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Title: Chaucer

Author: Sir Adolphus William Ward

Release date: January 1, 2003 [eBook #3624]
                Most recently updated: January 8, 2021

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Barb Grow and Sue Asscher.  HTML version by Al Haines.


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CHAUCER ***




Produced by Barb Grow and Sue Asscher.  HTML version by Al Haines.









From:  ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS



CHAUCER


BY

ADOLPHUS WILLIAM WARD




NOTE.

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

A.W.W.




CONTENTS.

CHAPTER 1.  CHAUCER'S TIMES.

CHAPTER 2.  CHAUCER'S LIFE AND WORKS.

CHAPTER 3.  CHARACTERISTICS OF CHAUCER AND OF HIS POETRY.

CHAPTER 4.  EPILOGUE.

GLOSSARY.

INDEX.




CHAUCER.



CHAPTER 1.  CHAUCER'S TIMES.

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

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

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

      *      *      *      *      *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    in one livery
  Of a solemn and great fraternity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ...shew forth the sword of castigation.

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

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

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

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

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

  That on a Sunday were upon her head.
  Her hosen too were of fine scarlet red,
  Full straight y-tied, and shoes full moist and new.
  ...
  Upon an ambler easily she sat,
  Y-wimpled well, and on her head a hat,
  As broad as is a buckler or a targe.

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

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

  Mother of God, and Virgin undefiled,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Because that it was old and somewhat strait;

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But others preferred to dwell on specifically lay sins; and these
moralists occasionally attributed to the love of expenditure on dress
the impoverishment of the kingdom, forgetting in their ignorance of
political economy and defiance of common sense, that this result was
really due to the endless foreign wars.  Yet in contrast with the pomp
and ceremony of life, upon which so great an amount of money and time
and thought was wasted, are noticeable shortcomings by no means
uncommon in the case of undeveloped civilisations (as for instance
among the most typically childish or childlike nationalities of the
Europe of our own day), viz. discomfort and uncleanliness of all sorts.
To this may be added the excessive fondness for sports and pastimes of
all kinds, in which nations are aptest to indulge before or after the
era of their highest efforts,--the desire to make life one long
holiday, dividing it between tournaments and the dalliance of courts of
love, or between archery-meetings (skilfully substituted by royal
command for less useful exercises), and the seductive company of
"tumblers," "fruiterers," and "waferers." Furthermore, one may notice
in all classes a far from eradicated inclination to superstitions of
every kind,--whether those encouraged or those discouraged by the Church

  (For holy Church's faith, in our belief,
  Suffereth no illusion us to grieve.
  "The Franklin's Tale."),

--an inclination unfortunately fostered rather than checked by the
uncertain gropings of contemporary science.  Hence, the credulous
acceptance of relics like those sold by the "Pardoner," and of legends
like those related to Chaucer's Pilgrims by the "Prioress" (one of the
numerous repetitions of a cruel calumny against the Jews), and by the
"Second Nun" (the supra-sensual story of Saint Cecilia).  Hence, on the
other hand, the greedy hunger for the marvels of astrology and alchemy,
notwithstanding the growing scepticism even of members of a class
represented by Chaucer's "Franklin" towards

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

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

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



CHAPTER 2.  CHAUCER'S LIFE AND WORKS.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Grant translateur, noble Gelfroi Chaucier.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and the dreamer awakes to resume his reading.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  That be as true as ever was any steel?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  true in loving all their lives.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  DE HUGILINO COMITE PISAE.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



CHAPTER 3.  CHARACTERISTICS OF CHAUCER AND OF HIS POETRY.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  somewhat agreeable,
  Though some verse fail in a syllable.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Than they can in their lewdness comprehend,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



CHAPTER 4.  EPILOGUE.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



GLOSSARY.

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



INDEX.

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

  "Adam" (Chaucer's Scrivener).

  "African."

  Albert of Brescia.

  "Alcestis."

  "Alchemist" (Ben Jonson).

  Aldgate.

  Alfred, King.

  Anne, Queen.

  "Antiquary Moth" (Cartwright).

  "Ariadne."

  Aristophanes.

  "Art of English Poesy" (Puttenham).

  "Arviragus."

  "Assembly of Fowls or Parliament of Birds."

  Astrology.

  Bailly, Master Harry.  See "Host."

  "Ballad of Sir Thopas."

  "Ballad sent to King Richard."

  Balle, John.

  Balzac.

  Barklay.

  Benedictines.

  Berkeley, Sir Edward.

  Berners, Lady Juliana.

  Bible, Chaucer's knowledge of.

  Black Friars.

  Black Prince.

  Blake, William.

  Blanche, Duchess of Lancaster.

  Boccaccio.

  Boethius.

  Bohemia.

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

  "Book of the Duchess."

  "Book of the Leo."

  Brembre, Sir Nicholas.

  Bretigny, Peace of.

  Brigham, Nicholas.

  "Bukton."

  Burley, Sir John.

  Burns, Robert.

  Byron.

  Cambridge.

  "Canace."

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

  Canterbury.

  Canterbury Pilgrims.

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

  "Carpenter."

  Cartwright.

  Caxton.

  "Ceyx and Alcyone," the tale of.

  Charles IV, Emperor.

  Charles V, King of France.

  Chaucer, Agnes (Chaucer's mother).

  "Chaucer's Dream."

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

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

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

  Chaucer's literary heirs.

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

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

  Chaucer, John (Chaucer's father).

  Chaucer, Lewis (Chaucer's son).

  Chaucer, Philippa (Chaucer's wife).

  Chaucer, Richard le.

  Chaucer, Thomas (Chaucer's supposed son).

  Chettle.

  Chivalry.

  Clarence, Lionel Duke of.

  Cleopatra.

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

  Colonna, Guido de.

  "Complaint of Chaucer to his Purse."

  "Complaint of Mars."

  "Complaint of the Death of Pity."

  "Complaint of the Ploughman."

  "Complaint of Venus."

  "Confessio Amantis" (Gower).

  Congreve.

  "Consolation of Philosophy" (Boethius).

  Constance, Duchess of Lancaster.

  "Constance," the story of.

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

  Court of Love.

  "Cressid."

  "Cuckoo and the Nightingale."

  Dante.

  "Daphnaida" (Spenser).

  Dartmouth.

  "Decamerone" (Boccaccio).

  Deschamps, Eustace.

  Dickens.

  Dido.

  "Divine Comedy."

  "Doctor of Physic."

  Dominicans.

  Don Quixote.

  "Dorigen."

  Doglas, Gawin.

  Drama in the fourteenth century.

  Drayton, Michael.

  Dryden.

  Dunbar.

  "Dunciad."

  "Dyer."

  "E.K."

  "Earthly Paradise" (William Morris).

  Edward III.

  Edwards, Richard.

  Elizabethan drama.

  English novel.

  "Envoy to Bukton."

  "Envoy to Scogan."

  "Fables" (Dryden).

  "Fairy Queen" (Spenser).

  Filostrato (Boccaccio).

  Flanders.

  Fletcher.

  Florence.

  "Flower and the Leaf."

  France and England.

  Francis of Assisi.

  Franciscans.

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

  French literary influences.

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

  Froissart.

  Genoa.

  German criticism.

  Gerson.

  Gisors, Henry.

  Gloucester, Humphrey Duke of.

  Gloucester, Thomas Duke of.

  Goethe.

  Goldsmith.

  "Good Counsel of Chaucer."

  Gower.

  Great Schism.

  Greene.

  Grey Friars.

  Grisseldis, The tale of.

  Hallam.

  Hatcham, Surrey.

  Hawes.

  Hawkwood, Sir John.

  Henry III.

  Henry IV.

  Henry V.

  Henryson.

  Heptameron.

  "Hero and Leander" (Marlowe).

  Herrick.

  Heyroom, Thomas.

  Heywood, John.

  Homer.

  Horne, Mr. R.

  "Host," the (Master Harry Bailly).

  "House of Fame."

  Hugh of Lincoln, legend of.

  "Imitation of Christ."

  Inner Temple.

  Inquisition.

  "Interludes" (Heywood).

  Italian literary influence.

  James I, King of Scotland.

  Jason.

  John, King of England.

  John, King of Bohemia.


  John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster.

  John of Trevisa.

  Jonson, Ben.

  Katharine, Duchess of Lancaster.

  Kent, county of.

  "King's Quair, The."

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

  Kynaston, Sir Francis.

  Lamb, Charles.

  "Lamech."

  Lancaster, House of.

  Lancaster, Henry, Duke of.

  Langland.

  "Legend of Ariadne."

  "Legend of Good Women."

  "Legend of the Saints of Cupid."

  Leland.

  "Lieutenant Bardolph."

  "Life of Saint Cecelia."

  "Limitour."

  Lollardry.

  London.

  Longfellow.

  Lorris, Guillaume de.

  "Love of Palamon and Arcite."

  Lydgate.

  Lyndsay, Sir David.

  Machault.

  Madame Eglantine.  See "Prioress."

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

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

  Marlowe.

  Marot, Clement.

  Mary Magdalene, homily on.

  Medea.

  Mendicant Orders.

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

  "Merry Wives of Windsor."

  Metrical Romances of thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

  Meung, Jean de.

  Middleton.

  "Midsummer Night's Dream."

  Milan.

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

  Milton.

  Minorities.

  Minot, Lawrence.

  Miracle Plays.

  Monastic Orders.

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

  "Mort d'Arthure."

  Nash.

  Nicholas, Sir Harris.

  Norwich, Bishop of.

  "Nun's Priest's Tale."

  Occleve.

  "On Perpetual Virginity" (St. Jerome).

  "On the Astrolabe."

  "Oratio Gallfridi Chaucer."

  Ovid.

  Oxford.

  Padua.

  "Palace of Honour" (Gawin Douglas).

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

  "Pandarus."

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

  Paris.
  University of.

  Parliament.

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

  "Pastime of Pleasure" (Hawes).

  Patient Grissel.
  "Patient Grissel" (play).

  Peasant Insurrection.

  Pedro, Don.

  "Pentamerone."

  "Perkyn Revellour."

  Pestilences in fourteenth century.

  Petrarch.

  "Phantasus."

  Philippa, Queen.

  "Phillis."

  Philpot, John.

  "Ploughman."

  Pole, William de la.

  Pope.

  "Praise of Women."

  Prayer of Chaucer."

  "Prioress" (Madame Eglantine).

  "Prologue to the Canterbury Tales."

  Puttenham, George.

  "Queen Anelida and the false Arcite."

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

  Reformation, The.

  Renascence.

  "Rhyme of Sir Thopas."

  Richard II.

  Richardson.

  Roet, Sir Paon de.

  "Roman de la Rose."

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

  Rome, Church of.

  Ronsard.

  "Rosa Anglia."

  Sainte-Maur, Benoit.

  St. Jerome.

  Salisbury, Countess of.

  "Scipio."

  Scogan, Henry.

  Scottish heirs of Chaucer.

  "Second Nun's Tale."

  Seneca.

  "Seven Wise Masters."

  Shakspere.

  "Shepherd's Calendar."

  Sheridan.

  "Ship of Fools."

  "Shipman."

  Sidney, Sir Philip.

  "Sir Thomas Norray" (Dunbar).

  Skelton.

  Southern Road.

  Speght.

  Spenser.

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

  Statute of Provisors.

  "Story of Thebes."

  Strode, Ralph.

  Sudbury, Archbishop.

  Suffolk, Michael de la Pole, Earl of.

  "Summoner."

  Surrey.

  Swynford, Sir Hugh.

  Tabard Inn.

  "Tale of Meliboeus."

  "Tarquin."

  "Temple of Fame" (Pope).

  "Temple of Glass" (Lydgate).

  "Teseide" (Boccaccio).

  "Testament of Cressid" (Henryson).

  "Thisbe."

  Thynne, William.

  Tieck, Ludwig.

  "Tityrus."

  Tombstone, Chaucer's.

  "Tottel's Miscellany."

  "Troilus and Cressid."

  "Troy-book" (Lydgate).

  "Tullius."

  "Two Noble Kinsmen."

  Tyrwhitt.

  Ugolino, Story of.

  Ulster, Elizabeth Countess of.

  Universities.

  Virgil.

  Visconti, Bernardo.

  "Vision concerning Piers Plowman."

  "Vows of the Heron."

  "Vox Clamantis" (Gower).

  "Webbe."

  Westminster.

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

  William of Wykeham.

  "Words unto his own Scrivener."

  Wordsworth.

  Wyatt.

  Wyclif.

  Wycliffism: was Chaucer a Wycliffite?

  Yerdely, Adam.












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