CHAPTER V

CHAUCER

WHILE the conflict was being waged between French civilization and English simplicity, there was being brought up at the Court a London boy, page in one of the Royal households, whose destiny it was to effect their reconciliation. Chaucer's early training was almost entirely French one of his earliest works was a version of the Roman de la Rose; others of about the same period were modelled after the current Romantic style which he afterwards gently satirized in the Rime of Sir Thopas. For a time it looked as though his work was to be merely a heightened and polished expression of the courtly manner, an effluence from the prevailing tradition rather than that 'well of English undefiled' which has been, in greater or less degree, the source of all our subsequent literature. Then his allegiance was shaken by the Italian mission (1372), which taught him a newer and deeper melody. In the growing maturity of his life-for he was thirty-two when he was sent as envoy to Genoa-he came under the spell of Dante, of Petrarch, of Boccaccio, the last of whom, as Mr. Stopford Brooke says, taught him to tell a story exquisitely'. For a time his work was intimately affected by Italian influence: then his native English rose in the ascendant, and his great masterpiece is one of the finest examples in history of a national idiom enriched but not overlaid by study in foreign schools. As Bach transcribed the Italian music of Vivaldi and the French music of Couperin, and grafted them on a German stock until they grew with its sap and blossomed with its flowers, so Chaucer, who

learned to write verse from Jean de Meung and to paint manners from Boccaccio, remains the most distinctive before Shakespeare of our English poets. It happened that about the time of the Canterbury Tales the progress of our language received a considerable impetus from Wiclif, whose translation of the Bible, in 1380, did more than any preceding work to establish a native speech. Chaucer took up the instrument, retuned the strings, and drew from them harmonies that have never lost their sweetness.

With the exception of the Chronicle, an exception which hardly counts, he tried his hand at all current forms of composition and excelled in all. We have no better sermon of the time than the Parson's Tale, or the Tale of Melibeus, or the Monk's Tale; no better hymn than that to the Virgin; no better Lives of Saints than the tales told by the Nun and the Prioress. For satire we have the Prologue to the Pardoner's Tale; for allegory the Book of the Duchess and the Parliament of Fowls, widely different in tone but of equal mastery; the short story may be illustrated by the Clerk, the Merchant, and the Wife of Bath; the animal-story (a favourite form of the Middle Ages) by the Nun Priest; ballads and songs by Truth, by Steadfastness, and by many of the minor poems. In Romance he ranges from the chivalry of the Knight's Tale and the amourism' of Troilus and Cressida to the semi-burlesque of the Squire and the pure burlesque of Sir Thopas: he makes his contribution to ethics in his translation of Boethius, and to science in the Canon's Yeoman's Tale and the Treatise on the Astrolabe. And not only is the range wide: it is covered throughout with wonderful familiarity and power, with that clearness of knowledge which is implanted as it were by nature, and which can transmute the dullest and most leaden erudition in the alembic of its own genius.

6

But it is in the depiction of human character that he stands highest. Here are all his treasures of delicate and sympathetic observation, of genial humour and kindly satire, of golden phrases that have passed into the currency of the language. Well might Dryden say that he knew the Pilgrims as though he had supped at the Tabard. They pass before us in distinct personality-a few vivid touches, and each portrait is complete: we can see them, we can hear their voices, we can follow their fortunes after the pilgrimage is ended. There are six and twenty people in the Prologue, and no two of them are alike: indeed we feel that Chaucer could have indefinitely multiplied their number without imperilling his limitless resource. It is only the great artists who can show this richness and variety, who can scatter with a full hand and never repeat the gift.

As an example of Chaucer's characterization we may take the Squire. He is twenty years of age, fresh, adventurous, inexperienced, the youngest man in the company, and evidently pleased at the notice and attention of his elders. With what courtesy does he begin his story: with what pomp and circumstance does he introduce the magic horse, which, when he gets fairly under way, he totally forgets: with what ingenuous charm does he make parade of his learning; with what ardour does he follow the digression which leads him away from his main issue. After six hundred lines he has advanced no further than an episode; but he is just beginning to feel his strength, he has enough material to carry him all the way to Canterbury; he proposes to start on the adventures of Cambuscan and of Algersif, and of Camballo; he draws breath for another canto of his delightful and interminable narrative; and then the Franklin intervenes. Never were flood-gates more delicately closed; the eloquent voice is hushed

by a compliment to its eloquence, and we can imagine the smile, half amusement and half relief, which passes, for a discreet moment, across the lips of the company. The whole thing is as diverting as a scene of Molière; it is light-handed, it is goodhumoured, and it leaves us on the best of terms with everybody concerned.

1

A special word should be said as to Chaucer's treatment of women. Before his time they had played the part commonly assigned to them in chivalrous romance; adored without comprehension and celebrated without insight. But with the 'good fair White' a new page is turned; we have a heroine of flesh and blood, set in the high light of panegyric, yet intensely and exquisitely human. For a companion picture we may take the pathos of Cressida's faithlessness and sorrow, which, though dimmed to our eyes by the lustre of a greater genius, is a true and living expression of genuine feeling. The women of the Tales, too, are not less real than the men; they are equally consistent, equally distinctive; as far removed from the shadowy temptress of Sir Gawayn as she is from the Princess Freawaru. There has come into English literature a new insight, a new vitality; there has been planted a seed which was to come to fruition in the great heroines of the Elizabethan drama.

Again, Chaucer's narrative is more rapid than that of preceding romances.2 His digressions, unless obviously intentional, are few in number, his descriptions are brief and vivid, the story runs its course with a firm rein. The little touches of landscape, always accessory, are painted with evident love, and recall his own statement that the study of birds and flowers was the only thing that would 1 See Troilus and Cressida, e.g. Book iv, l. 103, &c., and Book v, 1. 151, &c.

Contrast, for instance, the opening of the Squiere's Tale with that of Sir Gawayn.

draw him from his books. And through all these shines the temper of a noble and lovable man. His humour, if sometimes broad, is never malicious; it is often tender and affectionate. He has a generous love of chivalry, of purity, of refinement; a religion so deep that it can afford to be quiet, and so charitable that it is intolerant of nought save imposture; a wide human sympathy from which nothing of wholesome manhood is alien. In the record of mediaeval literature he is surpassed by one poet alone: of his own age and country he was the acknowledged and accepted master.

GEOFFREY CHAUCER (about 1340-1400), son of John Chaucer, citizen and vintner, was born in London. He began his career as a page in the household of Elizabeth, wife of Lionel Duke of Clarence, and throughout his life was more or less continuously in the service of the Court. One of his earliest works was a translation of the Roman de la Rose, and in all his writings before 1372 he shows considerable traces of French influence. Among them may be mentioned a translation of Deguilleville's Prayer to the Virgin (quaintly entitled A. B. C., from the fact that the stanzas begin with successive letters of the alphabet), the Book of the Duchesse (1369), written in memory of Blanche, the wife of John of Gaunt, and the Lyfe of Sainte Cecyle (about 1370), which was afterwards incorporated in the Canterbury Tales. In 1372 he was sent to Italy, where he remained for eleven months, and where he made that acquaintance with classical Italian literature which is so evident in the writings of his second period. On his return to England he was appointed Comptroller of Wool, and eight years later Comptroller of Petty Customs, two lucrative offices of which he was allowed to perform the duties by deputy. The works of his second period (1372-1384) include the Compleint to his Lady, the Compleint of Mars, the Parlement of Foules, the unfinished Hous of Fame, and the original versions of Palamon and Arcite, the Tale of Melibeus, the Persone's Tale, and the Man of Lawe's Tale. During these years he was sent on many secret missions to Flanders, France, and Italy, in which he bore him