypte.

Note also the common rhymes—delite, eslite, habite, petite—of the last two passages. Compare the last two lines of the Dit with ll. 7-8 of the Dittié; etc. For Machault's influence on Froissart, see further Eng. Stud., xxvi, 336; Gröber, Grundriss, ii¹, 1050; Sandras, Elude sur G. Chaucer (Paris, 1859), 78-9.

^{page 598 note 2} Oeuvres (ed. Scheler), i, 107 ff.

^{page 598 note 3} See particularly Besant's chapter on “Froissart's Love Story” in Essays and Historiettes (London, 1903), 197-223; G. C. Macaulay's “Froissart the Lover” in Macmillan's Mag., January, 1895 (vol. lxxi, No. 423, pp. 223-30); Kervyn de Lettenhove, Froissart, Étude Littéraire (Bruxelles, 1857), i, 20-42; Oeuvres de Froissart (Bruxelles, 1870), i, 1^re Partie, 22-34, 60-86; Mary Darmesteter, Froissart (Paris, 1894), 10 ff.; Gröber, Grundriss, c., ii¹, 1049-50; Petit de Julleville, Hist. de la Langue et Litt. fr. (Paris, 1896), ii, 346; Dinaux, Les Trouvères (Bruxelles, 1863), iv, 487-499.

^{page 599 note 1} Ll. 4141-4182 (Oeuvres, ed. Scheler, i, 209-10)—esp. 4178-9.

^{page 599 note 2} Ll. 3380-3383 (i, 187). See Scheler (Oeuvres, i, 388-9), where this is pointed out, for the suggestion of the surname Vrediau. Kervyn de Lettenhove in his Froissart (1S57), i, 29, gave a different reading of the name—as also Dinaux in Les Trouvères, iv, 497-8—but in his edition of the Chroniques (1870), i, 1^re Partie, 31, he accepts the reading given above. Cf. Gröber, Grundriss, ii¹, 1050.

^{page 599 note 3} Note what Gröber (op. cit., 1051), says of “die Jugenddichtung Loenge dou joli mois de May …. unter dem Eindruck der schönen Jahreszeit einer Dame dargebracht, der ohne zweifel auch der Dittié de la flour de la Margherite …, also der Jugendgeliebten, galt. Cf. pp. 1049-50.

^{page 599 note 4} Paradys d'Amours, 1620-26 (i, 48-9).

^{page 599 note 5} Ib., 1627-53 (i, 49-50).

^{page 599 note 6} Compare Le Joli Buisson, 443 ff. (ii, 14) with ib., 859-60 (ii, 26). See Eng. Stud., xxvi, 327-9.

^{page 600 note 1} By Professor Kittredge in Eng. Stud., xxvi, 321-336. See also Longnon's introduction to Froissart's Meliador (Paris, 1895), I, 1-li, and his reply to Professor Kittredge, ib., iii, 363-369.

^{page 600 note 2} Prison Amoureuse, 2252-3 (i, 288).

^{page 600 note 3} Presumably Wenceslas of Brabant; see Gröber, Grundriss, ii¹, 1050; Scheler, Oeuvres, ii, 404; Kervyn de Lettenhove, Froissart (1857), ii, 269-71, and in Oeuvres (1870), i¹, 264-5; Darmesteter, Froissart (Paris, 1894), 44; contra, Longnon in Meliador, i, lxvi ff.

^{page 600 note 4} La Prison Amoureuse, 852-903 (i, 240-41); esp. 898-9. Cf. the close of the letter, i, 247. Similarly, in the Joli Buisson, ll. 1106-9 (ii, 33), he tells us:

J'ai usage, quant je me lieve,

Afin que le jour ne me grieve,

De dire une orison petite

Ou nom de sainte Margherite.

^{page 600 note 5} Oeuvres (ed. Scheler), ii, 343-6; cf. Pastourelle, xix, with the refrain: “Un chapelet de margherites,” ii, 348-50.

^{page 600 note 6} Ib., ii, 235-245—“der jüngste Debat Froissarts, nach 1392,” Gröber, Grundriss, ii¹, 1052. See p. 617, n. 1, for the lines.

^{page 601 note 1} No. 447 (Oeuvres, iii, 259). Compare, for other references to Machault, Nos. 123-4 (i, 243-6); 127 (i, 248); 306 (ii, 202, ll. 298-9); 447 (iii, 259); 872 (v, 53); 1416 (viii, 52-3); 1474 (viii, 177); and see Raynaud in Oeuvres, xi, 223-4.

^{page 601 note 2} No. 307 (ii, 203 ff.), ll. 27-65.

^{page 601 note 3} See Machault's lines (Oeuvres, p. 123) immediately following those quoted on p. 598, n. 1:

Li estos est plus vert que n’ est verdure,

Où la fleur est entée par mesure:

Et la graine jaune est de sa nature;

Et sa racine

Toute douceur veint, et passe, et obscure.

Compare with this the Lay de Franchise, 33-39:

L'estoc a vert, s'a de fin or la graine;

Blanc et vermeil lui ont donné coulour.

Par l'estoc vert fermeté la demaine,

Le blanc purté chascun jour lui admaine,

Et le vermeil sui rent honte et paour;

La graine d'or monstre sa grant valour

Et comme elle est en tous temps pure et saine.

Compare, too, 11. 40 ff. of the Lay, with the opening lines of Machault already quoted (p. 598, n. 1).

^{page 601 note 4} iii, 379.

^{page 601 note 5} See, for instance, ll. 1-10:

Tresdoulce fleur toute blanche et vermeille,

A l'estoc vert et a la graynne d'or,

Qui au monde n'avez pas vo pareille,

Mais vous avez un singulier tresor;

Seurté par l'estoc vert

En voz oeuvres et en voz fais appert,

Et par la blanc Parté en vous habite,

Par le vermeil Paour vous suit et sert;

Vostre nom est precieux, Marguerite

La grayne d'or est sens, etc.

Compare, too, the last stanza with 11. 40 ff. of the Lay, and with the opening lines of Machault.

^{page 602 note 1} See p. 599. In all this, one sees once more the dominant influence of Machault. See a selection from his numerous devices of this kind, in Tarbé's index, s. v. Enigme (pp. 167-173). Cf. P. Paris, in his edition of the Voir Dit (Paris, 1875), xix-xxiii.

^{page 602 note 2} iii, 381. See index, s. v. La Clinete (x, 201) and Deschamps (x, 183), and Raynaud in Oeuvres, xi, 137. There is another Marguerite poem of Deschamps—No. 1357 (vii, 146-7)—beginning with an acrostic on the name Marguerite de Saint-Dizier, in which the woman, a religieuse of Notre-Dame de Soissons, is called “douce flour du monde.” But it is of an entirely different type from the others, being a genuine expression of grief, without any further play on the name than already indicated, for the death of his friend on May 8th, 1399. See Raynaud in xi, 85, where he associates with the poem in question Nos. 423 (iii, 227), 571 (iv, 30), and 726 (iv, 196).

^{page 602 note 3} xi, 271.

^{page 602 note 4} Raynaud enumerates the following: No. 431 (iii, 238): La fleur des fleurs, c'est ma dame et m'amie; No. 527 (iii, 362): Tresdoulce flour; No. 528 (iii, 363): Tresprecieuse flour; No. 532 (iii, 368): Treshumble flour—and especially ll. 14-16, quoted later (p. 614, n. 3); No. 538 (iii, 378): la doulce flour; and No. 539 already described. To these may perhaps be added No. 433 (iii, 240): humble fleur desirée; No. 523 (iii, 357): Celle qui est la fleur d'umilité; No. 526 (iii, 361): La flour des flours; No. 546 (iii, 389): La flour des flours. Add, in general, Nos. 409, 411-12, 421, 440, 453, 460, 474, 498, 515, 517, 524, 543, 553, 558, 561, 574, 588, 624, 664, 714, 724, 728, 730, 747, 749-50, 761, 875, 881, 1008, 1043, 1444; lx, lxiv (Vol. x).

^{page 603 note 1} Nos. 417 (iii, 220); 463 (iii, 279); 468-9 (iii, 286-8).

^{page 603 note 2} Nos. 417, 463.

^{page 603 note 3} No. 469, l. 5

^{page 603 note 4} Oeuvres, xi, 47.

^{page 603 note 5} Oeuvres de Deschamps, xi, 46. The long-expected eleventh volume of Deschamps came into my hands after the chronology, for the present purpose, had been worked out. As Raynaud gives his conclusion without proof, and as the data are of considerable interest in themselves, I have thought best to include them substantially as they stood before Raynaud's high authority was at hand.

^{page 604 note 1} Ll. 149-156 (ii, 208).

^{page 604 note 2} Chroniques (ed. Kervyn), 167-59; Chron. de St. Denys, i, 216; cf. 214.

^{page 604 note 3} No. 1124 (vi, 40 ff.), ll. 29-32. See Raynaud, in Oeuvres, xi, 79, for date.

^{page 604 note 4} He gives the number as 26,000 again in No. 94 (i, 201); as 20,000 in No. 19 (i, 96); and as 25,000 in No. 347 (iii, 69). The number is given by Froissart as “xxvi [var. xxv] mille hommes et plus” (Chroniques, ed. Kervyn, x, 173), and in the Chronique de St. Denys as “viginti quinque milia” (i, 220, cf. 222-4). See more fully the notes in Deschamps, Oeuvres, i, 363; Kervyn de Lettenhove, Chroniques, x, 479-81.

^{page 604 note 5} No. 347 (iii, 69), ll. 1-2, 6. This date agrees with that given still more specifically by Froissart (Chron., x, 172, cf. 477). Other references to the battle of Rosebech in Deschamps are i, 94, 134; iii, 41; iv, 284.

^{page 605 note 1} No. 55 (i, 146), ll. 1-4, 8.

^{page 605 note 2} The discrepancy between Deschamps‘statement of Charles’ age at the time of the battle, and the fact that he actually lacked but six days of being fourteen years old, need give no pause, since Deschamps has a delightful habit of regulating the king's age by the demands of his metre. We have seen already that he has twice made him less than thirteen years of age at Rosebech. With perfect impartiality, he twice makes him fourteen on the same occasion. In the balade devoted to an account of the battle (No. 347) we read:

Le roy y porta s'enseingne

A. XIIII. ans, la fait qu'en sang se taingne

Son oriflambe;

while in the highly symbolical reference to the battle “par maniere de prophetie” in No. 1390 (vii, 244 f.), the king, under the name of Cerf Volant, is said to have put his enemies “Ains. XIIII. ans a grant confusion” (11. 4-6). In like manner Deschamps treats the king's age at his coronation. This took place November 4th, 1380, when Charles was “ou XIIe an de son eage,” as Froissart correctly gives it (ed. Kervyn, ix, 300; cf. xxi, 356); when he was “nondum duodenis,” according to the Chronique de St. Denys (i, 4). Deschamps, however, in the Lay du Roy (No. 311, vol. ii, 314 ff.), addressing the king, says:

A. XIII. ans en Royauté,

En bail de ton parenté

Veu venir l'ay— (ll. 36-8.)

where he makes him older in November, 1380, than he had made him in November, 1382! More nearly correct, though still a year too much, is the statement of No. 168 (i, 300): En. XIII^e. an vient a seignourier” (l. 17). It may be noted that Froissart gives his age at the time of the battle correctly: “Et estoit pour lors li rois de France Charles VI^e de ce nom au quatorsisme an de son eage” (ed. Kervyn, x, 172).

^{page 606 note 1} Independently of the above, it could not have been written after July 17th, 1385, the date of the king's marriage to Isabel of Bavaria, inasmuch as the king appears in the Lay, with no mention of a queen, merely “Acompaigniez de son frere pareil” (l. 158). (Bellaguet, in Chron. deSt. Denys, i, 360-1, gives the date of the king's marriage as July 18th. For correct date see Kervyn de Lettenhove in Chroniques, xxi, 367; cf. x, 344-52, 356-7; and Raynaud, Oeuvres, xi, 46.)

^{page 606 note 2} Ll. 235 ff.:

De la cornant et dansant vers Beauté

Dehors le boys en un plaisant hosté

Tous et toutes illec s'acheminerent;

Marne l'ensaint par derrier a un lé, etc. (Cf. l. 182.)

The Chateau is described by Deschamps in balade No. 61 (i, 155), which affords an interesting comparison with the descriptive passages of the Lay.

^{page 606 note 3} “Mai 1 Lundi—Mons. au bois de Vincennes devers le roy.”—Itinéraires de Philippe le Hardi, ed. Ernest Petit (Paris, 1888), p. 177.

^{page 606 note 4} Froissart, Chroniques, x, 311-15; Chron. de St. Denys, i, 352-4.

^{page 606 note 5} See the following entries in the Itinéraires de Philippe le Hardi for February, 1385: 4 Samedi—madame et mademoiselle Marguerite—gister à Beauté; 14 Mardi—mes dites dames gister à Beauté; 22 Mercredi—souper et gister à Beauté vers ces dames; 26 Dimanche—Mons., madame mons. le conte de Nevers et mademoiselle Marguerite—tout le jour à Beauté. See also for March: 5 Dimanche—Mons., madame, mons. le conte de Nevers et mademoiselle Marguerite—tout le jour à Beauté sur Marne; 12 Dimanche—madame, mons. de Nevers et mademoiselle Marguerite—tout le jour à Beauté; 16 Jeudi—madame, mademoiselle Marguerite, sa fille, tout le jour à Beauté.

^{page 607 note 1} Ll. 308-12. Kervyn de Lettenhove in his Froissart (1857), i, 135-6; ii, 264-5, assumed that Froissart's balade in the Paradys d'Amours was originally written on the occasion of the marriages at Cambray. The suggestion was abandoned in his later work.

^{page 607 note 2} It may be said at this point that Deschamps’ poems which deal with his experiences during his campaigns in Flanders are all well worth study, both for their own very great interest, and for the emphasis they place by contrast upon Chaucer's silence regarding similar experiences of his own. Deschamps reiterates the statement that he was three times—according to No. 17 (i, 94), four times—with the king on Flemish soil; see No. 781 (iv, 283 ff.); No. 19 (i, 96-7); and the note in Oeuvres, i, 333. With a vividness of phrase that rivals my Uncle Toby, he inveighs against his discomforts while with the army in Flanders; see, in addition to the Rosebech balades (p. 604, n. 5), and the balades just mentioned, the following: Nos. 334 (iii, 41); 548 (iv, 1-3); 782 (iv, 285-6); 812 (iv, 329-30); 876 (v, 58-9); and especially the letter, No. 1403 (vii, 343-7) whose pages

…. furent faictes, Dieu mercy,

En retournant du Dam en Flandre,

A un feu et a belle cendre,

A Artevelle et au retour,

L'an de grace Nostre Seignour

Mil. CCC. cinq et quatre vins,

Qu'en France de Flandres revins. (ll. 120–126.)

I may add from Raynaud, Nos. 16 (i, 92) and 18 (i, 95); see xi, 37-8, 47. For the understanding of certain elements of Chaucer's character and genius, few things could be more illuminating, by contrast, than the reading of such a group of poems as these.

^{page 608 note 1} See p. 601, n. 5.

^{page 608 note 2} See Raynaud, Oeuvres de Deschamps, xi, 47.

^{page 608 note 3} Nos. 764-7 (iv, 257-64).

^{page 608 note 4} By Professor Kittredge, “Chaucer and Some of his Friends,” Mod. Philology, i (June, 1903), 1-13, esp. 5-6. See also an article by Furnivall on “‘The Flower and the Leaf,’ and Chaucer's ‘Legend of Good Women’” in the Athenœum, No. 2333, July 13, 1872, pp. 49-50; and Sandras, Étude, 102-3, 105.

^{page 608 note 5} Deschamps, Oeuvres, ii, 138 (No. 285); with translation and notes by Paget Toynbee, in Academy, Nov. 14, 1891, pp. 432 f.

^{page 609 note 1} Mod. Philol., i, 3-6; esp. p. 4.

^{page 609 note 2} Froissart, ed. Kervyn, x, 347. Cf. Raynaud, Oeuvres de Deschamps, xi, 46, n. 5.

^{page 609 note 3} Froissart, ed. Kervyn, x, 346: Estoit avenut, estant en che voiage de Berghes et de Bourbourc, que li oncle dou roy …. ly avoient demandé moult amiablement se il n'avoit nulle fille à marier.

^{page 609 note 4} Ib., 347: Or remist sus la ducoise de Braibant, quant elle fu à Cambray …. le mariage de Bavière.

^{page 609 note 6} Ib…. et quidoit bien que on euist mis en noncalloir toutes ces coses, et ossi on parloit dou mariage dou roy ailleurs.

^{page 609 note 6} Oeuvres de Deschamps, i, 333; Froissart, ed. Kervyn, x, 265-73.

^{page 609 note 7} Cf. p. 606.

^{page 609 note 8} “Voire, dame,” respondirent li oncle dou roy, “mais nous n'en oons nulles nouvelles.”—“Or vous taissiés,” dist la ducoise, “je le feray traire avant, et en orés nouvelles en cel esté sans nulle faute.” Les promesses de la ducoise furent averies, etc.—Froissart, x, 347.

^{page 610 note 1} No. 765 (iv, 259).

^{page 610 note 2} No. 766 (iv, 261).

^{page 610 note 3} For the former, see Kervyn de Lettenhove in Froissart, xxiii, 213; for the latter, ib., xxii, 280: “Il se signala à la bataille de Roosebeke et reçut à cette occasion un don de deux mille francs.”

^{page 610 note 4} No. 501 (iii, 328); see xi, 45; Petit, Itinéraires, 174. From 1. 12 of the balade, we learn that mademoiselle Marguerite also witnessed the tourney.

^{page 610 note 5} See G. Paris, La Poésie du Moyen Age, 2^e Series (Paris, 1895), 199-200, 229; cf. Gröber, Grundriss, ii¹, 1037-66.

^{page 611 note 1} See, for his knowledge of Machault, the index to the Oxford Chaucer (vi, 387); Sandras, Étude, 75 ff., 288-294; ten Brink, Studien, 7-12, cf. 197-205; Geschichte, ii, 43-46; Lounsbury, Studies, ii, 212-15, cf. i, 423, iii, 409. For his knowledge of Froissart, see the references in Professor Kittredge's article in Eng. Studien, xxvi, 321-336. For his knowledge of Deschamps, see Oxford Chaucer, vi, 386 (index), and i, 563, lvi-vii; Lounsbury, Studies, ii, 217; iii, 14, 423; ten Brink, Geschichte, ii, 199.

^{page 611 note 2} It is outside the scope of the present paper to carry the history of the daisy cultus beyond Chaucer. See, for that, Schick's references in his edition of Lydgate's Temple of Glas (E. E. T. S.), p. 74, on ll. 70-74.

^{page 611 note 3} For convenience, the terms adopted by Mr. Skeat will be used in referring to the two versions: B. for the so-called vulgata; A. for the version of the unique ms. Gg. 4, 27. In so using the terms, however, their chronological implications are for the present waived.

^{page 611 note 4} It has already been pointed out by Professor Kittredge (Mod. Philol., i, p. 3, n.), that this is “addressed to contemporary poets, rather than to the great of old,” and that “Chaucer is not speaking of the material of his Legend, but of what he intends to say in the Prologue itself in praise of the Daisy.”

^{page 612 note 1} Note how skilfully the passage is given a distinct unity of its own by the contrast between Chaucer's qualified “wit and might,” in the closing line, and the unqualified “conning and might” ascribed to his models, in the opening line. The italicized words or lines are those peculiar to this version.

^{page 612 note 2} Froissart, Paradys d'Amours, 1633-5; cf. 1642-4 (i, 49). For the “whyte and rede,” cf. Dittié, 156-158 (ii, 214):

…. me fait plaisance, pour

A grant loisir regarder sa coulour

Blanche et vermeille, assise sur verdour.

Cf. also ib., l. 17; Paradys d'Amours, 1639; etc.

^{page 613 note 1} Paradys, 1621-2 (i, 49). Froissart repeats the phrase in La Prison Amoureuse, 898-9 (i, 241): “une fleur petite Que nous appellons margherite.” Chaucer's half-apologetic insistence on the name the flower bears “in our toun” seems to have in mind the necessary abandonment in English of the name on which his French contemporaries had rung so many changes—as also his justification of the English name in B. 182-5. With B. 293—“This flour, which that I clepe the dayesye”—compare Paradys d'Amours, 1672-1673 (i, 50): “De la flour où je me delitte, Que je vous nomme margherite.”

^{page 613 note 2} Deschamps, Lay de Franchise, ll. 14, 27-30 (ii, 204). That the “tresdouce flour” is the marguerite is clear from the lines immediately following:

Qui en bonté, en douçour, en honour

Et en tous biens, est la flour souveraine.

L'estoc a vert, etc.

The next lines are quoted on p. 601, note 3; and accordingly the celebration of the daisy (carried on in the succeeding stanzas, to be referred to later) is directly associated with the early Mayday walk.

^{page 613 note 3} Froissart, Ditlié, ll. 162-6 (ii, 214).

^{page 614 note 1} Machault, Dit de la Marguerite, p. 124. With B. 50 compare Voir Dit (ed. P. Paris), p. 93, l. 2193: “Vostre douçour adoucist ma dolour.”

^{page 614 note 2} Froissart, Le joli mois de May, ll. 289-90 (ii, 203). It is perhaps worth noting that the title of Froissart's poem just quoted occurs in B. 176: “the joly month of May.” The phrase is, however, a commonplace; cf. Froissart, Chroniques, xiv, 107: “A l'entrée du joly mois de May. Compare also A. 36—“the joly tyme of May”—with Gower, i, 336 (Balade, No. 36, l. 1): “Ce jolif temps de Maii.”

^{page 614 note 3} Deschamps, No. 532, 1. 16 (iii, 368-9)—one of the balades already noted (p. 602, note 4) as closely preceding the Marguerite pair, Nos. 539-40. Chaucer's three lines, 53-55, are almost a composite of the two passages just mentioned, which are, in full, as follows:

Car elle est la flour souverainne

De bonté el de beauté plainne,

Qui nulle bruïne n'estaint.

En tous temps est clere et certaine.

(Le joli mois de May, 289-92.)

Vostre doulçour vous fait partout amer

Et en tous lieux la flour des flours clamer

Qui en tous temps belle et fresche sera.

(Balade, No. 532, ll. 14-16.)

Compare, moreover, Le joli mois, 289, with the two lines of the Lay de Franchise just quoted on p. 613, note 2; and with Le joli mois, 292, and balade No. 532, 16, compare Machault, Dit, pp. 128-9:

…. c'est l'yaue douce et belle

Qui me freschit et qui me renouvelle

Et toudis est sainne, clère el nouvelle.

It is important for its later bearings to note that in one of these phrases particularly, we are dealing with a commonplace. With “la flour des flours“of No. 532, 15, compare Froissart, Paradys d'Amours, 592-3 (i, 18), “j'aim La flour sus trestoute aultre flour;” and note that Deschamps applies the phrase “la fleur de toutes flours” to Machault in No. 447 (iii, 259), while in No. 124 (i, 245), he calls him “O fleur des fleurs de toute melodie.” See further, Gower's Balades, Nos. 4 (i, 341), 6 (343), 9 (346), and cf. Nos. 16 (351), 31 (363). Chaucer had himself used it in the A.B.C., l. 4, though it does not occur in the original of Guillaume de Deguilleville (see Oxford Chaucer, i, 261). In B. 185—“The emperice and flour of floures alle”—Chaucer seems to combine both “la flour souverainne” and “la flour des flours;” cf. Froissart, Dittié, 28-30 (ii, 210), “tele flourette…. Qui de bonté et de beauté est ditte La souveraine.” See further, p. 629, n. 2.

^{page 615 note 1} Froissart, Dittié, 81-2 (ii, 212); cf. Deschamps, No. 538 (iii, 378), ll. 17-18, 21-2.

^{page 615 note 2} Froissart, Dittié, 159-62 (ii, 21-2).

^{page 615 note 3} Deschamps, Lay de Franchise, ll. 44-50 (ii, 205); cf. also B. 198-9. Chaucer, while keeping the phraseology, has reversed Deschamps’ interpretation of the daisy's habit of showing its face en clarté and closing en obscur, and has taken it, more naturally, to signify fear, rather than the absence of fear. Deschamps’ meaning is made perfectly clear by the corresponding passage in the Marguerite balade, No. 539 (iii, 380), ll. 19-22:

Vous vous ouvrez quand li soleil s'esveille,

A la clarté monstrez vostre chief sor;

Quant il couche, vous cloez vostre oreille

Et ne doubtez leu, penthere ne tor.

The chief sor (“blond doré”) of the second line removes all possible doubt as to the meaning of son atour in the first passage, which is seen to be the direct equivalent of “hir chere” in the Prologue. It should be noted that the idea of the daisy's fear of darkness is given, by implication, in Froissart's Dittié, where the flower is said to follow the sun:

Car le soleil, qui en beauté l'afine,

Naturelment li est chambre et courtine,

Et le deffent contre toute bruïne. ll. 58-60 (ii, 211).

^{page 616 note 1} It is worth noting that in the Paradys d’ Amours Froissart, referring to the balade of the marguerite itself, says:

Oïl, dame, de sentement

Et de coer amoureus et sade

Ai ordonné une balade. (ll. 1604-6.)

^{page 616 note 2} Note, too, that the lines immediately preceding (B. 66-7) are:

Allas! that I ne had English, ryme or prose,

Suffisant this flour to preyse aright!

^{page 616 note 3} The “colours of rethoryk” are not mine, but Deschamps’ own. In Chaucer's garden, he protested, he should be but a nettle—“En ton jardin ne seroye qu'ortie”—but he obviously was willing to be transplanted, none the less. If the Prologue did form the answer to Deschamps’“de rescripre te prie”—and all this goes to strengthen one's feeling that such may have been the case—the exquisite courtesy of the reference to the gleaning in Deschamps’ and Froissart's fields is manifest.

^{page 617 note 1} There is but one phrase in the corresponding lines of the A-version—whose relation to B. will be considered later—on which the French poems seem to throw additional light. This is A. 58—“As wel in winter as in somer newe”—which corresponds to B. 56—“And I love hit, and ever y-lyke newe.” The parallels for the idea of A. are abundant, as for instance the following:

Car en janvier,

Que toutes flours sont mortes pour l'yvier,

Celle perçut blancir et vermillier, etc.

(Froissart, Dittié, ll. 96-8; cf. ll. 42-4.)

or the following lines:

Car en tous temps, plueve, gresille ou gelle,

Soit la saisons ou fresque, ou laide, ou nette,

Ceste flour est gracieuse et nouvelle.

(Froissart, Paradys d’ Amours, 1636–8.)

Compare also Pastourelle, No. xvii, 44-50 (ii, 345):

Quant la violette est fanée

Et roses dont on fait chapeaus,

Et il vient froit temps et gelée,

Lors ai tantos une esculée

De margherites, sans mentir,

Se jusqu’ aux champs je voeil courir;

J'en trouve en chemins et en fretes, etc.

Almost Chaucer's exact phrase occurs in one of the later poems of Froissart (see p. 600, n. 6), the Plaidoirie de la Rose et de la Violette, ll. 333-336 (ii, 245):

Encore a il les margerites

Qui sont flours belles et petites,

Dont il est très bon recouvier,

En tous temps, l'esté et l'ivier.

The claims of the poets are entirely within the facts, for England and the continent alike. For statements to the effect that the daisy blooms all the year, see, among others, Hooker, Students’ Flora of the British Islands (London, 1884), 205; Ellacombe, Plant-lore of Shakespeare (London, 1884), p. 376, in the essay on the Daisy, which gathers together a great number of references to it in the English poets; de Lamarck et de Candolle: Flore française (Paris, 1815), iii, 185; and finally the statement in Schlechtendal, Langethal u. Schenck, Flora von Deutschland (Gera-Untermhaus, 1887), xxix, 109; “Fast das ganze Jahr hindurch, selbst unter dem Schnee fortblühend.” One recalls, of course, Wordsworth's To a Daisy:

Thee Winter in the garland wears

That thinly decks his few gray hairs….

Whole Summer-fields are thine by right; etc.

(Globe ed., 1888, p. 184.)

The phrase has, however, symbolic associations, which are perhaps best seen in an interesting passage of the Voir Dit. Machault is telling

Comment li ancien entailloient

L‘image d’ Amour, ou paignoient,

and enumerates three inscriptions surrounding the figure of the God of Love— “De près et de loing;” “A mort et à vie;” and “Et en yver et en esté.” The latter, it is explained,

…. enseigne et devise

Qu’à parfaite amour rien ne chaut,

D'iver, d'esté, de froit, de chaut;

Ne elle ne se varie point,

Ainsois est toudis en un point,

Ferme, loial, viste et ounie.

(Voir Dit, ed. P. Paris, pp. 297-9.)

Some such implication undoubtedly carries over to the poets’ statements of the well-known persistence into winter of the flower. See also p. 630, n. 2.

^{page 619 note 1} Opere volgari di Giovanni Boccaccio (Firenze, per Ig. Moutier, 1831), vol. xiii, p. 12 (Il Filostrato, Pt. I, stanza ii, ll. 1-4).

^{page 619 note 2} Ib. p. 13, stanza v, ll. 1-6. It is interesting to notice that Chaucer, having begun, under the influence of his context, in the third person—“She is the clernesse,” etc.—passes almost immediately into the second person of the Italian on which he has his eye.

^{page 619 note 3} Ib. p. 12, stanza iv, ll. 7-8.

^{page 619 note 4} Ib. p. 12, stanza II, 11. 7-8. It will be noted that all the lines from the Filostrato occur within the limits of three stanzas—the 2d, 4th, and 5th.

^{page 620 note 1} Dit de la Marguerite, pp. 126-7. It is of importance to the later discussion to make entirely clear the fact that the phrases here in question are among the commonplaces of such poems as we are considering. For that reason the lists subjoined are longer than may at this point seem necessary. With the passage just cited, compare the following from Machault's Voir Dit: car je vous ameray et obéiray, doubteray, serviray tant com je vivray (ed. P. Paris, p. 21); Et je qui l'amay et doubtay (p. 297); … ma dame de pris, Que j'aim, criem, sers, et loe et pris (p. 307). See also Froissart, Le joli Buisson, 2718-19 (ii, 81): Il m'a loyalment servi, Doublé, cremu, obey; Lays Amoureus, No. 6 (ii, 280), ll. 125-9: S'amerai, Servirai, Cremerai Et à li obeïrai; Le joli mois de May, 80-81 (ii, 196): La plus très parfaite en honnour Sers, crienc et ains. Add Deschamps, x, xlvii: dame, que j'aim, honnour et craing; x, liv: Car je dy, quant je l'aour, Aim et desir, sers et craing et honnour; etc. To “drede” as well as love one's lady, was a duty. See, for instance, Machault, Oeuvres (ed. Tarbé), p. 37:

Lors me dist qu'il n'est nulz vivans

Qui soit amis s'il n'est doutans:

Car on doit sa dame doubter.

Cf. ib., p. 39:

Pour ce en doutance et en cremour

Veil ma douce Dame obéir.

^{page 621 note 1} Lay de Franchise, 1. 52 (ii, 205). The same phrase occurs again in balade No. 414 (iii, 216), where the lady is also called dame souverayne.

^{page 621 note 2} “Tu es d'amours mondains Dieux en Albie” (No. 285, ii, 139). Conclusive against Toynbee's “god of worldly love “(see p. 608, n. 5) is the reference to Machault as “mondains dieux d'armonie” (No. 124, i, 245). Compare Machault himself in the Voir Dit: Si vous jur et promet que, à mon pooir, je vous serviray loyalment et diligemment …. comme Lancelos ne Tristans servirent onques leurs dames; et aourray comme Dieu terrien et comme la plus precieuse et glorieuse relique que je véysse onques en lieu où je fuisse (ed. P. Paris, p. 68; also Oeuvres, ed. Tarbé, p. 140). Compare also Voir Dit, p. 101, ll. 2415-16; Deschamps, iv, pp. 113, 124, 217. With the use of the word relique above, cf. B. 321.

^{page 621 note 3} See, for instance, Deschamps, iii, 257 (No. 445), l. 13—where the lady is also called “mon bien mondain,” and “ma deesse ou j'ay ferme creance”; iii, 286 (No. 468)—where the lady is also called “la tresmontaine”; iii, 318 (No. 493); iii, 342 (No. 511); iii, 358 (No. 524),—where the lady is also called “tresdoulces flour”; x, li (No. xliv); Froissart, ed. Scheler, i, 167, l. 2724; 121, l. 1199; ii, 17, l. 571; Machault, Voir Dit, pp. 18-21, 41-42, 52, 54-5, 60-61, 67-9; Oeuvres (ed. Tarbé), p. 169; Gower (ed. Macaulay), Balades, Nos. 14 (i, 349), 39 (i, 368); etc., etc. The number of references may be multiplied indefinitely.

^{page 621 note 4} The first 47 lines are printed in Bartsch, Chrestomathie de l'ancien français (Leipzig, 1901, 7th ed.), p. 411; see also Snell, The Fourteenth Century (N. Y., 1899), p. 166; Tarbé in Oeuvres, xxi, 169. See, for instance, such lines as the following:

Si que je puis legierement prouver

qu'on ne porroit pas instrument trouver

de si plaisant ne de si cointe touche,

quant blanche main de belle et bonne y touche,

ne qu'en douceur a elle se compere. (ll. 25-9.)

^{page 622 note 1} It will be remembered that Chaucer twice uses the harp in similes in the Troilus, in both instances where he is not following Boccaccio—once (T., i, 729-35) where the suggestion is from Boethius; and again in T., ii, 1030-36. See Anglia, v, 358.

^{page 622 note 2} T., i, 15-18.

^{page 622 note 3} T., ii, 20-21.

^{page 622 note 4} T., iii, 40-41.

^{page 622 note 5} T., ii, 13-14. Compare “Ye lovers, that can make of sentement,” B. 69.

^{page 623 note 1} Alcun di Giove sogliono il favore

Ne'lor principii pietosi invocare;

Altri d'Apollo chiamano il valore;

Io di Parnaso le muse pregare

Solea ne’ miei bisogni, ma amore

Novellamente m'ha fatto mutare

Il mio costume antico e usitato,

Poi fu’ di te, madonna, innamorata. (Opere, xiii, p. 11).

^{page 623 note 2} In two sections on p. 619—see notes 1 and 4—between which come the lines:

Ancora di salute tu se’ quella

Che se'tutto il mio bene e'l mio conforto; (Opere, xiii, p. 12).

^{page 623 note 3} In the stanzas which Chaucer has translated and amplified in Troilus, Bk. V, 519-679.

^{page 623 note 4} Per che volendo per la tua partita,

Più greve a me che morte e più noiosa,

Scriver qual fosse la dolente vita

Di Troilo, da poi che l'amorosa

Griseida da Troia sen fu gita, etc. (Opere, xiii, p. 12.)

See especially Boccaccio's Proemio to the Filostrato (Opere, xiii, pp. 1-10).

^{page 623 note 5} Have he my thank, and myn be this travayle! (Troilus, i, 21.)

^{page 624 note 1} Parl. Foules, 8.

^{page 624 note 2} Among other things, it is a delightful instance of Chaucer's economy of his material—“die ökonomie, welche ihm in der verwaltung seines geistiges erwerbes eigen ist,” as Koeppel phrases it. (Anglia, N. F., i, 175.) Compare his use of the stanzas from the Teseide in the Troilus and the Parlement of Foules, etc.

^{page 624 note 3} Dit de la Marguerite, p. 128. This is again one of the commonplaces of the poetry of the type under discussion. Compare the passage in Machault's Voir Dit (ed. P. Paris, Paris, 1875), p. 5, beginning:

C'est l'escharboucle qui reluist

Et esclarcist l'obscure nuit;

C'est en or li fins dyamans

Qui donne grace à tous aimans;

………………….

C'est droitement la tresmontaine

Qui cuers au port de joie maine. (ll. 95-8, 101-2.)

See, too, Deschamps’Lay de Departement (No. 313, n, 335 S.), ll. 25 ff.—

C'est l'estoille trasmontaine,

Aurora la desirée, etc.—

and the passage beginning with l. 227:

C'est ma tour et ma fortresse, etc.

Compare Deschamps, No. 740 (iv, 217), ll. 9-17.

The commonplace seems to represent—and the fact is of interest in its bearing on the evolution of conventions—a transfer to an earthly lady and the “love of kinde,” of the expressions commonly used of “love celestiall” in the hymns to the Virgin—notably the “Ave maris Stella” in the Office of the Virgin. See in Deschamps himself No. 363 (iii, 104):

Marie as nom, estoille tresmontaine;

and especially the invocation to Mary at the close of his translation of the treatise of Pope Innocent:

Prions ent la souverainne

Vierge, estoile tresmontainne

La mere d’ umilité

Que par sa doulce pité

Au port de salut nous mainne.

(No. 309^b, ii, 304, § xxxviii.)

But he had said the same of Marie of Hungary!

Aux desvoiez estes la tresmontaine

Vo doulx parler leur rent si tresdoulx son

Qu'au port d'onneur les radresce et ramaine.

(No. 468, iii, 286-7; cf. xi, 47.)

Compare the address to the Virgin at the close of Gower's Miroir de l’ Omme (ed. Macaulay, i, 333-4):

O de la mer estoille pure,

O cliere lune esluminouse,

………………….

O gemme, O fine Margarite, etc. (ll. 29925-6, 29937.)

So Dits et Contes Baudouin de Condé (ed. Scheler), i, xxiii:

Sainte Marie, douce mere,

Qui es de mer estoile clere,

Et dou ciel beneoite porte (Dis de Nostre-Dame).

See also The Minor Poems of the Vernon MS. (E. E. T. S.), Pt. I, 134, 136, etc.; Pt. II, 735-6, etc. Compare in general what Dr. Neilson says (Court of Love, 220 ff.) of the transfer to the shrine of Venus of the modes of adoration of the Virgin; and see W. A. R. Kerr on Souverain, in Pub. Mod. Lang. Assoc., xix, 33. For a description of the real “Tresmontaine,” see the Voir Dit, p. 256.

^{page 626 note 1} At all events, it was precisely this similarity between the lines of Machault and the Filostrato stanza, that suggested to the present writer the lines of Boccaccio as Chaucer's source; and the fact that the one did, in this instance—if one may be allowed sic parvis componere magna—actually so recall the other, is so far forth good evidence for what might in the first place have occurred, particularly in the case of one who knew both poems intimately. Nor may it perhaps be considering too curiously to see a second possible association. The acknowledgment, in the Prologue, of Chaucer's indebtedness, begins with an appeal to lovers for help:

But helpeth, ye that han conning and might,

Ye lovers, that can make of sentement (B. 68-9).

The sixth stanza of the Filostrato, immediately following the passage we have seen Chaucer proceeds to use, begins similarly with an appeal to lovers:

E voi amanti prego che ascoltiate

Ciò che dirà ‘l mio verso lagrimoso;

E se nel cuore avvien che voi sentiate

Destarsi alcuno spirito pietoso,

Per me vi prego ch'amore preghiate (Opere xiii, p. 13);

and these lines Chaucer did use in his Troilus:

But ye loveres, that bathen in gladnesse,

If any drope of pitee in you be,

… eek for me preyeth to god so dere (Troilus I, 22-3, 32).

To a man whose own phrases clung to his mind as Chaucer's certainly did, the flash of the memory from “Ye lovers that can make of sentement,” to the earlier “Ye loveres that bathen in gladnesse,” would be most natural, and would carry with it the recollection of the stanzas previously rejected, but now so apt.

^{page 626 note 2} For “my sorwes alle” turn out to be not Chaucer's, but Boccaccio's! Whose was the “siknesse” of the Proem to the Book of the Duchesse?

^{page 627 note 1} Professor Kittredge has already pointed out (Eng. Stud., xxvi, 336, n. 1) the striking resemblance between Leg. 1-8 and Froissart's Le Joli Buisson, 786-92 (ii, 24.)

^{page 627 note 2} B. 117-18.

^{page 627 note 3} B. 119-24; cf. The Court of Love, ll. 801-2.

^{page 627 note 4} Roses, their sharp spines being gone,

Not royal in their smells alone,

But in their hue;

Maiden pinks, of odour faint,

Daisies smell-less, yet most quaint,

And sweet thyme true.

(Works of Beaumont and Fletcher, ed. Dyce (London, 1846), xi, 331.)

^{page 627 note 5} If one hesitate to trust the testimony of one poet against another, or even the evidence of one's proper nose, one may find impartial and scientific authority on the point from Ruel: In sativis plerique et punicei et versicolores flosculi spectant, sed omnes sine odore (De Natura Stirpium, 1543, p. 441); through Dalechamps et Moulin: ses fleurs …. ne sentient rien (Histoire générale des Plantes, Lyon, 1653, i, 742); down to Sowerby: Flowers various in size, inodorous (English Botany, London, 1797, vi, 424); and von Strautz: … das kleine duftlose Ding (Die Blume in Sage und Geschichte, Berlin, 1875, p. 225). Compare Cornhill Magazine, Jan., 1878, p. 64. Godwin pointed out the lack of odor as one of the defects “supplied by the wantonness of the poet's fancy” (Life of Chaucer, ed. 1803, ii, 349).

^{page 628 note 1} See, for the principle, a superb parallel in Neckam, De Laudibus Divinæ Sapientiæ, v, 931-48. The feeling is closely related to that involved in the rise of flower nomenclature itself for women, as Langlois gives it: Au moyen age surtout …. on n'aurait pas compris qu'une belle femme eût un nom disgracieux. Le trouvère, qui, avec une certaine naïveté, prétendait toujours que celle dont il célébrait les mérites fût la plus belle et la plus aimable ‘qui onques de mère fust née,’ lui cherchait un nom digne d'elle, un nom qui flattat l'oreille par la douceur de sa pronunciation et l'imagination par l'idée qu'il évoquait d'un objet ou d'une qualité aimiables. Certains noms de fleurs …. réunissaient cette double qualité, c.—Origines et Sources du Roman de la Rose (Paris, 1891), 38-9. See the whole interesting passage.

^{page 628 note 2} Dit de la marguerite, p. 123. Cf. further: Dès que mon œil la vit premièrement Et je senti son odour doucement (p. 125); and also: Sa douce odeur qui de loing m'est présente (p. 125); et qui la sent (p. 125); etc. Skeat (Oxford Chaucer, iii, xxxi) has pointed out a parallel between B. 53-55 (though B. 123-4 is much closer) and the lines immediately preceding that cited in the text from Machault:

Toutes passe, ce m'est vis, en colour;

Et toutes ha surmonté de douçour.

Ne comparer

Ne se porroit nulle à li de colour.

^{page 629 note 1} Compare with this the interesting transfer to an earthly mistress (already noted, p. 625) of the conventions hitherto attaching to the Virgin.

^{page 629 note 2} The phrases themselves, “la flour des flours,” “la flour sus trestoute aultre flour,” etc. (see p. 614, n. 3), are cases of such inheritance. See, for instance, La Patenostre d'Amours (Barbazan, Fabliaux et Contes, Paris, 1808, iv, 442):

Voluntas tua. S'est enclose

M'amor en vous: comme la rose

Est sor toutes flors la plus bele,

Ausi estes-vous, Damoisele,

De toutes puceles la flor, etc. (ll. 37-41.)

So also Li Contes de la Rose, in Dits et Contes de Baudouin de Condé (ed. Scheler, Brussels, 1866), i, 145: Bose est sor toutes flors la fine. Compare the line from the Carmen de Rasa quoted in Langlois, Origines et Sources du Roman de la Rose (Paris, 1891), p. 45:

Vidi florem floridum, vidi florum florem

(Carmina Burana, Stuttgart, 1847, No. 50, p. 141); and the “Vale, flos florum!“of ib., No. 57, p. 145; cf. No. cxlviii, p. 53. One recalls, too:

Ut rosa flos florum

Sic Arthurus rex regum.

^{page 629 note 3} Bartsch, Le lang, et la litt. françaises (1887), 610; see also Langlois, op. cit., 44.

^{page 630 note 1} For example, Baudouin de Condé, op. cit., i, 146; Voir Dit, ll. 992-4.

^{page 630 note 2} A corresponding transfer is possibly seen in the “winter and summer” phrases already discussed on p. 617, n. 1. Compare the following passages quoted in Langlois, op. cit., 34:

Qu'il i avoit tous jours plenté

De flors, et yver et esté (R. R., 1409-10);

Fuelles et flors ont tos tans li ramier ….

Ja par ivier n'aront nul destorbier.

(Fablel dou dieu d'Amours, p. p. A Jubinal, Paris, 1834, p. 15.)

In this case, however, it is more likely that we have a genuine observation of the actual persistence into winter of the flower.

^{page 630 note 3} Pastourelle, xvii, 66 (ii, 345).

^{page 630 note 4} No. 539, 1. 16 (iii, 380).

^{page 630 note 5} Ll. 645 (ii, 205).

^{page 631 note 1} The reading is that of the Fairfax and Tanner mss. The Trinity College and Arch. Seld. mss. read floures (flouris). See A Parallel-Text Edition of Chaucer's Minor Poems (Chaucer Soc.), p. 257. On the superior value of the Fairfax and Tanner mss. as authorities for the text, see Bilderbeck, Chaucer's Legend of Good Women (London, 1902), p. 49; Skeat, Oxford Chaucer, III, l-li, cf. xlviii; cf. Globe Chaucer, xlvi.

^{page 631 note 2} Altenglische Sprachproben, Wörterbuch (Berlin, 1885), ii, 143, s.v. flouroun.

^{page 631 note 3} Middle-Eng. Dic., ed. Bradley (Oxford, 1891), 230, s.v. flouroun.

^{page 631 note 4} s. v. fleuron.

^{page 631 note 5} “Ornement en forme de fleur,” Godefroy, ix, 629.

^{page 631 note 6} “Une couronne d'or a douze florons“(21 août, 1384, Test, chirog., A. Douai); “Nostre bonne couronne a esté desmenbree et les flourons d'icelle bailles en gaijes” (25 mai, 1413, Ord., x, 92)—both cited by Godefroy. See the examples in Littré, ii, 1700, s. v. fleuron 1dg, Hist. xiv^e s.

^{page 632 note 1} Ste Palaye, vi, 235-6, s. v. fleuron; Godefroy, iv, 32, s. v. fleuron; Littré, ii, 1700, s. v. fleuron 5dg.

^{page 632 note 2} The dictionaries give no example, unless one include the passage from Watriquet de Couvin, ed. Scheler, p. 101, cited in Ste Palaye, vi, 239, s. v. florin 3.

^{page 632 note 3} ix, 629: “Un grant dragouer, fait dessuz et par le pié en maniere d’ une rose, et es florons d'icelle rose a esmaux a plusieurs bestelettes” (Invent. du due d'Anjou, ndg. 639).

^{page 632 note 4} Littré, ii, 1700, 4dg. Cf. Rousseau, Lettres élémentaires sur la Botanique, Lettre vi, Oeuvres (Paris, 1891), vi, 48-49.

^{page 632 note 5} l. 166 (ii, 214).

^{page 632 note 6} Ll. 187-190 (ii, 215).

^{page 632 note 7} See, in Rousseau's delightful paragraph on the daisy in the sixth of the Lettres eléméntaires already referred to, the following: Arrachez une des folioles blanches de la couronne, vous croirez d'abord cette foliole plate d'un bout à l'autre; mais regardez-la bien par le bout qui étoit attaché à le fleur, vous verrez que ce bout n’ est pas plat, mais rond et creux en forme de tube, et que de ce tube sort un petit filet à deux cornes: ce filet est le style fourchu de cette flour,” etc.; cf. Ellacombe, op. cit., 374. See also, in the absence of the flower itself (remembering that our so-called American daisy is not Chaucer's daisy—Bellis perennis—at all), such figures of the floron with its little “dart” as those in Baillon, Dict. de Botanique (Paris, 1876), I, 397, or Britton and Brown, Illus. Flora of U. S. and Canada (N. Y., 1898), iii, 350 (Fig. 3724). The passage also makes clear a line in the balade of the Paradys d’ Amours that led Kervyn de Lettenhove astray in his Froissart (i, 135-6; ii, 264-5):

Deus coeurs navrés d'une plaisant sajette (l. 1648).

^{page 633 note 1} It is of course true, from the very nature of the case, that Chaucer's word has also the meaning assigned to it by Mätzner, Stratmann, and Godefroy; but that has nothing to do with the specific shape of the Blumenwerk. Moreover, it is distinctly said (ll. 223-4) that

…. “the whyte coroun, above the grene,

Made hir lyk a daysie for to sene”—

which would not so clearly be the case on the supposition of a mass of smaller flowers. As for ll. 221-2—

For of o perle fyne, oriental,

Hir whyte coroun was y-maked al—

the meaning is not affected by the interpretation given. For while, in a poem where daisies “surmounten pleynly alle odoures,” pearls may certainly be rendered tractable and the splendid hyperbole of a single pearl admitted, it seems, none the less, more reasonable to take “o“as here meaning “one in kind; the same in quality or nature” (New Eng. Dic. s. v. one, 13), and accordingly to picture the “whyte leves” as inlaid in the ordinary fashion with many pearls of one fineness. See K. T., 154: Bothe in oon armes; Latimer, 5th Sermon before Edw. VI (Arber), 149: They are all one apples, etc.

^{page 634 note 1} It should be added, in connection with the side of the subject we are leaving, that there is one quality of the daisy on which the French poets lay stress—namely, its medicinal virtue—which Chaucer seems to have ignored. Deschamps refers to it:

De qui vertu puet santé recevoir

Tous langoreux (Lay de Franchise, ll. 62-3).

Machault seems even to give voice to the well-known belief that holding the daisy in the hand had medicinal efficacy (see Morley, Eng. Writers, v, 134):

Et qui la tient, il ne puet mal avoir (p. 124),

and in English there is an interesting reference in point in the Boke of Cupide, ll. 241-5 (ed. Vollmer, p. 41):

‘Yee? use thou,’ quoth she, this medecyne,

Every day this May, er that thou dyne:

Goo loke upon the fresshe flour daysye;

And thogh thou be for wo in poynt to dye,

That shal ful gretly lyssen the of thy pyne.

Anyone who wishes orientation in this general field without turning over for himself the curious and fascinating pages of the pre-Linnaean herbalists—Ruellius, Mattioli, Turner, Parkinson, Ray—will find it most quickly in Zedler's Grosses vollständiges Universal Lexicon (Halle u. Leipzig, 1733), in the third of the sixty-four volumes which fulfil the promise of its name, pp. 1060-62. Among the older writers themselves, perhaps the fullest are John Parkinson's Theatrum Botanicum, The Theater of Plantes (London, 1640), p. 532, and, by the same King's Herbarist, that delightful work whose title plays upon his name, the Paradisi in Sole, or, A Garden of all sorts of pleasant flowers which our English ayr will permitt to be noursed up (London, 2d impress, 1656), 320-23, and the reprint (London, 1904) of the ed. of 1629, pp. 320-23; Bauhin, Historia Plantamm Universalis (Ebroduni, 1651), iii, 111-15; Turner's New Herball (1551), f. 11. Morley's enticing reference (Eng. Writers, v, 134) to Raymond Minderer's Medicina Militaris (1634) pp. 57-60, I have not been able to verify.

^{page 636 note 1} Ll. 1-23.

^{page 636 note 2} Ll. 27-32.

^{page 637 note 1} All these lines are quoted or characterized elsewhere in this paper, and may be found as follows: ll. 33-39, on p. 601, n. 3; ll. 40-43, on p. 601, n. 3; ll. 44-50, on p. 615; l. 52, on p. 621; ll. 53-61, on p. 639; ll. 62-3, on p. 634, n. 1; ll. 63-5, on p. 630.

^{page 637 note 2} See Neilson, Court of Love, 144.

^{page 637 note 3} See ib., index, s. v. Dream-setting.

^{page 637 note 4} The long description, for instance, of the birds, “et li deduis a celles et a ceaulx Qui la furent” (ll. 101-115); and the particularly vivid description of the freshness of the grass (139-143). The setting of the action is given in ll. 66-143.

^{page 639 note 1} See p. 607 for the lines. For like use of Robin and Marion again, see No. 315 (iii, 1).

^{page 639 note 2} Bech noted this difference, without knowing the parallel in Deschamps: “Unser dichter ist sich aber zugleich der verschiedenen stellung bewusst, die er in der verehrung des massliebchens jenen leuten [i. e., den lyrischen dichtem] gegenüber einnimmt. Bei ihm ist nicht das massliebchen das sinnbild der liebe und der geliebten (vgl. ten Brink a. a. o.), sondern er personifiziert es als die tugendhafteste frau aus dem alterthum” (Anglia, v, 357).

^{page 639 note 3} Neilson, Court of Love, 145. The italics are mine.

^{page 640 note 1} Ll. 53-61. Compare, in illustration of Deschamps's statement, the following descriptions of robes, armor, or jewels from the Itinéraires de Philippe le Hardi: quatre demi corps …. frettés de fort or soudés et ouvrés d'or de Chipre dessus, en chaque losange un P, et en l'autre une toffe de marguerites (p. 530, under 1389); un autre pourpoint de veluau …. estoit couvert de perles. Il y avoit 40 soleils d'or à ce pourpoint et 46 fleurs d'or esmailliées de bleu, et en chaque fleur une clochette d'or en façon de marguerite (ib. 530); Les dits harnois tout semés de marguerites (ib. 533, under 1390); un fermail d'or d'une marguerite et une brebis à quatre rubis, un saphir, six perles (ib. 542, under 1392). It is interesting to note that the last entry, in a list of New Year's gifts of the Duke of Bourgogne, occurs between the names of Guillaume de la Trémouille and Ellion de Neillac.

^{page 640 note 2} It is perhaps worth while to call attention, also, to the interesting parallel to the kernel of Alceste's plea for Chaucer (B. 412-13), found at the close of Deschamps's Lay amoureuse, ii, 193 ff. (No. 306), ll. 275 to end, esp. ll. 295-8.

^{page 641 note 1} Professor Kittredge, in Mod. Philol., i, p. 6: “If the manuscript which Deschamps sent to Chaucer contained the poems on the Flower and the Leaf, may not Chaucer have replied by sending him the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women, or, indeed, the whole Legend, so far as it was ever completed?”

^{page 641 note 2} Geschichte, ii, 199. “Dies ist nun zwar,” he continues, “wie es scheint, nicht geschehen.” This last statement, however, as well as Professor Lounsbury's remark that “to him [Deschamps] not a single line of the English poet has so far been traced” (Studies, ii, 217), seems no longer warranted by the facts.

^{page 641 note 3} No. 285 (ii, 138), 1. 10; cf. ll. 22-27. Is it too much to suggest, in this connection, that Chaucer may have had Deschamps's characterization of himself in mind, when he put into the mouth of the Clerk of Oxford the famous lines which speak of

“Fraunceys Petrark, the laureat poete

…. whos rethoryke sweete

Enlumined al Itaille of poetrye,

As Linian dide of philosophye”? (E. 31-4.)

Deschamps's lines to Chaucer, it will be remembered, are as follows:

O Socrates plains de philosophie,

Seneque en meurs et Anglux en pratique,

Ovides grans en ta poeterie,

Bries en parler, saiges en reihorique,

Aigles treshaultz, qui par ta theorique

Enlumines le regne d'Eneas. (ll. 1-6.)

^{page 642 note 1} The parallelism between these opening lines and those of The Book of the Duchesse was first pointed out by Sandras, Étude (1859), p. 90.

^{page 642 note 2} The dispute as to whether Froissart or Chaucer was the borrower of this name has been finally settled by Professor Kittredge in the article in Englische Studien, xxvi, 321-36—a conclusion which makes it certain that Chaucer knew, and in 1369 had used, the Paradys d'Amours.

^{page 643 note 1} The situation recalls very vividly Chaucer's picture of the “man in blak,” in the Book of the Duchesse, 445 ff.

^{page 644 note 1} “And she was clad in real habit grene,” B. 214; …. “ladyës nyntene In real habit,” B. 283-4. The quotations which follow from the Prologue, in connection with the outline of the Paradys, are rather to keep in mind the general parallelism of the two poems, than to imply, in any given case, a specific borrowing on Chaucer's part.

^{page 644 note 2} Compare the charge of trespass on Love's territory, and that of his flower, brought against Chaucer by the god of Love in B. 310 ff.

^{page 644 note 3} Compare the passage in B. ending with ll. 403 ff:

And if so be he may him nat excuse,

But asketh mercy with a dredful herte, etc.

^{page 645 note 1} Cf. B. 498 ff:

‘Wostow’ quod he, ‘wher this be wyf or mayde,

Or quene, or countesse, or of what degree?

And I answerde, ‘nay, sir, so have I blis,

No more but that I see wel she is good.'

‘That is a trewe tale, by myn hood,’

Quod Love, ‘and that thou knowest wel, pardee,

If hit be so that thou avyse thee.

…………………

And I answerde ageyn, and seyde, ‘yis,

Now knowe I hir!’ etc.

^{page 646 note 1} Cf. B. 518 ff:

…. And is this good Alceste,

The dayeseye, and myn owne hertes reste?

Now fele I wel the goodnesse of this wyf,

…………………….

Hir grete bountee doubleth hir renoun!

^{page 646 note 2} Cf. B. 330: That is an heresye ageyns my lawe.

B. 336: For, thogh that thou reneyed hast my lay.

^{page 647 note 1} Cf. B. 368: Or him repenteth utterly of this.

^{page 647 note 2} Cf. B. 53: As she, that is of alle floures flour, etc.

^{page 648 note 1} Compare the passage in the Book of the Duchesse beginning with line 348.

^{page 648 note 2} It is worth noting again that we have here a reference to Troilus as a lover—heading, indeed, the list of lovers—before 1369. See Tatlock in Mod. Phil, i, 323, n.

^{page 648 note 3} For the significance of the occurrence of these names, see Englische Studien, xxvi, 330 ff.

^{page 649 note 1} Cf. B. 160-3:

Al founde they Daunger for a tyme a lord,

Yet Pitee, through his stronge gentil might,

Forgaf, and made Mercy passen Right.

^{page 651 note 1} Neilson, Court of Love, p. 228.

^{page 652 note 1} See p. 644.

^{page 652 note 2} See p. 646.

^{page 652 note 3} See p. 644.

^{page 652 note 4} See pp. 645-6.

^{page 652 note 5} See p. 647.

^{page 652 note 6} See p. 650.

^{page 653 note 1} See p. 648.

^{page 653 note 2} Ib., note 1.

^{page 653 note 3} pp. 645-6.

^{page 653 note 4} “The Nature and Fabric of The Pearl” (Pubs. Med. Lang. Assoc., xix, 179).

^{page 654 note 1} “Where the poet distinctly says, on the appearance of the visitant: “I knew hyr wel, I hade sen hyr ere, etc.” (ed. Gollancz, stanza 14).

^{page 654 note 2} Where the author merely wonders, asks, and has reply. See ed. Skeat (Oxford, 1886), i, 20 ff; Schofield, loc. cit.

^{page 654 note 3} Where the poet marvels who the woman is, turns to Sir Comfort, asks, and is answered. See Percy Folio ms. (London, 1868), iii, 49 ff; Schofield, op. cit. 179, n. 2, 196.

^{page 654 note 4} Where the question is put by Philosophy herself, but the denial is absent. See particularly Chaucer's translation, Bk. i, Prose ii and iii; Schofield, loc. cit.

^{page 654 note 5} See p. 642, n. 2.

^{page 654 note 6} Even should a parallel elsewhere be found for the heightening of the situation, the addition of the situation itself to the large number of similar groupings of conventions common to the two poems, would still have evidential value.

^{page 655 note 1} For discussion of this contradiction, see, especially, Binz, Anglia, Beiblatt, xi, 232-4.

^{page 655 note 2} As Professor Kittredge has pointed out to me.

^{page 655 note 3} The situation in A. will be discussed later.

^{page 656 note 1} See B. 247-8: And therfor may I seyn, as thinketh me,

This song, in preysing of this lady fre.

So sharp is the interruption as to lead Dr. Mather, for instance, to speak of the poet as singing the balade “to himself, we must suppose” (Prologue, Knight's Tale, etc., p. xxv). And how else, indeed, can it well be taken?

^{page 656 note 2} See B. 270-1: This balade may ful wel y-songen be,

As I have seyd erst, by my lady free, etc.

^{page 656 note 3} The change in the balade of the Prologue once rendered necessary by the previous use of the material of Froissart's balade, the new form adopted by Chaucer belonged, as we should expect, to a well-known type. See, for instances, in addition to the parallel referred to by Mr. Skeat (Oxford Chaucer, iii, 298; now printed in Deschamps, Oeuvres, x, xlix), the following in Deschamps: No. 313 (ii, 336, ll. 17 ff.); No. 546 (iii, 389); No. 651 (iv, 110); No. 778 (iv, 279); No. 1274 (vii, 13-14); etc. Compare, for a parallel case, the manner in which Chaucer, after he had used, in the opening stanzas (1-6) of Bk. III of the Troilus, the material of Troilus’ song found in Filostrato, iii, stanzas 74-9, substituted for the already used stanzas of the Filostrato, when he finally came to Troilus’ song, a paraphrase of Boethius ii, metre 8 (Troilus, iii, 1744-68).

^{page 657 note 1} The variant stanza is given in Oeuvres, ed. Scheler, i, 368-9; cf. n, 371.

^{page 657 note 2} B. 537 ff.

^{page 657 note 3} B. 554 ff.

^{page 657 note 4} B. 537-9; cf. ten Brink, in Eng. Stud, xvii, 16 ff.

^{page 657 note 5} B. 554 ff.

^{page 658 note 1} But what becomes, there will be those who ask, of the originality of the Prologue—particularly of the famous and beautiful lines in celebration of the daisy itself? What of the effect upon one's feeling for the beauty of the poet's work? The question is a fair one; and yet perhaps it cannot be too often said that facts like these “forbode not any severing of our loves.” The difficulty back of such a question lies in this—that one persists in bringing modern preconceptions to a mediæval case; that to times when property-rights in other men's work were literally “free as the road, as large as store,” one keeps applying what are to-day the inexorable implications of mine and thine. So soon as one comes to see that for the older literature the question of the source of its material has, beside the imaginative handling of it, absolutely no ethical and only indirectly any aesthetic significance, so soon is one rewarded for the possible relinquishment of one delight, by the more habitual sway of a larger and certainly a truer sense of what originality really is. These things are truisms—but truisms, perhaps, rather in theory than application.

^{page 659 note 1} B. 40: Now have i than swich a condicioun.

A. 40: “therto this”

^{page 659 note 2} See pp. 613-15. The italics are there omitted to avoid confusion in comparing with the French. The word-order differs in A. 56 and B. 54.

^{page 660 note 2} There are other evidences in the passage of close and careful revision. The change already noted (p. 659, n. 1) from “than swich a” (B. 40) to “therto this” (A. 40) avoids the awkward phrase “Now have i than“etc., as well as the repetition of “than” in the next line but one. The substitution of “this flour” (B. 48) for “these floures” (A. 48) obviates the ambiguity of “it” in the succeeding line, and also brings A. 48 into agreement with A. 42, as contrasted with the divergence of the corresponding lines in B. Moreover, while Deschamps's contrast between obscur (“derknesse,” B. 63) and clarté (“brightnesse,” B. 64) is in its general sense retained in A. 53-4 (part, now, of the definite time-order of A.), his phraseology is no longer followed (p. 615, n. 3)—precisely the sort of change we should expect where a passage written with the eye on a foreign original is later revised with the eye on its relations to its own context. This change, on revision, away from conformity with the wording of the original and into conformity with the English context seems to have taken place in scores of instances in Chaucer's revision of the Troilus. See, for a few easily accessible examples, the half-dozen instances given in the Globe Chaucer, in the marginal notes to Troilus i, 83, 85, 111, 124, 442, 546. Others are cited in the report of a paper by Professor W. S. McCormick, in the Academy, 21 Dec., 1895 (No. 1233), p. 552. A set of the proof-sheets there referred to as containing the fuller list is in the Harvard Library. To enter further into the parallels for the present purpose, however, would be to anticipate the results of Dr. Tatlock's investigations for the Troilus, soon to be published.

It is true that A. 58 introduces a new detail—“As wel in winter as in somer newe”—which parallels the marguerite poems. This is, however, but one such instance in A. against all those pointed out for B.; it rounds out, as we have seen, a definite movement in time; and it is not a verbal parallel at all—unless, indeed, we assume that it is borrowed from the Plaidoirie (see p. 600, n. 6), written, according to Gröber, in 1392, and accordingly among the poems which in 1394 Froissart brought back with him to England and presented to King Richard (see Kervyn de Lettenhove, Chroniques, i, i, 374 ff.; Darmesteter, Froissart, 133 ff.). See also p. 617, n. 1. It should be observed, moreover, that the change noted does away with the three-fold repetition of “ever” in B. 55-7.

^{page 662 note 1} See pp. 611-12.

^{page 663 note 1} See B. 73 = A. 61; B. 77 = A. 65; B. 79-81 = A. 67-69.

^{page 663 note 2} Gower, Confessio Amanits, viii, 2435-7.

^{page 663 note 3} With this interpretation harmonize the changes in A. 69-70, which not only eliminate the pronoun of the second person, but actually include the substance of the omitted couplet, B. 71-2—

To forthren me somewhat in my labour,

Whether ye ben with the leef or with the flour—

and give, as will be seen at a glance, by the inclusion of both leaf and flower instead of flower alone (as in B. 82) the link needed for the immediately following lines of A., now to be considered.

^{page 664 note 1} It is of course possible to say that the one and a half lines of B. represent a condensation of the two and a half lines of A., in order to avoid this very repetition; but it is a little complicated to suppose that Chaucer would at the same time so construct the preceding paragraph in B.—which is not found in A. at all, except that B. 180, 182 correspond to A. 90, 92—as to have it end in the middle of a couplet with the same rhyme.

^{page 665 note 1} Had the two passages not been separated, in the parallel printing of the two versions, by more than one hundred lines, the fact could scarcely have escaped earlier notice. With it should be compared the somewhat parallel and very suggestive case in A. 341-2 = B. 363-4, where bokes in A. stands for thinges in B. It will be noticed that in the preceding line in A. the specific “translate a thing” stands for the general “doon hit” of B., where “hit” has no antecedent whatever save “al this,” nineteen lines back (B. 344). Assume the change of B. 363 to A. 341, in order to supply a definite antecedent (as in the parallel case discussed on p. 678, n. 4), and the change of thinges to bokes is also rendered necessary to avoid repetition of the word. Assume the opposite change—that is, from antecedent to no antecedent!—and there is still no reason why the specific bokes should become the general thinges. It is only fair to add that the reverse change occurs in A. 330 = B. 354, where, however, corresponding fairness will probably admit that thing is, for its particular context, more definite than soun. With the passages just discussed should be compared the evidence submitted on pp. 661, n. 2; 675, n. 1, end; and 680, n. 1.

^{page 666 note 1} It will be sufficient here to refer to other well-known statements of the view—which, so far as I know, has never met opposition—that Alcestis represents Queen Anne: ten Brink, Studien, 147-50; Geschichte, ii, 113, 116; Koch, Chronology, 44-5, 52; Düring, Geoffrey Chaucers Werke (Strassburg, 1883), i, 268, 280-1; Bech, Anglia, v, 355; Furnivall, Trial Forewords, 106; Pollard (cautiously) Chaucer (Literature Primers), 95-6; Globe Chaucer, xlv; Mather, The Prologue, The Knight's Tale, etc., (1899), xxiii, xxvii; Snell, The Fourteenth Century (1899), 308; The Age of Chaucer (1901), 187-8; Bilderbeek, Chaucer's Legend of Good Women (London, 1902), 85 and passim; etc.

^{page 666 note 2} Oxford Chaucer, iii, xix, xxii.

^{page 666 note 3} Oxford Chaucer, iii, xxii.

^{page 667 note 1} Oxford Chaucer, iii, xxiii; cf. xxi: “The lines in which ‘the queen’ is expressly mentioned [italics mine] occur in the later version only.” Add Bilderbeck's statement, in his suggestive study just referred to, p. 85, that Chaucer in B. “justifies the introduction of the balade by saying that it is applicable to his ‘lady souereyne,’ an expression which, neither literally nor metaphorically, can be regarded as an appropriate description of the relations of Alcestis to the poet. Again, in lines 82-93 of the revised version, the daisy, which in the fable symbolizes Alcestis, is described as the flower which the poet both loves and dreads, and to which he is ever ready to render obedient service. Here, again, the poet's meaning, if his language is applied only to the daisy or to Alcestis, is far from clear. On the other hand, everything becomes intelligible if we assume that the poet intends both daisy and Alcestis to serve but as a veil to the identity of good Queen Anne.”

^{page 667 note 2} Skeat, op. cit., iii, xxiv. Lydgate's statement that Chaucer wrote the Legend “at the request of the quene,” is also adduced (ib., xx).

^{page 667 note 3} Ib., xxiv.

^{page 667 note 4} Op. cit., pp. 85-7.

^{page 668 note 1} “Ob die neunzehn Hofdamen Alcestes ihre Urbilder in der Umgebung der Königen hatten …. lasst sieh nicht feststellen.—Düring, op. cit., i, 282.

^{page 668 note 2} That is no longer strictly true! For just as this article goes to the printer, comes a letter to the Nation, which, put on its inferences, amounts to the conjecture that the nineteen ladies were suggested by the “hundred and forty and four thousand sealed out of every tribe of the children of Israel,” and the “tras of women” by the “great multitude which no man could number …. standing before the throne and before the Lamb,” in the seventh chapter of the Apocalypse ! The “hymn sung by Chaucer's good women” (i. e. B. 296-9), moreover, is suggested by the “Salvation to our God which sitteth upon the throne,” of the same chapter—although “a closer parallel …. is found in Revelation xix. 1. “See the Nation for October 20, 1904 (Vol. 79, No. 2051), p. 315. That Chaucer knew the chapter in question, as Dr. Root points out, is indisputable. But aside from the fact that the common quality of definiteness (and the symbolic number of the Apocalypse is anything but definite at that!) is a rather slender thread on which to hang an association of the numbers 144000 and 19—aside from such an objection, the suggestion of the passage lies close at hand in the endlessly recurring convention, in the poems of the Court of Love genre, of the band of lovers about the god of Love—from which, for his present purpose, Chaucer eliminates the men. See, for instance, in the Parodys d'Amours itself, the “compagne grande De dames et de damoiselles,” and the “grant foison de damoiseaus” (ll. 957 ff., i, 29), from whom a smaller number—twenty-eight, it happens—are set apart by name (p. 648 of the present paper). Compare also Deschamps, Lay Amoureux (ii, 193 ff.), ll. 146 ff., where, besides the twenty-five lovers named, “de tous pays avoit gens.” If one feel urgently compelled to go farther afield, one can reduce by 13976 the discrepancy referred to above by suggesting the four and twenty elders of the twenty-ninth canto of the Purgatorio, coming—in procession, be it noted—crowned with flowers-de-luce along “i fiori e l'altre fresche erbette,” singing—of a woman, this time, whether it be the Virgin or Beatrice—

Benedette tue

Nelle figlie d’ Adamo, e benedette

Sieno in eterno le bellezze tue (ll. 85-7).

One might even add that Dante's procession later surrounds with a hymn a mystic tree (Canto xxxii, ll. 38 ff.), as Chaucer's procession surrounds with song the daisy-flower! But with the well-known convention of such poems as Chaucer is concerned with under his very hand, the seeming parallels in Dante—and in the Apocalypse—may well be looked upon as purely accidental.

^{page 670 note 1} Mod. Philol., i, pp. 327-8.

^{page 670 note 2} See especially pp. 619-21.

^{page 670 note 3} Apart from the doubtful propriety—to say nothing of the tact—involved in calling the Queen a god and the King a half-god, as Mr. Skeat's statement just quoted (p. 667) assumes, it has to be said, of course, that Chaucer did nothing of the sort. The “half goddes” of B. 387 refers to “his lordes” of B. 384.

^{page 670 note 4} See p. 621. Mr. Skeat might have noted, but did not, that in the Parlement of Foules, ll. 416, 422, the phrase is applied by the tercel to the formel, who does probably represent Anne of Bohemia. But there once more it stands merely for the conventional relation of lover and lady, as also in the Compleynt of Mars, l. 215, and Anelida and Arcite, l. 252. Nor is Chaucer's use of the phrase “love and drede” confined to the Prologue. It occurs in the Compleynte unto Pite, 1. 95, and in A Compleint to his Lady, 1. 84; cf. Troilus, n, 1080. It may be added that in the Compleynt unto Pite the lady is called “Benigne flour” (1. 58), while in the A. B. C. the phrase “O fresshe flour” is used of the Virgin (l. 159).

^{page 671 note 1} B. 53, 63-4, 84 (changed to ye or yow in the succeeding lines, 86-95, but still, of course, personal), 186-7. Note the constant recurrence, none the less, to the neuter pronoun—e. g., hit (56) only three lines after she (53); it (62), hit (65), but she, hir in the two lines between; etc. For similar instances see what Langlois, op. cit., 45, says of the Carmen de Rosa, and compare Skeat (Oxford Chaucer, iii, 292, on l. 52).

^{page 671 note 2} See pp. 614-15, 619.

^{page 671 note 3} See p. 614, n. 3, end.

^{page 671 note 4} I am indebted to Professor Kittredge for the further suggestion that the reminiscence of the death of Alceste for her husband—which, be it noted, the god of Love expressly mentions (B. 513-16)—that this reference to Alceste's choice “to goon to helle, rather than he” would not be, to say the least, the most tactful of allusions on Chaucer's part, if Alceste really stood for Anne, particularly when one remembers the passionate devotion of Richard to his wife. It will be recalled how characteristically this actually showed itself after her death, in 1394, in the destruction of the palace at Shene, in which she died (see Stow, Annales (1631), 308; Hist. Vitœ et Regni Ric. II, ed. Hearne, 125). Yet one is asked to believe that Chaucer, who certainly knew the feeling of the king towards his young Queen, none the less puts into his own mouth the words:

Now fele I wel the goodnesse of this wyf,

That bothe after hir deeth, and in hir lyf,

Hir grete bountee doubleth hir renoun! (B. 520-22.)

Parables are not, of course, to be put on all fours, but Chaucer was courtier enough, one may suppose, to recognize the wisdom of pruning, where parables have to do with reigning Queens, such exuberance of fancy as might leave embarassing interpretations open. (Is, for instance, B. 59—“Ther loved no wight hotter in his lyve”—conceivable, if the daisy is Queen Anne?) It is true—and this very plausible suggestion I owe to Mr. E. F. Piper—that Chaucer takes care at the beginning of the Prologue to state explicitly

That ther nis noon dwelling in this contree,

That either hath in heven or helle y-be (B. 5-6);

and that at the end the god of Love assures the poet:

Ne shal no trewe lover come in helle (B. 553).

Queen Anne's sensibilities, accordingly, need not have been offended; the De te, fabula! did not, in this respect, apply to her. But after all, is not that a little too much like giving Chaucer Bottom's rôle, as who should say (since to bring in—God shield us!—such a matter touching the Queen is a most dreadful thing): “Fair ladies, I would entreat you not to fear, not to tremble; my life for yours, if you think I mean that, it were pity of my life; no, I mean no such thing?”

Moreover, the advocates of the identity of Queen Anne and Alceste have failed to observe the rude blow dealt their theory in the change of a single word, whose significance nobody seems to have pointed out. Lines 439-440 of A., and 449-450 of B. are as follows (A in the left column):

Al lyth in yow, doth with him what Al lyth in yow, doth with him as yow leste, yow leste.

And al foryeve, with-outen lenger 1 al foryeve, with-outen lenger space. space.

In A., Alceste is to forgive the poet; in B., the god of Love. If one assume the priority of A., and ascribe the changes in B. to Chaucer's desire to emphasize more strongly the beneficent agency of the Queen, one has to face the remarkable fact that at the very climax of the action the hard-won forgiveness which in A. the god of Love, with exquisite tact, deputes to Alceste herself, in B. is actually taken from her, and granted Chaucer by the god alone! That scarcely seems to serve the purpose of bringing, as Skeat puts it, “the expression of gratitude …. out with sufficient clearness, at least with regard to the person to whom he owed the greatest debt” (see p. 666).

And finally, if Alceste is the Queen, it is passing strange that it should be from her lips that we have the couplet:

And whan this book is maad, yive hit the queue

On my behalfe, at Eltham, or at Shene (B. 496-7).

That the figure who symbolizes the Queen should thus sharply distinguish herself from her antitype, where the words might equally well have been spoken by the god of Love, involves a gratuitous confusion of the literal and the allegorical hard to believe on the part of so skilful an artist as Chaucer.

^{page 672 note 1} A Short History of English Literature (1900), p. 126.

^{page 673 note 1} Troilus v. 1777-8. The other reference (v. 1527-33) is identical in substance, and in part in phraseology, with B. 511-16:

As wel thou mightest lyen on Alceste,

That was of creatures, but men lye,

That ever weren, kindest and the beste.

For whanne hir housbonde wos in jupartye

To dye him-self, but-if she wolde dye,

She chees for him to dye and go to helle,

And starf anon, as us the bokes telle.

^{page 673 note 2} B. 518-19.

^{page 674 note 1} Anglia, v, 359; cf. Skeat, Oxford Chaucer, iii, 298.

^{page 674 note 2} Ll. 888 ff.; ed. Michel, i, pp. 29-30; see Oxford Chaucer, i, 130-1, for the original again, with the Chaucerian translation. Dr. Furnivall's delightful suggestion (Trial Forewords, 106) about Queen Anne in a green gown should not, in this connection, be overlooked.

^{page 675 note 1} They also involve the relations of the two versions. The sun, being one of Richard's devices, was, according to Bilderbeck, substituted in B. for the garland of A., out of compliment to him. But apart from the fact that the sun as a crown was not Richard's device, while it was a commonplace of mediæval art, a closer examination of the passage seems to point the other way. There is, to say the least, an odd mixture of the literal and the imaginative involved in the explanatory line:

In-stede of gold, for hevinesse and wighte (B. 231).

For if one takes the sun literally enough to abstract from it the uncomfortable heaviness and weight of gold, one is inevitably reminded of other qualities that the sun—thus brought into the realm of the literal— possesses, which might render uneasy the head that wore it. The line certainly seems to be one which mature consideration would excise rather than add. Moreover, in the two following lines of B. (232-3) it is the sun that crowns him which makes the face of the god shine so bright that Chaucer “wel unnethes mighte him beholde;” whereas in the corresponding lines of A (162-4), there is the magnificent identification, by effect, of the god's face itself with the blinding brightness of the sun, so that “a furlong-wey I mighte him not beholde.” (For “furlong-wey “referring to time, see B. 307, and compare “But at the laste“of A. 166). In a word, we have in A. a highly imaginative, in B. a thoroughly conventional description.

As for the lilies, Bilderbeck explains (op. cit., 103) what he regards as their omission in B.—which he refers to the year 1390 (op. cit., 104)—on the ground that a three years’ truce had been concluded with France in 1389; whereas in 1385 Richard was at war with France. This rests—even if one grant the identification of Richard and the god of Love—on the curious assumption that during a truce Richard waived all claim to the crown of France.

The passage should not be left without noting the fact, pointing once more to the priority of B., that by the substitution of gan he (A. 168) for saugh I (B. 236) the repetition of the latter in B. within three lines (see B. 234) is avoided; as A., by the change in 1. 160, had avoided the repetition of fret in B. 225 and 228.

^{page 676 note 1} For, after lapse of time, “wordes tho That hadden prys, now wonder nyce and straunge Us thinketh hem.”—Troilus, ii, 23-5.

^{page 676 note 2} This applies even to the omission of the beautiful passage borrowed from the Filostrato, which is not only, as we have already seen, rather out of harmony, in its references to the “derke worlde” and “sorowful brest,” with the mood of what precedes and follows it, but is also inconsistent with the compactness of structure which now characterizes A.

^{page 676 note 3} See pp. 631-4.

^{page 677 note 1} See pp. 631-4.

^{page 677 note 2} Compare the almost parallel instance, in the case of clarté and obscur, noted on pp. 615, n. 3, 661, n. 2.

^{page 677 note 3} A. 516-17; B. 528-9.

^{page 678 note 1} A New Herball (London, 1551), f. ii.

^{page 678 note 2} Lutcus et bellio pastillieantibus quinquatgenis quinis barbulis coronatur. Pliny, Nat. Hist., lib. xxi, 25 (8).

^{page 678 note 3} Interesting in this connection is Deschamps's balade, “Sur l'ordre de la couronne” (ii, 35, No. 212), with its “.xii. fleurs de grant auctorité.”

^{page 678 note 4} Two further details, which are independent of the French originals, must be added. Legouis—whose article, Quel fut le premier composé par Chaucer des deux prologues de la Légendes des Femmes Exemplaires (La Havre, 1900) I know, despite several attempts to secure the original, only in the reviews of Binz (Anglia, Beiblatt, xi, 231–7) and Koch (Eng. Stud. xxx, 456-8) and in a reference of Bilderbeck (op. cit. 77, n.)—Legouis seems to include among his arguments for the priority of A. the tweye of A. 346 = B. 366 (see Binz, op. cit., 236; Koch, op. cit., 457-8). Its reference in A. is clear from the couplet preceding; in B., however, one must go back 34 lines (and, it may be added, forward 74 lines, i. e. to B. 441) for mention of the tweye referred to. “Diese kleine unklarheit,” Legouis holds, “ist eben die folge der abkürzung von A. zu B.” “Das,” Binz remarks, “scheint an und für sich recht einleuchtend,” but suggests that the two lines may have fallen out of B. Such an assumption is, however, entirely unnecessary. For put the case that in B. Chaucer, writing currente calamo, forgot that what was all the while clear in his own mind had been allowed to drop for the moment from his reader's attention—a situation painfully familiar to all who write—and that on revision the slip was noted. The simple device of inserting the single couplet (A. 344–5) to supply the missing antecedent of “thilke tweyne” becomes at once self-explanatory.

Legouis seems also to use the absence from A. of the beautiful couplet B. 143-4 as an argument for the priority of the version which does not contain it. A glance, however, at the lines preceding and following the point in A. where we should naturally expect to find the couplet seems to show a different and interesting situation—giving us, apparently, a glimpse of Chaucer at work on his revision. For in carrying out the sort of condensation elsewhere noted (see p. 663, n. 3, for the compression of B. 71-2, 81-2 into the single couplet A. 69-70; p. 680, n. 1, for the compression of B. 202 and 211 into A. 106) part of the couplet—i. e. “on the braunches”—seems to have been already absorbed in A. 127. The disturbed condition of the text for A. 126-138—witness the emendations of the Globe and the Oxford editors—may be accounted for on the supposition that the revision was for some reason left at this point incomplete. The bearing, finally, of A. 544 = B. 578 has been elsewhere pointed out.

^{page 679 note 1} P. 635.

^{page 679 note 2} A. 90 really stands for all the first part of B., so far as that precedes the dream.

^{page 680 note 1} Note in the transposed paragraph, as further evidence for the priority of B., the elimination of the repetition of goon to reste (B. 198, 201) by the omission of B. 201, and of To seen this flour (B. 202, 211) by the fusion of the two lines into A. 106. Add the suppression of one occurrence of naked (B. 126, 129) by the change in A. 117. Note also that the fusion, just referred to, of B. 202 and 211 in A. 106 serves, with the addition of A. 105 (referring to A. 90), the necessary purpose of completing the couplet when the paragraph is transferred, since the paragraph as it stands in B. ends (with 211) in the middle of a couplet. If one compare these evidences of painstaking and minute revision with the similar instances cited on pp. 661, n. 2 and 665, n. 1, but one conclusion seems possible.

^{page 681 note 1} Eng. Stud. xvii., 16-17.

^{page 681 note 2} Cf. pp. 655-7.

^{page 681 note 3} This same instinct for unity is seen in the direct mention of Alceste, not only in the refrain of the balade in A., hut throughout that version from her first appearance. It readily explains, too, the transfer by the god of Love, in A. 440, of the grant of forgiveness from himself to Alceste—a transfer so difficult to account for on the other hypothesis (see p. 672, note). For the failure to remove, in revision, the discrepancy (already noticed on p. 654) involved in Chaucer's late recognition of Alceste, the reason probably lies in the fact that the revision after the first 390 lines of B., as a glance will show (see also Binz in Anglia, Beiblatt, XI, 233–4), was manifestly most perfunctorily carried out, so that either the discrepancy was overlooked, or, if noticed, was seen to involve a more extensive remodelling than Chaucer now cared to undertake, and was so allowed to stand. The important thing to bear in mind is that the blunder is common to the two versions.

^{page 682 note 1} Anglia, N. F. I., 175.

^{page 682 note 2} It is scarcely superfluous to note, perhaps, that the reference to the “observaunces” of the birds in B. 152—” Construeth that as yow list, I do no cure”—which to say the least is unnecessary, does not occur in A., although the rhyme-syllable is unchanged.

^{page 683 note 1} Eng. Stud. xvii. 15.

^{page 683 note 2} Ib. 13-23.

^{page 683 note 3} Ib. 195-200; Literaturblatt f. germ. u. rom. Philol., 1893, pp. 51-3.

^{page 683 note 4} Eng. Stud. xxii. 281.

^{page 683 note 5} The Prologue, The Knights’ Tale, etc. (1899) xxiii, n.

^{page 683 note 6} Eng. Stud. xxx. 456-8; Chronology of Chaucer's Writings, 81-7.

^{page 683 note 7} See p. 678, n. 4. According to Bilderbeck (op. cit., 77. n.), Legouis concludes that the B. text “offre des marques évidentes de progrès; il est plus plein, plus harmonieux, plus beau; il est litterairement plus parfait.” That the B. version has the note of freshness, of spontaneity, of composition con amore to a greater degree than A.—that it is even the more delightful version of the two—all will perhaps agree; but these are the very marks of a work written currente calamo, as against the firmer touch, the surer craftmanship, the more compact unity of A.

^{page 683 note 8} Op. cit., pp. 77-110.

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XIX.—The Prologue to the Legend of Good Women as Related to the French Marguerite Poems, and the Filostrato

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