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Cicero on Parnassus

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Charles Sears Baldwin
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Extract

Let me tell an old British tale in my own plain way; for I am unversed in ornaments of style. This is all that the Franklin's prologue means on its surface. The connotation beneath is inviting. Are “aventures,” “layes,” “rymeyed,” “instruments” intended precisely? How much grasp they suggest of early medieval poetic is perhaps beyond our determination. But the term “colours of rethoryk” occurs also in the Hous of Fame. The interlude before the Clerk's Tale has a sarcasm of the Host against these same “colours” in the same connection. The Squire's disclaimer has the same significant terms as the Franklin's, and the same point as the Clerk's reply to the Host. The satire in the Tale of the Nun's Priest on Geoffrey of Vinsauf confirms the suspicion that in all these passages Chaucer implies specific criticism of a certain later medieval poetic, the poetic current in the Latin manuals entitled poetria. For the language of the Franklin's prologue, in spite of his disclaimer, is literary. Chaucer knew as well as Shakspere that he who announces “a plain, unvarnished tale” may command a better art than the rhetoric that he disclaims. It is worth while to explore, therefore, the mention of rhetoric in connection with story-telling, the conjunction of Cicero and Parnassus. As Sir Thopas parodies not only the conventional motives of romance, but also particular faults in its conventional technic, so Chaucer's references to “colours of rethoryk,” instead of being taken as general disparagement of grandiloquence, may well be sounded for their particular significance. In any age, indeed, the man of letters contemplating the rules of his art laid down by the pedagogues is moved to sarcasm; but Chaucer's sarcasms may suggest specifically wherein the pedagogues that he knew went wide of the narrative art that he came to comprehend as artist and as critic. His reference in the House of Fame merely glances at “prolixitee.” The passages in the four Canterbury tales, ampler and more specific, together suggest that the application of “colours of rethoryk” to narrative is a perversion, that Cicero is out of place on Parnassus.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 42 , Issue 1 , March 1927 , pp. 106 - 112
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1927

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References

1 It is advanced, however, by Tatlock's interpretation of the evidence as suggesting rather Chaucer's adoption of the “lay” as a literary form than his use of a particular “lay” as a source (The Scene of the Franklin's Tale Visited, London, Chaucer Society, 1914).

2 E. Faral, Les arts poétiques du XIIe et du XIIIe siècle, pp. 52-54.

3 The “heigh style” in the Squire's joke may have the same reference.

Accordant to his wordes was his chere,

As techeth art of speche hem that it lere.

Albeit that I can nat soune his style,

Ne can nat climben over so heigh a style,

Yet seye I this, as to commune entente,

Thus muche amounteth al that ever he mente.

F. 103-108.

4 Baldwin, Ancient Rhetoric and Poetic, p. 56; Faral, op. cit., p. 86.

5 The doctrine of the poetriœ is conveniently summarized in Faral's admirable introduction.

6 If “endyteth” here also refers to dictamen, Chaucer is underlining Petrarch's rhetoric. But the word is not necessarily technical. It seems more probably specific in B 4397, for instance, than in A 1380.

7 B. 4537.

8 The reference to romance which follows the sarcasm of the Nun's Priest's rhetorical dilation of truisms suggests that here, too, as well as in the direct reference to Geoffrey, Chaucer was perhaps glancing at rhetorication of narrative.

Got woot that worldly joye is sone ago;

And if a rethor coude faire endyte,

He in a cronique saufly mighte it wryte,

As for a sovereyn notabilitee.

Now every wys man lat him herkne me.

This storie is also trewe, I undertake,

As is the book of Launcelot de Lake. B. 4396-4402.

Perhaps also he was thinking of Geoffrey's dilation on the instability of “worldly joye” (277-291, “Quid gaudia tanta”).

9 Nevertheless Geoffrey is added to Cicero and Vergil in an allusion to “colours” at the opening of the Court of Love, which Skeat places in the sixteenth century.

The blosmes fresshe of Tullius garden soote

Present thaim not my mater for to borne.

Poems of Virgil taken here no rote,

Ne crafte of Galfrid may not here sojorne. Skeat's Chaucer, vol. VII (Chaucerian and other pieces) xxiv, page 409, ll. 8-11.

For the persistence of rhetorication in poetic see D. L. Clark, Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance, New York, 1922 (Columbia University Press).

10 E.g., John of Garlandia, ed. Mari in Romanische Forschungen, 13 (1901-02): 900; Geoffrey of Vinsauf, (prose) Documentum, ed. Faral, op. cit., II.D.145. John has the Rota Virgilii, a diagram of the three styles, which is reproduced by Faral at page 87 of his introduction.

11 “O Veneris lacrimosa dies!” 375. Chaucer's reference is at B. 4531. The Pardoner's apostrophes (C 512, 534, 551, 895) are subtly tinged, as everything else that he says, with demagogy. Those of the Nun's Priest (B 4416, 4529), of course, are played flat. But in other places (E 2056, 2242, G 1076) Chaucer's use of this “colour” seems conventional.

12 The rehearsal of all the conventionally appropriate loci of description at the funeral of Arcite (A 2919-2966) sounds to modern ears impatient, if not sarcastic. But, after all, the whole long passage is the “colour” aposiopesis. The shorter aposiopesis in the Squire's Tale (F 63-75) suggests sarcasm less by itself than in its connection with lines 32-40 and 401-408 quoted above.