All the later major poets, and almost all distinguished English and American men of letters up to the first third of the twentieth century have made at least passing allusion to Chaucer. But it is not the purpose of the present volumes to collect such allusions, a task already superbly, though inevitably selectively, performed by Miss Spurgeon.Nor is it their purpose to reprint the very many modernisations, translations and imitations made over the centuries, which imply various critical views, but views that are more explicit elsewhere and whose bulk would have required impracticably vast volumes for relatively small critical return. The aim of the present volumes is to give a copious selection, including all the significant passages, of all the "critical" writings on Chaucer from his own day up to 1933. That date has been chosen, as the Introduction to Volume 2 more fully explains, as marking roughly the end of the tradition of the generally cultivated amateur critic and reader, who shared, usually unconsciously, the general tradition of Neoclassical, Romantic and Victorian premises about literature, with their social implications. This general tradition, as will be shown more fully below, began about the middle of the sixteenth century in England and became dominant with Dryden.

Chaucer's genius was recognised as outstanding even in his own day. Leaving aside the probable intention of honouring him by burial in Westminster Abbey, then normally reserved for royalty, what other English author has been so heartily praised by a French contemporary (No. 1)? It is worth glancing for comparison at the reputations of Chaucer's English contemporaries. Apart from Chaucer, only Lydgate and Gower attracted comment in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and they were often noticed mainly because of their association with Chaucer. From the seventeenth century until the middle of the twentieth Lydgate has been practically forgotten except, notably, by the poet Gray (No. 81). During the same period Gower slumbered on without being awakened even by Gray, though modern taste now places him above Lydgate and in a few respects not too far below Chaucer. Langland's "Piers Plowman", widely read at the end of the fourteenth century and in the fifteenth, was for some reason not printed by Caxton, who was otherwise so assiduous to preserve late medieval English culture. "Piers Plowman" was at last printed, probably for religious rather than literary reasons, in 1550, but only from the middle of the twentieth century has it been given the attention its greatness deserves. The "Gawain" -poet, as great a poet as Chaucer, though very different, survived from the fourteenth century in only one small MS., was unknown till the nineteenth century, and hardly discussed till the 1950s. Chaucer alone, from his own day onwards, has been accepted as a major English poet, and, understandably though erroneously, has very often been taken as the founding father of English literature, and the first refiner of our language. His work has been present as a general, much-enjoyed, if often little understood, possession of the English literary mind, solidly "there", since his own lifetime.

The tradition of commenting in reference to Chaucer is thus the only tradition of critical commentary in English that exists continuously from before the end of the sixteenth century, and it immediately reveals the remarkable change and innovation that began to take place around 1600 in England in the premises, expectations and theories held about literature. The change may be described as the change from Gothic to Neoclassical concepts of literature.

We are immediately in a difficulty here, because we owe most, if not all, of our ideas about what literature is, or should be, and the very idea of literary criticism and theory itself, to Neoclassicism; more strictly, to Humanism, i.e. the study of literae humaniores, "the more humane writings". In our era it was Humanism, and especially the Humanist scholars of Italy and France in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, who established the nature and importance of literature. Almost everything that it seems natural for normal twentieth-century liberal educated Westerners to say about literature, for example that it represents "reality", is "educative", and in some way "improving", and almost all our artistic criteria, derive specifically from Humanism. Naturally, not all Humanistic concepts were entirely original. Most were rooted in some aspect of medieval literature, in particular, medieval Latin literature, which itself was largely a product of the official ecclesiastical tradition, as well as heir to the prestige of ancient Roman literary culture. But even medieval Latin literature (in the sense of avowed verbal fictions) was not always highly thought of, especially as scholasticism became dominant from the beginning of the thirteenth century, and the vernacular was for long a poor relation of Latin.One of the great achievements of literary Humanism, reflected in the course of the criticism of Chaucer, was to raise the status of the vernacular, as of literature itself: a dual achievement to which, in England, Chaucer's own works also contributed.

But the very diversity of attitudes to Chaucer's works in the latter part of the sixteenth century reveals some of the dilemmas of Humanistic, or more conveniently named Neoclassical criticism, when confronted with a substantial body of vernacular literature composed with no regard for Neoclassical rules. The difficulty is not that Neoclassical rules were broken (though they constantly were), but that in the earlier tradition fundamental attitudes towards, and within, literature, were different. It is convenient to sum up the pre-Neoclassical attitudes as "rhetorical", typical of all sorts of traditional literature, including so-called "oral literature". The English segment of traditional literature which is represented by Chaucer's work is most conveniently called English Gothic literature, by analogy with the contemporary easily recognisable Gothic style in the visual and plastic arts, and like that style extending roughly from about 1200 to about the end of the sixteenth century.

"Rhetoric" is a wide and confusing term. It is partly a technical term, and largely, since about 1700, a term of abuse. Like the old soldier, it's dead but it won't lie down. The concept and practice of rhetoric are un-avoidable in language and above all in literature but they may well be misconceived, distorted or disregarded. The history of rhetoric has been well traced in general, and the criticism of Chaucer, amongst much other evidence, gives specific examples of its use or absence as a critical premise. As a technical term "rhetoric" may refer to the various treatises written from Classical Antiquity onwards, which in the Middle Ages degenerated into lists of verbal devices, with little (though still some) attention paid to underlying structural principle. It is easy to see how these, and even their sixteenth-century successors, came to be despised. Yet they offer a clue to a most important and until recently neglected aspect of language, its intrinsic vitality, its creative autonomy. Language, by elaboration, by choice of purely verbal resource, independent of external control, can be conceived as in itself a work of art. How this can be involves difficult questions of the relation of the universe of discourse to non-linguistic universes, and these cannot be examined here. Neoclassicism introduced a literalism of discourse, which denied its creative autonomy, subduing language (as far as it could) to a narrowly descriptive function. Since such literal description was plainly inadequate to convey personal feeling, Romanticism emphasised the expressive element through the speaker's or writer's own self -description. Accuracy and sincerity thus became important criteria. Of course these have their places in traditional pre-Neoclassical writing, since most writing is a multiple-level activity, but accuracy and sincerity are only part of a general creative linguistic effort which allows other effects too, such as word-play, hyperbole, proverbial (not personal) wisdom. This general creative linguistic effort is what is denoted by a "rhetorical", that is, traditional, way of writing. Failure to understand this underlies much modern misunder-standing of the Bible, Shakespeare, Chaucer. Our misun-derstanding may be partly excused by the lack of literary conceptualisation characteristic of traditional writers, and found even in the writers of technical rhetorical treatises, who were mostly men with a practical concern to teach the tricks of the trade. They were teaching how to generate verbal structures: "creative writing", in fact. The treatises themselves were never intended as manuals of criticism or of the theory of literature, and hardly enter into the history of the criticism of Chaucer (though cf. Brathwait, No. 55). The notions about literature and language that underlie the treatises on rhetoric do however underlie critical commentary up to the middle of the sixteenth century, when Neoclassical ideas begin to enter. If we are sympathetic to these rhetorical, traditional and Gothic premises about literature we can learn a good deal about Chaucer's poetry, English poetry and criticism, and the nature of literature itself.

The very first comment on Chaucer, by the contemporary French poet, Deschamps, emphasises Chaucer's variety. The warmest praise, if reiteration is any guide, is for Chaucer as a translator, and though there may be some French conceit in this, it accords well with the general medieval and indeed traditional sense, as implicit in medieval rhetoric, that a poet's greatness consists in his ability specifically to find words for matter which is already provided. Deschamps' praise of Chaucer as a man goes far beyond this, even taking hyperbole into account. Learned, scientific, good, practical, not too talkative: we are told that these were Chaucer's personal characteristics, though seen in his writing as well. As a poet, Chaucer is compared with Ovid, the master of pathos, of love, of comedy and witty verbal elaboration. Though both Chaucer and Ovid are extraordinarily creative and both in various ways may be said to teach, neither laid claim to the poet's sublime superiority of wisdom and morality over historian and philosopher, let alone over the non-writing part of humanity, which the noble Neoclassical ideal of Sidney and Milton asserted . . .

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