Hitherto we have known scarcely anything about the lives, and usually have not even known the names, of the writers in English verse and prose. About
The Morning Star of Song who made
His music heard below,
about Geoffrey Chaucer, we know more than we do of Shakespeare.
Chaucer is the earliest English poet who is still read for human pleasure, as well as by specialists in the studies of literature, language, and prosody. A few of his lines are part of the common stock of familiar quotations. Coming between two periods of literary twilight—the second saddened rather than cheered by notes more like those of the owl than of the lark and nightingale,—Chaucer is himself the sun of England during the age of the glory and decline of the Plantagenets. His "Canterbury Tales" show us the world in which he lived, or at least part of that world; his pilgrims are personages in that glorious pageant which Froissart painted—kings, ladies, nobles and knights in steel, or in velvet and cloth of gold; tournaments glitter in all the colours and devices of the heralds—while the horizon is dim with the smoke of burning towns and villages.
It is not really possible to say what conditions produce great poets: they may arise in times of peace or war; in times quiet or revolutionary; at prosperous Courts or in the clay-built cottages of peasants. At least Chaucer lived a long time in an age eagerly astir, lived through the light cast by the great victories of Edward III,—Crécy and Poitiers,—the years when London knew two[Pg 79] captive Kings, John of France and David of Scotland; the years when Edward turned away from the all-but conquered Scotland to fight the France which he could not conquer. Chaucer knew the Court triumphant, and the Court overshadowed by the discredited old age of Edward III, the fatal malady of the Black Prince, the troubles of the minority of Richard II, and the peasant rising of Wat Tyler. He had his part in the patronage of that art-loving King, by character and fate more resembling a Stuart than a Plantagenet; and he was in friendly relations with the rising House of Lancaster. He marked the dawn of the religious and social revolution in the doctrines of Wyclif and of the Lollards, the hatred of the rich and noble, the scorn of priests and monks and friars. He felt the poetic influences of France and Italy, and, if not in Italy, certainly in France, had poetic friends. He bore arms in France: in Italy and France he fulfilled diplomatic duties; at home he held a courtly place; he sat in Parliament; he was a complete man of the world and of affairs, as well as a man of learning and of letters. He was always of open, kind, and cheerful humour; still, when nicknamed "Old Grizzle" by his friends, dipping a white beard contentedly in the Gascon wine; still "not without the lyre," not a deserter of the Muse. His portrait, as Old Grizzle, white-bearded and white-haired, a rosary in his hand, shows a face refined, kindly, and humane.
The father of the poet, John Chaucer, was a citizen of London, a prosperous vintner, or wine-merchant. The date of the poet's birth is unknown, that he died an old man in 1400 is certain. His birth year was for long given as 1328, when his father was scarcely 16, and was unmarried. The date 1328 for the poet's birth must be wrong, and the year 1340 is uncertain. In a trial of 1386, to decide whether the Scropes or Grosvenors had the better right to blazon the famous "Bend Or," Chaucer was described as "of the age of forty years and more, having borne arms for twenty-seven years". "And more" is vague, we cannot be certain that it means "just over forty years of age," though that (as far as I have observed) is the usual meaning in old records of ages of witnesses. In some cases, on the other hand, they are given most incorrectly. Chaucer's own[Pg 80] remarks about his "eld" in late poems, tell us little; at 40 Thackeray wrote of himself as if he "lay in Methusalem's cradle".
As, in 1386, Chaucer had borne arms for twenty-seven years, that takes us back to 1359, when he went, under the standard of Lionel, Duke of Clarence, on a far from triumphant expedition of Edward III against France. He is unlikely, at that date (1359) to have been under 15 years of age; he may have been born as late as 1343, or anywhere between 1340 and 1343. The household accounts of the wife of the Duke of Clarence prove that Chaucer was a member of her household, and, in 1357, she, and Chaucer, were staying with John of Gaunt, at Hatfield, in Yorkshire.
In the campaign of 1359, when Chaucer bore arms, Edward III failed to take Rheims and Paris: he wasted the country vainly, and made peace, at Bretigny, in 1360. Somewhere and somehow Chaucer was taken prisoner by the French, whether in a skirmish, or while foraging, or when visiting his lady, or absorbed in a book, or meditating the Muse, and contending with the difficulties of rhyme. His captors thought that there was money in his case, or they would have knocked him on the head. There was money. Edward III paid, sixteen pounds, whether as the whole or as part of his ransom (1 March, 1360). The sum (equivalent to our ￡200) was not then insignificant for a youth not of noble birth, though, in 1368, an Esquire.
Account books show Chaucer (1367) as a valet of the Royal chamber, like Molière (and Shakespeare!) in France during the time of war in 1369; salaried by the King; a married man; pensioned by John of Gaunt in 1374, and receiving a daily pitcher of wine, commuted for money in 1378. In 1372-1373, he went on a mission to Genoa and Florence. Whether he then met the famous poet Petrarch or not, is uncertain: in his "Clerk's Tale," the Clerk says that he met Petrarch; it does not follow that Chaucer was so fortunate. In 1374 he got a good place in the Custom House, in the wool department, and, 1375-1376, had valuable gifts from the King. In 1377 he went on a mission to Flanders, and on another to France. Froissart the delightful[Pg 81] chronicler mentions him in this connexion. In the following year he went on a mission to Visconti in Milan, and to the celebrated English commander of mercenaries, Sir John Hawkwood.
His experiences made Chaucer equally fit to sing of "the Court, the camp, the grove": his various posts in the Civil Service brought him acquainted with merchant-men, architects, all sorts and conditions of men. In 1386 he sat in Parliament for a division of Kent. Parliament made an attack on the Court, and Chaucer lost his offices, which he had for some time performed by deputy. Later he received valuable appointments, but by 1398 he needed and obtained royal protection from his creditors; probably he was never a frugal man, he was not in the best circumstances towards the end of his life, but neither Richard II or Henry IV let Old Grizzle starve. Henry was no sooner on the throne (30 September, 1399) than (3 October) he gave the poet a pension of forty marks and ratified a pension given by the ill-fated Richard five years previously. If Chaucer's wife, Philippa, was the sister of Catherine, mistress and (1396) wife of John of Gaunt, father of Henry IV, the poet had a friend in the Lancastrian party. But the fact is uncertain, unimportant, and a great cause of the spilling of ink. Chaucer died on 25 October, 1400.
We only know, as regards Chaucer's children, that he had a little boy, Lewis, whom, in his prose work on the astrolabe, he addresses in a style that makes us love him. He gives him, at his earnest prayer, an astrolabe and writes for him, in English, a little treatise on its use, "for Latin can'st thou but small, my little son". The poet, the friend of that less charming minstrel, "moral Gower," left a fragrant memory.
When we open Chaucer's works at the Prologue to the "Canterbury Tales," usually placed in the forefront, and when we remember the wilderness of long romances through which we have wandered, the happy change of scene, the return to actual human life, is surprising.
Chaucer is by no means free from the blemishes of "middle English" literature. If he is not to be called prolix in his narratives, "when his eye is on the object"—the main object,—he is none the less profuse in digressions. His mastery of verse was not[Pg 82] born fully armed; he had to acquire it by effort, by experiment; he had to feel his way. An unusually large number of his poems are unfinished: some he seems to have abandoned, like the "Legend of Good Women," because he felt that he was on the wrong path; that his task was no longer pleasant to himself, and therefore certainly could not give pleasure to his readers. He was, at first, eager to impart information, as the early scops conceived it their duty to do. Gathering his materials from all sources, Latin, French, and Italian, he, in "The Book of the Duchess" (about 1369), makes the bereaved husband not only allude to many classical tales of sorrow, but actually give his authorities for each case; "And so seyth Dares Frights," or "Aurora telleth so". Even the old habit of preaching at great length, the habit of edifying, clung to Chaucer. He was a man of the world, the last man to risk martyrdom for any advanced theological ideas which he might be inclined to entertain; and not the first to suppose that any set of opinions contained the absolute truth. In his day a fierce attack was made against the wealth of the Church and the luxury into which many members of the Regulars, of the various monkish Orders, had fallen. The curse of a parson was no longer so much feared as it had been. The exhibition of saintly relics for money, the arrival of pardons "hot from Rome," could safely be derided. The friars had been the butts of the French authors of fabliaux, tales of coarse popular humour, for two centuries.
Such censures were not heterodox, they did not assail matters of faith, and the satire of Chaucer is always as good-humoured as it is humorous. To him the Pardoner and Summonour of the "Canterbury Tales," and the rest of the riff-raff of the Church are amusing knaves: he has Shakespeare's smiling tolerance for such a rogue as Parolles. He is earnestly sympathetic in his famous portrait of the good and gentle parish priest, a man of "true religion and undefiled," a man of "the Order of St. James," like the ladies in the "Ancren Riwle".
It were much more pleasant, perhaps more profitable, to linger over and lovingly enumerate the charms of Chaucer at his best, than to trace him through his early experiments to such masterpieces[Pg 83] as the blending of old Greek romance and manners with the manners and romance of chivalry in "The Knight's Tale," and in "Troilus and Criseyde". But it is customary to trace the "making" of Chaucer, not only through his experiences of Court, and camp, and grove, and city, but through his literary work. It is certain that in youth he translated that great popular French poem, the "Roman de la Rose," for he says so in his prologue to his "Legend of Good Women". The French poem was begun by Guillaume de Lorris about a century before the birth of Chaucer, as an allegory on the refinements of the doctrine of Love, as taught in the Courts of Love. Guillaume says that he has the warrant of Macrobius, in his "Dream of Scipio," for supposing that dreams are not wholly to be neglected: so he dreams, of course in May, of how the birds sang, and how he walked beside that very stream which the author of "Pearl" borrowed, and converted into the River that sunders the living and the dead. He encounters allegorical works of art, representative of all things evil, outside the walls of a beautiful garden, within which are Love and all things good. The ideas have a sweet vernal freshness, on their first presentation, but by repetition become as artificial as those of the "Carte du Tendre," the map of Love's land which amused the "Précieuses," the affected literary ladies, in the youth of Molière (1650-1660). The dreamer desires a lovely Rose, watched by a squire "Bel Accueil" (Fair Welcome) and the adventures, and fables from Ovid, are of a kind so taking to mediaeval readers that henceforth every poet had his May dream, birds, river, Love, Venus, allegorical personages, and the rest of the "machinery". De Lorris left the lover in despair, but Jean de Meung continued the poem at enormous length, and in a spirit far from chivalrous: he introduced every kind of new heresy against the feudal ideals, and so began a controversy in which Gerson, who lived to befriend the cause of Jeanne d'Arc (1429) took up his pen in defence of Christianity and chastity.
This "Roman de la Rose," or much of it, Chaucer assuredly did translate, but on the question as to whether the "Romaunt of the Rose," printed in his works, is wholly, or only in part, or is not at all from his hand, scholars dispute endlessly. It is not[Pg 84] possible, here, to follow the mazes of the dispute, which turns on the quality of the work, the closeness or laxity of the translation in various parts, the presence or absence of traces of the northern dialect (Chaucer wrote Midland English), the correctness or incorrectness of the rhymes, and other details. The opinion that the first 1700 lines or so are Chaucer's, that his manuscript was defective, that the later portions, some 6000 lines, were filled up from manuscripts by other hands, is not certain, but is not improbable. Many other views are defended.
Early Poems.
Though we do not often know the dates of Chaucer's poems, the development of his genius can be traced with much probability. Roughly speaking, in his first period he is mainly inspired by French influences; in his second are added Italian influences; he was always reading such Latin authors as he could procure; he was suppling his style by experiments in French measures demanding much search for rhymes; and finally, in the "Canterbury Tales," his best work is purely English in character, though he still introduces translations from other languages when it suits his purpose.
The Dethe of the Duchesse.
is of 1369-1370, for it deplores the decease of Blanche, wife of John of Gaunt (Lancaster), and the lady departed this life in 1369. Here Chaucer works in accordance with the usual formula of the "Roman de la Rose". He begins with a dream, but his sleep is a respite in a period of eight years of insomnia, described so pitifully that the passage seems autobiographical. He cannot tell, he says why he is unable to sleep,
I hold? hit be a siknesse
That I have suffred this eight yere.
Perhaps his nerves were shattered by the circumstances of his capture and durance in 1360, for prisoners of war were treated with great cruelty, placed in holes under heavy stones, or locked up in wooden cages.
Unable to sleep, Chaucer has Ovid's story of Ceyx and Alcyone[Pg 85] read to him. He says elsewhere that in youth he made a poem on this tale; now he probably utilized his old material in the poem on the Duchess. In the Ceyx tale, Alcyone prays to Juno for the grace of sleep and dream, and Chaucer, humorous always, vows that he will even risk the heresy of presenting gifts to heathen gods, Morpheus and Juno, if they will give him slumber. His prayer is heard, and this prologue is by far the best part of "The Dethe of Blanche the Duchesse". It is personal, it is touching, and the story is charmingly told.
In his sleep comes the usual dream of the chamber decorated with works of mythological art (a stock feature, as in the "Roman de la Rose"), there is a hunting scene, with French terms of venery, and then Chaucer meets a mourner, John of Gaunt, whose long plaint and narration of similar sorrows in fable, with due reference to authorities, is prolix and pedantic, to a modern taste.
This piece is in rhymed octosyllabic couplets.
Other Early Poems.
"The Compleynte unto Pite" (Pity) is the earliest of Chaucer's poems in "Rhyme Royal" (so called, some think, because James I of Scotland used it much later in "The King's Quhair," a far-fetched guess). The poet seeks Pity, and finds her dead; he adds the petition which he meant to have presented to her, that of a despairing lover. The ideas are hackneyed, and the piece is a mere exercise. The metre, later much used by Chaucer in narrative runs thus:—
This is to seyne, I wol be youres ever;
Though ye me slee by Crueltee, your fo,
Algate my spirit shal never dissever
Fro your servyse, for any peyne or we.
Sith ye be deed,—alias! that hit is so!—
Thus for your deth I may wel wepe and pleyne
With herte sore and fill of besy peyne.
The "A.B.C." is a hymn of prayer to Our Lady, each stanza beginning with each successive letter of the alphabet. It is an exercise in translation from a French original; the stanzas are shorter than in the French.
[Pg 86]
"The Compleynte of Mars" tells of the wooing of a mediaeval Mars and Venus, interrupted by Apollo "with torche in honde"; the original source of the story is the song of the Ph?acian minstrel in the "Odyssey," but that is humorous, while Chaucer is sympathetic; Mars asks poets not to make game of his passion,
take hit noght a-game.
The Ph?acian singer did "take it a-game".
"A Compleynte to his Lady" is of the conventional kind, and an exercise in metres.
"Anelida and Arcite" is also scholar's work, but the scholar has now learned Italian, during his Italian mission of 1372; has read and in places translates the "Teseide" of Boccaccio, which he often utilized. He had also Statius, a late Latin poet, and other models, or he dealt in his own inventions. As in the "Knight's Tale," Theseus returns from conquered Scythia, with his bride, Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons, and her sister, Emily, the heroine of the "Knight's Tale". The unpopular tyrant, Creon, is ruling in Thebes, where Anelida loves Arcite, who is a true lover, in the "Knight's Tale," but here "double in love," a follower of Lamech, in Genesis, the first man who loved two ladies at once. His second love holds him tightly "up by the bridle," so Anelida despairs, expressing her woe in a kind of ode, strophe and anti-strophe, in stanzas of eight, and next of nine lines, with complicated rhymes, finally with rhymes in the middle as well as at the end of each line. The poem, more interesting than the previous experiments, and not without passion, is unfinished: ends abruptly.
"The Parlement of Fowls" appears to be a kind of Laureate's Ode on the marriage (January, 1382) of Richard II with Anne of Bohemia, who previously had two other wooers, a Prince of Bavaria, and the Margrave of Meissen. When the Birds hold their Parliament, the Formel Eagle represents Anne, Richard is the Royal Tercel Eagle, the two other tercels are the German wooers. Chaucer was always a most literary poet, and was still an adaptive poet. As he must begin with a dream, he versifies the contents of Cicero's "Dream of Scipio": he takes a little from Dante, a little from Claudian, the whole Pageant of Birds he borrows from Alain Delille's[Pg 87] "Plaint of Nature," greatly improving on it, while, in the debate of the birds on St. Valentine's Day, as to which tercel shall win the formel tercel, he gives way to his own sense of humour. The verses are vers de société, designed not for our taste, but for that of the society of his time. Chaucer himself perceived the tediousness of the love-pleading of the tercels: like the Host in the "Canterbury Tales," when bored by Sir Thopas and the Monk's tragedies, the jury of birds cry to be released,
The noise of foules for to ben delivered
So loude rong, "have doon and let us wende!"
In giving their verdicts the Goose is remote from sentiment, saying to the unsuccessful wooer,
But she wol love him, lat him love another!
The turtle-dove blushes, and gives her word for immortal hopeless love. The poem, in the seven line stanza, ends with a rondel, confessedly translated from the French, and the poet wakens from his dream and returns to his dear books, on the look-out for new material. He has shown his mastery of style, and his knowledge, but he has not yet "come to his kingdom".
Troilus and Criseyde.
Not to linger over other minor pieces, we may say that, in "Troilus and Criseyde," Chaucer does come to his kingdom, and proves himself a Master, granting the taste and conditions of his age, while, in many beautiful passages, he attains to what is good for universal taste, to what is universally human.
The subject is an episode in the mediaeval legend of the Siege of Troy, as it was embellished on the lines of the pseudo-Dares and the pseudo-Dictys, by Beno?t de Sainte-Maure, then by Guido de Colonna, and then by Boccaccio in the "Filostrato". The last gives Chaucer his starting-point; out of 8239 lines, 2583 are reckoned to be translated from Boccaccio, while there are borrowings from Petrarch, and much moralizing is rendered out of the prose of Bo?thius, whom King Alfred translated into Anglo-Saxon, and Chaucer into the prose of his own time. Chaucer uses his materials as he pleases, greatly expanding, transposing, and[Pg 88] omitting. Almost all his own is the character of Pandarus, who, in Homer, is merely notable for having broken a solemn truce by wounding Menelaus with an arrow. Boccaccio made him a young cousin of Criseyde, who, in the mediaeval legend, stays shamefaced in Troy, while her father, Calchas, deserts to the Greeks. Troilus, scarcely mentioned by Homer, is the brother, and in battle almost the equal of Hector. Troilus, though he had scoffed at love, is smitten by the eyes of Criseyde, and is on the point of dying without avowing his passion, when Pandarus, whom Chaucer makes the uncle of Criseyde, acts vigorously as go-between, and saves the life of Troilus by bringing the pair together. Pandarus is a good-natured but the reverse of a scrupulously delicate friend and uncle. Nevertheless, a conscience he has, in his way, and lectures Troilus at length on the infamy of men who boast of their victories in love, and of men who play his own part from any lower motive than kindness and pity.
For thee am I becomen,
Betwixen game and ernest, swich a mene
As maken wommen unto men to comen:
Al sey I nought, thou wost wel what I mene.
Pandarus has a conscience, to this extent, and it is to be presumed that he did not go beyond the mediaeval idea of what a gentleman might do to help a friend in love. Yet "he will be mocking," and his conduct is as remote from our ideas of honour, as from those of the heroic Greeks and Trojans themselves. Shakespeare has debased the Pandarus of Chaucer in his treatment of the same character in "Troilus and Cressida".
Criseyde herself, granting the ideas of Chaucer's time about love, is an honourable and most winning lady, the soul of honour (she wears widow's weeds for her father's shame), but she has not the faintest idea of marrying her lover.
In the beautiful, the magical story of "The Vigils of the Dead," in the mediaeval "Miracles of Our Lady," we meet a most devout and pious damsel, whose views are precisely those of Criseyde. No modern novelist could treat the struggle of Criseyde with her passion more psychologically and more delicately, and none so charmingly as Chaucer has done.
[Pg 89]
We all see Criseyde, so young, gay, and winning, with the eyes of Troilus; and Troilus, brave, gentle, courteous, and modest, with the eyes of Criseyde. She, learning his love from Pandarus, and deeply pitying him, sees him ride past from the battle, his helmet hewn, his shield shattered with sword strokes, the people welcoming him, and her love outruns her pity. It must be confessed that the man?uvres of Pandarus are told at very great length. The poet has all our sympathy when he cries:—
But flee we now prolixitee best is,
For love of God; and lat us faste go
Right to th' effect.
When he does come to the point it is in a scene where delicacy tempers passion.
Considered alle thinges as they stode,
No wonder is, sin she dide al for gode,
trapped by Pandarus, and yielding to love and pity. Assuredly Criseyde seemed so true a lover that, like Queen Guinevere, she should have "made a good end". But as she must pass to her father in the Greek camp, being exchanged for Antenor, the end came which all the world knows, and which she foreknew.
Allas, of me, unto the worldes ende,
Shal neither been y-writen nor y-songe
No good word, for thise bokes wol me shende.
O, rolled shal I been on many a tonge!
Destiny and Diomede prevailed, but Chaucer speaks of false Criseyde as tenderly and chivalrously as Homer speaks of Helen.
Ne me ne list this sely womman chyde
Ferther than the story wol devyse.
Hir name, alias! is publisshed so wyde,
That, for hir gilt it oughte y-now suffyse.
Had Chaucer left to us nothing but "Troilus and Criseyde," he would have given assurance of a poet so much greater than any English predecessor that the difference is one of kind, not of degree. Chaucer is our first poet of great and various genius.
Space being limited, we can only say that "The House of Fame" (1383) is much influenced by Dante, while, even in[Pg 90] modelling himself on Dante, Chaucer gives play to his natural jollity and humour. Dante was never jolly. The poem in rhyming couplets of eight syllables shows Chaucer borne heavenwards by an eagle, like a middle-aged Ganymede, to Jove's House of Fame. He addresses the eagle with charming banter, and the bird tells him that he is to have a holiday, for all day he sits "at his reckonings" in the Custom House, and, when he returns home
also domb as any stoon
Thou sittest at another boke.
This was just before the spring of 1385, when Chaucer was allowed to have a deputy. This may have been granted at the request of the Queen, Anne of Bohemia; and, if she did not ask Chaucer to write his next work, the "Legend of Good Women," as counterbalancing the naughty Criseyde, he may have chosen the subject in gratitude. It concerns ladies who were true lovers; and this book Alcestis, who gave her life for her lord's, bids Chaucer present to the Queen. If he meant to celebrate nineteen of St. Cupid's Saints, he tired of his work, and tells only of ten, of whom Cleopatra and Medea are less than saintly. Boccaccio's book "On Famous Ladies," and Ovid, on Heroines, gave him hints and materials; he also uses Ovid's "Metamorphoses," the "?neid," and other sources of information. He is extremely severe on male flirts.
Have at thee, Jasoun I now thyn horn is blowe!
but, far from being prolix, he merely gives the briefest summary possible of Medea's case, and leaves out almost the whole of the wonderful romance. He bids Theseus "be red for shame," as the deserter of Ariadne, but here again he is very brief, and leaves Ovid to tell the tale.
As all the stories are of man's cruelty and all the complaint of the women (who usually die forsaken), is
Oh, do not leave me!
the poet felt that the thing was like the tragedies of his monk in the "Canterbury Tales"—was becoming stereotyped, and he left off in the middle of a story. The poem is in "heroic" measure, and[Pg 91] Chaucer's command of this practically new instrument is perhaps the main merit of the book.
The Canterbury Tales.
Chaucer's aim, in the "Canterbury Tales," in which most readers begin to study him, though a great part of the book belongs to his late maturity, was to be universal: to paint all his world, to appeal to every taste, from that of the lovers of the broadest and coarsest humour (as in the Miller's and the Reeve's Tales), to that of devout students of saintly legends (the Man of Law's, the Second Nun's, and the Prioress's Tales). In the Prologue to the "Canterbury Tales," and in the discourses of the Pilgrims, he is entirely English, the mirror of his own people. We are in a throng of Shakespearean variety, while their talk is dramatically appropriate; each speaks in character, though the "Wife of Bath's Tale," for example, is far more philosophic, being a reply in part to St. Jerome's praise of celibacy, than anything that we are to expect from Dame Quickly, or from Scott's Mrs. Saddletree.
The Prologue and the conversations of the pilgrims are the thoroughly English work of Chaucer, in the maturity of his genius. So are the humorous pieces, the Wife of Bath, the Reeve, and the Miller, and that striking contrast with all these, the Knight's Tale, a noble masterpiece of true chivalry, which was composed in another form, in stanzas, and was again refashioned in couplets of ten syllables, before the idea of the pilgrimage occurred to the poet.[1]
Several of the Tales had been first undertaken earlier, and were later fitted into the general scheme of Pilgrims to Canterbury telling their stories as they ride. Chaucer supplies his own criticisms, often in the rough banter of the Host, who cannot endure the sing-song romance of "Sir Thopas" (a parody of the form of many romances), or the dismal "tragedies" of the lusty Monk.
The Prologue and conversations and some tales are thus the[Pg 92] work of the very Chaucer, in accomplished maturity of power, but he is giving examples of many tastes and fashions older in literature than his own free, humorous, and ironical view of life. He professes, in his art, to be all things to all men, he must rehearse
tales alle, be they bettre or werse,
and whosoever does not like the humour of the Reeve or the intoxicated Miller may "turn over the leaf and tell another tale".
The modern reader, for one good reason or another, may "turn over the leaf, and choose another tale," whether the Reeve, or the Monk, or the Parson, or Chaucer himself be narrating. Like all old poets he wrote for his own age, not for ours; but in him, as in all great poets, however old, much is universally human and is immortal.
The scansion, in the so-called "heroic couplet," practically Chaucer's own conquest and bequest to our literature, gives little trouble, especially if, as in the Globe edition, the final ès which are to be sounded, are marked by a dot over the letter. The spelling repels the very indolent, but no attempt hitherto made to modernize the spelling has been successful, though the task does not seem to pass the powers of man.
The device of setting stories in a kind of framework, so that the variety of each narrator, according to his kind, lends dramatic interest, is very old. Chaucer is especially happy in his idea of making thirty pilgrims, of all sorts and conditions, meet at the ancient Inn of the Tabard in Southwark and agree to journey together to the tomb of St. Thomas a Becket. This was a favourite shrine of pilgrims, the road led through a smiling landscape, the Saint had always been popular and a great worker of miracles; and the pilgrimage was dear to an England still merry. In less than a century and a half after Chaucer's death, Henry VIII seized the wealth of the Saint, the gold and jewels given by noble pilgrims, and destroyed this pleasant pilgrimage.
Chaucer's Prologue with his description of the Pilgrims, is the most kind, genial, and jocund of his works, a perfect picture of a mixed multitude of English folk of many classes, and with no awkwardness caused by a keen sense of distinction of class.
[Pg 93]
The Knight is a flower of chivalry; he has sought honour everywhere, in the dangerous crusade against the barbarians of Pruce (Prussia), against the Moors, against the Turks: he is a fighting man who speaks no evil and bears no malice. His tale is from the old Romance of Thebes and Athens, and has its root in ancient Athenian literature, though its flowers are derived from mediaeval fancy, and mainly from the Italian poem, the "Teseid," or poem of Theseus, by Boccaccio. It is written in the rhyming couplets of five feet apiece which are practically the great metrical gift of Chaucer to English poetry: he took to them late in life, about 1385-1386, and his tales in this measure were made later than his stories in stanzas.
The jolly Host of the Tabard, who directs the tale-telling of the Company, next asks, out of respect, the Monk to follow the Knight; but the rude Miller is drunk, and insists on being heard.
For I wol speke or elles go my wey.
Thus the noble tale is followed by a "churl's tale" for the sake of contrast, and Chaucer warns his readers that a coarse story it is, and that whoever does not want to hear it must turn the pages over and pass on. The Miller begins decorously enough with a description of a pretty young musical scholar of Oxford, that could read the stars and predict the weather, and lodged with an old carpenter that had a pretty young wife, and had never read Cato who would have advised him to mate with an older woman. The Miller's description of the pretty young woman is more delicate than we expect from this noisy drunkard. A parish clerk, not more godly than the scholar, is next introduced; and a peculiarly broad piece of rural pleasantry finishes the story of the Miller.
The listeners laughed at "this nice case," all but the Reeve, who was a carpenter by trade, and did not like a carpenter to be mocked. He therefore tells a tale against a Miller, a proud and dishonest Miller, who suffers loss and infinite dishonour and has his head broken, at the hands of two young Cambridge men. This tale also may be judiciously skipped: the fourth is that of the Cook, and is only a fragment: manifestly it was to be matter[Pg 94] of rude, mirth, but Chaucer dropped it. The Host calls in The Man of Law, whose story is told in stanzas; The Man of Law was himself told it by merchants. It is an early piece of work by Chaucer, fitted into this place. He had plenty of short stories of many kinds, written by himself at various dates, and he placed them into the mouths of the pilgrims; not always quite appropriately. The Man of Law's tale of fair Constance, daughter of an Emperor of Rome, herself a pearl of beauty and goodness, persecuted by elderly ladies professing the Moslem or heathen religion, and driven from Syria to pagan Northumberland, is partly based on a widely diffused fairy-tale. It is pure and tender, and more fit for the ears of the Prioress than several of the coarse comic stories. In these days, as Chaucer would learn from the "Decameron" of Boccaccio, ladies listened to very strange narratives.
The Host next bids the Parish Priest to tell a story, and swears in a style which the good parson resents. The Host "smells a Lollard," or Puritan heretic, in a clergyman who objects to swearing, which suggests that the orthodox priests were very indulgent!
The sailor, or shipman, a rough brown man and "a good fellow," cries
heer he shal nat preche,
He shal no gospel glosen heer ne teche,
he is a heretic, a sower of tares among the wheat; and, to check heresy tells a story far from creditable to the morals of a monk. This is in the "heroic" verse, rhymed couplets of ten syllables each, like the coarse stories of the Reeve and the Miller. As this measure was adopted late by Chaucer, in place of the earlier stanzas, it appears that his taste did not grow more delicate with his advance in years.
The dainty Prioress, as becomes her, now tells, in stanzas, the legend of a miracle of Our Lady: how a little boy used to sing her praises through the Jewish quarter of a town; how the Jews slew him and cast him into a pit, and how he nevertheless continued to sing his hymn like "young Hugh of Lincoln, who cursed Jews," slain also in 1255, if ever the thing occurred: it was a common fable of the Middle Ages.
The poet himself is called in next, and recites "Sir Thopas";[Pg 95] a parody of the rhymed romances of chivalry. It bores the Host, "No more of this," he cries, "you do nothing but waste our time," so the poet tells "a litel thing in prose," the Story of Melibeus. It is not so very "litel," and is freely translated from the French of Jean de Meung. There are about twelve thousand words in Melibeus, which is full of quotations from all sorts of learned books and moral lessons: the Host, however, thought it would have been very edifying to his ill-tempered wife, a fierce woman.
The Monk now "tells sad stories of the deaths of Kings," and of the miseries of celebrated persons from Lucifer, Adam, and Hercules to Nero, and Croesus, and Julius C?sar. Chaucer borrowed from the Bible, Boccaccio, Bo?thius, the "Romance of the Rose": in fact he seems to have begun the collection while he was young, taken it up again after his visit to Italy, and finally wearied of the long series of miseries; so he makes even the courteous Knight rebel, and cry, "Good sir, no more of this". He wants more cheerful matter. The Host is of the same mind, and calls one of the three priests that ride with the Prioress. Since the Monk is described as a jolly hunting clergyman, it is not clear why Chaucer put old work about mortal tragedies into his mouth. The Priest tells a form of the tale of the Cock, his Hens, and the Fox, which includes a ghost story, a good deal of learning and morality, and a great deal of humour and of brilliant description. The tale is in ten syllabled verse; and in Chaucer's late manner, as is the Physician's Tale, the Roman story of Virginia, (as in Macaulay's "Lays of Ancient Rome"). Chaucer in part translates the version of Jean de Meung in the "Romance of the Rose". The tale is told with sweet pitifulness and delicacy.
The Pardoner, with his wallet
Bret-ful of pardoun come from Rome al hoot,
"pardons hot from Rome," and with a large collection of spurious relics of Saints, is an odious kind of sacred swindler, but his tale is pointed against avarice. It is derived from a very old story found in Asia as well as in Europe. The Pardoner begins by a satirical account of his profession and of his practices, his greed[Pg 96] and lust, his spoiling of the poor, before he preaches his moral tale of the evils of greed.
For, though myself be a ful vicious man,
A moral tale yet I you telle can,
and a terrible tale of murder it is. The Host himself is sickened by the cynicism of the Pardoner, but the tolerant Knight makes peace between them: in the nature of things the Knight would have ridden forward out of his odious society. It has been said that the tales "display the literary and artistic side" of Chaucer's genius; and many of them were not made for their places in the Pilgrimage, while Chaucer's "observing and dramatic genius" appears in the prologues and places where the characters converse together. These passages are often, to us, the most curious and interesting, for they are dramatic and humorous pictures of actual life and manners. But the tolerance of the Pardoner by the Knight, is almost too great a stretch of gentleness.
The rich, business-like, proud, luxurious Wife of Bath who has had as many husbands as the Woman of Samaria, begins with a long Prologue about her own past life and her distaste for the mediaeval exaltation of virginity; she prefers the example of the much married King Solomon. She boasts herself to be a worshipper of Venus and Mars, love is not more her delight than domestic broils and domineering. Her prologue and tale are in Chaucer's best later style of verse: the tale is like that of courteous Sir Gawain, and his bride, the Loathly Lady, in a romance, and the Friar, or Frere, justly says that she deals too much "in school matter of great difficulty," and in learned authorities.
The Frere and the Summoner next tell tales gibing at each other's profession. They are of the coarser sort, and are relieved by the Clerk's tale in stanzas; it is a form of the famous legend of Patient Griselda, whose patience is like that of Enid in "The Idylls of the King". The Clerk says that he learned the story from Petrarch, the great Italian poet, in Padua. The story, like most of those which are serious, is given in stanzas: Boccaccio wrote it in Italian; Petrarch in Latin. The poet would not wish wives be as meek as Griselda; there is a happy mean between her invincible patience and the tyranny of the Wife of Bath.
[Pg 97]
The Merchant's Tale continues the debate on Marriage, started by the Wife of Bath, and carried into clearer air by the modest Clerk of Oxford. Chaucer had Latin sources for the discussions, and the humorous laxity of the story of January and May is based on an old popular jest-story of which Boccaccio's version, in the "Decameron," seems nearest to the original form—the Tree, as in Asiatic versions, is enchanted. A more pleasant variety of Asiatic tale, that of the Flying Horse (as in the "Arabian Nights"), is "left half-told" by the Squire, the son of the Knight: as good a man as his father. Chaucer either never finished the story, or the conclusion was lost.
The story told by the Franklin is, after those of the Knight and the Prioress, perhaps the most poetical of all. It is a romance in which the problem of marriage and the supremacy of husband or wife is once more touched on and happily settled by the steadfast love of the knight and lady. They are separated for years, a new lover is rejected by the lady, and, to win her, makes a magician cause by "glamour" (something in the way of hypnotic suggestion) the apparent disappearance of the black rocks of Britanny. But loyalty is stronger than magic. This charming tale is based on a Breton original; but the handling is entirely Chaucer's, and is done in his best and gentlest manner.
The Second Nun's Tale is the legend of the marriage and wooing of St. Cecily; it was composed in stanzas, and is put into its place without the removal of lines which show that it was written separately before Chaucer thought of his framework. Among the latest additions are the Prologue and Tale of the Canon's Yeoman,—neither yeoman nor canon is among the original characters of the General Prologue. The story contains a satire of the golden dreams, self-deceptions, and impostures of the Alchemists, with their search for the Philosopher's Stone.
The Tale of the Manciple, or kitchen servant, is really a "Just so Story" explaining why the crow is black, and is taken from Ovid, who took it from an old Greek fable.
Finally, the honest country Parson has his chance. He announces that being a man of Southern England, he likes not rum, ram, ruf (alliterative verse), nor cares for rhyme, and he preaches[Pg 98] in prose at very great length. His sermon is a free translation, with alterations of all sorts, from a French source, the same as the source of the "Ayenbite of Inwyt" (Remorse).
The immense variety in character of the Tales, covering all the tastes of the time, is now apparent. For the gay and the grave, the lively and severe, Chaucer has provided reading.
[1] This is manifest for (line 1201) he dismisses the story of Perithous and Theseus la Hades,
But of that story list me nat to wryte.