Chaucer and His Times

CHAPTER IV

One only of Chaucer’s earlier poems shows the true bent of his genius. The rough sketches which he afterwards worked up and used in the Canterbury Tales had given some evidence of his keen interest in human nature, but not until we come to Troilus and Criseyde do we find him giving full rein to his invention. The earlier part of Book I, which describes how Troilus first catches sight of Cressida in the temple and at once falls in love with her, is taken almost literally from Boccaccio, but the entrance of Pandarus strikes a new note. Troilus lies languishing in his chamber in the most approved manner, when Pandarus comes in and hearing him asks what is the matter:—

Han now thus sone Grekes maad yow lene?[71]
Or hastow som remors of conscience,
And art now falle in som devocioun...?

Troilus replies that he is the “refus of every creature,” and that love has overcome him and brought him to despair. Pandarus heaves a sigh of relief and says if that is all he will soon put matters right, for though he knows nothing of such foolishness himself, he can easily arrange the affair:—

A whetston is no kerving instrument,
And yet it maketh sharpe kerving-tolis.[72]

Troilus still refuses to be comforted and only casts up his eyes and sighs, whereupon Pandarus grows annoyed as well as anxious:—

And cryde “a-wake” ful wonderly and sharpe;
What? slombrestow as in a lytargye?[73]
Or artow lyk an asse to the harpe,
That hereth soun, when men the strenges plye,
But in his minde of that no melodye
May sinken, him to glade, for that he
So dul is of his bestialitee?

Having at last succeeded in rousing the disconsolate lover and inducing him once more to take his part in the life of court and camp, Pandarus hurries off to interview his niece, whom he finds sitting with her maidens “with-inne a paved parlour” reading the geste of Thebes. The contrast between the shrewd, elderly man of the world and the love-sick youth has been admirably brought out in Book I; in Book II a different, but no less striking contrast is shown between the coarse humour and practical wisdom of the uncle and the daintiness and charm of the niece. Pandarus angles for Cressida and plays her as a skilful fisherman plays a trout. It is obvious that he regards the whole thing as a good-natured grown-up regards a children’s game. It is deadly earnest to them, and since they take it so seriously he will do his best to help them, but all the while he considers it a piece of pretty and amusing childishness, though he takes pleasure in playing it adroitly. His idea of effective appeal is to poke his niece “ever newe and newe” and his jests when he has succeeded in bringing the lovers together savour more of the camp than the court. When the tragedy occurs and Troilus and Cressida are parted for ever, Pandarus has no better comfort to offer than the platitude:—

That alwey freendes may nought been y-fere,[74]

and he evidently thinks that Troilus is making a most unnecessary fuss about it, though he is so sincerely distressed at Cressida’s treachery that he offers—lightly enough—to “hate hir evermore”:—

If I dide ought that mighte lyken thee,
It is me leef;[75] and of this treson now,
God woot, that it a sorwe is un-to me!
And dredeless, for hertes ese of yow,[76]
Right fayn wolde I amende it, wiste I how
And fro this world, almighty god I preye
Delivere hir sone; I can no-more seye.

At the same time he is a person of some energy and force. When Troilus rushes about his chamber beating his head against the wall,

And of his deeth roreth in compleyninge,

Pandarus shows some impatience of such weakness and bids him pull himself together and

... manly set the world on sixe and sevene;
And if thou deye a martir, go to hevene.

Excellently sound advice.

Nowhere is attention ostentatiously called to him; we are never allowed to feel that he is being dragged in by way of comic relief; but his mere presence at once removes Troilus and Criseyde from the category of conventional love-romances, and the very fact that we are left to discover his significance for ourselves, without comment or explanation shows Chaucer’s confidence in his craftmanship.

But skilfully as Pandarus is drawn, the character of Cressida shows even greater subtlety of treatment. To the medieval mind faithlessness in love was the one unforgivable crime. Nearly a hundred years after Chaucer wrote his Troilus and Criseyde, Sir Thomas Malory tells us of Guenever, “she was a good lover and therefore she made a good end,” and again and again in the medieval romances proper we find the same thought insisted on. Chaucer had therefore no light task before him when he set out to draw a heroine at once lovable and fickle, and to enlist the sympathies of his readers on behalf of one whose name had become a by-word for faithlessness in love. With consummate skill he insists from the outset on her gentleness and timidity. When Pandarus declares that the deaths both of Troilus and himself will lie at her door if she turns a deaf ear to his pleading, Cressida is simple enough to believe that he means it, and

... wel neigh starf for fere,[77]
So as she was the ferfulleste wight[78]
That might be....

That she is no vulgar coquette is shown by her ignorance of Troilus’s passion. Apparently he spends his whole time in the temple gazing at her, but there is no mistaking the sincerity of her unselfconsciousness and surprise when Pandarus tells her of her lover’s plight. Nor is she at first altogether pleased at having one of the handsomest and bravest of Priam’s sons at her feet; indeed Chaucer is at some pains to explain that she does not suffer herself to be lightly won:—

For I sey nought that she so sodeynly
Yaf him hir love, but that she gan enclyne
To lyk him first, and I have told you why;
And after that, his manhood and his pyne[79]
Made love with-inne hir for to myne,[80]
For which, by process and by good servyse
He gat hir love, and in no sodyn wyse.

Altogether we get the impression of a simple, child-like being who wanders happily about her garden with Flexippe and Tharbe and Antigone “and othere of hir wommen,” or sits poring over tales of chivalry, without a thought of marriage. She is woman enough to feel the force of Pandarus’s hint that it is folly to live

... alle proude
Til crowes feet be growe under your yë,

and to like the thought that the hero who rides blushing through the cheering crowd

... is he
Which that myn uncle swereth he most be deed
But I on him have mercy and pitee,

but she is no Delilah spreading her snares for men. Her uncle, the only person whom she has to advise her, urges her to listen to Troilus; the prince himself has everything likely to attract a girl’s fancy; and as she sagely remarks:—

I knowe also, and alday here and see
Men loven wommen al this toun aboute;
Be they the wers? why nay, with-outen doubte.

No wonder she finally yields to her lover’s passionate wooing when Pandarus tricks her into coming to see him:—

“But nathelees, this warne I yow,” quod she,
“A kinges sone although ye be, y-wis,
Ye shul na-more have soverainetee
Of me in love, than right that cas is;
Ne I nil forbere, if that ye doon a-mis,
To wrathen[81] yow; and whyl that ye me serve
Cherycen[82] yow right after ye deserve.

And shortly, dere herte and al my knight,
Beth glad, and draweth yow to lustinisse,
And I shal trewely, with al my might,
Your bittre tornen al into swetnesse;
If I be she that may yow do gladnesse,
For every wo ye shal recovre a blisse;
And him in armes took, and gan him kisse.”

There is no prettier confession of love in all literature. Then follows their brief period of rapture, with its mock quarrels and speedy reconciliations, before the dreadful day when Calkas sends for his daughter. The news that Cressida is to be delivered up to the Greeks fills the lovers with despair. Troilus flings himself on his bed railing against Fortune and abusing Calkas as an

... olde unholsom and mislyved man:

Cressida with tears prepares for her journey. One of the most delightful pictures in the whole story is that of the worthy women who came to bid her farewell and take her tears as a delicate compliment to themselves:—

And thilke foles sittinge hir aboute
Wenden that she wepte and syked[83] sore
By-cause that she sholde out of that route
Depart, and never pleye with hem more.
And they that hadde y-knowen hir of yore
Seye hir so wepe, and thoughte it kindenesse,
And eche of hem wepte eek for hir distresse.

Her sorrow is sincere, and her tears do not cease to flow when Troilus is out of sight. Shakespeare’s Cressid, whose one idea is to ingratiate herself with her new friends, is a very different person from Chaucer’s woebegone heroine. And yet in her very sorrow we see her weakness. When Pandarus first tried to move her pity she had yielded, not solely out of compassion but also because she was afraid of what might be said of her if any harm came to Troilus:—

And if this man slee here himself, allas!
In my presence, it wol be no solas.
What men wolde of hit deme I can nat seye:
It nedeth me ful sleyly for to pley.[84]

The same strain of selfishness manifests itself now. Cressida is incapable of being swept away by a great passion. She has a cat-like softness and daintiness and charm, a cat’s readiness to attach herself to the person she is with at the moment, and a cat’s adaptability to circumstances. She is genuinely distressed at being parted from Troilus, she cries till her eyes have dark rings round them, and even Pandarus is moved at the sight, but she is incapable of exposing herself to any danger or inconvenience for her lover’s sake. Like the lady in the Statue and the Bust she hesitates at the thought of difficulty:—

“And if that I me putte in jupartye[85]
To stele awey by nighte, and it befalle
That I be caught, I shal be holde a spye,
Or elles, lo, this drede I most of alle
If in the hondes of som wrecche I falle,
I am but lost, al be myn herte trewe;
Now mighty god, thou on my sorwe rewe!
······
But natheles, bityde what bityde,
I shal to-morwe at night, by est or weste,
Out of the ost stele on som maner syde,
And go with Troilus wher-as him leste.
This purpos wol I holde, and this is beste.
No fors of wikked tonges janglerye,[86]
For ever on love han wrecches had envye.

To such souls to-morrow never comes, and it is no surprise to find her before long yielding to Diomede’s entreaties, as she had formerly yielded to those of Troilus. Boccaccio’s heroine at once makes up her mind to flee from the Greek camp, and then is quickly turned from her “high and great intent” by the advent of a new lover. Chaucer with far greater sublety prepares us for the change, and makes her very weakness her excuse:—

But trewely, the story telleth us,
Ther made never womman more wo
Than she, whan that she falsed Troilus.

The reason for this excess of sorrow is characteristic:—

She seyde, “Allas! for now is clene a-go
My name of trouthe in love for ever-mo
······
Allas, of me unto the worldes ende
Shal neither been y-written nor y-songe
No good word, for thise bokes wol me shende,[87]
O, rolled shal I ben on many a tonge,”[88]

and equally characteristic her hasty excuse,

“Al be I not the firste that dide amis,”

and the sublime self-confidence with which in the act of jilting one lover she announces her unalterable fidelity to the next:—

“And sin I see there is no bettre way,
And that to late is now for me to rewe,
To Diomede algate I wol be trewe.”

The whole character is drawn with extraordinary delicacy and insight, and with a tenderness which marks Chaucer’s large-hearted tolerance. It is comparatively easy for an author to hold up a character to execration, but only the very greatest can show us the weaknesses of human nature without for one moment becoming cynical or contemptuous.

In the Canterbury Tales Chaucer’s method of character delineation is more concise. In Troilus and Criseyde he has five books, containing over 8000 lines, at his disposal, and the raptures and anguish of the lovers are described at considerable length. In the Canterbury Tales he has a far more complex task before him; he has to present the pilgrims themselves, in the various prologues and end-links; to make each tale a dramatic revelation of the character of the teller; and to exhibit the characters of the personages who play a part in the various stories. The 560 lines of the Prologue in themselves contain a far greater number and variety of characters than are to be found in the whole of Troilus and Criseyde, and if there is less subtlety of treatment the later prologues and end-links soon atone for this. Nothing, for instance, would have been easier than to draw a conventional picture of the self-indulgent, pleasure-loving monk, and at first sight we might think that Chaucer had done little more, though even in the Prologue we are conscious of a sharp distinction between the Monk, who with all his faults is a gentleman, and such vulgar impostors as the Pardoner and the Somnour. But further acquaintance soon rectifies this conception. Self-indulgent and pleasure-loving the Monk undoubtedly is, but he is no hypocrite or evil-liver. The Host makes one of his few mistakes in tact by treating him with breezy familiarity, “Ryd forth,” he cries:—

Ryd forth, myn owne lord, brek nat our game,
But, by my trouthe, I knowe nat your name,
Wher shal I calle you my lord dan John,
Or dan Thomas, or elles dan Albon?
Of what hous be ye, by your fader kin?
I vow to god, thou hast a ful fair skin,
It is a gentil pasture ther thou goost;
Thou art nat lyk a penaunt[89] or a goost.

The Monk knows better than to rebuke the somewhat coarse pleasantries that follow; but with quiet dignity he ignores the familiarity and offers to relate either the life of St. Edward or else a series of tragedies:—

Of whiche I have an hundred in my celle.

The choice of subjects in itself constitutes a delicate but unmistakable snub. The Host expected some tale of hunting and merriment from him—tragedy has little in common with his stout, jovial person, and frank delight in good living—instead of which the pilgrims are regaled with a series of moral discourses which would have been perfectly in place in the cloister, but seem strangely ill-suited to the present company. Indeed, the pilgrims grow restive under so much good advice; they evidently fear that the worthy Monk means to inflict the whole hundred tragedies on them, and after listening, with growing impatience, to seventeen tales of woe, the tender-hearted Knight can bear no more:—

“Ho!” quod the knight, “good sir, na-more of this.
That ye han seyd is right y-nough, y-wis,
And mochel more; for litel hevinesse
Is right y-nough to mochel folk, I gesse.
I seye for me it is a greet disese
Wher-as men han ben in greet welthe and ese
To heren of hir sodyn fal, allas!”

But it is significant that it is the Knight and not the Host who breaks in, and that it is not until the Knight has spoken that Harry Bailly informs the narrator of the obvious fact that his tale “anoyeth al this companye,” and courteously begs him to “sey somwhat of hunting.” The Monk refuses, and the turn passes to the Nun’s Priest, but never again does the Host venture to take a liberty with “dan Piers.”

The Host’s character is drawn with extraordinary skill, and without the aid of any such introductory description as the Prologue gives us of the other pilgrims. The knowledge of human nature is part of his trade, and the success with which he manages the diverse company which chance has thrown in his way is proof enough that he is passed-master of his profession. Shrewd, worldly, and unimaginative, we should imagine that the coarser tales best please his taste, but it is his business to cater for people of all kinds, and he well understands how to ensure sufficient variety to suit all listeners. His rough good-humoured air of authority is sufficient to keep the Friar and the Somnour within bounds. He prevents the drunken Cook from becoming an intolerable nuisance to the company. He keeps an eye on every individual pilgrim, and sees that no one is overlooked. His ready jests smooth over many little roughnesses and disagreeables, and the one thing that really takes him aback is when the poor parson rebukes him for the constant oaths which slip off his tongue so readily. He can only conclude that a person so extraordinary must be a Lollard. And all the time that he is keeping the pilgrims in a good temper and preventing them from feeling the journey irksome, he has by no means lost sight of the fact that the reward of the best story is to be “a soper at our aller cost,” given at the Tabard Inn. The money he expended on the pilgrimage was probably a good investment—not to mention the chance that his expenses might very possibly be reduced to nothing, since at the very beginning he had established it as a law that:—

... who-so wol my judgement withseye
Shal paye al that we spenden by the weye

A very practical person, Harry Bailly!

Chaucer excels in drawing characters of this type. His young men are not unlike the heroes of Shakespearean comedy. They are real enough, but they have no very marked individuality. The Squire is by far the best of them. In him we see the charm and freshness of youth, and it would be ungracious to ask more of so fair a promise. But Troilus, with his tearfulness and emotionalism, his readiness to procrastinate and to look to others to help him out of his difficulties, with something of Bassanio’s gallantry and attractiveness, has also Bassanio’s pliability. His is too slight a nature to form the centre of a tragedy. Palamon and Arcite are as indistinguishable as Demetrius and Lysander. There are critics who profess to see subtle differences of character between them, but to the majority of readers they are mere types of chivalry. Dorigen’s husband, Averagus, is little more than an embodiment of loyal truth, and Griselda’s, were one to regard him as anything but the means of testing wifely patience, would be a monster of cruelty. Compare with these, the Pardoner, the Friar, the Somnour, the Canon’s Yeoman, the Miller, and all the other commonplace, practical men whom Chaucer describes. Most of them strike us as elderly; certainly none of them have any of the freshness or idealism of youth. The remarkable thing about them is that they are so ordinary and yet so interesting. The fussy self-importance of Chauntecleer; the garrulous vulgarity of Pandarus; the senile uxoriousness of January, are all drawn to the life, without one touch of bitterness or exaggeration. We listen to the jests and squabbles of the pilgrims on the road to Canterbury, or the story of some drama of everyday life, and we feel as if we had been made free of the ale-house and were listening to the village gossips of our own day.

But if the best drawn of Chaucer’s men are confined to one comparatively narrow class, his women show no such limitation. He draws no great tragedy-queen, no Guenever or Vittoria Corrombona, but with this great exception he depicts women of almost every type. Before going on to discuss his heroines in detail, however, it might, perhaps, be well to say a few words as to Chaucer’s attitude towards women in general.

It must be evident even to the most superficial observer, that Chaucer had an innate reverence for womanhood. The cult of the Virgin Mary, which had done so much to exalt woman among all Christian nations, appealed to him strongly, and, as we have seen, he more than once goes out of his way to introduce some invocation to the “flour of virgines alle.” His love of children no doubt inclined him to look with tenderness on the relation of mother and child, and among his most beautiful pictures are those of Constance, with her baby in her arms, and Griselda bidding farewell to her “litel yonge mayde”:—

And in her barm[90] this litel child she leyde
With ful sad face, and gan the child to kisse
And lulled it, and after gan it blisse.[91]

But he was far too shrewd and honest an observer of life to persuade himself that all women were angels, or to allow reverence to degenerate into sentimentality. His attitude towards marriage is characteristic. Reference has already been made to his acceptance of the comic convention of the shrewish wife, and certainly both the Host and the Merchant have but few illusions left concerning wives. The virago whom the Host has married cannot as much as go to say her prayers without finding some cause of quarrel:—

And if that any neighebour of myne
Wol nat in chirche to my wyf enclyne,[92]
Or be so hardy to hir to trespace,
Whan she comth hoom, she rampeth in my face
And cryeth, “false coward, wreek[93] thy wyf!”

The Merchant’s wife would “overmatch the devil himself” were he foolish enough to wed her. In the Lenvoy to the Clerkes Tale Chaucer warns modern husbands to look for no patient Griseldas among their wives, and gives much satiric advice to “archewyves” to stand no nonsense from their husbands. In the Lenvoy a Bukton he warns his friend of “the sorwe and wo that is in mariage”:—

I wol nat seyn how that it is the cheyne[94]
Of Sathanas, on which he gnaweth ever,
But I dar seyn, were he out of his peyne,
As by his wille, he wolde be bounne never.

A fair proportion of the Canterbury Tales deal with the tricks by which a faithless wife imposes on her too credulous husband, and the bitterest of all the words which Chaucer utters on the subject are those which preface the Marchantes Tale of January and May, when with biting sarcasm he rebukes Theophrastus for daring to say that a good servant is of more value than a wife, and goes on to discuss at length the happiness of wedded life:—

How mighte a man han any adversitee
That hath a wyf? certes I can nat seye.
The blisse which that is bitwixe hem tweye
Ther may no tonge telle, or herte thinke.
If he be poore, she helpeth him to swinke;[95]
She kepeth his good, and wasteth never a deel;
Al that her housbonde lust,[96] hir lyketh weel;[97]

before relating the shame which a young wife brings upon her doting old husband. The Shipmann protests with brutal frankness that wives cost more than they are worth, and tells a tale to prove it. From all this we might imagine Chaucer a cross-grained misogynist, but a glance for one moment at the other side of the picture corrects this impression. He is as ready to say what will amuse his contemporaries as Shakespeare is to tickle the ears of the groundlings in his generation, but, like Shakespeare, he is too just to see anything from only one point of view. There certainly are women who abuse their husbands, and Chaucer’s inferiority to Shakespeare is marked by the fact that he finds the situation amusing; and there are also shrews and termagants who make their husbands’ lives a burden in other ways. But pecking is not confined to hens. Chaucer realises that for woman marriage is even more of a lottery than for man, since she is necessarily so much at her husband’s mercy:—

Lo, how a woman doth amis,
To love him that unknowen is!
For, by Crist, lo! thus it fareth;
“Hit is not al gold that glareth.”[98]
For, al-so brouke I wel myn heed,[99]
Ther may be under goodliheed
Kevered many a shrewd vyce;
Therefore be no wight so nyce
To take a love only for chere,
For speche, or for frendly manere;
For this shal every woman finde
That som man, of his pure kinde,[100]
Wol shewen outward the faireste,
Til he have caught that what him leste;
And thanne wol he causes finde,
And swere how that she is unkinde,
Or fals, or prevy, or double was.
(Hous of Fame, Bk. I, ll. 269-85.)

Husband-hunting is a sport which has roused the laughter of men from time immemorial; Chaucer is one of the few who has ever portrayed that fierce shrinking from the thought of matrimony which is no less common among women. Emily longing to be free to roam in the forest and “noght to been a wyf,” and Constance trembling at the thought of the strange man into whose hands she is being committed, are as true to life as the Wife of Bath with her husbands five at the Church door. And this poet, who sees so clearly the dangers and evils of matrimony, has left us one of the most perfect pictures of married life at its best. Dorigen and Averagus understand how to remain lovers all their lives:—

Heer may men seen an humble wys accord;
Thus hath she take hir servant and hir lord,
Servant in love, and lord in mariage;
Then was he bothe in lordship and servage;
Servage? nay, but in lordshipe above
Sith he hath bothe his lady and his love;
His lady, certes, and his wyf also,
The whiche that lawe of love acordeth to.
(Frankeleyns Tale, ll. 63-70.)

The passage immediately preceding this, with its beautiful picture of what love understands by freedom, is too long to quote in full, but it shows clearly enough Chaucer’s conception of the relation of the sexes. To talk of mastery is absurd:—

Whan maistrie comth, the god of love anon
Beteth his winges, and farewel! he is gon!

True love learns to give and take and does not demand payment for every wrong:—

Ire, siknesse, or constellacioun,[101]
Wyn, wo, or chaunginge of complexioun[102]
Causeth ful ofte to doon amis or speken.
On every wrong a man may nat be wreken ...

and the great lesson of married life is patience and tender forbearance in such moments of weakness. The story illustrates the text. Averagus has no word of reproach for his wife when she tells him what she has done, and Dorigen, on her part, shows a simple confidence in her husband’s honour which almost makes us forget the impossible absurdity of the situation. After all, it is in Chaucer’s women themselves, rather than in what he says about woman, that we see his attitude most clearly. In the character of Blanche the Duchesse he portrays an ideal which differs in many ways from the conventional standard of the day. Instead of the typical heroine of romance, whose sole thought is of love and whose sole desire that her knight may prove the bravest in Christendom, Chaucer draws a lively, quick-witted girl, whose consciousness of her own power and simple delight in her own beauty never degenerate into selfish coquetry. The medieval heroine considered it a point of honour to set her lover impossible tasks to perform for her sake. Blanche “ne used no such knakkes small.” She sees no sense in sending a man

... into Walayke,[103]
To Pruyse and in-to Tartarye,
To Alisaundre, ne in-to Turkye,
And bidde him faste, annoo that he
Go hoodles to the drye see[104]
And come hoom by the Carrenare;[105]

and telling him to be

... right ware
That I may of yow here seyn[106]
Worship, or that ye come ageyn.

Nor does she use any arts to enhance her beauty. She looks you straight in the face with those great grey eyes of hers:—

Debonair, goode, gladde, and sadde,

and offers a frank friendship to all “gode folk.” She utters no half truths, and takes no pleasure in deceit, nor was there ever

... through hir tonge
Man ne woman greatly harmed.

There is no touch of pettiness in her nature. One of the most delightful passages in the poem is that in which the Black Knight declares how ready she always was to forgive and forget:—

Whan I had wrong and she the right
She wolde alwey so goodely
For-geve me so debonairly.
In alle my youthe in alle chaunce
She took me in hir governaunce.

At the same time she “loved so wel hir owne name” that she suffered no liberties to be taken with her:—

She wrong do wolde to no wight;

and

No wight might do her no shame.

Through the whole picture there breathes a spirit of vigour and freshness and gaiety. Once again Chaucer seems to foreshadow Shakespeare: Blanche might well take her place beside Rosalind and Portia and Beatrice, as a type of simple unspoiled girlhood. Her frank enjoyment of life, her keen wit, which knows no touch of malice, her combination of tender-heartedness and strength remind us more than once of Shakespeare’s heroines, and like them she is no colourless model of propriety, but has all a true woman’s charm and unexpectedness.

No other of Chaucer’s portraits is so detailed, but he recurs more than once to the same type. Emily is drawn with comparatively few strokes, but she gives us very much the same impression as Blanche. There is the same sense of the open air, the same simplicity and directness. Nothing better brings out the peculiar quality of Chaucer’s heroine than a comparison between the Emily of the Knightes Tale and the Emily of Two Noble Kinsmen. The one walks alone in the garden, gathering flowers, and singing to herself for sheer lightness of heart. The other converses with her waiting-woman, and her chief interest in nature lies in the hope that the maid may prove able “to work such flowers in silk.” There is no reason why the second Emily should not wish to have an embroidered gown, but its introduction here at once destroys the freshness and simplicity of the picture. Canace, too, delights in wandering in the forest in the early morning. She is so closely in sympathy with nature that it seems but natural that she should understand bird-latin, and her quick sympathy with the unhappy falcon is very characteristic of a Chaucerian heroine, for again and again he tells us

That pitee renneth sone in gentil heart.

It is a pretty picture which shows the king’s daughter gently bandaging the wounded bird upon her lap, or doing “hir bisiness and al hir might” to gather herbs for salves.

Constance, Griselda, Dorigen are maturer and more developed. They are women, not girls, and women who have lived and suffered, but they are just what we should expect Blanche, or Emily, or Canace to develop into. They have less gaiety and light-heartedness, less pretty wilfulness than these younger sisters of theirs, but they have the same frankness and directness, the same honesty of mind. They meet their fate with grave serenity and simple courage. Griselda abandons herself to what she believes to be her duty. Constance and Dorigen when confronted by danger show perfect readiness to do what in them lies to defend their own honour. Constance throws the wicked steward into the sea; Dorigen, instead of indulging in hysterics, is quick-witted enough to hit on a way of escape which no natural means could have blocked. Through all three stories runs a vein of tenderness which stirs our sympathy. Griselda, who has borne so much in patience, gives vent to one passionate cry of reproach when she is bidden to make way for the new wife, a cry which has in it all a woman’s fond clinging to the memory of a past happiness:—

O gode god! how gentil and how kinde
Ye semed by your speche and your visage
The day that maked was our mariage;

and surely no direct accusation of cruelty could show with equal clearness how deeply she has suffered. They are great-hearted women, before whose innate nobility the persecutions and unjust accusations to which they are subjected drop into nothingness.

When Chaucer deliberately sets out to draw a saint instead of a woman, he is less successful. Our sympathies are with Blanche, as she sings and dances so gaily, rather than with the preternaturally pious Virginia, who at the age of twelve often feigns sickness in order to

... fleen the companye
Wher lykly was to treten of folye,[107]
As is at festes, revels, and at daunces ...

Indeed the whole of the Phisiciens Tale seems curiously cold and lifeless. There is a touch of nature at the end where the child, forgetting her piety, flings her arms round her father’s neck, and asks if there is no remedy, and again where she begs him to smite softly, but these are not enough to atone for the perfunctoriness of the rest. The story is too essentially tragic for the barest narration of it not to make some appeal to us, but it is impossible not to feel that Chaucer was either hurried or working against the grain when he wrote his version.

The Seconde Nonnes Tale contains even less of human interest. Cecilia is neither more nor less than the mouthpiece of the Christian religion, and the miracles that she works and the sermons that she preaches leave the reader unmoved. The music of the verse has a charm of its own, and Chaucer’s most left-handed work is yet the work of a genius, but a comparison of Cecilia with Constance soon shows the difference between a real woman and an embodied ideal. The miraculous element, which is subordinated to the human interest in the Man of Lawes Tale, dominates the whole of the Seconde Nonnes Tale, and the inevitable sameness of the various conversions further detracts from its vividness.

In Cressida Chaucer had painted a woman of the butterfly type. In the Canterbury Tales he gives us a certain number of actually immoral women, such as Alisoun and May, but he paints no second picture of pretty helpless coquettishness. The heroines of the less savoury tales are coarser in fibre and for the most part lower in the social scale than Calkas’ daughter, and their stories are of mere sensuous self-indulgence with none of the charm and poetry which marks the tale of Troilus and Cressida. One character alone recalls Chaucer’s earlier heroine. The Prioress is very much what a fourteenth-century Cressida would have been if her friends had placed her in a convent instead of finding her a husband. She has the same daintiness and trimness, the same superficial tender-heartedness. It is difficult to imagine that her sympathy, like Canace’s, would take the practical form of applying salves or binding up wounds, but:—

She was so charitable and so pitous,
She wolde wepe if that she sawe a mous
Caught in a trappe, if it were deed or bledde.

Her table manners are excellent, and she wears her veil with an air:—

Ful semely hir wimpel pinched was.

Her silver brooch, with its Amor vincit omnia, betrays a naïve interest in her personal appearance. She is never brought into contact with the more passionate side of life as Cressida is, and her seclusion from the world has given her a touch of primness which combines oddly with her little affectations. The contrast between her worldliness and that of the Monk is complete. He is gross, jovial, self-indulgent; she is delicate, mincing, conventional. Like Cressida she would always follow the line of least resistance, though it would cause her genuine—if but momentary—distress to give pain to anyone. She is too well-bred ever to think for herself, and too innocent and simple-minded not to accept life as it is offered her. She tells her story with real tenderness and feeling, and it is evident that the atmosphere of the cloister in no wise irks her. It is impossible to regard her as a pattern nun, but equally impossible to judge her harshly. Both she and Cressida have something childlike about them, and it seems out of place to try them by the ordinary standards.

Of a very different type are Chaucer’s practical, bustling housewives, amongst whom the Wife of Bath and Dame Pertelote stand pre-eminent. The Wife of Bath is a capable, active, pushing woman, with plenty of courage and plenty of self-confidence. She is well-to-do and has a fitting sense of her own dignity and importance, but she has no idea of letting dignity stand in the way of enjoyment, and is quite ready to take her part in the rough jests of the company. Comely of face and plump of person, she dresses well and is quite prepared to make the most of her attractions. The prologue to her tale shows that she has plenty of shrewd mother-wit. Her view of matrimony is characteristic. She recognises the “greet perfeccioun” of celibacy, but since all men and women are not suited to such a life, she is impatient of the idea that they should marry but once, and she quotes the Scriptures most aptly for her purpose. Her present husband is her fifth, and when he dies she has every intention of marrying again:—

“I nil envye no virginitee;”

she cries,

“Let hem be breed of pured whete-seed,
And lat us wyves hoten barly-breed,”[108]

for barley-bread is by no means to be despised. In fact she is the epitome of common-sense, and her confidence in her own opinion enables her to bear contradiction good-humouredly enough. Her methods with her various husbands were simple: three she bullied and brow-beat, one she paid back in his own coin. The fifth, who had the sense to beat her, was the only one for whom she had any respect, and even he had finally yielded her

... the governance of hous and lond
And of his tonge and of his hond also.

It is the picture of a violent, coarse—but not wholly ill-natured—woman, who despises bookishness and thoroughly enjoys good ale and good company. She has no morals and no ideals, though she loves to go

To vigiles and to processiouns,
To preching eek, and to thise pilgrimages,
To pleyes of miracles and mariages,

but her genial good-fellowship makes her a pleasant enough companion.

Dame Pertelote is drawn with even greater skill. The impatience with which she listens to Chauntecleer’s account of his dream is just what we should expect of a sensible, unimaginative, middle-class woman, whose own nerves and digestion were in excellent order, if her husband came to her with a long story of a supernatural warning. Dreams, she says, are the natural consequence of over-eating; the best thing he can do is to take some of the herbs she recommends, and when he has pecked these up, “right as they growe” and “ete hem in” he will find all his nervousness and depression disappear. Chauntecleer is furious at being treated with such scant respect and proceeds to overwhelm her with examples of dreams that have come true. His wise wife, who knows when to hold her tongue, makes no attempt to answer him back, but is evidently only too thankful when at last, being convinced that he has established his point, he suffers his attention to be distracted and turns to the pleasanter business of love-making. Pertelote is in fact typical of the good wives of her class, as the Wife of Bath is of the bad. She is no more a heroine than the Wife of Bath is a villainess, but the one studies her husband’s comforts and thoroughly understands how to make him happy, while the other cares for nothing but her own amusement. Pertelote’s lamentations when Chauntecleer is borne off are in the best taste. Restraint was considered no virtue in a medieval widow, and Pertelote very properly screams loudly and persistently. Nor does wifely affection go unrewarded. The “sely widwe” and her daughters who own the hen-yard

Herden thise hennes cry and maken wo,
And out at dores steten they anoon,

with the result that Chauntecleer is saved.

It is this power of making characters at once typical and individual which marks true dramatic genius. Browning’s men and women reveal their innermost souls to us, we see them with a passionate vividness which is almost startling in its brilliancy, but all the while we are conscious of the intensity of their individuality. The conspicuous thing about them is that which marks them out from the rest of the world. The commonplace novelist or dramatist, on the other hand, gives us mere types of vice and virtue. Mr. Jerome’s gallery of Stageland characters—the hero, the heroine, the comic Irishman, the good old man, and the rest—is scarcely caricature. It is hardly necessary to give them names, the same types have been recurring again and again for many a long year, and are likely to continue to recur as long as there are cheap books and cheap theatres. But the great masters of character-drawing contrive to show us the individual at once as a unit and as part of the whole. We see the peculiar idiosyncrasies of this or that person, and we are conscious, not only of a subtle bond between ourselves and them which enables us to see things from their point of view, but of their relation to human nature in general and to their own class in particular.

CHAPTER V

Critics may be divided in opinion as to Chaucer’s right to be called the Father of English poetry, but there can be no question that he is the first great English humorist. As far back as Henry III’s reign fabliaux had been imported from France, but they took no real root in English soil, and though their coarse jests and indecent situations were fully appreciated by thirteenth- and fourteenth-century readers, they never rose above the level of collections of “merrie tales” and made no pretensions to originality or literary style. The same stories were repeated again and again, with slight variations, and are often to be found in Indian or Arabian versions as well as in French and English. Chaucer alone, showed that it was possible to see in them a revelation of human nature. The romances, as has been said, were far more French than English, and, even so, comparatively few of them show any flicker of humour. Aucassin and Nicolette stands out as a conspicuous exception, but this is pure French, and the more English romances, such as Guy of Warwick or Bevis of Hampton, take everything with intense seriousness. It is true that the Continental animal epic had begun to make its influence felt in England, but it was still the Continental epic: it belonged to the days of literary free-trade before the national spirit made itself felt in literature. Satire, it is true, had long since made its appearance in England, but except for rude popular rhymes and an occasional poem of greater pretensions—such as the Land of Cokaygne—it was in Latin, and had nothing distinctively English about it. In the Miracle Plays, it is true, we find that mixture of shrewd common-sense and real feeling, of comedy and tragedy, which we are accustomed to regard as characteristically English, but though they had been popular in England for many years before Chaucer began to write, the best of them date from the fifteenth century, and the comic element in the earlier plays seems chiefly to have consisted in rough-and-tumble farce. It was left for Chaucer to show the true meaning and value of the comic point of view, and at the same time to embody the characteristics of a nation which had but recently awakened to the consciousness of its own individuality.

To say that humour is the most subtle and illusive of qualities, is to utter a truism. Certain situations are in themselves necessarily and essentially tragic. The slaying of parent by child, or child by parent; a great shipwreck involving terrible loss of life; any sudden and overwhelming catastrophe must always bring with it a sense of horror. But comedy depends on point of view rather than on situation. An absurdity of dress or manner which would cause us to smile under normal circumstances, would cease to be amusing if it indicated dangerous insanity: a man falling off the roof of a house might go into the most ridiculous attitudes without in the least stirring the spectator’s sense of humour. It is this which makes it difficult to accept Professor Bergson’s most interesting and suggestive theory of the mechanical nature of comedy as wholly satisfactory. And again, while such tragic incidents as have been suggested appeal to every normal human being, what amuses one person may leave another absolutely untouched. We all know the blank sensation of having our best story received with stony politeness, and the despair of trying to explain a joke. Certain things, however, do appeal in greater or less degree to the majority of people, and among these is the element of unexpectedness. The whole point of the modern musical comedy consists in making the actor behave as no sane person ever dreamed of behaving in actual life. If it were the fashion to enter a room in a series of cart-wheels we should see nothing funny in it. The audience roars with laughter when the elderly gentleman sits on his hat, because hats are not intended to be used as cushions. Nor is this element of unexpectedness confined to mere farce. It constitutes more than half the point of a brilliant repartee or play upon words. The child’s misuse of terms is amusing because it suggests something which would never have occurred to us. And it is this which underlies the assertion that humour consists in incongruity. True humour, however, contains far more than this. If comedy plays on the surface of life, its greatest exponents bring home to us the fact that that surface covers a depth. It is no accident that causes Shakespeare’s comedies to deepen in tone until they become well-nigh indistinguishable from tragedies, or that leads Chaucer to introduce a Pandarus into the tragedy of Troilus and Criseyde. Comedy has a double value. It is amusing, and it is also a bond which connects us with everyday life. It keeps tragedy from soaring into worlds peopled exclusively by heroes and heroines of almost superhuman greatness, and romance from dwelling wholly in a land of faery. Had the poets of the Restoration ever dared to view their heroes from the comic point of view we should have been spared the bombastic grandiloquence of their Almanzors and Osmyns. Had Rosalind no sense of humour, were Touchstone and Jaques non-existent, As You Like It might still be a charming forest idyll, but it would cease to have any hint of realism.

Chaucer’s comedy touches both extremes: it includes the most elementary, and the most subtle forms, and though he never rises to the height of the great Shakespearean dramas, he does reveal possibilities hitherto undreamed of in English literature. For the sake of clearness it may be well to consider his comedy under four heads: farce, wit, satire, humour proper.

(1) Farce.—Farce may be defined as that form of comedy which makes least appeal to the intelligence, which is, in fact, almost wholly physical. An imbecile may be incapable of realising that there is anything unusual in wearing straws in one’s hair and therefore may not find the spectacle amusing, but it needs but a very low order of intelligence to appreciate such physical peculiarity—hence the popularity of costume songs, and pantomime generally, which call for no mental effort on the part of the audience. But while farce is undoubtedly the lowest form of comedy, it does not necessarily follow that it is to be despised. The greatest authors do not disdain to make use of it, only they keep it subordinate to other interests. Shakespeare contrives to blend farce with character-study in a way that is truly marvellous. Falstaff’s fatness is eminently farcical, and yet it is something more—a starveling Sir John would be a wholly different person. It is farce touched with humour. Dogberry and Verges are of a different species from the comic policeman of musical comedy.

In Chaucer we find both forms of farce. The “sely carpenter” of the Milleres Tale provides plenty of incident well suited to tickle the most elementary sense of the comic. The picture of the unfortunate John victualling his tub in readiness for a second edition of Noah’s flood, and sitting in it, slung up to the ceiling, “awaytinge on the reyn,” is irresistibly funny, and it is easy to fancy the delight of the audience when, thinking the flood has come, he cuts the cord and comes bumping on to the floor; for the truest farce of all is the practical joke which makes someone else ridiculous. All the coarser tales are full of such episodes. It would make no difference if the incidents were transferred from one tale to another, they have no subtle connection with the personality of those involved in them; the absurdity lies in the actual situation, and is exactly on a level with the rough-and-tumble fights between Noah and his wife, which proved so popular in the Miracle Plays, or the tossing of Mak in a blanket in the well-known Townley Mystery.

The portrait of the drunken Cook contains farce of a somewhat higher order. He is a most unattractive person, and from any other point of view would be merely repulsive. But humour, while it cuts through false sentiment, not infrequently softens down the harsher lines in a character. There is no bitterness in true laughter; we cannot wholly despise what amuses us. In a tract the Cook and the Wife of Bath, the Friar and the Pardoner, would serve as awful warnings. In the Canterbury Tales they show an extraordinary power of disarming criticism and worming themselves into our affections:—

The Cook of London, whyl the Reve spak,
For joye, him thoughte, he clawed him on the bak.

He is a genial rascal after all, and we almost resent his having so unfortunately appropriate a name as Hogge. When he falls asleep as he rides and rolls off his horse our sympathies are with him, though we fully appreciate the force of the Maunciple’s plea that he shall not be permitted to tell his tale. The picture of the rest of the pilgrims shoving him to and fro in their efforts to mount him again, is farce of the simplest and most primitive kind, but Roger himself is a live man, not a mere occasion of mirth in others.

The Wyf of Bath, again, is a foul-mouthed, coarse-grained woman, selfish and self-indulgent. Her prologue shows an amazing ignorance of the meaning of clean living, and her piety merely serves as an excuse for seeing the world. Yet such is the power of the comic point of view that it is quite impossible to judge her from the conventional moral standpoint. Comedy lays stress on her good-humour and her sense, and, above all, on her power of amusing the company. Compare her for one moment with Mrs. Sinclair in Clarissa, or the old hag in Dombey and Son, and the effect produced by comic treatment at once becomes evident. It is not that it dulls our moral sense, but it gives us a peculiar tolerance of its own. Instead of judging all men from our own particular plane, we learn to see these illiterate and common folk as they see each other, and we find them extraordinarily human after all.

(2) Wit.—Wit is the intellectual counterpart of farce. Farce at its lowest is actually physical—the jester trips his victim up, ’Arry and ’Arriet exchange hats—and at its highest consists in physical absurdity. Wit appeals as much to a blind man as to one who can see. In neither case has the comic element any necessary connection with the characters of those concerned. Farce, as we have seen, may be combined with humour, and wit may gain an added keenness from our knowledge of the witty person, but in their simplest form neither depends on any such connection. A man chasing his hat is a funny sight, quite apart from our having any idea of who he is. Any additional element of humour which may be added by the fact that it is Mr. So-and-so, who prides himself on his dignified deportment, is not purely farcical. In like manner, a brilliant repartee is amusing, though we may have no notion who uttered it: in fact, not infrequently the same story is told, with equal effect, about two or more different men. At the same time a remark, witty in itself, often gains additional force from its context, and in certain cases the chief point depends on the setting. The wit-traps so beloved by Restoration comedy writers, of which George Meredith speaks in his Essay on Comedy, are typical examples of pure wit. It does not matter in the least by whom the remark is made: the actual verbal sword-play is in itself amusing. Frequently such dialogue does nothing whatever to help on the plot. Its wit is in itself sufficient to justify its existence. Shakespeare, on the other hand, has extraordinarily few passages which can be detached from the play in which they occur, and quoted as essentially amusing. Falstaff’s jests without Falstaff lose all their savour, and the wit of a Rosalind or a Beatrice is too intimate a part of her personality for the two to be divorced. Millament’s brilliant jests are scintillating jewels of wit. The wit of Shakespeare’s heroines is a facet of their character.

Drama naturally affords more scope for the display of wit than does narrative poetry. That Chaucer is witty is undeniable, but his wit shows itself chiefly in sly comments and parentheses, or in the adroit use of an unexpected simile. His dry comment on the probable fate of Arcite’s soul; the parenthesis which tells us how small is the number of those who having done well desire to hide their good deeds; the eagle’s complaint, in the Hous of Fame, that the poet is “noyous for to carie”; Placebo’s explanation of the reason why he has never yet quarrelled with any lord of “heigh estaat,” are good examples of the former method. Detached from their context, there is little or nothing in any of them to raise a smile. They contain no play upon words, nothing intrinsically amusing. But in their proper setting they cause that pleasant shock which breeds laughter; they give a sudden whimsical turn to the thought.

The Nonne Preestes Tale illustrates, not only Chaucer’s comic use of simile, but, what is closely allied to this, the comic effect produced by speaking of one thing in terms of another. The mock-heroic effect produced by the learning of Chauntecleer and the weight of the illustrations which he adduces in support of his faith in dreams, is inimitable. This cock quotes Josephus and Macrobius and Cato with such pompous gravity that he almost persuades us to share his own sense of his importance. The grave disquisition on predestination and free-will which prefaces the account of his untoward fate has an irresistibly comic effect. This is, however, not purely comic. It is characteristic of Chaucer that he should treat a matter which was evidently much in his thoughts, in this half-ironic manner. The comparison of the bereaved Pertelote to “Hasdrubales wyf,” and her sister hens to the wives of the senators of Rome

—whan that Nero brende[109] the citee—

is no less effective. The whole story indeed is treated consistently from the comic point of view, and while here again there is nothing inherently funny in detached passages, wit lights up the poem from end to end.

(3) Satire.—Satire differs from farce or wit in that it has a definite moral purpose.

It is our purpose, Crites, to correct
And punish with our laughter ...

says Mercury in Cynthia’s Revels. The satirist deliberately alienates our sympathies from those whom he describes, and as the true humorist is apt to pass from comedy to romance, and from romance to tragedy, so the satirist not infrequently ends by finding rage and disgust overpower his sense of the ridiculous. Ben Jonson passes from the comedy of Every Man in his Humour to the bitterness of Volpone, Swift from the comparative lightness of Gulliver in Lilliput, to the savage brutality of the Hounyhymns. Of satire pure and simple few examples are to be found in Chaucer. The Hous of Fame is indeed satiric in conception, and certain of the pictures it contains are decidedly effective. The fourteenth-century equivalent of the game of Russian Scandal which it describes, has already been noticed. No less ironic is the account of the

shipmen and pilgrymes
With scrippes bret-ful of lesinges
Entremedled with tydinges,[110]

whom the poet meets in the house of Rumour. But the poem as a whole is so lengthy and so much of it is occupied with the description of symbols, references to classical mythology, and other equally serious matters, that the more witty portions stand out conspicuously, and the reader is apt to find some difficulty in seeing the various parts in their proper relation. Successful satire must ever keep its object in view. The Hous of Fame is too discursive to be really effective as a whole.

The fact is that satire is not Chaucer’s natural bent. He is too quick-witted not to see through sham and humbug, but his interest lies in portraiture rather than in exposure. His object is to paint life as he sees it, to hold up the mirror to nature, and, as has justly been said, “a mirror has no tendency,” it reflects, but it does not, or should not, distort. In two cases only does Chaucer deliberately draw a one-sided picture, and both are topical skits, too slight to regard as satire proper. The Compleint of Mars, which is not specially witty or amusing in itself, is said to have been written at the expense of my lady of York and the Earl of Huntingdon, but any savour which the jest may once have had, has long since passed away. The rhyme of Sir Thopas has already been noticed as a good-natured parody of the conventional romance.

But if Chaucer is too tolerant and genial, too little of a preacher and enthusiast, for a satirist, enough has already been said to show that his wit has often a satiric turn. The student of the Canterbury Tales is often reminded of the worth of another great English humorist. Chaucer and Fielding are alike in a certain air of rollicking good-fellowship, a certain virility, a determination to paint men and women as they know them. Neither is particularly squeamish, both enjoy a rough jest, and have little patience with over-refinement. Both give one a sense of sturdy honesty and kindliness, and know how to combine tenderness with strength. Both, with all their tolerance, have a keen eye for hypocrisy or affectation and a sharp tongue wherewith to chastise and expose it. Chaucer hates no one, not even the Pardoner, as whole-heartedly as Fielding hates Master Blifil, but the Pardoners Tale affords the best instance of the satiric bent of the poet’s humour when he is brought face to face with a scheming rogue.

The Host, who has been much moved by the piteous tale of Virginia, turns to the Pardoner for something to remove its depressing influence:—

“Or but I here anon a mery tale.”

he cries,

“Myn herte is lost for pitee of this mayde.
Thou belamy,[111] thou Pardoner,” he seyde,
“Tel us som mirthe or japes[112] right anon.”

The Pardoner is ready enough to oblige, as soon as he has called at the inn they are passing and has eaten and drunk. But it is noteworthy that the pilgrims, who have listened to the Miller’s tale without a murmur, are nervous as to what the Pardoner’s idea of a merry tale may be. With one voice they protest:—

“Nay! lat him telle us of no ribaudye;[113]
Tell us som moral thing, that we may lere[114]
Som wit, and thanne wol we gladly here.”

To the Pardoner it is all one. Practised speaker as he is, a comic story or a sermon comes equally readily to his lips, and he promises with ready good-nature, though he begs for a moment for reflection:—

“I graunte, y-wis,” quod he, “but I moste thinke
Up-on som honest thing, whyl that I drinke.”

Of their insinuations as to the kind of tale he is likely to tell if left to himself, he takes not the slightest notice. His tongue loosened by the ale, he begins with a cynical confession of his methods as a popular preacher.

“Lordings,” quod he, “in chirches whan I preche
I peyne me to han an hauteyn[115] speche,
And ringe it out as round as gooth a belle,
For I can al by rote that I telle.[116]
My theme is alwey oon, and ever was—
‘Radix malorum est Cupiditas.’”