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Title: Chaucer

Author: Adolphus William Ward

Release Date: January, 2003  [Etext #3624]
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From:  ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS


CHAUCER

BY ADOLPHUS WILLIAM WARD




NOTE.

The peculiar conditions of this essay must be left to explain themselves.
It could not have been written at all without the aid of the Publications
of the Chaucer Society, and more especially of the labours of the
Society's Director, Mr. Furnivall.  To other recent writers on Chaucer--
including Mr Fleay, from whom I never differ but with hesitation--I have
referred, in so far as it was in my power to do so.  Perhaps I may take
this opportunity of expressing a wish that Pauli's "History of England," a
work beyond the compliment of an acknowledgement, were accessible to every
English reader.

A.W.W.




CONTENTS.

CHAPTER 1.  CHAUCER'S TIMES.

CHAPTER 2.  CHAUCER'S LIFE AND WORKS.

CHAPTER 3.  CHARACTERISTICS OF CHAUCER AND OF HIS POETRY.

CHAPTER 4.
EPILOGUE.

GLOSSARY.

INDEX.




CHAUCER.



CHAPTER 1.  CHAUCER'S TIMES.

The biography of Geoffrey Chaucer is no longer a mixture of unsifted
facts, and of more or less hazardous conjectures.  Many and wide as are
the gaps in our knowledge concerning the course of his outer life, and
doubtful as many important passages of it remain--in vexatious contrast
with the certainty of other relatively insignificant data--we have at
least become aware of the foundations on which alone a trustworthy account
of it can be built.  These foundations consist partly of a meagre though
gradually increasing array of external evidence, chiefly to be found in
public documents,--in the Royal Wardrobe Book, the Issue Rolls of the
Exchequer, the Customs Rolls, and suchlike records--partly of the
conclusions which may be drawn with confidence from the internal evidence
of the poet's own indisputably genuine works, together with a few
references to him in the writings of his contemporaries or immediate
successors.  Which of his works are to be accepted as genuine, necessarily
forms the subject of an antecedent enquiry, such as cannot with any degree
of safety be conducted except on principles far from infallible with
regard to all the instances to which they have been applied, but now
accepted by the large majority of competent scholars.  Thus, by a process
which is in truth dulness and dryness itself except to patient endeavour
stimulated by the enthusiasm of special literary research, a limited
number of results has been safely established, and others have at all
events been placed beyond reasonable doubt.  Around a third series of
conclusions or conjectures the tempest of controversy still rages; and
even now it needs a wary step to pass without fruitless deviations through
a maze of assumptions consecrated by their longevity, or commended to
sympathy by the fervour of personal conviction.

A single instance must suffice to indicate both the difficulty and the
significance of many of those questions of Chaucerian biography which,
whether interesting or not in themselves, have to be determined before
Chaucer's life can be written.  They are not "all and some" mere
antiquarians' puzzles, of interest only to those who have leisure and
inclination for microscopic enquiries.  So with the point immediately in
view.  It has been said with much force that Tyrwhitt, whose services to
the study of Chaucer remain uneclipsed by those of any other scholar,
would have composed a quite different biography of the poet, had he not
been confounded by the formerly (and here and there still) accepted date
of Chaucer's birth, the year 1328.  For the correctness of this date
Tyrwhitt "supposed" the poet's tombstone in Westminster Abbey to be the
voucher; but the slab placed on a pillar near his grave (it is said at the
desire of Caxton), appears to have merely borne a Latin inscription
without any dates; and the marble monument erected in its stead "in the
name of the Muses" by Nicolas Brigham in 1556, while giving October 25th,
1400, as the day of Chaucer's death, makes no mention either of the date
of his birth or of the number of years to which he attained, and, indeed,
promises no more information than it gives.  That Chaucer's contemporary,
the poet Gower, should have referred to him in the year 1392 as "now in
his days old," is at best a very vague sort of testimony, more especially
as it is by mere conjecture that the year of Gower's own birth is placed
as far back as 1320.  Still less weight can be attached to the
circumstance that another poet, Occleve, who clearly regarded himself as
the disciple of one by many years his senior, in accordance with the
common phraseology of his (and, indeed, of other) times, spoke of the
older writer as his "father" and "father reverent." In a coloured portrait
carefully painted from memory by Occleve on the margin of a manuscript,
Chaucer is represented with grey hair and beard; but this could not of
itself be taken to contradict the supposition that he died about the age
of sixty.  And Leland's assertion that Chaucer attained to old age self-
evidently rests on tradition only; for Leland was born more than a century
after Chaucer died.  Nothing occurring in any of Chaucer's own works of
undisputed genuineness throws any real light on the subject.  His poem,
the "House of Fame," has been variously dated; but at any period of his
manhood he might have said, as he says there, that he was "too old" to
learn astronomy, and preferred to take his science on faith.  In the
curious lines called "L'Envoy de Chaucer a Scogan," the poet, while
blaming his friend for his want of perseverance in a love-suit, classes
himself among "them that be hoar and round of shape," and speaks of
himself and his Muse as out of date and rusty.  But there seems no
sufficient reason for removing the date of the composition of these lines
to an earlier year than 1393; and poets as well as other men since Chaucer
have spoken of themselves as old and obsolete at fifty.  A similar remark
might be made concerning the reference to the poet's old age "which
dulleth him in his spirit," in the "Complaint of Venus," generally
ascribed to the last decennium of Chaucer's life.  If we reject the
evidence of a further passage, in the "Cuckoo and the Nightingale," a poem
of disputed genuineness, we accordingly arrive at the conclusion that
there is no reason for demurring to the only direct external evidence in
existence as to the date of Chaucer's birth.  At a famous trial of a cause
of chivalry held at Westminster in 1386, Chaucer, who had gone through
part of a campaign with one of the litigants, appeared as a witness; and
on this occasion his age was, doubtless on his own deposition, recorded as
that of a man "of forty years and upwards," who had borne arms for twenty-
seven years.  A careful enquiry into the accuracy of the record as to the
ages of the numerous other witnesses at the same trial has established it
in an overwhelming majority of instances; and it is absurd gratuitously to
charge Chaucer with having understated his age from motives of vanity.
The conclusion, therefore, seems to remain unshaken, that he was born
about the year 1340, or some time between that year and 1345.

Now, we possess a charming poem by Chaucer called the "Assembly of Fowls,"
elaborately courtly in its conception, and in its execution giving proofs
of Italian reading on the part of its author, as well as of a ripe humour
such as is rarely an accompaniment of extreme youth.  This poem has been
thought by earlier commentators to allegorise an event known to have
happened in 1358, by later critics another which occurred in 1364.
Clearly, the assumption that the period from 1340 to 1345 includes the
date of Chaucer's birth, suffices of itself to stamp the one of these
conjectures as untenable, and the other as improbable, and (when the style
of the poem and treatment of its subject are taken into account) adds
weight to the other reasons in favour of the date 1381 for the poem in
question.  Thus, backwards and forwards, the disputed points in Chaucer's
biography and the question of his works are affected by one another.

--------------------------------------------------

Chaucer's life, then, spans rather more than the latter half of the
fourteenth century, the last year of which was indisputably the year of
his death.  In other words, it covers rather more than the interval
between the most glorious epoch of Edward III's reign--for Crecy was
fought in 1346--and the downfall, in 1399, of his unfortunate successor
Richard II.

The England of this period was but a little land, if numbers be the test
of greatness--but in Edward III's time as in that of Henry V, who
inherited so much of Edward's policy and revived so much of his glory,
there stirred in this little body a mighty heart.  It is only of a small
population that the author of the "Vision concerning Piers Plowman"  could
have gathered the representatives into a single field, or that Chaucer
himself could have composed a family picture fairly comprehending, though
not altogether exhausting, the chief national character-types.  In the
year of King Richard II's accession (1377), according to a trustworthy
calculation based upon the result of that year's poll-tax, the total
number of the inhabitants of England seems to have been two millions and a
half.  A quarter of a century earlier--in the days of Chaucer's boyhood--
their numbers had been perhaps twice as large.  For not less than four
great pestilences (in 1348-9, 1361-2, 1369, and 1375-6) had swept over the
land, and at least one-half of its population, including two-thirds of the
inhabitants of the capital, had been carried off by the ravages of the
obstinate epidemic--"the foul death of England," as it was called in a
formula of execration in use among the people.  In this year 1377, London,
where Chaucer was doubtless born as well as bred, where the greater part
of his life was spent, and where the memory of his name is one of those
associations which seem familiarly to haunt the banks of the historic
river from Thames Street to Westminster, apparently numbered not more than
35,000 souls.  But if, from the nature of the case, no place was more
exposed than London to the inroads of the Black Death, neither was any
other so likely elastically to recover from them.  For the reign of Edward
III had witnessed a momentous advance in the prosperity of the capital,--
an advance reflecting itself in the outward changes introduced during the
same period into the architecture of the city.  Its wealth had grown
larger as its houses had grown higher; and mediaeval London, such as we
are apt to picture it to ourselves, seems to have derived those leading
features which it so long retained, from the days when Chaucer, with
downcast but very observant eyes, passed along its streets between
Billingsgate and Aldgate.  Still, here as elsewhere in England the
remembrance of the most awful physical visitations which have ever
befallen the country must have long lingered; and, after all has been
said, it is wonderful that the traces of them should be so exceedingly
scanty in Chaucer's pages.  Twice only in his poems does he refer to the
Plague:--once in an allegorical fiction which is of Italian if not of
French origin, and where, therefore, no special reference to the ravages
of the disease IN ENGLAND may be intended when Death is said to have "a
thousand slain this pestilence,"--

  he hath slain this year
Hence over a mile, within a great village
Both men and women, child and hind and page.

The other allusion is a more than half humorous one.  It occurs in the
description of the "Doctor of Physic," the grave graduate in purple
surcoat and blue white-furred hood; nor, by the way, may this portrait
itself be altogether without its use as throwing some light on the
helplessness of fourteenth-century medical science.  For though in all the
world there was none like this doctor to SPEAK of physic and of surgery;--
though he was a very perfect practitioner, and never at a loss for telling
the cause of any malady and for supplying the patient with the appropriate
drug, sent in by the doctor's old and faithful friends the apothecaries;--
though he was well versed in all the authorities from Aesculapius to the
writer of the "Rosa Anglica" (who cures inflammation homeopathically by
the use of red draperies);--though like a truly wise physician he began at
home by caring anxiously for his own digestion and for his peace of mind
("his study was but little in the Bible"):--yet the basis of his
scientific knowledge was "astronomy," i.e. astrology, "the better part of
medicine," as Roger Bacon calls it; together with that "natural magic" by
which, as Chaucer elsewhere tells us, the famous among the learned have
known how to make men whole or sick.  And there was one specific which,
from a double point of view, Chaucer's Doctor of Physic esteemed very
highly, and was loth to part with on frivolous pretexts.  He was but easy
(i.e. slack) of "dispence":--

He kepte that he won in pestilence.
For gold in physic is a cordial;
Therefore he loved gold in special.

Meanwhile the ruling classes seem to have been left untouched in heart by
these successive ill-met and ill-guarded trials, which had first smitten
the lower orders chiefly, then the higher with the lower (if the Plague of
1349 had swept off an archbishop, that of 1361 struck down among others
Henry Duke of Lancaster, the father of Chaucer's Duchess Blanche).
Calamities such as these would assuredly have been treated as warnings
sent from on high, both in earlier times, when a Church better braced for
the due performance of its never-ending task, eagerly interpreted to awful
ears the signs of the wrath of God, and by a later generation, leavened in
spirit by the self-searching morality of Puritanism.  But from the sorely-
tried third quarter of the fourteenth century the solitary voice of
Langland cries,  as the voice of Conscience preaching with her cross, that
"these pestilences" are the penalty of sin and of naught else.  It is
assuredly presumptuous for one generation, without the fullest proof, to
accuse another of thoughtlessness or heartlessness; and though the classes
for which Chaucer mainly wrote and with which he mainly felt, were in all
probability as little inclined to improve the occasions of the Black Death
as the middle classes of the present day would be to fall on their knees
after a season of commercial ruin, yet signs are not wanting that in the
later years of the fourteenth century words of admonition came to be not
unfrequently spoken.  The portents of the eventful year 1382 called forth
moralisings in English verse, and the pestilence of 1391 a rhymed
lamentation in Latin; and at different dates in King Richard's reign the
poet Gower, Chaucer's contemporary and friend, inveighed both in Latin and
in English, from his conservative point of view, against the corruption
and sinfulness of society at large.  But by this time the great peasant
insurrection had added its warning, to which it was impossible to remain
deaf.

A self-confident nation, however, is slow to betake itself to sackcloth
and ashes.  On the whole it is clear, that though the last years of Edward
III were a season of failure and disappointment,--though from the period
of the First Pestilence onwards the signs increase of the king's
unpopularity and of the people's discontent,--yet the overburdened and
enfeebled nation was brought almost as slowly as the King himself to
renounce the proud position of a conquering power.  In 1363 he had
celebrated the completion of his fiftieth year; and three suppliant kings
had at that time been gathered as satellites round the sun of his success.
By 1371 he had lost all his allies, and nearly all the conquests gained by
himself and the valiant Prince of Wales; and during the years remaining to
him his subjects hated his rule and angrily assailed his favourites.  From
being a conquering power the English monarchy was fast sinking into an
island which found it difficult to defend its own shores.  There were
times towards the close of Edward's and early in his successor's reign
when matters would have gone hard with English traders, naturally desirous
of having their money's worth for their subsidy of tonnage and poundage,
and anxious, like their type the "Merchant" in Chaucer, that "the sea were
kept for anything" between Middelburgh and Harwich, had not some of them,
such as the Londoner John Philpot, occasionally armed and manned a
squadron of ships on their own account, in defiance of red tape and its
censures.  But in the days when Chaucer and the generation with which he
grew up were young, the ardour of foreign conquest had not yet died out in
the land, and clergy and laity cheerfully co-operated in bearing the
burdens which military glory has at all times brought with it for a
civilised people.  The high spirit of the English nation, at a time when
the decline in its fortunes was already near at hand (1366), is evident
from the answer given to the application from Rome for the arrears of
thirty-three years of the tribute promised by King John, or rather from
what must unmistakeably have been the drift of that answer.  Its terms are
unknown, but the demand was never afterwards repeated.

The power of England in the period of an ascendancy to which she so
tenaciously sought to cling, had not been based only upon the valour of
her arms.  Our country was already a rich one in comparison with most
others in Europe.  Other purposes besides that of providing good cheer for
a robust generation were served by the wealth of her great landed
proprietors, and of the "worthy vavasours" (smaller landowners) who, like
Chaucer's "Franklin"--a very Saint Julian or pattern of hospitality--knew
not what it was to be "without baked meat in the house," where their

 tables dormant in the hall alway
Stood ready covered all the longe day.

From this source, and from the well-filled coffers of the traders came the
laity's share of the expenses of those foreign wars which did so much to
consolidate national feeling in England.  The foreign companies of
merchants long contrived to retain the chief share of the banking business
and export trade assigned to them by the short-sighted commercial policy
of Edward III, and the weaving and fishing industries of Hanseatic and
Flemish immigrants had established an almost unbearable competition in our
own ports and towns.  But the active import trade, which already connected
England with both nearer and remoter parts of Christendom, must have been
largely in native hands; and English chivalry, diplomacy, and literature
followed in the lines of the trade-routes to the Baltic and the
Mediterranean.  Our mariners, like their type the "Shipman" in Chaucer (an
anticipation of the "Venturer" of later days, with the pirate as yet,
perhaps, more strongly marked in him than the patriot),--

 knew well all the havens, as they were
From Gothland, to the Cape of Finisterre,
And every creek in Brittany and Spain.

Doubtless, as may be noticed in passing, much of the tendency on the part
of our shipmen in this period to self-help in offence as well as in
defence, was due to the fact that the mercantile navy was frequently
employed in expeditions of war, vessels and men being at times seized or
impressed for the purpose by order of the Crown.  On one of these
occasions the port of Dartmouth, whence Chaucer at a venture ("for aught I
wot") makes his "Shipman" hail, is found contributing a larger total of
ships and men than any other port in England.  For the rest, Flanders was
certainly still far ahead of her future rival in wealth, and in mercantile
and industrial activity; as a manufacturing country she had no equal, and
in trade the rival she chiefly feared was still the German Hansa.
Chaucer's "Merchant" characteristically wears a "Flandrish beaver hat;"
and it is no accident that the scene of the "Pardoner's Tale," which
begins with a description of "superfluity abominable," is laid in
Flanders.  In England, indeed the towns never came to domineer as they did
in the Netherlands.  Yet, since no trading country will long submit to be
ruled by the landed interest only, so in proportion as the English towns,
and London especially, grew richer, their voices were listened to in the
settlement of the affairs of the nation.  It might be very well for
Chaucer to close the description of his "Merchant" with what looks very
much like a fashionable writer's half sneer:--

Forsooth, he was a worthy man withal;
But, truly, I wot not how men him call.

Yet not only was high political and social rank reached by individual
"merchant princes," such as the wealthy William de la Pole, a descendant
of whom is said (though on unsatisfactory evidence) to have been Chaucer's
grand-daughter, but the government of the country came to be very
perceptibly influenced by the class from which they sprang.  On the
accession of Richard II, two London citizens were appointed controllers of
the war-subsidies granted to the Crown; and in the Parliament of 1382 a
committee of fourteen merchants refused to entertain the question of a
merchants' loan to the king.  The importance and self-consciousness of the
smaller tradesmen and handicraftsmen increased with that of the great
merchants.  When in 1393 King Richard II marked the termination of his
quarrel with the City of London by a stately procession through "new
Troy," he was welcomed, according to the Friar who has commemorated the
event in Latin verse, by the trades in an array resembling an angelic
host; and among the crafts enumerated we recognise several of those
represented in Chaucer's company of pilgrims--by the "Carpenter," the
"Webbe" (Weaver), and the "Dyer," all clothed

 in one livery
Of a solemn and great fraternity.

The middle class, in short, was learning to hold up its head, collectively
and individually.  The historical original of Chaucer's "Host"--the actual
Master Harry Bailly, vintner and landlord of the Tabard Inn in Southwark,
was likewise a member of Parliament, and very probably felt as sure of
himself in real life as the mimic personage bearing his name does in its
fictitious reproduction.  And he and his fellows, the "poor and simple
Commons"--for so humble was the style they were wont to assume in their
addresses to the sovereign,--began to look upon themselves, and to be
looked upon, as a power in the State.  The London traders and
handicraftsmen knew what it was to be well-to-do citizens, and if they had
failed to understand it, home monition would have helped to make it clear
to them:--

Well seemed each of them a fair burgess,
For sitting in a guildhall on a dais.
And each one for the wisdom that he can
Was shapely for to be an alderman.
They had enough of chattels and of rent,
And very gladly would their wives assent;
And, truly, else they had been much to blame.
It is full fair to be yclept madame,
And fair to go to vigils all before,
And have a mantle royally y-bore.

The English State had ceased to be the feudal monarchy --the ramification
of contributory courts and camps--of the crude days of William the
Conqueror and his successors.  The Norman lords and their English
dependants no longer formed two separate elements in the body politic.  In
the great French wars of Edward III, the English armies had no longer
mainly consisted of the baronial levies.  The nobles had indeed, as of
old, ridden into battle at the head of their vassals and retainers; but
the body of the force had been made up of Englishmen serving for pay, and
armed with their national implement, the bow--such as Chaucer's "Yeoman"
carried with him on the ride to Canterbury:--

A sheaf of peacock arrows bright and keen
Under his belt he bare full thriftily.
Well could he dress his tackle yeomanly:
His arrows drooped not with feathers low,
And in his hand he bare a mighty bow.

The use of the bow was specially favoured by both Edward III and his
successor; and when early in the next century the chivalrous Scottish
king, James I (of whom mention will be made among Chaucer's poetic
disciples) returned from his long English captivity to his native land, he
had no more eager care than that his subjects should learn to emulate the
English in the handling of their favourite weapon.  Chaucer seems to be
unable to picture an army without it, and we find him relating how, from
ancient Troy,--

Hector and many a worthy wight out went
With spear in hand, and with their big bows bent.

No wonder that when the battles were fought by the people itself, and when
the cost of the wars was to so large an extent defrayed by its self-
imposed contributions, the Scottish and French campaigns should have
called forth that national enthusiasm which found an echo in the songs of
Lawrence Minot, as hearty war-poetry as has been composed in any age of
our literature.  They were put forth in 1352, and considering the unusual
popularity they are said to have enjoyed, it is not impossible that they
may have reached Chaucer's ears in his boyhood.

Before the final collapse of the great King's fortunes, and his death in a
dishonoured old age, the ambition of his heir, the proudest hope of both
dynasty and nation, had overleapt itself, and the Black Prince had
preceded his father to the tomb.  The good ship England (so sang a
contemporary poet) was left without rudder or helm; and in a kingdom full
of faction and discontent the future of the Plantagenet throne depended on
a child.  While the young king's ambitious uncle, John of Gaunt, Duke of
Lancaster (Chaucer's patron), was in nominal retirement, and his
academical ally, Wyclif, was gaining popularity as the mouthpiece of the
resistance to the papal demands, there were fermenting beneath the surface
elements of popular agitation, which had been but little taken into
account by the political factions of Edward the Third's reign, and by that
part of its society with which Chaucer was more especially connected.  But
the multitude, whose turn in truth comes but rarely in the history of a
nation, must every now and then make itself heard, although poets may seem
all but blind and deaf to the tempest as it rises, and bursts, and passes
away.  Many causes had concurred to excite the insurrection which
temporarily destroyed the influence of John of Gaunt, and which for long
cast a deep shade upon the effects of the teaching of Wyclif.  The
acquisition of a measure of rights and power by the middle classes had
caused a general swaying upwards; and throughout the peoples of Europe
floated those dreams and speculations concerning the equality and
fraternity of all men, which needed but a stimulus and an opportunity to
assume the practical shape of a revolution.  The melancholy thought which
pervades Langland's "Vision" is still that of the helplessness of the
poor; and the remedy to which he looks against the corruption of the
governing classes is the advent of a superhuman king, whom he identifies
with the ploughman himself, the representative of suffering humility.  But
about the same time as that of the composition of this poem--or not long
afterwards--Wyclif had sent forth among the people his "simple priests,"
who illustrated by contrast the conflict which his teaching exposed
between the existing practice of the Church and the original documents of
her faith.  The connexion between Wyclif's teaching and the peasants'
insurrection under Richard II is as undeniable as that between Luther's
doctrines and the great social uprising in Germany a century and a half
afterwards.  When, upon the declaration of the Papal Schism, Wyclif
abandoned all hope of a reform of the Church from within, and, defying the
injunctions of foe and friend alike, entered upon a course of theological
opposition, the popular influence of his followers must have tended to
spread a theory admitting of very easy application ad hominem--the theory,
namely, that the tenure of all offices, whether spiritual or temporal, is
justified only by the personal fitness of their occupants.  With such
levelling doctrine, the Socialism of popular preachers like John Balle
might seem to coincide with sufficient closeness; and since worthiness was
not to be found in the holders of either spiritual or temporal authority,
of either ecclesiastical or lay wealth, the time had palpably come for the
poor man to enjoy his own again.  Then, the advent of a weak government,
over which a powerful kinsman of the king and unconcealed adversary of the
Church was really seeking to recover the control, and the imposition of a
tax coming home to all men except actual beggars, and filling serfdom's
cup of bitterness to overflowing, supplied the opportunity, and the
insurrection broke out.  Its violence fell short of that of the French
Jacquerie a quarter of a century earlier; but no doubt could exist as to
its critical importance.  As it happened, the revolt turned with special
fury against the possessions of the Duke of Lancaster, whose sympathies
with the cause of ecclesiastical reform it definitively extinguished.

After the suppression of this appalling movement by a party of Order
comprehending in it all who had anything to lose, a period of reaction
ensued.  In the reign of Richard II, whichever faction might be in the
ascendant, and whatever direction the king's own sympathies may have
originally taken, the last state of the peasantry was without doubt worse
than the first.  Wycliffism as an influence rapidly declined with the
death of Wyclif himself, as it hardly could but decline, considering the
absence from his teaching of any tangible system of church government; and
Lollardry came to be the popular name, or nickname, for any and every form
of dissent from the existing system.  Finally, Henry of Lancaster, John of
Gaunt's son, mounted the throne as a sort of saviour of society,--a
favourite character for usurpers to pose in before the applauding
assemblage of those who claim "a stake in the country."  Chaucer's
contemporary, Gower, whose wisdom was of the kind which goes with the
times, who was in turn a flatterer of Richard and (by the simple expedient
of a revised second edition of his magnum opus) a flatterer of Henry,
offers better testimony than Chaucer to the conservatism of the upper
classes of his age, and to the single-minded anxiety for the good times
when

Justice of law is held;
The privilege of royalty
Is safe, and all the barony
Worshipped is in its estate.
The people stands in obeisance
Under the rule of governance.

Chaucer is less explicit, and may have been too little of a politician by
nature to care for preserving an outward consistency in his incidental
remarks concerning the lower classes.  In his "Clerk's Tale" he finds room
for a very dubious commonplace about the "stormy people," its levity,
untruthfulness, indiscretion, fickleness, and garrulity, and the folly of
putting any trust in it.  In his "Nun's Priest's Tale" he further enlivens
one of the liveliest descriptions of a hue-and-cry ever put upon paper by
a direct reference to the Peasants' Rebellion:--

So hideous was the noise, ah bencite!
That of a truth Jack Straw, and his meinie
Not made never shoutes half so shrill,
When that they any Fleming meant to kill.

Assuredly, again, there is an unmistakably conservative tone in the
"Ballad" purporting to have been sent by him "to King Richard," with its
refrain as to all being "lost for want of steadfastness," and its
admonition to its sovereign to

..shew forth the sword of castigation.

On the other hand, it would be unjust to leave unnoticed the passage, at
once powerful and touching, in the so-called "Parson's Tale" (the sermon
which closes the "Canterbury Tales" as Chaucer left them), in which
certain lords are reproached for taking of their bondmen amercements,
"which might more reasonably be called extortions than amercements," while
lords in general are commanded to be good to their thralls (serfs),
because "those that they clept thralls, be God's people; for humble folks
be Christ's friends; they be contubernially with the Lord."  The solitary
type, however, of the labouring man proper which Chaucer, in manifest
remembrance of Langland's allegory, produces, is one which, beautiful and
affecting as it is, has in it a flavour of the comfortable sentiment, that
things are as they should be.  This is--not of course the "Parson"
himself, of which most significant character hereafter, but--the
"Parson's" brother, the "Ploughman".  He is a true labourer and a good,
religious and charitable in his life,--and always ready to pay his tithes.
In short, he is a true Christian, but at the same time the ideal rather
than the prototype, if one may so say, of the conservative working man.

Such were some, though of course some only, of the general currents of
English public life in the latter half--Chaucer's half--of the fourteenth
century.  Its social features were naturally in accordance with the course
of the national history.  In the first place, the slow and painful process
of amalgamation between the Normans and the English was still unfinished,
though the reign of Edward III went far towards completing what had
rapidly advanced since the reigns of John and Henry III.  By the middle of
the fourteenth century English had become, or was just becoming, the
common tongue of the whole nation.  Among the political poems and songs
preserved from the days of Edward III and Richard II, not a single one
composed on English soil is written in French.  Parliament was opened by
an English speech in the year 1363, and in the previous year the
proceedings in the law courts were ordered to be conducted in the native
tongue.  Yet when Chaucer wrote his "Canterbury Tales," it seems still to
have continued the pedantic affectation of a profession for its members,
like Chaucer's "Man of Law," to introduce French law-terms into common
conversation; so that it is natural enough to find the "Summoner"
following suit, and interlarding his "Tale" with the Latin scraps picked
up by him from the decrees and pleadings of the ecclesiastical courts.
Meanwhile, manifold difficulties had delayed or interfered with the fusion
between the two races, before the victory of the English language showed
this fusion to have been in substance accomplished.  One of these
difficulties, which has been sometimes regarded as fundamental, has
doubtless been exaggerated by national feeling on either side; but that it
existed is not to be denied.  Already in those ages the national character
and temperament of French and English differed largely from one another;
though the reasons why they so differed, remain a matter of argument.  In
a dialogue, dated from the middle of the fourteenth century, the French
interlocutor attributes this difference to the respective national
beverages: "WE are nourished with the pure juice of the grape, while
naught but the dregs is sold to the English, who will take anything for
liquor that is liquid."  The case is put with scarcely greater politeness
by a living French critic of high repute, according to whom the English,
still weighted down by Teutonic phlegm, were drunken gluttons, agitated at
intervals by poetic enthusiasm, while the Normans, on the other hand,
lightened by their transplantation, and by the admixture of a variety of
elements, already found the claims of esprit developing themselves within
them.  This is an explanation which explains nothing--least of all, the
problem: why the lively strangers should have required the contact with
insular phlegm in order to receive the creative impulse--why, in other
words, Norman-French literature should have derived so enormous an
advantage from the transplantation of Normans to English ground.  But the
evil days when the literary labours of Englishmen had been little better
than bond-service to the tastes of their foreign masters had passed away,
since the Norman barons had, from whatever motive, invited the commons of
England to take a share with them in the national councils.  After this,
the question of the relations between the two languages, and the wider one
of the relations between the two nationalities, could only be decided by
the peaceable adjustment of the influences exercised by the one side upon
the other.  The Norman noble, his ideas, and the expression they found in
forms of life and literature, had henceforth, so to speak, to stand on
their merits; the days of their dominion as a matter of course had passed
away.

Together with not a little of their political power, the Norman nobles of
Chaucer's time had lost something of the traditions of their order.
Chivalry had not quite come to an end with the Crusades; but it was a
difficult task to maintain all its laws, written and unwritten, in these
degenerate days.  No laurels were any longer to be gained in the Holy
Land; and though the campaigns of the great German Order against the
pagans of Prussia and Lithuania attracted the service of many an English
knight--in the middle of the century, Henry, Duke of Lancaster, fought
there, as his grandson, afterwards King Henry IV, did forty years later--
yet the substitute was hardly adequate in kind.  Of the great mediaeval
companies of Knights, the most famous had, early in the century, perished
under charges which were undoubtedly in the main foul fictions, but at the
same time were only too much in accord with facts betokening an
unmistakable decay of the true spirit of chivalry; before the century
closed, lawyers were rolling parchments in the halls of the Templars by
the Thames.  Thus, though the age of chivalry had not yet ended, its
supremacy was already on the wane, and its ideal was growing dim.  In the
history of English chivalry the reign of Edward III is memorable, not only
for the foundation of our most illustrious order of knighthood, but
likewise for many typical acts of knightly valour and courtesy, as well on
the part of the King when in his better days, as on that of his heroic
son.  Yet it cannot be by accident that an undefinable air of the old-
fashioned clings to that most delightful of all Chaucer's character-
sketches, the "Knight" of the "Canterbury Tales."  His warlike deeds at
Alexandria, in Prussia, and elsewhere, may be illustrated from those of
more than one actual knight of the times; and the whole description of him
seems founded on one by a French poet of King John of Bohemia, who had at
least the external features of a knight of the old school.  The chivalry,
however, which was in fashion as the century advanced, was one outwardly
far removed from the sturdy simplicity of Chaucer's "Knight," and inwardly
often rotten in more than one vital part.  In show and splendour a higher
point was probably reached in Edward III's than in any preceding reign.
The extravagance in dress which prevailed in this period is too well known
a characteristic of it to need dwelling upon.  Sumptuary laws in vain
sought to restrain this foible; and it rose to such a pitch as even to
oblige men, lest they should be precluded from indulging in gorgeous
raiment, to abandon hospitality, a far more amiable species of excess.
When the kinds of clothing respectively worn by the different classes
served as distinctions of rank, the display of splendour in one class
could hardly fail to provoke emulation in the others.  The long-lived
English love for "crying" colours shows itself amusingly enough in the
early pictorial representations of several of Chaucer's Canterbury
pilgrims, though in floridity of apparel, as of speech, the youthful
"Squire" bears away the bell:--

Embroidered was he, as it were a mead
All full of freshest flowers, white and red.

But of the artificiality and extravagance of the costumes of these times
we have direct contemporary evidence, and loud contemporary complaints.
Now, it is the jagged cut of the garments, punched and shredded by the
man-milliner; now, the wide and high collars and the long-pointed boots,
which attract the indignation of the moralist; at one time he inveighs
against the "horrible disordinate scantness" of the clothing worn by
gallants, at another against the "outrageous array" in which ladies love
to exhibit their charms.  The knights' horses are decked out with not less
finery than are the knights themselves, with "curious harness, as in
saddles and bridles, cruppers, and breast-plates, covered with precious
clothing, and with bars and plates of gold and silver."  And though it is
hazardous to stigmatize the fashions of any one period as specially
grotesque, yet it is significant of this age to find the reigning court
beauty appearing at a tournament robed as Queen of the Sun; while even a
lady from a manufacturing district, the "Wife of Bath," makes the most of
her opportunities to be seen as well as to see.  Her "kerchiefs" were
"full fine" of texture, and weighed, one might be sworn, ten pound--

That on a Sunday were upon her head.
Her hosen too were of fine scarlet red,
Full straight y-tied, and shoes full moist and new.

..

Upon an ambler easily she sat,
Y-wimpled well, and on her head a hat,
As broad as is a buckler or a targe.

So, with a foot-mantle round her hips, and a pair of sharp spurs on her
feet, she looked as defiant as any self-conscious Amazon of any period.
It might perhaps be shown how in more important artistic efforts than
fashions of dress this age displayed its aversion from simplicity and
moderation.  At all events, the love of the florid and overloaded declares
itself in what we know concerning the social life of the nobility, as, for
instance, we find that life reflected in the pages of Froissart, whose
counts and lords seem neither to clothe themselves nor to feed themselves,
nor to talk, pray, or swear like ordinary mortals.  The "Vows of the
Heron," a poem of the earlier part of King Edward III's reign, contains a
choice collection of strenuous knightly oaths; and in a humbler way the
rest of the population very naturally imitated the parlance of their
rulers, and in the words of the "Parson's Tale," "dismembered Christ by
soul, heart, bones, and body."

But there is one very much more important feature to be noticed in the
social life of the nobility, for whom Chaucer's poetry must have largely
replaced the French verse in which they had formerly delighted.  The
relation between knight and lady plays a great part in the history as well
as in the literature of the later Plantagenet period; and incontestably
its conceptions of this relation still retained much of the pure sentiment
belonging to the best and most fervent times of Christian chivalry.  The
highest religious expression which has ever been given to man's sense of
woman's mission, as his life's comfort and crown, was still a universally
dominant belief.  To the Blessed Virgin, King Edward III dedicated his
principal religious foundation; and Chaucer, to whatever extent his
opinions or sentiments may have been in accordance with ideas of
ecclesiastical reform, displays a pious devotion towards the foremost
Saint of the Church.  The lyric entitled the "Praise of Women," in which
she is enthusiastically recognized as the representative of the whole of
her sex, is generally rejected as not Chaucer's; but the elaborate "Orison
to the Holy Virgin," beginning

Mother of God, and Virgin undefiled,

seems to be correctly described as "Oratio Gallfridi Chaucer"; and in
"Chaucers A. B. C., Called La Priere de Notre Dame," a translation by him
from a French original, we have a long address to the Blessed Virgin in
twenty-three stanzas, each of which begins with one of the letters of the
alphabet arranged in proper succession.  Nor, apart from this religious
sentiment, had men yet altogether lost sight of the ideal of true knightly
love, destined though this ideal was to be obscured in the course of time,
until at last the "Mort d'Arthure" was the favourite literary nourishment
of the minions and mistresses of Edward IV's degenerate days.  In his
"Book of the Duchess" Chaucer has left us a picture of true knightly love,
together with one of true maiden purity.  The lady celebrated in this poem
was loth, merely for the sake of coquetting with their exploits, to send
her knights upon errands of chivalry--

 into Walachy,
To Prussia, and to Tartary,
To Alexandria or Turkey.

And doubtless there was many a gentle knight or squire to whom might have
been applied the description given by the heroine of Chaucer's "Troilus
and Cressid" of her lover, and of that which attracted her in him:--

For trust ye well that your estate royal,
Nor vain delight, nor only worthiness
Of you in war or tourney martial,
Nor pomp, array, nobility, riches,
Of these none made me rue on your distress,
BUT MORAL VIRTUE, GROUNDED UPON TRUTH,
THAT WAS THE CAUSE I FIRST HAD ON YOU RUTH.

And gentle heart, and manhood that ye had,
And that ye had (as methought) in despite
Everything that tended unto bad,
As rudeness, and as popular appetite,
And that your reason bridled your delight,
'Twas these did make 'bove every creature,
That I was yours, and shall while I may 'dure.

And if true affection under the law still secured the sympathy of the
better-balanced part of society, so the vice of those who made war upon
female virtue, or the insolence of those who falsely boasted of their
conquests, still incurred its resentment.  Among the companies which in
the "House of Fame" sought the favour of its mistress, Chaucer vigorously
satirises the would-be-lady-killers, who were content with the REPUTATION
of accomplished seducers; and in "Troilus and Cressid" a shrewd observer
exclaims with the utmost vivacity against

Such sort of folk,--what shall I clepe them? what?
That vaunt themselves of women, and by name,
That yet to them ne'er promised this or that,
Nor knew them more, in sooth, than mine old hat.

The same easy but sagacious philosopher (Pandarus) observes, that the harm
which is in this world springs as often from folly as from malice.  But a
deeper feeling animates the lament of the "good Alceste," in the Prologue
to the "Legend of Good Women," that among men the betrayal of women is now
"held a game."  So indisputably it was already often esteemed, in too
close an accordance with examples set in the highest places in the land.
If we are to credit an old tradition, a poem in which Chaucer narrates the
amours of Mars and Venus was written by him at the request of John of
Gaunt, to celebrate the adultery of the duke's sister-in-law with a
nobleman, to whom the injured kinsman afterwards married one of his own
daughters!  But nowhere was the deterioration of sentiment on this head
more strongly typified than in Edward III himself.  The King, who (if the
pleasing tale be true which gave rise to some beautiful scenes in an old
English drama) had in his early days royally renounced an unlawful passion
for the fair Countess of Salisbury, came to be accused of at once
violating his conjugal duty and neglecting his military glory for the sake
of strange women's charms.  The founder of the Order of the Garter--the
device of which enjoined purity even of thought as a principle of conduct-
-died in the hands of a rapacious courtesan.  Thus, in England, as in
France, the ascendancy is gained by ignobler views concerning the relation
between the sexes,--a relation to which the whole system of chivalry owed
a great part of its vitality, and on the view of which prevailing in the
most influential class of any nation, the social health of that nation
must inevitably in no small measure depend.  Meanwhile, the
artificialities by means of which in France, up to the beginning of the
fifteenth century, it was sought to keep alive an organised system of
sentimentality in the social dealings between gentlemen and ladies,
likewise found admission in England, but only in a modified degree.  Here
the fashion in question asserted itself only, or chiefly, in our poetic
literature, and in the adoption by it of such fancies as the praise and
worship of the daisy, with which we meet in the Prologue to Chaucer's
"Legend of Good Women," and in the "Flower and the Leaf," a most pleasing
poem (suggested by a French model), which it is unfortunately no longer
possible to number among his genuine works.  The poem of the "Court of
Love," which was likewise long erroneously attributed to him, may be the
original work of an English author; but in any case its main contents are
a mere adaptation of a peculiar outgrowth on a foreign soil of conceptions
common to chivalry in general.

Of another force, which in the Middle Ages shared with chivalry (though
not with it alone) the empire over the minds of men, it would certainly be
rash to assert that its day was passing away in the latter half of the
fourteenth century.  It has indeed been pointed out that the date at which
Wyclif's career as a reformer may be said to have begun almost coincides
with that of the climax and first decline of feudal chivalry in England.
But, without seeking to interpret coincidences, we know that, though the
influence of the Christian Church and that of its Roman branch in
particular, has asserted and reasserted itself in various ways and degrees
in various ages, yet in England, as elsewhere, the epoch of its moral
omnipotence had come to an end many generations before the disruption of
its external framework.  In the fourteenth century men had long ceased to
look for the mediation of the Church between an overbearing Crown and a
baronage and commonalty eager for the maintenance of their rights or for
the assertion of their claims.  On the other hand, the conflicts which
still recurred between the temporal power and the Church had as little
reference as ever to spiritual concerns.  Undoubtedly, the authority of
the Church over the minds of the people still depended in the main upon
the spiritual influence she exercised over them; and the desire for a
reformation of the Church, which was already making itself felt in a
gradually widening sphere, was by the great majority of those who
cherished it held perfectly compatible with a recognition of her
authority.  The world, it has been well said, needed an enquiry extending
over three centuries, in order to learn to walk without the aid of the
Church of Rome.  Wyclif, who sought to emancipate the human conscience
from reliance upon any earthly authority intermediate between the soul and
its Maker, reckoned without his generation; and few, except those with
whom audacity took the place of argument, followed him to the extreme
results of his speculations.  The Great Schism rather stayed than promoted
the growth of an English feeling against Rome, since it was now no longer
necessary to acknowledge a Pope who seemed the henchman of the arch-foe
across the narrow seas.

But although the progress of English sentiment towards the desire for
liberation from Rome was to be interrupted by a long and seemingly
decisive reaction, yet in the fourteenth as in the sixteenth century the
most active cause of the alienation of the people from the Church was the
conduct of the representatives of the Church themselves.  The Reformation
has most appropriately retained in history a name at first unsuspiciously
applied to the removal of abuses in the ecclesiastical administration and
in the life of the clergy.  What aid could be derived by those who really
hungered for spiritual food, or what strength could accrue to the
thoughtless faith of the light-hearted majority, from many of the most
common varieties of the English ecclesiastic of the later Middle Ages?
Apart from the Italian and other foreign holders of English benefices, who
left their flocks to be tended by deputy, and to be shorn by an army of
the most offensive kind of tax-gatherers, the native clergy included many
species, but among them few which, to the popular eye, seemed to embody a
high ideal of religious life.  The times had by no means come to an end
when many of the higher clergy sought to vie with the lay lords in warlike
prowess.  Perhaps the martial Bishop of Norwich, who, after persecuting
the heretics at home, had commanded in army of crusaders in Flanders,
levied on behalf of Pope Urban VI against the anti-Pope Clement VII and
his adherents, was in the poet Gower's mind when he complains that while

 the law is ruled so,
That clerks unto the war intend,
I wot not how they should amend
The woeful world in other things,
And so make peace between the kings
After the law of charity,
Which is the duty properly
Belonging unto the priesthood.

A more general complaint, however, was that directing itself against the
extravagance and luxury of life in which the dignified clergy indulged.
The cost of these unspiritual pleasures the great prelates had ample means
for defraying in the revenues of their sees; while lesser dignitaries had
to be active in levying their dues or the fines of their courts, lest
everything should flow into the receptacles of their superiors.  So in
Chaucer's "Friar's Tale" an unfriendly Regular says of an archdeacon,--

For small tithes and for small offering
He made the people piteously to sing.
For ere the bishop caught them on his hook,
They were down in the archdeacons book.

As a matter of course, the worthy who filled the office of "Summoner" to
the court of the archdeacon in question, had a keen eye for the profitable
improprieties subject to its penalties, and was aided in his efforts by
the professional abettors of vice whom he kept "ready to his hand."  Nor
is it strange that the undisguised worldliness of many members of the
clerical profession should have reproduced itself in other lay
subordinates, even in the parish clerks, at all times apt to copy their
betters, though we would fain hope such was not the case with the parish
clerk, in "the jolly Absalom" of the "Miller's Tale."  The love of gold
had corrupted the acknowledged chief guardians of incorruptible treasures,
even though few may have avowed this love as openly as the "idle" "Canon,"
whose "Yeoman" had so strange a tale to tell to the Canterbury pilgrims
concerning his master's absorbing devotion to the problem of the
multiplication of gold.  To what a point the popular discontent with the
vices of the higher secular clergy had advanced in the last decennium of
the century, may be seen from the poem called the "Complaint of the
Ploughman"--a production pretending to be by the same hand which in the
"Vision" had dwelt on the sufferings of the people and on the sinfulness
of the ruling classes.  Justly or unjustly, the indictment was brought
against the priests of being the agents of every evil influence among the
people, the soldiers of an army of which the true head was not God, but
Belial.

In earlier days the Church had known how to compensate the people for the
secular clergy's neglect, or imperfect performance, of its duties.  But in
no respect had the ecclesiastical world more changed than in this.  The
older monastic Orders had long since lost themselves in unconcealed
worldliness; how, for instance, had the Benedictines changed their
character since the remote times when their Order had been the principal
agent in revivifying the religion of the land!  Now, they were taunted
with their very name, as having been bestowed upon them "by antiphrasis,"
i.e. by contraries.  From many of their monasteries, and from the inmates
who dwelt in these comfortable halls, had vanished even all pretence of
disguise.  Chaucer's "Monk" paid no attention to the rule of St. Benedict,
and of his disciple St. Maur,

Because that it was old and somewhat strait;

and preferred to fall in with the notions of later times. He was an
"outrider, that loved venery," and whom his tastes and capabilities would
have well qualified for the dignified post of abbot.  He had "full many a
dainty horse" in his stable, and the swiftest of greyhounds to boot; and
rode forth gaily, clad in superfine furs and a hood elegantly fastened
with a gold pin, and tied into a love-knot at the "greater end," while the
bridle of his steed jingled as if its rider had been as good a knight as
any of them--this last, by the way, a mark of ostentation against which
Wyclif takes occasion specially to inveigh.  This Monk (and Chaucer must
say that he was wise in his generation) could not understand why he should
study books and unhinge his mind by the effort; life was not worth having
at the price; and no one knew better to what use to put the pleasing gift
of existence.  Hence mine host of the Tabard, a very competent critic, had
reason for the opinion which he communicated to the Monk:--

It is a noble pasture where thou go'st;
Thou art not like a penitent or ghost.

In the Orders of nuns, certain corresponding features were becoming usual.
But little in the way of religious guidance could fall to the lot of a
sisterhood presided over by such a "Prioress" as Chaucer's Madame
Eglantine, whose mind--possibly because her nunnery fulfilled the
functions of a finishing school for young ladies--was mainly devoted to
French and deportment, or by such a one as the historical Lady Juliana
Berners, of a rather later date, whose leisure hours produced treatises on
hunting and hawking, and who would probably have on behalf of her own sex
echoed the "Monk's" contempt for the prejudice against the participation
of the Religious in field-sports:--

He gave not for that text a pulled hen
That saith, that hunters be no holy men.

On the other hand, neither did the Mendicant Orders, instituted at a later
date purposely to supply what the older Orders, as well as the secular
clergy, seemed to have grown incapable of furnishing, any longer satisfy
the reason of their being.  In the fourteenth century the Dominicans or
Black Friars, who at London dwelt in such magnificence that king and
Parliament often preferred a sojourn with them to abiding at Westminster,
had in general grown accustomed to concentrate their activity upon the
spiritual direction of the higher classes.  But though they counted among
them Englishmen of eminence (one of these was Chaucer's friend, "the
philosophical Strode"), they in truth never played a more than secondary
part in this country, to whose soil the delicate machinery of the
Inquisition, of which they were by choice the managers, was never
congenial.  Of far greater importance for the population of England at
large was the Order of the Franciscans or (as they were here wont to call
themselves or to be called) Minorites or Grey Friars.  To them the poor
had habitually looked for domestic ministrations, and for the inspiring
and consoling eloquence of the pulpit; and they had carried their labours
into the midst of the suffering population, not afraid of association with
that poverty which they were by their vow themselves bound to espouse, or
of contact with the horrors of leprosy and the plague.  Departing from the
short-sighted policy of their illustrious founder, they had become a
learned, as well as a ministering and preaching Order; and it was
precisely from among them that, at Oxford and elsewhere, sprang a
succession of learned monks, whose names are inseparably connected with
some of the earliest English growths of philosophical speculation and
scientific research.  Nor is it possible to doubt that in the middle of
the thirteenth century the monks of this Order at Oxford had exercised an
appreciable influence upon the beginnings of a political struggle of
unequalled importance for the progress of our constitutional life.  But in
the Franciscans also the fourteenth century witnessed a change, which may
be described as a gradual loss of the qualities for which they had been
honourably distinguished; and in England, as elsewhere, the spirit of the
words which Dante puts into the mouth of St. Francis of Assisi was being
verified by his degenerate Children:--

So soft is flesh of mortals, that on earth
A good beginning doth no longer last
Than while an oak may bring its fruit to birth.

Outwardly, indeed, the Grey Friars might still often seem what their
predecessors had been, and might thus retain a powerful influence over the
unthinking crowd, and to sheer worldlings appear as heretofore to
represent a troublesome memento of unexciting religious obligations;
"Preach not," says Chaucer's "Host,"

 "as friars do in Lent,
That they for our old sins may make us weep,
Nor in such wise thy tale make us to sleep."

But in general men were beginning to suspect the motives as well as to
deride the practices of the Friars, to accuse them of lying against St.
Francis, and to desiderate for them an actual abode of fire, resembling
that of which in their favourite religious shows they were wont to present
the mimic semblance to the multitude.  It was they who became in England
as elsewhere the purveyors of charms and the organisers of pious frauds,
while the learning for which their Order had been famous was withering
away into the yellow leaf of scholasticism.  The Friar in general became
the common butt of literary satire; and though the populace still remained
true to its favourite guides, a reaction was taking place in favour of the
secular as against the regular clergy in the sympathies of the higher
classes, and in the spheres of society most open to intellectual
influences.  The monks and the London multitude were at one time united
against John of Gaunt, but it was from the ranks of the secular clergy
that Wyclif came forth to challenge the ascendancy of Franciscan
scholasticism in his university.  Meanwhile the poet who in the "Poor
Parson of the Town" paints his ideal of a Christian minister--simple,
poor, and devoted to his holy work,--has nothing but contempt for the
friars at large, and for the whole machinery worked by them, half effete,
and half spasmodic, and altogether sham.  In King Arthur's time, says that
accurate and unprejudiced observer the "Wife of Bath," the land was filled
with fairies--NOW it is filled with friars as thick as motes in the beam
of the sun.  Among them there is the "Pardoner," i.e. seller of pardons
(indulgences)--with his "haughty" sermons, delivered "by rote" to
congregation after congregation in the self-same words, and everywhere
accompanied by the self-same tricks of anecdotes and jokes,--with his
Papal credentials, and with the pardons he has brought from Rome "all
hot,"--and with precious relics to rejoice the hearts of the faithful, and
to fill his own pockets with the proceeds: to wit, a pillowcase covered
with the veil of Our Lady, and a piece of the sail of the ship in which
St. Peter went out fishing on the Lake of Gennesareth.  This worthy, who
lays bare his own motives with unparalleled cynical brutality, is
manifestly drawn from the life;--or the portrait could not have been
accepted which was presented alike by Chaucer, and by his contemporary
Langland, and (a century and a half later) in the plagiarism of the
orthodox Catholic John Heywood.  There, again, is the "Limitour," a friar
licensed to beg, and to hear confession and grant absolution, within the
LIMITS of a certain district.  He is described by Chaucer with so much
humour, that one can hardly suspect much exaggeration in the sketch.  In
him we have the truly popular ecclesiastic who springs from the people,
lives among the people, and feels with the people.  He is the true friend
of the poor, and being such, has, as one might say, his finger in every
pie: for "a fly and a friar will fall in every dish and every business."
His readily-proffered arbitration settles the differences of the humbler
classes at the "love-days," a favourite popular practice noted already in
the "Vision" of Langland; nor is he a niggard of the mercies which he is
privileged to dispense:--

Full sweetly did he hear confession,
And pleasant was his absolution.
He was an easy man to give penance,
Whereso wist to have a good pittance;
For unto a poor Order for to give,
Is signe that a man is well y-shrive;
For if he gave, he durste make a vaunt
He wiste that a man was repentant.
For many a man so hard is of his heart
He can not weep although he sorely smart.
Therefore instead of weeping and of prayers
Men must give silver to the poore Freres.

Already in the French "Roman de la Rose" the rivalry between the Friars
and the Parish Priests is the theme of much satire, evidently unfavourable
to the former and favourable to the latter; but in England, where Langland
likewise dwells upon the jealousy between them, it was specially
accentuated by the assaults of Wyclif upon the Mendicant Orders.  Wyclif's
Simple Priests, who at first ministered with the approval of the Bishops,
differed from the Mendicants, first by not being beggars, and secondly by
being poor.  They might perhaps have themselves ultimately played the part
of a new Order in England, had not Wyclif himself by rejecting the
cardinal dogma of the Church severed these followers of his from its
organism and brought about their suppression.  The question as to
Chaucer's own attitude towards the Wycliffite movement will be more
conveniently touched upon below; but the tone is unmistakable of the
references or allusions to Lollardry which he occasionally introduces into
the mouth of his "Host," whose voice is that vox populi which the upper
and middle classes so often arrogate to themselves.  Whatever those
classes might desire, it was not to have "cockle sown" by unauthorised
intruders "in the corn" of their ordinary instruction.  Thus there is a
tone of genuine attachment to the "vested interest" principle, and of
aversion from all such interlopers as lay preachers and the like, in the
"Host's" exclamation, uttered after the "Reeve," has been (in his own
style) "sermoning" on the topic of old age:--

 What availeth all this wit?
What? should we speak all day of Holy Writ?
The devil surely made a reeve to preach;

for which he is as well suited as a cobbler would be for turning mariner
or physician!

Thus, then, in the England of Chaucer's days we find the Church still in
possession of vast temporal wealth and of great power and privileges,--as
well as of means for enforcing unity of profession which the legislation
of the Lancastrian dynasty, stimulated by the prevailing fears of heresy,
was still further to increase.  On the other hand, we find the influence
of the clergy over the minds of the people diminished though not
extinguished.  This was, in the case of the higher secular clergy, partly
attributable to their self-indulgence or neglect of their functions,
partly to their having been largely superseded by the Regulars in the
control of the religious life of the people.  The Orders we find no longer
at the height of their influence, but still powerful by their wealth,
their numbers, their traditional hold upon the lower classes, and their
determination to retain this hold even by habitually resorting to the most
dubious of methods.  Lastly, we find in the lower secular clergy, and
doubtless may also assume it to have lingered among some of the regular,
some of the salt left whose savour consists in a single-minded and humble
resolution to maintain the highest standard of a religious life.  But such
"clerks" as these are at no times the most easily found, because it is not
they who are always running it "unto London, unto St. Paul's" on urgent
private affairs.  What wonder, that the real teaching of Wyclif, of which
the full significance could hardly be understood, but by a select few,
should have virtually fallen dead upon his generation, to which the
various agitations and agitators, often mingling ideas of religious reform
with social and political grievances, seemed to be identical in character
and alike to require suppression!  In truth, of course, these movements
and their agents were often very different from one another in their ends,
and were not to be suppressed by the same processes.

It should not be forgotten that in this century learning was, though only
very gradually, ceasing to be a possession of the clergy alone.  Much
doubt remains as to the extent of education--if a little reading, and less
writing deserve the name--among the higher classes in this period of our
national life.  A cheering sign appears in the circumstance that the legal
deeds of this age begin to bear signatures, and a reference to John of
Trevisa would bear out Hallam's conjecture, that in the year 1400 "the
average instruction of an English gentleman of the first class would
comprehend common reading and writing, a considerable knowledge of French,
and a slight tincture of Latin."  Certain it is that in this century the
barren teaching of the Universities advanced but little towards the true
end of all academical teaching--the encouragement and spread of the
highest forms of national culture.  To what use could a gentleman of
Edward III's or Richard II's day have put the acquirements of a "Clerk of
Oxenford" in Aristotelian logic, supplemented perhaps by a knowledge of
Priscian, and the rhetorical works of Cicero?  Chaucer's scholar, however
much his learned modesty of manner and sententious brevity of speech may
commend him to our sympathy and taste, is a man wholly out of the world in
which he lives, though a dependent on its charity even for the means with
which to purchase more of his beloved books.  Probably no trustworthier
conclusions as to the literary learning and studies of those days are to
be derived from any other source than from a comparison of the few
catalogues of contemporary libraries remaining to us; and these help to
show that the century was approaching its close before a few sparse rays
of the first dawn of the Italian Renascence reached England.  But this ray
was communicated neither through the clergy nor through the Universities;
and such influence as was exercised by it upon the national mind, was
directly due to profane poets,--men of the world, who like Chaucer quoted
authorities even more abundantly than they used them, and made some of
their happiest discoveries after the fashion in which the "Oxford Clerk"
came across Petrarch's Latin version of the story of Patient Grissel: as
it were by accident.  There is only too ample a justification for leaving
aside the records of the history of learning in England during the latter
half of the fourteenth century in any sketch of the main influences which
in that period determined or affected the national progress.  It was not
by his theological learning that Wyclif was brought into living contact
with the current of popular thought and feeling.  The Universities were
thriving exceedingly on the scholastic glories of previous ages; but the
ascendancy was passing away to which Oxford had attained over Paris--
during the earlier middle ages, and again in the fifteenth century until
the advent of the Renascence, the central university of Europe in the
favourite study of scholastic philosophy and theology.

But we must turn from particular classes and ranks of men to the whole
body of the population, exclusively of that great section of it which
unhappily lay outside the observation of any but a very few writers--
whether poets or historians.  In the people at large we may, indeed,
easily discern in this period the signs of an advance towards that self-
government which is the true foundation of our national greatness.  But on
the other hand it is impossible not to observe how, while the moral ideas
of the people wore still under the control of the Church, the State in its
turn still ubiquitously interfered in the settlement of the conditions of
social existence, fixing prices, controlling personal expenditure,
regulating wages.  Not until England had fully attained to the character
of a commercial country, which it was coming gradually to assume, did its
inhabitants begin to understand the value of that which has gradually come
to distinguish ours among the nations of Europe, viz. the right of
individual Englishmen, as well as of the English people, to manage their
own affairs for themselves.  This may help to explain what can hardly fail
to strike a reader of Chaucer and of the few contemporary remains of our
literature.  About our national life in this period, both in its virtues
and in its vices, there is something--it matters little whether we call
it--childlike or childish; in its "apert" if not in its privy sides it
lacks the seriousness belonging to men and to generations, who have learnt
to control themselves, instead of relying on the control of others.

In illustration of this assertion, appeal might be made to several of the
most salient features in the social life of the period.  The extravagant
expenditure in dress, fostered by a love of pageantry of various kinds
encouraged by both chivalry and the Church, has been already referred to;
it was by no means distinctive of any one class of the population.  Among
the friars who went about preaching homilies on the people's favourite
vices some humorous rogues may, like the "Pardoner" of the "Canterbury
Tales," have made a point of treating their own favourite vice as their
one and unchangeable text:--

My theme is always one, and ever was:
Radix malorum est cupiditas.

But others preferred to dwell on specifically lay sins; and these
moralists occasionally attributed to the love of expenditure on dress the
impoverishment of the kingdom, forgetting in their ignorance of political
economy and defiance of common sense, that this result was really due to
the endless foreign wars.  Yet in contrast with the pomp and ceremony of
life, upon which so great an amount of money and time and thought was
wasted, are noticeable shortcomings by no means uncommon in the case of
undeveloped civilisations (as for instance among the most typically
childish or childlike nationalities of the Europe of our own day), viz.
discomfort and uncleanliness of all sorts.  To this may be added the
excessive fondness for sports and pastimes of all kinds, in which nations
are aptest to indulge before or after the era of their highest efforts,--
the desire to make life one long holiday, dividing it between tournaments
and the dalliance of courts of love, or between archery-meetings
(skilfully substituted by royal command for less useful exercises), and
the seductive company of "tumblers," "fruiterers," and "waferers."
Furthermore, one may notice in all classes a far from eradicated
inclination to superstitions of every kind,--whether those encouraged or
those discouraged by the Church
(For holy Church's faith, in our belief,
Suffereth no illusion us to grieve.
"The Franklin's Tale."),
--an inclination unfortunately fostered rather than checked by the
uncertain gropings of contemporary science.  Hence, the credulous
acceptance of relics like those sold by the "Pardoner," and of legends
like those related to Chaucer's Pilgrims by the "Prioress" (one of the
numerous repetitions of a cruel calumny against the Jews), and by the
"Second Nun" (the supra-sensual story of Saint Cecilia).  Hence, on the
other hand, the greedy hunger for the marvels of astrology and alchemy,
notwithstanding the growing scepticism even of members of a class
represented by Chaucer's "Franklin" towards

 such folly
As in our days is not held worth a fly,

and notwithstanding the exposure of fraud by repentant or sickened
accomplices, such as the gold-making "Canon's Yeoman."  Hence, again, the
vitality of such quasi-scientific fancies as the magic mirror, of which
miraculous instrument the "Squire's" "half-told story" describes a
specimen, referring to the incontestable authority of Aristotle and
others, who write "in their lives" concerning quaint mirrors and
perspective glasses, as is well known to those who have "heard the books"
of these sages.  Hence, finally, the corresponding tendency to eschew the
consideration of serious religious questions, and to leave them to clerks,
as if they were crabbed problems of theology.  For in truth, while the
most fertile and fertilising ideas of the Middle Ages had exhausted, or
were rapidly coming to exhaust, their influence upon the people, the forms
of the doctrines of the Church--even of the most stimulative as well as of
the most solemn among them,--had grown hard and stiff.  To those who
received if not to those who taught these doctrines they seemed alike
lifeless, unless translated into the terms of the merest earthly
transactions or the language of purely human relations.  And thus,
paradoxical as it might seem, cool-headed and conscientious rulers of the
Church thought themselves on occasion called upon to restrain rather than
to stimulate the religious ardour of the multitude--fed as the flame was
by very various materials.  Perhaps no more characteristic narrative has
come down to us from the age of the Poet of the "Canterbury Tales," than
the story of Bishop (afterwards Archbishop) Sudbury and the Canterbury
Pilgrims.  In the year 1370 the land was agitated through its length and
breadth, on the occasion of the fourth jubilee of the national saint,
Thomas the Martyr.  The pilgrims were streaming in numbers along the
familiar Kentish road, when, on the very vigil of the feast, one of their
companies was accidentally met by the Bishop of London.  They demanded his
blessing; but to their astonishment and indignation he seized the occasion
to read a lesson to the crowd on the uselessness to unrepentant sinners of
the plenary indulgences, for the sake of which they were wending their way
to the Martyr's shrine.  The rage of the multitude found a mouthpiece in a
soldier, who loudly upbraided the Bishop for stirring up the people
against St. Thomas, and warned him that a shameful death would befall him
in consequence.  The multitude shouted Amen--and one is left to wonder
whether any of the pious pilgrims who resented Bishop Sudbury's manly
truthfulness, swelled the mob which eleven years later butchered "the
plunderer" as it called him, "of the Commons."  It is such glimpses as
this which show us how important the Church had become towards the people.
Worse was to ensue before the better came; in the meantime, the nation was
in that stage of its existence when the innocence of the child was fast
losing itself, without the self-control of the man having yet taken its
place.

But the heart of England was sound the while.  The national spirit of
enterprise was not dead in any class, from knight to shipman; and
faithfulness and chastity in woman were still esteemed the highest though
not the universal virtues of her sex.  The value of such evidence as the
mind of a great poet speaking in his works furnishes for a knowledge of
the times to which he belongs is inestimable.  For it shows us what has
survived, as well as what was doomed to decay, in the life of the nation
with which that mind was in sensitive sympathy.  And it therefore seemed
not inappropriate to approach, in the first instance, from this point of
view the subject of this biographical essay,--Chaucer, "the poet of the
dawn."  For in him there are many things significant of the age of
transition in which he lived; in him the mixture of Frenchman and
Englishman is still in a sense incomplete, as that of their language is in
the diction of his poems.  His gaiety of heart is hardly English; nor is
his willing (though, to be sure, not invariably unquestioning) acceptance
of forms into the inner meaning of which he does not greatly vex his soul
by entering; nor his airy way of ridiculing what he has no intention of
helping to overthrow; nor his light unconcern in the question whether he
is, or is not, an immoral writer.  Or, at least, in all of these things he
has no share in qualities and tendencies, which influences and conflicts
unknown to and unforeseen by him may be safely said to have ultimately
made characteristic of Englishmen.  But he IS English in his freedom and
frankness of spirit; in his manliness of mind; in his preference for the
good in things as they are to the good in things as they might be; in his
loyalty, his piety, his truthfulness.  Of the great movement which was to
mould the national character for at least a long series of generations he
displays no serious foreknowledge; and of the elements already preparing
to affect the course of that movement he shows a very incomplete
consciousness.  But of the health and strength which, after struggles many
and various, made that movement possible and made it victorious, he, more
than any one of his contemporaries, is the living type and the speaking
witness.  Thus, like the times to which he belongs, he stands half in and
half out of the Middle Ages, half in and half out of a phase of our
national life, which we can never hope to understand more than partially
and imperfectly.  And it is this, taken together with the fact that he is
the first English poet to read whom is to enjoy him, and that he garnished
not only our language but our literature with blossoms still adorning them
in vernal freshness,--which makes Chaucer's figure so unique a one in the
gallery of our great English writers, and gives to his works an interest
so inexhaustible for the historical as well as for the literary student.


CHAPTER 2.  CHAUCER'S LIFE AND WORKS.

Something has been already said as to the conflict of opinion concerning
the period of Geoffrey Chaucer's birth, the precise date of which is very
unlikely ever to be ascertained.  A better fortune has attended the
anxious enquiries which in his case, as in those of other great men have
been directed to the very secondary question of ancestry and descent,--a
question to which, in the abstract at all events, no man ever attached
less importance than he.  Although the name "Chaucer" is (according to
Thynne), to be found on the lists of Battle Abbey, this no more proves
that the poet himself came of "high parage," than the reverse is to be
concluded from the nature of his coat-of-arms, which Speght thought must
have been taken out of the 27th and 28th Propositions of the First Book of
Euclid.  Many a warrior of the Norman Conquest was known to his comrades
only by the name of the trade which he had plied in some French or Flemish
town, before he attached himself a volunteer to Duke William's holy and
lucrative expedition; and it is doubtful whether even in the fourteenth
century the name "Le Chaucer" is, wherever it occurs in London, used as a
surname, or whether in some instances it is not merely a designation of
the owner's trade.  Thus we should not be justified in assuming a French
origin for the family from which Richard le Chaucer, whom we know to have
been the poet's grandfather, was descended.  Whether or not he was at any
time a shoemaker (chaucier, maker of chausses), and accordingly belonged
to a gentle craft otherwise not unassociated with the history of poetry,
Richard was a citizen of London, and vintner, like his son John after him.
John Chaucer, whose wife's Christian name may be with tolerable safety set
down as Agnes, owned a house in Thames Street, London, not far from the
arch on which modern pilgrims pass by rail to Canterbury or beyond, and in
the neighbourhood of the great bridge, which in Chaucer's own day, emptied
its travellers on their errands, sacred or profane, into the great
Southern road, the Via Appia of England.  The house afterwards descended
to John's son, Geoffrey, who released his right to it by deed in the year
1380.  Chaucer's father was probably a man of some substance, the most
usual personal recommendation to great people in one of his class.  For he
was at least temporarily connected with the Court, inasmuch as he attended
King Edward III and Queen Philippa on the memorable journey to Flanders
and Germany, in the course of which the English monarch was proclaimed
Vicar of the Holy Roman Empire on the left bank of the Rhine.  John
Chaucer died in 1366, and in course of time his widow married another
citizen and vintner.  Thomas Heyroun, John Chaucer's brother of the half-
blood, was likewise a member of the same trade; so that the young Geoffrey
was certainly not brought up in an atmosphere of abstinence.  The "Host"
of the "Canterbury Tales," though he takes his name from an actual
personage, may therefore have in him touches of a family portrait; but
Chaucer himself nowhere displays any traces of a hereditary devotion to
Bacchus, and makes so experienced a practitioner as the "Pardoner" the
mouthpiece of as witty an invective against drunkenness as has been
uttered by any assailant of our existing licensing laws.  Chaucer's own
practice as well as his opinion on this head is sufficiently expressed in
the characteristic words he puts into the mouth of Cressid:--

In every thing, I wot, there lies measure:
For though a man forbid all drunkenness,
He biddeth not that every creature
Be drinkless altogether, as I guess.

Of Geoffrey Chaucer we know nothing whatever from the day of his birth
(whenever it befell) to the year 1357.  His earlier biographers, who
supposed him to have been born in 1328, had accordingly a fair field open
for conjecture and speculation.  Here it must suffice to risk the
asseveration, that he cannot have accompanied his father to Cologne in
1338, and on that occasion have been first "taken notice of" by king and
queen, if he was not born till two or more years afterwards.  If, on the
other hand, he was born in 1328, both events MAY have taken place.  On
neither supposition is there any reason for believing that he studied at
one--or at both--of our English Universities.  The poem cannot be accepted
as Chaucerian, the author of which (very possibly by a mere dramatic
assumption) declares:--

Philogenet I call'd am far and near,
Of Cambridge clerk;

nor can any weight be attached to the circumstance that the "Clerk," who
is one of the most delightful figures among the Canterbury Pilgrims, is an
Oxonian.  The enticing enquiry as to so WHICH of the sister Universities
may claim Chaucer as her own must, therefore, be allowed to drop, together
with the subsidiary question, whether stronger evidence of local colouring
is furnished by the "Miller's" picture of the life of a poor scholar in
lodgings at Oxford, or by the "Reeve's" rival narrative of the results of
a Trumpington walk taken by two undergraduates of the "Soler Hall" at
Cambridge.  Equally baseless is the supposition of one of Chaucer's
earliest biographers, that he completed his academical studies at Paris--
and equally futile the concomitant fiction that in France "he acquired
much applause by his literary exercises."  Finally, we have the tradition
that he was a member of the Inner Temple--which is a conclusion deduced
from a piece of genial scandal as to a record having been seen in that Inn
of a fine imposed upon him for beating a friar in Fleet-street.  This
story was early placed by Thynne on the horns of a sufficiently decisive
dilemma: in the days of Chaucer's youth, lawyers had not yet been admitted
into the Temple; and in the days of his maturity he is not very likely to
have been found engaged in battery in a London thoroughfare.

We now desert the region of groundless conjecture, in order with the year
1357 to arrive at a firm though not very broad footing of facts.  In this
year, "Geoffrey Chaucer" (whom it would be too great an effort of
scepticism to suppose to have been merely a namesake of the poet) is
mentioned in the Household Book of Elizabeth Countess of Ulster, wife of
Prince Lionel (third son of King Edward III, and afterwards Duke of
Clarence), as a recipient of certain articles of apparel.  Two similar
notices of his name occur up to the year 1359.  He is hence concluded to
have belonged to Prince Lionel's establishment as squire or page to the
Lady Elizabeth; and it was probably in the Prince's retinue that he took
part in the expedition of King Edward III into France, which began at the
close of the year 1359 with the ineffectual siege of Rheims, and in the
next year, after a futile attempt upon Paris, ended with the compromise of
the Peace of Bretigny.  In the course of this campaign Chaucer was taken
prisoner; but he was released without much loss of time, as appears by a
document bearing date March 1st, 1360, in which the king contributes the
sum of 16 pounds for Chaucer's ransom.  We may therefore conclude that he
missed the march upon Paris, and the sufferings undergone by the English
army on their road thence to Chartres--the most exciting experiences of an
inglorious campaign; and that he was actually set free by the Peace.
When, in the year 1367, we next meet with his name in authentic records,
his earliest known patron, the Lady Elizabeth, is dead; and he has passed
out of the service of Prince Lionel into that of King Edward himself, as
Valet of whose Chamber or household he receives a yearly salary for life
of twenty marks, for his former and future services.  Very possibly he had
quitted Prince Lionel's service when in 1361 that Prince had by reason of
his marriage with the heiress of Ulster been appointed to the Irish
government by his father, who was supposed at one time to have destined
him for the Scottish throne.

Concerning the doings of Chaucer in the interval between his liberation
from his French captivity and the first notice of him as Valet of the
King's Chamber we know nothing at all.  During these years, however, no
less important a personal event than his marriage was by earlier
biographers supposed to have occurred.  On the other hand, according to
the view which commends itself to several eminent living commentators of
the poet, it was not courtship and marriage, but a hopeless and unrequited
passion, which absorbed these years of his life.  Certain stanzas in
which, as they think, he gave utterance to this passion are by them
ascribed to one of these years; so that if their view were correct, the
poem in question would have to be regarded as the earliest of his extant
productions.  The problem which we have indicated must detain us for a
moment.

It is attested by documentary evidence, that in the year 1374, Chaucer had
a wife by name Philippa, who had been in the service of John of Gaunt,
Duke of Lancaster, and of his Duchess (doubtless his second wife,
Constance), as well as in that of his mother the good Queen Philippa, and
who, on several occasions afterwards, besides special new year's gifts of
silver-gilt cups from the Duke, received her annual pension of ten marks
through her husband.  It is likewise proved that, in 1366, a pension of
ten marks was granted to _a_ Philippa Chaucer, one of the ladies of the
Queen's Chamber.  Obviously, it is a highly probable assumption that these
two Philippa Chaucers were one and the same person; but in the absence of
any direct proof it is impossible to affirm as certain, or to deny as
demonstrably untrue, that the Philippa Chaucer of 1366 owed her surname to
marriage.  Yet the view was long held, and is still maintained by writers
of knowledge and insight, that the Phillipa of 1366 was at that date
Chaucer's wife.  In or before that year he married, it was said, Philippa
Roet, daughter of Sir Paon de Roet of Hainault, Guienne King of Arms, who
came to England in Queen Philippa's retinue in 1328.  This tradition
derived special significance from the fact that another daughter of Sir
Paon, Katharine, widow of Sir Hugh Swynford, was successively governess,
mistress, and (third) wife to the Duke of Lancaster, to whose service both
Geoffrey and Philippa Chaucer were at one time attached.  It was
apparently founded on the circumstance that Thomas Chaucer, the supposed
son of the poet, quartered the Roet arms with his own.  But unfortunately
there is no evidence to show that Thomas Chaucer was a son of Geoffrey;
and the superstructure must needs vanish with its basis.  It being then no
longer indispensable to assume Chaucer to have been a married man in 1366,
the Philippa Chaucer of that year MAY have been only a namesake, and
possibly a relative, of Geoffrey; for there were other Chaucers in London
besides him and his father (who died this year), and one Chaucer at least
has been found who was well-to-do enough to have a Damsel of the Queen's
Chamber for his daughter in these certainly not very exclusive times.

There is accordingly no PROOF that Chaucer was a married man before 1374,
when he is known to have received a pension for his own and his wife's
services.  But with this negative result we are asked not to be poor-
spirited enough to rest content.  At the opening of his "Book of the
Duchess," a poem certainly written towards the end of the year 1369,
Chaucer makes use of certain expressions, both very pathetic and very
definite.  The most obvious interpretation of the lines in question seems
to be that they contain the confession of a hopeless passion, which has
lasted for eight years--a confession which certainly seems to come more
appropriately and more naturally from an unmarried than from a married
man.  "For eight years," he says, or seems to say, "I have loved, and
loved in vain--and yet my cure is never the nearer.  There is but one
physician that can heal me--but all that is ended and done with.  Let us
pass on into fresh fields; what cannot be obtained must needs be left."
It seems impossible to interpret this passage (too long to cite in
extenso) as a complaint of married life.  Many other poets have indeed
complained of their married lives, and Chaucer (if the view to be advanced
below be correct) as emphatically as any.  But though such occasional
exclamations of impatience or regret--more especially when in a comic
vein--may receive pardon, or even provoke amusement, yet a serious and
sustained poetic version of Sterne's "sum multum fatigatus de uxore mea"
would be unbearable in any writer of self-respect, and wholly out of
character in Chaucer.  Even Byron only indited elegies about his married
life after his wife HAD LEFT HIM.

Now, among Chaucer's minor poems is preserved one called the "Complaint of
the Death of Pity," which purports to set forth "how pity is dead and
buried in a gentle heart," and, after testifying to a hopeless passion,
ends with the following declaration, addressed to Pity, as in a "bill" or
letter:--

This is to say: I will be yours for ever,
Though ye me slay by Cruelty, your foe;
Yet shall my spirit nevermore dissever
From your service, for any pain or woe,
Pity, whom I have sought so long ago!
Thus for your death I may well weep and plain,
With heart all sore, and full of busy pain.

If this poem be autobiographical, it would indisputably correspond well
enough to a period in Chaucer's life, and to a mood of mind preceding
those to which the introduction to the "Book of the Duchess" belongs.  If
it be not autobiographical--and in truth there is nothing to prove it
such, so that an attempt has been actually made to suggest its having been
intended to apply to the experiences of another man--then the "Complaint
of Pity" has no special value for students of Chaucer, since its poetic
beauty, as there can be no harm in observing, is not in itself very great.

To come to an end of this topic, there seems no possibility of escaping
from one of the following alternatives.  EITHER the Philippa Chaucer of
1366 was Geoffrey Chaucer's wife, whether or not she was Philippa Roet
before marriage, and the lament of 1369 had reference to another lady--an
assumption to be regretted in the case of a married man, but not out of
the range of possibility.  OR--and this seems on the whole the most
probable view--the Philippa Chaucer of 1366 was a namesake whom Geoffrey
married some time after 1369, possibly, (of course only POSSIBLY,) the
very lady whom he had loved hopelessly for eight years, and persuaded
himself that he had at last relinquished--and who had then relented after
all.  This last conjecture it is certainly difficult to reconcile with the
conclusion at which we arrive on other grounds, that Chaucer's married
life was not one of preponderating bliss.  That he and his wife were
COUSINS is a pleasing thought, but one which is not made more pleasing by
the seeming fact that, if they were so related, marriage in their case
failed to draw close that hearts' bond which such kinship at times half
unconsciously knits.

Married or still a bachelor, Chaucer may fairly be supposed, during part
of the years previous to that in which we find him securely established in
the king's service, to have enjoyed a measure of independence and leisure
open to few men in his rank of life, when once the golden days of youth
and early manhood have passed away.  Such years are in many men's lives
marked by the projection, or even by the partial accomplishment, of
literary undertakings on a large scale, and more especially of such as
partake of an imitative character.  When a juvenile and facile writer's
taste is still unsettled, and his own style is as yet unformed, he eagerly
tries his hand at the reproduction of the work of others; translates the
"Iliad" or "Faust," or suits himself with unsuspecting promptitude to the
production of masques, or pastorals, or life dramas--or whatever may be
the prevailing fashion in poetry--after the manner of the favourite
literary models of the day.  A priori, therefore, everything is in favour
of the belief hitherto universally entertained, that among Chaucer's
earliest poetical productions was the extant English translation of the
French "Roman de la Rose."  That he made SOME translation of this poem is
a fact resting on his own statement in a passage indisputably written by
him (in the "Prologue" to the "Legend of Good Women"); nor is the value of
this statement reduced by the negative circumstance, that in the
extraordinary tag (if it may be called by so irreverent a name) to the
extant "Canterbury Tales," the "Romaunt of the Rose" is passed over in
silence, or at least not nominally mentioned, among the objectionable
works which the poet is there made to retract.  And there seems at least
no necessity for giving in to the conclusion that Chaucer's translation
has been lost, and was not that which has been hitherto accepted as his.
For this conclusion is based upon the use of a formal test, which in truth
need not be regarded as of itself absolutely decisive in any case, but
which in this particular instance need not be held applicable at all.  A
particular rule against rhyming with one another particular sounds, which
in his later poems Chaucer seems invariably to have followed, need not
have been observed by him in what was actually, or all but, his earliest.
The unfinished state of the extant translation accords with the
supposition that Chaucer broke it off on adopting (possibly after
conference with Gower, who likewise observes the rule) a more logical
practice as to the point in question.  Moreover, no English translation of
this poem besides Chaucer's is ever known to have existed.

Whither should the youthful poet, when in search of materials on which to
exercise a ready but as yet untrained hand, have so naturally turned as to
French poetry, and in its domain whither so eagerly as to its universally
acknowledged master-piece?  French verse was the delight of the Court,
into the service of which he was about this time preparing permanently to
enter, and with which he had been more or less connected from his boyhood.
In French Chaucer's contemporary Gower composed not only his first longer
work, but not less than fifty ballads or sonnets, and in French (as well
as in English) Chaucer himself may have possibly in his youth set his own
'prentice hand to the turning of "ballades, rondels, virelayes."  The time
had not yet arrived, though it was not far distant, when his English verse
was to attest his admiration of Machault, whose fame Froissart and
Froissart's imitations had brought across from the French Court to the
English; and when Gransson, who served King Richard II as a squire, was
extolled by his English adapter as the "flower of them that write in
France."  But as yet Chaucer's own tastes, his French blood, if he had any
in his veins, and the familiarity with the French tongue which he had
already had opportunities of acquiring, were more likely to commend to him
productions of broader literary merits and a wider popularity.  From these
points of view, in the days of Chaucer's youth, there was no rival to the
"Roman de la Rose," one of those rare works on which the literary history
of whole generations and centuries may be said to hinge.  The Middle Ages,
in which from various causes the literary intercommunication between the
nations of Europe was in some respects far livelier than it has been in
later times, witnessed the appearance of several such works--diverse in
kind but similar to one another in the universality of their popularity:
"The Consolation of Philosophy," the "Divine Comedy," the "Imitation of
Christ," the "Roman de la Rose," the "Ship of Fools."  The favour enjoyed
by the "Roman de la Rose," was in some ways the most extraordinary of all.
In France, this work remained the dominant work of poetic literature, and
"the source whence every rhymer drew for his needs" down to the period of
the classical revival led by Ronsard (when it was edited by Clement Marot,
Spenser's early model).  In England, it exercised an influence only
inferior to that which belonged to it at home upon both the matter and the
form of poetry down to the renascence begun by Surrey and Wyatt.  This
extraordinary literary influence admits of a double explanation.  But just
as the authorship of the poem was very unequally divided between two
personages, wholly divergent in their purposes as writers, so the
POPULARITY of the poem is probably in the main to be attributed to the
second and later of the pair.

To the trouvere Guillaume de Lorris (who took his name from a small town
in the valley of the Loire) was due the original conception of the "Roman
de la Rose," for which it is needless to suspect any extraneous source.
To novelty of subject he added great ingenuity of treatment.  Instead of
narrative of warlike adventures he offered to his readers a psychological
romance, in which a combination of symbolisations and personified
abstractions supplied the characters of the moral conflict represented.
Bestiaries and Lapidaries had familiarised men's minds with the art of
finding a symbolical significance in particular animals and stones; and
the language of poets was becoming a language of flowers.  On the other
hand, the personification of abstract qualities was a usage largely
affected by the Latin writers of the earlier Middle Ages, and formed a
favourite device of the monastic beginnings of the Christian drama.  For
both these literary fashions, which mildly exercised the ingenuity while
deeply gratifying the tastes of mediaeval readers, room was easily found
by Guillaume de Lorris within a framework in itself both appropriate and
graceful.  He told (as reproduced by his English translator) how in a
dream he seemed to himself to wake up on a May morning.  Sauntering forth,
he came to a garden surrounded by a wall, on which were depicted many
unkindly figures, such as Hate and Villainy, and Avarice and Old Age, and
another thing

That seemed like a hypocrite,
And it was cleped pope holy.

Within, all seemed so delicious that, feeling ready to give an hundred
pound for the chance of entering, he smote at a small wicket and was
admitted by a courteous maiden named Idleness.  On the sward in the garden
were dancing its owner, Sir Mirth, and a company of friends; and by the
side of Gladness the dreamer saw the God of Love and his attendant, a
bachelor named Sweet-looking, who bore two bows, each with five arrows.
Of these bows the one was straight and fair, and the other crooked and
unsightly, and each of the arrows bore the name of some quality or emotion
by which love is advanced or hindered.  And as the dreamer was gazing into
the spring of Narcissus (the imagination), he beheld a rose-tree "charged
full of roses," and, becoming enamoured of one of them, eagerly advanced
to pluck the object of his passion.  In the midst of this attempt he was
struck by arrow upon arrow, shot "wonder smart" by Love from the strong
bow.  The arrow called Company completes the victory; the dreaming poet
becomes the Lover ("L'Amant"), and swears allegiance to the God of Love,
who proceeds to instruct him in his laws; and the real action (if it is to
be called such) of the poem begins.  This consists in the Lover's desire
to possess himself of the Rosebud, the opposition offered to him by powers
both good and evil, and by Reason in particular, and the support which he
receives from more or less discursive friends.  Clearly, the conduct of
such a scheme as this admits of being varied in many ways and protracted
to any length; but its first conception is easy and natural, and when it
was novel to boot, was neither commonplace nor ill-chosen.

After writing about one-fifth of the 22,000 verses of which the original
French poem consists, Guillaume de Lorris, who had executed his part of
the task in full sympathy with the spirit of the chivalry of his times,
died, and left the work to be continued by another trouvere, Jean de Meung
(so-called from the town, near Lorris, in which he lived).  "Hobbling
John" took up the thread of his predecessor's poem in the spirit of a wit
and an encyclopaedist.  Indeed, the latter appellation suits him in both
its special and its general sense.  Beginning with a long dialogue between
Reason and the Lover, he was equally anxious to display his freedom of
criticism and his universality of knowledge, both scientific and
anecdotical.  His vein was pre-eminently satirical and abundantly
allusive; and among the chief objects of his satire are the two favourite
themes of medieval satire in general, religious hypocrisy (personified in
"Faux-Semblant," who has been described as one of the ancestors of
"Tartuffe"), and the foibles of women.  To the gross salt of Jean de
Meung, even more than to the courtly perfume of Guillaume de Lorris, may
be ascribed the long-lived popularity of the "Roman de la Rose"; and thus
a work, of which already the theme and first conception imply a great step
forwards from the previous range of mediaeval poetry, became a favourite
with all classes by reason of the piquancy of its flavour, and the
quotable applicability of many of its passages.  Out of a chivalrous
allegory Jean de Meung had made a popular satire; and though in its
completed form it could look for no welcome in many a court or castle,--
though Petrarch despised it, and Gerson in the name of the Church recorded
a protest against it,--and though a bevy of offended ladies had well-nigh
taken the law into their own hands against its author,--yet it commanded a
vast public of admirers.  And against such a popularity even an offended
clergy, though aided by the sneers of the fastidious and the vehemence of
the fair, is wont to contend in vain.

Chaucer's translation of this poem is thought to have been the cause which
called forth from Eustace Deschamps, Machault's pupil and nephew, the
complimentary ballade in the refrain of which the Englishman is saluted as

Grant translateur, noble Gelfroi Chaucier.

But whether or not such was the case, his version of the "Roman de la
Rose" seems, on the whole, to be a translation properly so called--
although, considering the great number of MSS. existing of the French
original, it would probably be no easy task to verify the assertion that
in one or the other of these are to be found the few passages thought to
have been interpolated by Chaucer.  On the other hand, his omissions are
extensive; indeed, the whole of his translation amounts to little more
than one-third of the French original.  It is all the more noteworthy that
Chaucer reproduces only about one-half of the part contributed by Jean de
Meung, and again condenses this half to one-third of its length.  In
general, he has preserved the French names of localities, and even
occasionally helps himself to a rhyme by retaining a French word.
Occasionally he shows a certain timidity as a translator, speaking of "the
tree which in France men call a pine," and pointing out, so that there may
be no mistake, that mermaidens are called it "sereyns" (sirenes) in
France.  On the other hand, his natural vivacity now and then suggests to
him a turn of phrase or an illustration of his own.  As a loyal English
courtier he cannot compare a fair bachelor to any one so aptly as to "the
lord's son of Windsor;" and as writing not far from the time when the
Statute of Kilkenny was passed, he cannot lose the opportunity of
inventing an Irish parentage for Wicked-Tongue:

 So full of cursed rage
It well agreed with his lineage;
For him an Irishwoman bare.

The debt which Chaucer in his later works owed to the "Roman of the Rose"
was considerable, and by no means confined to the favourite May-morning
exordium and the recurring machinery of a vision--to the origin of which
latter (the dream of Scipio related by Cicero and expounded in the widely-
read Commentary of Macrobius) the opening lines of the "Romaunt" point.
He owes to the French poem both the germs of felicitous phrases, such as
the famous designation of Nature as "the Vicar of the almighty Lord," and
perhaps touches used by him in passages like that in which he afterwards,
with further aid from other sources, drew the character of a true
gentleman.  But the main service which the work of this translation
rendered to him was the opportunity which it offered of practising and
perfecting a ready and happy choice of words,--a service in which,
perhaps, lies the chief use of all translation, considered as an exercise
of style.  How far he had already advanced in this respect, and how
lightly our language was already moulding itself in his hands, may be seen
from several passages in the poem; for instance, from that about the
middle, where the old and new theme of self-contradictoriness of love is
treated in endless variations.  In short, Chaucer executed his task with
facility, and frequently with grace, though for one reason or another he
grew tired of it before he had carried it out with completeness.  Yet the
translation (and this may have been among the causes why he seems to have
wearied of it) has notwithstanding a certain air of schoolwork; and though
Chaucer's next poem, to which incontestable evidence assigns the date of
the year 1369, is still very far from being wholly original, yet the step
is great from the "Romaunt of the Rose" to the "Book of the Duchess."

Among the passages of the French "Roman de la Rose" omitted in Chaucer's
translation are some containing critical reflexions on the character of
kings and constituted authorities--a species of observations which kings
and constituted authorities have never been notorious for loving.  This
circumstance, together with the reference to Windsor quoted above,
suggests the probability that Chaucer's connexion with the Court had not
been interrupted, or had been renewed, or was on the eve of renewing
itself, at the time when he wrote this translation.  In becoming a
courtier, he was certainly placed within the reach of social opportunities
such as in his day he could nowhere else have enjoyed.  In England as well
as in Italy during the fourteenth and the two following centuries; as the
frequent recurrence of the notion attests, the "good" courtier seemed the
perfection of the idea of gentleman.  At the same time exaggerated
conceptions of the courtly breeding of Chaucer's and Froissart's age may
very easily be formed; and it is almost amusing to contrast with Chaucer's
generally liberal notions of manners, severe views of etiquette like that
introduced by him at the close of the "Man of Law's Tale," where he
stigmatizes as a solecism the statement of the author from whom he copied
his narrative, that King Aella sent his little boy to invite the emperor
to dinner.  "It is best to deem he went himself."

The position which in June, 1367, we find Chaucer holding at Court is that
of "Valettus" to the King, or, as a later document of May, 1368, has it,
of "Valettus Camerae Regis"--Valet or Yeoman of the King's Chamber.  Posts
of this kind, which involved the ordinary functions of personal
attendance--the making of beds, the holding of torches, the laying of
tables, the going on messages, etc.--were usually bestowed upon young men
of good family.  In due course of time a royal valet usually rose to the
higher post of royal squire--either "of the household" generally, or of a
more special kind.  Chaucer appears in 1368 as an "esquire of less
degree," his name standing seventeenth in a list of seven-and-thirty.
After the year 1373 he is never mentioned by the lower, but several times
by Latin equivalents of the higher, title.  Frequent entries occur of the
pension or salary of twenty marks granted to him for life; and, as will be
seen, he soon began to be employed on missions abroad.  He had thus become
a regular member of the royal establishment, within the sphere of which we
must suppose the associations of the next years of his life to have been
confined.  They belonged to a period of peculiar significance both for the
English people and for the Plantagenet dynasty, whose glittering exploits
reflected so much transitory glory on the national arms.  At home, these
years were the brief interval between two of the chief visitations of the
Black Death (1361 and 1369), and a few years earlier the poet of the
"Vision" had given voice to the sufferings of the poor.  It was not,
however, the mothers of the people crying for their children whom the
courtly singer remembered in his elegy written in the year 1369; the woe
to which he gave a poetic expression was that of a princely widower
temporarily inconsolable for the loss of his first wife.  In 1367 the
Black Prince was conquering Castile (to be lost again before the year was
out) for that interesting protege of the Plantagenets and representative
of legitimate right, Don Pedro the Cruel, whose daughter the inconsolable
widower was to espouse in 1372, and whose "tragic" downfall Chaucer
afterwards duly lamented in his "Monk's Tale":--

O noble, O worthy Pedro, glory of Spain,
Whom fortune held so high in majesty!

As yet the star of the valiant Prince of Wales had not been quenched in
the sickness which was the harbinger of death; and his younger brother,
John of Gaunt, though already known for his bravery in the field (he
commanded the reinforcements sent to Spain in 1367), had scarcely begun to
play the prominent part in politics which he was afterwards to fill.  But
his day was at hand, and the anti-clerical tenour of the legislation and
of the administrative changes of these years was in entire harmony with
the policy of which he was to constitute himself the representative.  1365
is the year of the Statute of Provisors, and 1371 that of the dismissal of
William of Wykeham.

John of Gaunt was born in 1340, and was, therefore, probably of much the
same age as Chaucer, and like him now in the prime of life.  Nothing could
accordingly be more natural than that a more or less intimate relation
should have formed itself between them.  This relation, there is reason to
believe, afterwards ripened on Chaucer's part into one of distinct
political partisanship, of which there could as yet (for the reason given
above) hardly be a question.  There was, however, so far as we know,
nothing in Chaucer's tastes and tendencies to render it antecedently
unlikely that he should have been ready to follow the fortunes of a prince
who entered the political arena as an adversary of clerical predominance.
Had Chaucer been a friend of it in principle, he would hardly have devoted
his first efforts as a writer to the translation of the "Roman de la
Rose."  In so far, therefore, and in truth it is not very far, as John of
Gaunt may be afterwards said to have been a Wycliffite, the same
description might probably be applied to Chaucer.  With such sentiments a
personal orthodoxy was fully reconcileable in both patron and follower;
and the so-called "Chaucer's A. B. C.," a version of a prayer to the
Virgin in a French poetical "Pilgrimage," might with equal probability
have been put together by him either early or late in the course of his
life.  There was, however, a tradition, repeated by Speght, that this
piece was composed "at the request of Blanche, Duchess of Lancaster, as a
prayer for her private use, being a woman in her religion very devout."
If so, it must have been written before the Duchess's death, which
occurred in 1369; and we may imagine it, if we please, with its twenty-
three initial letters blazoned in red and blue and gold on a flyleaf
inserted in the Book of the pious Duchess,--herself, in the fervent
language of the poem, an illuminated calendar, as being lighted in this
world with the Virgin's holy name.

In the autumn of 1369, then, the Duchess Blanche died an early death; and
it is pleasing to know that John of Gaunt, to whom his marriage with her
had brought wealth and a dukedom, ordered services, in pious remembrance
of her, to be held at her grave.  The elaborate elegy which--very possibly
at the widowed Duke's request--was composed by Chaucer, leaves no doubt as
to the identity of the lady whose loss it deplores:--

 --Goode faire "White" she hight;
Thus was my lady named right;
For she was both fair and bright.

But, in accordance with the taste of his age, which shunned such sheer
straightforwardness in poetry, the "Book of the Duchess" contains no
further transparent reference to the actual circumstances of the wedded
life which had come to so premature an end--for John of Gaunt had married
Blanche of Lancaster in 1359;--and an elaborate framework is constructed
round the essential theme of the poem.  Already, however, the instinct of
Chaucer's own poetic genius had taught him the value of personal
directness; and, artificially as the course of the poem is arranged, it
begins in the most artless and effective fashion with an account given by
the poet of his own sleeplessness and its cause already referred to--an
opening so felicitous that it was afterwards imitated by Froissart.  And
so, Chaucer continues, as he could not sleep, to drive the night away he
sat upright in his bed reading a "romance," which he thought better
entertainment than chess or draughts.  The book which he read was the
"Metamorphoses" of Ovid; and in it he chanced on the tale of Ceyx and
Alcyone--the lovers whom, on their premature death, the compassion of Juno
changed into the seabirds that bring good luck to mariners.  Of this story
(whether Chaucer derived it direct from Ovid, or from Machault's French
version is disputed), the earlier part serves as the introduction to the
poem.  The story breaks off--with the dramatic abruptness in which Chaucer
is a master, and which so often distinguishes his versions from their
originals--at the death of Alcyone, caused by her grief at the tidings
brought by Morpheus of her husband's death.  Thus subtly the god of sleep
and the death of a loving wife mingle their images in the poet's mind; and
with these upon him he falls asleep "right upon his book."

What more natural, after this, than the dream which came to him?  It was
May, and he lay in his bed at morning-time, having been awakened out of
his slumbers by the "small fowls," who were carolling forth their notes--
"some high, some low, and all of one accord."  The birds singing their
matins around the poet, and the sun shining brightly through his windows
stained with many a figure of poetic legend, and upon the walls painted in
fine colours "both text and gloss, and all the Romaunt of the Rose"--is
not this a picture of Chaucer by his own hand, on which, one may love to
dwell?  And just as the poem has begun with a touch of nature, and at the
beginning of its main action has returned to nature, so through the whole
of its course it maintains the same tone.  The sleeper awakened--still of
course in his dream--hears the sound of the horn, and the noise of
huntsmen preparing for the chase.  He rises, saddles his horse, and
follows to the forest, where the Emperor Octavian (a favourite character
of Carolingian legend, and pleasantly revived under this aspect by the
modern romanticist, Ludwig Tieck--in Chaucer's poem probably a flattering
allegory for the King) is holding his hunt.  The deer having been started,
the poet is watching the course of the hunt, when he is approached by a
dog, which leads him to a solitary spot in a thicket among mighty trees;
and here of a sudden he comes upon a man in black, sitting silently by the
side of a huge oak.  How simple and how charming is the device of the
faithful dog acting as a guide into the mournful solitude of the faithful
man!  For the knight whom the poet finds thus silent and alone, is
rehearsing to himself a lay, "a manner song," in these words:--

I have of sorrow so great wone,
That joye get I never none,
Now that I see my lady bright,
Which I have loved with all my might,
Is from me dead, and is agone.
Alas! Death, what aileth thee
That thou should'st not have taken me,
When that thou took'st my lady sweet?
That was so fair, so fresh, so free,
So goode, that men may well see
Of all goodness she had no meet.

Seeing the knight overcome by his grief, and on the point of fainting, the
poet accosts him, and courteously demands his pardon for the intrusion.
Thereupon the disconsolate mourner, touched by this token of sympathy,
breaks out into the tale of his sorrow which forms the real subject of the
poem.  It is a lament for the loss of a wife who was hard to gain (the
historical basis of this is unknown, but great heiresses are usually hard
to gain for cadets even of royal houses), and whom, alas! her husband was
to lose so soon after he had gained her.  Nothing could be simpler, and
nothing could be more delightful than the Black Knight's description of
his lost lady as she was at the time when he wooed and almost despaired of
winning her.  Many of the touches in this description--and among them some
of the very happiest--are, it is true, borrowed from the courtly Machault;
but nowhere has Chaucer been happier, both in his appropriations and in
the way in which he has really converted them into beauties of his own,
than in this, perhaps the most lifelike picture of maidenhood in the whole
range of our literature.  Or is not the following the portrait of an
English girl, all life and all innocence--a type not belonging, like its
opposite, to any "period" in particular--?

I saw her dance so comelily,
Carol and sing so sweetely,
And laugh, and play so womanly,
And looke so debonairly,
So goodly speak and so friendly,
That, certes, I trow that nevermore
Was seen so blissful a treasure.
For every hair upon her head,
Sooth to say, it was not red,
Nor yellow neither, nor brown it was,
Methought most like gold it was.
And ah! what eyes my lady had,
Debonair, goode, glad and sad,
Simple, of good size, not too wide.
Thereto her look was not aside.
Nor overthwart;

but so well set that, whoever beheld her was drawn and taken up by it,
every part of him.  Her eyes seemed every now and then as if she were
inclined to be merciful, such was the delusion of fools: a delusion in
very truth, for

It was no counterfeited thing;
It was her owne pure looking;
So the goddess, dame Nature,
Had made them open by measure
And close; for were she never so glad,
Not foolishly her looks were spread,
Nor wildely, though that she play'd;
But ever, methought, her eyen said:
"By God, my wrath is all forgiven."

And at the same time she liked to live so happily that dulness was afraid
of her; she was neither too "sober" nor too glad; in short, no creature
had over more measure in all things.  Such was the lady whom the knight
had won for himself, and whose virtues he cannot weary of rehearsing to
himself or to a sympathising auditor.

"Sir!" quoth I, "where is she now?"
"Now?" quoth he, and stopped anon;
Therewith he waxed as dead as stone,
And said: "Alas that I was bore!
That was the loss! and heretofore
I told to thee what I had lost.
Bethink thee what I said.  Thou know'st
In sooth full little what thou meanest:
I have lost more than thou weenest.
God wot, alas! right that was she."
"Alas, sir, how? what may that be?
"She is dead."  "Nay?"  "Yes, by my truth!"
Is that your loss? by God, it is ruth."

And with that word, the hunt breaking up, the knight and the poet depart
to a "long castle with white walls on a rich hill" (Richmond?), where a
bell tolls and awakens the poet from his slumbers, to let him find himself
lying in his bed, and the book with its legend of love and sleep resting
in his hand.  One hardly knows at whom more to wonder--whether at the
distinguished French scholar who sees so many trees that he cannot see a
forest, and who, not content with declaring the "Book of the Duchess," as
a whole as well as in its details, a servile imitation of Machault,
pronounces it at the same time one of Chaucer's feeblest productions; or
at the equally eminent English scholar who, with a flippancy which for
once ceases to be amusing, opines that Chaucer ought to "have felt ashamed
of himself for this most lame and impotent conclusion" of a poem "full of
beauties," and ought to have been "caned for it!"  Not only was this "lame
and impotent conclusion" imitated by Spenser in his lovely elegy,
"Daphnaida" (I have been anticipated in pointing out this fact by the
author of the biographical essay on "Spenser" in this series--an essay to
which I cannot help taking this opportunity of offering a tribute of
sincere admiration.  It may not be an undesigned coincidence that the
inconsolable widower of the "Daphnaida" is named Alcyon, while Chaucer's
poem begins with a reference to the myth of Ceyx and Alcyone.  Sir Arthur
Gorges re-appears in Alcyon in "Colin Clout's come home again."); but it
is the first passage in Chaucer's writings revealing, one would have
thought unmistakeably, the dramatic power which was among his most
characteristic gifts.  The charm of this poem, notwithstanding all the
artificialities with which it is overlaid, lies in its simplicity and
truth to nature.  A real human being is here brought before us instead of
a vague abstraction; and the glow of life is on the page, though it has to
tell of death and mourning.  Chaucer is finding his strength by dipping
into the true spring of poetic inspiration; and in his dreams he is
awaking to the real capabilities of his genius.  Though he is still
uncertain of himself and dependent on others, it seems not too much to say
that already in this "Book of the Duchess" he is in some measure an
original poet.

How unconscious, at the same time, this waking must have been is manifest
from what little is known concerning the course of both his personal and
his literary life during the next few years.  But there is a tide in the
lives of poets, as in those of other men, on the use or neglect of which
their future seems largely to depend.  For more reasons than one Chaucer
may have been rejoiced to be employed on the two missions abroad, which
apparently formed his chief occupation during the years 1370-1373.  In the
first place, the love of books, which he so frequently confesses, must in
him have been united to a love of seeing men and cities; few are observers
of character without taking pleasure in observing it.  Of his literary
labours he probably took little thought during these years; although the
visit which in the course of them he paid to Italy may be truly said to
have constituted the turning-point in his literary life.  No work of his
can be ascribed to this period with certainty; none of importance has ever
been ascribed to it.

On the latter of these missions Chaucer, who left England in the winter of
1372, visited Genoa and Florence.  His object at the former city was to
negotiate concerning the settlement of a Genoese mercantile factory in one
of our ports, for in this century there already existed between Genoa and
England a commercial intercourse, which is illustrated by the obvious
etymology of the popular term "jane" occurring in Chaucer in the sense of
any small coin.  ("A jane" is in the "Clerk's Tale" said to be a
sufficient value at which to estimate the "stormy people")  It has been
supposed that on this journey he met at Padua Petrarch, whose residence
was near by at Arqua.  The statement of the "Clerk" in the "Canterbury
Tales" that he learnt the story of patient Griseldis "at Padua of a worthy
clerk...now dead," who was called "Francis Petrarch, the laureate poet,"
may of course merely imply that Chaucer borrowed the "Clerk's Tale" from
Petrarch's Latin version of the original by Boccaccio.  But the meeting
which the expression suggests may have actually taken place, and may have
been accompanied by the most suitable conversation which the imagination
can supply; while, on the other hand, it is a conjecture unsupported by
any evidence whatever, that a previous meeting between the pair had
occurred at Milan in 1368, when Lionel Duke of Clarence was married to his
second wife with great pomp in the presence of Petrarch and of Froissart.
The really noteworthy point is this: that while neither (as a matter of
course) the translated "Romaunt of the Rose," nor the "Book of the
Duchess" exhibits any traces of Italian influence, the same assertion
cannot safely be made with regard to any important poem produced by
Chaucer after the date of this Italian journey.  The literature of Italy
which was--and in the first instance through Chaucer himself--to exercise
so powerful an influence upon the progress of our own, was at last opened
to him, though in what measure, and by what gradations, must remain
undecided.  Before him lay both the tragedies and the comedies, as he
would have called them, of the learned and brilliant Boccaccio--both his
epic poems and that inexhaustible treasure-house of stories which Petrarch
praised for its pious and grave contents, albeit they were mingled with
others of undeniable jocoseness--the immortal "Decamerone."  He could
examine the refined gold of Petrarch's own verse with its exquisite
variations of its favourite pure theme and its adequate treatment of other
elevated subjects; and he might gaze down the long vista of pictured
reminiscences, grand and sombre, called up by the mightiest Muse of the
Middle Ages, the Muse of Dante.  Chaucer's genius, it may said at once was
not TRANSFORMED by its contact with Italian literature; for a conscious
desire as well as a conscientious effort is needed for bringing about such
a transformation; and to compare the results of his first Italian journey
with those of Goethe's pilgrimage across the Alps, for instance, would be
palpably absurd.  It might even be doubted whether for the themes which he
was afterwards likely to choose, and actually did choose, for poetic
treatment the materials at his command in French (and English) poetry and
prose would not have sufficed him.  As it was, it seems probable that he
took many things from Italian literature; it is certain that he learnt
much from it.  There seems every reason to conclude that the influence of
Italian study upon Chaucer made him more assiduous as well as more careful
in the employment of his poetic powers--more hopeful at once, if one may
so say, and more assured of himself.

Meanwhile, soon after his return from his second foreign mission, he was
enabled to begin a more settled life at home.  He had acquitted himself to
the satisfaction of the Crown, as is shown by the grant for life of a
daily pitcher of wine, made to him on April 23rd, 1374, the merry day of
the Feast of St. George.  It would of course be a mistake to conclude,
from any seeming analogies of later times, that this grant, which was
received by Chaucer in money-value, and which seems finally to have been
commuted for an annual payment of twenty marks, betokened on the part of
the King a spirit of patronage appropriate to the claims of literary
leisure.  How remote such a notion was from the minds of Chaucer's
employers is proved by the terms of the patent by which, in the month of
June following, he was appointed Comptroller of the Customs and Subsidy of
wools, skins, and tanned hides in the port of London.  This patent
(doubtless according to the usual official form) required him to write the
rolls of his office with his own hand, to be continually present there,
and to perform his duties in person and not by deputy.  By a warrant of
the same month Chaucer was granted the pension of 10 pounds for life
already mentioned, for services rendered by him and his wife to the Duke
and Duchess of Lancaster and to the Queen; by two successive grants of the
year 1375 he received further pecuniary gratifications of a more or less
temporary nature; and he continued to receive his pension and allowance
for robes as one of the royal esquires.  We may therefore conceive of him
as now established in a comfortable as well as seemingly secure position.
His regular work as comptroller (of which a few scattered documentary
vestiges are preserved) scarcely offers more points for the imagination to
exercise itself upon than Burns's excisemanship or Wordsworth's
collectorship of stamps (It is a curious circumstance that Dryden should
have received as a reward for his political services as a satirist, an
office almost identical with Chaucer's.  But he held it for little more
than a year.), though doubtless it must have brought him into constant
contact with merchants and with shipmen, and may have suggested to him
many a broad descriptive touch.  On the other hand, it is not necessary to
be a poet to feel something of that ineffable ennui of official life,
which even the self-compensatory practice of arriving late at one's desk,
but departing from it early, can only abate, but not take away.  The
passage has been often quoted in which Chaucer half implies a feeling of
the kind, and tells how he sought recreation from what Charles Lamb would
have called his "works" at the Custom House in the reading, as we know he
did in the writing, of other books:--

--when thy labour done all is,
And hast y-made reckonings,
Instead of rest and newe things
Thou go'st home to thine house anon,
And there as dumb as any stone
Thou sittest at another book.

The house at home was doubtless that in Aldgate, of which the lease to
Chaucer, bearing date May, 1374, has been discovered; and to this we may
fancy Chaucer walking morning and evening from the riverside, past the
Postern Gate by the Tower.  Already, however, in 1376, the routine of his
occupations appears to have been interrupted by his engagement on some
secret service under Sir John Burley; and in the following year, and in
1378, he was repeatedly abroad in the service of the Crown.  On one of his
journeys in the last-named year he was attached in a subordinate capacity
to the embassy sent to negotiate for the marriage with the French King
Charles V's daughter Mary to the young King Richard II, who had succeeded
to his grandfather in 1377,--one of those matrimonial missions which, in
the days of both Plantagenets and Tudors, formed so large a part of the
functions of European diplomacy, and which not unfrequently, as in this
case at least ultimately, came to nothing.  A later journey in May of the
same year took Chaucer once more to Italy, whither he had been sent with
Sir Edward Berkeley to treat with Bernardo Visconti, joint lord of Milan,
and "scourge of Lombardy," and Sir John Hawkwood--the former of whom finds
a place in that brief mirror of magistrates, the "Monk's Tale."  It was on
this occasion that of the two persons whom, according to custom, Chaucer
appointed to appear for him in the Courts during his absence, one was John
Gower, whose name as that of the second poet of his age is indissolubly
linked with Chaucer's own.

So far, the new reign, which had opened amidst doubts and difficulties for
the country, had to the faithful servant of the dynasty brought an
increase of royal goodwill.  In 1381--after the suppression of the great
rebellion of the villeins--King Richard II had married the princess whose
name for a season linked together the history of two countries the
destinies of which had before that age, as they have since, lain far
asunder.  Yet both Bohemia and England, besides the nations which received
from the former the impulses communicated to it by the latter, have reason
to remember Queen Anne the learned and the good; since to her was probably
due in the first instance the intellectual intercourse between her native
and her adopted country.  There seems every reason to believe that it was
the approach of this marriage which Chaucer celebrated in one of the
brightest and most jocund marriage-poems ever composed by a laureate's
hand; and if this was so, he cannot but have augmented the favour with
which he was regarded at Court.  When, therefore, by May, 1382, his
foreign journeys had come to an end, we do not wonder to find that,
without being called upon to relinquish his former office, he was
appointed in addition to the Comptrollership of the Petty Customs in the
Port of London, of which post he was allowed to execute the duties by
deputy.  In November, 1384, he received permission to absent himself from
his old comptrollership for a month, and in February, 1385, was allowed to
appoint a (permanent) deputy for this office also.  During the month of
October, 1386, he sat in Parliament at Westminster as one of the Knights
of the Shire for Kent, where we may consequently assume him to have
possessed landed property.  His fortunes, therefore, at this period had
clearly risen to their height; and naturally enough his commentators are
anxious to assign to these years the sunniest, as well as some of the most
elaborate, of his literary productions.  It is altogether probable that
the amount of leisure now at Chaucer's command enabled him to carry into
execution some of the works for which he had gathered materials abroad and
at home, and to prepare others.  Inasmuch as it contains the passage cited
above, referring to Chaucer's official employment, his poem called the
"House of Fame" must have been written between 1374 and 1386 (when Chaucer
quitted office), and probably is to be dated near the latter year.
Inasmuch as both this poem and "Troilus and Cressid" are mentioned in the
Prologue to the "Legend of Good Women," they must have been written
earlier than it; and the dedication of "Troilus" to Gower and Strode very
well agrees with the relations known to have existed about this time
between Chaucer and his brother-poet.  Very probably all these three works
may have been put forth, in more or less rapid succession, during this
fortunate season of Chaucer's life.

A fortunate season--for in it the prince who, from whatever cause, was
indisputably the patron of Chaucer and his wife, had, notwithstanding his
unpopularity among the lower orders, and the deep suspicion fostered by
hostile whisperings against him in his royal nephew's breast, still
contrived to hold the first place by the throne.  Though serious danger
had already existed of a conflict between the King and his uncle, yet John
of Gaunt and his Duchess Constance had been graciously dismissed with a
royal gift of golden crowns, when in July, 1386, he took his departure for
the continent, to busy himself till his return home in November, 1389,
with the affairs of Castile, and with claims arising out of his
disbursements there.  The reasons for Chaucer's attachment to this
particular patron are probably not far to seek; on the precise nature of
the relation between them it is useless to speculate.  Before Wyclif's
death in 1384, John of Gaunt had openly dissociated himself from the
reformer; and whatever may have been the case in his later years, it was
certainly not as a follower of his old patron that at this date Chaucer
could have been considered a Wycliffite.

Again, this period of Chaucer's life may be called fortunate, because
during it he seems to have enjoyed the only congenial friendships of which
any notice remains to us, The poem of "Troilus and Cressid" is, as was
just noted, dedicated to "the moral Gower and the philosophical Strode."
Ralph Strode was a Dominican of Jedburgh Abbey, a travelled scholar, whose
journeys had carried him as far as the Holy Land, and who was celebrated
as a poet in both the Latin and the English tongue, and as a theologian
and philosopher. In connexion with speculations concerning Chaucer's
relations to Wycliffism it is worth noting that Strode, who after his
return to England was appointed to superintend several new monasteries,
was the author of a series of controversial arguments against Wyclif.  The
tradition, according to which he taught one of Chaucer's sons, is
untrustworthy.  Of John Gower's life little more is known than of
Chaucer's; he appears to have been a Suffolk man, holding manors in that
county as well as in Essex, but occasionally to have resided in Kent.  At
the period of which we are speaking, he may be supposed, besides his
French productions, to have already published his Latin "Vox Clamantis"--a
poem which, beginning with an allegorical narrative of Wat Tyler's
rebellion, passes on to a series of reflexions on the causes of the
movement, conceived in a spirit of indignation against the corruptions of
the Church, but not of sympathy with Wycliffism.  This is no doubt the
poem which obtained for Gower the epithet "moral" (i.e. sententious)
applied to him by Chaucer, and afterwards by Dunbar, Hawes, and Shakspere.
Gower's "Vox Clamantis" and other Latin poems (including one "against the
astuteness of the Evil One in the matter of Lollardry") are forgotten; but
his English "Confessio Amantis" has retained its right to a place of
honour in the history of our literature.  The most interesting part of
this poem, its "Prologue," has already been cited as of value for our
knowledge of the political and social condition of its times.  It gives
expression to a conservative tone and temper of mind; and like many
conservative minds, Gower's had adopted, or affected to adopt, the
conviction that the world was coming to an end.  The cause of the
anticipated catastrophe he found in the division, or absence of concord
and love, manifest in the condition of things around.  The intensity of
strife visible among the conflicting elements of which the world, like the
individual human being, is composed, too clearly announced the imminent
end of all things.  Would that a new Arion might arise to make peace where
now is hate; but, alas! the prevailing confusion is such that God alone
may set it right.  But the poem which follows cannot be said to sustain
the interest excited by this introduction.  Its machinery was obviously
suggested by that of the "Roman de la Rose," though, as Warton has happily
phrased it, Gower, after a fashion of his own, blends Ovid's "Art of Love"
with the Breviary.  The poet, wandering about in a forest, while suffering
under the smart of Cupid's dart, meets Venus, the Goddess of Love, who
urges him, as one upon the point of death, to make his full confession to
her clerk or priest, the holy father Genius.  This confession hereupon
takes place by means of question and answer; both penitent and confessor
entering at great length into an examination of the various sins and
weaknesses of human nature, and of their remedies, and illustrating their
observations by narratives, brief or elaborate, from Holy Writ, sacred
legend, ancient history, and romantic story.  Thus Gower's book, as he
says at its close, stands "between earnest and game," and might be fairly
described as a "Romaunt of the Rose," without either the descriptive grace
of Guillaume de Lorris, or the wicked wit of Jean de Meung, but full of
learning and matter, and written by an author certainly not devoid of the
art of telling stories.  The mind of this author was thoroughly didactic
in its bent; for the beauty of nature he has no real feeling, and though
his poem, like so many of Chaucer's, begins in the month of May, he is
(unnecessarily) careful to tell us that his object in going forth was not
to "sing with the birds."  He could not, like Chaucer, transfuse old
things into new, but there is enough in his character as a poet to explain
the friendship between the pair, of which we hear at the very time when
Gower was probably preparing his "Confessio Amantis" for publication.

They are said afterwards to have become enemies; but in the absence of any
real evidence to that effect we cannot believe Chaucer to have been likely
to quarrel with one whom he had certainly both trusted and admired.  Nor
had literary life in England already advanced to a stage of development of
which, as in the Elizabethan and Augustan ages, literary jealousy was an
indispensable accompaniment.  Chaucer is supposed to have attacked Gower
in a passage of the "Canterbury Tales," where he incidentally declares his
dislike (in itself extremely commendable) of a particular kind of
sensational stories, instancing the subject of one of the numerous tales
in the "Confessio Amantis."  There is, however, no reason whatever for
supposing Chaucer to have here intended a reflection on his brother poet,
more especially as the "Man of Law," after uttering the censure, relates,
though probably not from Gower, a story on a subject of a different kind
likewise treated by him.  It is scarcely more suspicious that when Gower,
in a second edition of his chief work, dedicated in 1393 to Henry, Earl of
Derby (afterwards Henry IV), judiciously omitted the exordium and altered
the close of the first edition, both of which were complimentary to
Richard II, he left out, together with its surrounding context, a passage
conveying a friendly challenge to Chaucer as a "disciple and poet of the
God of Love."

In any case there could have been no political difference between them,
for Chaucer was at all times in favour with the House of Lancaster,
towards whose future head Gower so early contrived to assume a correct
attitude.  To him--a man of substance, with landed property in three
counties--the rays of immediate court-favour were probably of less
importance than to Chaucer; but it is not necessity only which makes
courtiers of so many of us: some are born to the vocation, and Gower
strikes one as naturally more prudent and cautious--in short, more of a
politic personage--than Chaucer.  He survived him eight years--a blind
invalid, in whose mind at least we may hope nothing dimmed or blurred the
recollection of a friend to whom he owes much of his fame.

In a still nearer relationship,--on which the works of Chaucer that may
certainly or probably be assigned to this period throw some light,--it
seems impossible to describe him as having been fortunate.  Whatever may
have been the date and circumstances of his marriage, it seems, at all
events in its later years, not to have been a happy one.  The allusions to
Chaucer's personal experience of married life in both "Troilus And
Cressid" and the "House of Fame" are not of a kind to be entirely
explicable by that tendency to make a mock of women and of marriage, which
has frequently been characteristic of satirists, and which was specially
popular in an age cherishing the wit of Jean de Meung, and complacently
corroborating its theories from naughty Latin fables, French fabliaux, and
Italian novelle.  Both in "Troilus And Cressid" and in the "House of Fame"
the poet's tone, when he refers to himself, is generally dolorous; but
while both poems contain unmistakeable references to the joylessness of
his own married life, in the latter he speaks of himself as "suffering
debonairly,"--or, as we should say, putting a good face upon--a state
"desperate of all bliss."  And it is a melancholy though half sarcastic
glimpse into his domestic privacy which he incidentally, and it must be
allowed rather unnecessarily, gives in the following passage of the same
poem:--

 "Awake!" to me he said,
In voice and tone the very same
THAT USETH ONE WHO I COULD NAME;
And with that voice, sooth to say(n)
My mind returned to me again;
For it was goodly said to me;
So was it never wont to be.

In other words, the kindness of the voice reassured him that it was NOT
the same as that which he was wont to hear close to his pillow!  Again,
the entire tone of the Prologue to the "Legend of Good Women" is not that
of a happy lover; although it would be pleasant enough, considering that
the lady who imposes on the poet the penalty of celebrating GOOD women is
Alcestis, the type of faithful wifehood, to interpret the poem as not only
an amende honorable to the female sex in general, but a token of
reconciliation to the poet's wife in particular.  Even in the joyous
"Assembly of Fowls," a marriage-poem, the same discord already makes
itself heard; for it cannot be without meaning that in his dream the poet
is told by "African,"--

--thou of love hast lost thy taste, I guess,
As sick men have of sweet and bitterness;

and that he confesses for himself that, though he has read much of love,
he knows not of it by experience.  While, however, we reluctantly accept
the conclusion that Chaucer was unhappy as a husband, we must at the same
time decline, because the husband was a poet, and one of the most genial
of poets, to cast all the blame upon the wife, and to write her down a
shrew.  It is unfortunate, no doubt, but it is likewise inevitable, that
at so great a distance of time the rights and wrongs of a conjugal
disagreement or estrangement cannot with safety be adjusted.  Yet again,
because we refuse to blame Philippa, we are not obliged to blame Chaucer.
At the same time it must not be concealed, that his name occurs in the
year 1380 in connexion with a legal process of which the most obvious,
though not the only possible, explanation is that he had been guilty of a
grave infidelity towards his wife.  Such discoveries as this last we might
be excused for wishing unmade.

Considerable uncertainty remains with regard to the dates of the poems
belonging to this seemingly, in all respects but one, fortunate period of
Chaucer's life.  Of one of these works, however, which has had the curious
fate to be dated and re-dated by a succession of happy conjectures, the
last and happiest of all may be held to have definitively fixed the
occasion.  This is the charming poem called the "Assembly of Fowls," or
"Parliament of Birds"--a production which seems so English, so fresh from
nature's own inspiration, so instinct with the gaiety of Chaucer's own
heart, that one is apt to overlook in it the undeniable vestiges of
foreign influences, both French and Italian.  At its close the poet
confesses that he is always reading, and therefore hopes that he may at
last read something "so to fare the better."  But with all this evidence
of study the "Assembly of Fowls" is chiefly interesting as showing how
Chaucer had now begun to select as well as to assimilate his loans; how,
while he was still moving along well-known tracks, his eyes were joyously
glancing to the right and the left; and how the source of most of his
imagery at all events he already found in the merry England around him,
even as he had chosen for his subject one of real national interest.

Anne of Bohemia, daughter of the great Emperor Charles IV, and sister of
King Wenceslas, had been successively betrothed to a Bavarian prince and
to a Margrave of Meissen, before--after negotiations which, according to
Froissart, lasted a year--her hand was given to the young King Richard II
of England.  This sufficiently explains the general scope of the "Assembly
of Fowls," an allegorical poem written on or about St. Valentine's Day,
1381--eleven months or nearly a year after which date the marriage took
place.  On the morning sacred to lovers the poet (in a dream, of course,
and this time conducted by the arch-dreamer Scipio in person) enters a
garden containing in it the temple of the god of Love, and filled with
inhabitants mythological and allegorical.  Here he sees the noble goddess
Nature, seated upon a hill of flowers, and around her "all the fowls that
be," assembled as by time honoured custom on St. Valentine's Day, "when
every fowl comes there to choose her mate."  Their huge noise and hubbub
is reduced to order by Nature, who assigns to each fowl its proper place--
the birds of prey highest; then those that eat according to natural
inclination--

--worm or thing of which I tell no tale;

then those that live by seed; and the various members of the several
classes are indicated with amusing vivacity and point, from the royal
eagle "that with his sharp look pierceth the sun," and "other eagles of a
lower kind" downwards.  We can only find room for a portion of the
company:--

The sparrow, Venus' son; the nightingale
That clepeth forth the fresh leaves new;
The swallow, murd'rer of the bees small,
That honey make of flowers fresh of hue;
The wedded turtle, with his hearte true;
The peacock, with his angels' feathers bright,
The pheasant, scorner of the cock by night.

The waker goose, the cuckoo, ever unkind;
The popinjay, full of delicacy;
The drake, destroyer of his owne kind;
The stork, avenger of adultery;
The cormorant, hot and full of gluttony
The crows and ravens with their voice of care;
And the throstle old, and the frosty fieldfare.

Naturalists must be left to explain some of these epithets and
designations, not all of which rest on allusions as easily understood as
that recalling the goose's exploit on the Capitol; but the vivacity of the
whole description speaks for itself.  One is reminded of Aristophanes'
feathered chorus; but birds are naturally the delight of poets, and were
befriended by Dante himself.

Hereupon the action of the poem opens.  A female eagle is wooed by three
suitors--all eagles; but among them the first, or royal eagle, discourses
in the manner most likely to conciliate favour.  Before the answer is
given, a pause furnishes an opportunity to the other fowls for delighting
in the sound of their own voices, Dame Nature proposing that each class of
birds shall, through the beak of its representative "agitator," express
its opinion on the problem before the assembly.  There is much humour in
the readiness of the goose to rush in with a ready-made resolution, and in
the smart reproof administered by the sparrow-hawk amidst the uproar of
"the gentle fowls all."  At last Nature silences the tumult, and the lady-
eagle delivers her answer, to the effect that she cannot make up her mind
for a year to come; but inasmuch as Nature has advised her to choose the
royal eagle, his is clearly the most favourable prospect.  Whereupon,
after certain fowls had sung a roundel, "as was always the usance," the
assembly, like some human Parliaments, breaks up with shouting;

(Than all the birdis song with sic a schout
That I annone awoik quhair that I lay
Dunbar, "The Thrissil and the Rois.")

and the dreamer awakes to resume his reading.

Very possibly the "Assembly of Fowls" was at no great interval of time
either followed or preceded by two poems of far inferior interest--the
"Complaint of Mars" (apparently afterwards amalgamated with that of
"Venus"), which is supposed to be sung by a bird on St. Valentine's
morning, and the fragment of "Queen Anelida and false Arcite."  There are,
however, reasons which make a less early date probable in the case of the
latter production, the history of the origin and purpose of which can
hardly be said as yet to be removed out of the region of mere speculation.
In any case, neither of these poems can be looked upon as preparations, on
Chaucer's part, for the longer work on which he was to expend so much
labour; but in a sense this description would apply to the translation
which, probably before he wrote "Troilus and Cressid," certainly before he
wrote the Prologue to the "Legend of Good Women," he made of the famous
Latin work of Boethius, "the just man in prison," on the "Consolation of
Philosophy."  This book was, and very justly so, one of the favourite
manuals of the Middle Ages, and a treasure-house of religious wisdom to
centuries of English writers.  "Boice of Consolacioun" is cited in the
"Romaunt of the Rose"; and the list of passages imitated by Chaucer from
the martyr of Catholic orthodoxy and Roman freedom of speech is
exceedingly long.  Among them are the ever-recurring diatribe against the
fickleness of fortune, and (through the medium of Dante) the reflection on
the distinction between gentle birth and a gentle life.  Chaucer's
translation was not made at second-hand; if not always easy it is
conscientious, and interpolated with numerous glosses and explanations
thought necessary by the translator.  The metre of "The Former Life" he at
one time or another turned into verse of his own.

Perhaps the most interesting of the quotations made in Chaucer's poems
from Boethus occurs in his "Troilus and Cressid," one of the many medieval
versions of an episode engrafted by the lively fancy of an Anglo-Norman
trouvere upon the deathless, and in its literary variations incomparably
luxuriant, growth of the story of Troy.  On Benoit de Sainte-Maure's poem
Guido de Colonna founded his Latin-prose romance; and this again, after
being reproduced in languages and by writers almost innumerable, served
Boccaccio as the foundation of his poem "Filostrato"--i.e. the victim of
love.  All these works, together with Chaucer's "Troilus and Cressid,"
with Lydgate's "Troy-Book," with Henryson's "Testament of Cressid" (and in
a sense even with Shakespere's drama on the theme of Chaucer's poem), may
be said to belong to the second cycle of modern versions of the tale of
Troy divine.  Already their earlier predecessors had gone far astray from
Homer, of whom they only know by hearsay, relying for their facts on late
Latin epitomes, which freely mutilated and perverted the Homeric narrative
in favour of the Trojans--the supposed ancestors of half the nations of
Europe.  Accordingly, Chaucer, in a well-known passage in his "House of
Fame," regrets, with sublime coolness, how "one said that Homer" wrote
"lies,"

Feigning in his poetries
And was to Greekes favourable.
Therefore held he it but fable.

But the courtly poets of the romantic age of literature went a step
further, and added a mediaeval colouring all their own.  One converts the
Sibyl into a nun, and makes her admonish Aeneas to tell his beads.
Another--it is Chaucer's successor Lydgate--introduces Priam's sons
exercising their bodies in tournaments and their minds in the glorious
play of chess, and causes the memory of Hector to be consecrated by the
foundation of a chantry of priests who are to pray for the repose of his
soul.  A third finally condemns the erring Cressid to be stricken with
leprosy, and to wander about with cup and clapper, like the unhappy lepers
in the great cities of the Middle Ages.  Everything, in short, is
transfused by the spirit of the adapters' own times; and so far are these
writers from any weakly sense of anachronism in describing Troy as if it
were a moated and turreted city of the later Middle Ages, that they are
only careful now and then to protest their own truthfulness when anything
in their narrative seems UNLIKE the days in which they write.

But Chaucer, though his poem is, to start with, only an English
reproduction of an Italian version of a Latin translation of a French
poem, and though in most respects it shares the characteristic features of
the body of poetic fiction to which it belongs, is far from being a mere
translator.  Apart from several remarkable reminiscences introduced by
Chaucer from Dante, as well as from the irrepressible "Romaunt of the
Rose," he has changed his original in points which are not mere matters of
detail or questions of convenience.  In accordance with the essentially
dramatic bent of his own genius, some of these changes have reference to
the aspect of the characters and the conduct of the plot, as well as to
the whole spirit of the conception of the poem.  Cressid (who, by the way,
is a widow at the outset--whether she had children or not, Chaucer nowhere
found stated, and therefore leaves undecided) may at first sight strike
the reader as a less consistent character in Chaucer than in Boccaccio.
But there is true art in the way in which, in the English poem, our
sympathy is first aroused for the heroine, whom, in the end, we cannot but
condemn.  In Boccaccio, Cressid is fair and false--one of those fickle
creatures with whom Italian literature, and Boccaccio in particular, so
largely deal, and whose presentment merely repeats to us the old cynical
half-truth as to woman's weakness.  The English poet, though he does not
pretend that his heroine was "religious" (i.e. a nun to whom earthly love
is a sin), endears her to us from the first; so much that "O the pity of
it" seems the hardest verdict we can ultimately pass upon her conduct.
How, then, is the catastrophe of the action, the falling away of Cressid
from her truth to Troilus, poetically explained?  By an appeal--
pedantically put, perhaps, and as it were dragged in violently by means of
a truncated quotation from Boethius--to the fundamental difficulty
concerning the relations between poor human life and the government of the
world.  This, it must be conceded, is a considerably deeper problem than
the nature of woman.  Troilus and Cressid, the hero sinned against and the
sinning heroine, are the VICTIMS OF FATE.  Who shall cast a stone against
those who are, but like the rest of us, predestined to their deeds and to
their doom; since the co-existence of free-will with predestination does
not admit of proof?  This solution of the conflict may be morally as well
as theologically unsound; it certainly is aesthetically faulty; but it is
the reverse of frivolous or commonplace.

Or let us turn from Cressid, "matchless in beauty," and warm with sweet
life, but not ignoble even in the season of her weakness, to another
personage of the poem.  In itself the character of Pandarus is one of the
most revolting which imagination can devise; so much so that the name has
become proverbial for the most despicable of human types.  With Boccaccio
Pandarus is Cressid's cousin and Troilus' youthful friend, and there is no
intention of making him more offensive than are half the confidants of
amorous heroes.  But Chaucer sees his dramatic opportunity; and without
painting black in black and creating a monster of vice, he invents a good-
natured and loquacious, elderly go-between, full of proverbial philosophy
and invaluable experience--a genuine light comedy character for all times.
How admirably this Pandarus practises as well as preaches his art; using
the hospitable Deiphobus and the queenly Helen as unconscious instruments
in his intrigue for bringing the lovers together:--

She came to dinner in her plain intent;
But God and Pandar wist what all this meant.

Lastly, considering the extreme length of Chaucer's poem, and the very
simple plot of the story which it tells, one cannot fail to admire the
skill with which the conduct of its action is managed.  In Boccaccio the
earlier part of the story is treated with brevity, while the conclusion,
after the catastrophe has occurred and the main interest has passed, is
long drawn out.  Chaucer dwells at great length upon the earlier and
pleasing portion of the tale, more especially on the falling in love of
Cressid, which is worked out with admirable naturalness.  But he
comparatively hastens over its pitiable end--the fifth and last book of
his poem corresponding to not less than four cantos of the "Filostrato."
In Chaucer's hands, therefore, the story is a real love-story, and the
more that we are led to rejoice with the lovers in their bliss, the more
our compassion is excited by the lamentable end of so much happiness; and
we feel at one with the poet, who, after lingering over the happiness of
which he has in the end to narrate the fall, as it were unwillingly
proceeds to accomplish his task, and bids his readers be wroth with the
destiny of his heroine rather than with himself.  His own heart, he says,
bleeds and his pen quakes to write what must be written of the falsehood
of Cressid, which was her doom.

Chaucer's nature, however tried, was unmistakeably one gifted with the
blessed power of easy self-recovery.  Though it was in a melancholy vein
that he had begun to write "Troilus and Cressid," he had found
opportunities enough in the course of the poem for giving expression to
the fresh vivacity and playful humour which are justly reckoned among his
chief characteristics.  And thus, towards its close, we are not surprised
to find him apparently looking forward to a sustained effort of a kind
more congenial to himself.  He sends forth his "little book, his little
tragedy," with the prayer that, before he dies, God his Maker may send him
might to "make some comedy."  If the poem called the "House of Fame"
followed upon "Troilus and Cressid" (the order of succession may, however,
have been the reverse), then, although the poet's own mood had little
altered, yet he had resolved upon essaying a direction which he rightly
felt to be suitable to his genius.

The "House of Fame" has not been distinctly traced to any one foreign
source; but the influence of both Petrarch and Dante, as well as that of
classical authors, are clearly to be traced in the poem.  And yet this
work, Chaucer's most ambitious attempt in poetical allegory, may be
described not only as in the main due to an original conception, but as
representing the results of the writer's personal experience.  All things
considered, it is the production of a man of wonderful reading, and shows
that Chaucer's was a mind interested in the widest variety of subjects,
which drew no invidious distinctions, such as we moderns are prone to
insist upon, between Arts and Science, but (notwithstanding an occasional
deprecatory modesty) eagerly sought to familiarise itself with the
achievements of both.  In a passage concerning the men of letters who had
found a place in the "House of Fame," he displays not only an acquaintance
with the names of several ancient classics, but also a keen appreciation,
now and then perhaps due to instinct, of their several characteristics.
Elsewhere he shows his interest in scientific inquiry by references to
such matters as the theory of sound and the Arabic system of numeration;
while the Mentor of the poem, the Eagle, openly boasts his powers of clear
scientific demonstration, in averring that he can speak "lewdly" (i.e.
popularly) "to a lewd man."  The poem opens with a very fresh and lively
discussion of the question of dreams in general--a semi-scientific subject
which much occupied Chaucer, and upon which even Pandarus and the wedded
couple of the "Nun's Priest's Tale" expend their philosophy.

Thus, besides giving evidence of considerable information and study, the
"House of Fame" shows Chaucer to have been gifted with much natural
humour.  Among its happy touches are the various rewards bestowed by Fame
upon the claimants for her favour, including the ready grant of evil fame
to those who desire it (a bad name, to speak colloquially, is to be had
for the asking; and the wonderful paucity of those who wish their good
works to remain in obscurity and to be their own reward, but then Chaucer
was writing in the Middle Ages.  And as pointing in a direction which the
author of the poem was subsequently to follow out, we may also specially
notice the company thronging the House of Rumour: shipmen and
pilgrims, the two most numerous kinds of travellers in Chaucer's age,
fresh from seaport and sepulchre, with scrips brimful of unauthenticated
intelligence.  In short, this poem offers in its details much that is
characteristic of its author's genius; while, as a whole, its abrupt
termination notwithstanding, it leaves the impression of completeness.
The allegory, simple and clear in construction, fulfils the purpose for
which it was devised; the conceptions upon which it is based are neither
idle, like many of those in Chaucer's previous allegories, nor are they so
artificial and far-fetched as to fatigue instead of stimulating the mind.
Pope, who reproduced parts of the "House of Fame" in a loose paraphrase,
in attempting to improve the construction of Chaucer's work, only
mutilated it.  As it stands, it is clear and digestible; and how many
allegories, one may take leave to ask, in our own allegory-loving
literature or in any other, merit the same commendation?  For the rest,
Pope's own immortal "Dunciad," though doubtless more immediately suggested
by a personal satire of Dryden's, is in one sense a kind of travesty of
the "House of Fame,"--A "House of Infamy."

In the theme of this poem there was undoubtedly something that could
hardly fail to humour the half-melancholy mood in which it was manifestly
written.  Are not, the poet could not but ask himself, all things vanity;
"as men say, what may ever last?"   Yet the subject brought its
consolation likewise.  Patient labour, such as this poem attests, is the
surest road to that enduring fame, which is "conserved with the shade;"
and awaking from his vision, Chaucer takes leave of the reader with a
resolution already habitual to him--to read more and more, instead of
resting satisfied with the knowledge he has already acquired.  And in the
last of the longer poems which seem assignable to this period of his life,
he proves that one Latin poet at least--Venus' clerk, whom in the "House
of Fame" he behold standing on a pillar of her own Cyprian metal--had been
read as well as celebrated by him

Of this poem, the fragmentary "Legend of Good Women," the "Prologue"
possesses a peculiar biographical as well as literary interest.  In his
personal feelings on the subject of love and marriage, Chaucer had, when
he wrote this "Prologue," evidently almost passed even beyond the
sarcastic stage.  And as a poet he was now clearly conscious of being no
longer a beginner, no longer a learner only, but one whom his age knew,
and in whom it took a critical interest.  The list including most of his
undoubted works, which he here recites, shows of itself that those already
spoken of in the foregoing pages were by this time known to the world,
together with two of the "Canterbury Tales," which had either been put
forth independently, or (as seems much less probable) had formed the first
instalment of his great work.  A further proof of the relatively late date
of this "Prologue" occurs in the contingent offer which it makes of the
poem to "the Queen," who can be no other than Richard II's young consort
Anne.  At the very outset we find Chaucer as it were reviewing his own
literary position--and doing so in the spirit of an author who knows very
well what is said against him, who knows very well what there is in what
is said against him, and who yet is full of that true self-consciousness
which holds to its course--not recklessly and ruthlessly, not with a
contempt for the feelings and judgments of his fellow-creatures, but with
a serene trust in the justification ensured to every honest endeavour.
The principal theme of his poems had hitherto been the passion of love,
and woman who is the object of the love of man.  Had he not, the superfine
critics of his day may have asked--steeped as they were in the
artificiality and florid extravagance of chivalry in the days of its
decline, and habituated to mistranslating earthly passion into the
phraseology of religious devotion--had he not debased the passion of love,
and defamed its object?  Had he not begun by translating the wicked satire
of Jean de Meung, "a heresy against the law" of Love, and had he not, by
cynically painting in his Cressid a picture of woman's perfidy, encouraged
men to be less faithful to women

That be as true as ever was any steel?

In Chaucer's way of meeting this charge, which he emphasises by putting it
in the mouth of the God of Love himself, it is, to be sure, difficult to
recognise any very deeply penitent spirit.  He mildly wards off the
reproach, sheltering himself behind his defender, the "lady in green," who
afterwards proves to be herself that type of womanly and wifely fidelity
unto death, the true and brave Alcestis.  And even in the body of the poem
one is struck by a certain perfunctoriness, not to say flippancy, in the
way in which its moral is reproduced.  The wrathful invective against the
various classical followers of Lamech, the maker of tents, wears no aspect
of deep moral indignation; and it is not precisely the voice of a
repentant sinner which concludes the pathetic story of the betrayal of
Phillis with the adjuration to ladies in general:--

Beware ye women of your subtle foe,
Since yet this day men may example see
And as in love trust ye no man but me.

(Lamech, Chaucer tells us in "Queen Annelida and the false Arcite," was
the

 first father that began
The love of two, and was in bigamy.

This poem seems designed to illustrate much the same moral as that
enforced by the "Legend of Good Women"--a moral which, by-the-bye, is
already foreshadowed towards the close of "Troilus and Cressid," where
Chaucer speaks of

 women that betrayed be
Through false folk, (God give them sorrow, amen!)
That with their greate wit and subtlety
Betray you; and 'tis this that moveth me
To speak; and, in effect, you all I pray:
Beware of men, and hearken what I say.)

At the same time the poet lends an attentive ear, as genius can always
afford to do, to a criticism of his shortcomings, and readily accepts the
sentence pronounced by Alcestis that he shall write a legend of GOOD
women, both maidens and also wives, that were

true in loving all their lives.

And thus, with the courage of a good or at all events easy conscience, he
sets about his task which unfortunately--it is conjectured by reason of
domestic calamities, probably including the death of his wife--remained,
or at least has come down to us unfinished.  We have only nine of the
nineteen stories which he appears to have intended to present (though
indeed a manuscript of Henry IV's reign quotes Chaucer's book of "25 good
women").  It is by no means necessary to suppose that all these nine
stories were written continuously; maybe, too, Chaucer, with all his
virtuous intentions, grew tired of his rather monotonous scheme, at a time
when he was beginning to busy himself with stories meant to be fitted into
the more liberal framework of the "Canterbury Tales."  All these
illustrations of female constancy are of classical origin, as Chaucer is
glad to make known and most of them are taken from Ovid.  But though the
thread of the English poet's narratives is supplied by such established
favourites as the stories of Cleopatra the Martyr Queen of Egypt, of
Thisbe of Babylon the Martyr, and of Dido to whom "Aeneas was forsworn,"
yet he by no means slavishly adheres to his authorities, but alters or
omits in accordance with the design of his book.  Thus, for instance, we
read of Medea's desertion by Jason, but hear nothing of her as the
murderess of her children; while, on the other hand, the tragedy of Dido
is enhanced by pathetic additions not to be found in Virgil.  Modern taste
may dislike the way in which this poem mixes up the terms and ideas of
Christian martyrology with classical myths, and as "the Legend of the
Saints of Cupid" assumes the character of a kind of calendar of women
canonised by reason of their faithfulness to earthly love.  But obviously
this is a method of treatment belonging to an age, not to a single poem or
poet.  Chaucer's artistic judgment in the selection and arrangement of his
themes, the wonderful vivacity and true pathos with which he turns upon
Tarquin or Jason as if they had personally offended him, and his genuine
flow of feeling not only FOR but WITH his unhappy heroines, add a new
charm to the old familiar faces.  Proof is thus furnished, if any proof
were needed, that no story interesting in itself is too old to admit of
being told again by a poet; in Chaucer's version Ovid loses something in
polish, but nothing in pathos; and the breezy freshness of nature seems to
be blowing through tales which became the delight of a nation's, as they
have been that of many a man's, youth.

A single passage must suffice to illustrate the style of the "Legend of
Good Women"; and it shall be the lament of Ariadne, the concluding passage
of the story which is the typical tale of desertion, though not, as it
remains in Chaucer, of desertion unconsoled.  It will be seen how far the
English poet's vivacity is from being extinguished by the pathos of the
situation described by him.

Right in the dawening awaketh she,
And gropeth in the bed, and found right naught.
 "Alas," quoth she, "that ever I was wrought!
I am betrayed!" and her hair she rent,
And to the strande barefoot fast she went,
And criede: "Theseus, mine hearte sweet!
Where be ye, that I may not with you meet?
And mighte thus by beastes been y-slain!"
The hollow rockes answered her again.
No man she sawe; and yet shone the moon,
And high upon a rock she wente soon,
And saw his barge sailing in the sea.
Cold waxed her heart, and right thus said she:
 "Meeker than ye I find the beastes wild!"
(Hath he not sin that he her thus beguiled?)
She cried, "O turn again for ruth and sin,
Thy barge hath not all thy meinie in."
Her kerchief on a pole sticked she,
Askance, that he should it well y-see,
And should remember that she was behind,
And turn again, and on the strand her find.
But all for naught; his way he is y-gone,
And down she fell aswoone on a stone;
And up she rose, and kissed, in all her care,
The steppes of his feet remaining there;
And then unto her bed she speaketh so:
 "Thou bed," quoth she, "that hast received two,
Thou shalt answer for two, and not for one;
Where is the greater part away y-gone?
Alas, what shall I wretched wight become?
For though so be no help shall hither come,
Home to my country dare I not for dread,
I can myselfe in this case not rede."
Why should I tell more of her complaining?
It is so long it were a heavy thing.
In her Epistle Naso telleth all.
But shortly to the ende tell I shall.
The goddes have her holpen for pity,
And in the sign of Taurus men may see
The stones of her crown all shining clear.
I will no further speak of this matter.
But thus these false lovers can beguile
Their true love; the devil quite him his while!

Manifestly, then, in this period of his life--if a chronology which is in
a great measure cojectural may be accepted--Chancer had been a busy
worker, and his pen had covered many a page with the results of his rapid
productivity.  Perhaps, his "Words unto his own Scrivener," which we may
fairly date about this time, were rather too hard on "Adam."  Authors ARE
often hard on persons who have to read their handiwork professionally; but
in the interest of posterity poets may be permitted an execration or two
against whosoever changes their words as well as against whosoever moves
their bones:--

Adam Scrivener, if ever it thee befall
"Boece" or "Troilus" to write anew,
Under thy long locks may'st thou have the scall,
If thou my writing copy not more true!
So oft a day I must thy work renew,
It to correct and eke to rub and scrape;
And all is through thy negligence and rape.

How far the manuscript of the "Canterbury Tales" had already progressed is
uncertain; the "Prologue" to the "Legend of Good Women" mentions the "Love
of Palamon and Arcite"--an earlier version of the "Knight's Tale," if not
identical with it--and a "Life of Saint Cecilia" which is preserved,
apparently without alteration, in the "Second Nun's Tale."  Possibly other
stories had been already added to these, and the "Prologue" written--but
this is more than can be asserted with safety.  Who shall say whether, if
the stream of prosperity had continued to flow, on which the bark of
Chaucer's fortunes had for some years been borne along, he might not have
found leisure and impulse sufficient for completing his masterpiece, or at
all events for advancing it near to completion?  That his powers declined
with his years is a conjecture which it would be difficult to support by
satisfactory evidence; though it seems natural enough to assume that he
wrote the best of his "Canterbury Tales" in his best days.  Troubled times
we know to have been in store for him.  The reverse in his fortunes may
perhaps fail to call forth in us the sympathy which we feel for Milton in
his old age doing battle against a Philistine reaction, or for Spenser
overwhelmed with calamities at the end of a life full of bitter
disappointment.  But at least we may look upon it with the respectful pity
which we entertain for Ben Jonson groaning in the midst of his literary
honours under that dura rerum necessitas, which is rarely more a matter of
indifference to poets than it is to other men.

In 1386, as already noted, Chaucer, while continuing to hold both his
offices at the Customs, had taken his seat in Parliament as one of the
knights of the shire of Kent.  He had attained to this honour during the
absence in Spain of his patron the Duke of Lancaster, though probably he
had been elected in the interest of that prince.  But John of Gaunt's
influence was inevitably reduced to nothing during his absence, and no
doubt King Richard now hoped to be a free agent.  But he very speedily
found that the hand of his younger uncle, Thomas Duke of Gloucester, was
heavier upon him than that of the elder.  The Parliament of which Chaucer
was a member was the assembly which boldly confronted the autocratical
tendencies of Richard II, and after overthrowing the Chancellor, Michael
de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk, forced upon the king a Council controlling
the administration of affairs.  Concerning the acts of this Council, of
which Gloucester was the leading member, little or nothing is known,
except that in financial matters it attempted, after the manner of new
brooms, to sweep clean.  Soon the attention of Gloucester and his
following was occupied by subjects more absorbing than a branch of reform
fated to be treated fitfully.  In this instance the new administration had
as usual demanded its victims--and among their number was Chaucer.  For it
can hardly be a mere coincidence that by the beginning of December in this
year, 1386, Chaucer had lost one, and by the middle of the same month the
other, of his comptrollerships.  At the same time, it would be
presumptuously unfair to conclude that misconduct of any kind on his part
had been the reason of his removal.  The explanation usually given is that
he fell as an adherent of John of Gaunt; perhaps a safer way of putting
the matter would be to say that John of Gaunt was no longer in England to
protect him.  Inasmuch as even reforming Governments are occasionally as
anxious about men as they are about measures, Chaucer's posts may have
been wanted for nominees of the Duke of Gloucester and his Council--such
as it is probably no injustice to Masters Adam Yerdely and Henry Gisors
(who respectively succeeded Chaucer in his two offices) to suppose them to
have been.  Moreover, it is just possible that Chaucer was the reverse of
a persona grata to Gloucester's faction on account of the Comptroller's
previous official connexion with Sir Nicholas Brembre, who, besides being
hated in the city, had been accused of seeking to compass the deaths of
the Duke and of some of his adherents.  In any case, it is noticeable that
four months BEFORE the return to England of the Duke of Lancaster, i.e. in
July, 1389, Chaucer was appointed Clerk of the King's Works at
Westminster, the Tower, and a large number of other royal manors or
tenements, including (from 1390 at all events) St. George's Chapel,
Windsor.  In this office he was not ill-paid, receiving two shillings a
day in money, and very possibly perquisites in addition, besides being
allowed to appoint a deputy.  Inasmuch as in the summer of the year 1389
King Richard had assumed the reins of government in person, while the
ascendancy of Gloucester was drawing to a close, we may conclude the King
to have been personally desirous to provide for a faithful and attached
servant of his house, for whom he had had reason to feel a personal
liking.  It would be specially pleasing, were we able to connect with
Chaucer's restoration to official employment the high-minded Queen Anne,
whose impending betrothal he had probably celebrated in one poem, and
whose patronage he had claimed for another.

The Clerkship of the King's Works to which Chaucer was appointed, seems to
have been but a temporary office; or at all events he only held it for
rather less than two years, during part of which he performed its duties
by deputy.  Already, however, before his appointment to this post, he had
certainly become involved in difficulties.  For in May, 1388, we find his
pensions, at his own request, assigned to another person (John Scalby)--a
statement implying that he had raised money on them which he could only
pay by making over the pensions themselves.  Very possibly, too, he had,
before his dismissal from his comptrollerships, been subjected to an
enquiry which, if it did not touch his honour, at all events gave rise to
very natural apprehensions on the part of himself and his friends.  There
is accordingly much probability in the conjecture which ascribes to this
season of peril and pressure the composition of the following justly
famous stanzas entitled "Good Counsel of Chaucer":-

Flee from the press, and dwell with soothfastness;
Suffice thee thy good, though it be small;
For hoard hath hate, and climbing tickleness:
Press hath envy, and wealth is blinded all.
Savour no more than thee behove shall;
Do well thyself that other folk canst rede;
And truth thee shall deliver, it is no dread.

Pain thee not each crooked to redress
In trust of her (Fortune) that turneth as a ball.
Greate rest stands in little business.
Beware also to spurn against a nail.
Strive not as doth a pitcher with a wall.
Deeme thyself that deemest others' deed;
And truth thee shall deliver, it is no dread.

That thee is sent receive in buxomness;
The wrestling of this world asketh a fall.
Here is no home, here is but wilderness.
Forth, pilgram! forth, beast, out of thy stall!
Look up on high, and thank God of all.
Waive thy lust, and let thy ghost thee lead,
And truth shall thee deliver, it is no dread.

Misfortunes, it is said, never come alone; and whatever view may be taken
as to the nature of the relations between Chaucer and his wife, her death
cannot have left him untouched.  From the absence of any record as to the
payment of her pension after June, 1387, this event is presumed to have
taken place in the latter half of that year.  More than this cannot safely
be conjectured; but it remains POSSIBLE that the "Legend of Good Women"
and its "Prologue" formed a peace-offering to one whom Chaucer may have
loved again after he had lost her, though without thinking of her as of
his "late departed saint."  Philippa Chaucer had left behind her a son of
the name of Lewis; and it is pleasing to find the widower in the year 1391
(the year in which he lost his Clerkship of the Works) attending to the
boy's education, and supplying him with the intellectual "bread and milk"
suitable for his tender age in the shape of a popular treatise on a
subject which has at all times excited the intelligent curiosity of the
young.  The treatise "On the Astrolabe," after describing the instrument
itself, and showing how to work it, proceeded, or was intended to proceed,
to fulfil the purposes of a general astronomical manual; but, like other
and more important works of its author, it has come down to us in an
uncompleted, or at all events incomplete, condition.  What there is of it
was, as a matter of course, not original--popular scientific books rarely
are.  The little treatise, however, possesses a double interest for the
student of Chaucer.  In the first place it shows explicitly, what several
passages imply, that while he was to a certain extent fond of astronomical
study (as to his capacity for which he clearly does injustice to himself
in the "House of Fame"), his good sense and his piety alike revolted
against extravagant astrological speculations.  He certainly does not wish
to go as far as the honest carpenter in the "Miller's Tale," who glories
in his incredulity of aught besides his credo, and who yet is afterwards
befooled by the very impostor of whose astrological pursuits he had
reprehended the impiety.  "Men," he says, "should know nothing of that
which is private to God.  Yea, blessed be alway a simple man who knows
nothing but only his belief."  In his little work "On the Astrolobe,"
Chaucer speaks with calm reasonableness of superstitions in which his
spirit has no faith, and pleads guilty to ignorance of the useless
knowledge with which they are surrounded.  But the other, and perhaps the
chief value, to us of this treatise lies in the fact that of Chaucer in an
intimate personal relation it contains the only picture in which it is
impossible to suspect any false or exaggerated colouring.  For here we
have him writing to his "little Lewis" with fatherly satisfaction in the
ability displayed by the boy "to learn sciences touching numbers and
proportions," and telling how, after making a present to the child of "a
sufficient astrolabe as for our own horizon, composed after the latitude
of Oxford," he has further resolved to explain to him a certain number of
conclusions connected with the purposes of the instrument.  This he has
made up his mind to do in a forcible as well as simple way; for he has
shrewdly divined a secret, now and then overlooked by those who condense
sciences for babes, that children need to be taught a few things not only
clearly but fully--repetition being in more senses than one "the mother of
studies":--

"Now will I pray meekly every discreet person that readeth or heareth this
little treatise, to hold my rude inditing excused, and my superfluity of
words, for two causes.  The first cause is: that curious inditing and hard
sentences are full heavy at once for such a child to learn.  And the
second cause is this: that truly it seems better to me to write unto a
child twice a good sentence, than to forget it once."

Unluckily we know nothing further of Lewis--not even whether, as has been
surmised, he died before he had been able to turn to lucrative account his
calculating powers, after the fashion of his apocryphal brother Thomas or
otherwise.

Though by the latter part of the year 1391 Chaucer had lost his Clerkship
of the Works, certain payments (possibly of arrears) seem afterwards to
have been made to him in connexion with the office.  A very disagreeable
incident of his tenure of it had been a double robbery from his person of
official money, to the very serious extent of twenty pounds.  The
perpetrators of the crime were a notorious gang of highwaymen, by whom
Chaucer was, in September, 1390, apparently on the same day, beset both at
Westminster, and near to "the foul Oak" at Hatcham in Surrey.  A few
months afterwards he was discharged by writ from repayment of the loss to
the Crown.  His experiences during the three years following are unknown;
but in 1394 (when things were fairly quiet in England) he was granted an
annual pension of twenty pounds by the King.  This pension, of which
several subsequent notices occur, seems at times to have been paid tardily
or in small instalments, and also to have been frequently anticipated by
Chaucer in the shape of loans of small sums.  Further evidence of his
straits is to be found in his having, in the year 1398, obtained letters
of protection against arrest, making him safe for two years.  The grant of
a tun of wine in October of the same year is the last favour known to have
been extended to Chaucer by King Richard II.  Probably no English
sovereign has been more diversely estimated, both by his contemporaries
and by posterity, than this ill-fated prince, in the records of whose
career many passages betokening high spirit strangely contrast with the
impotence of its close.  It will at least be remembered in his favour that
he was a patron of the arts; and that after Froissart had been present at
his christening, he received, when on the threshold of manhood, the homage
of Gower, and on the eve of his downfall showed most seasonable kindness
to a poet far greater than either of these.  It seems scarcely justifiable
to assign to any particular point of time the "Ballade sent to King
Richard" by Chaucer; but its manifest intention was to apprise the king of
the poet's sympathy with his struggle against the opponents of the royal
policy, which was a thoroughly autocratical one.  Considering the nature
of the relations between the pair, nothing could be more unlikely than
that Chaucer should have taken upon himself to exhort his sovereign and
patron to steadfastness of political conduct.  And in truth, though the
loyal tone of this address is (as already observed) unmistakeable enough,
there is little difficulty in accounting for the mixture of commonplace
reflexions and of admonitions to the king, to persist in a spirited
domestic policy.  He is to

"Dread God, do law, love truth and worthiness,"

and wed his people--not himself--"again to steadfastness."  However, even
a quasi-political poem of this description, whatever element of implied
flattery it may contain, offers pleasanter reading than those least
attractive of all occasional poems, of which the burden is a cry for
money.  The "Envoy to Scogan" has been diversely dated, and diversely
interpreted.  The reference in these lines to a deluge of pestilence,
clearly means, not a pestilence produced by heavy rains, but heavy rains
which might be expected to produce a pestilence.  The primary purpose of
the epistle admits of no doubt, though it is only revealed in the
postscript.  After bantering his friend on account of his faint-
heartedness in love:--

"Because thy lady saw not thy distress,
Therefore thou gavest her up at Michaelmas--"

Chaucer ends by entreating him to further his claims upon the royal
munificence.  Of this friend, Henry Scogan, a tradition repeated by Ben
Jonson averred that he was a fine gentleman and Master of Arts of Henry
IV's time, who was regarded and rewarded for his Court "disguisings" and
"writings in ballad-royal."  He is therefore appropriately apostrophised
by Chaucer as kneeling

--at the streames head
Of grace, of all honuor and worthiness,

and reminded that his friend is at the other end of the current.  The
weariness of tone, natural under the circumstances, obscures whatever
humour the poem possesses.

Very possibly the lines to Scogan were written not before, but immediately
after, the accession of Henry IV.  In that case they belong to about the
same date as the wellknown and very plainspoken "Complaint of Chaucer to
his Purse," addressed by him to the new Sovereign without loss of time, if
not indeed, as it would be hardly uncharitable to suppose, prepared
beforehand.  Even in this "Complaint" (the term was a technical one for an
elegiac piece, and was so used by Spenser) there is a certain frank
geniality of tone, the natural accompaniment of an easy conscience, which
goes some way to redeem the nature of the subject.  Still, the theme
remains one which only an exceptionally skilful treatment can make
sufficiently pathetic or perfectly comic.  The lines had the desired
effect; for within four days after his accession--i.e. on October 3rd,
1399--the "conqueror of Brut's Albion," otherwise King Henry IV, doubled
Chaucer's pension of twenty marks, so that, continuing as he did to enjoy
the annuity of twenty pounds granted him by King Richard, he was now once
more in comfortable circumstances.  The best proof of these lies in the
fact that very speedily--on Christmas Eve, 1399--Chaucer, probably in a
rather sanguine mood, covenanted for the lease for fifty-three years of a
house in the garden of the chapel of St. Mary at Westminster.  And here,
in comfort and in peace, as there seems every reason to believe, he died
before another year, and with it the century, had quite run out--on
October 25th, 1400.

Our fancy may readily picture to itself the last days of Geoffrey Chaucer,
and the ray of autumn sunshine which gilded his reverend head before it
was bowed in death.  His old patron's more fortunate son, whose earlier
chivalrous days we are apt to overlook in thinking of him as a politic
king and the sagacious founder of a dynasty, cannot have been indifferent
to the welfare of a subject for whose needs he had provided with so prompt
a liberality.  In the vicinity of a throne the smiles of royalty are wont
to be contagious--and probably many a courtier thought well to seek the
company of one who, so far as we know, had never forfeited the goodwill of
any patron or the attachment of any friend.  We may, too, imagine him
visited by associates who loved and honoured the poet as well as the man--
by Gower, blind or nearly so, if tradition speak the truth, and who,
having "long had sickness upon hand," seems unlike Chaucer to have been
ministered to in his old age by a housewife whom he had taken to himself
in contradiction of principles preached by both the poets; and by
"Bukton," converted, perchance, by means of Chaucer's gift to him of the
"Wife of Bath's Tale," to a resolution of perpetual bachelorhood, but
otherwise, as Mr. Carlyle would say, "dim to us."  Besides these, if he
was still among the living, the philosophical Strode in his Dominican
habit, on a visit to London from one of his monasteries; or--more
probably--the youthful Lydgate, not yet a Benedictine monk, but pausing,
on his return from his travels in divers lands, to sit awhile, as it were,
at the feet of the master in whose poetic example he took pride; the
courtly Scogan; and Occleve, already learned, who was to cherish the
memory of Chaucer's outward features as well as of his fruitful
intellect:--all these may in his closing days have gathered around their
friend; and perhaps one or the other may have been present to close the
watchful eyes for ever.

But there was yet another company with which, in these last years, and
perhaps in these last days of his life, Chaucer had intercourse, of which
he can rarely have lost sight, and which even in solitude he must have had
constantly with him.  This company has since been well known to
generations and centuries of Englishmen.  Its members head that goodly
procession of figures which have been familiar to our fathers as livelong
friends, which are the same to us, and will be to our children after us --
the procession of the nation's favourites among the characters created by
our great dramatists and novelists, the eternal types of human nature
which nothing can efface from our imagination.  Or is there less reality
about the "Knight" in his short cassock and old-fashioned armour and the
"Wife of Bath" in hat and wimple, than--for instance--about Uncle Toby and
the Widow Wadman?  Can we not hear "Madame Eglantine" lisping her
"Stratford-atte-Bowe" French as if she were a personage in a comedy by
Congreve or Sheridan?  Is not the "Summoner" with his "fire-red cherubim's
face" a worthy companion for Lieutenant Bardolph himself?  And have not
the humble "Parson" and his Brother the "Ploughman" that irresistible
pathos which Dickens could find in the simple and the poor?  All these
figures, with those of their fellow-pilgrims, are to us living men and
women; and in their midst the poet who created them lives, as he has
painted himself among the company, not less faithfully than Occleve
depicted him from memory after death.

How long Chaucer had been engaged upon the "Canterbury Tales" it is
impossible to decide.  No process is more hazardous than that of
distributing a poet's works among the several periods of his life
according to divisions of species--placing his tragedies or serious
stories in one season, his comedies or lighter tales in another, and so
forth.  Chaucer no more admits of such treatment than Shakspere, nor
because there happens to be in his case little actual evidence by which to
control or contradict it, are we justified in subjecting him to it.  All
we know is that he left his great work a fragment, and that we have no
mention in any of his other poems of more than three of the "Tales"--two,
as already noticed, being mentioned in the Prologue to the Legend of Good
Women, written at a time when they had perhaps not yet assumed the form in
which they are preserved, while to the third (the "Wife of Bath")
reference is made in the "Envoi to Bukton," the date of which is quite
uncertain.  At the same time, the labour which was expended upon the
"Canterbury Tales" by their author manifestly obliges us to conclude that
their composition occupied several years, with inevitable interruptions;
while the gaiety and brightness of many of the stories, and the exuberant
humour and exquisite pathos of others, as well as the masterly
effectiveness of the "Prologue," make it almost certain that these parts
of the work were written when Chaucer was not only capable of doing his
best, but also in a situation which admitted of his doing it.  The
supposition is therefore a very probable one, that the main period of
their composition may have extended over the last eleven or twelve years
of his life, and have begun about the time when he was again placed above
want by his appointment to the Clerkship of the Royal Works.

Again, it is virtually certain that the poem of the "Canterbury Tales" was
left in an unfinished and partially unconnected condition, and it is
altogether uncertain whether Chaucer had finally determined upon
maintaining or modifying the scheme originally indicated by him in the
"Prologue."  There can accordingly be no necessity for working out a
scheme into which everything that he has left belonging to the "Canterbury
Tales" may most easily and appropriately fit.  Yet the labour is by no
means lost of such inquiries as those which have with singular zeal been
prosecuted concerning the several problems that have to be solved before
such a scheme can be completed.  Without a review of the evidence it would
however be preposterous to pronounce on the proper answer to be given to
the questions: what were the number of tales and that of tellers
ultimately designed by Chaucer; what was the order in which he intended
the "Tales" actually written by him to stand; and what was the plan of the
journey of his pilgrims, as to the localities of its stages and as to the
time occupied by it--whether one day for the fifty-six miles from London
to Canterbury (which is by no means impossible), or two days (which seems
more likely), or four.  The route of the pilgrimage must have been one in
parts of which it is pleasant even now to dally, when the sweet spring
flowers are in bloom which Mr. Boughton has painted for lovers of the
poetry of English landscape.

There are one or two other points which should not be overlooked in
considering the "Canterbury Tales" as a whole.  It has sometimes been
assumed as a matter of course that the plan of the work was borrowed from
Boccaccio.  If this means that Chaucer owed to the "Decamerone" the idea
of including a number of stories in the framework of a single narrative,
it implies too much.  For this notion, a familiar one in the East, had
long been known to Western Europe by the numerous versions of the terribly
ingenious story of the "Seven Wise Masters" (in the progress of which the
unexpected never happens), as well as by similar collections of the same
kind.  And the special connexion of this device with a company of pilgrims
might, as has been well remarked, have been suggested to Chaucer by an
English book certainly within his ken, the "Vision concerning Piers
Plowman," where in the "fair field full of folk" are assembled among
others "pilgrims and palmers who went forth on their way" to St. James of
Compostella and to saints at Rome "with many wise tales"--("and had leave
to lie all their life after").  But even had Chaucer owed the idea of his
plan to Boccaccio, he would not thereby have incurred a heavy debt to the
Italian novelist.  There is nothing really dramatic in the schemes of the
"Decamerone" or of the numerous imitations which it called forth, from the
French "Heptameron" and the Neapolitan "Pentamerone" down to the German
"Phantasus."  It is unnecessary to come nearer to our own times; for the
author of the "Earthly Paradise" follows Chaucer in endeavouring at least
to give a framework of real action to his collection of poetic tales.
There is no organic connexion between the powerful narrative of the Plague
opening Boccaccio's book, and the stories chiefly of love and its
adventures which follow; all that Boccaccio did was to preface an
interesting series of tales by a more interesting chapter of history, and
then to bind the tales themselves together lightly and naturally in days,
like rows of pearls in a collar.  But while in the "Decamerone" the
framework in its relation to the stories is of little or no significance,
in the "Canterbury Tales" it forms one of the most valuable organic
elements in the whole work.  One test of the distinction is this: what
reader of the "Decamerone" connects any of the novels composing it with
the personality of the particular narrator, or even cares to remember the
grouping of the stories as illustrations of fortunate or unfortunate,
adventurous or illicit, passion?  The charm of Boccaccio's book, apart
from the independent merits of the Introduction, lies in the admirable
skill and unflagging vivacity with which the "novels" themselves are told.
The scheme of the "Canterbury Tales," on the other hand, possesses some
genuinely dramatic elements.  If the entire form, at all events in its
extant condition, can scarcely be said to have a plot, it at least has an
EXPOSITION unsurpassed by that of any comedy, ancient or modern; it has
the possibility of a growth of action and interest; and (which is of far
more importance, it has a variety of characters which mutually both
relieve and supplement one another.  With how sure an instinct, by the
way, Chaucer has anticipated that unwritten law of the modern drama
according to which low comedy characters always appear in couples!  Thus
the "Miller" and the "Reeve" are a noble pair running in parallel lines,
though in contrary directions; so are the "Cook" and the "Manciple," and
again and more especially the "Friar" and the "Summoner."  Thus at least
the germ of a comedy exists in the plan of the "Canterbury Tales."  No
comedy could be formed out of the mere circumstance of a company of ladies
and gentlemen sitting down in a country-house to tell an unlimited number
of stories on a succession of topics; but a comedy could be written with
the purpose of showing how a wide variety of national types will present
themselves, when brought into mutual contact by an occasion peculiarly
fitted to call forth their individual rather than their common
characteristics.

For not only are we at the opening of the "Canterbury Tales" placed in the
very heart and centre of English life; but the poet contrives to find for
what may be called his action a background, which seems of itself to
suggest the most serious emotions and the most humorous associations.  And
this without anything grotesque in the collocation, such as is involved in
the notion of men telling anecdotes at a funeral, or forgetting a
pestilence over love-stories.  Chaucer's dramatis personae are a company
of pilgrims, whom at first we find assembled in a hostelry in Southwark,
and whom we afterwards accompany on their journey to Canterbury.  The
hostelry is that "Tabard" inn which, though it changed its name, and no
doubt much of its actual structure, long remained both in its general
appearance, and perhaps in part of its actual self, a genuine relic of
mediaeval London.  There, till within a very few years from the present
date, might still be had a draught of that London ale of which Chaucer's
"Cook" was so thorough a connoisseur; and there within the big courtyard,
surrounded by a gallery very probably a copy of its predecessor, was ample
room for

--well nine and twenty in a company
Of sundry folk,

with their horses and travelling gear sufficient for a ride to Canterbury.
The goal of this ride has its religious, its national, one might even say
its political aspect; but the journey itself has an importance of its own.
A journey is generally one of the best of opportunities for bringing out
the distinctive points in the characters of travellers; and we are
accustomed to say that no two men can long travel in one another's company
unless their friendship is equal to the severest of tests.  At home men
live mostly among colleagues and comrades; on a journey they are placed in
continual contrast with men of different pursuits and different habits of
life.  The shipman away from his ship, the monk away from his cloister,
the scholar away from his books, become interesting instead of remaining
commonplace, because the contrasts become marked which exist between them.
Moreover, men undertake journeys for divers purposes, and a pilgrimage in
Chaucer's day united a motley group of chance companions in search of
different ends at the same goal.  One goes to pray, the other seeks
profit, the third distraction, the fourth pleasure.  To some the road is
everything; to others, its terminus.  All this vanity lay in the mere
choice of Chaucer's framework; there was accordingly something of genius
in the thought itself; and even an inferior workmanship could hardly have
left a description of a Canterbury pilgrimage unproductive of a wide
variety of dramatic effects.

But Chaucer's workmanship was as admirable as his selection of his
framework was felicitous. He has executed only part of his scheme,
according to which each pilgrim was to tell two tales both going and
coming, and the best narrator, the laureate of this merry company, was to
be rewarded by a supper at the common expense on their return to their
starting-place.  Thus the design was, not merely to string together a
number of poetical tales by an easy thread, but to give a real unity and
completeness to the whole poem.  All the tales told by all the pilgrims
were to be connected together by links; the reader was to take an interest
in the movement and progress of the journey to and fro; and the poem was
to have a middle as well as a beginning and an end:--the beginning being
the inimitable "Prologue" as it now stands; the middle the history of the
pilgrims' doings at Canterbury; and the close their return and farewell
celebration at the Tabard inn.  Though Chaucer carried out only about a
fourth part of this plan, yet we can see, as clearly as if the whole poem
lay before us in a completed form, that its most salient feature was
intended to lie in the variety of its characters.

Each of these characters is distinctly marked out in itself, while at the
same time it is designed as the type of a class.  This very obvious
criticism of course most readily admits of being illustrated by the
"Prologue"--a gallery of genre-portraits which many master-hands have
essayed to reproduce with pen or with pencil.  Indeed one lover of Chaucer
sought to do so with both--poor gifted Blake, whose descriptive text of
his picture of the Canterbury Pilgrims Charles Lamb, with the loving
exaggeration in which he was at times fond of indulging, pronounced the
finest criticism on Chaucer's poem he had ever read.  But it should be
likewise noticed that the character of each pilgrim is kept up through the
poem, both incidentally in the connecting passages between tale and tale,
and in the manner in which the tales themselves are introduced and told.
The connecting passages are full of dramatic vivacity; in these the
"Host," Master Harry Bailly, acts as a most efficient choragus, but the
other pilgrims are not silent, and in the "Manciple's" Prologue, the
"Cook" enacts a bit of downright farce for the amusement of the company
and of stray inhabitants of "Bob-up-and-down."  He is, however,
homoeopathically cured of the effects of his drunkenness, so that the
"Host" feels justified in offering up a thanksgiving to Bacchus for his
powers of conciliation.  The "Man of Law's" Prologue is an argument; the
"Wife of Bath's" the ceaseless clatter of an indomitable tongue.  The
sturdy "Franklin" corrects himself when deviating into circumlocution:--

Till that the brighte sun had lost his hue,
For th' horizon had reft the sun of light,
(This is as much to say as: it was night).

The "Miller" "tells his churlish tale in his manner," of which manner the
less said the better; while in the "Reeve's Tale," Chaucer even, after the
manner of a comic dramatist, gives his Northern undergraduate a vulgar
ungrammatical phraseology, probably designedly, since the poet was himself
a "Southern man."  The "Pardoner" is exuberant in his sample-eloquence;
the "Doctor of Physic" is gravely and sententiously moral--

--a proper man,
And like a prelate, by Saint Runyan,

says the "Host."  Most sustained of all, though he tells no tale, is, from
the nature of the case, the character of Harry Bailly, the host of the
Tabard, himself--who, whatever resemblance he may bear to his actual
original, is the anecestor of a long line of descendants, including mine
Host of the Garter in the "Merry Wives of Windsor."  He is a thorough
worldling, to whom anything smacking of the precisian in morals is as
offensive as anything of a Romantic tone in literature; he smells a
Lollard without fail, and turns up his nose at an old-fashioned ballad or
a string of tragic instances as out of date or tedious.  In short, he
speaks his mind and that of other more timid people at the same time, and
is one of those sinners whom everybody both likes and respects.  "I
advise," says the "Pardoner," with polite impudence (when inviting the
company to become purchasers of the holy wares which he has for sale),
that

--our host, he shall begin,
For he is most enveloped in sin.

He is thus both an admirable picture in himself, and an admirable foil to
those characters which are most unlike him--above all to the "Parson" and
the "Clerk of Oxford," the representatives of religion and learning.

As to the "Tales" themselves, Chaucer beyond a doubt meant their style and
tone to be above all things POPULAR.  This is one of the causes accounting
for the favour shown to the work,--a favour attested, so far as earlier
times are concerned, by the vast number of manuscripts existing of it.
The "Host" is, so to speak, charged with the constant injunction of this
cardinal principle of popularity as to both theme and style.  "Tell us,"
he coolly demands of the most learned and sedate of all his fellow-
travellers,

--some merry thing of adventures;
Your termes, your colours, and your figures,
Keep them in store, till so be ye indite
High style, as when that men to kinges write;
Speak ye so plain at this time, we you pray,
That we may understande that ye say.

And the "Clerk" follows the spirit of the injunction both by omitting, as
impertinent, a proeme in which his original, Petrarch, gives a great deal
of valuable, but not in its connexion interesting, geographical
information, and by adding a facetious moral to what he calls the
"unrestful matter" of his story.  Even the "Squire," though, after the
manner of young men, far more than his elders addicted to the grand style,
and accordingly specially praised for his eloquence by the simple
"Franklin," prefers to reduce to its plain meaning the courtly speech of
the Knight of the Brazen Steed.  In connexion with what was said above, it
is observable that each of the "Tales" in subject suits its narrator.  Not
by chance is the all-but-Quixotic romance of "Palamon and Arcite," taken
by Chaucer from Boccaccio's "Teseide," related by the "Knight"; not by
chance does the "Clerk," following Petrarch's Latin version of a story
related by the same author, tell the even more improbable, but, in the
plainness of its moral, infinitely more fructuous tale of patient
Griseldis.  How well the "Second Nun" is fitted with a legend which
carries us back a few centuries into the atmosphere of Hrosvitha's
comedies, and suggests with the utmost verisimilitude the nature of a
Nun's lucubrations on the subject of marriage.  It is impossible to go
through the whole list of the "Tales"; but all may be truly said to be in
keeping with the characters and manners (often equally indifferent) of
their tellers--down to that of the "Nun's Priest," which, brimful of
humour as it is, has just the mild naughtiness about it which comes so
drolly from a spiritual director in his worldlier hour.

Not a single one of these "Tales" can with any show of reason be ascribed
to Chaucer's own invention.  French literature--chiefly though not solely
that of fabliaux--doubtless supplied the larger share of his materials;
but that here also his debts to Italian literature, and to Boccaccio in
particular, are considerable, seems hardly to admit of denial.  But while
Chaucer freely borrowed from foreign models, he had long passed beyond the
stage of translating without assimilating.  It would be rash to assume
that where he altered he invariably improved.  His was not the unerring
eye which, like Shakspere's in his dramatic transfusions of Plutarch,
missed no particle of the gold mingled with the baser metal, but rejected
the dross with sovereign certainty.  In dealing with Italian originals
more especially, he sometimes altered for the worse, and sometimes for the
better; but he was never a mere slavish translator.  So in the "Knight's
Tale" he may be held in some points to have deviated disadvantageously
from his original; but, on the other hand, in the "Clerk's Tale," he
inserts a passage on the fidelity of women, and another on the instability
of the multitude, besides adding a touch of nature irresistibly pathetic
in the exclamation of the faithful wife, tried beyond her power of
concealing the emotion within her:

O gracious God! how gentle and how kind
Ye seemed by your speech and your visage
The day that maked was our marriage.

So also in the "Man of Law's Tale," which is taken from the French, he
increases the vivacity of the narrative by a considerable number of
apostrophes in his own favourite manner, besides pleasing the general
reader by divers general reflexions of his own inditing.  Almost
necessarily, the literary form and the self-consistency of his originals
lose under such treatment.  But his dramatic sense, on which perhaps his
commentators have not always sufficiently dwelt, is rarely, if ever, at
fault.  Two illustrations of this gift in Chaucer must suffice, which
shall be chosen in two quarters where he has worked with materials of the
most widely different kind.  Many readers must have compared with Dante's
original (in canto 33 of the "Inferno") Chaucer's version in the "Monk's
Tale" of the story of Ugolino.  Chaucer, while he necessarily omits the
ghastly introduction, expands the pathetic picture of the sufferings of
the father and his sons in their dungeon, and closes, far more briefly and
effectively than Dante, with a touch of the most refined pathos:--

DE HUGILINO COMITE PISAE.

Of Hugolin of Pisa the langour
There may no tongue telle for pity.
But little out of Pisa stands a tower,
In whiche tower in prison put was he;
And with him be his little children three.
The eldest scarcely five years was of age;
Alas! fortune! it was great cruelty
Such birds as these to put in such a cage.

Condemned he was to die in that prison,
For Royer, which that bishop was of Pise,
Had on him made a false suggestion,
Through which the people gan on him arise,
And put him in prison in such a wise,
As ye have heard, and meat and drink he had
So little that it hardly might suffice,
And therewithal it was full poor and bad.

And on a day befell that in that hour
When that his meat was wont to be y-brought,
The gaoler shut the doors of that tower.
He heard it well, although he saw it not;
And in his heart anon there fell a thought
That they his death by hunger did devise.
"Alas!" quoth he, "alas! that I was wrought!"
Therewith the teares fell from his eyes

His youngest son, that three years was of age,
Unto him said: "Father, why do ye weep?
When will the gaoler bring us our pottage?
Is there no morsel bread that ye do keep?
I am so hungry that I cannot sleep.
Now woulde God that I might sleep for ever!
Then should not hunger in my belly creep.
There is no thing save bread that I would liever."

Thus day by day this child began to cry,
Till in his father's lap adown he lay,
And saide: "Farewell, father, I must die!"
And kissed his father, and died the same day.
The woeful father saw that dead he lay,
And his two arms for woe began to bite,
And said: "Fortune, alas and well-away!
For all my woe I blame thy treacherous spite."

His children weened that it for hunger was,
That he his arms gnawed, and not for woe.
And saide: "Father, do not so, alas!
But rather eat the flesh upon us two.
Our flesh thou gavest us, our flesh thou take us fro,
And eat enough."  Right thus they to him cried;
And after that, within a day or two,
They laid them in his lap adown and died.

The father in despair likewise died of hunger; and such was the end of the
mighty Earl of Pisa, whose tragedy whosoever desires to hear at greater
length may read it as told by the great poet of Italy hight Dante.

The other instance is that of the "Pardoner's Tale," which would appear to
have been based on a fabliau now lost, though the substance of it is
preserved in an Italian novel, and in one or two other versions.  For the
purpose of noticing how Chaucer arranges as well as tells a story, the
following attempt at a condensed prose rendering of his narrative may be
acceptable:--

Once upon a time in Flanders there was a company of young men, who gave
themselves up to every kind of dissipation and debauchery--haunting the
taverns where dancing and dicing continues day and night, eating and
drinking, and serving the devil in his own temple by their outrageous life
of luxury.  It was horrible to hear their oaths, how they tore to pieces
our blessed Lord's body, as if they thought the Jews had not rent Him
enough; and each laughed at the sin of the others, and all were alike
immersed in gluttony and wantonness.

And so one morning it befel that three of these rioters were sitting over
their drink in a tavern, long before the bell had rung for nine o'clock
prayers.  And as they sat, they heard a bell clinking before a corpse that
was being carried to the grave.  So one of them bade his servant-lad go
and ask what was the name of the dead man; but the boy said that he knew
it already, and that it was the name of an old companion of his master's.
As he had been sitting drunk on a bench, there had come a privy thief,
whom men called Death, and who slew all the people in this country; and he
had smitten the drunken man's heart in two with his spear, and had then
gone on his way without any more words.  This Death had slain a thousand
during the present pestilence; and the boy thought it worth warning his
master to beware of such an adversary, and to be ready to meet him at any
time.  "So my mother taught me; I say no more."  "Marry," said the keeper
of the tavern; "the child tells the truth: this Death has slain all the
inhabitants of a great village not far from here; I think that there must
be the place where he dwells."  Then the rioter swore with some of his big
oaths that he at least was not afraid of this Death, and that he would
seek him out wherever he dwelt.  And at his instance his two boon-
companions joined with him in a vow that before nightfall they would slay
the false traitor Death, who was the slayer of so many; and the vow they
swore was one of closest fellowship between them--to live and die for one
another as if they had been brethren born.  And so they went forth in
their drunken fury towards the village of which the taverner had spoken,
with terrible execrations on their lips that "Death should be dead, if
they might catch him."

They had not gone quite half a mile when at a stile between two fields
they came upon a poor old man, who meekly greeted them with a "God save
you, sirs."  But the proudest of the three rioters answered him roughly,
asking him why he kept himself all wrapped up except his face, and how so
old a fellow as he had managed to keep alive so long?  And the old man
looked him straight in the face and replied, "Because in no town or
village, though I journey as far as the Indies, can I find a man willing
to exchange his youth for my age; and therefore I must keep it so long as
God wills it so.  Death, alas! will not have my life, and so I wander
about like a restless fugitive, and early and late I knock on the ground,
which is my mother's gate, with my staff, and say, 'Dear mother, let me
in! behold how I waste away!  Alas! when shall my bones be at rest?
Mother, gladly will I give you my chest containing all my worldly gear in
return for a shroud to wrap me in.'  But she refuses me that grace, and
that is why my face is pale and withered.  But you, sirs, are uncourteous
to speak rudely to an inoffensive old man, when Holy Writ bids you
reverence grey hairs.  Therefore, never again give offence to an old man,
if you wish men to be courteous to you in your age, should you live so
long.  And so God be with you: I must go whither I have to go."  But the
second rioter prevented him, and swore he should not depart so lightly.
"Thou spakest just now of that traitor Death, who slays all our friends in
this country.  As thou art his spy, hear me swear that, unless thou
tellest where he is, thou shalt die; for thou art in his plot to slay us
young men, thou false thief!"  Then the old man told them that if they
were so desirous of finding Death, they had but to turn up a winding path
to which he pointed, and there they would find him they sought in a grove
under an oak-tree, where the old man had just left him; "he will not try
to hide himself for all your boasting.  And so may God the Redeemer save
you and amend you!"  And when he had spoken, all the three rioters ran
till they came to the tree.  But what they found there was a treasure of
golden florins--nearly seven bushels of them as they thought.  Then they
no longer sought after Death, but sat down all three by the shining gold.
And the youngest of them spoke first, and declared that Fortune had given
this treasure to them, so that they might spend the rest of their lives in
mirth and jollity.  The question was how to take this money--which clearly
belonged to some one else--safely to the house of one of the three
companions.  It must be done by night; so let them draw lots, and let him
on whom the lot fell run to the town to fetch bread and wine, while the
other two guarded the treasure carefully till the night came, when they
might agree whither to transport it.

The lot fell on the youngest, who forthwith went his way to the town.
Then one of those who remained with the treasure said to the other: "Thou
knowest well that thou art my sworn brother, and I will tell thee
something to thy advantage.  Our companion is gone, and here is a great
quantity of gold to be divided among us three.  But say, if I could manage
so that the gold is divided between us two, should I not do thee a
friend's turn?"  And when the other failed to understand him, he made him
promise secrecy and disclosed his plan.  "Two are stronger than one.  When
he sits down, arise as if thou wouldest sport with him; and while thou art
struggling with him as in play, I will rive him through both his sides;
and look thou do the same with thy dagger.  After which, my dear friend,
we will divide all the gold between you and me, and then we may satisfy
all our desires and play at dice to our hearts' content."

Meanwhile the youngest rioter, as he went up to the town, revolved in his
heart the beauty of the bright new florins, and said unto himself: "If
only I could have all this gold to myself alone, there is no man on earth
who would live so merrily as I."  And at last the Devil put it into his
relentless heart to buy poison, in order with it to kill his two
companions.  And straightway he went on into the town to an apothecary,
and besought him to sell him some poison for destroying some rats which
infested his house and a polecat which, he said, had made away with his
capons.  And the apothecary said: "Thou shalt have something of which (so
may God save my soul!) no creature in all the world could swallow a single
grain without losing his life thereby--and that in less time than thou
wouldest take to walk a mile in."  So the miscreant shut up this poison in
a box, and then he went into the next street and borrowed three large
bottles, into two of which he poured his poison, while the third he kept
clean to hold drink for himself; for he meant to work hard all the night
to carry away the gold.  So he filled his three bottles with wine, and
then went back to his companions under the tree.

What need to make a long discourse of what followed?  As they had plotted
their comrade's death, so they slew him, and that at once.  And when they
had done this, the one who had counselled the deed said, "Now let us sit
and drink and make merry, and then we will bury his body."  And it
happened to him by chance to take one of the bottles which contained the
poison; and he drank, and gave drink of it to his fellow; and thus they
both speedily died.

The plot of this story is, as observed, not Chaucer's.  But how carefully,
how artistically the narrative is elaborated, incident by incident, and
point by point!  How well every effort is prepared, and how well every
turn of the story is explained!  Nothing is superfluous, but everything is
arranged with care, down to the circumstances of the bottles being bought,
for safety's sake, in the next street to the apothecary's, and of two out
of three bottles being filled with poison, which is at once a proceeding
natural in itself, and increases the chances against the two rioters when
they are left to choose for themselves.  This it is to be a good story-
teller.  But of a different order is the change introduced by Chaucer into
his original, where the old hermit--who, of course, is Death himself--is
fleeing from Death.  Chaucer's Old Man is SEEKING Death, but seeking him
in vain--like the Wandering Jew of the legend.  This it is to be a poet.

Of course it is always necessary to be cautious before asserting any
apparent addition of Chaucer's to be his own invention.  Thus, in the
"Merchant's Tale," the very naughty plot of which is anything but
original, it is impossible to say whether such is the case with the
humorous competition of advice between Justinus and Placebo, ("Placebo"
seems to have been a current term to express the character or the ways of
"the too deferential man."  "Flatterers be the Devil's chaplains, that
sing aye Placebo."--"Parson's Tale."), or with the fantastic machinery in
which Pluto and Proserpine anticipate the part played by Oberon and
Titania in "A Midsummer Night's Dream."  On the other hand, Chaucer is
capable of using goods manifestly borrowed or stolen for a purpose never
intended in their original employment.  Puck himself must have guided the
audacious hand which could turn over the leaves of so respected a Father
of the Church as St. Jerome, in order to derive from his treatise "On
Perpetual Virginity" materials for the discourse on matrimony delivered,
with illustrations essentially her own, by the "Wife of Bath."

Two only among these "Tales" are in prose--a vehicle of expression, on the
whole, strange to the polite literature of the pre-Renascence ages--but
not both for the same reason.  The first of these "Tales" is told by the
poet himself, after a stop has been unceremoniously put upon his recital
of the "Ballad of Sir Thopas" by the Host.  The ballad itself is a
fragment of straightforward burlesque, which shows that in both the manner
and the metre (Dunbar's burlesque ballad of "Sir Thomas Norray" is in the
same stanza) of ancient romances, literary criticism could even in
Chaucer's days find its opportunities for satire, though it is going
rather far to see in "Sir Thopas" a predecessor of "Don Quixote."  The
"Tale of Meliboeus" is probably an English version of a French translation
of Albert of Brescia's famous "Book of Consolation and Counsel," which
comprehends in a slight narrative framework a long discussion between the
unfortunate Meliboeus, whom the wrongs and sufferings inflicted upon him
and his have brought to the verge of despair, and his wise helpmate, Dame
Prudence.  By means of a long argumentation propped up by quotations (not
invariably assigned with conscientious accuracy to their actual source)
from "The Book," Seneca, "Tullius," and other authors, she at last
persuades him not only to reconcile himself to his enemies, but to forgive
them, even as he hopes to be forgiven.  And thus the Tale well bears out
the truth impressed upon Meliboeus by the following ingeniously combined
quotation:--

And there said once a clerk in two verses: What is better than gold?
Jasper.  And what is better than jasper?  Wisdom.  And what is better than
wisdom?  Woman.  And what is better than woman?  No thing.

Certainly, Chaucer gave proof of consummate tact and taste, as well as of
an unaffected personal modesty, in assigning to himself as one of the
company of pilgrims, instead of a tale bringing him into competition with
the creatures of his own invention, after his mocking ballad has served
its turn, nothing more ambitious than a version of a popular discourse--
half narrative, half homily--in prose.  But a question of far greater
difficulty and moment arises with regard to the other prose piece included
among the "Canterbury Tales."  Of these the so-called "Parson's Tale" is
the last in order of succession.  Is it to be looked upon as an integral
part of the collection; and, if so, what general and what personal
significance should be attached to it?

As it stands, the long tractate or sermon (partly adapted from a popular
French religious manual), which bears the name of the "Parson's Tale," is,
if not unfinished, at least internally incomplete.  It lacks symmetry, and
fails entirely to make good the argument or scheme of divisions with which
the sermon begins, as conscientiously as one of Barrow's.  Accordingly, an
attempt has been made to show that what we have is something different
from the "meditation" which Chaucer originally put into his "Parson's"
mouth.  But, while we may stand in respectful awe of the German daring
which, whether the matter in hand be a few pages of Chaucer, a Book of
Homer, or a chapter of the Old Testament, is fully prepared to show which
parts of each are mutilated, which interpolated, and which transposed, we
may safely content ourselves, in the present instance, with considering
the preliminary question.  A priori, is there sufficient reason for
supposing any transpositions, interpolations, and mutilations to have been
introduced into the "Parson's Tale"?  The question is full of interest;
for while, on the one hand, the character of the "Parson" in the
"Prologue" has been frequently interpreted as evidence of sympathy on
Chaucer's part with Wycliffism, on the other hand, the "Parson's Tale," in
its extant form, goes far to disprove the supposition that its author was
a Wycliffite.

This, then, seems the appropriate place for briefly reviewing the vexed
question--WAS CHAUCER A WYCLIFFITE?  Apart from the character of the
"Parson" and from the "Parson's Tale," what is the nature of our evidence
on the subject?  In the first place, nothing could be clearer than that
Chaucer was a very free-spoken critic of the life of the clergy--more
especially of the Regular clergy,--of his times.  In this character he
comes before us from his translation of the "Roman de la Rose" to the
"Parson's Tale" itself, where he inveighs with significant earnestness
against self indulgence on the part of those who are Religious, or have
"entered into Orders, as sub-deacon, or deacon, or priest, or
hospitallers."  In the "Canterbury Tales," above all, his attacks upon the
Friars run nearly the whole gamut of satire, stopping short perhaps before
the note of high moral indignation.  Moreover, as has been seen, his long
connexion with John of Gaunt is a well-established fact; and it has thence
been concluded that Chaucer fully shared the opinions and tendencies
represented by his patron.  In the supposition that Chaucer approved of
the countenance for a long time shown by John of Gaunt to Wyclif there is
nothing improbable; neither, however, is there anything improbable in this
other supposition, that, when the Duke of Lancaster openly washed his
hands of the heretical tenets to the utterance of which Wyclif had
advanced, Chaucer, together with the large majority of Englishmen, held
with the politic duke rather than with the still unflinching Reformer.  So
long as Wyclif's movement consisted only of an opposition to
ecclesiastical pretensions on the one hand, and of an attempt to revive
religious sentiment on the other, half the country or more was Wycliffite,
and Chaucer no doubt with the rest.  But it would require positive
evidence to justify the belief that from this feeling Chaucer ever passed
to sympathy with LOLLARDRY, in the vague but sufficiently intelligible
sense attaching to that term in the latter part of Richard the Second's
reign.  Richard II himself, whose patronage of Chaucer is certain, in the
end attempted rigorously to suppress Lollardry; and Henry IV, the politic
John of Gaunt's yet more politic son, to whom Chaucer owed the prosperity
enjoyed by him in the last year of his life, became a persecutor almost as
soon as he became a king.

Though, then, from the whole tone of his mind, Chaucer could not but
sympathise with the opponents of ecclesiastical domination--though, as a
man of free and critical spirit, and of an inborn ability for penetrating
beneath the surface, he could not but find subjects for endless blame and
satire in the members of those Mendicant Orders in whom his chief patron's
academical ally had recognised the most formidable obstacles to the spread
of pure religion--yet all this would not justify us in regarding him as
personally a Wycliffite.  Indeed, we might as well at once borrow the
phraseology of a recent respectable critic, and set down Dan Chaucer as a
Puritan!  The policy of his patron tallied with the view which a fresh
practical mind such as Chaucer's would naturally be disposed to take of
the influence of monks and friars, or at least of those monks and friars
whose vices and foibles were specially prominent in his eyes.  There are
various reasons why men oppose established institutions in the season of
their decay; but a fourteenth century satirist of the monks, or even of
the clergy at large, was not necessarily a Lollard, any more than a
nineteenth century objector to doctors' drugs is necessarily a
homoeopathist.

But, it is argued by some, Chaucer has not only assailed the false; he has
likewise extolled the true.  He has painted both sides of the contrast.
On the one side are the Monk, the Friar, and the rest of their fellows; on
the other is the "Poor Parson of a town"--a portrait, if not of Wyclif
himself, at all events of a Wycliffite priest; and in the "Tale" or sermon
put in the Parson's mouth are recognisable beneath the accumulations of
interested editors some of the characteristic marks of Wycliffism.  Who is
not acquainted with the exquisite portrait in question?--

A good man was there of religion,
And was a poore Parson of a town.
But rich he was of holy thought and work.
He was also a learned man, a clerk
That Christes Gospel truly woulde preach;
And his parishioners devoutly teach.
Benign he was, and wondrous diligent,
And in adversity full patient.
And such he was y-proved ofte sithes.
Full loth he was to curse men for his tithes;
But rather would he give, without doubt,
Unto his poor parishioners about
Of his off'ring and eke of his substance.
He could in little wealth have suffisance.
Wide was his parish, houses far asunder,
Yet failed he not for either rain or thunder
In sickness nor mischance to visit all
The furthest in his parish, great and small,
Upon his feet, and in his hand a staff.
This noble ensample to his sheep he gave,
That first he wrought, and afterwards he taught
Out of the Gospel he those wordes caught,
And this figure he added eke thereto,
That "if gold ruste, what shall iron do?"
For if a priest be foul, on whom we trust,
No wonder is it if a layman rust;
And shame it is, if that a priest take keep,
A foul shepherd to see and a clean sheep;
Well ought a priest ensample for to give
By his cleanness, how that his sheep should live.
He put not out his benefice on hire,
And left his sheep encumbered in the mire,
And ran to London unto Sainte Paul's,
To seek himself a chantery for souls,
Or maintenance with a brotherhood to hold;
But dwelt at home, and kepte well his fold,
So that the wolf ne'er made it to miscarry;
He was a shepherd and no mercenary.
And though he holy were, and virtuous,
He was to sinful man not despitous,
And of his speech nor difficult nor digne,
But in his teaching discreet and benign.
For to draw folk to heaven by fairness,
By good ensample, this was his business:
But were there any person obstinate,
What so he were, of high or low estate,
Him would he sharply snub at once.  Than this
A better priest, I trow, there nowhere is.
He waited for no pomp and reverence,
Nor made himself a spiced conscience;
But Christes lore and His Apostles' twelve
He taught, but first he followed it himself.

The most striking features in this portrait are undoubtedly those which
are characteristics of the good and humble working clergyman of all times;
and some of these, accordingly, Goldsmith could appropriately borrow for
his gentle poetic sketch of his parson-brother in "Sweet Auburn."  But
there are likewise points in the sketch which may be fairly described as
specially distinctive of Wyclif's Simple Priests--though, as should be
pointed out, these Priests could not themselves be designated parsons of
towns.  Among the latter features are the specially evangelical source of
the "Parson's" learning and teaching; and his outward appearance--the
wandering, staff in hand, which was specially noted in an archiepiscopal
diatribe against these novel ministers of the people.  Yet it seems
unnecessary to conclude anything beyond this: that the feature which
Chaucer desired above all to mark and insist upon in his "Parson," was the
Poverty and humility which in him contrasted with the luxurious self-
indulgence of the "Monk," and the blatant insolence of the "Pardoner."
From this point of view it is obvious why the "Parson" is made brother to
the "Ploughman."  For, in drawing the latter, Chaucer cannot have
forgotten that other Ploughman whom Langland's poem had identified with
Him for whose sake Chaucer's poor workman laboured for his poor
neighbours, with the readiness always shown by the best of his class.  Nor
need this recognition of the dignity of the lowly surprise us in Chaucer,
who had both sense of justice and sense of humour enough not to flatter
one class at the expense of the rest, and who elsewhere (in the "Manciples
Tale") very forcibly puts the truth that what in a great man is called a
coup d'etat is called by a much simpler name in a humbler fellow-sinner.

But though, in the "Parson of a Town," Chaucer may not have wished to
paint a Wycliffite priest--still less a Lollard, under which designation
so many varieties of malcontents, in addition to the followers of Wyclif,
were popularly included--yet his eyes and ears were open; and he knew well
enough what the world and its children are at all times apt to call those
who are not ashamed of their religion, as well as those who make too
conscious a profession of it.  The world called them Lollards at the close
of the fourteenth century, and it called them Puritans at the close of the
sixteenth, and Methodists at the close of the eighteenth.  Doubtless the
vintners and the shipmen of Chaucer's day, the patrons and purveyors of
the playhouse in Ben Jonson's, the fox-hunting squires and town wits of
Cowper's, like their successors after them, were not specially anxious to
distinguish nicely between more or less abominable varieties of
saintliness.  Hence, when Master Harry Bailly's tremendous oaths produce
the gentlest of protests from the "Parson," the jovial "Host"
incontinently "smells a Lollard in the wind," and predicts (with a further
flow of expletives) that there is a sermon to follow.  Whereupon the
"Shipman" protests not less characteristically:--

"Nay, by my father's soul, that shall he not,"
Saide the Shipman, "here shall he not preach,
He shall no gospel here explain or teach.
We all believe in the great God," quoth he;
"He woulde sowe some difficulty,
Or springe cockle in our clean corn."
(The nickname Lollards was erroneously derived from "lolia" (tares).)

After each of the pilgrims except the "Parson" has told a tale (so that
obviously Chaucer designed one of the divisions of his work to close with
the "Parson's"), he is again called upon by the "Host".  Hereupon
appealing to the undoubtedly evangelical and, it might without straining
be said, Wycliffite authority of Timothy, he promises as his contribution
a "merry tale in prose," which proves to consist of a moral discourse.  In
its extant form the "Parson's Tale" contains, by the side of much that
might suitably have come from a Wycliffite teacher, much of a directly
opposite nature.  For not only is the necessity of certain sacramental
usages to which Wyclif strongly objected insisted upon, but the spoliation
of Church property is unctuously inveighed against as a species of one of
the cardinal sins.  No enquiry could satisfactorily establish how much of
this was taken over or introduced into the "Parson's Tale" by Chaucer
himself.  But one would fain at least claim for him a passage in perfect
harmony with the character drawn of the "Parson" in the "Prologue"--a
passage (already cited in part in the opening section of the present
essay) where the poet advocates the cause of the poor in words which,
simple as they are, deserve to be quoted side by side with that immortal
character itself.  The concluding lines may therefore be cited here:--

Think also that of the same seed of which churls spring, of the same seed
spring lords; as well may the churl be saved as the lord.  Wherefore I
counsel thee, do just so with thy churl as though wouldest thy lord did
with thee, if thou wert in his plight.  A very sinful man is a churl as
towards sin.  I counsel thee certainly, thou lord, that, thou work in such
wise with thy churls that they rather love thee than dread thee.  I know
well, where there is degree above degree, it is reasonable that men should
do their duty where it is due; but of a certainty, extortions, and despite
of our underlings, are damnable.

In sum, the "Parson's Tale" cannot, any more than the character of the
"Parson" in the "Prologue," be interpreted as proving Chaucer to have been
a Wycliffite.  But the one as well as the other proves him to have
perceived much of what was noblest in the Wycliffite movement, and much of
what was ignoblest in the reception with which it met at the hands of
worldlings--before, with the aid of the State, the Church finally
succeeded in crushing it, to all appearance, out of existence.

The "Parson's Tale" contains a few vigorous touches, in addition to the
fine passage quoted, which make it difficult to deny that Chaucer's hand
was concerned in it.  The inconsistency between the religious learning
ascribed to the "Parson" and a passage in the "Tale," where the author
leaves certain things to be settled by divines, will not be held of much
account.  The most probable conjecture seems therefore to be that the
discourse has come down to us in a mutilated form.  This MAY be due to the
"Tale" having remained unfinished at the time of Chaucer's death: in which
case it would form last words of no unfitting kind.  As for the actual
last words of the "Canterbury Tales"--the so-called "Prayer of Chaucer"--
it would be unbearable to have to accept them as genuine.  For in these
the poet, while praying for the forgiveness of sins, is made specially to
entreat the Divine pardon for his "translations and inditing in worldly
vanities," which he "revokes in his retractions."  These include, besides
the Book of the Leo (doubtless a translation or adaptation from Machault)
and many other books which the writer forgets, and "many a song and many a
lecherous lay," all the principal poetical works of Chaucer (with the
exception of the "Romaunt of the Rose") discussed in this essay.  On the
other hand, he offers thanks for having had the grace given him to compose
his translation of Boethius and other moral and devotional works.  There
is, to be sure, no actual evidence to decide in either way the question as
to the genuineness of this "Prayer," which is entirely one of internal
probability.  Those who will may believe that the monks, who were the
landlords of Chaucer's house at Westminster, had in one way or the other
obtained a controlling influence over his mind.  Stranger things than this
have happened; but one prefers to believe that the poet of the "Canterbury
Tales" remained master of himself to the last.  He had written much which
a dying man might regret; but it would be sad to have to think that,
"because of humility," he bore false witness at the last against an
immortal part of himself--his poetic genius.


CHAPTER 3.  CHARACTERISTICS OF CHAUCER AND OF HIS POETRY.

Thus, then, Chaucer had passed away;--whether in good or in evil odour
with the powerful interest with which John of Gaunt's son had entered into
his unwritten concordate, after all matters but little now.  He is no dim
shadow to us, even in his outward presence; for we possess sufficient
materials from which to picture to ourselves with good assurance what
manner of man he was.  Occleve painted from memory, on the margin of one
of his own works, a portrait of his "worthy master," over against a
passage in which, after praying the Blessed Virgin to intercede for the
eternal happiness of one who had written so much in her honour, he
proceeds as follows:--

Although his life be quenched, the resemblance
Of him hath in me so fresh liveliness,
That to put other men in remembrance
Of his person I have here his likeness
Made, to this end in very soothfastness,
That they that have of him lost thought and mind
May by the painting here again him find.

In this portrait, in which the experienced eye of Sir Harris Nicolas sees
"incomparably the best portrait of Chaucer yet discovered," he appears as
an elderly rather than aged man, clad in dark gown and hood--the latter
of the fashion so familiar to us from this very picture, and from the well
known one of Chaucer's last patron, King Henry IV.  His attitude in this
likeness is that of a quiet talker, with downcast eyes, but sufficiently
erect bearing of body.  One arm is extended, and seems to be gently
pointing some observation which has just issued from the poet's lips.  The
other holds a rosary, which may be significant of the piety attributed to
Chaucer by Occleve, or may be a mere ordinary accompaniment of
conversation, as it is in parts of Greece to the present day.  The
features are mild but expressive, with just a suspicion--certainly no
more--of saturnine or sarcastic humour.  The lips are full, and the nose
is what is called good by the learned in such matters.  Several other
early portraits of Chaucer exist, all of which are stated to bear much
resemblance to one another.  Among them is one in an early if not
contemporary copy of Occleve's poems, full-length, and superscribed by the
hand which wrote the manuscript.  In another, which is extremely quaint,
he appears on horseback, in commemoration of his ride to Canterbury, and
is represented as short of stature, in accordance with the description of
himself in the "Canterbury Tales."

For, as it fortunately happens, he has drawn his likeness for us with his
own hand, as he appeared on the occasion to that most free-spoken of
observers and most personal of critics, the host of the Tabard, the "cock"
and marshal of the company of pilgrims.  The fellow-travellers had just
been wonderfully sobered (as well they might be) by the piteous tale of
the Prioress concerning the little clergy-boy,--how, after the wicked Jews
had cut his throat because he ever sang "O Alma Redemptoris," and had cast
him into a pit, he was found there by his mother loudly giving forth the
hymn in honour of the Blessed Virgin which he had loved so well.  Master
Harry Bailly was, as in duty bound, the first to interrupt by a string of
jests the silence which had ensued:--

And then at first he looked upon me,
And saide thus: "What man art thou?" quoth he;
"Thou lookest as thou wouldest find a hare,
For over upon the ground I see thee stare.
Approach more near, and looke merrily!
Now 'ware you, sirs, and let this man have space.
He in the waist is shaped as well as I;
This were a puppet in an arm to embrace
For any woman, small and fair of face.
He seemeth elfish by his countenance,
For unto no wight doth he dalliance.

From this passage we may gather, not only that Chaucer was, as the "Host"
of the Tabard's transparent self-irony implies, small of stature and
slender, but that he was accustomed to be twitted on account of the
abstracted or absent look which so often tempts children of the world to
offer its wearer a penny for his thoughts.  For "elfish" means bewitched
by the elves, and hence vacant or absent in demeanour.

It is thus, with a few modest but manifestly truthful touches, that
Chaucer, after the manner of certain great painters, introduces his own
figure into a quiet corner of his crowded canvas.  But mere outward
likeness is of little moment, and it is a more interesting enquiry whether
there are any personal characteristics of another sort, which it is
possible with safety to ascribe to him, and which must be, in a greater or
less degree, connected with the distinctive qualities of his literary
genius.  For in truth it is but a sorry makeshift of literary biographers
to seek to divide a man who is an author into two separate beings, in
order to avoid the conversely fallacious procedure of accounting for
everything which an author has written by something which the MAN has done
or been inclined to do.  What true poet has sought to hide, or succeeded
in hiding, his moral nature from his muse?  None in the entire band, from
Petrarch to Villon, and least of all the poet whose song, like so much of
Chaucer's, seems freshly derived from Nature's own inspiration.

One very pleasing quality in Chaucer must have been his modesty.  In the
course of his life this may have helped to recommend him to patrons so
many and so various, and to make him the useful and trustworthy agent that
he evidently became for confidential missions abroad.  Physically, as has
been seen, he represents himself as prone to the habit of casting his eyes
on the ground; and we may feel tolerably sure that to this external manner
corresponded a quiet, observant disposition, such as that which may be
held to have distinguished the greatest of Chaucer's successors among
English poets.  To us, of course, this quality of modesty in Chaucer makes
itself principally manifest in the opinion which he incidentally shows
himself to entertain concerning his own rank and claims as an author.
Herein, as in many other points, a contrast is noticeable between him and
the great Italian masters, who were so sensitive as to the esteem in which
they and their poetry were held.  Who could fancy Chaucer crowned with
laurel, like Petrarch, or even, like Dante, speaking with proud humility
of "the beautiful style that has done honour to him," while acknowledging
his obligation for it to a great predecessor?  Chaucer again and again
disclaims all boasts of perfection, or pretensions to pre-eminence, as a
poet.  His Canterbury Pilgrims have in his name to disavow, like Persius,
having slept on Mount Parnassus, or possessing "rhetoric" enough to
describe a heroine's beauty; and he openly allows that his spirit grows
dull as he grows older, and that he finds a difficulty as a translator in
matching his rhymes to his French original.  He acknowledges as
incontestable the superiority of the poets of classical antiquity:--

--Little book, no writing thou envy,
But subject be to all true poesy,
And kiss the steps, where'er thou seest space
Of Virgil, Ovid, Homer, Lucan, Stace (Statius).

But more than this.  In the "House of Fame" he expressly disclaims having
in his light and imperfect verse sought to pretend to "mastery" in the art
poetical; and in a charmingly expressed passage of the "Prologue" to the
"Legend of Good Women" he describes himself as merely following in the
wake of those who have already reaped the harvest of amorous song, and
have carried away the corn:--

And I come after, gleaning here and there,
And am full glad if I can find an ear
Of any goodly word that ye have left.

Modesty of this stamp is perfectly compatible with a certain self-
consciousness which is hardly ever absent from greatness, and which at all
events supplies a stimulus not easily dispensed with except by sustained
effort on the part of a poet.  The two qualities seem naturally to combine
into that self-containedness (very different from self-contentedness)
which distinguishes Chaucer, and which helps to give to his writings a
manliness of tone, the direct opposite of the irretentive querulousness
found in so great a number of poets in all times.  He cannot indeed be
said to maintain an absolute reserve concerning himself and his affairs in
his writings; but as he grows older, he seems to become less and less
inclined to take the public into his confidence, or to speak of himself
except in a pleasantly light and incidental fashion.  And in the same
spirit he seems, without ever folding his hands in his lap, or ceasing to
be a busy man and an assiduous author, to have grown indifferent to the
lack of brilliant success in life, whether as a man of letters or
otherwise.  So at least one seems justified in interpreting a remarkable
passage in the "House of Fame," the poem in which perhaps Chaucer allows
us to see more deeply into his mind than in any other.  After surveying
the various company of those who had come as suitors for the favours of
Fame, he tells us how it seemed to him (in his long December dream) that
some one spoke to him in a kindly way,

And saide: "Friend, what is thy name?
Art thou come hither to have fame?"
"Nay, forsoothe, friend!" quoth I;
"I came not hither (grand merci!)
For no such cause, by my head!
Sufficeth me, as I were dead,
That no wight have my name in hand.
I wot myself best how I stand;
For what I suffer, or what I think,
I will myselfe all it drink,
Or at least the greater part
As far forth as I know my art."

With this modest but manly self-possession we shall not go far wrong in
connecting what seems another very distinctly marked feature of Chaucer's
inner nature.  He seems to have arrived at a clear recognition of the
truth with which Goethe humorously comforted Eckermann in the shape of the
proverbial saying, "Care has been taken that the trees shall not grow into
the sky."  Chaucer's, there is every reason to believe, was a contented
faith, as far removed from self-torturing unrest as from childish
credulity.  Hence his refusal to trouble himself, now that he has arrived
at a good age, with original research as to the constellations.  (The
passage is all the more significant since Chaucer, as has been seen,
actually possessed a very respectable knowledge of astronomy.)  That
winged encyclopaedia, the Eagle, has just been regretting the poet's
unwillingness to learn the position of the Great and the Little Bear,
Castor and Pollux, and the rest, concerning which at present he does not
know where they stand.  But he replies, "No matter!

--It is no need;
I trust as well (so God me speed!)
Them that write of this matter,
As though I know their places there."

Moreover, as he says (probably without implying any special allegorical
meaning), they seem so bright that it would destroy my eyes to look upon
them.  Personal inspection, in his opinion, was not necessary for a faith
which at some times may, and at others must, take the place of knowledge;
for we find him, at the opening of the "Prologue" to the "Legend of Good
Women," in a passage the tone of which should not be taken to imply less
than its words express, writing, as follows:--

A thousand times I have heard men tell,
That there is joy in Heaven, and pain in hell;
And I accorde well that it is so
But natheless, yet wot I well also,
That there is none doth in this country dwell
That either hath in heaven been or hell,
Or any other way could of it know,
But that he heard, or found it written so,
For by assay may no man proof receive.
 But God forbid that men should not believe
More things than they have ever seen with eye!
Men shall not fancy everything a lie
Unless themselves it see, or else it do;
For, God wot, not the less a thing is true,
Though every wight may not it chance to see.

The central thought of these lines, though it afterwards receives a
narrower and more commonplace application, is no other than that which has
been so splendidly expressed by Spenser in the couplet:--

Why then should witless man so much misween
That nothing is but that which he hath seen?

The NEGATIVE result produced in Chaucer's mind by this firm but placid way
of regarding matters of faith was a distrust of astrology, alchemy, and
all the superstitions which in the "Parson's Tale" are noticed as
condemned by the Church.  This distrust on Chaucer's part requires no
further illustration after what has been said elsewhere; it would have
been well for his age if all its children had been as clear-sighted in
these matters as he, to whom the practices connected with these delusive
sciences seemed, and justly so from his point of view, not less impious
than futile.  His "Canon Yeoman's Tale," a story of imposture so vividly
dramatic in its catastrophe as to have suggested to Ben Jonson one of the
most effective passages in his comedy "The Alchemist," concludes with a
moral of unmistakeable solemnity against the sinfulness, as well as
uselessness, of "multiplying" (making gold by the arts of alchemy):--

--Whoso maketh God his adversary,
As for to work anything in contrary
Unto His will, certes ne'er shall he thrive,
Though that he multiply through all his life.

But equally unmistakeable is the POSITIVE side of this frame of mind in
such a passage as the following--which is one of those belonging to
Chaucer himself, and not taken from his French original--in the "Man of
Law's Tale."  The narrator is speaking of the voyage of Constance, after
her escape from the massacre in which, at a feast, all her fellow-
Christians had been killed, and of how she was borne by the "wild wave"
from "Surrey" (Syria) to the Northumbrian shore:--

Here men might aske, why she was not slain?
Eke at the feast who might her body save?
And I answere that demand again:
Who saved Daniel in th' horrible cave,
When every wight save him, master or knave,
The lion ate--before he could depart?
No wight but God, whom he bare in his heart.

"In her," he continues, "God desired to show His miraculous power, so that
we should see His mighty works.  For Christ, in whom we have a remedy for
every ill, often by means of His own does things for ends of His own,
which are obscure to the wit of man, incapable by reason of our ignorance
of understanding His wise providence.  But since Constance was not slain
at the feast, it might be asked: who kept her from drowning in the sea?
Who, then, kept Jonas in the belly of the whale, till he was spouted up at
Ninive?  Well do we know it was no one but He who kept the Hebrew people
from drowning in the waters, and made them to pass through the sea with
dry feet.  Who bade the four spirits of the tempest, which have the power
to trouble land and sea, north and south, and west and east, vex neither
sea nor land nor the trees that grow on it?  Truly these things were
ordered by Him who kept this woman safe from the tempest, as well when she
awoke as when she slept.  But whence might this woman have meat and drink,
and how could her sustenance last out to her for three years and more?
Who, then, fed Saint Mary the Egyptian in the cavern or in the desert?
Assuredly no one but Christ. It was a great miracle to feed five thousand
folk with five loaves and two fishes; but God in their great need sent to
them abundance."

As to the sentiments and opinions of Chaucer, then, on matters such as
these, we can entertain no reasonable doubt.  But we are altogether too
ill acquainted with the details of his personal life, and with the motives
which contributed to determine its course, to be able to arrive at any
valid conclusions as to the way in which his principles affected his
conduct.  Enough has been already said concerning the attitude seemingly
observed by him towards the great public questions, and the great
historical events, of his day.  If he had strong political opinions of his
own, or strong personal views on questions either of ecclesiastical policy
or of religions doctrine--in which assumptions there seems nothing
probable--he at all events did not wear his heart on his sleeve, or use
his poetry, allegorical or otherwise, as a vehicle of his wishes, hopes,
or fears on these heads.  The true breath of freedom could hardly be
expected to blow through the precincts of a Plantagenet court.  If Chaucer
could write the pretty lines in the "Manciple's Tale" about the caged bird
and its uncontrollable desire for liberty, his contemporary Barbour could
apostrophise Freedom itself as a noble thing, in words the simple
manliness of which stirs the blood after a very different fashion.
Concerning his domestic relations, we may regard it as virtually certain
that he was unhappy as a husband, though tender and affectionate as a
father.  Considering how vast a proportion of the satire of all times--but
more especially that of the Middle Ages, and in these again pre-eminently
of the period of European literature which took its tone from Jean de
Meung--is directed against woman and against married life, it would be
difficult to decide how much of the irony, sarcasm, and fun lavished by
Chaucer on these themes is due to a fashion with which he readily fell in,
and how much to the impulse of personal feeling.  A perfect anthology, or
perhaps one should rather say a complete herbarium, might be collected
from his works of samples of these attacks on women.  He has manifestly
made a careful study of their ways, with which he now and then betrays
that curiously intimate acquaintance to which we are accustomed in a
Richardson or a Balzac.  How accurate are such incidental remarks as this,
that women are "full measurable" in such matters as sleep--not caring for
so much of it at a time as men do!  How wonderfully natural is the
description of Cressid's bevy of lady-visitors, attracted by the news that
she is shortly to be surrendered to the Greeks, and of the "nice vanity"
i.e. foolish emptiness--of their consolatory gossip.  "As men see in town,
and all about, that women are accustomed to visit their friends," so a
swarm of ladies came to Cressid, "and sat themselves down, and said as I
shall tell.  'I am delighted,' says one, 'that you will so soon see your
father.'  'Indeed I am not so delighted,' says another, 'for we have not
seen half enough of her since she has been at Troy.'  'I do hope,' quoth
the third, 'that she will bring us back peace with her; in which case may
Almighty God guide her on her departure.'  And Cressid heard these words
and womanish things as if she were far away; for she was burning all the
time with another passion than any of which they knew; so that she almost
felt her heart die for woe, and for weariness of that company."  But his
satire against women is rarely so innocent as this; and though several
ladies take part in the Canterbury Pilgrimage, yet pilgrim after pilgrim
has his saw or jest against their sex.  The courteous "Knight" cannot
refrain from the generalisation that women all follow the favour of
fortune.  The "Summoner," who is of a less scrupulous sort, introduces a
diatribe against women's passionate love of vengeance; and the "Shipman"
seasons a story which requires no such addition by an enumeration of their
favourite foibles.  But the climax is reached in the confessions of the
"Wife of Bath," who quite unhesitatingly says that women are best won by
flattery and busy attentions; that when won they desire to have the
sovereignty over their husbands, and that they tell untruths and swear to
them with twice the boldness of men;--while as to the power of their
tongue, she quotes the second-hand authority of her fifth husband for the
saying that it is better to dwell with a lion or a foul dragon, than with
a woman accustomed to chide.  It is true that this same "Wife of Bath"
also observes with an effective tu quoque:--

By God, if women had but written stories,
As clerkes have within their oratories,
They would have writ of men more wickedness
Than all the race of Adam may redress;

and the "Legend of Good Women" seems, in point of fact, to have been
intended to offer some such kind of amends as is here declared to be
called for.  But the balance still remains heavy against the poet's
sentiments of gallantry and respect for women.  It should at the same time
be remembered that among the "Canterbury Tales" the two which are of their
kind the most effective, constitute tributes to the most distinctively
feminine and wifely virtue of fidelity.  Moreover, when coming from such
personages as the pilgrims who narrate the "Tales" in question, the praise
of women has special significance and value.  The "Merchant" and the
"Shipman" may indulge in facetious or coarse jibes against wives and their
behaviour, but the "Man of Law," full of grave experience of the world, is
a witness above suspicion to the womanly virtue of which his narrative
celebrates so illustrious an example, while the "Clerk of Oxford" has in
his cloistered solitude, where all womanly blandishments are unknown, come
to the conclusion that:

Men speak of Job, most for his humbleness,
As clerkes, when they list, can well indite,
Of men in special; but, in truthfulness,
Though praise by clerks of women be but slight,
No man in humbleness can him acquit
As women can, nor can be half so true
As women are, unless all things be new.

As to marriage, Chaucer may be said generally to treat it in that style of
laughing with a wry mouth, which has from time immemorial been affected
both in comic writing and on the comic stage, but which, in the end, even
the most determined old bachelor feels an occasional inclination to
consider monotonous.

In all this, however, it is obvious that something at least must be set
down to conventionality.  Yet the best part of Chaucer's nature, it is
hardly necessary to say, was neither conventional nor commonplace.  He was
not, we may rest assured, one of that numerous class which in his days, as
it does in ours, composed the population of the land of Philistia--the
persons so well defined by the Scottish poet, Sir David Lyndsay (himself a
courtier of the noblest type):--

Who fixed have their hearts and whole intents
On sensual lust, on dignity, and rents.

Doubtless Chaucer was a man of practical good sense, desirous of suitable
employment and of a sufficient income; nor can we suppose him to have been
one of those who look upon social life and its enjoyments with a jaundiced
eye, or who, absorbed in things which are not of this world, avert their
gaze from it altogether.  But it is hardly possible that rank and position
should have been valued on their own account by one who so repeatedly
recurs to his ideal of the true gentleman, as to a conception dissociated
from mere outward circumstances, and more particularly independent of
birth or inherited wealth.  At times, we know, men find what they seek;
and so Chaucer found in Boethius and in Guillaume de Lorris that
conception which he both translates and reproduces, besides repeating it
in a little "Ballade," probably written by him in the last decennium of
his life.  By far the best-known and the finest of these passages is that
in the "Wife of Bath's Tale," which follows the round assertion that the
"arrogance" against which it protests is not worth a hen; and which is
followed by an appeal to a parallel passage in Dante:--

Look, who that is most virtuous alway
Privy and open, and most intendeth aye
To do the gentle deedes that he can,
Take him for the greatest gentleman.
Christ wills we claim of Him our gentleness,
Not of our elders for their old riches.
For though they give us all their heritage
Through which we claim to be of high parage,
Yet may they not bequeathe for no thing--
To none of us--their virtuous living,
That made them gentlemen y-called be,
And bade us follow them in such degree.
Well can the wise poet of Florence,
That Dante highte, speak of this sentence;
Lo, in such manner of rhyme is Dante's tale:
"Seldom upriseth by its branches small
Prowess of man; for God of His prowess
Wills that we claim of Him our gentleness;
For of our ancestors we no thing claim
But temporal thing, that men may hurt and maim."
(The passage in Canto 8 of the "Purgatorio" is thus translated by
Longfellow:

"Not oftentimes upriseth through the branches
The probity of man; and this He wills
Who gives it, so that we may ask of Him."

Its intention is only to show that the son is not necessarily what the
father is before him; thus, Edward I of England is a mightier man than was
his father Henry III.  Chaucer has ingeniously, though not altogether
legitimately, pressed the passage into his service.)

By the still ignobler greed of money for its own sake there is no reason
whatever to suppose Chaucer to have been at any time actuated; although,
under the pressure of immediate want, he devoted a "Complaint" to his
empty purse, and made known, in the proper quarters, his desire to see it
refilled.  Finally, as to what is commonly called pleasure, he may have
shared the fashions and even the vices of his age; but we know hardly
anything on the subject, except that excess in wine, which is often held a
pardonable peccadillo in a poet, receives his emphatic condemnation.  It
would be hazardous to assert of him, as Herrick asserted of himself that
though his "Muse was jocund, life was chaste;" inasmuch as his name occurs
in one unfortunate connexion full of suspiciousness.  But we may at least
believe him to have spoken his own sentiments in the Doctor of Physic's
manly declaration that

--of all treason sovereign pestilence
Is when a man betrayeth innocence.

His true pleasures lay far away from those of vanity and dissipation.  In
the first place, he seems to have been a passionate reader.  To his love
of books he is constantly referring; indeed, this may be said to be the
only kind of egotism which he seems to take a pleasure in indulging.  At
the opening of his earliest extant poem of consequence, the "Book of the
Duchess," he tells us how he preferred to drive away a night rendered
sleepless through melancholy thoughts, by means of a book, which he
thought better entertainment than a game either at chess or at "tables."
This passion lasted longer with him than the other passion which it had
helped to allay; for in the sequel to the well-known passage in the "House
of Fame," already cited, he gives us a glimpse of himself at home,
absorbed in his favourite pursuit:--

Thou go'st home to thy house anon,
And there, as dumb as any stone,
Thou sittest at another book,
Till fully dazed is thy look;
And liv'st thus as a hermit quite,
Although thy abstinence is slight.

And doubtless he counted the days lost in which he was prevented from
following the rule of life which elsewhere be sets himself, to study and
to read alway, day by day," and pressed even the nights into his service
when he was not making his head ache with writing.  How eager and,
considering the times in which he lived, how diverse a reader he was, has
already been abundantly illustrated in the course of this volume.  His
knowledge of Holy Writ was considerable, though it probably for the most
part came to him at second-hand.  He seems to have had some acquaintance
with patristic and homiletic literature; he produced a version of the
homily on Mary Magdalene, improperly attributed to Origen; and, as we have
seen, emulated King Alfred in translating Boethius's famous manual of
moral philosophy.  His Latin learning extended over a wide range of
literature, from Virgil and Ovid down to some of the favourite Latin poets
of the Middle Ages.  It is to be feared that he occasionally read Latin
authors with so eager a desire to arrive at the contents of their books
that he at times mistook their meaning--not far otherwise, slightly to
vary a happy comparison made by one of his most eminent commentators, than
many people read Chaucer's own writings now-a-days.  That he possessed any
knowledge at all of Greek may be doubted, both on general grounds and on
account of a little slip or two in quotation of a kind not unusual with
those who quote what they have not previously read. His "Troilus and
Cressid" has only a very distant connexion indeed with Homer, whose
"Iliad," before it furnished materials for the mediaeval Troilus-legend,
had been filtered through a brief Latin epitome, and diluted into a Latin
novel, and a journal kept at the seat of war, of altogether apocryphal
value.  And, indeed, it must in general be conceded that, if Chaucer had
read much, he lays claim to having read more; for he not only occasionally
ascribes to known authors works which we can by no means feel certain as
to their having written, but at times he even cites (or is made to cite in
all the editions of his works), authors who are altogether unknown to fame
by the names which he gives to them.  But then it must be remembered that
other mediaeval writers have rendered themselves liable to the same kind
of charge.  Quoting was one of the dominant literary fashions of the age;
and just as a word without an oath went for but little in conversation, so
a statement or sentiment in writing aquired greatly enhanced value when
suggested by authority, even after no more precise a fashion than the use
of the phrase "as old books say."  In Chaucer's days the equivalent of the
modern "I have seen it said SOMEWHERE"--with perhaps the venturesome
addition: "I THINK, in Horace" had clearly not become an objectionable
expletive.

Of modern literatures there can be no doubt that Chaucer had made
substantially his own, the two which could be of importance to him as a
poet.  His obligations to the French singers have probably been over-
estimated--at all events if the view adopted in this essay be the correct
one, and if the charming poem of the "Flower and the Leaf," together with
the lively, but as to its meaning not very transparent, so-called
"Chaucer's Dream," be denied admission among his genuine works.  At the
same time, the influence of the "Roman de la Rose" and that of the courtly
poets, of whom Machault was the chief in France and Froissart the
representative in England, are perceptible in Chaucer almost to the last,
nor is it likely that he should ever have ceased to study and assimilate
them.  On the other hand, the extent of his knowledge of Italian
literature has probably till of late been underrated in an almost equal
degree.  This knowledge displays itself not only in the imitation or
adaptation of particular poems, but more especially in the use made of
incidental passages and details.  In this way his debts to Dante were
especially numerous; and it is curious to find proofs so abundant of
Chaucer's relatively close study of a poet with whose genius his own had
so few points in common.  Notwithstanding first appearances, it is an open
question whether Chaucer had ever read Boccaccio's "Decamerone," with
which he may merely have had in common the sources of several of his
"Canterbury Tales."  But as he certainly took one of them from the
"Teseide" (without improving it in the process), and not less certainly,
and adapted the "Filostrato" in his "Troilus and Cressid," it is strange
that he should refrain from naming the author to whom he was more indebted
than to any one other for poetic materials.

But wide and diverse as Chaucer's reading fairly deserves to be called,
the love of nature was even stronger and more absorbing in him than the
love of books.  He has himself, in a very charming passage, compared the
strength of the one and of the other of his predilections:--

And as for me, though I have knowledge slight,
In bookes for to read I me delight,
And to them give I faith and full credence,
And in my heart have them in reverence
So heartily, that there is game none
That from my bookes maketh me be gone,
But it be seldom on the holiday,--
Save, certainly, when that the month of May
Is come, and that I hear the fowles sing,
And see the flowers as they begin to spring,
Farewell my book, and my devotion.

Undoubtedly the literary fashion of Chaucer's times is responsible for
part of this May-morning sentiment, with which he is fond of beginning his
poems (the Canterbury pilgrimage is dated towards the end of April--but is
not April "messenger to May"?).  It had been decreed that flowers should
be the badges of nations and dynasties, and the tokens of amorous
sentiment; the rose had its votaries, and the lily, lauded by Chaucer's
"Prioress" as the symbol of the Blessed Virgin; while the daisy, which
first sprang from the tears of a forlorn damsel, in France gave its name
(marguerite) to an entire species of courtly verse.  The enthusiastic
adoration professed by Chaucer, in the "Prologue" to the "Legend of Good
Women," for the daisy, which he afterwards identifies with the good
Alceste, the type of faithful wifehood, is of course a mere poetical
figure.  But there is in his use of these favourite literary devices, so
to speak, a variety in sameness significant of their accordance with his
own taste, and of the frank and fresh love of nature which animated him,
and which seems to us as much a part of him as his love of books.  It is
unlikely that his personality will over become more fully known than it is
at present; nor is there anything in respect of which we seem to see so
clearly into his inner nature, as with regard to these twin predilections,
to which he remains true in all his works, and in all his moods.  While
the study of books was his chief passion, nature was his chief joy and
solace; while his genius enabled him to transfuse what he read in the
former, what came home to him in the latter was akin to that genius
itself; for he at times reminds us of his own fresh Canace, whom he
describes as looking so full of happiness during her walk through the wood
at sunrise:--

What for the season, what for the morning
And for the fowles that she hearde sing,
For right anon she wiste what they meant
Right by their song, and knew all their intent.

If the above view of Chaucer's character and intellectual tastes and
tendencies be in the main correct, there will seem to be nothing
paradoxical in describing his literary progress, so far as its data are
ascertainable, as a most steady and regular one.  Very few men awake to
find themselves either famous or great of a sudden, and perhaps as few
poets as other men, though it may be heresy against a venerable maxim to
say so.  Chaucer's works form a clearly recognisable series of steps
towards the highest achievement of which, under the circumstances in which
he lived and wrote, he can be held to have been capable; and his long and
arduous self-training, whether consciously or not directed to a particular
end, was of that sure kind from which genius itself derives strength.  His
beginnings as a writer were dictated, partly by the impulse of that
imitative faculty which, in poetic natures, is the usual precursor of the
creative, partly by the influence of prevailing tastes and the absence of
native English literary predecessors whom, considering the circumstances
of his life and the nature of his temperament, he could have found it a
congenial task to follow.  French poems were, accordingly, his earliest
models; but fortunately (unlike Gower, whom it is so instructive to
compare with Chaucer, precisely because the one lacked that gift of genius
which the other possessed) he seems at once to have resolved to make use
for his poetical writings of his native speech.  In no way, therefore,
could he have begun his career with so happy a promise of its future, as
in that which he actually chose.  Nor could any course so naturally have
led him to introduce into his poetic diction the French idioms and words
already used in the spoken language of Englishmen, more especially in
those classes for which he in the first instance wrote, and thus to confer
upon our tongue the great benefit which it owes to him.  Again most
fortunately, others had already pointed the way to the selection for
literary use of that English dialect which was probably the most suitable
for the purpose; and Chaucer as a Southern man (like his "Parson of a
Town") belonged to a part of the country where the old alliterative verse
had long since been discarded for classical and romance forms of
versification.  Thus the "Romaunt of the Rose" most suitably opens his
literary life--a translation in which there is nothing original except an
occasional turn of phrase, but in which the translator finds opportunity
for exercising his powers of judgment by virtually re-editing the work
before him.  And already in the "Book of the Duchess," though most
unmistakeably a follower of Machault, he is also the rival of the great
French trouvere, and has advanced in freedom of movement not less than in
agreeableness of form.  Then, as his travels extended his acquaintance
with foreign literatures to that of Italy, he here found abundant fresh
materials from which to feed his productive powers, and more elaborate
forms in which to clothe their results; while at the same time comparison,
the kindly nurse of originality, more and more enabled him to recast
instead of imitating, or encouraged him freely to invent.  In "Troilus and
Cressid" he produced something very different from a mere condensed
translation, and achieved a work in which he showed himself a master of
poetic expression and sustained narrative; in the "House of Fame" and the
"Assembly of Fowls" he moved with freedom in happily contrived allegories
of his own invention; and with the "Legend of Good Women" he had already
arrived at a stage when he could undertake to review, under a pleasant
pretext, but with evident consciousness of work done, the list of his
previous works.  "He hath," he said of himself, "made many a lay and many
a thing."  Meanwhile the labour incidentally devoted by him to translation
from the Latin, or to the composition of prose treatises in the scholastic
manner of academical exercises, could but little affect his general
literary progress.  The mere scholarship of youth, even if it be the
reverse of close and profound, is wont to cling to a man through life and
to assert its modest claims at any season; and thus, Chaucer's school-
learning exercised little influence either of an advancing or of a
retarding kind upon the full development of his genius.  Nowhere is he so
truly himself as in the masterpiece of his last years.  For the
"Canterbury Tales," in which he is at once greatest, most original, and
most catholic in the choice of materials as well as in moral sympathies,
bears the unmistakeable stamp of having formed the crowning labour of his
life--a work which death alone prevented him from completing.

It may be said, without presumption, that such a general view as this
leaves ample room for all reasonable theories as to the chronology and
sequence, where these remain more or less unsettled, of Chaucer's
indisputably genuine works.  In any case, there is no poet whom, if only
as an exercise in critical analysis, it is more interesting to study and
re-study in connexion with the circumstances of his literary progress.  He
still, as has been seen, belongs to the Middle Ages, but to a period in
which the noblest ideals of these Middle Ages are already beginning to
pale and their mightiest institutions to quake around him; in which
learning continues to be in the main scholasticism, the linking of
argument with argument, and the accumulation of authority upon authority,
and poetry remains to a great extent the crabbedness of clerks or the
formality of courts.  Again, Chaucer is mediaeval in tricks of style and
turns of phrase; he often contents himself with the tritest of figures and
the most unrefreshing of ancient devices, and freely resorts to a mixture
of names and associations belonging to his own times with others derived
from other ages.  This want of literary perspective is a sure sign of
mediaevalism, and one which has amused the world, or has jarred upon it,
since the Renascence taught men to study both classical and biblical
antiquity as realities, and not merely as a succession of pictures or of
tapestries on a wall.  Chaucer mingles things mediaeval and things
classical as freely as he brackets King David with the philosopher Seneca,
or Judas Iscariot with the Greek "dissimulator" Sinon.  His Dido, mounted
on a stout palfrey paper white of hue, with a red-and-gold saddle
embroidered and embossed, resembles Alice Perrers in all her pomp rather
than the Virgilian queen.  Jupiter's eagle, the poet's guide and
instructor in the allegory of the "House of Fame," invokes "Saint Mary,
Saint James," and "Saint Clare" all at once; and the pair of lovers at
Troy sign their letters "la vostre T." and la vostre C."  Anachronisms of
this kind (of the danger of which, by the way, to judge from a passage in
the "Prologue" to the "Legend of Good Women," Chaucer would not appear to
have been wholly unconscious) are intrinsically of very slight importance.
But the morality of Chaucer's narratives is at times the artificial and
overstrained morality of the Middle Ages, which, as it were, clutches hold
of a single idea to the exclusion of all others--a morality which, when
carried to its extreme consequences, makes monomaniacs as well as martyrs,
in both of which species, occasionally perhaps combined in the same
persons, the Middle Ages abound.  The fidelity of Griseldis under the
trials imposed upon her by her, in point of fact, brutal husband is the
fidelity of a martyr to unreason.  The story was afterwards put on the
stage in the Elizabethan age; and though even in the play of "Patient
Grissil" (by Chettle and others), it is not easy to reconcile the
husband's proceedings with the promptings of common sense, yet the
playwrights, with the instinct of their craft, contrived to introduce some
element of humanity into his character and of probability into his
conduct.  Again the supra-chivalrous respect paid by Arviragus, the Breton
knight of the "Franklin's Tale," to the sanctity of his wife's word,
seriously to the peril of his own and his wife's honour, is an effort to
which probably even the Knight of La Mancha himself would have proved
unequal.  It is not to be expected that Chaucer should have failed to
share some of the prejudices of his times as well as to fall in with their
ways of thought and sentiment; and though it is the "Prioress" who tells a
story against the Jews which passes the legend of Hugh of Lincoln, yet it
would be very hazardous to seek any irony in this legend of bigotry.  In
general, much of that naivete which to modern readers seems Chaucer's most
obvious literary quality must be ascribed to the times in which he lived
and wrote.  This quality is in truth by no means that which most deeply
impresses itself upon the observation of any one able to compare Chaucer's
writings with those of his more immediate predecessors and successors.
But the sense in which the term naif should be understood in literary
criticism is so imperfectly agreed upon among us, that we have not yet
even found an English equivalent for the word.

To Chaucer's times, then, belongs much of what may at first sight seem to
include itself among the characteristics of his genius; while, on the
other hand, there are to be distinguished from these the influences due to
his training and studies in two literatures--the French and the Italian.
In the former of these he must have felt at home, if not by birth and
descent, at all events by social connexion, habits of life, and ways of
thought, while in the latter he, whose own country's was still a half-
fledged literary life, found ready to his hand masterpieces of artistic
maturity, lofty in conception, broad in bearing, finished in form.  There
still remain, for summary review, the elements proper to his own poetic
individuality--those which mark him out not only as the first great poet
of his own nation, but as a great poet for all times.

The poet must please; if he wishes to be successful and popular, he must
suit himself to the tastes of his public; and even if he be indifferent to
immediate fame, he must, as belonging to one of the most impressionable,
the most receptive species of humankind, live in a sense WITH and FOR his
generation.  To meet this demand upon his genius, Chaucer was born with
many gifts which he carefully and assiduously exercised in a long series
of poetical experiments, and which he was able felicitously to combine for
the achievement of results unprecedented in our literature.  In readiness
of descriptive power, in brightness and variety of imagery, and in flow of
diction, Chaucer remained unequalled by any English poet, till he was
surpassed--it seems not too much to say, in all three respects--by
Spenser.  His verse, where it suits his purpose, glitters, to use Dunbar's
expression, as with fresh enamel, and its hues are variegated like those
of a Flemish tapestry.  Even where his descriptive enumerations seem at
first sight monotonous or perfunctory, they are in truth graphic and true
in their details, as in the list of birds in the "Assembly of Fowls,"
quoted in part on an earlier page of this essay, and in the shorter list
of trees in the same poem, which is, however, in its general features
imitated from Boccaccio.  Neither King James I of Scotland, nor Spenser,
who after Chaucer essayed similar tours de force, were happier than he had
been before them.  Or we may refer to the description of the preparations
for the tournament and of the tournament itself in the "Knight's Tale," or
to the thoroughly Dutch picture of a disturbance in a farm-yard in the
"Nun's Priest's."  The vividness with which Chaucer describes scenes and
events as if he had them before his own eyes, was no doubt, in the first
instance, a result of his own imaginative temperament; but one would
probably not go wrong in attributing the fulness of the use which he made
of this gift to the influence of his Italian studies--more especially to
those which led him to Dante, whose multitudinous characters and scenes
impress themselves with so singular and immediate a definiteness upon the
imagination.  At the same time, Chaucer's resources seem inexhaustible for
filling up or rounding off his narratives with the aid of chivalrous love
or religious legend, by the introduction of samples of scholastic
discourse or devices of personal or general allegory.  He commands, where
necessary, a rhetorician's readiness of illustration, and a masque-
writer's inventiveness, as to machinery; he can even (in the "House of
Fame") conjure up an elaborate but self-consistent phantasmagory of his
own, and continue it with a fulness proving that his fancy would not be at
a loss for supplying even more materials than he cares to employ.

But Chaucer's poetry derived its power to please from yet another quality;
and in this he was the first of our English poets to emulate the poets of
the two literatures to which in the matter of his productions, and in the
ornaments of his diction, he owed so much.  There is in his verse a music
which hardly ever wholly loses itself, and which at times is as sweet as
that in any English poet after him.

This assertion is not one which is likely to be gainsaid at the present
day, when there is not a single lover of Chaucer who would sit down
contented with Dryden's condescending mixture of censure and praise.  "The
verse of Chaucer," he wrote, "I confess, is not harmonious to us.  They
who lived with him, and some time after him, thought it musical; and it
continues so, even in our judgment, if compared with the numbers of
Lydgate and Gower, his contemporaries: there is a rude sweetness of a
Scotch tune in it, which is natural and pleasing, though not perfect."  At
the same time, it is no doubt necessary, in order to verify the
correctness of a less balanced judgment, to take the trouble, which, if it
could but be believed, is by no means great, to master the rules and
usages of Chaucerian versification.  These rules and usages the present is
not a fit occasion for seeking to explain.  (It may, however, be stated
that they only partially connect themselves with Chaucer's use of forms
which are now obsolete--more especially of inflexions of verbs and
substantives (including several instances of the famous final e), and
contractions with the negative ne and other monosyllabic words ending in a
vowel, of the initial syllables of words beginning with vowels or with the
letter h.  These and other variations from later usage in spelling and
pronunciation--such as the occurrence of an e (sometimes sounded and
sometimes not) at the end of words in which it is now no longer retained,
and again the frequent accentuation of many words of French origin in
their last syllable, as in French, and of certain words of English origin
analogously--are to be looked for as a matter of course in a last writing
in the period of our language in which Chaucer lived.  He clearly foresaw
the difficulties which would be caused to his readers by the variations of
usage in spelling and pronunciation--variations to some extent rendered
inevitable by the fact that he wrote in an English dialect which was only
gradually coming to be accepted as the uniform language of English
writers.  Towards the close of his "Troilus and Cressid," he thus
addresses his "little book," in fear of the mangling it might undergo from
scriveners who might blunder in the copying of its words, or from reciters
who might maltreat its verse in the distribution of the accents:--

And, since there is so great diversity
In English, and in writing of our tongue,
I pray to God that none may miswrite thee
Nor thee mismetre, for default of tongue,
And wheresoe'er thou mayst be read or sung,
That thou be understood, God I beseech.

But in his versification he likewise adopted certain other practices which
had no such origin or reason as those already referred to.  Among them
were the addition, at the end of a line of five accents, of an unaccented
syllable; and the substitution, for the first foot of a line either of
four or of five accents, of a single syllable.  These deviations from a
stricter system of versification he doubtless permitted to himself, partly
for the sake of variety, and partly for that of convenience; but neither
of them is peculiar to himself, or of supreme importance for the effect of
his verse.  In fact, he seems to allow as much in a passage of his "House
of Fame," a poem written, it should, however, be observed, in an easy-
going form of verse (the line of four accents) which in his later period
Chaucer seems with this exception to have invariably discarded.  He here
beseeches Apollo to make his rhyme

somewhat agreeable,
Though some verse fail in a syllable.

But another of his usages--the misunderstanding of which has more than
anything else caused his art as a writer of verse to be misjudged--seems
to have been due to a very different cause.  To understand the real nature
of the usage in question it is only necessary to seize the principle of
Chaucer's rhythm.  Of this principle it was well said many years ago by a
most competent authority--Mr. R. Horne--that, it is "inseparable from a
full or fair exercise of the genius of our language in versification."
For though this usage in its full freedom was gradually again lost to our
poetry for a time, yet it was in a large measure recovered by Shakspere
and the later dramatists of our great age, and has since been never
altogether abandoned again--not even by the correct writers of the
Augustan period--till by the favourites of our own times it is resorted to
with a perhaps excessive liberality.  It consists simply in SLURRING over
certain final syllables--not eliding them or contracting them with the
syllables following upon them, but passing over them lightly, so that,
without being inaudible, they may at the same time not interfere with the
rhythm or beat of the verse.  This usage, by adding to the variety,
incontestably adds to the flexibility and beauty of Chaucer's
versification.)

With regard to the most important of them is it not too much to say that
instinct and experience will very speedily combine to indicate to an
intelligent reader where the poet has resorted to it.  WITHOUT
intelligence on the part of the reader, the beautiful harmonies of Mr.
Tennyson's later verse remain obscure; so that, taken in this way the most
musical of English verse may seem as difficult to read as the most rugged;
but in the former case the lesson is learnt not to be lost again, in the
latter the tumbling is ever beginning anew, as with the rock of Sisyphus.
There is nothing that can fairly be called rugged in the verse of Chaucer.

And fortunately there are not many pages in this poet's works devoid of
lines or passages the music of which cannot escape any ear, however
unaccustomed it may be to his diction and versification.  What is the
nature of the art at whose bidding ten monosyllables arrange themselves
into a line of the exquisite cadence of the following:--

And she was fair, as is the rose in May?

Nor would it be easy to find lines surpassing in their melancholy charm
Chaucer's version of the lament of Medea, when deserted by Jason,--a
passage which makes the reader neglectful of the English poet's modest
hint that the letter of the Colchian princess may be found at full length
in Ovid.  The lines shall be quoted verbatim, though not literatim; and
perhaps no better example, and none more readily appreciable by a modern
ear, could be given than the fourth of them of the harmonious effect of
Chaucer's usage of SLURRING, referred to above:--

Why liked thee my yellow hair to see
More than the boundes of mine honesty?
Why liked me thy youth and thy fairness
And of thy tongue the infinite graciousness?
O, had'st thou in thy conquest dead y-bee(n),
Full myckle untruth had there died with thee.

Qualities and powers such as the above, have belonged to poets of very
various times and countries before and after Chaucer.  But in addition to
these he most assuredly possessed others, which are not usual among the
poets of our nation, and which, whencesoever they had come to him
personally, had not, before they made their appearance in him, seemed
indigenous to the English soil.  It would indeed be easy to misrepresent
the history of English poetry, during the period which Chaucer's advent
may be said to have closed, by ascribing to it a uniformly solemn and
serious, or even dark and gloomy, character.  Such a description would not
apply to the poetry of the period before the Norman Conquest, though, in
truth, little room could be left for the play of fancy or wit in the
hammered-out war-song, or in the long-drawn scriptural paraphrase.  Nor
was it likely that a contagious gaiety should find an opportunity of
manifesting itself in the course of the versification of grave historical
chronicles, or in the tranquil objective reproduction of the endless
traditions of British legend.  Of the popular songs belonging to the
period after the Norman Conquest, the remains which furnish us with direct
or indirect evidence concerning them hardly enable us to form an opinion.
But we know that (the cavilling spirit of Chaucer's burlesque "Rhyme of
Sir Thopas" notwithstanding) the efforts of English metrical romance in
the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were neither few nor feeble,
although these romances were chiefly translations, sometimes abridgments
to boot--even the Arthurian cycle having been only imported across the
Channel, though it may have thus come back to its original home.  There is
some animation in at least one famous chronicle in verse, dating from
about the close of the thirteenth century; there is real spirit in the
war-songs of Minot in the middle of the fourteenth; and from about its
beginnings dates a satire full of broad fun concerning the jolly life led
by the monks.  But none of these works or of those contemporary with them
show that innate lightness and buoyancy of tone, which seems to add wings
to the art of poetry.  Nowhere had the English mind found so real an
opportunity of poetic utterance in the days of Chaucer's own youth as in
Langland's unique work, national in its allegorical form and in its
alliterative metre; and nowhere had this utterance been more stern and
severe.

No sooner, however, has Chaucer made his appearance as a poet, than he
seems to show what mistress's badge he wears, which party of the two that
have at most times divided among them a national literature and its
representatives he intends to follow.  The burden of his song is "Si douce
est la marguerite:" he has learnt the ways of French gallantry as if to
the manner born, and thus becomes, as it were without hesitation or
effort, the first English love-poet.  Nor--though in the course of his
career his range of themes, his command of materials, and his choice of
forms are widely enlarged--is the gay banner under which he has ranged
himself ever deserted by him.  With the exception of the "House of Fame,"
there is not one of his longer poems of which the passion of love, under
one or another of its aspects, does not either constitute the main subject
or (as in the "Canterbury Tales") furnish the greater part of the
contents.  It is as a love-poet that Gower thinks of Chaucer when paying a
tribute to him in his own verse; it is to the attacks made upon him in his
character as a love-poet, and to his consciousness of what he has achieved
as such, that he gives expression in the "Prologue" to the "Legend of Good
Women," where his fair advocate tells the God of Love:--

The man hath served you of his cunning,
And furthered well your law in his writing,
All be it that he cannot well indite,
Yet hath he made unlearned folk delight
To serve you in praising of your name.

And so he resumes his favourite theme once more, to tell, as the "Man of
Law" says, "of lovers up and down, more than Ovid makes mention of in his
old 'Epistles.'"  This fact alone--that our first great English poet was
also our first English love-poet, properly so called--would have sufficed
to transform our poetic literature through his agency.

What, however, calls for special notice, in connexion with Chaucer's
special poetic quality of gaiety and brightness, is the preference which
he exhibits for treating the joyous aspects of this many-sided passion.
Apart from the "Legend of Good Women," which is specially designed to give
brilliant examples of the faithfulness of women under circumstances of
trial, pain, and grief, and from two or three of the "Canterbury Tales,"
he dwells with consistent preference on the bright side of love, though
remaining a stranger to its divine radiance, which shines forth so fully
upon us out of the pages of Spenser.  Thus, in the "Assembly of Fowls" all
is gaiety and mirth, as indeed beseems the genial neighbourhood of Cupid's
temple.  Again, in "Troilus and Cressid," the earlier and cheerful part of
the love-story is that which he developes with unmistakeable sympathy and
enjoyment, and in his hands this part of the poem becomes one of the most
charming poetic narratives of the birth and growth of young love, which
our literature possesses--a soft and sweet counterpart to the consuming
heat of Marlowe's unrivalled "Hero and Leander."  With Troilus it was love
at first sight--with Cressid a passion of very gradual growth.  But so
full of nature is the narrative of this growth, that one is irresistibly
reminded at more than one point of the inimitable creations of the great
modern master in the description of women's love.  Is there not a touch of
Gretchen in Cressid, retiring into her chamber to ponder over the first
revelation to her of the love of Troilus?--

Cressid arose, no longer there she stayed,
But straight into her closet went anon,
And set her down, as still as any stone,
And every word gan up and down to wind,
That he had said, as it came to her mind.

And is there not a touch of Clarchen in her--though with a difference--
when from her casement she blushingly beholds her lover riding past in
triumph:

So like a man of armes and a knight
He was to see, filled full of high prowess,
For both he had a body, and a might
To do that thing, as well as hardiness;
And eke to see him in his gear him dress,
So fresh, so young, so wieldly seemed he,
It truly was a heaven him for to see.

His helm was hewn about in twenty places,
That by a tissue hung his back behind,
His shield was dashed with strokes of swords and maces
In which men mighte many an arrow find
That pierced had the horn and nerve and rind;
And aye the people cried: "Here comes our joy,
And, next his brother, holder up of Troy."

Even in the very "Book of the Duchess," the widowed lover describes the
maiden charms of his lost wife with so lively a freshness as almost to
make one forget that it is a LOST wife whose praises are being recorded.

The vivacity and joyousness of Chaucer's poetic temperament, however, show
themselves in various other ways besides his favourite manner of treating
a favourite theme.  They enhance the spirit of his passages of dialogue,
and add force and freshness to his passages of description.  They make him
amusingly impatient of epical lengths, abrupt in his transitions, and
anxious, with an anxiety usually manifested by readers rather than by
writers, to come to the point, "to the great effect," as he is wont to
call it.  "Men," he says, "may overlade a ship or barge, and therefore I
will skip at once to the effect, and let all the rest slip."  And he
unconsciously suggests a striking difference between himself and the great
Elizabethan epic poet who owes so much to him, when he declines to make as
long a tale of the chaff or of the straw as of the corn, and to describe
all the details of a marriage-feast seriatim:

The fruit of every tale is for to say:
They eat and drink, and dance and sing and play.

This may be the fruit; but epic poets, from Homer downwards, have been
generally in the habit of not neglecting the foliage.  Spenser in
particular has that impartial copiousness which we think it our duty to
admire in the Ionic epos, but which, if the truth were told, has prevented
generations of Englishmen from acquiring an intimate personal acquaintance
with the "Fairy Queen."  With Chaucer the danger certainly rather lay in
an opposite direction.  Most assuredly he can tell a story with admirable
point and precision, when he wishes to do so.  Perhaps no better example
of his skill in this respect could be cited than the "Manciple's Tale,"
with its rapid narrative, its major and minor catastrophe, and its concise
moral ending thus:--

My son, beware, and be no author new
Of tidings, whether they be false or true;
Whereso thou comest, among high or low,
Keep well thy tongue, and think upon the crow.

At the same time, his frequently recurring announcements of his desire to
be brief have the effect of making his narrative appear to halt, and thus
unfortunately defeat their own purpose.  An example of this may be found
in the "Knight's Tale," a narrative poem of which, in contrast with its
beauties, a want of evenness is one of the chief defects.  It is not that
the desire to suppress redundancies is a tendency deserving anything but
commendation in any writer, whether great or small; but rather, that the
art of concealing art had not yet dawned upon Chaucer.  And yet, few
writers of any time have taken a more evident pleasure in the process of
literary production, and have more visibly overflowed with sympathy for,
or antipathy against, the characters of their own creation.  Great
novelists of our own age have often told their readers, in prefaces to
their fictions or in quasi-confidential comments upon them, of the
intimacy in which they have lived with the offspring of their own brain,
to them far from shadowy beings.  But only the naivete of Chaucer's
literary age, together with the vivacity of his manner of thought and
writing, could place him in so close a personal relation towards the
personages and the incidents of his poems.  He is overcome by "pity and
ruth" as he reads of suffering, and his eyes "wax foul and sore" as he
prepares to tell of its infliction.  He compassionates "love's servants"
as if he were their own "brother dear;" and into his adaptation of the
eventful story of Constance (the "Man of Law's Tale") he introduces
apostrophe upon apostrophe, to the defenceless condition of his heroine--
to her relentless enemy the Sultana, and to Satan, who ever makes his
instrument of women "when he will beguile"--to the drunken messenger who
allowed the letter carried by him to be stolen from him,--and to the
treacherous Queen-mother who caused them to be stolen.  Indeed, in
addressing the last-named personage, the poet seems to lose all control
over himself.

O Domegild, I have no English digne
Unto thy malice and thy tyranny:
And therefore to the fiend I thee resign,
Let him at length tell of thy treachery.
Fye, mannish, fye!--Oh nay, by God, I lie;
Fye fiendish spirit, for I dare well tell,
Though thou here walk, thy spirit is in hell.

At the opening of the "Legend of Ariadne" he bids Minos redden with shame;
and towards its close, when narrating how Theseus sailed away, leaving his
true-love behind, he expresses a hope that the wind may drive the traitor
"a twenty devil way."  Nor does this vivacity find a less amusing
expression in so trifling a touch as that in the "Clerk's Tale," where the
domestic sent to deprive Griseldis of her boy becomes, eo ipso as it were,
"this ugly sergeant."

Closely allied to Chaucer's liveliness and gaiety of disposition, and in
part springing from them, are his keen sense of the ridiculous and the
power of satire which he has at his command.  His humour has many
varieties, ranging from the refined and half-melancholy irony of the
"House of Fame" to the ready wit of the sagacious uncle of Cressid, the
burlesque fun of the inimitable "Nun's Priest's Tale," and the very gross
salt of the "Reeve," the "Miller," and one or two others.  The springs of
humour often capriciously refuse to allow themselves to be discovered; nor
is the satire of which the direct intention is transparent invariably the
most effective species of satire.  Concerning, however, Chaucer's use of
the power which he in so large a measure possessed, viz. that of covering
with ridicule the palpable vices or weaknesses of the classes or kinds of
men represented by some of his character-types, one assertion may be made
with tolerable safety.  Whatever may have been the first stimulus and the
ultimate scope of the wit and humour which he here expended, they are NOT
to be explained as moral indignation in disguise.  And in truth Chaucer's
merriment flows spontaneously from a source very near the surface; he is
so extremely diverting, because he is so extremely diverted himself.

Herein, too, lies the harmlessness of Chaucer's fun.  Its harmlessness, to
wit, for those who are able to read him in something like the spirit in
which he wrote--never a very easy achievement with regard to any author,
and one which the beginner and the young had better be advised to abstain
from attempting with Chaucer in the overflow of his more or less
unrestrained moods.  At all events, the excuse of gaiety of heart--the
plea of that vieil esprit Gaulois which is so often, and very rarely
without need, invoked in an exculpatory capacity by modern French
criticism--is the best defence ever made for Chaucer's laughable
irregularities, either by his apologists or by himself.  "Men should not,"
he says, and says very truly, "make earnest of game."  But when he
audaciously defends himself against the charge of impropriety by declaring
that he must tell stories IN CHARACTER, and coolly requests any person who
may find anything in one of his tales objectionable to turn to another:--

For he shall find enough, both great and small
Of storial thing that toucheth gentleness,
Likewise morality and holiness;
Blame ye not me, if ye should choose amiss--

we are constrained to shake our heads at the transparent sophistry of the
plea, which requires no exposure.  For Chaucer knew very well how to give
life and colour to his page without recklessly disregarding bounds the
neglect of which was even in his day offensive to many besides the
"PRECIOUS folk" of whom he half derisively pretends to stand in awe.  In
one instance he defeated his own purpose; for the so-called "Cook's Tale
of Gamelyn" was substituted by some earlier editor for the original
"Cook's Tale," which has thus in its completed form become a rarity
removed beyond the reach of even the most ardent of curiosity hunters.
Fortunately, however, Chaucer spoke the truth when he said that from this
point of view he had written very differently at different times; no
whiter pages remain than many of his.

But the realism of Chaucer is something more than exuberant love of fun
and light-hearted gaiety.  He is the first great painter of character,
because he is the first great observer of it among modern European
writers.  His power of comic observation need not be dwelt upon again,
after the illustrations of it which have been incidentally furnished in
these pages.  More especially with regard to the manners and ways of
women, which often, while seeming so natural to women themselves, appear
so odd to male observers, Chaucer's eye was ever on the alert.  But his
works likewise contain passages displaying a penetrating insight into the
minds of men, as well as a keen eye for their manners, together with a
power of generalising, which, when kept within due bonds, lies at the root
of the wise knowledge of humankind so admirable to us in our great
essayists, from Bacon to Addison and his modern successors.  How truly,
for instance, in "Troilus and Cressid," Chaucer observes on the
enthusiastic belief of converts, the "strongest-faithed" of men, as he
understands!  And how fine is the saying as to the suspiciousness
characteristic of lewd, (i.e. ignorant,) people, that to things which are
made more subtly

Than they can in their lewdness comprehend,

they gladly give the worst interpretation which suggests itself!  How
appositely the "Canon's Yeoman" describes the arrogance of those who are
too clever by half; "when a man has an over-great wit," he says, "it very
often chances to him to misuse it"!  And with how ripe a wisdom, combined
with ethics of true gentleness, the honest "Franklin," at the opening of
his "Tale," discourses on the uses and the beauty of long-suffering:--

For one thing, sires, safely dare I say,
That friends the one the other must obey,
If they will longe holde company.
Love will not be constrained by mastery.
When mastery comes, the god of love anon
Beateth his wings--and, farewell! he is gone.
Love is a thing as any spirit free.
Women desire, by nature, liberty,
And not to be constrained as a thrall,
And so do men, if I the truth say shall.
Look, who that is most patient in love,
He is at his advantage all above.
A virtue high is patience, certain,
Because it vanquisheth, as clerks explain,
Things to which rigour never could attain.
For every word men should not chide and plain;
Learn ye to suffer, or else, so may I go,
Ye shall it learn, whether ye will or no.
For in this world certain no wight there is
Who neither doth nor saith some time amiss.
Sickness or ire, or constellation,
Wine, woe, or changing of complexion,
Causeth full oft to do amiss or speak.
For every wrong men may not vengeance wreak:
After a time there must be temperance
With every wight that knows self-governance.

It was by virtue of his power of observing and drawing character, above
all, that Chaucer became the true predecessor of two several growths in
our literature, in both of which characterisation forms a most important
element,--it might perhaps be truly said, the element which surpasses all
others in importance.  From this point of view the dramatic poets of the
Elizabethan age remain unequalled by any other school or group of
dramatists, and the English novelists of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries by the representatives of any other development of prose-
fiction.  In the art of construction, in the invention and the arrangement
of incident, these dramatists and novelists may have been left behind by
others; in the creation of character they are on the whole without rivals
in their respective branches of literature.  To the earlier at least of
these growths Chaucer may be said to have pointed the way.  His
personages, more especially of course, as has been seen, those who are
assembled together in the "Prologue" to the "Canterbury Tales," are not
mere phantasms of the brain, or even mere actual possibilities, but real
human beings, and types true to the likeness of whole classes of men and
women, or to the mould in which all human nature is cast.  This is upon
the whole the most wonderful, as it is perhaps the most generally
recognised of Chaucer's gifts.  It would not of itself have sufficed to
make him a great dramatist, had the drama stood ready for him as a
literary form into which to pour the inspirations of his genius, as it
afterwards stood ready for our great Elizabethans.  But to it were added
in him that perception of a strong dramatic situation, and that power of
finding the right words for it, which have determined the success of many
plays, and the absence of which materially detracts from the completeness
of the effect of others, high as their merits may be in other respects.
How thrilling, for instance, is that rapid passage across the stage, as
one might almost call it, of the unhappy Dorigen in the "Franklin's Tale!"
The antecedents of the situation, to be sure, are, as has been elsewhere
suggested, absurd enough; but who can fail to feel that spasm of anxious
sympathy with which a powerful dramatic situation in itself affects us,
when the wife, whom for truth's sake her husband has bidden be untrue to
him, goes forth on her unholy errand of duty?  "Whither so fast?" asks the
lover:

And she made answer, half as she were mad:
"Unto the garden, as my husband bade,
My promise for to keep, alas! alas!"

Nor, as the abbreviated prose version of the "Pardoner's Tale" given above
will suffice to show, was Chaucer deficient in the art of dramatically
arranging a story; while he is not excelled by any of our non-dramatic
poets in the spirit and movement of his dialogue.  The "Book of the
Duchess" and the "House of Fame," but more especially "Troilus and
Cressid" and the connecting passages between some of the "Canterbury
Tales," may be referred to in various illustration of this.

The vividness of his imagination, which conjures up, so to speak, the very
personality of his characters before him, and the contagious force of his
pathos, which is as true and as spontaneous as his humour, complete in him
the born dramatist.  We can see Constance as with our own eyes, in the
agony of her peril:--

Have ye not seen some time a pallid face
Among a press, of him that hath been led
Towards his death, where him awaits no grace,
And such a colour in his face hath had,
Men mighte know his face was so bested
'Mong all the other faces in that rout?
So stands Constance, and looketh her about.

And perhaps there is no better way of studying the general character of
Chaucer's pathos, than a comparison of the "Monk's Tale" from which this
passage is taken, and the "Clerk's Tale," with their originals.  In the
former, for instance, the prayer of Constance, when condemned through
Domegild's guilt to be cast adrift once more on the waters, her piteous
words and tenderness to her little child, as it lies weeping in her arm,
and her touching leave-taking from the land of the husband who has
condemned her,--all these are Chaucer's own.  So also are parts of one of
the most affecting passages in the "Clerk's Tale"--Griseldis' farewell to
her daughter.  But it is as unnecessary to lay a finger upon lines and
passages illustrating Chaucer's pathos, as upon others illustrating his
humour.

Thus, then, Chaucer was a born dramatist; but fate willed it, that the
branch of our literature which might probably have of all been the best
suited to his genius was not to spring into life till he and several
generations after him had passed away.  To be sure, during the fourteenth
century, the so-called miracle-plays flourished abundantly in England, and
were, as there is every reason to believe, already largely performed by
the trading-companies of London and the towns.  The allusions in Chaucer
to these beginnings of our English drama are, however, remarkably scanty.
The "Wife of Bath" mentions plays of miracles among the other occasions of
religious sensation haunted by her, clad in her gay scarlet gown,--
including vigils, processions, preaching, pilgrimages, and marriages.  And
the jolly parish-clerk of the "Miller's Tale," we are informed, at times,
in order to show his lightness and his skill, played "Herod on a scaffold
high"--thus, by the bye, emulating the parish clerks of London, who are
known to have been among the performers of miracles in the Middle Ages.
The allusion to Pilate's voice in the "Miller's Prologue," and that in the
"Tale" to

The sorrow of Noah with his fellowship
That he had ere he got his wife to ship,

seem likewise dramatic reminiscences; and the occurrence of these three
allusions in a single "Tale" and its "Prologue" would incline one to think
that Chaucer had recently amused himself at one of these performances.
But plays are not mentioned among the entertainments enumerated at the
opening of the "Pardoner's Tale"; and it would in any case have been
unlikely that Chaucer should have paid much attention to diversions which
were long chiefly "visited" by the classes with which he could have no
personal connexion, and even at a much later date were dissociated in
men's minds from poetry and literature.  Had he ever written anything
remotely partaking of the nature of a dramatic piece, it could at the most
have been the words of the songs in some congratulatory royal
pageant such as Lydgate probably wrote on the return of Henry V after
Agincourt; though there is not the least reason for supposing Chaucer to
have taken so much interest in the "ridings" through the City which
occupied many a morning of the idle apprentice of the "Cook's Tale,"
Perkyn Revellour.  It is perhaps more surprising to find Chaucer, who was
a reader of several Latin poets, and who had heard of more, both Latin and
Greek, show no knowledge whatever of the ancient classical drama, with
which he may accordingly be fairly concluded to have been wholly
unacquainted.

To one further aspect of Chaucer's realism as a poet reference has already
been made; but a final mention of it may most appropriately conclude this
sketch of his poetical characteristics.  His descriptions of nature are as
true as his sketches of human character; and incidental touches in him
reveal his love of the one as unmistakeably as his unflagging interest in
the study of the other.  Even these May-morning exordia, in which he was
but following a fashion--faithfully observed both by the French trouveres
and by the English romances translated from their productions, and not
forgotten by the author of the earlier part of the "Roman de la Rose"--
always come from his hands with the freshness of natural truth.  They
cannot be called original in conception, and it would be difficult to
point out in them anything strikingly original in execution; yet they
cannot be included among those matter-of-course notices of morning and
evening, sunrise and sunset, to which so many poets have accustomed us
since (be it said with reverence) Homer himself.  In Chaucer these
passages make his page "as fresh as is the month of May."  When he went
forth on these April and May mornings, it was not solely with the intent
of composing a roundelay or a marguerite; but we may be well assured, he
allowed the song of the little birds, the perfume of the flowers, and the
fresh verdure of the English landscape, to sink into his very soul.  For
nowhere does he seem, and nowhere could he have been, more open to the
influence which he received into himself, and which in his turn he
exercised, and exercises, upon others, than when he was in fresh contact
with nature.  In this influence lies the secret of his genius; in his
poetry there is LIFE.


CHAPTER 4.  EPILOGUE.

The legacy which Chaucer left to our literature was to fructify in the
hands of a long succession of heirs; and it may be said, with little fear
of contradiction, that at no time has his fame been fresher and his
influence upon our poets--and upon our painters as well as our poets--more
perceptible than at the present day.  When Gower first put forth his
"Confessio Amantis," we may assume that Chaucer's poetical labours, of the
fame of which his brother-poet declared the land to be full, had not yet
been crowned by his last and greatest work.  As a poet, therefore, Gower
in one sense owes less to Chaucer than did many of their successors;
though, on the other hand it may be said with truth that to Chaucer is due
the fact, that Gower (whose earlier productions were in French and in
Latin) ever became a poet at all.  The "Confessio Amantis" is no book for
all times like the "Canterbury Tales"; but the conjoined names of Chaucer
and Gower added strength to one another in the eyes of the generations
ensuing, little anxious as these generations were to distinguish which of
the pair was really the first to it "garnish our English rude" with the
flowers of a new poetic diction and art of verse.

The Lancaster period of our history had its days of national glory as well
as of national humiliation, and indisputably, as a whole, advanced the
growth of the nation towards political manhood.  But it brought with it no
golden summer to fulfil the promises of the spring-tide of our modern
poetical literature.  The two poets whose names stand forth from the
barren after-season of the earlier half of the fifteenth century, were,
both of them, according to their own profession, disciples of Chaucer.  In
truth, however, Occleve, the only name-worthy poetical writer of the reign
of Henry IV, seems to have been less akin as an author to Chaucer than to
Gower, while his principal poem manifestly was, in an even greater degree
than the "Confessio Amantis," a severely learned or, as its author terms
it, unbuxom book.  Lydgate, on the other hand, the famous monk of Bury,
has in him something of the spirit as well as of the manner of Chaucer,
under whose advice he is said to have composed one of his principal poems.
Though a monk, he was no stay-at-home or do-nothing; like him of the
"Canterbury Tales," we may suppose Lydgate to have scorned the maxim that
a monk out of his cloister is like a fish out of water; and doubtless many
days which he could spare from the instruction of youth at St. Edmund's
Bury were spent about the London streets, of the sights and sounds of
which he has left us so vivacious a record--a kind of farcical supplement
to the "Prologue" of the "Canterbury Tales."  His literary career, part of
which certainly belongs to the reign of Henry V, has some resemblance to
Chaucer's, though it is less regular and less consistent with itself; and
several of his poems bear more or less distinct traces of Chaucer's
influence.  The "Troy-book" is not founded on "Troilus and Cressid,"
though it is derived from the sources which had fed the original of
Chaucer's poem; but the "Temple of Glass" seems to have been an imitation
of the "House of Fame"; and the "Story of Thebes" is actually introduced
by its author as an additional "Canterbury Tale," and challenges
comparison with the rest of the series into which it asks admittance.
Both Occleve and Lydgate enjoyed the patronage of a prince of genius
descended from the House, with whose founder Chaucer was so closely
connected--Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester.  Meanwhile, the sovereign of a
neighbouring kingdom was in all probability himself the agent who
established the influence of Chaucer as predominant in the literature of
his native land.  The long though honourable captivity in England of King
James I of Scotland--the best poet among kings and the best king among
poets, as he has been antithetically called--was consoled by the study of
the "hymns" of his "dear masters, Chaucer and Gower," for the happiness of
whose souls he prays at the close of his poem, "The King's Quair."  That
most charming of love-allegories, in which the Scottish king sings the
story of his captivity and of his deliverance by the sweet messenger of
love, not only closely imitates Chaucer in detail, more especially at its
opening, but is pervaded by his spirit.  Many subsequent Scottish poets
imitated Chaucer, and some of them loyally acknowledged their debts to
him.  Gawin Douglas in his "Palace of Honour," and Henryson in his
"Testament of Cressid" and elsewhere, are followers of the southern
master.  The wise and brave Sir David Lyndsay was familiar with his
writings; and he was not only occasionally imitated, but praised with
enthusiastic eloquence by William Dunbar, that "darling of the Scottish
Muses," whose poetical merits Sir Walter Scott, from some points of view,
can hardly be said to have exaggerated, when declaring him to have been
"justly raised to a level with Chaucer by every judge of poetry, to whom
his obsolete language has not rendered him unintelligble."  Dunbar knew
that this Scottish language was but a form of that which, as he declared,
Chaucer had made to "surmount every terrestrial tongue, as far as midnight
is surmounted by a May morning."

Meanwhile, in England, the influence of Chaucer continued to live even
during the dreary interval which separates from one another two important
epochs of our literary history.  Now, as in the days of the Norman kings,
ballads orally transmitted were the people's poetry; and one of these
popular ballads carried the story of "Patient Grissel" into regions where
Chaucer's name was probably unknown.  When, after the close of the
troubled season of the Roses, our Poetic literature showed the first signs
of a revival, they consisted in a return to the old masters of the
fourteenth century.  The poetry of Hawes, the learned author of the
crabbed "Pastime of Pleasure," exhibits an undeniable continuity with that
of Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate, to which triad he devotes a chapter of
panegyric.  Hawes, however, presses into the service of his allegory not
only all the Virtues and all the Vices, whom from habit we can tolerate in
such productions, but also Astronomy, Geometry, Arithmetic, and the rest
of the seven Daughters of Doctrine, whom we CANNOT; and is altogether
inferior to the least of his models.  It is at the same time to his credit
that he seems painfully aware of his inability to cope with either Chaucer
or Lydgate as to vigour of invention.  There is in truth, more of the
dramatic spirit of Chaucer in Barklay's "Ship of Fools," which, though
essentially a translation, achieved in England the popularity of an
original work.  For this poem, like the "Canterbury Tales," introduces
into its admirable framework a variety of lifelike sketches of character
and manners; it has in it that dramatic element which is so Chaucerian a
characteristic.  But the aim of its author was didactic, which Chaucer's
had never been.

When with the poems of Surrey and Wyatt, and with the first attempts in
the direction of the regular drama, the opening of the second great age in
our literature approached, and when, about half a century afterwards, that
age actually opened with an unequalled burst of varied productivity, it
would seem as if Chaucer's influence might naturally enough have passed
away, or at least become obscured.  Such was not, however, the case, and
Chaucer survived into the age of the English Renascence as an established
English classic, in which capacity Caxton had honoured him by twice
issuing an edition of his works from the Westminster printing-press.
Henry VIII's favourite, the reckless but pithy satirist, Skelton, was
alive to the merits of his great predecessor, and Skelton's patron,
William Thynne, a royal official, busied himself with editing Chaucer's
works.  The loyal servant of Queen Mary, the wise and witty John Heywood,
from whose "Interludes" the step is so short to the first regular English
comedy, in one of these pieces freely plagiarised a passage in the
"Canterbury Tales."  Tottel, the printer of the favourite poetic
"Miscellany" published shortly before Queen Elizabeth's accession,
included in his collection the beautiful lines, cited above, called "Good
Counsel of Chaucer."  And when, at last, the Elizabethan era properly so-
called began, the proof was speedily given that geniuses worthy of holding
fellowship with Chaucer had assimilated into their own literary growth
what was congruous to it in his, just as he had assimilated to himself--
not always improving, but hardly ever merely borrowing or taking over--
much that he had found in the French trouveres, and in Italian poetry and
prose.  The first work which can be included in the great period of
Elizabethan literature is the "Shepherd's Calendar," where Spenser is
still in a partly imitative stage; and it is Chaucer whom he imitates and
extols in his poem, and whom his alter ego, the mysterious "E.K.," extols
in preface and notes.  The longest of the passages in which reference is
made by Spenser to Chaucer, under the pseudonym of Tityrus, is more
especially noteworthy, both as showing the veneration of the younger for
the older poet, and as testifying to the growing popularity of Chaucer at
the time when Spenser wrote.

The same great poet's debt to his revered predecessor in the "Daphnaida"
has been already mentioned.  The "Fairy Queen" is the masterpiece of an
original mind, and its supreme poetic quality is a lofty magnificence upon
the whole foreign to Chaucer's genius; but Spenser owed something more
than his archaic forms to "Tityrus," with whose style he had erst
disclaimed all ambition to match his pastoral pipe.  In a well-known
passage of his great epos he declares that it is through sweet infusion of
the older poet's own spirit that he, the younger, follows the footing of
his feet, in order so the rather to meet with his meaning.  It was this,
the romantic spirit proper, which Spenser sought to catch from Chaucer,
but which, like all those who consciously seek after it, he transmuted
into a new quality and a new power.  With Spenser the change was into
something mightier and loftier.  He would, we cannot doubt, readily have
echoed the judgment of his friend and brother-poet concerning Chaucer.  "I
know not," writes Sir Philip Sidney, "whether to marvel more, either that
he in that misty time could see so clearly, or that we, in this clear age,
walk so stumblingly after him.  Yet had he," adds Sidney with the
generosity of a true critic, who is not lost in wonder at his own
cleverness in discovering defects, "great wants, fit to be forgiven in so
reverent an antiquity."  And yet a third Elizabethan, Michael Drayton,
pure of tone and high of purpose, joins his voice to those of Spenser and
Sidney, hailing in the "noble Chaucer"

--the first of those that ever brake
Into the Muses' treasure and first spake
In weighty numbers,

and placing Gower, with a degree of judgment not reached by his and
Chaucer's immediate successors, in his proper relation of poetic rank to
his younger but greater contemporary.

To these names should be added that of George Puttenham--if he was indeed
the author of the grave and elaborate treatise, dedicated to Lord
Burghley, on "The Art of English Poesy."  In this work mention is
repeatedly made of Chaucer, "father of our English poets;" and his
learning, and "the natural of his pleasant wit," are alike judiciously
commanded.  One of Puttenham's best qualities as a critic is that he never
speaks without his book; and he comes very near to discovering Chaucer's
greatest gift when noticing his excellence in "prosopographia," a term
which to Chaucer would perhaps have seemed to require translation.  At the
obsoleteness of Chaucer's own diction this critic, who writes entirely
"for the better brought-up sort," is obliged to shake his learned head.

Enough has been said in the preceding pages to support the opinion that
among the wants which fell to the lot of Chaucer as a poet, perhaps the
greatest (though Sidney would never have allowed this), was the want of
poetic form most in harmony with his most characteristic gifts.  The
influence of Chaucer upon the dramatists of the Elizabethan age was
probably rather indirect and general than direct and personal; but
indications or illustrations of it may be traced in a considerable number
of these writers, including perhaps among the earliest Richard Edwards as
the author of a non-extant tragedy, "Palamon and Arcite," and among the
latest the author--or authors--of "The Two Noble Kinsmen."  Besides
Fletcher and Shakspere, Greene, Nash and Middleton, and more especially
Jonson (as both poet and grammarian), were acquainted with Chaucer's
writings; so that it is perhaps rather a proof of the widespread
popularity of the "Canterbury Tales" than the reverse, that they were not
largely resorted to for materials by the Elizabethan and Jacobean
dramatists.  Under Charles I "Troilus and Cressid" found a translator in
Sir Francis Kynaston, whom Cartwright congratulated on having made it
possible "that we read Chaucer now without a dictionary."  A personage
however, in Cartwright's best known play, the Antiquary Moth, prefers to
talk on his own account "genuine" Chaucerian English.

To pursue the further traces of the influence of Chaucer through such a
literary aftergrowth as the younger Fletchers, into the early poems of
Milton, would be beyond the purpose of the present essay.  In the
treasure-house of that great poet's mind were gathered memories and
associations innumerable, though the sublimest flights of his genius
soared aloft into regions whither the imagination of none of our earlier
poets had preceded them.  On the other hand, the days have passed for
attention to be spared for the treatment experienced by Chaucer in the
Augustan Age, to which he was a barbarian only to be tolerated if put into
the court-dress of the final period of civilisation.  Still, even thus, he
was not left altogether unread; nor was he in all cases adapted without a
certain measure of success.  The irrepressible vigour, and the frequent
felicity, of Dryden's "Fables" contrast advantageously with the tame
evenness of the "Temple of Fame," an early effort by Pope, who had wit
enough to imitate in a juvenile parody some of the grossest peculiarities
of Chaucer's manner, but who would have been quite ashamed to reproduce
him in a serious literary performance, without the inevitable polish and
cadence of his own style of verse.  Later modernisations--even of those
which a band of poets in some instances singularly qualified for the task
put forth in a collection published in the year 1841, and which, on the
part of some of them at least, was the result of conscientious endeavour--
it is needless to characterise here.  Slight incidental use has been made
of some of these in this essay, the author of which would gladly have
abstained from printing a single modernised phrase or word--most of all
any which he has himself been guilty of re-casting.  The time cannot be
far distant when even the least unsuccessful of such attempts will no
longer be accepted, because no such attempts whatever will be any longer
required.  No Englishman or Englishwoman need go through a very long or
very laborious apprenticeship in order to become able to read, understand,
and enjoy what Chaucer himself wrote.  But if this apprenticeship be too
hard, then some sort of makeshift must be accepted, or antiquity must
remain the "canker-worm" even of a great national poet, as Spenser said it
had already in his day proved to be of Chaucer.

Meanwhile, since our poetic literature has long thrown off the shackles
which forced it to adhere to one particular group of models, he is not a
true English poet who should remain uninfluenced by any of the really
great among his predecessors.  If Chaucer has again, in a special sense,
become the "master dear and father reverent" of some of our living poets,
in a wider sense he must hold this relation to them all and to all their
successors, so long as he continues to be known and understood.  As it is,
there are few worthies of our literature whose names seem to awaken
throughout the English-speaking world a readier sentiment of familiar
regard; and in New England, where the earliest great poet of Old England
is cherished not less warmly than among ourselves, a kindly cunning had
thus limned his likeness:--

An old man in a lodge within a park;
The chamber walls depicted all around
With portraiture of huntsman, hawk and hound,
And the hurt deer.  He listeneth to the lark,
Whose song comes with the sunshine through the dark
Of painted glass in leaden lattice bound;
He listeneth and he laugheth at the sound,
Then writeth in a book like any clerk.
He is the poet of the dawn, who wrote
The Canterbury Tales, and his old age
Made beautiful with song; and as I read
I hear the crowing cock, I hear the note
Of lark and linnet, and from every page
Rise odours of ploughed field or flowery mead.


GLOSSARY.

Bencite = benedicite.
Clepe, call.
Deem, judge.
Despitous, angry to excess.
Digne, fit;--disdainful.
Frere, friar.
Gentle, well-born.
Keep, care.
Languor, grief.
Meinie, following, household.
Meet, mate (?), measure (?).
Overthwart, across.
Parage, rank, degree.
Press, crowd.
Rede, advise, counsel.
Reeve, steward, bailiff.
Ruth, pity.
Scall, scab.
Shapely, fit.
Sithe, time.
Spiced, nice, scrupulous.
Targe, target, shield.
Y prefix of past participle as in, y-bee = bee(n).
While, time; to quite his while, to reward his pains.
Wieldy, active.
Wone, custom, habit.


INDEX.

"A.B.C." ("La Priere de Notre Dame").

"Adam" (Chaucer's Scrivener).

"African."

Albert of Brescia.

"Alcestis."

"Alchemist" (Ben Jonson).

Aldgate.

Alfred, King.

Anne, Queen.

"Antiquary Moth" (Cartwright).

"Ariadne."

Aristophanes.

"Art of English Poesy" (Puttenham).

"Arviragus."

"Assembly of Fowls or Parliament of Birds."

Astrology.

Bailly, Master Harry.  See "Host."

"Ballad of Sir Thopas."

"Ballad sent to King Richard."

Balle, John.

Balzac.

Barklay.

Benedictines.

Berkeley, Sir Edward.

Berners, Lady Juliana.

Bible, Chaucer's knowledge of.

Black Friars.

Black Prince.

Blake, William.

Blanche, Duchess of Lancaster.

Boccaccio.

Boethius.

Bohemia.

"Book of Consolation and Counsel" (Albert of Brescia).

"Book of the Duchess."

"Book of the Leo."

Brembre, Sir Nicholas.

Bretigny, Peace of.

Brigham, Nicholas.

"Bukton."

Burley, Sir John.

Burns, Robert.

Byron.

Cambridge.

"Canace."

"Canon Yeoman's Tale."
The "Canon's Yeoman."
"The Canon."

Canterbury.

Canterbury Pilgrims.

"Canterbury Tales," Chaucer's greatest work.
conjecture as to the composition of.
references to in Prologue to "Legend of Good Women."
characters in.
framework of.
what is Chaucer's obligation to Boccaccio.
popular style of.
language of.
sources of.
Chaucer's method of dealing with his originals.
the two prose tales.
reference to the condition of the poor.
woman in the.
supposed reference to Gower.
Lydgate's Supplements to.
vogue of the, with Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists.

"Carpenter."

Cartwright.

Caxton.

"Ceyx and Alcyone," the tale of.

Charles IV, Emperor.

Charles V, King of France.

Chaucer, Agnes (Chaucer's mother).

"Chaucer's Dream."

Chaucer, Geoffrey, difficulties as to his biography.
the date of his birth.
his name.
his ancestry.
conjecture as to his early years.
enters Prince Lionel's household.
accompanies the prince to France and is taken prisoner.
becomes valet of the chamber of King Edward.
his marriage.
translation of "Roman de la Rose."
promoted to the post of royal squire.
"Book of the Duchess."
missions abroad.
receives grant from the Crown of daily pitcher of wine.
appointed Comptroller of the Customs in the port of London.
permitted to execute the duties by deputy.
granted pension of ten pounds for life.
visits to the Continent.
appointed to the Comptrollership of the Petty Customs in London.
sits in Parliament.
"House of Fame" written.
"Troilus and Cressid."
"Assembly of Fowls."
translation of the "Consolation of Philosophy."
"Legend of Good Women."
loses his Comptrollerships.
appointed Clerk of King Richard's Works.
money difficulties.
death of his wife.
"On the Astrolabe."
his son.
robbed by highwaymen.
granted pension of twenty pounds by King Richard.
"Ballade sent to King Richard."
"Envoy to Scogan."
"Complaint of Chaucer to his Purse."
his pension doubled.
death.
the "Canterbury Tales" left unfinished.

Chaucer, characteristics of.
his personal appearance.
his modesty.
self-containedness.
contained faith.
his attitude to women.
his ideal of the true gentleman.
his opinion about drunkenness.
his reading.
French influences.
Italian influences.
language.
his love of nature.
his literary development.
his mediaevalism.

Chaucer's England, its population.
the Black Death.
London.
national spirit.
trade.
decline of the feudal system.
condition of the people.
the language.
chivalry.
extravagance in dress.
the "Church."
the clergy.
learning.
the life of the nation.

Chaucer's literary heirs.

Chaucer's poetry, its power to please.
music of his verse.
as a love poet.
his joyousness.
his humour.
as an interpreter of character.
his dramatic qualities.
his receptiveness.

Chaucer's times.
his feeling towards the lower classes.
his attitude to the Church.
as an interpreter of his age.

Chaucer, John (Chaucer's father).

Chaucer, Lewis (Chaucer's son).

Chaucer, Philippa (Chaucer's wife).

Chaucer, Richard le.

Chaucer, Thomas (Chaucer's supposed son).

Chettle.

Chivalry.

Clarence, Lionel Duke of.

Cleopatra.

"Clerk's Tale."
the "Clerk."

Colonna, Guido de.

"Complaint of Chaucer to his Purse."

"Complaint of Mars."

"Complaint of the Death of Pity."

"Complaint of the Ploughman."

"Complaint of Venus."

"Confessio Amantis" (Gower).

Congreve.

"Consolation of Philosophy" (Boethius).

Constance, Duchess of Lancaster.

"Constance," the story of.

"Cook's Tale."
the "Cook."

Court of Love.

"Cressid."

"Cuckoo and the Nightingale."

Dante.

"Daphnaida" (Spenser).

Dartmouth.

"Decamerone" (Boccaccio).

Deschamps, Eustace.

Dickens.

Dido.

"Divine Comedy."

"Doctor of Physic."

Dominicans.

Don Quixote.

"Dorigen."

Doglas, Gawin.

Drama in the fourteenth century.

Drayton, Michael.

Dryden.

Dunbar.

"Dunciad."

"Dyer."

"E.K."

"Earthly Paradise" (William Morris).

Edward III.

Edwards, Richard.

Elizabethan drama.

English novel.

"Envoy to Bukton."

"Envoy to Scogan."

"Fables" (Dryden).

"Fairy Queen" (Spenser).

Filostrato (Boccaccio).

Flanders.

Fletcher.

Florence.

"Flower and the Leaf."

France and England.

Francis of Assisi.

Franciscans.

"Franklin's Tale."
the "Franklin."

French literary influences.

"Friar's Tale."
the "Friar."

Froissart.

Genoa.

German criticism.

Gerson.

Gisors, Henry.

Gloucester, Humphrey Duke of.

Gloucester, Thomas Duke of.

Goethe.

Goldsmith.

"Good Counsel of Chaucer."

Gower.

Great Schism.

Greene.

Grey Friars.

Grisseldis, The tale of.

Hallam.

Hatcham, Surrey.

Hawes.

Hawkwood, Sir John.

Henry III.

Henry IV.

Henry V.

Henryson.

Heptameron.

"Hero and Leander" (Marlowe).

Herrick.

Heyroom, Thomas.

Heywood, John.

Homer.

Horne, Mr. R.

"Host," the (Master Harry Bailly).

"House of Fame."

Hugh of Lincoln, legend of.

"Imitation of Christ."

Inner Temple.

Inquisition.

"Interludes" (Heywood).

Italian literary influence.

James I, King of Scotland.

Jason.

John, King of England.

John, King of Bohemia.


John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster.

John of Trevisa.

Jonson, Ben.

Katharine, Duchess of Lancaster.

Kent, county of.

"King's Quair, The."

"Knight's Tale."
the "Knight."

Kynaston, Sir Francis.

Lamb, Charles.

"Lamech."

Lancaster, House of.

Lancaster, Henry, Duke of.

Langland.

"Legend of Ariadne."

"Legend of Good Women."

"Legend of the Saints of Cupid."

Leland.

"Lieutenant Bardolph."

"Life of Saint Cecelia."

"Limitour."

Lollardry.

London.

Longfellow.

Lorris, Guillaume de.

"Love of Palamon and Arcite."

Lydgate.

Lyndsay, Sir David.

Machault.

Madame Eglantine.  See "Prioress."

"Man of Law's Tale."
the "Man of Law."

"Manciple's Tale."
the "Manciple."

Marlowe.

Marot, Clement.

Mary Magdalene, homily on.

Medea.

Mendicant Orders.

"Merchant's Tale."
the "Merchant."

"Merry Wives of Windsor."

Metrical Romances of thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

Meung, Jean de.

Middleton.

"Midsummer Night's Dream."

Milan.

"Miller's Tale."
the "Miller."

Milton.

Minorities.

Minot, Lawrence.

Miracle Plays.

Monastic Orders.

"Monk's Tale."
the "Monk."

"Mort d'Arthure."

Nash.

Nicholas, Sir Harris.

Norwich, Bishop of.

"Nun's Priest's Tale."

Occleve.

"On Perpetual Virginity" (St. Jerome).

"On the Astrolabe."

"Oratio Gallfridi Chaucer."

Ovid.

Oxford.

Padua.

"Palace of Honour" (Gawin Douglas).

"Palamon and Arcite."
tragedy by R. Edwards.

"Pandarus."

"Pardoner's Tale."
the "Pardoner."

Paris.
University of.

Parliament.

"Parson's Tale."
the "Parson."

"Pastime of Pleasure" (Hawes).

Patient Grissel.
"Patient Grissel" (play).

Peasant Insurrection.

Pedro, Don.

"Pentamerone."

"Perkyn Revellour."

Pestilences in fourteenth century.

Petrarch.

"Phantasus."

Philippa, Queen.

"Phillis."

Philpot, John.

"Ploughman."

Pole, William de la.

Pope.

"Praise of Women."

Prayer of Chaucer."

"Prioress" (Madame Eglantine).

"Prologue to the Canterbury Tales."

Puttenham, George.

"Queen Anelida and the false Arcite."

"Reeve's Tale."
the "Reeve."

Reformation, The.

Renascence.

"Rhyme of Sir Thopas."

Richard II.

Richardson.

Roet, Sir Paon de.

"Roman de la Rose."

"Romaunt of the Rose" (translation by Chaucer of "Roman de la Rose").

Rome, Church of.

Ronsard.

"Rosa Anglia."

Sainte-Maur, Benoit.

St. Jerome.

Salisbury, Countess of.

"Scipio."

Scogan, Henry.

Scottish heirs of Chaucer.

"Second Nun's Tale."

Seneca.

"Seven Wise Masters."

Shakspere.

"Shepherd's Calendar."

Sheridan.

"Ship of Fools."

"Shipman."

Sidney, Sir Philip.

"Sir Thomas Norray" (Dunbar).

Skelton.

Southern Road.

Speght.

Spenser.

"Squire's Tale."
the "Squire."

Statute of Provisors.

"Story of Thebes."

Strode, Ralph.

Sudbury, Archbishop.

Suffolk, Michael de la Pole, Earl of.

"Summoner."

Surrey.

Swynford, Sir Hugh.

Tabard Inn.

"Tale of Meliboeus."

"Tarquin."

"Temple of Fame" (Pope).

"Temple of Glass" (Lydgate).

"Teseide" (Boccaccio).

"Testament of Cressid" (Henryson).

"Thisbe."

Thynne, William.

Tieck, Ludwig.

"Tityrus."

Tombstone, Chaucer's.

"Tottel's Miscellany."

"Troilus and Cressid."

"Troy-book" (Lydgate).

"Tullius."

"Two Noble Kinsmen."

Tyrwhitt.

Ugolino, Story of.

Ulster, Elizabeth Countess of.

Universities.

Virgil.

Visconti, Bernardo.

"Vision concerning Piers Plowman."

"Vows of the Heron."

"Vox Clamantis" (Gower).

"Webbe."

Westminster.

"Wife of Bath's Tale."
the "Wife of Bath."

William of Wykeham.

"Words unto his own Scrivener."

Wordsworth.

Wyatt.

Wyclif.

Wycliffism: was Chaucer a Wycliffite?

Yerdely, Adam.





End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of Chaucer, by Adolphus William Ward

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