there are few things more melancholy than the spectacle of literary fossilization. a great writer comes into being, lives, labours and dies. time passes; year by year the sediment of muddy comment and criticism thickens round the great man’s bones. the sediment sets firm; what was once a living organism becomes a thing of marble. on the attainment of total fossilization the great man has become a classic. it becomes increasingly difficult for the members of each succeeding generation to remember that the stony objects which fill the museum cases were once alive. it is often a work of considerable labour to reconstruct the living animal from the fossil shape. but the trouble is generally worth taking. and in no case is it more worth while than in chaucer’s.
with chaucer the ordinary fossilizing process, to which every classical author is subject, has been complicated by the petrifaction of his language. five hundred years have almost sufficed to turn the most living of poets into a substitute on the modern sides of schools for the mental gymnastic of latin and greek. prophetically, chaucer saw the 195fate that awaited him and appealed against his doom:
ye know eke that, in form of speech is change
within a thousand year, and wordes tho
that hadden price, now wonder nice and strange
us thinketh them; and yet they spake them so,
and sped as well in love as men now do.
the body of his poetry may have grown old, but its spirit is still young and immortal. to know that spirit—and not to know it is to ignore something that is of unique importance in the history of our literature—it is necessary to make the effort of becoming familiar with the body it informs and gives life to. the antique language and versification, so “wonder nice and strange” to our ears, are obstacles in the path of most of those who read for pleasure’s sake (not that any reader worthy of the name ever reads for anything else but pleasure); to the pedants they are an end in themselves. theirs is the carcass, but not the soul. between those who are daunted by his superficial difficulties and those who take too much delight in them chaucer finds but few sympathetic readers. i hope in these pages to be able to give a few of the reasons that make chaucer so well worth reading.
chaucer’s art is, by its very largeness and 196objectiveness, extremely difficult to subject to critical analysis. confronted by it, dryden could only exclaim, “here is god’s plenty!”—and the exclamation proves, when all is said, to be the most adequate and satisfying of all criticisms. all that the critic can hope to do is to expand and to illustrate dryden’s exemplary brevity.
“god’s plenty!”—the phrase is a peculiarly happy one. it calls up a vision of the prodigal earth, of harvest fields, of innumerable beasts and birds, of teeming life. and it is in the heart of this living and material world of nature that chaucer lives. he is the poet of earth, supremely content to walk, desiring no wings. many english poets have loved the earth for the sake of something—a dream, a reality, call it which you will—that lies behind it. but there have been few, and, except for chaucer, no poets of greatness, who have been in love with earth for its own sake, with nature in the sense of something inevitably material, something that is the opposite of the supernatural. supreme over everything in this world he sees the natural order, the “law of kind,” as he calls it. the teachings of most of the great prophets and poets are simply protests against the law of kind. chaucer does not protest, he accepts. it is precisely this acceptance that 197makes him unique among english poets. he does not go to nature as the symbol of some further spiritual reality; hills, flowers, sea, and clouds are not, for him, transparencies through which the workings of a great soul are visible. no, they are opaque; he likes them for what they are, things pleasant and beautiful, and not the less delicious because they are definitely of the earth earthy. human beings, in the same way, he takes as he finds, noble and beastish, but, on the whole, wonderfully decent. he has none of that strong ethical bias which is usually to be found in the english mind. he is not horrified by the behaviour of his fellow-beings, and he has no desire to reform them. their characters, their motives interest him, and he stands looking on at them, a happy spectator. this serenity of detachment, this placid acceptance of things and people as they are, is emphasized if we compare the poetry of chaucer with that of his contemporary, langland, or whoever it was that wrote piers plowman.
the historians tell us that the later years of the fourteenth century were among the most disagreeable periods of our national history. english prosperity was at a very low ebb. the black death had exterminated nearly a third of the working population of 198the islands, a fact which, aggravated by the frenzied legislation of the government, had led to the unprecedented labour troubles that culminated in the peasants’ revolt. clerical corruption and lawlessness were rife. all things considered, even our own age is preferable to that in which chaucer lived. langland does not spare denunciation; he is appalled by the wickedness about him, scandalized at the openly confessed vices that have almost ceased to pay to virtue the tribute of hypocrisy. indignation is the inspiration of piers plowman, the righteous indignation of the prophet. but to read chaucer one would imagine that there was nothing in fourteenth-century england to be indignant about. it is true that the pardoner, the friar, the shipman, the miller, and, in fact, most of the canterbury pilgrims are rogues and scoundrels; but, then, they are such “merry harlots” too. it is true that the monk prefers hunting to praying, that, in these latter days when fairies are no more, “there is none other incubus” but the friar, that “purse is the archdeacon’s hell,” and the summoner a villain of the first magnitude; but chaucer can only regard these things as primarily humorous. the fact of people not practising what they preach is an unfailing source of amusement to him. where langland cries aloud 199in anger, threatening the world with hell-fire, chaucer looks on and smiles. to the great political crisis of his time he makes but one reference, and that a comic one:
so hideous was the noyse, ah benedicite!
certes he jakke straw, and his meyné,
ne maden schoutes never half so schrille,
whan that they wolden eny flemyng kille,
as thilke day was mad upon the fox.
peasants may revolt, priests break their vows, lawyers lie and cheat, and the world in general indulge its sensual appetites; why try and prevent them, why protest? after all, they are all simply being natural, they are all following the law of kind. a reasonable man, like himself, “flees fro the pres and dwelles with soothfastnesse.” but reasonable men are few, and it is the nature of human beings to be the unreasonable sport of instinct and passion, just as it is the nature of the daisy to open its eye to the sun and of the goldfinch to be a spritely and “gaylard” creature. the law of kind has always and in everything dominated; there is no rubbing nature against the hair. for
god it wot, there may no man embrace
as to destreyne a thing, the which nature
hath naturelly set in a creature.
take any brid, and put him in a cage,
200and do all thine entent and thy corrage
to foster it tendrely with meat and drynke,
and with alle the deyntees thou canst bethinke,
and keep it all so kyndly as thou may;
although his cage of gold be never so gay,
yet hath this brid, by twenty thousand fold,
lever in a forest, that is wyld and cold,
gon ete wormes, and such wrecchidnes;
for ever this brid will doon his busynes
to scape out of his cage when that he may;
his liberté the brid desireth aye ...
lo, heer hath kynd his dominacioun,
and appetyt flemeth (banishes) discrescioun.
also a she wolf hath a vilayne kynde,
the lewideste wolf that she may fynde,
or least of reputacioun, him will sche take,
in tyme whan hir lust to have a make.
alle this ensaumples tell i by these men
that ben untrewe, and nothing by wommen.
(as the story from which these lines are quoted happens to be about an unfaithful wife, it seems that, in making the female sex immune from the action of the law of kind, chaucer is indulging a little in irony.)
for men han ever a licorous appetit
on lower thing to parforme her delit
than on her wyves, ben they never so faire,
ne never so trewe, ne so debonaire.
nature, deplorable as some of its manifestations may be, must always and inevitably assert itself. the law of kind has power 201even over immortal souls. this fact is the source of the poet’s constantly expressed dislike of celibacy and asceticism. the doctrine that upholds the superiority of the state of virginity over that of wedlock is, to begin with (he holds), a danger to the race. it encourages a process which we may be permitted to call dysgenics—the carrying on of the species by the worst members. the host’s words to the monk are memorable:
allas! why wearest thou so wide a cope?
god give me sorwe! and i were a pope
nought only thou, but every mighty man,
though he were shore brode upon his pan (head)
should han a wife; for all this world is lorn;
religioun hath take up all the corn
of tredyng, and we burel (humble) men ben shrimpes;
of feble trees there cometh wrecchid impes.
this maketh that our heires ben so sclendere
and feble, that they may not wel engendre.
but it is not merely dangerous; it is anti-natural. that is the theme of the wife of bath’s prologue. counsels of perfection are all very well when they are given to those
that wolde lyve parfytly;
but, lordyngs, by your leve, that am not i.
the bulk of us must live as the law of kind enjoins.
202it is characteristic of chaucer’s conception of the world, that the highest praise he can bestow on anything is to assert of it, that it possesses in the highest degree the qualities of its own particular kind. thus of cressida he says:
she was not with the least of her stature,
but all her limbes so well answering
weren to womanhood, that creature
nas never lesse mannish in seeming.
the horse of brass in the squire’s tale is
so well proportioned to be strong,
right as it were a steed of lombardye,
thereto so horsely and so quick of eye.
everything that is perfect of its kind is admirable, even though the kind may not be an exalted one. it is, for instance, a joy to see the way in which the canon sweats:
a cloote-leaf (dock leaf) he had under his hood
for sweat, and for to keep his head from heat.
but it was joye for to see him sweat;
his forehead dropped as a stillatorie
were full of plantain or of peritorie.
the canon is supreme in the category of sweaters, the very type and idea of perspiring humanity; therefore he is admirable and joyous to behold, even as a horse that is supremely 203horsely or a woman less mannish than anything one could imagine. in the same way it is a delight to behold the pardoner preaching to the people. in its own kind his charlatanism is perfect and deserves admiration:
mine handes and my tonge gon so yerne,
that it is joye to see my busynesse.
this manner of saying of things that they are joyous, or, very often, heavenly, is typical of chaucer. he looks out on the world with a delight that never grows old or weary. the sights and sounds of daily life, all the lavish beauty of the earth fill him with a pleasure which he can only express by calling it a “joy” or a “heaven.” it “joye was to see” cressida and her maidens playing together; and
so aungellyke was her native beauté
that like a thing immortal seemede she,
as doth an heavenish parfit creature.
the peacock has angel’s feathers; a girl’s voice is heavenly to hear:
antigone the shene
gan on a trojan song to singen clear,
that it an heaven was her voice to hear.
204one could go on indefinitely multiplying quotations that testify to chaucer’s exquisite sensibility to sensuous beauty and his immediate, almost exclamatory response to it. above all, he is moved by the beauty of “young, fresh folkes, he and she”; by the grace and swiftness of living things, birds and animals; by flowers and placid, luminous, park-like landscapes.
it is interesting to note how frequently chaucer speaks of animals. like many other sages, he perceives that an animal is, in a certain sense, more human in character than a man. for an animal bears the same relation to a man as a caricature to a portrait. in a way a caricature is truer than a portrait. it reveals all the weaknesses and absurdities that flesh is heir to. the portrait brings out the greatness and dignity of the spirit that inhabits the often ridiculous flesh. it is not merely that chaucer has written regular fables, though the nun’s priest’s tale puts him among the great fabulists of the world, and there is also much definitely fabular matter in the parliament of fowls. no, his references to the beasts are not confined to his animal stories alone; they are scattered broadcast throughout his works. he relies for much of his psychology and for much of his most vivid description on the comparison 205of man, in his character and appearance (which with chaucer are always indissolubly blended), with the beasts. take, for example, that enchanting simile in which troilus, stubbornly anti-natural in refusing to love as the law of kind enjoins him, is compared to the corn-fed horse, who has to be taught good behaviour and sound philosophy under the whip:
as proude bayard ginneth for to skip
out of the way, so pricketh him his corn,
till he a lash have of the longe whip,
then thinketh he, “though i prance all biforn,
first in the trace, full fat and newe shorn,
yet am i but an horse, and horses’ law
i must endure and with my feeres draw.”
or, again, women with too pronounced a taste for fine apparel are likened to the cat:
and if the cattes skin be sleek and gay,
she will not dwell in housé half a day,
but forth she will, ere any day be dawet
to show her skin and gon a caterwrawet.
in his descriptions of the personal appearance of his characters chaucer makes constant use of animal characteristics. human beings, both beautiful and hideous, are largely described in terms of animals. it is interesting to see how often in that exquisite description 206of alisoun, the carpenter’s wife, chaucer produces his clearest and sharpest effects by a reference to some beast or bird:
fair was this younge wife, and therewithal
as any weasel her body gent and small ...
but of her song it was as loud and yern
as is the swallow chittering on a barn.
thereto she coulde skip and make a game
as any kid or calf following his dame.
her mouth was sweet as bragot is or meath,
or hoard of apples, laid in hay or heath.
wincing she was, as is a jolly colt,
long as a mast and upright as a bolt.
again and again in chaucer’s poems do we find such similitudes, and the result is always a picture of extraordinary precision and liveliness. here, for example, are a few:
gaylard he was as goldfinch in the shaw,
or,
such glaring eyen had he as an hare;
or,
as piled (bald) as an ape was his skull.
the self-indulgent friars are
like jovinian,
fat as a whale, and walken as a swan.
207the pardoner describes his own preaching in these words:
then pain i me to stretche forth my neck
and east and west upon the people i beck,
as doth a dove, sitting on a barn.
very often, too, chaucer derives his happiest metaphors from birds and beasts. of troy in its misfortune and decline he says: fortune
gan pull away the feathers bright of troy
from day to day.
love-sick troilus soliloquizes thus:
he said: “o fool, now art thou in the snare
that whilom japedest at lovés pain,
now art thou hent, now gnaw thin owné chain.”
the metaphor of troy’s bright feathers reminds me of a very beautiful simile borrowed from the life of the plants:
and as in winter leavés been bereft,
each after other, till the tree be bare,
so that there nis but bark and branches left,
lieth troilus, bereft of each welfare,
ybounden in the blacke bark of care.
and this, in turn, reminds me of that couplet 208in which chaucer compares a girl to a flowering pear-tree:
she was well more blissful on to see
than is the newe parjonette tree.
chaucer is as much at home among the stars as he is among the birds and beasts and flowers of earth. there are some literary men of to-day who are not merely not ashamed to confess their total ignorance of all facts of a “scientific” order, but even make a boast of it. chaucer would have regarded such persons with pity and contempt. his own knowledge of astronomy was wide and exact. those whose education has been as horribly imperfect as my own will always find some difficulty in following him as he moves with easy assurance through the heavens. still, it is possible without knowing any mathematics to appreciate chaucer’s descriptions of the great pageant of the sun and stars as they march in triumph from mansion to mansion through the year. he does not always trouble to take out his astrolabe and measure the progress of “phebus, with his rosy cart”; he can record the god’s movements in more general terms than may be understood even by the literary man of nineteen hundred and twenty-three. here, for example, is a description 209of “the colde frosty seisoun of decembre,” in which matters celestial and earthly are mingled to make a picture of extraordinary richness:
phebus wox old and hewed like latoun,
that in his hoté declinacioun
shone as the burned gold, with streames bright;
but now in capricorn adown he light,
where as he shone full pale; i dare well sayn
the bitter frostes with the sleet and rain
destroyed hath the green in every yerd.
janus sit by the fire with double beard,
and drinketh of his bugle horn the wine;
beforn him stont the brawn of tusked swine,
and “noel” cryeth every lusty man.
in astrology he does not seem to have believed. the magnificent passage in the man of law’s tale, where it is said that
in the starres, clearer than is glass,
is written, god wot, whoso can it read,
the death of every man withouten drede,
is balanced by the categorical statement found in the scientific and educational treatise on the astrolabe, that judicial astrology is mere deceit.
his scepticism with regard to astrology is not surprising. highly as he prizes authority, he prefers the evidence of experience, and where that evidence is lacking he is content 210to profess a quiet agnosticism. his respect for the law of kind is accompanied by a complementary mistrust of all that does not appear to belong to the natural order of things. there are moments when he doubts even the fundamental beliefs of the church:
a thousand sythes have i herd men telle
that there is joye in heaven and peyne in helle;
and i accorde well that it be so.
but natheless, this wot i well also
that there is none that dwelleth in this countree
that either hath in helle or heaven y-be.
of the fate of the spirit after death he speaks in much the same style:
his spiryt changed was, and wente there
as i came never, i cannot tellen where;
therefore i stint, i nam no divinistre;
of soules fynde i not in this registre,
ne me list not th’ opiniouns to telle
of hem, though that they witten where they dwelle.
he has no patience with superstitions. belief in dreams, in auguries, fear of the “ravenes qualm or schrychynge of thise owles” are all unbefitting to a self-respecting man:
to trowen on it bothe false and foul is;
alas, alas, so noble a creature
as is a man shall dreaden such ordure!
211by an absurd pun he turns all calchas’s magic arts of prophecy to ridicule:
so when this calkas knew by calkulynge,
and eke by answer of this apollo
that grekes sholden such a people bringe,
through which that troye muste ben fordo,
he cast anon out of the town to go.
it would not be making a fanciful comparison to say that chaucer in many respects resembles anatole france. both men possess a profound love of this world for its own sake, coupled with a profound and gentle scepticism about all that lies beyond this world. to both of them the lavish beauty of nature is a never-failing and all-sufficient source of happiness. neither of them are ascetics; in pain and privation they see nothing but evil. to both of them the notion that self-denial and self-mortification are necessarily righteous and productive of good is wholly alien. both of them are apostles of sweetness and light, of humanity and reasonableness. unbounded tolerance of human weakness and a pity, not the less sincere for being a little ironical, characterize them both. deep knowledge of the evils and horrors of this unintelligible world makes them all the more attached to its kindly beauty. but in 212at least one important respect chaucer shows himself to be the greater, the completer spirit. he possesses, what anatole france does not, an imaginative as well as an intellectual comprehension of things. faced by the multitudinous variety of human character, anatole france exhibits a curious impotence of imagination. he does not understand characters in the sense that, say, tolstoy understands them; he cannot, by the power of imagination, get inside them, become what he contemplates. none of the persons of his creation are complete characters; they cannot be looked at from every side; they are portrayed, as it were, in the flat and not in three dimensions. but chaucer has the power of getting into someone else’s character. his understanding of the men and women of whom he writes is complete; his slightest character sketches are always solid and three-dimensional. the prologue to the canterbury tales, in which the effects are almost entirely produced by the description of external physical features, furnishes us with the most obvious example of his three-dimensional drawing. or, again, take that description in the merchant’s tale of old january and his young wife may after their wedding night. it is wholly a description of external details, yet the result is not 213a superficial picture. we are given a glimpse of the characters in their entirety:
thus laboureth he till that the day gan dawe.
and then he taketh a sop in fine clarré,
and upright in his bed then sitteth he.
and after that he sang full loud and clear,
and kissed his wife and made wanton cheer.
he was all coltish, full of ragerye,
and full of jargon as a flecked pye.
the slacké skin about his necké shaketh,
while that he sang, so chanteth he and craketh.
but god wot what that may thought in her heart,
when she him saw up sitting in his shirt,
in his night cap and with his necké lean;
she praiseth not his playing worth a bean.
but these are all slight sketches. for full-length portraits of character we must turn to troilus and cressida, a work which, though it was written before the fullest maturity of chaucer’s powers, is in many ways his most remarkable achievement, and one, moreover, which has never been rivalled for beauty and insight in the whole held of english narrative poetry. when one sees with what certainty and precision chaucer describes every movement of cressida’s spirit from the first movement she hears of troilus’ love for her to the moment when she is unfaithful to him, one can only wonder why the novel of character should have been so slow 214to make its appearance. it was not until the eighteenth century that narrative artists, using prose as their medium instead of verse, began to rediscover the secrets that were familiar to chaucer in the fourteenth.
troilus and cressida was written, as we have said, before chaucer had learnt to make the fullest use of his powers. in colouring it is fainter, less sharp and brilliant than the best of the canterbury tales. the character studies are there, carefully and accurately worked out; but we miss the bright vividness of presentation with which chaucer was to endow his later art. the characters are all alive and completely seen and understood. but they move, as it were, behind a veil—the veil of that poetic convention which had, in the earliest poems, almost completely shrouded chaucer’s genius, and which, as he grew up, as he adventured and discovered, grew thinner and thinner, and finally vanished like gauzy mist in the sunlight. when troilus and cressida was written the mist had not completely dissipated, and the figures of his creation, complete in conception and execution as they are, are seen a little dimly because of the interposed veil.
the only moment in the poem when chaucer’s insight seems to fail him is at the very end; he has to account for cressida’s unfaithfulness, 215and he is at a loss to know how he shall do it. shakespeare, when he re-handled the theme, had no such difficulty. his version of the story, planned on much coarser lines than chaucer’s, leads obviously and inevitably to the fore-ordained conclusion; his cressida is a minx who simply lives up to her character. what could be more simple? but to chaucer the problem is not so simple. his cressida is not a minx. from the moment he first sets eyes on her chaucer, like his own unhappy troilus, falls head over ears in love. beautiful, gentle, gay; possessing, it is true, somewhat “tendre wittes,” but making up for her lack of skill in ratiocination by the “sudden avysements” of intuition; vain, but not disagreeably so, of her good looks and of her power over so great and noble a knight as troilus; slow to feel love, but once she has yielded, rendering back to troilus passion for passion; in a word, the “least mannish” of all possible creatures—she is to chaucer the ideal of gracious and courtly womanhood. but, alas, the old story tells us that cressida jilted her troilus for that gross prize-fighter of a man, diomed. the woman whom chaucer has made his ideal proves to be no better than she should be; there is a flaw in the crystal. chaucer is infinitely reluctant to admit the 216fact. but the old story is specific in its statement; indeed, its whole point consists in cressida’s infidelity. called upon to explain his heroine’s fall, chaucer is completely at a loss. he makes a few half-hearted attempts to solve the problem, and then gives it up, falling back on authority. the old clerks say it was so, therefore it must be so, and that’s that. the fact is that chaucer pitched his version of the story in a different key from that which is found in the “olde bokes,” with the result that the note on which he is compelled by his respect for authority to close is completely out of harmony with the rest of the music. it is this that accounts for the chief, and indeed the only, defect of the poem—its hurried and boggled conclusion.
i cannot leave cressida without some mention of the doom which was prepared for her by one of chaucer’s worthiest disciples, robert henryson, in some ways the best of the scottish poets of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. shocked by the fact that, in chaucer’s poem, cressida receives no punishment for her infidelity, henryson composed a short sequel, the testament of cresseid, to show that poetic justice was duly performed. diomed, we are told, grew weary as soon as he had “all his appetyte and mair, 217fulfillit on this fair ladie” and cast her off, to become a common drab.
o fair cresseid! the flour and a per se
of troy and greece, how wast thow fortunait!
to change in filth all thy feminitie
and be with fleshly lust sa maculait,
and go amang the grekis, air and late
so giglot-like.
in her misery she curses venus and cupid for having caused her to love only to lead her to this degradation:
the seed of love was sowen in my face
and ay grew green through your supply and grace.
but now, alas! that seed with frost is slain,
and i fra lovers left, and all forlane.
in revenge cupid and his mother summon a council of gods and condemn the a per se of greece and troy to be a hideous leper. and so she goes forth with the other lepers, armed with bowl and clapper, to beg her bread. one day troilus rides past the place where she is sitting by the roadside near the gates of troy:
then upon him she cast up both her een,
and with ane blenk it cam into his thocht,
that he some time before her face had seen,
but she was in such plight he knew her nocht,
yet then her look into his mind it brocht
218the sweet visage and amorous blenking
of fair cresseid, one sometime his own darling.
he throws her an alms and the poor creature dies. and so the moral sense is satisfied. there is a good deal of superfluous mythology and unnecessary verbiage in the testament of cresseid, but the main lines of the poem are firmly and powerfully drawn. of all the disciples of chaucer, from hoccleve and the monk of bury down to mr. masefield, henryson may deservedly claim to stand the highest.
