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  HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
  OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE

  CHAUCER AND HIS TIMES

  BY GRACE E. HADOW

  LONDON
  WILLIAMS & NORGATE

  HENRY HOLT & Co., NEW YORK
  CANADA: WM. BRIGGS, TORONTO
  INDIA: R. & T. WASHBOURNE, LTD.

  1914

  HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
  OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE

  _Editors_:
    HERBERT FISHER, M.A., F.B.A, LL.D.
    PROF. GILBERT MURRAY, D.LITT., LL.D., F.B.A.
    PROF. J. ARTHUR THOMSON, M.A., LL.D.
    PROF. WILLIAM T. BREWSTER, M.A.
      (Columbia University, U.S.A.)

  NEW YORK
  HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

  CHAUCER AND HIS TIMES

  BY GRACE E. HADOW

  LECTURER IN ENGLISH, LADY MARGARET
  HALL, OXFORD; LATE READER IN ENGLISH,
  BRYN MAWR COLLEGE, U.S.A.

  LONDON
  WILLIAMS AND NORGATE

_The following volumes of kindred interest have already been published in
this Library_:

  43. English Literature: Mediæval. By Prof. W. P. Ker.
  13. Mediæval Europe. By H. W. C. Davis, M.A.
  45. The English Language. By L. Pearsall Smith, M.A.
  35. Landmarks in French Literature. By G. L. Strachey.

_First Printed April 1914_

CONTENTS

  CHAP.                                               PAGE

       NOTES ON CHAUCER'S USE OF 'E'                    vi

     I CHAUCER'S LIFE AND TIMES                          7

    II CHAUCER'S WORKS                                  32

   III CHAUCER'S TREATMENT OF HIS SOURCES               69

    IV CHAUCER'S CHARACTER-DRAWING                     106

     V CHAUCER'S HUMOUR                                143

    VI CHAUCER'S DESCRIPTIVE POWER                     173

   VII SOME VIEWS OF CHAUCER'S ON MEN AND THINGS       196

  VIII CHAUCER'S INFLUENCE                             229

       BIBLIOGRAPHY                                    254

       INDEX                                           255

NOTES ON CHAUCER'S USE OF 'E'

     1. Final _e_ is usually sounded in Chaucerian verse, but

     (_a_) it is slurred over before a word beginning with a vowel, e.g. I
     noldë sette◠at al that noyse◠a grote; before certain words beginning
     with _h_, such as _he_; any part of the verb to _have_; the adverbs
     _heer_, _how_, and a mute _h_ as in _honour_--e.g. Tho redde◠he me
     how Sampson loste◠his heres:

     (_b_) it is sometimes dropped in certain words in common use such as
     _were_, _hadde_, _wolde_, etc.--e.g. Wolde◠go to bedde,◠he wolde◠no
     lenger tarie.

     2. Middle _e_ is sometimes dropped: e.g. hav(e)nes.

     3. Final _e_ should always be sounded at the end of a line.

These notes are based on the grammatical hints given in Professor Skeat's
Introduction to his single-volume edition of Chaucer's complete works
(Clarendon Press, 1901), from which the illustrations in this book are
also drawn. To his researches and to those of Professors Lounsbury and Ten
Brink, and of the members of the Chaucer Society, all students of Chaucer
must gratefully acknowledge their indebtedness. In quoting from Chaucer I
have kept to Professor Skeat's spelling. All attempts to modernise
Chaucerian verse inevitably result in destroying something of the charm
and melody of the original. Readers whose eyes are not accustomed to the
forms of Middle English will find practically all difficulty disappear if
they read the passages aloud with modern pronunciation. With other Middle
English and Scottish poets I have reluctantly taken greater liberties,
since their language is often more remote from the speech of to-day. An
example of the original Scottish forms will be found on p. 240.

G. E. H.

CHAUCER AND HIS TIMES

CHAPTER I

CHAUCER'S LIFE AND TIMES

"The biography of Chaucer is built upon doubts and thrives upon
perplexities" according to one of the most famous of Chaucer scholars, and
the more carefully we consider the evidence upon which this statement is
based, the more fully do we find it endorsed. The name Chaucer itself has
been variously derived from the Latin _calcearius_, a shoemaker, the
French _chaussier_, a maker of long hose, and the French _chaufecire_,
chafe-wax (_i. e._ a clerk of the court of Chancery whose duty consisted
in affixing seals to royal documents). The one point of agreement seems to
be that the family was undoubtedly of French origin, though whether the
founder of the English branch came over with the Conqueror or in Henry
III's reign, cannot be decided. Most scholars are now agreed that Geoffrey
Chaucer was born about 1340, and that his father was John Chaucer, a
vintner of Thames Street, London, though at one time his birth was dated
as early as 1328, and Mr. Snell, in his _Age of Chaucer_, endeavours
further to darken counsel--already sufficiently obscure--by suggesting
that there may have been two contemporary Geoffreys, and that the facts
which are usually accepted as throwing light on the history of the poet
may really apply to his unknown namesake. This theory, however, has at
present no evidence to support it, and it is reasonable to assume that
Chaucer was a native of London. Possibly it was his early association with
the wine-trade that gave him such insight into its mysteries, and called
forth the Pardoner's warning:--

  Now kepe yow fro the whyte and fro the rede,
  And namely fro the whyte wyn of Lepe,
  That is to selle in Fish-strete or in Chepe.
  This wyn of Spayne crepeth subtilly
  In othere wynes, growing faste by,
  Of which there ryseth swich fumositee
  That when a man hath dronken draughtes three
  And weneth that he be at hoom in Chepe,
  He is in Spayne, right at the toune of Lepe.

    (_Pardoners Tale_, l. 562, etc.)

And it is noteworthy that more than once Chaucer goes out of his way to
inveigh against drunkenness:--

  A lecherous thing is wyn, and dronkenesse
  Is ful of stryving and of wrecchednesse

  For dronkenesse is verray sepulture
  Of mannes wit and his discrecioun.

    (_Pardoners Tale_, l. 549-559.)

Of his early years we know nothing. Probably he lived the life of other
boys of that time: Lydgate's portrait of the mediæval school-boy may well
stand for a type:--

  I had in custom to come to school late
  Not for to learn but for a countenance,
  With my fellows ready to debate,
  To jangle and jape was set all my pleasaunce.
  Whereof rebuked was my Chevisaunce[1]
  To forge a lesyng and thereupon to muse
  When I trespassed myselfe to excuse.

  Loth to rise, lother to bed at eve;
  With unwashed handes ready aye to dinner;
  My Paternoster, my Creed, or my Believe
  Cast at the Cook; lo! this was my manner;
  Waved with each wind, as doth a reede-spear;
  Snibbed[2] of my friends such taches[3] for to amend
  Made deaf eare list nat to them attend.

    (_Testament._)

Leland, with that sublime disregard for anything so prosaic as evidence
which characterises sixteenth-century biographers, declares that "Geoffrey
Chaucer, a youth of noble birth and highest promise, studied at Oxford
University with all the earnestness of those who have applied themselves
most diligently to learning.... He left the University an acute logician,
a delightful orator, an elegant poet, a profound philosopher, and an able
mathematician"; and to this list of accomplishments he afterwards adds,
"and a devout theologian." Fifty years later, Speght--to whom lovers of
Chaucer are deeply indebted in other respects--equally authoritatively
asserts that he was at Cambridge, but as he bases this assertion on a
remark--

  Philogenet I called am far and near
  Of Cambridge clerk--

made by one of the characters in the _Court of Love_, a poem which
scholars are now universally of opinion is not Chaucer's work, it has
little weight. As a matter of fact Chaucer's name does not appear in the
records of any college at either university, and, as Professor Lounsbury
has conclusively shown, wide as are the poet's interests, and great as
his knowledge undoubtedly is, the scholarship shown by his works is not so
remarkable as necessarily to imply close and protracted study. Classical
legends were frequently embodied in the romances of an age in which, if we
may believe Jean Bodel, himself a poet,

  Ne sont que trois matières à nul homme entendant,
  De France, et de Bretagne, et de Rome la grant,[4]

and the habit of treating Alexander the Great as if he were
brother-in-arms to Roland and Oliver naturally opened the door to all
sorts of embellishments and modifications. A veil of romance covers and
colours the history of Greece and Rome. To Chaucer, Cleopatra is akin to
the Lady of the Hideous Pass, or Morgan le Fay. The account of her death
given in the _Legend of Good Women_ (l. 671, etc.) is purely mediæval:--

  (She) made her subtil workmen make a shryne
  Of alle the rubies and the stones fyne
  In all Egipte that she coude espye;
  And putte ful the shryne of spycerye,
  And leet the cors embaume;[5] and forth she fette
  This dede cors, and in the shryne hit shette.[6]
  And next the shryne a pit than doth she grave;
  And alle the serpents that she mighte have
  She putte hem in that grave....

  And with that word, naked, with ful good herte,
  Among the serpents in the pit she sterte.[7]

Nor is this devout theologian always accurate in his references to Bible
history. His allusions to Old Testament stories are full of mistakes, as,
for instance, when he speaks (in _Book of Duchesse_, l. 738) of Samson
slaying himself with a pillar for love of Delila. It was not an age of
nice scholarship, or care for detail. Men used stories as they found them,
and repeated them as they happened to remember them, and no one was
hyper-critical enough to refer to the original. More than half a century
after Chaucer's death Caxton translates the _Æneid_, not from the Latin of
Virgil, but from "a little book in French," and Gawain Douglas, the most
scholarly of all the Scottish poets of the early sixteenth century,
regards it as a moral allegory of the soul's progress, cast in the form
of an epic. But while Chaucer's occasional mistranslations of Latin words
and misrenderings of classical legends cannot be said to disprove his
residence at one of the universities, they certainly cannot be said to
support Leland's statement, and the probability is that he early became
attached to the court. The reign of Edward III witnessed a marked increase
in the prosperity of the merchant class. The members of the great trade
guilds were men of wealth and importance and there is nothing surprising
in finding a vintner's son one of the household of Elizabeth, wife of the
king's son, Lionel, Duke of Clarence. In fact the seals of John Chaucer
and Agnes his wife show that both bore arms. In 1357 we find, from the
royal accounts, that Geoffrey Chaucer was provided with a paltok (cloak)
costing four shillings, and a pair of red and black breeches and a pair of
shoes, valued at three shillings, and in December of the same year he
received a grant of 2_s._ 6_d._ "for necessaries against the feast of the
Nativity" (Chaucer Soc., _Life Records of Chaucer_, p. xiv). The
_Canterbury Tales_ give abundant proof that their author had a keen eye
for the niceties of dress, and at seventeen he had doubtless a proper
appreciation of new shoes and red and black breeches.

Two years later (1359) he served in the French wars and was taken prisoner
at "Retters," a place which has been variously identified as Retiers, near
Rennes, and Rethel, near Reims. He was liberated in March 1360, Edward III
paying £16 (over £200 of our money) towards his ransom, which looks as if
he were considered a person of some importance. Apparently he returned to
court life in England, and to the duties of _valettus camerae regis_. A
valet of the King's Chamber had to "make beddis, to beare or hold torches,
to sett boardis, to apparell all chambres, and such othir seruices as the
Chamberlain, or Vshers of the Chambre, comaunde or assigne, to attend the
Chambre, to watch the King by course, to go in messages, etc." (_Life
Records_, Pt. II, p. xi), and holders of the office must have had ample
opportunity of acquiring the wisdom of Placebo:--

  I have now been a court-man al my lyf.
    And god it woot,[8] though I unworthy be,
  I have stonden in ful greet degree
  Abouten lordes of ful heigh estaat;
  Yet hadde I never with noon of hem debaat.
  I never hem contraried,[9] trewely;
  I woot wel that my lord can[10] more than I.
  What that he seith, I holde it ferme and stable;
  I say the same, or elles thing semblable.[11]
  A ful gret fool is any conseillour,
  That serveth any lord of heigh honour,
  That dar presume, or elles thenken it,
  That his conseil sholde passe his lordes wit.
  Nay, lordes been no foles,[12] by my fay.

    (_Marchantes Tale_, l. 1492, etc.)

In 1366 a pension was granted to Philippa Chaucer, one of the damsels of
the Queen's Chamber, and it is usually thought that this indicates
Chaucer's marriage about this time, since in 1381 the money was paid "to
Geoffrey Chaucer, her husband." Philippa seems to have been the
sister--the Chaucer Society suggests, the sister-in-law--of Katherine
Swynford, who became John of Gaunt's third wife, and this connection
possibly helps to explain the consistent kindness shown to Chaucer by the
House of Lancaster. Various attempts have been made to show that the
marriage was an unhappy one. Some of these will be noticed later in
treating of Chaucer's women, here it may suffice to say that although it
is true that he paints a sufficiently gloomy picture of married life in
the _Lenvoy de Chaucer a Bukton_, that neither the host nor the merchant
are happy in their choice, and that the _Lenvoy_ which concludes the
_Clerkes Tale_ warns husbands that if they expect to find their wives
patient Griseldas they will certainly be disappointed, we have to remember
that the shrewish wife was as stock a comic convention of those days as
the shrewish mother-in-law of later times, and when it comes to taking
away the character of Philippa Chaucer on the ground that her husband
complains in the _Hous of Fame_ that he is unaccustomed to be awakened
gently, it is impossible not to feel that she is receiving unnecessarily
harsh treatment. Equally slight is the evidence for his suffering from an
unhappy love affair. In the _Parlement of Foules_ (ll. 89, 90) he speaks
of himself as

  Fulfild of thought and besy hevinesse;
  For bothe I hadde thing which that I nolde,[13]
  And eek I ne hadde that thing that I wolde,

and commentators have leaped to the conclusion that he is here referring
to his wife and a lady of high rank for whom he sighed in vain. In the
same way when, in the _Book of the Duchesse_, he speaks of having suffered
for eight years from a sickness which one physician alone can cure, this
is taken as an unmistakable reference to the same unrequited passion. But
we have nothing to show that in these passages Chaucer is revealing his
actual feelings. To be crossed in love is proper to every poet, and if his
wife might have been justly annoyed when in 1382--at least sixteen years
after his marriage--he wrote

  ... I knowe not love in dede
  Ne wot how that he quyteth folk hir hyre,[14]

    (_Parlement of Foules_, ll. 8, 9.)

"Rosemounde"--if she had any real existence--can hardly have felt
complimented by the affection of a poet who told her--and the world at
large--

  Nas never pyk walwed in galauntyne
  As I in love am walwed and y-wounde.[15]

There is no proof one way or the other.

We know nothing of his children, except that in 1391 he wrote a treatise
on the astrolabe for his little son Lewis, then ten years of age.
Gascoigne, a generation after Chaucer's death, speaks of Thomas Chaucer, a
well-known man of wealth and position in the early fifteenth century,
more than once Speaker of the House of Commons, as Geoffrey's son, but no
mention is made of him by Chaucer himself or by any of his contemporaries
or immediate successors. John of Gaunt paid a considerable sum of money to
place a certain Elizabeth Chaucer in the nunnery of Barking in 1381, but
she is usually considered to have been the poet's sister.

In 1367 Chaucer himself was granted a pension of twenty marks a year for
life, in recognition of his services, and in 1368 (or, according to Mr. G.
C. Coulton, 1372) he was promoted to be an Esquire of the royal household.
The duties of an esquire seem better suited to a poet than those of a
valet: "These Esquires of houshold of old be accustumed winter & summer in
afternoons & in eunings to drawe to Lordes Chambres within Court, there to
keep honest company after there Cunninge, in talking of Cronicles of
Kinges & of others pollicies, & in pipeing or harpinge, songinges or other
actes marcealls, to helpe to occupie the Court, & accompanie estraingers
till the time require of departing."

In 1369 a Geoffrey Chaucer was again with the army in France, but no
particular adventures seem to have befallen him.

At this time John of Gaunt's influence was paramount at the English court,
which may partly account for Chaucer's steady and rapid promotion. In 1370
he was sent abroad on an important mission--the exact nature of which we
do not know--and two years later he went to Genoa to arrange which English
port should become the headquarters of the Genoese trade. From Genoa he
went to Florence, and by November 1373 he was back in England again.

When Chaucer went to Italy, Dante had already been dead for over fifty
years, but Petrarch and Boccaccio, the other members of that great trilogy
of the earlier Renaissance, were both alive. Chaucer makes his clerk
declare that he learned the tale of Griselda

  ... at Padowe of a worthy clerk,

  Fraunceys Petrark, the laureat poete,
  Highte this clerk, whos rethoryke sweete
  Enlumined al Itaille of poetrye,[16]

    (_Clerkes Prologue_, ll. 31-33.)

but it is impossible to say whether this is autobiographical or not. The
two poets may well have met, but in this, as in so many other cases, we
cannot be certain. It is improbable that he ever met Boccaccio, since,
largely as he borrows from the _Filostrato_ and the _Teseide_, he never
once mentions Boccaccio's name, and when, in _Troilus and Criseyde_, he
confesses that he is indebted to an earlier poet for his story, he gives
him the apparently fictitious name of Lollius. Mr. Coulton suggests that
Boccaccio's works may have been published anonymously and that Chaucer may
have been ignorant of their real author, and this could hardly have been
the case if the two had met. But whether Chaucer had, or had not, any
personal intercourse with Petrarch and Boccaccio, both their work and
Dante's exercised marked influence upon him. More of this will be said in
the next chapter; here it is sufficient to note that the Italian mission
affected not only his material prosperity but also his literary
development.

Meanwhile he continued to grow in favour at court. On St. George's Day,
1374, he was granted a daily pitcher of wine from the royal cellars--later
commuted for a payment in money. In the following May he rented the
gate-house of Aldgate from the corporation of London. A month later he was
appointed controller of customs for wool, etc., in the port of London,
receiving a few days afterwards an additional pension of £10 a year from
John of Gaunt and his wife. Office work seems to have weighed heavily on
the poet, and there may well be truth in the complaint of the _Hous of
Fame_ (Bk. II, l. 644, etc.) that it cut him off from all intercourse with
the world:--

  ... thou hast no tydinges
  Of Loves folk, if they be glade,
  Ne of noght elles that god made;
  And noght only fro fer contree
  That ther no tyding comth to thee,
  But of thy verray neyghebores,
  That dwellen almost at thy dores,
  Thou herest neither that ne this;
  For whan thy labour doon al is,
  And hast y-maad thy rekeninges,
  In stede of reste and newe thinges,
  Thou gost hoom to thy hous anoon;
  And, also domb as any stoon,
  Thou sittest at another boke,
  Til fully daswed is thy loke,[17]
  And livest thus as an hermyte
  Although thyn abstinence is lyte.

In November 1375 Chaucer was granted the wardship of Edmund Staplegate of
Kent. Few persons nowadays would welcome such a charge, but in the
fourteenth century the position of guardian was highly coveted, and not
infrequently bought for a good round sum, since the holder had a right to
a certain percentage (sometimes amounting to as much as 10%) of the ward's
property, to say nothing of the power of selling him (or her) in marriage.
This particular wardship brought in £103.

In 1376-7 Chaucer was again employed on various secret missions abroad. In
April 1377 he was sent to France to treat for peace with Charles V, for
which service he received £48 13_s._ 4_d._ In June of this year Edward III
died, but for a time John of Gaunt still retained his power, and soon
after the accession of the boy king, Richard II, we find Chaucer sent on
an embassy to

                Barnabo Viscounte,
  God of delyt, and scourge of Lumbardye.

    (_Monkes Tale_, ll. 408-409.)

Amongst those whom he appointed to act for him during his absence, was his
friend and fellow-poet, John Gower.

In May 1380 occurred a curious incident, of which no full and satisfactory
explanation has yet been found. By a deed dated May 1st, one Cecilia de
Chaumpaigne releases Geoffrey Chaucer from a charge which she had brought
against him _de raptu meo_. It has been suggested (_Camb. Hist. Lit._,
Vol. II) that this may refer to one of those attempts to carry off an heir
or heiress and marry them forcibly to some relation of the abductor, which
were not infrequent at the time. Chaucer's own father had been the victim
of such an attempt, being kidnapped in order that he might be married to
Joan de Westhale. The case had come before the courts and the jury found
that "the defendants had by night forcibly abducted John le Chaucer from
the plaintiff's custody, but did not marry him," and assessed the damages
at £250. John Chaucer was under fourteen at the time, and there are
instances of mere babies of four and five being carried off in the same
way. One poor little lady was twice widowed and thrice married before she
was nine. Whatever the facts may have been in connection with Cecilia de
Chaumpaigne it is evident that Chaucer's influence at court was sufficient
to protect him from any unpleasant consequences.

A year later (May 1382) to his controllership of wool was added that of
petty customs. This probably meant a substantial increase of income, but
the poet, who found his original duties sufficiently irksome, does not
seem to have looked with favour upon a corresponding increase in office
hours. In February 1385 he was granted the privilege of appointing a
permanent deputy to perform his official duties. Professor Skeat suggests
that the expressions of gratitude towards the queen which are inserted in
the later version of the prologue to the _Legend of Good Women_, point to
the probability that he owed this unusual concession to her intervention.

About this time Chaucer seems to have given up his house over Aldgate and
to have moved to Greenwich. The lease of the Aldgate house was made over
to a certain Richard Foster in 1386, and in the _Lenvoy a Scogan_ (written
probably about 1393) Chaucer contrasts the lot of his friend,

  ... that knelest at the stremes heed
  Of grace, of alle honour and worthinesse,

with his own fate at the other end of the same stream,

  Forgete in solitarie wildernesse,

and adds two footnotes to explain that he is referring in the first place
to Windsor and in the second to Greenwich. If the description in the
prologue to the _Legend of Good Women_ is not mere poetic fiction, it
would seem that the poet had a pleasant country house and garden in his
"solitarie wildernesse," and that he cultivated the excellent habit of
sleeping out of doors in the summer.

Meanwhile his activity found scope in various directions. He had been
appointed a Justice of the Peace for Kent in 1381, and in 1386 he entered
Parliament as one of the Knights of the Shire for the same county. In
August of this year Chaucer's patron, John of Gaunt, went to Spain, and
during his absence his brother and rival, Thomas, Duke of Gloucester,
succeeded in establishing his ascendancy over the king. Chaucer felt the
change at once. He was deprived of both his controllerships, and the money
loss must have been considerable. In 1387 his wife died, so that her
pension must also have lapsed. Evidently the poet was in straits, for in
1388 he was driven to raising money on his pensions and allowances, making
them over to John Scalby of Lincolnshire. His abstinence, as we have seen,
was "lyte," and the necessity for retrenchment must have been extremely
galling.

The fall of Gloucester in 1389 swept away the clouds which had darkened
the poet's sky. Once more we find him filling one office after another,
and engaged in such useful and prosaic occupations as superintending the
repairs done to the banks of the Thames or the erection of scaffolds in
Smithfield for the king and queen to view the tournament held there in May
1390. One of his appointments was that of Clerk of the Works to his
Majesty, which gave him charge of the fabric of the Tower, Westminster
Palace, Windsor Castle, and other royal residences. He was commissioner of
the roads between Greenwich and Woolwich, and the post of sub-forester of
North Pemberton Park (in Somerset) must have given him ample opportunity
for studying

  The bilder ook, and eek the hardy asshe;
  The piler elm, the cofre unto careyne;[18]
  The boxtree piper;[19] holm[20] to whippes lasshe;
  The sayling firr;[21] the cipres, deth to pleyne;[22]
  The sheter ew,[23] the asp for shaftes pleyne,[24]

if not--

  The olyve of pees, and eek the drunken vyne

or--

  The victor palm.

    (_Parlement of Foules_, l. 176, etc.
    The whole passage is taken from Boccaccio's _Teseide_.)

The commissionership of roads can have been no sinecure. In 1499--after
nearly a century more of development and civilisation--"a glover from
Leighton Buzzard travelled with his wares to Aylesbury for the market
before Christmas Day. It happened that an Aylesbury miller, Richard Boose,
finding that his mill needed repairs, sent a couple of servants to dig
clay called 'Ramming clay' for him on the highway, and was in no way
dismayed because the digging of this clay made a great pit in the middle
of the road ten feet wide, eight feet broad, and eight feet deep, which
was quickly filled with water by the winter rains. But the unhappy glover,
making his way from the town in the dusk, with his horse laden with
paniers full of gloves, straightway fell into the pit, and man and horse
were drowned. The miller was charged with his death, but was acquitted by
the court on the ground that he had no malicious intent and had only dug
the pit to repair his mill, and because he really did not know of any
other place to get the kind of clay he wanted save the highroad" (Mrs.
Green, _Town Life in the Fifteenth Century_, Vol. II, pp. 31-2). The
modern traveller in the United States is sometimes surprised at dusk by
finding the highway temporarily blocked by a house which is being moved
from one side to the other and has been dumped down at the end of the
day's work, but this is nothing to finding that the road itself has been
removed bodily. It is true that the corporation of Nottingham issued an
order in 1507 forbidding people to dig holes in the market-place without
leave, but this was long after Chaucer's day, and if such ordinances were
necessary to protect the actual market-place of a busy commercial city, it
is not difficult to imagine the condition of country roads. The keeping of
bridges in repair was looked upon, not as a matter of ordinary business,
but as an act of piety, so that on the Continent special "Bridge Friars"
existed, part of whose religious duties consisted in such work. In 1311-16
Richard of Kellawe, Bishop of Durham, offered forty days' indulgence to
all those "who shall help by their charitable gifts, or by their bodily
labour" in repairing various roads and bridges (Jusserand, _English
Wayfaring Life in the Middle Ages_, p. 4). And in 1353 a patent of Edward
III had ordered the paving of the highroad from Temple Bar to Westminster,
since "it is so full of holes and bogs ... and the pavement is so damaged
and broken" that traffic has become dangerous to man and beast. No wonder
that robbers abounded, and that pilgrims found safety in numbers.

In 1390 highwaymen seem to have been particularly active, and the
commissioner of roads himself was robbed more than once. Richard Brerelay
was indicted for having "with others unknown" robbed Geoffrey Chaucer at
Westminster of the sum of £10, on the Tuesday after the Nativity of the
Virgin Mary (_i. e._ September 6); and in the same year "near the Fowle
Ok" at Hatcham, in Surrey, Chaucer was robbed of a horse worth £10, goods
worth 100 shillings, and £20 6_s._ 8_d._ in cash. Some, at least, of this
seems to have been public money, for he was granted a royal pardon for the
loss of £20 of the King's money taken from him "by some notable robbers."

In 1391 he lost his post as Clerk of the Works, but this does not seem to
imply any serious loss of the royal favour, for three years later the
king granted him a pension of £20 (about £300 of our money) a year for
life. During the interval he seems to have got into money difficulties,
for no sooner was this grant made than his creditors promptly sued him for
debt.

In 1398 he received an additional grant of wine--a tun a year for
life--and was also promoted to be sole, instead of sub-, forester of North
Pemberton. In 1399 the son of his earliest and most powerful patron came
to the throne, and Chaucer, who was still struggling with his creditors,
addressed an impassioned appeal to him. Already, in 1398, the poet had
been threatened with legal proceedings, and although the king had
entrusted him with various commissions in the country, he had not dared to
leave his house for fear of arrest (Ten Brink, _History of English
Literature_, Vol. II, p. 198). No wonder he sang:--

  To you, my purse, and to non other wight
  Compleyne I, for ye be my lady dere!
  I am so sory, now that ye be light;
  For certes, but ye make me hevy chere.

    (_The Complaint of Chaucer to his Empty Purse._
    Professor Ten Brink believes this poem to have been
    addressed to King Richard, but Professor Skeat has
    no doubt that it was addressed to Henry.)

It is consoling to learn that Henry IV added forty marks a year to the
pension granted by King Richard, thus bringing Chaucer's income up to £600
or £700 of our money. This new outburst of good fortune promised well for
the future, and Chaucer evidently looked forward to a prosperous and
comfortable old age, for, on December 24, 1399, he took the lease of a
house in the garden of St. Mary's, Westminster, for fifty-four years. He
was not, however, to make long use of his new possession, for on October
25, 1400, he died, and his grave was the first to mark the Poets' Corner
of Westminster Abbey. One of his later ballades, _Truth_ may well serve as
epitaph for the poet whom court life could never corrupt into a courtier,
and whose clear sight and sharp wit never led him into bitterness or
cynicism:--

  That thee is sent, receyve in buxumnesse,[25]
  The wrastling for this worlde axeth a fal.
  Her nis non hoom,[26] her nis but wildernesse:
  Forth pilgrim, forth! Forth beste out of thy stal!
  Know thy contree, look up, thank God of al;
  Hold the hye way, and lat thygost thee lede:[27].
  And trouthe shal delivre, hit is no drede.[28]

CHAPTER II

CHAUCER'S WORKS

When Chaucer began to write, English literature was at a low ebb. The
Norman Conquest had practically killed the old alliterative poetry, and
the passion and mysticism of Old English epic and lament had given way to
the prim didacticism of interminable homilies in verse, or the jog-trot
respectability of rhymed chronicles. "For a long time before and after
1100," says Professor Ker, "there is a great scarcity of English
production," and the more ambitious attempts at verse which appeared in
the twelfth, thirteenth, and early fourteenth centuries, are entirely
lacking in the charm and dignity of pre-Conquest poetry. "The verse of
Layamon's _Brut_ is unsteady, never to be trusted, changing its pace
without warning in a most uncomfortable way." Nor as a rule is the matter
greatly superior to the manner. Such interest as is possessed by the
majority of the poems of this period (apart from the definitely
historical or philological point of view) arises largely from the
unconscious naïveté and simplicity of their authors. What hard heart could
refuse to be touched by the difficulties which that saintly hermit Richard
Rolle of Hampole had evidently experienced in distinguishing the sex of a
baby, or to share in the triumph with which he suggests a solution of the
difficulty:--

  For unethes[29] is a child born fully
  That it ne beginnes to yowle and cry;
  And by that cry men may know then
  Whether it be man or woman,
  For when it is born it cries swa;[30]
  If it be man it says "a, a."
  That the first letter is of the nam(e)
  Of our fore-father Adam.
  And if the child a woman be,
  When it is born it says "e, e,"
  E is the first letter and the hede[31]
  Of the name of Eve that began our dede.[32]

But delightful as this is, it is not poetry. In the middle of the
fourteenth century come the notable exceptions of _Sir Gawayne_, _The
Pearl_, and _Piers Plowman_, but by this time we are already drawing near
the era of Chaucer himself. His poor Parson dismisses the popular
alliterative verse of the day contemptuously enough:--

  I can nat geste--rum, ram, ruf--by lettre--

but perhaps his strictures must not be taken too seriously, as he goes on
to say:--

  Ne, God wot, rym holde I but litel bettre--

a sentiment with which we can hardly imagine Chaucer to have been in
sympathy. As a matter of fact, the lyric verse which lightens up the three
hundred years from the Conquest to Chaucer, has a daintiness and grace
which show that the poetic sense of England was by no means dead. _Sumer
is icumen in, Lenten is come with love to toune, Of one that is so fair
and bright_, and numberless other songs with which recent anthologies have
made everyone familiar are sufficient evidence of this. But these are
chance flowers blossoming haphazard beside the dusty highway.

One well-beaten track, it is true, does lead us through green glades and
meadows enamelled with eye-pleasing flowers to the mysterious depths of
enchanted forests haunted by fell enchanters and baleful dragons, but the
metrical romances are for the most part more or less direct translations
from French originals, and show little that is distinctively English,
beyond a tendency to cut the sentiment and come to the story.[33]

To French influence also we owe the development of satire. Old Norse and
Icelandic poetry abound in instances of dry humour, but the Anglo-Saxon
idea of repartee seems--if we may judge by pre-Conquest literature--to
have consisted chiefly in such grim jests as baking the head of your
enemy's son in a pie and inviting the father to dinner. Tenderness,
passion, imagination, are to be found in such poems as _Beowulf_, the
_Husband's Lament_, _Judith_, but it is not until French wit flashes
across English seriousness that we travel to the Land of Cokaygne, where

  There are rivers great and fine
  Of oil, of milk, honey, and wine.
  Water serveth there for nothing
  Save to look at, and for washing:

or listen to Hendyng's shrewd comments on human nature:--

  Many a man saith, were he rich,
  There shoulde none be me y-lyche[34]
      To be good and free;
  But when he hath ought bygeten[35]
  All the freedom is forgeten
      And laid under knee.
  "He is free of his horse, that never had one,"
                  Quoth Hendyng.

The prose of the period is still less inspiring than the poetry. Not even
Chaucer discovered that prose-writing is an art. Works of any importance
were written in Latin, and such English prose as there was, consisted in
sermons, lives of the saints, etc. Now and then some author happens upon a
telling phrase or an apt illustration, but such instances are few and
obviously accidental. French influence was too strong for native
literature to put forth any very vigorous shoots of its own, and attempts
to force homilies, scientific treatises, and historical records into
French rhyme forms led to the production of such dreary works as the
_Cursor Mundi_ or Layamon's _Brut_.

By the fourteenth century, however, Normans and Saxons had long since
begun to amalgamate, and the Hundred Years' War did much to foster the
spirit of patriotism, and thus weld together the conflicting elements of
which the nation was composed. Different dialects prevailed in different
parts of the country, but they were at least varieties of English, and
English was the language of the people as a whole. French, whether of
Paris or of Stratford atte Bowe, was learned as a foreign tongue, although
as late as the end of the fourteenth century we still find Gower writing
indifferently in Latin, French, and English. It needed only that there
should arise an author great enough to establish some one dialect--or
combination of dialects--as standard English, and this creation of
language from dialect, we owe--among other things--in large measure to
Chaucer.

London was already the centre of English trade and industry, and the
circumstances of its position, which brought its inhabitants into contact
with both Northerners and Southerners, made its dialect particularly
suitable for the standard language of the country. Chaucer, as we have
seen, was London born and bred, and wrote naturally in the "cokeneye"
dialect, thus helping to establish it as the common speech. The modern
reader who turns over the pages of the _Ayenbite of Inwit_ or the _Ancren
Riwle_ finds himself confronted by what is practically a foreign tongue;
it is excusable if he finds even _Piers Plowman_ baffling in places, and
has difficulty in construing such passages as:--

  He was pale as a pelet, in the palsye he semed,
  And clothed in a caurimaury, I couthe it nouȝte discreue;
  In kirtel and kourteley, and a knyf bi his syde;
  Of a freres frokke were þe forsleues,[36]

but Chaucer's English, full as it may be of old and decayed terms,
presents few serious difficulties to any ordinary intelligence. We may
have to look up a word here and there in the glossary, or find ourselves
puzzled by some astronomical or chemical terms, but these are merely by
the way, and Chaucer fairly lays claim to the title of Father, not only of
English poetry, but of modern English.

In metre his work is no less remarkable. Professor Skeat, in his
introduction to the Oxford edition of Chaucer's works, gives a list of no
less than thirteen metres which he introduced into English poetry,
consisting for the most part of modifications and alterations of French
and Italian models.

The so-called Chaucerian stanza consists of seven lines of iambic verse
rhyming _ababbcc_--_e. g._:

    Ămōng thĭse chīldrĕn wās ă wīdwë̆s sōnë
  Ă lītĕl clērgeŏn, sēvĕn yēēr ŏf āgë,
  Thăt dāy by̆ dāy tŏ scōlë̆ wās hĭs wōnë,
  Ănd ēēk ălsō, whĕr-ās hĕ sāūgh th' ĭmāgë
  Ŏf Crīstĕs mōdĕr, hādde◠hĕ īn ŭsāgë
  Ăs hīm wăs tāūght, tŏ knēle◠adōūn and sēyë
  Hĭs _Āvé̆ Mārie_,◠ăs hē gŏth bȳ thĕ wēyë.

It is a modification of a form used by Boccaccio, and was itself possibly
used by Spenser as the basis of his peculiar stanza. Chaucer employs it
very largely for narrative purposes, preventing it from becoming
monotonous by varying the place of the cæsura, and freely adding or
suppressing weak syllables when he so desires. Mr. A. W. Pollard, in his
article on Chaucer in the _Encyclopædia Britannica_, declares that the
English poet borrowed both his stanza and his decasyllabic line from
Guillaume de Machault. The point of the whole matter, however, lies, not
in whether Chaucer was indebted to French or Italian sources for his
metres, but in the fact that he revealed the latent possibilities of
English as a poetic medium.

It is usual to divide Chaucer's life into three periods, and to speak of
him as successively under French, Italian, and English influence, and
although, as Professor Ker has pointed out, this method is open to some
objections, it brings out certain critical points of interest and is worth
adhering to for the sake of clearness.

French, as we have seen, had long been the dominant influence in English
literature. To French erotic poetry we owe the elaborate code of duties
owed by husband to wife and lover to mistress, and the whole artificial
convention which prescribed unhappy love affairs and revelled in the
minute analysis of over-strained emotion. "In poetry and life," says Ten
Brink, "fashion required an educated young man, especially one in the
service of the court, to fall in love at the earliest opportunity, and, if
possible, hopelessly." We have already seen Chaucer obeying this
convention in the _Book of the Duchesse_ and the _Parlement of Foules_,
and to these may be added the _Compleinte unto Pitè_, the _Compleint to
his Lady, Merciles Beaute_, _To Rosemounde_, _Against Women Unconstant_,
_An Amorous Compleint_, and Book I, stanza 3 of _Troilus and Criseyde_.
The poet protests so much that it is difficult to believe that he is
describing anything more than a lover bewailing his unhappy lot (in the
French fashion). Evidently French love-poetry appealed strongly to his
imagination, for one of his earliest works is a translation of the famous
_Romance of the Rose_. This long, allegorical poem (the original consists
of over 22,000 lines), falls into two parts. The first, by Guillaume de
Lorris, describes the search of the ideal lover for the mystic rose. The
hero is admitted by the portress Idleness into a fair garden of flowers,
where he finds Sir Mirth, Lady Courtesy, Dame Gladness, and many another
gallant and debonair knight and lady. In this garden is the enchanted Well
of Love, in whose depths the lover beholds the image of the Rose. He tries
to seize it, and finds that a hard struggle lies before him ere he can
hope to win the prize of love. Lorris left the poem unfinished, and the
second part was added by Jean le Meung, a cynic with no very high opinion
of women or of love. He introduces a sceptical friend who has a long
conversation with the lover in which he points out with extreme clearness
the drawbacks of marriage and the frailties of women.

The English version of the poem consists of three fragments, A, B, and C
(it is only 7,696 lines in all), and scholars are divided in opinion as to
how much of the translation is actually by Chaucer himself. Professor
Saintsbury, in the _Cambridge History of Literature_ considers that
Chaucer is probably the author of A, possibly the author of B, and
probably not the author of C. He must, however, have been known as the
translator of the later part, for in the _Prologue to the Legend of Good
Women_ (written about 1385), the god of love scolds the poet severely on
the ground,--

  Thou hast translated the Romauns of the Rose
  That is an hereyse ageyns my lawe.

Another early work is the A.B.C., a hymn in honour of the Virgin, modelled
upon a similar poem by Guillaume de Deguileville. Deguileville was well
known as a devotional writer at the time, and according to Speght
Chaucer's paraphrase was written "at the request of Blanch Duchesse of
Lancaster, as a praier for her priuat vse, being a woman in her religion
very deuout." There is, however, no evidence of this, and Ten Brink
believes that the A.B.C. dates from a later period when the poet was
passing through a phase of deep religious feeling. Whatever the facts
about this particular poem may be, it is interesting to notice that even
in these early days Chaucer combined some of the qualities of a satirist
with those of an idealist.

His first great original work was produced in 1369, when John of Gaunt's
beautiful and charming young wife died. The _Book of the Duchesse_ makes
no pretence to originality of treatment. The poet, after a conventional
lament over the conventional hard-heartedness of his mistress, falls into
a conventional slumber in the course of which he has a conventional dream
that he is following a conventional hunt in a conventional forest. Here he
meets a handsome young man

  Of the age of four and twenty yeer

  And he was clothed al in blakke.

The young man is complaining to himself most piteously:--

  Hit was gret wonder that nature
  Might suffre(n) any creature
  To have swich sorwe and be not deed.

The poet is touched by his sorrow, and since they have evidently lost the
hunt, he begs the mourner to tell him of "his sorwes smerte." This opens
the way for a long, rambling lament, full of allusions to classical
mythology. So involved is it, that the poet finds some difficulty in
grasping the point, and cuts into a description of the lady's charms with
a puzzled,--

  Sir ... wher is she now?

The brief answer--

  I have lost more than thou wenest

  She is deed--

strikes a note of tragedy which is beyond the scope of the youthful poet
as yet, and the elegy ends abruptly with

  Is that your los? by god hit is routhe.[37]

The scheme of the poem is simple, the idea is borrowed from French
laments, and whole passages are translated from de Machault's _Le Dit de
la Fontaine Amoureuse_ and _Remède de la Fortune_, but through all the
stiffness and conventionality, all the obvious immaturity, there flash
unmistakable signs of vigorous and original genius. Every poet of the day
finds himself wandering in a forest, but Chaucer alone meets

  A whelp that fauned me as I stood,
  That hadde y-followed, and coude no good,
  Hit com and creep to me as lowe,
  Right as hit hadde me y-knowe,
  Hild doun his heed and joyned his eres
  And leyde al smothe doun his heres;

or notices with tender amusement the

      many squirelles, that sete
  Ful hye upon the trees, and ete,
  And in hir maner made festes.

The praises of many fair ladies were sung by troubadour and minstrel, but
it would be hard to find another heroine possessed of the gaiety and
vigour and charm of Blanche:--

  I saw hir daunce so comlily
  Carole and singe so swetely,
  Laughe and pleye so womanly,
  And loke so debonairly,
  So goodly speke and so frendly,
  That certes I trow that evermore
  Nas seyn so blisful a tresore

  Therewith hir liste so wel to live,
  That dulnesse was of hir a-drad.

Already Chaucer shows that truth to life, that impatience of artificiality
which are to become two of his most striking characteristics.

A number of experiments in verse follow. Chaucer had a habit of
rough-casting a poem, then leaving it for some time, and eventually using
it in a more or less modified form in some later work. The story of _Ceys
and Alcioun_, which forms part of the introduction to the _Book of the
Duchesse_, originally appears to have been written as a separate poem, and
between 1369 and 1379 we find no fewer than seven works, in prose and
poetry, which were afterwards embodied in the _Canterbury Tales_: the _Lyf
of St. Cecyle_ (afterwards used for the _Second Nonnes Tale_); parts of
the _Monkes Tale_; the greater part of the _Clerkes Tale_; _Palamon and
Arcite_ (which forms the basis of the _Knightes Tale_); the _Tale of
Melibeus_; the _Persones Tale_; and the _Man of Lawe's Tale_. In addition
to these come the _Compleint to his Lady_; _An Amorous Compleint_;
_Womanly Noblesse_; _Compleint unto Pitè_; _Anelida and Arcite_
(containing ten stanzas from Palamon); _Of the Wretched Engendring of
Mankind_ (a prose translation of Innocent III's _De Miseria Humanæ
Conditionis_, of which the title alone remains, though fragments of it are
used in the _Man of Lawe's Tale_); a translation of Boëthius's
_Consolations of Philosophy_; the _Complaint of Mars_; _Troilus and
Criseyde_; _Wordes to Adam Scriveyn_; _The Former Age_; _Fortune_. Apart
from _Troilus and Criseyde_ and the poems afterwards used in the
_Canterbury Tales_, none of these works are of any great importance in
themselves, but in them we see a steady development in technical skill.
The verse of the _Book of the Duchesse_ is easy and flowing but not
distinguished. The _Compleint unto Pitè_ shows a freedom and boldness in
the use of the French seven-lined stanza which marks a new departure in
English versification. Chaucer tries his hand at roundels and balades, at
narrative poetry and love laments, and the result is that he attains a
suppleness and melody unknown to his predecessors and unfortunately
ignored by his immediate successors. The music of his verse is not the
least of his contributions to a literature, whose exponents could placidly
remark

  And trouthe of metre I sette also a-syde;
  For of that art I hadde as tho no guyde
  Me to reduce when I went a-wronge:
  I toke none hede nouther of shorte nor longe.

Lydgate did not begin to write until after Chaucer's death, but the lines
quoted above from the _Troy Book_ exactly express the point of view of
the majority of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century poets.

In 1372, as we have seen, Chaucer went to Italy, and the influence of
Italian poetry upon him can hardly be exaggerated. Professor Ten Brink
believes that the influence of Dante was largely responsible for a sudden
quickening and deepening of religious feeling in Chaucer, and he
attributes the A.B.C., the _Lyf of St. Cecyle_, and the translation of the
_De Miseria Humanæ Conditionis_ to this period. Whether he is right or
wrong in this respect (and Professor Skeat dates both the A.B.C. and the
_Lyf of St. Cecyle_ before the Italian journey) there can be no question
as to Chaucer's profound admiration for the author of the _Divina
Commedia_. The _Inuocacio ad Mariam_ which prefaces the _Second Nonnes
Tale_ is drawn from the concluding canto of the _Paradiso_, the most
striking of all the Monk's tales

  Of him that stood in greet prosperitee
  And is y-fallen out of heigh degree
  Into miserie, and endeth wrecchedly,

is that of Count Hugo of Pisa, which is drawn direct from Canto XXXIII of
the _Inferno_, and it is impossible not to feel that the intense
reverence for things holy which underlay all Chaucer's shrewdness and
humour, may have been due--at least in part--to the influence of one of
the greatest of all religious poets. Of Petrarch he speaks with admiration
in the preface to the tale which he borrows from him, but except for a
translation of the eighty-eighth sonnet which is inserted in Book I of
_Troilus and Criseyde_, under the heading _Cantus Troili_, there is little
evidence of any direct influence. From Boccaccio he borrowed freely, with
a royal bettering in the borrowing. _Troilus and Criseyde_ is taken bodily
from the _Filostrato_, though with numerous additions, omissions,
alterations, and adaptations: the _Knightes Tale_ is condensed from the
twelve books of the _Teseide_: the idea of the _Canterbury Tales_ is taken
from that of the _Decamerone_, though with the very significant difference
that whereas Boccaccio's story-tellers are all drawn from one class and
are shut off from intercourse with the outer world, Chaucer's range from
knight to miller, from aristocratic prioress to bourgeois wife of Bath,
and the fact of their being on a pilgrimage affords opportunity for
incident on the way and for the introduction of fresh characters, thus
giving scope for far greater variety and keeping far more closely in touch
with actual life.

Between 1377 and 1382 he translated Boëthius's _De Consolatione
Philosophiæ_, a work which evidently produced a deep impression upon him.

In 1382 Chaucer produced another topical poem. So far he had addressed
himself to John of Gaunt--for whom not only the _Book of the Duchesse_,
but the scandalous _Compleint of Mars_ is said to have been written; now
he addresses King Richard, and after the fashion of the day clothes in
allegorical compliment the story of his wooing of Anne of Bohemia, who had
twice before been engaged to other suitors. The wedding festivities lasted
over February 14, when St. Valentine marries every year,

  The lyric lark, and the grave whispering dove,
  The sparrow that neglects his life for love,
  The household bird with the red stomacher;

and the opportunity was too good a one to be lost. Chaucer saluted his
king and queen in the _Parlement of Foules_, which though partially based
on the fabliau of _Hucline and Eglantine_ and containing passages from
Dante and Boccaccio, is in all essentials a thoroughly original work. The
poet, as usual, falls asleep and has a dream. He is taken by Scipio
Africanus (he had just been reading the _Somnium Scipionis_), to the gate
of a park which he is told none but the servants of Love may enter.
Although he himself is but dull and has lost the taste of love he is
permitted to see what passes in order that he may describe it, and is led
into a beautiful garden in which many fair ladies, such as Beautee and
Jolyte, are disporting themselves under the eye of Cupid. A number of
women are dancing round a temple of brass, before whose door

  Dame Pees sat with a curteyn in hir hond.

A long description of the temple and its occupants (Venus, Bacchus, Ceres,
etc.) follows, and the poet then passes once more into the open air where

  ... in a launde[38] upon a hille of floures

he finds the "noble goddesse Nature," who has sent for every bird to come
and choose its mate in honour of St. Valentine. Upon her hand she holds

  A formel[39] egle, of shap the gentileste[40]
  That ever she among hir werkes fonde.

Nature calls upon the royal eagle to make first choice, and he,

  With hed enclyned and with ful humble chere,

at once chooses the bird upon her hand. Before the formel eagle has
summoned up sufficient courage to give her answer,

  Another tercel egle spak anoon,
  Of lower kinde, and seyde, "that shal not be;
  I love hir bet than ye do, by seynt John."

And hardly has he finished when a third eagle puts forward his claim. The
various birds are called upon for their advice, and after a great deal of
chattering and confusion, Nature finally decrees that the choice is to lie
with the formel eagle herself. She modestly begs for a year's respite in
which to make up her mind, and the parliament is adjourned.

  But first were chosen foules for to singe
  As yeer by yere was always hir usaunce
  To singe a roundel at hir departinge
  To do Nature honour and pleasunce,

and the whole ends with the charming roundel:--

  Now welcom somer with thy sonne softe.

The poem has a freshness and tenderness which its conventional setting
cannot conceal, and the humour of the conversation among the worm-foul,
water-foul, and seed-foul, must have been even more delightful than it is
to-day if--as has been suggested--the "fool cukkow," "the waker goos,"
"the popinjay, ful of delicacy," and the rest were easily recognisable
portraits of contemporary courtiers.

The _Parlement of Foules_ was followed by the _Hous of Fame_. Here again
Chaucer makes use of the conventional stock-in-trade of medieval poets.

We have the dream, the strings of proper names drawn from Ovid and Virgil
and the Bible, the constant moralisations, the temple to which the dreamer
is guided, the use of allegory and symbol, all of which are common
property. The influence of Dante is evident, and shows itself in detail as
well as in the conception of the whole. The method of beginning each book
with an invocation, the exact marking of the date on which the poem was
begun, the steep rock, the description of the house of Rumour, and
numerous other points are borrowed direct from the _Divina Commedia_,
while there is no need to emphasise the obvious resemblance between the
general plan of Dante's great poem and the _Hous of Fame_. Professor Skeat
even goes so far as to suggest that Lydgate is referring to the _Hous of
Fame_ when he speaks of a poem of Chaucer's as "Dant in English."

The poem is divided into three books. Book I opens with a discussion of
dreams in general, what causes them and what weight should be attached to
them:--

  Why that is an avisioun
  And this a revelacioun.

This is followed by an invocation to the god of sleep, and then comes the
vision itself. The poet falls asleep on the tenth day of December, and
dreams that he is in a temple of glass. On a tablet on the wall is
engraved the history of "daun Eneas," and its recital occupies almost the
whole of the book. When the poet has "seyen al this sighte" he passes out
of the temple and finds himself in a desert place:--

  Withouten toun, or hous, or tree
  Or bush, or gras, or cred[41] lond.

  Ne I no maner creature
  That is y-formed by nature
  Ne saw.

Terrified by the strangeness and loneliness of the place, he casts his
eyes towards heaven, praying to be saved,

  Fro fantom and illusion,

and as he looks upwards he becomes aware of a wonderful eagle with
feathers of gold, flying towards him. Book II opens with further remarks
on dreams, and a declaration that no one, not even Isaiah or Scipio or
Nebuchadnezzar, ever had such a dream as this. The story then continues.
The eagle swoops down upon the poet and catches him up in "his grimme
pawes stronge,"--

  Me caryinge in his clawes starke
  As lightly as I were a larke.

Dazed and astonished, Chaucer almost loses consciousness, till he is
recalled to life by the eagle, with "mannes voice," bidding him

                        ... Awak
  And be not so a-gast for shame!

and adding in a well-meant attempt to cheer him up,--

                ... Seynte Marie!
  Thou art noyous for to carie.[42]

He is then told that as a reward for his long and faithful service of
Cupid--

  Withoute guerdon ever yit,

Jove has decreed that he is to be taken to the House of Fame:--

  To do thee som disport and game,
  In som recompensacioun
  Of labour and devocioun.

In Fame's palace he will hear more wonders in two hours than there are
grains of corn in a granary, for every sound made upon earth,--

  Thogh hit were pyped of a mouse,

rises up there, multiplied and increased. Having concluded a learned
disquisition on the properties of air, water, and sound--which he
explains, he has kindly simplified in order to bring it within the grasp
of a "lewed[43] man"--the eagle bears the poet through the stars and past
all manner of "eyrish bestes" until they reach the House of Fame. Here
Chaucer is set upon his feet--much to his relief--and is told to enter; he
is further warned that every sound which rises from earth may be not only
heard but seen, since it takes the form of whatever made it. Book III
opens with an invocation to Apollo. The poet then climbs the steep rock of
ice on which the palace stands, noticing as he passes the names of famous
men cut in the ice and rapidly thawing away in the sun. At the summit is a
wonderful castle of beryl stone, and all round it crowd

  ... alle maner of minstrales
  And gestiours,[44] that tellen tales
  Bothe of weping and of game,
  Of al that longeth unto Fame.

Amongst these are all the famous harpers and singers of old days, and
close by stand

  ... hem that maken blody soun
  In trumpe, beme[45] and clarioun.

A curiously carved gate gives admission to the castle, and entering,
Chaucer finds a large number of knights-at-arms pouring out of a great
hall. The hall itself is

            plated half a fote thikke
  Of gold ...

and set with precious stones. Here the Lady Fame sits on a throne, her
feet resting on earth and her head touching the heavens. The nine Muses
sing her praises eternally, and on either side of her are pillars on which
stand the historian Josephus and the poets Statius, Homer, Virgil, Ovid,
Lucan, and Claudian:--

  The halle was al ful y-wis,
  Of hem that writen olde gestes,
  As ben on trees rokes nestes.

Suddenly a great noise is heard, and there bursts into the hall a
multitude of people of every race and every condition come to prefer their
requests to Fame. Some beg

  "That thou graunte us now good fame,
  And lete our werkes han that name;
  In ful recompensacioun
  Of good werk, give us good renoun;"

others said

              "Mercy, lady dere!
  To telle certain, as hit is,
  We han don neither that ne this
  But ydel al our lyf y-be.
  But, natheles, yit preye we,
  That we mowe han so good a fame
  And greet renoun and knowen name,
  As they that han don nobel gestes ..."

others--

  "But certeyn they were wonder fewe,"

cried

            "Certes, lady brighte,
  We han don wel with al our mighte;
  But we ne kepen have no fame.
  Hyd our werkes and our name,
  For goddes love! for certes we
  Han certeyn doon hit for bountee
  And for no maner other thing."

Their requests are granted or refused with absolute capriciousness. Fame
is attended by Eolus, who according to her direction blows a black trumpet
called Sclaunder (Slander) or a golden clarion called Clere Laude (Clear
Praise), and these trumpets are used as the whim takes her. Evil men have
good fame, and good men are slandered, or on the other hand, both receive
their deserts without any reason except Fame's good pleasure. As Chaucer
stands watching the endless procession, a man approaches him and asks if
he too has come to receive fame. The poet hastily protests against any
such desire, and explains that he has come for--

  Tydinges, other this or that
  Of love, or swiche thinges glade.

The stranger bids him follow him to another place, and leads him to

  An hous, that _domus Dedali_,
  That _Laborintus_ cleped is.

It is made of sticks and twigs and continually spins round and round:--

  And ther-out com so greet a noise
  That, had it stonden upon Oise,
  Men mighte hit han herd esely
  To Rome, I trowe sikerly.

  And on the roof men may yit seen
  A thousand holes, and wel mo,
  To leten wel the soun out go.

This is the house of Rumour, to which come tidings

  Of werre, of pees, of mariages,
  Of reste, of labour of viages,[46]
  Of abood[47] of deeth, of lyfe,
  Of love, of hate, accorde, of stryfe, etc.

Here Chaucer meets the eagle again, who tells him that he is once more
prepared to become his guide, and without more ado seizes him "bitweene
his toon" and puts him in through the window. The house is full of people
all busy whispering in each other's ears:--

  Whan oon had herd a thing, y-wis,
  He com forth to another wight,
  And gan him tellen, anoon-right,
  The same that to him was told,
  Or hit a furlong-way was old,
  But gan somwhat for to eche
  To this tyding in this speche
  More than hit ever was.
  And nat so sone departed nas
  That he fro him, that he ne mette
  With the thridde; and or he lette
  Any stounde,[48] he tolde him als;
  Were the tyding sooth or fals,
  Yit wolde he telle hit natheless.

Out of the windows fly lies and truths, jostling each other, and Fame
decides which shall prevail. Shipmen and pilgrims, pardoners and
messengers, crowd into the house with boxes crammed with marvellous
stories. In one corner of the great hall men are telling love stories, the
poet goes to listen to these. Here, just when the climax appears to be in
sight, the poem breaks off in the middle of a sentence. Remarkable as it
is, full of humour and shrewd observation, and with signs of Chaucer's
genius for narrative, it is not in his most characteristic vein. _Troilus
and Criseyde_ had already given promise of genius of a very different
order, and it is possible that Chaucer himself grew weary of the smooth
monotony of his own verse, and felt within him a growing impulse to
produce something more human and more vivid. The _Hous of Fame_ is an
almost perfect example of a type of poem whose popularity was to continue
undiminished for another century and more. It was imitated again and
again, and a comparison between it and such works as Lydgate's _Temple of
Glas_ is sufficient to show the difference between genius and talent even
when genius in working with not wholly congenial material. If Chaucer's
reputation rested upon the _Book of the Duchesse_, the _Parlement of
Foules_, the _Hous of Fame_, and the _Legend of Good Women_, a few
scholars would know and appreciate his work, and anthologies would
probably make the majority of readers acquainted with a few
carefully-chosen extracts, but he would have done little or nothing to
break down the literary conventions of his day. It would need a keen eye
to discern in these the dawn of a new era, without the light thrown upon
them by _Troilus and Criseyde_ and the _Canterbury Tales_.

The _Legend of Good Women_ is said by Lydgate to have been written at the
Queen's request. The general plan is taken from Boccaccio's _De Claris
Mulieribus_, and Chaucer also translates freely from the _Heroides_ and
the _Metamorphoses_ of Ovid. The interest of the poem lies in the
Prologue, which consists of nearly six hundred lines, and of which there
are two distinct versions. The poet describes how in the spring he goes
out into the fields to worship the daisy, and he gives a long and poetical
description of this "emperice and flour of floures alle." That night he
sleeps in a little arbour in his garden, and in a dream he sees the god of
love leading by the hand a queen clothed in green and gold and of
surpassing beauty. Here follows a ballad in her praise. A rout of ladies
now appears, and they all kneel down and sing the praise of their queen.
The poet kneels among them, but presently the god of love catches sight of
him and declares that he is a traitor and heretic for he has translated
the _Romance of the Rose_--

  That is an heresye ageyns my lawe,

and has also written of the fickleness of Cressida--

  Why noldest thou as wel han seyd goodnesse
  Of women, as thou hast seyd wikkednesse?

The queen, who is none other than Alcestis, intercedes for him, reminding
the irate god that the poet is also the author of the _Book of the
Duchesse_, the _Parlement of Foules_, the story of _Palamon and Arcite_,
to say nothing of

  "... many an ympne for your haly-dayes."[49]

and the _Lyf of St. Cecyle_. She therefore begs that he may be forgiven,
and in token of true contrition he shall spend the most part of his time

  In making of a glorious Legende
  Of Gode Women, maidenes and wyves,
  That weren trewe in lovinge al hir lyves.

The legends which follow are the result of this command, and the
definition of virtue given above accounts for the inclusion of such "good
women" as Cleopatra and Medea. The plan of the poem necessarily involved
sameness of treatment. Chaucer grew tired of his heroines, and of the
twenty legends which he seems to have planned, only nine were written. The
stories of Cleopatra, Thisbe, Dido, Hypsipyle and Medea, Lucretia,
Ariadne, Philomela, Phyllis, and Hypermnestra, are strung together
somewhat perfunctorily. As the names show, they are all drawn from Latin
authors, but with the usual freedom of a medieval translator Chaucer does
not hesitate to alter the originals to suit his purpose. He wishes to show
the torments and constancy of love's martyrs, and without scruple he
blackens the characters of Jason and Æneas and Theseus, in order to bring
out the virtues of Medea, Dido, and Ariadne. The legends show little of
the humour and freshness of Chaucer's other poems. Occasionally a
description of the lover's passion recalls some similar passage in
_Troilus and Criseyde_, and the mere fact that the interest centres in
emotion rather than action is in itself of importance, but Hercules, in
the legend of Hypsipyle, is a poor substitute for Pandarus, and the
perpetual recurrence of the love _motif_ tends to weaken its effect. The
two versions of the Prologue show many interesting points of difference.
Mention has already been made of the supposed intervention of the Queen,
through which Chaucer obtained permission to appoint a deputy to assist
him in his office work. It is supposed that this incident must have
occurred after the writing of the first prologue and before the writing of
the second, for while the whole poem is written in Queen Anne's honour,
the second prologue contains numerous passages expressing the poet's
gratitude and affection, which are not found in the first. She is

              ... of alle floures flour,
  Fulfilled of al vertu and honour.

  She is the clernesse and the verray light
  That in this derke worlde me wynt and ledeth,

  For as the sonne wol the fyr disteyne[50]
  So passeth al my lady sovereyne,
  That is so good, so fair, so debonaire;
  I prey to god that ever falle hir faire!

Another striking change in the second version is the omission of certain
too explicit lines in which the poet had dared to set forth the duties of
kings towards their subjects. Part of this wise advice still remains, but
evidently Chaucer found it dangerous to call Richard's attention to the
necessity for hearing his people's petitions and complaints, and the later
version contents itself with a more general statement that kings should

    ... nat be lyk tiraunts of Lumbardye
  That han no reward but at tirannye.

It is also noteworthy that several words which appear in their older form
in the first version are modernised in the second (_e. g._ in the first
line _sythes_ becomes _tymes_), so that it is possible to see the language
in actual process of development.

Chaucer's last and greatest work, the _Canterbury Tales_, was begun in
1386--though as has been shown, certain isolated tales, or rough sketches
for tales, were already in existence--and the composition continued till
1389, when it--like so many of his other poems--was left unfinished. A
number of fugitive pieces and lyrics also date from about this time, as
does the prose _Treatise on the Astrolabe_ written for his little son,
Lewis.

The popularity of Chaucer's poetry is shown not only by repeated
references to him as master and teacher, made by his immediate successors,
but by the entire Chaucer apocrypha which soon sprang into being. Some
genuine works of his--such as the _Book of the Lion_ (this very probably
was no more than a translation of Machault's _Le Dit du Lion_), have been
lost, but to make up for this a number of poems have been attributed to
him, some of which were not written until years after his death. Subjoined
is a list of the more important of these, with the names of the real
authors in cases where scholars have succeeded in tracing them.

     _The Testament of Love._ Thomas Usk (_d._ 1386).

     _La Belle Dame sans Merci._ Sir R. Ros (fifteenth century).

     _The Cuckoo and the Nightingale_ (sometimes called _The Book of Cupid
     God of Love_). Sir Thomas Clanvowe.

     _The Flower and the Leaf_; _The Assembly of Ladies_. Considered by
     some scholars to be the work of the same hand. Both purport to be
     written by a woman.

     _The Court of Love._

     _The Second Merchant's Tale_, or _The Tale of Beryn_ (containing a
     preliminary account of the Pardoner's adventures in Canterbury).

     _The Complaint of the Black Knight._ Lydgate.

     _The Tale of Gamelyn._ This poem is included among the MSS. of the
     _Canterbury Tales_. Professor Ten Brink suggests that Chaucer may
     have intended to work it up into the Yeoman's tale.

     _The Letter of Cupid._ Occleve.

CHAUCER'S TREATMENT OF HIS SOURCES

The sin of plagiary is a development of modern civilisation. To medieval
authors, as to Elizabethan, the interest of a story lay in the telling,
and while plot was of first-rate importance the same plot could quite well
be used indifferently by any number of writers. Indeed, they did not
hesitate to go even further and to form a patchwork of scraps taken from
different authors, so that the plot may be drawn from one poet, fragments
of the dialogue from another, and descriptive or reflective passages from
a third, and yet the whole may be justly reckoned the work of the
compiler. In the _Parlement of Foules_, for instance, Chaucer takes the
idea of the whole from a current fabliau, the first eighty-four lines from
Cicero's _Somnium Scipionis_, three distinct passages from Dante, the
description of the garden from Boccaccio, and lines 95-105 from Claudian,
and yet the originality of the whole is incontestable. It is a noteworthy
fact that he tries his hand at almost every form of poetry popular in his
day, he writes romances, lives of the saints, homilies, allegorical poems,
topical satire, love songs, and fabliaux, and in every case he borrows
wherever he sees anything likely to suit his purpose, he alters and adds
and omits as he sees fit; yet it is only necessary to compare a story
(that of Constance, for instance) as told by him, with the same as told by
any other poet of the day, to see why it is impossible for a genius to be
a plagiarist.

Chaucer's treatment of romance is particularly characteristic. As has been
said, the medieval romance is the most intrinsically interesting literary
development of the period from the Conquest to Chaucer. Very roughly
speaking, romances may be said--apart from allegorical works such as the
_Romance of the Rose_--to fall into two classes, those, such as _Guy of
Warwick_, or _Sir Ferumbras_, in which adventure and action form the chief
interest, and those, such as _Aucassin and Nicolette_, or _Florice and
Blanchefleur_, in which the stress is laid on emotion. In both cases the
action is usually set in motion by the hero's desire to ingratiate himself
with his lady, but in the one he rides off in quest of renown that may
make him worthy to aspire to her hand, and probably does not see her
again for years; in the other, though he may perform doughty deeds for her
sake, he may even go so far as to refuse battle unless he may have his
sweet love, and much space is devoted to the description of his sighs and
tears. In both, the emotion is perfectly simple and straightforward. The
knight wishes for the lady's hand and fights or sulks, as the case may be,
until he gets it, but in the former type there is scope for indefinite
digressions and interminable adventures, while the latter, at all events
in England, is apt to be shorter. Occasionally some opening is given for a
more complex treatment of character, but as a rule the opportunity is
ignored. Guy, when he returns to Felice after many years of adventure,
lives with her only forty days. Then he becomes pensive and downcast, for
it occurs to him

  How he had done many a man wo,
  And slain many a man with his hand,
  Burnt and destroyed many a land,
  And all was for woman's love,
  And not for God's sake above,

and he leaves her for ever, that he may give himself to penance and fight
for the glory of God. Here is a fine opportunity for tragic emotion, but
although we are told that Felice thinks of killing herself, the whole
episode is so perfunctorily related and the purpose of it is so evidently
to provide occasion for fresh adventures that it is impossible to feel the
slightest sympathy with either husband or wife. In _Sir Gawayne and the
Green Knight_ the remorse of Gawayne after he has failed to keep his word
is finely suggested, but the whole poem is far in advance of most romances
of the period, and even here the magic setting rather detracts from the
human interest. It is impossible to feel that it is a fair fight when one
of the combatants can be beheaded without inconvenience to himself. The
magic castles and enchanted swords, the dragons and sorcerers of medieval
romance have a fascination of their own, but it is the fascination of
sheer story-telling, not of character study. The love romances might
naturally be expected to show evidence of a more analytical mind, but the
feelings they describe are too obviously conventional to be very
convincing, and though there is an undeniable charm in works of this sort,
there is an equally undeniable sameness. Their strength lies, not in
dramatic force of emotion, but in daintiness of description. Nicolette
escaping from her turret chamber, with her skirts kilted behind and
before for fear of the dew, Florice borne to Blanchefleur's chamber in a
basket of flowers, are pictures which can never lose their freshness, but
we grow weary of the perpetual swoons and tears of every lover, and the
small variety of characters introduced, the fact that practically all
belong to the same class and are distinguishable only as villains or
heroes, base enchantresses or noble ladies, intensifies the monotony. To
this must be added the dreary jingle of the verse, which almost invariably
consists of short, rhyming couplets, the lines constantly having to be
eked out by expletives and meaningless monosyllables.

Chaucer showed himself fully alive at once to the possibilities and the
absurdities of the romance. In the _Knightes Tale_ we have an excellent
example of the romance of adventure. It is based upon Boccaccio's
_Teseide_, but while the _Teseide_ is an epic in twelve books, the
_Knightes Tale_ consists of only 2,250 lines. The poet who set out to
write a romance seems as a rule to have had no sense either of time or of
unity. The hero sets out on his travels and in the first forest glade he
comes to, meets a stranger knight. The two at once joust. After
unheard-of prowess the hero unhorses the stranger and unlaces his vizor.
The strange knight no sooner recovers his senses than he sets to work to
relate his totally irrelevant adventures, and the reader is lucky if in
the course of those adventures the still more irrelevant life-story of
some other knight is not introduced. Not till some hundreds of lines have
been thus occupied do we come back to the original hero who has all this
while been left in the glade. The _Teseide_, as has been said, is an epic
rather than a romance, and its twelve books afford scope for such episodes
as the war of Theseus with the Amazons, his marriage with Hippolyta, the
obsequies of those who fall in the combat between Palamon and Arcite,
etc., etc. Chaucer in turning epic into romance has shown an extraordinary
power of condensation. The conventional romance writer seems to have had
no idea of proportion, no conception that one incident could be of more
importance than another, or that it could be necessary to slur over one
episode and concentrate on another. In the _Knightes Tale_ Chaucer shows
the instinct of the true story-teller. The account of the war with the
Amazons and Theseus' marriage--which occupies two books of the
_Teseide_--is reduced to twelve lines, which briefly tell us the bare
facts. Theseus and Hippolyta are kept in the background throughout that
the figures of Palamon, Arcite, and Emily may stand out the more clearly.
The story moves steadily and rapidly, without a single digression.
Occasionally, indeed, a little more explanation would be welcome. Who, for
instance, was the friend by whose aid Palamon broke prison after seven
weary years? Was it the gaoler's daughter, as the _Two Noble Kinsmen_
would have us believe, or did his servant bribe a physician to help him,
as the _Teseide_ relates? Chaucer merely whets our curiosity by stating
that he drugged the gaoler, and hurries on to describe his meeting with
Arcite. It is this very speed, this close-knitting of the story, which
marks it out from other poems of the kind. The characterisation is slight.
Palamon and Arcite might well be, not cousins but twins, so closely do
they resemble each other. Emily, sweet and gracious as she is, scarcely
seems more than a fair vision of girlhood. Only now and then, as in the
thumb-nail sketch of the crowd watching the knights assemble for the
tourney, or in some sudden aside, such as his comment on Arcite's death--

  His spirit chaunged hous, and wente ther,
  As I cam never, I can nat tellen wher--

do we catch a glimpse of Chaucer's shrewd observation and dry humour. He
is learning how to tell a tale, and for the moment his interest lies in
the telling.

In _Troilus and Criseyde_, his method is very different. Here he is
dealing with a love romance, and he does not hesitate to dwell at length
upon the sufferings and emotions of his hero and heroine. About a third of
the whole work is actual paraphrase or translation of Boccaccio's
_Filostrato_: Book IV contains a lengthy extract from Boëthius, and
certain passages are drawn from Guido delle Colonne, but the _Filostrato_
forms the basis of the whole. This being so, the first thing we notice is
that whereas in the _Knightes Tale_ Chaucer has very considerably cut down
his original, here he has enlarged it, for the 5,704 lines of Boccaccio's
poem have become 8,329 in the English version. Further, he has taken
considerable liberties with the characters themselves. Troilus is in many
respects a conventional enough hero. He falls in love with Cressida at
first sight and at once despairs of winning her. Handsome, brave, and
resolute, he is well fitted to gain the love of any woman, but such is
his modesty that he is incapable of helping himself and can do nothing
more to the purpose than sit on his bed and groan. The unnecessary mystery
made by the lovers, the endless difficulties which they put in their own
way, are quite in keeping with the spirit of the age, though even here
Chaucer shows a skill in characterisation which almost makes us forget to
be impatient with his hero's helplessness. Cressida, while she too has
much in common with the conventional heroine of romance, has much that is
peculiarly her own. She is beautiful and tender and clinging, as a heroine
should be, but her shallow little character has an individuality of its
own. It will be treated more fully in a later chapter, here it is
sufficient to say that Chaucer transforms the mature woman of Boccaccio's
poem into a timid girl, whose youth and inexperience appeal to our pity
and make it impossible to judge her harshly. But the most important and
characteristic change which Chaucer makes in the story is in the character
of Pandarus. Instead of the gay young cousin of Troilus, he gives us the
vulgar, gossiping, good-natured old uncle of Cressida, an utterly
unimaginative and prosaic person who plays with the fires of passion as
ignorantly and light-heartedly as the Nurse in _Romeo and Juliet_. Not
only is the character of Pandarus of interest in itself but its creation
and its introduction into a poem of this type marks a new development in
literature--the study of the common-place. Hitherto, though some rare
flash of humour might for an instant lighten the pages of the love romance
and give us such an episode as that of the herd-boy in _Aucassin and
Nicolette_, it was but a flash. The interest was concentrated in the hero
and heroine, and though some faithful servant or lady-in-waiting might
assist their lovers, it would have been regarded as undignified in the
extreme to give prominence to such a character. Chaucer flings dignity to
the winds. What he cares for is truth to life, and already he has made the
great discovery that certain persons are not told off by nature to be
unhappy and certain others to be amusing, but that a perfectly
common-place and ordinary individual may play a part in tragedy without
even realising what tragedy is. He studies a man, not because he is
unusual, but just because he is the kind of person to be met with any day,
and by using Pandarus as a foil he prevents the high-flown emotion of the
lovers from becoming absurd or monotonous.

Chaucer evidently realised to the full the attractiveness and the dramatic
possibilities of this form of literature, but at the same time his eyes
were open to its shortcomings. In the _Squieres Tale_ we have a typical
romance in which love, magic, and adventure are all blended together. It
has the true medieval air of having all eternity in which to tell its
story. It begins with an account of King Cambinskan, his two sons Algarsif
and Cambalo, and his daughter Canace, and the coming of the magic
gifts--the steed of brass which will carry its rider whithersoever he
desires, the mirror which shows if any adversity is about to befall its
owner, the ring which enables its wearer to understand the speech of the
birds and also gives knowledge of the healing properties of all herbs, and
the sword whose edge will cut through any armour and the flat of whose
blade will cure the wound so made. Any one of these would in itself be
sufficient to furnish forth a tale, and when we find them heaped together
with so lavish a hand at the very beginning, we know what to expect. Three
hundred and four of the squire's 361 lines are occupied with the
apparently irrelevant story of the love-lorn falcon and the faithless
tercelet. Even this is not ended. Canace uses her knowledge of simples for
the poor hawk's benefit, and cures its wounds and swears to redress its
wrongs; but having got thus far the narrator draws breath and then plunges
into a list of further episodes with which he intends to deal:--

  Thus lete I Canace hir hauk keping;
  I wol na-more as now speke of hir ring,
  Til it come eft to purpos for to seyn
  How that this faucon gat hir love ageyn
  Repentant, as the storie telleth us.

  But hennes-forth I wol my proces holde
  To speke of aventures and of batailles,
  That never yet was herd so grete mervailles.
  First wol I telle yow of Cambinskan,
  That in his tyme many a citee wan;
  And after wol I speke of Algarsyf,
  How that he wan Theodora to his wyf,
  For whom ful ofte in greet peril he was,
  Ne hadde he ben holpen by the steed of bras;
  And after wol I speke of Cambalo
  That faught in listes with the brethren two
  For Canacee, er that he mighte hir winne,
  And ther I lefte I wol ageyn beginne.

It is here that the Franklin breaks in, and in the most courteous and
charming manner succeeds in checking the story, of which the pilgrims
have evidently had as much as they want, and in skilfully leading up to
his own tale. Nothing could give a more vivid impression of youth and
exuberance than the Squire's naïve enjoyment of the marvellous adventures
which he describes: the story is exactly suited to the teller, and his
sublime unconsciousness of the fact that any one else can possibly find it
long or quail before the prospect of a tale which bids fair to last all
the way to Canterbury and back, is just what we should expect of this

                            ... lusty bacheler
  With lokkes crulle,[51] as they were leyd in presse.
  Of twenty yeer of age he was, I gesse

  Embrouded[52] was he, as it were a mede
  Al ful of fresshe floures, whyte and rede.
  Singinge he was, or floytinge[53] al the day;
  He was as fresh as is the month of May.

No wonder he tells of enchanted steeds and magic rings, of joust and
tourney. And in showing the charm and youthfulness of the Squire, Chaucer
also contrives to show us the charm, and we might almost add the
youthfulness, of the popular romance. It is difficult to believe that the
_Squieres Tale_ was left unfinished by chance. The manner in which it is
cut short not only lights up the characters of the Squire and the Franklin
in a manner eminently characteristic of Chaucer, but also gently satirises
the long-windedness and absurdity of the romance-writers; and that Chaucer
was keenly alive to their faults is shown by the rollicking burlesque of
_Sir Thopas_. The _Squieres Tale_ forms, as it were, a half-way house
between the serious treatment of romance in _Troilus and Criseyde_ and the
_Knightes Tale_, and the pure parody of Chaucer's own "tale of mirthe."

_Sir Thopas_ parodies not only the matter but the manner of the romance
writers. It out-Herods Herod in the intolerable jingle of its verse and
the absurdity of its extra syllables, while the adventures of Sir Thopas
and the fairy queen prove too much even for the pilgrims, ready as they
are to be interested in a story of any kind.

  Sir Thopas wex a doghty swayn,
  Whyt was his face as payndemayn[54]
    His lippes red as rose;
  His rode[55] is lyk scarlet in grayn,
  And I you telle in good certayn
    He hadde a semely nose,

drones the poet, and no wonder after bearing a couple of hundred lines,
the host breaks in with,

  "No more of this, for goddes dignitee

  Myn eres aken of thy drasty[56] speche;
  Now swiche a rym the devel I biteche!
  This may wel be rym dogerel," quod he.

Considerations of space make it impossible to take in detail Chaucer's
treatment of all his various sources. Like Shakespeare, he rarely troubles
to invent a plot for himself, and Professor Skeat's table shows but one of
all the _Canterbury Tales_ for which no original has yet been found. In
the brief consideration of his treatment of romance as a whole two points
stand out conspicuously: in the first place his skill in simple narration,
and in the second his interest in action as revealing character rather
than for its own sake. In the _Canterbury Tales_ he shows greater
certainty in the delineation of character, greater readiness to trust to
his readers' discrimination. Instead of describing characters at length,
he gives us an occasional comment, or leaves us to see for ourselves the
meaning of some significant action, and the consequence is that every
addition or omission that he makes is worthy of careful attention. Three
typical instances may be taken as illustrating his method: the _Man of
Lawes Tale_, the _Nonne Preestes Tale_, and the story of Count Hugo of
Pisa in the _Monkes Tale_.

The story of Constance is taken from the Anglo-Norman chronicle of
Nicholas Trivet. Trivet's version, which is in prose, is considerably
longer than Chaucer's. It begins, undramatically, by speaking of the
virtue and prosperity of Maurice, "a very gracious youth, and wondrously
strong for his age, and wise and sharp of wit. According to the history of
the Saxons aforesaid, he was the son of Constance, the daughter of
Tiberius, by a king of the Saxons, Alle,"[57]--thus doing away with all
suspense as to Constance's fate, and showing at the outset that the story
is to have a happy ending. The chronicle then goes on to lay stress on the
learning of the princess, who was instructed not only in the Christian
faith but also in the seven sciences, logic, physics, morals, astronomy,
geometry, music, and perspective,[58] and in various tongues. When she was
thirteen, there came to her father's court certain Saracen merchants, and
Constance, hearing of the rich merchandise they had brought, went down to
inspect it and to question them concerning their land and creed. Finding
that they were heathen, she at once proceeded to convert them, and such
was her eloquence that before returning to their own land, they were all
baptised. Nor were they content with this, for on their arrival in
Saracenland, they began to preach the new doctrine. The Sultan sent for
them, that his wise men might rebuke them, but they refuted the arguments
of the heathen, and then "began to praise the maid Constance, who had
converted and fully instructed them, for very high and noble wit and
wisdom, and great marvellous beauty, and gentleness, and nobleness of
blood." So deep an impression did they make on their lord that he was
"greatly overcome with love for the maiden" and promptly dispatched these
same merchants, and with them a heathen Admiral, to demand her in
marriage. Tiberius sent back the messengers with great honour, giving his
consent if his prospective son-in-law on his part would agree to become a
Christian. "And the Admiral, before the Sultan and all his council, vowed
himself to the Christian faith, if the Sultan should consent." The
impatient lover soon agreed, and Constance accordingly set sail for
Saracenland under escort of "a cardinal bishop, and a cardinal priest,
with a great number of clergy, and a senator of Rome, with noble chivalry
and great and rich array, and with a great number of Christians who went
thither, some on pilgrimage, others to take possession of Jerusalem." The
Sultan's mother, seeing her religion in danger, determined to rid the land
of these invaders. Having made a covenant with seven hundred Saracens, who
swore to aid her, she invited all the Christians to a great feast,
professing that she herself desired to embrace their religion. At a given
signal the seven hundred Saracens fell upon the unarmed guests, and of the
whole number there escaped but three young men and Constance herself. The
Sultan, the Admiral, and the other converts were involved in the general
massacre. The three young men fled to Rome, where they told the Emperor
that his daughter had perished with the rest. Constance, having refused
to renounce her faith, "for no fair promise of wealth or honour, nor for
any threat of punishment or death," is set adrift in an open boat, with
provision enough to last her for three years, and also with all the
treasure which she had brought with her as a bride. For three whole years
she drifts about on the great ocean. "Then, in the eighth month of the
fourth year, God who steered the ship of the holy man Noah in the great
flood, sent a favourable wind, and drove the ship to England, under a
castle in the kingdom of Northumberland, near Humber." Elda, the warden of
the castle, goes down to ask her of her condition. "And she answered him
in Saxon ... as one who was learned in divers languages, as is aforesaid."
The good warden receives her hospitably, and his wife Hermingild becomes
so enamoured of the maiden "that nothing could happen to her that she
would not do according to her will." Then follows the conversion of
Hermingild and Elda owing to a miracle wrought by Constance upon a blind
man. Elda tells Alle, King of Northumberland, of the wonderful maiden at
his castle, and Alle is about to visit her when dire distress falls upon
the three friends. A felon knight, to whose suit Constance has turned a
deaf ear, murders Hermingild and contrives that suspicion shall fall upon
Constance. Elda cannot believe her capable of such treachery, whereupon
the accuser swears upon the gospels and upon his baptism, "which he had
already lately received," that Constance is the criminal. Scarcely had he
ended the word, when a closed hand, like a man's fist, appeared before
Elda and all who were present, and smote such a blow on the nape of the
felon's neck, that both his eyes flew out of his head, and his teeth out
of his mouth; and the felon fell smitten down to the earth. And thereupon
a voice said in the hearing of all, "Against Mother Church thou wert
laying a scandal: this hast thou done, and I have held my peace." On
Alle's arrival the felon is condemned to death, and so struck is the king
by what has passed that he is himself baptised, and then marries
Constance. Six months later he is called away by a border raid. During his
absence the queen is delivered of a fair boy, and letters are sent to the
king to tell him the good news. Once again, however, Constance is
unfortunate enough to possess a mother-in-law who hates her: "For she had
great disdain that King Alle had, for the love of a strange woman whose
lineage was unknown to him, forsaken his former religion." The messenger
rests at her house at Knaresborough, and the queen-mother gives him an
evil drink, and then alters his letters, telling King Alle that his wife
is an evil spirit in the form of a woman, "Whereto witnesseth the child
born of her, which resembles not a human form, but a cursed form hideous
and doleful." With rare justice and self-restraint Alle writes back to his
lords, bidding them take no steps against the queen or her child until he
himself can return and inquire into the matter. Again the foolish
messenger stays the night at Knaresborough, and again the queen-mother
tampers with the letters. Under the king's seal she writes to the lords
and bids them set Constance and her child adrift in an open boat, that she
may leave the land in like manner that she came to it. The king's word is
obeyed, and amidst the lamentations and tears of all the people Constance
is put on board a ship "without sail or oar or any device." The ship is
driven to the coast of Spain, where a certain heathen Admiral befriends
her. His seneschal, a renegade knight named Thelous, persuades Constance
that he wishes to repent of his sins and return to the Christian faith,
and prays her to take him with her, that he may come to a land of
Christians. Once alone with her, he reveals his true purpose. Constance
begs him to look out and see if there is no land in sight, and then comes
privily behind his back and thrusts him into the sea. Meanwhile Alle,
having discovered his mother's treachery, puts her to death, and vows
never to marry again. Constance is eventually rescued by mariners and
brought to Rome. She learns that her father has avenged her supposed death
upon the Saracens, but instead of revealing her identity she lives for
twelve years with a noble couple called Arsemius and Helen. At the end of
that time Alle visits Rome, and Constance's son, Maurice, is invited to be
present at the feast in his honour. Constance bids the youth make a point
of serving the King of England. Alle, struck by Maurice's likeness to
Constance, inquires what his origin may be, and by this means recovers his
wife and child. Tiberius proclaims Maurice his heir and "companion in the
Empire." Constance returns to England with her husband, but six months
later, hearing that her father is dying, she comes back to Rome, where
she herself dies a year later.

The story is worth telling in some detail because it shows how closely
Chaucer keeps to his original when it suits his purpose. The Man of Lawe
does not alter a single point of any importance. He makes no attempt to
soften down the improbabilities of the story or reduce the miraculous
element. After all, he is himself going on a pilgrimage to the
wonder-working shrine of St. Thomas à Becket, and shrewd man of the world
as he is, there is nothing in the history of Constance to strain his
credulity. But whereas in Trivet the characters are mere lay figures set
up to illustrate the power of Christianity and the evil fate which befalls
the opponents of Mother Church, in Chaucer they have an individuality of
their own. Instead of alienating our sympathy at the outset by insisting
on the learning and missionary enterprise of a child of thirteen, Chaucer
omits all this and follows the more natural path of making the foreign
chapmen so struck by the good report which they hear of the emperor's
daughter, that having once seen her, and proved her beauty for themselves,
when after their custom they go to tell the Soldan what wonders they have
met with on their travels, they in turn inflame his imagination by their
description. The brief dialogue between Constance and her father, when the
marriage has been arranged, is Chaucer's own interpolation, and its note
of despair prepares us for what is to follow:--

  Allas! unto the Barbre nacioun[59]
  I moste anon, sin that it is your wille;
  But Crist, that starf[60] for our redempcioun
  So yeve me grace his hestes[61] to fulfille;
  I, wrecche womman, no fors though I spille[62]
  Wommen are born to thraldom and penance,
  And to ben under mannes governance.

Here we have no priggish and self-righteous virgin setting forth with smug
self-satisfaction to convert Saracenland, but a lonely, timid girl, whose
heart misgives her at the thought of leaving her parents and going to meet
an unknown husband. Equally vivid and effective is Chaucer's picture of
the Soldan's wicked mother, who not only professes readiness to accept
baptism herself but advises her fellow-conspirators to do the same on the
ground--

  Cold water shal not greve us but a lyte,[63]

and adds with savage humour that by the time she has done with her son's
wife,

  She shal have nede to wasshe awey the rede,
  Thogh she a font-ful water with hir lede.

The marriage festivities are passed over lightly, and then comes a
characteristic interpolation which Chaucer borrows from quite a different
source, _i. e._ from Innocent III's _De Miseria Humanæ Conditionis_:--

  O sodeyn wo! that ever art successour
  To worldly blisse, spreynd[64] with bitternesse;
  Th'ende of the joye of our worldly labour;
  Wo occupieth the fyn of our gladnesse.[65]
  Herke this conseil for thy sikernesse,
  Upon thy gladde day have in thy minde
  The unwar wo or harm that comth behinde.

Then come a few brief words describing the massacre and Constance's
unhappy fate, followed by the beautiful prayer of Constance when she finds
herself alone on "the salte see," of which no trace at all is to be found
in Trivet. Here the poet breaks off to discuss the miraculous element in
the story. Nothing is more characteristic of Chaucer than this habit of
pausing to consider some abstract question raised by what he is
relating--it is even more conspicuously evident in the _Nonne Preestes
Tale_ than it is here, where such a discussion is in keeping with the
spirit of the poem, and where he shows himself content to take the simple
explanation of religion.

The episode of Elda and Hermingild is given very simply and shortly,
Elda's name not being mentioned. Then comes the false accusation brought
against Constance by the treacherous knight, and here we see Chaucer's
power of painting a dramatic situation in a few words. He tells us how
Constance is brought before the king and gives her brief prayer to the God
"that savedest Susanne," and then with a sudden vivid simile drives home
to us her agony of suspense:--

  Have ye nat seyn som tyme a pale face
  Among a prees, of him that hath be lad
  Toward his deeth, where-as him gat no grace,
  And swich a colour in his face hath had,
  Men mighte knowe his face, that was bestad,
  Amonges alle faces in that route:
  So stant Custance, and loketh hir aboute.

Her marriage with Alle, Chaucer dismisses even more hastily than her
marriage with the Soldan:--

  Me list nat of the chaf nor of the stree
  Maken so long a tale as of the corn.
  What sholde I tellen of the royaltee
  At mariage, or which cours gooth biforn
  Who bloweth in a trompe or in an horn?
  The fruit of every tale is for to seye,
  They ete, and drinke, and daunce, and singe, and pleye.

The mishap of the messenger causes him to break out into an invective
against drunkenness, and then follows one of the most wonderful passages
in the whole poem, that in which he describes Constance going down to the
boat "with deedly pale face," her baby weeping in her arms. Chaucer's love
of children manifests itself again and again in his poems. The tenderness
of the mother's

  "Pees litel sone, I wol do thee non harm"

as she binds her kerchief round the child's eyes is far more moving in its
simplicity than the most harrowing description could be. And here again,
as Constance lulls the baby in her arms, Chaucer puts into her mouth a
beautifully simple and touching prayer to the Virgin Mother:--

  "Thou sawe thy child y-slayn bifor thy yën,
  And yet now liveth my litel child, parfay!
  Now, lady bright, to whom alle woful cryen,
  Thou glorie of wommanhede, thou faire may,[66]
  Thou haven of refut, brighte sterre of day
  Rewe on[67] my child, that of thy gentilesse
  Rewest on every rewful[68] in distresse."

With these words on her lips she turns to Elda and holding up the child
cries

  "And if thou darst not saven him for blame,
  So kis him ones in his fadres name,"

and without further complaint

  She blesseth hir; and in-to ship she wente.

The whole passage has a breathing human passion in it of which Trivet's
chronicle knows nothing. We forget the absurdity of the story, the
impossible repetition of an impossible situation, and see only a cruelly
wronged wife and mother meeting her fate with simple dignity and faith.

Trivet gives us lurid details concerning the vengeance that falls on
Alle's mother. Chaucer, who never takes pleasure in horrors, remarks
briefly that he "his moder slow," and hastens on to tell of Constance's
adventures off the coast of Spain. Here again, we find a break in the
narrative, as the author pauses to comment on the evils of
self-indulgence, and to explain how God sends weak women the "spirit of
vigour" that they may save themselves in time of need. The rest of the
story follows Trivet's chronicle very closely, though the description of
Alle's meeting with his wife is Chaucer's own:--

  I trowe an hundred tymes been they kist,
  And swich a blisse is ther bitwix hem two
  That, save the joye that lasteth evermo
  Ther is non lyk, that any creature
  Hath seyn or shal whyl that the world may dure.

And he also adds a brief comment on the instability of human happiness.

It will be seen that Chaucer tends to reduce descriptive passages pure and
simple to a minimum, and so far to condense the actual narrative that it
moves quickly and straight-forwardly, while at the same time he expands
any situation which affords opportunity for the display of character, adds
dialogue and intensifies emotion, and also shows a disposition to comment
on what he is describing.

The _Nonne Preestes Tale_ is based on Marie de France's fable of the _Cock
and the Fox_, though it is possible that Chaucer's more immediate source
was an enlargement of this, called the _Roman de Renart_. The _Cock and
the Fox_ consists of but thirty-eight lines, and the _Roman de Renart_ of
453, whereas the _Nonne Preestes Tale_ consists of 626 lines, so that here
we have a case in which Chaucer enlarges his original very considerably.
In fact he can hardly be said to have borrowed more than the bare outline
of the story.

In the first place, the whole description of the "poore widwe" and her
poultry-yard is entirely Chaucer's. There is nothing in the French to
correspond to the delightful picture of Chauntecleer strutting among the
submissive hens--

  Of which the faireste hewed on hir throte
  Was cleped faire damoysele Pertelote,

or singing "my lief is faren in londe"[69] in sweet accord with his love.
Then the incident of the dream is entirely altered. The French author
makes dame Pinte, the hen, expound the dream to her husband and warn him
of the danger which lies before him. Chaucer draws inimitable portraits of
the fussy, self-important cock, thoroughly frightened and yet too
conceited to accept his wife's simple and prosaic suggestion that his
terrors spring from indigestion, and of the sensible, practical hen with
her scathing contempt for the husband who though he has a beard has yet
"no mannes heart." And here follows a lengthy disquisition on dreams, the
cock overwhelming his sceptical wife with examples of warnings which have
been fulfilled, and illustrations drawn from the most varied sources.
Having restored his self-esteem by reference to the histories of Joseph,
St. Kenelm, Crœsus, Andromache and others,

  Royal he was, he was namore aferd.

The advent of the fox gives Chaucer another opportunity to discuss
fore-knowledge, and suddenly, in the midst of this lightest and most
amusing of skits, we find him gravely considering the question of
predestination and free-will. He comes to no conclusion, but after stating
various learned opinions, shrugs his shoulders and turns aside with a
dry:--

  I wol not han to do of swich matere;
  My tale is of a cok, as ye may here ...

The dialogue between the cock and the fox is much the same in both
versions, though as Dr. Furnivall points out (_Chaucer's Originals and
Analogues_, p. 112), Chaucer improves the story by omitting the spring
made by the fox before he begins to flatter Chauntecleer; but Pinte shows
none of the extremely proper feeling displayed by Pertelote when she sees
her husband carried off before her eyes:--

  But soverynly dame Pertelote shrighte
  Ful louder than dide Hasdrubables wyf,
  Whan that hir housbond hadde lost his lyf,
  And that the Romans hadde brende Cartage.

The peculiar characteristic of the English version is its all-pervading
sense of humour, the gravity with which we are led on step by step until
we find ourselves accepting the most ridiculous situations, and the
extraordinary skill with which the characters of Chauntecleer and
Pertelote are drawn.

In the _Monkes Tale_ Chaucer draws his stories of the falls of illustrious
men from all kinds of sources. The heroes range from Lucifer to Pedro the
Cruel, and the worthy monk chooses his illustrations apparently at random,
now from sacred history, now from the classics, now from contemporary
life. No great dramatic skill is to be expected of the narrator, and for
the most part the tragedies succeed one another with placid regularity,
the occasional comments made by the monk himself showing no particular
insight or intelligence. Having described the fall of Sampson, for
instance, no more inspiring reflection occurs to him than

  That no men telle hir conseil til hir wyves
  Of swich thing as they wolde han secree fayn,
  If that it touche hir limmes or hir lyves.

One tale, however, stands out conspicuously above the rest. In the
_Inferno_ (Canto XXXIII) Dante had told the story of Count Hugo of Pisa,
who was locked up in a tower with his sons and starved to death. In a few
grim words he describes the father's despair and the slow death of the
wretched sons:--

                          When we came
  To the fourth day, then Gaddo at my feet
  Outstretch'd did fling him, crying, "Hast no help
  For me, my father?" There he died; and e'en
  Plainly as thou seest me, saw I the three
  Fall one by one 'twixt the fifth day and sixth:
  Whence I betook me, now grown blind, to grope
  Over them all, and for three days aloud
  Call'd on them who were dead. Then, fasting got
  The mastery of grief.

    (Carey's translation.)

Chaucer takes this and uses it as the basis of one of his tragedies. In
Dante the actual story occupies fifty-nine lines, in Chaucer it occupies
fifty-six, so in this case there is little in the way either of
condensation or expansion. The changes which Chaucer makes are, however,
very significant. Dante simply says that the three sons of Count Hugo
suffer with their father. Chaucer enhances the pathos by telling us that

  The eldeste scarsly fyf yeer was of age.
  Allas, fortune! it was greet crueltee
  Swiche briddes for to putte in swiche a cage!

When Dante's Count Hugo hears

  ... at its outlet underneath lock'd up
  The horrible tower ...

he is so turned to stone that he can find no relief in tears. Chaucer's
cries,

        "Allas! ... that I was wrought."
  Therewith the teres fillen from his yën.[70]

Chaucer gives us a moving picture of the little three-year-old looking up
and asking

            "Fader, why do ye wepe!
  Whan wol the gayler bringen our potage,
  Is ther no morsel breed that ye do kepe?
  I am so hungry that I may nat slepe ..."

and finally lying down in his father's lap, and kissing him, and dying.
The stern horror of Dante's story is too terrible to admit of pathos such
as this. Chaucer's version is infinitely touching, but it has nothing in
it that chills our blood as does the picture of the father, grown blind
with hunger, groping over the dead bodies of his children till fasting
gets the mastery of grief. He can depict innocent suffering, he can arouse
our sympathy and stir our pity, but he never strikes the note of real
tragedy. It is not only that no one of his many heroes and heroines
experiences any tragic conflict of soul, but in the simple presentation of
suffering Chaucer shows little of that power of grim suggestion, of appeal
to the imagination, which are among the most essential characteristics of
the tragic poet. Cressida's hesitation has nothing grand or tragic about
it. She is simply uncertain which course will bring her most happiness.
And her repentance--if such it can be called--is no more than a momentary
discomfort at the thought that she has caused Troilus pain and that unkind
things are likely to be said of her. Troilus suffers, but, in Professor
Bradley's phrase, it is suffering that merely befalls him, the whole
tragedy is external, and his abandonment of passion has none of the
dignity and restraint of a great emotion. Othello's cry of "Desdemona,
Desdemona dead!" contains more poignancy of suffering than all the
outbursts of Troilus put together. Constance, and Griselda, and Dorigen
all know the meaning of sorrow, but their simple acceptance of their fate
is pathetic rather than tragic, and in the cases of Constance and
Griselda, as in the case of Count Hugo, the tragedy is further softened by
the part played by the children. The monk's definition of tragedy--though
it need not necessarily be Chaucer's own--sufficiently explains the
medieval conception:--

  Tragedie is to seyn a certeyn storie,
  As olde bokes maken us memorie,
  Of him that stood in greet prosperitee
  And is y-fallen out of heigh degree
  Into miserie, and endeth wrecchedly.

To Chaucer the interest lies in the study of normal men and women, and in
comparing his narratives with their originals nothing is more striking
than the air of homeliness and naturalness with which he contrives to
invest the most amazing incidents. Dorigen and her husband strike one as
simple, natural folk whose nice sense of honour leads them to keep their
word though it were to their own hindrance. We hardly notice the absurdity
of the situation itself, and are little troubled by the magic arts which
enable her persecutor to remove all rocks from the coast of Brittany.
Constance is no tragedy-queen, but a true-hearted, simple woman; and the
fact that she lives in a world of miracles never obtrudes itself. We
accept her adventures without a qualm since our interest lies in her
personality, and the odd thing is that her personality, attractive as it
is, strikes one as so little out of the common. Writers of the day, as a
rule, desired either to point a moral or to thrill their readers by sheer
force of adventure. Chaucer took the accepted conventions of his day, and
pierced through them to the human nature underneath.

CHAPTER IV

CHAUCER'S CHARACTER-DRAWING

Like every other young poet Chaucer had to learn his trade, and in nothing
is the development of his genius more clearly to be traced than in his
treatment of character. The _Book of the Duchesse_ gives us a sort of map
of the character of the good fair White: in his choice of qualities and
method of expression Chaucer shows both observation and originality, but
the plan of the poem precludes anything in the nature of dramatic
self-revelation, and the whole description of Blanche is from the outside.
The _Parlement of Foules_ and the _Hous of Fame_ afford little scope for
character-drawing, and though something more might be expected of the
_Legend of Good Women_, as we have seen, the moral purpose which inspires
it leads to perfunctory and undramatic treatment of the legends.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  And of his deeth roreth in compleyninge,

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

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

Excellently sound advice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ... olde unholsom and mislyved man:

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

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

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

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

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

  "And if that I me putte in jupartye[85]
  To stele awey by nighte, and it befalle
  That I be caught, I shal be holde a spye,
  Or elles, lo, this drede I most of alle
  If in the hondes of som wrecche I falle,
  I am but lost, al be myn herte trewe;
  Now mighty god, thou on my sorwe rewe!

  But natheles, bityde what bityde,
  I shal to-morwe at night, by est or weste,
  Out of the ost stele on som maner syde,
  And go with Troilus wher-as him leste.
  This purpos wol I holde, and this is beste.
  No fors of wikked tonges janglerye,[86]
  For ever on love han wrecches had envye.

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

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

The reason for this excess of sorrow is characteristic:--

  She seyde, "Allas! for now is clene a-go
  My name of trouthe in love for ever-mo

  Allas, of me unto the worldes ende
  Shal neither been y-written nor y-songe
  No good word, for thise bokes wol me shende,[87]
  O, rolled shal I ben on many a tonge,"[88]

and equally characteristic her hasty excuse,

  "Al be I not the firste that dide amis,"

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

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

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

In the _Canterbury Tales_ Chaucer's method of character delineation is
more concise. In _Troilus and Criseyde_ he has five books, containing over
8000 lines, at his disposal, and the raptures and anguish of the lovers
are described at considerable length. In the _Canterbury Tales_ he has a
far more complex task before him; he has to present the pilgrims
themselves, in the various prologues and end-links; to make each tale a
dramatic revelation of the character of the teller; and to exhibit the
characters of the personages who play a part in the various stories. The
560 lines of the _Prologue_ in themselves contain a far greater number and
variety of characters than are to be found in the whole of _Troilus and