I can speke lewedly to a le-wed

man "

Geoffrey Chaucer. By John Livingston Lowes. (Oxford University Press. 8s. 8d.) " No holder of an academic chair ever exerted himself with more benevolent solicitude to accommodate his learning to the capacity of his hearers." Thus comments Professor Lowes on that remarkable bird which whisked the exhausted Controller of Customs from Aldgate into heavenly regions, nearly six hundred years ago, to behold the whirling wicker house of Rumour with its thousand exits and entrances, that woven net to catch the wind. The Professor has taken Chaucer's learned and loquacious eagle as his model in these lectures delivered at Swarthmore College and dedicated to his " mayster dere," George Lyman Kittredge, Chaucerian scholar and interpreter. _ The lecture is the most difficult of all literary forms, except- ing only the sermon and the Platonic dialogue. As far as one can judge from the printed word, Professor Lowes combines the voracity and iron digestion of Saintsbury, the precise erudition and acumen..of W. P. Ker, with the inspiration of Raleigh, the polished ease of the President of Magdalen and the intimacy of Q. Chaucer is a subject admirably suited to him. Chaucer is more dearly loved across the Atlantic than in our own universities and schools. We might have anti.

cipated this book from some stimulating pages in Lowes's Convention and Revolt in Poetry, which give an inventory and pedigree of the Prioress's charms. It is admirably suited because Chaucer had " the same insatiable appetite for books and the same prehensile amalgamating memory " as the hero of the Road to Xanadu. Professor Lowes, with the wage of Patience on a monument, has pursued the game

method with Chaucer as with Coleridge. He starts, of course with the Divine Comedy, the Roman de la Rose and the Art of Love in his head. He has perused with unflagging attention and unenchanted eye. Machaut, Deschamps, Froissart, the Ovide Moralise ; St. Jerome, Pope Innocent, Boethius ; the Roman d'Eneas, the Roman de Thlbes, Li Hystere de Julius Caesar ; Bradwardine, Alanus de Insulis, Martianus Capella,

Theodulus, Macrobius on the Somnium Scipionis. Like Chaucer, like Coleridge, Professor Lowes never reads a book in vain. When he has a quest—and he always has—no treatise, allegory or mediaeval romance is too tedious or inter- minable for him. He is always in at the death of the blatant beast. He knows from experience that he may spring his quarry on the last page, in the ultimate stanza, and clutching the inviolable shade he perseveres. Again and again he shows us in what fields the poets gleaned the straw to make their bricks ; he shows us that straw as green and springing stalks of corn.

But a complete man—and only a complete man should meddle with Chaucer—must be more than a solitary academie," however worthy of his Chair. He must not only

,expound the Treatise of the Astrolabe, he must understand the Wife of Bath.

Every schoolboy knows that Matthew Arnold condemned Chaucer despite the grave and moral Wades, despite the close Of Troilus and Criseyde, for his lack of high seriousness. And .Arnold believed that poetry might be tested by the use of

touchstones, the samples as it were of the commercial traveller. His selection from Chaucer was misleadingly : " 0 martyr souded to virginitee,"

'yet surely this bears comparison with Arnold's favourite line : " And never lifted up &single stone "

which may be " serious " and " high " and " inevitable," but has not the Celtic magic " and the " lyrical cry." Why

did not Arnold quote :

" But, Lord exist whan that it remembreth me

Up-on my yowthe, and on my jolitee, It tikleth me aboute myn herte rote, Unto this day it dooth myn herte bote That I have had my world as in my tyme."

That sublime utterance of the Wife of Bath ranks with ..4` We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Shallow . . . And is Old Double dead ? "

" 0 yonge, freshe folkes, he and she," schoolboys and schoolgirls, to whom Chaucer spells " Higher Certificate " and

The Canterbury Tales a Holiday Task, here at last is a iner. curial delightful guide, touched with the estro of Chaucer, able like Chaucer to find learning not incompatible with life, ready to exclaim :

" whan that the month of May Is comen, and that I here the foules singe, Farewell my book and my dervoeioun."

Not a guide only but a means of transport ; one who like the eagle can speke lewedly to a lewed man, one who though we be " noyous " to carry will bear us lightly as a lark with academic " clawes stark."

The scheme of the lecture course must be briefly outlined. It is simple and complete. Professor Lowes first reveals the mediaeval world ; the world of alchemy and astrology and superstition, when planetary hours, and spheres, and signs of the Zodiac, and elements, and humours and mappamondes, and Anthropophagi, and steeds of brass and the Sangreal were what wireless, and relativity, and Mount Everest, and Karl Marx and psycho-analysis are today. Chaucer, like other novelists, Mr. Aldous Huxley, for instance, had great intel- lectual euriousity. The Professor then gives the familiar chapter on Chaucer as a man of affairs, and contrives to make the familiar new, The sequel, The World of Books, is pecu- liarly his own and makes one wish he would treat Shakespeare and Milton in the same way. The seventy pages that follow, with their careful and subtle analysis of the Book of the Duchess, the House of Fame and Troilus, are the heart—and head—of the course. And so we reach at last the Wife of Bath. Great men have said good things on the Canterbury Talcs from Dryden to Kittredge. Professor Lowes has less to add here, but the last lecture is as excellent as the first.

GEORGE RYLANDS.